Everybody's Crime

Everybody's Crime

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
November 1963

Washington -- The Spanish Ambassador was on his knees. The people who were in line behind him walked around him. The coffin was draped with an American flag. But at the bottom, just before the black velvet started, a little bit of mahogany wood showed. The body of the thirty-fifth President of the United States is inside the wood. Or whatever it is that is left after the .25-caliber bullet that ripped his head apart. You noticed the mahogany wood because it was reflecting the bright, bare light the six television Kleig lights threw onto the floor of the rotunda of the Capital building.

The place was silent. The people, silent people who had blank faces, moved around the coffin in two orderly lines. They were trying to pick up their feet so their shoes would make as little of the noise of shuffling as possible. The Spanish Ambassador said prayers.

A Negro woman, a black kerchief covering her head, walked around him. A little boy of about three held onto her right had. The boy had on long pants and an overcoat and a blue cap. He was looking away from the coffin. All the police and soldiers and television lights caught his attention.

The mother yanked his hand. "Look this way, Roger," she whispered. The little head turned and the woman in the black scarf bent over and put her cheek against the boy's. "He's right there under that flag," she whispered. "That's President Kennedy there. Look at it, Roger. Mommy wants you to know about this."

Then she was gone and there was somebody else there. The Spanish Ambassador was on his feet now, and he was walking by too. The place was quiet and unreal, and far above you, up at the top of the dome, shafts of light coming in through the windows crisscrossed each other.

There was a sound in the hallway to the right, the hallway which leads to the Senate offices. The two policemen there moved back. Then you what was making the sound. It was an honor guard coming out. There were six of them. They were holding rifles at carry arms, which means the butt of the rifle is just a little bit off the floor. And they moved imperceptibly. But their heels clicked against the floor in cadence each time they moved, and this was what was making the little noise.

When they got out on the rotunda floor, light from the television Kleig lights sprayed off the bayonets of their guns. Then you noticed the soldiers on duty for the first time. They were at parade rest around the coffin. Six of them. But they had been so motionless that you didn't even notice them before this. You had only been seeing the coffin and the people.

But now you noticed the soldiers. You saw the ones standing so stiffly around the coffin, and the others moving slowly and clicking their heels while the bayonets sparkled. And then everything came over you, and you stood in the Rotunda of the Capitol building of the United States of America and looked at a coffin that held the body of a President whose head had been blown off by a gun fired by one of his own people and now you fell apart inside and there was this terrible sense of confusion and inability to understand what was going on. And there were tears; of course there were tears, there have been tears for three days now; and then you started talking out loud.

"Oh Christ, what are we doing here?" It was a prayer, not a blasphemy.

Dallas. You started to think about Dallas. In Dallas they sat and told you that a Communist shot the President of the United States. They sat and told you that, while everybody in the town with any brains knew that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was shot because this is a country that has let the art of hating grow so strong that now we kill our President because of it.

And Dallas does not own hate. Dallas is a collective word and it means Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and, yes, Scarsdale and Bay Ridge and the Bronx too. Dallas means every place where people in this nation stand off with their smugness and their paychecks and their cute little remarks, and run their lives on the basis of hate. Everybody has a piece of this murder. Everybody who ever stood off and said, "That Jew bastard," and everybody who ever said, "I don't want niggers near me," is a part of this murder.