How Dallas came to terms with tragedy

The gunfire that felled President John Kennedy 40 years ago on Saturday was an event so searing that millions of people, not just in America but worldwide, can still recall in vivid detail the moment they learned the news. Almost lost in that moment is the fact that those bullets left other casualties in Dallas that day and caused grave injury to the standing of the city itself.

In short order, Dallas would come to be dubbed "the city of hate." When its residents traveled out of state, they learned not to name their hometown. Some who did were thrown out of taxis, refused service in restaurants, or otherwise snubbed. Telephone operators cut them off. An assassin could have struck in countless other cities, but he fired at Dealey Plaza. The only way many Americans could cope with the assassination, it seemed, was to attack the city where it happened.

Those painful days are now behind Dallas, which has become one of America's most popular tourist destinations. Indeed, more visitors go to Dealey Plaza than to any other spot in the city - a tribute, of sorts, to how Dallas eventually came to grips with its ignominious place in history. In the end, the city made a conscious decision not to try to bury the past or hide from it, but to give full disclosure in the form of The Sixth Floor Museum, housed in the very building in which Lee Harvey Oswald waited in ambush. The story of the museum's birth is the story of Dallas's own recovery from the JFK assassination. It was not an easy delivery.

At first, Dallas behaved as if repressing its memory were the only way to cope with Nov. 22, 1963. For more than 15 years, the city did little to acknowledge the event. Yet even before the president was buried, throngs streamed into Dealey Plaza, finding only an abandoned warehouse locked up and showing no sign of its indelible mark on US heritage.

Dallas was like many other cities that have ignored or abandoned sites of historic tragedies for decades before commemorating them. Washington, D.C., for instance, allowed Ford's Theater, the site of Lincoln's assassination, to deteriorate almost beyond salvaging before the Eisenhower administration began to rebuild it.

But in the late '70s, a handful of visionaries resolved that Dallas would not wait generations before acknowledging its place in presidential history. Initially, they faced resistance beyond the borders of Texas. Lindalyn Adams, then chairwoman of the Dallas County Historical Commission, recalls a trip to Washington to meet officials from the National Register of Historic Places. Sitting in a restaurant, she heard two men behind her laughing. She had paid no attention until one said he was about to meet with some Texans.

" 'They want to put the Texas School Book Depository on the National Register,' " Ms. Adams recalls one of them saying. " 'Next thing you know, someone will want to register the Watergate.' "

Adams and two other Dallasites subsequently had a difficult meeting with the officials, who sat with their arms folded. The Register committee softened when members began to recall exactly where they had been the day Kennedy was shot. Still, the Dallas trio went home without any encouragement. "As a rule of thumb, nothing is historic until it's 50 years old," Adams recalls being told at the 1979 meeting.

At that point, Dallas took one key step, led by Judson Shook, a persistent engineer who had served as county director of public works since 1968. From his office window on Dealey Plaza he could see the old depository and the stream of visitors taking pictures or rattling the doors to find a way into the grimy building. He was concerned that keeping the building locked would only prolong Dallas's pain and make visitors more suspicious of the city.

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