I have been through the depository tour twice. The last time was just 5 or 6 years ago. It is amazing to walk right by the spot where the shots were fired (I know some still don't buy there were shots fired from here at all). Many photos from the days preceeding and after the shooting highlight the tour. Eery to look down onto the street at the view Oswalt would have had. The area below still resembles the film footage from that day. Many still sob as they progress through to tour, even though so many years have passed.

One of the heaviest encounters I had with this was waiting on John Connally when he was briefly running for president and came to Portland. I was right behind him as he was seated at the head table, and imagined the whole sequence as depicted in Zapruder film.

The shot from the window would have been easier if it was taken before the president's car turned. I always thought the point was the number of shots fired in a short period of time and the fact that the physics of the fatal head shot indicated it came from ahead of the cat, not behind.

That cam has been running for years, and it's a regular source of joy for many of us in Dallas. If you go to it one Saturday morning and see someone with a placard reading "OSWALD ACTED ALONE," wave hello.

(I'll say, though, that the absolute best prank involving Dealy Plaza was one pulled by notorious underground filmmaker Joe Christ back in 1983. Dallas was going through one of its usual revisionist kicks on how it wasn't a vile city in 1963 and that the Dallas Morning News hadn't been running anti-Kennedy screeds telling him to stay the hell out of town in the days before the shooting. In fact, the twentieth anniversary was pretty much officially the moment Dallas became the first city in the US to turn a Presidential assassination into a citywide tourist attraction. Anyway, Joe and his crew timed everything perfectly, and at the height of the retrospective, came down the street in a convertible just like Kennedy's, with Joe's then-girlfriend dressed as Jackie next to a big mannequin with Kennedy's head. As they drove by, the head popped off about six feet in the air, with squibs and hoses spurting blood into the air. Joe and his crew weren't arrested, but they made quite the impact; thirty years later, the city is doing everything in its power to make sure that something that improper doesn't happen again. Hell, I'm amazed that they haven't locked up Joe's corpse to make sure it doesn't get up and try anything even worse.)

"Forty-nine years later, it doesn't look like all that difficult of a shot."

Once someone with minimal experience shooting breakable targets takes a look at the Zapruder film, it no longer matters whether Oswald was shooting or not.

The conspiracy issue is no longer the question. It's why he had to die. Here's a good book on that:

JFK and the Unspeakable
Why he died and why it matters

Author: James W. Douglass