Governor and Mrs. John Connally, of Texas, with the Kennedys, in the Presidential limousine, in Dallas, November 22, 1963. Courtesy International Center of Photography

Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world, lucky for us, but they can be worldly judges of poetic legislators. Lincoln’s soul survives in Whitman’s words, and the response of American poets to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, fifty years ago, suggests that there really was, beyond the hype and the teeth, an interesting man in there. An entire volume of mostly elegiac poems, “Of Poetry and Power,” with a Rauschenberg silk-screen portrait of the President for its cover, came out within months of his murder. (It was even recorded, complete, on Folkways Records.)

John Berryman wrote a “Formal Elegy” for the President (“Yes. it looks like wilderness”); Auden an “Elegy for J.F.K.,” originally accompanied by twelve-tone music by Stravinsky. Robert Lowell—who in the Second World War had gone to prison as a conscientious objector, and in the late sixties became a Pentagon-bashing radical hero—wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that the murder left him “weeping through the first afternoon,” and then “three days of television uninterrupted by advertising till the grand, almost unbearable funeral.” The country, he said, “went through a moment of terror and passionate chaos.” Lowell’s friend and fellow-poet Randall Jarrell called it the “saddest” public event that he could remember. Jarrell tried to write an elegy but could get no further than “The shining brown head.”

This passionate chaos was set loose, then, in every back yard. It is easy to be cynical about it in retrospect—being cynical about it in retrospect is by now a branch of American historical studies—and say that the poets’ overwrought grief was the product of a sleight of hand worked by Jackie, no other group so easily bought as American writers. (Even the Salingers were invited to the White House—and Mrs. Salinger wanted to go!) But there was more than that. The death of J.F.K. marked the last time the highbrow reaches of the American imagination were complicit in the dignity of the Presidency. In Norman Mailer’s “Presidential Papers,” published the month Kennedy died, the point is that there was a “fissure in the national psyche,”* a divide between the passionate inner life of America and its conformist, repressed official life: “The life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far.” For Mailer, Kennedy’s Presidency supplied the hope of an epiphany wherein the romantic-hero President would somehow lead his people on an “existential” quest to heal this breach. It sounded just as ridiculous then, but there was something gorgeous in the absurdity.

Of course, people made fun of Kennedy—the Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader was the single biggest loser after the assassination. (“Poor Vaughn Meader,” Lenny Bruce is said to have muttered in his standup act on the night of the killing.) And the John Birch right wingers hated him as implacably as their children do Obama. But the king always has his fool, and the haters were largely marginalized. Lowell wondered what character in Shakespeare Bobby, the dour younger brother, most resembled. Finding Shakespearean dimensions in politicians was an accepted sport. This kind of contemplation became increasingly incredible in the years that followed. (L.B.J. could be Macbeth, but only as the burlesque MacBird.) Reagan and Clinton were both larger-than-life figures drawn from simpler American entertainments—Mr. Deeds and the Music Man, the wise innocent in power or the lovable fast-talking con man who turns out to be essential to everyone’s happiness. Kennedy, by contrast, was still seen as a king of divine right out of the seventeenth century—the subject of endless reverie about his capacity to renew the world. And so the obsession with his body, that shining head, recalling the seventeenth-century French court watching the King sleep and rise and defecate, leads in the end to the grisly conspiracy-theory compulsion to review every square inch of his autopsied body. (One conspiracy theorist, David Lifton, said once that he never married because every would-be bride realized that he was more interested in the President’s dead body than in her living one.)

The nation really did get turned inside out when Kennedy was killed, as nations do at the death of kings. But what altered? In many ways, it was a time more past than present. Though it’s said that the event marked the decisive move from page to screen, newspaper to television, all the crucial information was channelled through the wire-service reporters, who, riding six cars back from the President’s, were the first to get and send the news of the shots, and were still thought of as the authoritative source. Walter Cronkite’s two most famous moments—breaking into “As the World Turns” to announce, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired”; and his later, holding-back-tears “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 P.M. Central Standard Time”—were in both cases simply read from the wire-service copy. You can see the assistants ripping the copy from the teleprinter and rushing it to the anchorman.

