In case you missed the Venture Galleries interview, I have
made it available in full for you here. Starting next week, the serialized
edition of The Man on the Grassy Knoll
will be available at Venture Galleries on a daily basis. It is free, so I encourage you to read it and
enjoy. If you’d like a hard copy o the book visit LULU Press.
The editors at
Venture Galleries recently sat down with author John Crawley to discus the 50th
Anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination in Dallas, Texas. Crawley is the
author of the book The Man on the Grassy
Knoll (2009 Lulu Press). Crawley has produced, to date, 11 novels; the
last four have been published by Venture Galleries in association with Lulu
Press. John’s latest, The Myth Makers,
was reviewed here last November.
VG: How is the City of Dallas
going to observe the 50th anniversary of JFK’s shooting? Will there
be speeches and parades and such, or will it be a more somber memorial?
Crawley: By not mentioning that he was shot in
Dallas at all.
VG: Not sure I understand.
Crawley: Dallas, as a city, is so afraid for its
“brand” that it doesn’t want to remind people that Kennedy was shot on Elm
Street here in our downtown. Even though it is part of American history, that
would mean the city was back in the news as the site of a horrendous murder.
Not that people don’t associate the assassination with Dallas anyway. — and not
like it isn’t going to be talked about in all forms of media on a daily basis
as the event’s date nears. It’s like saying, ‘oh the Alamo…I forgot it is in
downtown San Antonio’. I mean sooner or later, Dallas is going to have to grow
up and quit hiding behind its own shadow. Hey, Reagan was shot in Washington,
but they don’t hide it. Lincoln, too. But Dallas has such an inferiority
complex for some reason that they just can’t handle the truth. Plus the mayor
is a PR/Ad guy who wants everything whitewashed. So we have a 50th
Anniversary scheduled…but 50th what?
VG: I understand you are
commemorating the event with the possible release of a film based on your book.
Crawley: It wasn’t planned to be commemorative,
it just so happened that the timing on the development of the film is happening
at the same time the 50th Anniversary is going on. Makes for good
marketing. But it truly is serendipitous.
VG: Have you seen more interest in
The Man on the Grassy Knoll this year
because of the anniversary?
Crawley: Yes.
People like you want to interview me now, when four years ago when it
came out I couldn’t buy press time. Now
you guys are having to line up to talk with me.
But I understand that. It is a
news event. There is air time that must
be filled and pages of print that must have ink spread upon them. And my story
is just one of many that will help fill those gaps.
VG: Does it make you uneasy to
feel as if you are taking advantage of a sad day in history…
Crawley: I can stop you before you finish. No.
Did Spielberg think twice about the Lincoln movie just because Lincoln was
gunned down in Ford’s Theater? No way. Did
Ken Burns pause in the making of the Civil War documentary because thousands
lost their lives during that terrible conflict?
No. They are historical events and we talk about them all the time. Same
is true with Kennedy’s assassination. My book alone came out of a conversation
I had with a Dallas police officer on duty that day, who said that there had
been suspicious activity along the rail lines atop the grassy knoll. Officers
had been assigned to check it out. The
guys that did, were not Dallas police. He figured they were Secret Service
agents, but the Secret Service said they weren’t involved in the surveillance
of the overpass at the Grassy Knoll. So you see, we’ve got us a bit of a
conspiracy hole to dig into. That’s how this stuff works. So I took that and developed
a character named Raul Salazar and for years worked and reworked his story to
get him onto the Grassy Knoll the day of the shooting.
VG: You worked on this book over
two decades, is that right?
Crawley: Twenty-six years to be exact. I started
in in 1983 and finally published the book in 2009. I wrote six complete drafts
of the book and tore each of them up.
VG: Why?
Crawley: They were dull and boring. You see, I
had done all this research into the assassination. I had reams of documents and
testimony; I had read and reread the Warren Commission Report. I had dates,
times facts and figures. And I tried to squeeze them all into each manuscript I
worked on. And every time I did, it got worse and worse. I finally threw them
all away and placed the project on a “permanent” hold. It sounded and felt way
too academic. (I said that the other day at a talk at the University of Texas
at Austin and suddenly said to my self, “I probably shouldn’t have used that
phrase.” But the professor all got a good laugh out of it and they understood
what I was saying. One professor even confessed he hated reading his own papers
based on his research because they were always so stiff and boring. So, I guess
I wasn’t the only one suffering from too much crap piled inside the lines.)
