David M. Lubin

Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art, Wake Forest University, author of Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images

Sometimes our most vivid memories are secondhand. I remember the day I was born because my father has told me about it countless times—how there was a blizzard that afternoon and our football team was playing in a championship game and my father didn’t have chains and no one was around to help him get my mother to the hospital. I have inherited this memory and meshed it with memories of my father recounting it at so many birthdays that now I wince to hear it. And yet, despite my emotional detachment from an event in which I played a crucial but supernumerary role, I think of it as the central paradigm of my life, as well as his and everyone else’s: We emerge in a state of emergency, alone, helpless, without chains to give us traction.

On a later birthday I watched “live” as Jack Ruby burst out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. I’ve looked at the pictures many times since and always noticed that Oswald was literally chained—handcuffed—to the police detective who was leading him through the subterranean passageway where the killing took place. It’s a world of Greek myth, of Theseus and the Minotaur, the Furies, or Laocoön, where private and public destinies are indissolubly linked. My memories of the event in Dallas and my watching of it in Ohio are themselves chained together and every bit as secondhand as the memory of my birth.