The steak was already being served when the news reached the room. Dallas's business establishment had sold out the hall at the Trade Mart on Stemmons Freeway for 22 November 1963, two thousand six hundred invitations out, and the motorcade through downtown was to arrive at half past twelve. Guests had gathered from eleven and were told from the podium to start eating; the Catholics among them had a dispensation for meat on a Friday. Then Erik Jonsson took the microphone to say the president of the United States had been injured, and the tables stopped. Those nearest the front filed out last and heard on a police radio in the car park outside that Kennedy had been pronounced dead at Parkland. Trammell Crow looked at the empty head table and told a waiter to put the president's place setting into a paper sack. It is at the Sixth Floor Museum now, plates and cup and saucer in the Royal Leaf pattern, the cutlery, a tumbler, a goblet, a napkin and the salt and pepper. The speech was written and typed onto thirty seven cards. It argues that American power without judgement is useless and that ignorance and misinformation are as dangerous as any enemy, and near the end comes the line Kennedy never got to say, that we in this country, in this generation, are by destiny rather than choice the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. The cards are at the Kennedy Library in Boston.
Getting there
32.8020, -96.8256
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Hear it from the road
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