But
the truth was that the writing wasn’t very good. So the story percolated in my
brain for almost two decades, then as I approached another book I was working
on, a thought struck me to tell Raul’ story in transcript format — an
interview— and by so doing, I would eliminate the need for such detail. A real
person wouldn’t go into the kind of mind-numbing detail during an interview. He
would simply tell his story. And it worked. It worked like gangbusters.
VG: So the transcript idea wasn’t
around on the first drafts?
Crawley: Oh no. Not by a long shot. The earlier
renditions were third person narratives that read like the Old Testament. This
fact begat this fact, which begat this date and this action. Horrible. Kurt
Vonnegut used to say you have to write a million words before you become a true
writer. Well, the early drafts of The Man
on the Grassy Knoll certainly helped get me down the road to that quota in
a hurry.
VG: Six complete drafts?
Crawley: At least six. There may have been a
seventh. God, think of the trees I destroyed. Those were back in the days we
actually typed on paper.
VG: How did you develop the story
of Raul?
Crawley: To begin with, I have never bought the
conclusions of the Warren Commission Report.
I believe the Warren Commission did exactly what they set out to do.
Reassure a nervous country that we were okay. That our institutions were safe
from foreigners or worse, from internal forces wanting to control the destiny
of the greatest country on Earth. And if they could sell the idea that one man,
crazy as he was, had acted alone, then all would be safe and cozy again. To
that end, I believe they did their job. It’s just that as many people,
including yours truly, doubted them as believed them.
I mean just
study the “magic” bullet alone, and you will see that their science is
specious. It goes into the President, exits him, goes through the seat into
Governor Connelly and back out and onto the floorboard and is as pristine as a
new shell — really? And this while
executing two acute angle turns in its trajectory.
And what
about the way in which Kennedy’s head explodes with the impact of the shot as
seen on various films of the event that day. Not from the School Book Depository
Building. Nope. The car had moved to far west down elm street. For the head to
explode the way in which it did, the shot must have come from the north or
northwest. The Grassy Knoll or the edge of the overpass along the railroad line
that leads into Union Station. Simply observations. Yet they made a shell game
of the facts constantly moving information around and changing testimony of
witnesses who tried to clear up their testimony when they read what the commission
reported they had said. Take events, quotes and facts out of context. Even
changing the history of events that happened at Parkland Hospital. Even the
idea that the parade route had been suddenly changed to swing the motorcade
down Elm Street. Why? Why go under the
Texas School Book Depository Building and along side the Grassy Knoll? Did
someone know there would be shooters waiting on Kennedy?
The Warren
Commission Report wasn’t suppose to prove who killed Kennedy. It was supposed
to assure a nation that they were safe from outside attacks or from sabotage
within. It was, at best, a whitewash of the facts.
So, armed
with this skepticism, I set out to build a case for what might have happened.
Fictional, to be sure, but based on facts and on times and on probability, not
just possibility. I had everything I
needed except a suspect, so I invented him in the form of Raul Salazar.
VG: Have you ever been challenged on your
approach to how the day unfolded and how your facts are played out in your
story?
Crawley: Not once. And I have had some very
knowledgeable assassination history buffs pour over my novel. Not one has said,
wait this couldn’t have happened because of yadda yadda. Not one. Now that’s not to say what I have
done is written history— non-fiction history. It is not, nor was it meant to
be. It is a novel. Pure and simple. But its goal was to get us all to look and
see how our foreign policy is conducted. How we recruit those who do our nefarious
bidding for us, how we train them and deploy them and how sometimes they return
to bite us back.
Was there a
Raul Salazar? I have no idea. But, deep in my heart of hearts, I know this: Oswald
did not act alone. Someone else was there that day. Maybe more than one other. Maybe there was a
Raul Salazar. Maybe he was from Mexico and trained by the CIA and maybe he did
infiltrate the Castro regime. I do not know.
