Welcome to the Texas Canon, a series that dives into the movies, TV shows, books, albums, and more that represent us and reach far beyond the Lone Star State’s borders. On the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, we look at the 1991 film “JFK” written and directed by Oliver Stone.

You can find the visitors most days, poking around, buying commemorative memorabilia, taking mini tours. For those who seek a more curated take, up above the Grassy Knoll is the Sixth Floor Museum. The gawkers still flock, six decades after the horror. Some claim President John F. Kennedy could have been assassinated anywhere. But Dallas has come to own its dark place in history, earned 60 years ago, even if it resists the moniker bestowed after the shooting: City of Hate.

When I moved to Texas in 1996, I realized my morning commute to the Dallas Morning News building took me right through the scene of the crime. I recognized it largely because of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which had come out just five years earlier. It was weird. There’s my freeway exit. And there’s where the president was killed. JFK takes place largely in New Orleans, where District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) prosecuted the only court case in the aftermath of the assassination. But the Dallas scenes, like the rest of the movie, are quite vivid. As Garrison stands in the window of the book depository, calculating how Lee Harvey Oswald might have squeezed off his three shots, it’s easy to share in his doubt. The assassination reenactments are also chilling, somehow turning the simple words “triple underpass” into an ominous incantation.

Then there’s the film within the film, the most important artifact of the assassination. A great many people encountered the Zapruder Film for the first time via Stone’s movie. A doggedly recorded snuff film, it raises as many questions as it answers (Costner’s Garrison: “Back, and to the left…”) in providing painfully graphic footage that can’t be unseen, innocence that can’t be regained. Our perception of the assassination would be much different were it not for a Ukrainian-born clothing manufacturer who happened to be on hand that day with his Bell & Howell camera. It might just be the most important film in the history of the medium.

JFK nibbles at the City of Hate idea; Donald Sutherland’s Mr. X, the ne plus ultra of anonymous sources, questions why so few precautions were taken in “a known hostile city like Dallas.” A Garrison associate played by Wayne Knight gets a choked laugh with this Lone Star observation on Oswald: “Jesus Christ, anybody can get a rifle in Texas!” Indeed, sir. But Stone is more interested in taking a sledgehammer to the Warren Report—in a mischievous bit of casting, the real-life Garrison plays Chief Justice Earl Warren—and mapping out a conspiracy with elements both plausible and deeply irresponsible.

Youngsters today might not realize what a tempest the movie created upon release, stoking the fires of lone gunman believers and conspiracists alike. The Oscar-winning editing and cinematography cast the sort of spell that makes one believe absolutely anything is possible. (For a more sober-minded critique of the Warren Commission, check out Rush to Judgment, Emile de Antonio’s 1967 documentary showing at MFAH on Nov. 22).  

Others, however, have been eager to explore Dallas’ culpability in the assassination. Two works worth seeking out are Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis’ book Dallas 1963 and Quin Matthews’ documentary City of Hate. Both stop short of any bellicose “Dallas killed Kennedy!” accusations, but both make plain that the city was a nest of right-wing venom in the ’60s, including vicious anti-Kennedy rhetoric from sources including the city’s official media organ.

Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey was outspoken in his disdain for the president. On the morning of the assassination, the newspaper printed a full-page ad, allegedly paid for by the bogus “American Fact-Finding Committee,” castigating Kennedy for being soft on communism (a red-meat talking point for Kennedy haters). Also circulating throughout the city was a flyer, done up as a mugshot, offering that Kennedy was “Wanted For Treason.” Just a month before the assassination, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson visited Dallas and was accosted by rowdy protesters, including a woman who hit him over the head with a sign. Further hate was spewed by locals including oil tycoon and radio personality H.L. Hunt; and Edwin Walker, a resigned army major general, outspoken Kennedy basher (partly responsible for those Wanted For Treason flyers)—and, according to Marina Oswald, the target of an assassination attempt by her husband, Lee Harvey.

Walker is also a character in Stephen King’s assassination novel 11/22/63, as well as my favorite work of fiction about the assassination, Don DeLillo’s novel Libra. In DeLillo’s hands, Oswald is indeed the ultimate patsy, raised by his narcissistic mother, in over his head with the CIA, a cog in a machine that originally plans a failed assassination attempt, then changes its mind and goes for the real thing. His CIA handlers plan to have him killed at the Texas Theatre, but the cops get there first. If JFK breathes fire, then Libra is an ice-cold vision of a Deep State of mind, deftly spinning fact and fiction into a haunting, speculative synthesis.

Today, 60 years after the fact, new details continue to emerge. In his recent memoir, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis claimed that he took a bullet from the president’s car that day and placed it on his hospital stretcher, raising new questions about who fired and from where. And here we are again, chasing after the truth. The infamy may belong to the entire country, but the events will forever be rooted in downtown Dallas.