The scene has been shot – as in filmed – to death and still no one can agree what happened. The image analysts working over the weekend reckoned eight shots. That would never do. And as to who did it, the shooters, forget it, they were faceless technicians, as boring as golf pros. The great thing about Lee Harvey Oswald was what a back story! You couldn’t have a more interesting patsy. And for every account there is another version. Officer Tippit encountered Oswald on the corner of 10 and Patton at 1.15, forty-five minutes after the assassination, and Tippit wound up dead on the ground, shot by Lee or someone else because there is always another phantom gunman wherever you turn. In another version, Lee couldn’t have met Tippit because he was already in the movie house where he was arrested, watching a double bill of War Is Hell and Cry of Battle, a Van Heflin flick. In another version he turned up much later without paying, which alerted the cashier, who called the police and minutes later they piled in. In the version where Oswald arrived early he went and sat in the gallery then came back down and bought popcorn and sat in the stalls. Popcorn? Is this the behaviour of a man with a lot on his mind? Yet other accounts locate Tippit at the cinema too. But this is the point. To fracture the narrative. Always. The freakiest accounts identify two Oswalds at the cinema. And in all of this no one has offered a lucid description of how you really work the patsy angle. How it really really works, how for instance you persuade a night-club owner with deep connections to the Mafia and Dallas police to step into history and shoot a man on prime-time TV. Really, what is the mise en scene, as those fancy French Cahier boys call it? And Jack Ruby thinking: What’s my motive here? Really.
Vice-President Lyndon was getting dumped. Lyndon was on the brink of corruption charges that would have seen him locked away, the story set to run only days later when the assassination of his boss became his get-out-of-jail card. This was a man who would when questioned by the press about what the Vietnam war was about unzipped his pants and slapped his enormous tool on the table, and said, This is what it is about!