Show this world that this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Nothing, as long as you live, will ever be more important. It’s up to you. —Attorney Jim Garrison (during his summation to the jury in the film JFK) There’s something so mysterious about an orchid. They look as though they had been grown in damp underground caves by demons. They’re evil sickly flowers with no life of their own, living on borrowed strength. —Mary Pinchot (Meyer) (from her short story “Futility,” Vassar Review and Little Magazine, 1941) A SHOCKED AND traumatized nation attempted to fathom the death of its president. The eye of the storm was centered in Washington, encased within a hurricane of concealed controversy. In Dallas, an hour and fifteen minutes after the president’s death, a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked in the Texas School Book Depository—the place where shots had allegedly been fired at the president—was arrested in a Dallas movie theater.