I do know
this. Oswald did not shoot the President of the United States alone. No way. No
how. He wasn’t fast enough to make the three shots from where they came.
But I also
think we will never know what happened that day. Not the whole truth, anyway.
So my novel is but one attempt to get people to open their minds and think of
what could have happened. How it could have happened and why it did happen. And like I said, its real mission is to show
how we attract those who do our dark ops work for us.
VG: Have you gotten any push-back from
authorities in Dallas about the promotion of your book or the film during this
time period?
Crawley: Not as of yet. But it is still early. I
warned the director that he might find getting city permits to film in certain
areas quite difficult, since the city wants to sanitize history of the event.
But so far there has been no conspiracy to stop us or to slow us down.
VG: Why, of all the assassinations and
assassination attempts, does the Kennedy one hold so many conspiracy theories
and have so many shadows around it?
Crawley: Good question. I believe first because
of the cover-up in the Warren Commission. Secondly, there were just a lot of
unanswered questions about the circumstances at Dealey Plaza that day. There
had been a huge “hate” campaign aimed at Kennedy, not unlike the kind we have
recently seen toward President Obama, perhaps even more overt. Ads ran in the
Dallas Morning News calling the President a “Traitor.” In huge bold letters
TRAITOR! That extreme versus the huge popularity of the young charismatic President
made the event such a major historic event. People were captured by the moment.
Captured in the moment and many found (and still find) it hard to believe that
one strange, crazy sole took it upon himself to bring down a sitting American President
they way he did. Others have shot at Presidents. But usually they are calculating
and get close in a handshake or in a receiving line or in the darkened theater.
But to get a job in a building where months later a parade with the President
was going to sweep beneath and to pluck out a high-powered rifle and shoot through
the trees at a moving target, is a tad bit hard to swallow. Not acting alone.
Not having been placed there carefully.
When it
comes to this assassination, I will always be a skeptic of the “official
report.” Sorry. That just me. And I
suppose they way I tried working it out of my system was by writing this book;
only in so doing, I cemented in my head and heart the belief that we were lied
to about the shooting.
VG: The
Man On The Grassy Knoll isn’t a long book…
Crawley: I timed the book as I read it aloud. It
felt like the right length for an interview with a man who was short of breath
and short on time to live. Plus, any longer and I am afraid I would have
started getting back into that bad trap of adding dates, and times and places
and names and all kinds of stuff that the interview would never have had in it
and that the book did not need. If it got longer, it would have gotten boring
again.
VG: Even the format of the book adds to its
real feeling.
Crawley: On purpose. The whole package is to make
you buy into the fact that Raul is a real character talking to you through a
tape machine. I have had friends of my
kids, in college— not that familiar with the events of the those days
like you and I are— read the book and then come to me and ask how come they had
never read this in their history books. I had to remind them— IT IS A
NOVEL! It is not reality. It is only
meant to simulate reality. That’s how convincing it can be.
VG: Where did you get the idea to write it
this way?
Crawley: From working on a screenplay of another
book and trying to compress time, I needed to interview witnesses of a crime
and my interviews with them allowed me to short cut a screenplays length from
the long passages of a novel. And also
it came from Margaret Atwood’s, The
Handmaid’s Tale. I needed to get the
reader into a place that allowed them to think reality was what they were
reading. History, if you will. Suspend belief for a moment and enter the myth
from the direction I wanted them to. To change their perceptions.
VG: And that it does so very well.
Crawley: Thank you.
VG: One final question. Will you write further
on this matter?
Crawley: Not on my own. I might add a pen to
someone else’s work or an opinion. But my job with the assassination is
finished. I have said my piece. And I
must confess, I am pleased with how it came out– all except one glaring mistake
in the book I missed in editing.
VG: And that is?
Crawley: Buy the book and see if you can find it.
Very few have.
The Man on the Grassy
Knoll will be available starting next week at Venture Galleries as a serial
novel. This is the second John Crawley book published in a series— his first
was Dream Chaser, soon to be
available at Amazon and other fine e-retailers.
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