Yet an imbalance between the flood of information and the uncertainty of our understanding—the sense that we know so much and grasp so little, and that reality becomes an image passing—does seem to have begun then: the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know. A compulsive “hyperperspicacity,” in the term of one assassination researcher—the tendency to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide—became the motif of the time. To dive into the assassination literature fifty years on—to read the hundreds of books, with their hundreds of theories, fingering everyone from Melvin Belli to the Mossad; to visit Dealey Plaza on trips to Dallas; and to venture in the middle of the night onto the assassination forums and chat rooms—is to find two truths overlaid. The first truth is that the evidence that the American security services gathered, within the first hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-witness evidence, fingerprint evidence, firearms evidence, circumstantial evidence, fibre evidence. The second truth of the assassination, just as inarguable, is that the security services collecting that evidence were themselves up to their armpits in sinister behavior, even conspiring with some of the worst people in the world to kill the Presidents of other countries. The accepted division of American life into two orders—an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime—collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir.

“Know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes?” the guilty Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tells his virtuous insurance colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) at the end of the great “Double Indemnity,” in a taunting confession. “I’ll tell ya. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya.” Keyes’s beautiful, enigmatic rejoinder is: “Closer than that, Walter.” He means that the cop and the killer share more than they knew before the crime, that temptations that lead to murder are available to us all; the lure of transgression makes us closer than we think.

These two truths lead you not so much to different claims as to different worlds. Every decade or so, the Oswald-incriminating facts are comprehensively reviewed—most recently by Vincent Bugliosi, in a thousand-plus-page volume, “Reclaiming History” (Norton)—and, every decade, people who don’t care tend to accept those facts, while the people who care most remain furious and unpersuaded. The world of the conspiracy buffs has a bibliography and a set of fixed points that run parallel to but separate from reality as it is usually conceived. The buffs, for instance, rely heavily on the memoir of Madeleine Brown, who claims to have been one of L.B.J.’s mistresses, and to have been told by him, the night before the murder, “Those goddam Kennedys will never embarrass me again!” The buffs debate whether she is wholly, largely, or only sporadically reliable. In the latest volume of Robert Caro’s L.B.J. biography, by contrast, Brown is not thought worth mentioning, even to disprove. (In any case, the key conspiracy scene she paints, a kind of pre-assassination party at the millionaire Clint Murchison’s Dallas house, attended by Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon, has been conclusively debunked. No record of it exists in any Dallas newspaper, and Johnson can be safely placed in Houston that night.) In the same way, the buffs take for granted the role of Joseph Kennedy, first as a bootlegger, then as a campaign fund-raiser for his son entangled with the Mafia, and argue about whether the Mafia alone was the killer or the Mafia in league with the C.I.A. Joe Kennedy’s guilty past is the entire pivot of the assassination in a new conspiracy book, ominously titled “The Poison Patriarch,” by Mark Shaw (Skyhorse); and the same idea is dramatized in the screenwriter William Mastrosimone’s Broadway-bound play “Ride the Tiger.” Yet David Nasaw’s recent, far-from-admiring biography of old Joe dismisses as complete legend the notion that he ever made a penny as a bootlegger or worked closely with the Mob. (He made his money in Hollywood and on Wall Street, mobs of their own.)

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Bugliosi handles the conspiracy theorists with a relentless note of sarcastic condescension. But there are ways in which the pattern-seeking is a meaningful index of the event, and gives us more insight into its hold fifty years on than the evidence does. A web without a spider still catches the light. There are distinct period styles in paranoia. The first generation of assassination obsessives—Josiah Thompson, still writing; Harold Weisberg, long dead—were essentially hopeful proceduralists, men and women with thick files and endless clippings, convinced that due scrutiny of the record would reveal sufficient inconsistencies, opacities, and falsehoods to compel the reopening of the entire case. Their model was journalists of the I. F. Stone kind, the isolated man of integrity who could find the truth by scrutinizing the record.