Dallas Still "Coming to Grips" With Kennedy Assassination? Still "Wounded"? If You Say So.

Nicola Longford, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum, won't talk to Schutze, no fan of the museum's plans to take over Dealey Plaza two years from today. But she will visit with the Los Angeles Times about those plans, not to mention that Dealey Plaza redo the city's splitting...

By Robert Wilonsky

November 22, 2011

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Nicola Longford, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum, won't talk to Schutze, no fan of the museum's plans to take over Dealey Plaza two years from today. But she will visit with the Los Angeles Times about those plans, not to mention that Dealey Plaza redo the city's splitting with the museum's fund-raisers. And Longford is quite comfortable speaking for all of us when she says "Dallas is still scarred and wounded" by the assassination of John Kennedy.

"For Dallas," she tells the Times today in a story headlined "Modern Dallas coming to grips with Kennedy assassination," the 50th anniversary event will be "an opportunity to look back and not ignore it, to move through it and be inspired." So, clearly, Stephen King's wrong. Dallas hasn't "put to bed" the killing of Kennedy.

And while you're reading the L.A. paper, might as well dig this: an interview with the great Darwin Payne, who was working on November 22, 1963, for the Dallas Times Herald, whose assassination 20 years ago this December 8 still scars and wounds me. Schutze too.

Bonus: On the New York Times's website this morning, director Errol Morris (maker of, among other films, The Thin Blue Line, about a different killing in Dallas), has this short film starring Tink Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. Thompson and Morris discuss "The Umbrella Man" espied at Dealey Plaza on that blue, bright day: "Can anyone come up with a non-sinister explanation for this?"

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