Tom Stone, a senior lecturer of English, has taught courses involving John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination for 18 years. His classes focus on the relationship between history and fiction.
“Different historians can look at the same set of facts and draw completely opposite conclusions,” Stone said. “Everything, especially if there’s a whole lot of information about it is an interpertation. It’s a class exploring how sharply defined the differences between genres and disciplines actually are.”
Stone said he’s interested in JFK’s presidency because it’s a vantage point to look at many aspects of America in that era.
“It is a way to talk about the power and influence of these unseen forces in American culture that really were unseen at the time,” he said. “This secret power that these organizations had to shape cultural perception and memory to control the flow of information and therefore keep the public as in the dark as possible. These things have changed a little but they haven’t changed as drastically as we might think.”
Around 200 people gathered at the JFK Memorial Plaza Friday morning, a block away from the commemoration held in Dealey Plaza, to voice their suspicions surrounding the assassination of the 35th president. Stone said that his students have to see that there’s no single way to tell the story of President Kennedy.
“Whether we like it or not, that’s just an uncertainty that we have to live with,” he said. “That shouldn’t make us hopeless, it should just make us realize we have to think for ourselves and inform ourselves. And that whatever truth we construct, if we do it responsibly, that’ll be as true as anybody else’s truth. There are no easy answers; there are no absolute certainties.”
Stone thought the city’s recognition of the tragedy that took place here half a century ago was a good decision, as no public event has ever been held before.
“A somber, carefully orchestrated, perhaps appropriately timid and bland event is better than no event at all,” he said. “It will give the city a chance to sort of put its best face forward to the world, which is why I think it’s happening.”
Despite the controversy and uncertainties surrounding JFK’s death, Stone believes “we pretty much know everything we’re ever going to know.”
Like Mayor Mike Rawlings and historian David McCollough expressed in their brief remarks Friday morning, Stone also remembers Kennedy’s inspirational legacy.
“I think that while there was naivete in the country and that people were overly trusting of their institutions and of the government, there was also a kind of optimism with Kennedy,” Stone said. “He really made people believe that problems were just there to be solved; that there was no such thing as a problem that America faced that couldn’t be fixed. And I think when he died, some of that just died with him.”
