Examining the Legacy of JFK’s Assassination
April 3, 2025
Visiting Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas can be a somber and disorientating experience for people familiar with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination there on Nov. 22, 1963. Author Tim Cloward BA’85, MA’92, PhD’02 has written that visiting the plaza leaves him troubled, confused and not knowing what to feel, even 60 years after the tragedy.
“I feel all tongue-tied and stumbly, like I’m standing around and don’t know what to do with my hands,” Coward wrote in his book, “The City That Killed the President: A Cultural History of Dallas & the Assassination.” The volume examines how the city and citizens of Dallas were ostracized and culturally stymied even decades after the incident.
A high school teacher, poet, performer and arts activist, Cloward earned three degrees from UT Dallas’ former School of Arts and Humanities, now the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. He has spent more than 30 years involved in the city’s arts and only recently turned his writing talents to examining how the Kennedy assassination impacted Dallas’ arts and literary scenes.
Cloward’s research has revealed that the assassination was such a horrendous event in the city’s history, and its citizens so traumatized, that any true examination of the impact was stifled and suppressed until 2013 when the City of Dallas sponsored a 50th anniversary commemoration.
“My original intention was to write a literary history of Dallas, but I kept finding fascinating material brewing up around the assassination,” Cloward said. “This was intriguing because everything about the assassination was surrounded by a larger silence and a sort of tension. So, I inadvertently got sucked into the JFK assassination black hole.”
Even before Kennedy’s Dallas visit in November 1963, the city had begun developing a national reputation for embracing extreme right-wing conservative political views. Business leaders, such as Ted Dealy at the Dallas Morning News, made no efforts to disguise their dislike for the young Democratic president. In fact, Dallas became known as the “City of Hate” even before the assassination.
Cloward wrote that this reputation meant that while it was lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald who murdered the president, the very citizens of Dallas were seen in the nation’s eyes as complicit in the assassination.
“Where the city got tarred was completely the result of the reputation that Dallas had built up for itself nationally,” Cloward said. “One thing that I tried to do in this book was point out that we did not truly address the right-wing conspiracy paranoia that dominated Dallas’ public life in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It’s worth looking at because what happened in the past is incredibly relevant today.”
Denial that Dallas held any responsibility for the assassination resulted in decades of self-imposed silence surrounding the event. Though Dealey Plaza is known to be the location of the shooting and a museum now tells the story from the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository building on the plaza, memorials to JFK are rare in Dallas. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza in downtown Dallas, dedicated in 1970, is not even located at Dealey Plaza.
“(The plaza) is an open wound that pulls all those memories back up. It’s the third rail of Dallas cultural life that you don’t mess with Dealey Plaza,” Cloward said. “People go there, and they don’t know what to do. And what’s the focal point? It’s the Xs in the road where he was shot that are put there by the local conspiracists, these unauthorized, surreptitious Xs that show up in the street all the time.”
Though the Kennedy assassination is one of the most written about episodes in U.S. history with thousands of books covering it, but ironically, one of the most disturbing elements of its legacy has been a lack of closure.
Despite numerous investigations that have failed to find evidence of multiple shooters or organizations or governments conspiring to kill the president, the assassination remains the story of a lone gunman whose reason for killing Kennedy is lost to history. Thousands of previously classified documents were recently released to the public. But to date, no new information confirms any of the many conspiracy theories.
“So, it’s interesting that the more information that comes out, we are nowhere closer to finding any evidence that there was a conspiracy,” Cloward said, “yet the perception of the event to the public appears muddier and muddier.”
On the anniversary of the assassination in 2024, The Dallas Morning News published an opinion piece by Cloward who wrote about how the country’s current obsession with conspiracy theories can be traced to the Kennedy assassination. He warns that such theories make society less prepared for the next pandemic, for climate change or for election misinformation.
“Those 1963 events in Dallas have become the origin point for a newer more infectious strain of conspiracy paranoia,” Cloward wrote. “In Dallas, we’ve borne an immense historical burden because of our conspiracy-mongering past.”
With fewer and fewer witnesses to the events of Kennedy’s assassination left alive, the current generation turns more and more to conspiracy theorizing. Even to Cloward’s high school students, the killing of Kennedy remains less a tragedy than a conspiracy joke.
As a cultural historian of the assassination, Cloward has searched far and wide for examples of people’s reactions to the killing. Since there were no locally produced journals or other platforms for Dallas citizens following the killing, he continues to search out little-know works that have not found their way to the light of day.
“One of the big questions I play out in my mind is, knowing that many people write poems in moments of trauma, there are no doubt a million unpublished tomes in people’s attics and file cabinets from that time,” Cloward said.