Last week was the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which the Washington Post observed by inviting the ubiquitous novelist Joyce Carol Oates to review a memoir by the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man whose 8mm movie of Kennedy’s shooting by Lee Harvey Oswald may well be the most analyzed—indeed, overanalyzed—26 seconds in film history.
In general, The Scrapbook believes that after 53 years, there isn’t much more to learn about Kennedy’s fatal encounter with Oswald or, especially, about Abraham Zapruder. But curiosity overcame The Scrapbook. We were interested to know what Joyce Carol Oates has to say on this unlikely subject (her Twitter account is a source of unintended merriment) and to our regret, we soon found out. Oates not only holds conventionally bumptious views on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath—she thinks that it “inaugurated an era of exceptional violence in the United States,” culminating in urban riots several years later—but she is something like a conspiracy theorist as well.
We know this because she puts the Kennedy assassination in historical context in this way:
Those of us, including The Scrapbook, old enough to recall the political climate of November 1963 will find Oates’s description of a “bitterly -polarized” America a debatable assertion, at best: Just 11 months after the Kennedy assassination, the Democratic candidate for president (Lyndon B. Johnson) was elected by the most lopsided popular-vote margin in history. But what The Scrapbook finds especially annoying, and a little saddening, about Oates’s essay is that after describing the scene of the crime as a right-wing “ground zero,” she says virtually nothing whatsoever about the man who actually shot and killed John F. Kennedy.
Which, of course, is instructive as well as annoying. For far from being “ultraconservative,” Lee Harvey Oswald was, in fact, a classic disaffected leftist, of his time and ours. A self-described Marxist, he had literally defected to Moscow in 1959, married the niece of a colonel in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, and lived and worked in the USSR until returning to the United States in 1962. Nor did his repatriation affect his left-wing politics: In New Orleans, Oswald was active in an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and, before killing President Kennedy, had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the ultraconservative retired Army general Edwin Walker.
None of this is mentioned by Joyce Carol Oates, who characterizes Oswald, at one point, as Kennedy’s “alleged killer” and, at another point, as “deranged”—and nothing more. Whether Oswald was deranged is a matter of speculation; but what is incontrovertible is that, the political temperament of Dallas notwithstanding, Lee Harvey Oswald was sane enough to hold political views not very distant from the political opinions of Joyce Carol Oates.
Of course, what is saddening about all this is that by deflecting the uncomfortable fact of Oswald’s left-wing rage and violence with lurid descriptions of “reactionary” Dallas, Oates and her fellow progressives continue to inspire the lurid conspiracy theories that cloud the truth about Kennedy’s murder. Five American presidents have been shot in our history, and four of them were Republicans. There may be a reason for this, not that Joyce Carol Oates knows it.
