HERE AND THERE
65
killed the President, somewhere around 20,000,000 people
believed
he
did
not.
Mark Lane had become a cultural focus: his nightly per–
formances at the Jan Hus were titled "Who Killed Uohn F.] Kennedy?".
On a Friday night I went.
The lecture was scheduled for 8: 30
P.M.
At 8: 25 I took my seat,
the only unoccupied one left in the house. People were still lined up at
the box office, gathered outside (in rain) waiting, clustered together
in the lobby. Inside the theater hundreds of people sat, lined the walls,
filled the aisles, the standing-room areas at the back. At least half of
them were high school age, or perhaps younger; a quarter more were
college students, many of those, freshmen; a good showing of semi–
hoods, beats, nineteen-thirties Village intellectuals, Chelsea Hotel think–
ers, Seventh Avenue pressers, Negro and white lawyers and law students
(one sat beside me), Lexington Avenue slummers, people in search of
a "happening," made up the rest of the crowd.
I felt the excitement the moment I sat down, all around me and in
myself. Here was the great tragedy of our lives.
An
assassination, an
arrest, a botch, a killing, a man with the nickname of "Sparky" await–
ing execution. Everything mad, everything jumbled, and here a talk
titled with a
question-who, indeed.
Wasn't there a doubt-even the
tiniest-in any reflective man's mind that Lee Harvey Oswald was
the assassin, or,
if
not that doubt, then the one tr,oubled by the con–
clusion that he acted alone? The charge to the Commission itself was
an odd one: it had obvious doubts about the Dallas police, the
F.B.I., and the Secret Service, and yet, what independent
investigative
body did it have at its command to do a disinterested analysis ,of the
role played by those three policing bodies? And that peculiar remark of
Chief Justice Warren-that there were aspects of the Kennedy assas–
sination which could never be known
in our lifetime.
At 8: 30 the crowd at the back of the room moved forward. Ticket–
takers and ticket-sellers squirmed their way in along the walls, found
tiny ledges they climbed onto, and sat. The stage was as yet unlighted.
Stage left was a dark white screen, rather small; stage right was a
lectern, beside it a small table, all in shadow. People were still surging
in through the rear door. The place was airless, damp with rained-on
coats and umbrellas, noisy in a peculiar murmuring way. Schoolbooks
were opened by those who didn't want to lose time. Great leonine old
Village heads turned majestically to see what was going on, or who.
At 8: 40 someone rushed on stage, turned on the lectern light,
rushed out; a light glowed on the white screen, then went off. A small
spotlight played on the lectern and table. Nothing happened. Some
