The Legacy of Lee Harvey Oswald
Twenty years ago he thrust himself into our lives; he is there yet.
ANGELA BETH HARTMAN says: DEAR TEXAS MONTHLY MAGAZINE I STILL THINK THAT IN MY HEART AND IN MY SOUL THAT LEE HARVEY OSWALD DID NOT SHOOT PRESIDENT KENNEDY OR J.D.TIPPIT I HAVE TO AGREE WITH LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S WIFE ON YOU TUBE THAT HE DID NOT SHOOT PRESIDENT KENNEDY OR OFFICER TIPPIT BECAUSE I THINK THAT LEE HARVEY OSWALD WAS INNOCENT INTO HE WAS ACCUSED OF MURDERING A POLICEMAN AND IF HE WAS HERE ALIVE RIGHT HERE IN MY HOUSE AT 4031 ASHLEY COURT HOLIDAY,FLORIDA. I WOULD SIT ON HIS LAP AND JUST TALK TO TALK TO HIM AND STROCK HIS HEAD AND EVERYTHING AND TELL LEE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT AND I WOULD ALSO PUT MY HEAD ON HIS SHOULDER TOO AND JUST CONTINUE TO LOVE HIM AND MAYBE SING TO HIM AND HIM AND WILL ROCK BACK AND FORTH TOGETHER JUST HIM AND I. (April 16th, 2010 at 4:46pm)
This November marks the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. Over the last two decades it has become one of the truisms of contemporary thinking that the assassination burst some seam in the American psyche, through which then flowed dissent, doubt, a breakdown of traditional respect for life and property, and a host of other ills. As the country searched for someone to blame for that terrible crime and its poisonous aftermath, the slight figure of Lee Harvey Oswald seemed hardly enough. Surely some powerful and insidious group — the military, the mob, the CIA, the Cubans — must have been responsible. Thus many single-minded individuals are, as Ron Rosenbaum’s story describes them, “Still on the Case”. Their deep obsessions, their conspiratorial cast, their sightings of ghosts in the alleys of New Orleans and Dallas, make their lives similar in many ways to that of their most elusive prey — Oswald himself.
After Oswald was murdered, the country’s bitterness toward Dallas and its people intensified. Lawrence Wright grew up in Dallas. He knew the city before the assassination. He knows what it meant to be from Dallas during the years when people everywhere were ready to blame the city for President Kennedy’s death. And he also knows how that legacy changed Dallas. His hometown is a very different place today from the Dallas of twenty years ago. What Dallas was and what it has become are the intertwined threads in “Why Do They Hate Us So Much?”
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