DALLAS STILL REMEMBERS 40 YEARS AFTER JFK'S ASSASSINATION, AND SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM STIR PROFOUND EMOTIONS.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

DALLAS - It's quiet at the window. Visitors walk to the glass, peer out and are reduced to silent contemplation. As if with a punch to the gut.

That's the way it usually happens at the sixth-floor windows of the former Texas School Book Depository, which stands at the edge of Dallas' Dealey Plaza. Over the treetops below, the descending slope of Elm Street is plainly visible. It was there - 40 years ago this Saturday - that President John F. Kennedy smiled and waved to the crowd while riding in an open black Lincoln.

It was here, just a few feet from this exact spot, that Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have cradled a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano Italian military rifle and drawn a bead on that figure through a four-power scope.

Whatever your view of the Kennedy assassination - whether Oswald acted alone or Dealey Plaza was a veritable shooting gallery that day for Cuban, Mafia and CIA hit men - the site of the killing of this president continues to evoke powerful emotions.

You'll find confirmation of that in the faces of people who make their way to these windows. Disbelief, outrage, crushing sadness ... four decades after the fact.

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza grew out of that emotion. It was founded 14 years ago by the Dallas County Historical Foundation as a response to an unremitting pilgrimage of visitors to the assassination scene. Today it is estimated that 2 million people visit Dealey Plaza each year, and a fourth of them enter the museum - making it the most-visited site in Dallas. And as evidence of the enduring popularity and mystique of JFK, as well as the controversy surrounding his killing, museum officials report that fully two-thirds of the visitors were born after Nov. 22, 1963.

The museum walks a delicate line. It purports to be neither an advocate of the Warren Commission's findings nor a proponent of the dozens of conspiracy theories that have spun out of that fateful day in Dallas. Instead, through photographs, video clips and artifacts, it simply relates the events of that day and the aftermath, and leaves it to the visitor to draw any conclusions.

An audio tour is available, and among the voices heard on it are those of motorcycle policemen who rode alongside the car, Secret Service men in the trailing vehicle, newsmen who filed the first frantic reports of the shooting (``Something is wrong here, something is terribly wrong!'') and Abraham Zapruder himself, the dress company president who stood on the grassy knoll and shot the most famous home movie in history.

Look up while on the sixth floor and you'll see weathered and water- stained beams, exposed plumbing, paint flaking off brick walls. This 102-year-old former warehouse is where textbooks were stored in cardboard boxes in 1963. In one corner, sealed off by glass to protect the well-worn wooden floor, boxes are stacked to form a crude barricade around a window. This was ``the sniper's perch,'' reputedly used by Oswald.

Artifacts elsewhere include newspapers of the day, one mapping out the exact motorcade route, another containing a full-page anti-Kennedy advertisement that ran the morning of Nov. 22. There's a menu from the luncheon Kennedy never got to. A display case contains the types of home-movie cameras that were in use at Dealey Plaza that day.

The museum relates the five official re-examinations of the assassination, all of which generally concurred with the Warren Commission's findings that Oswald's bullets cut down Kennedy. But it also lists various shadowy entities that have been under the finger of suspicion over the years: the Soviet government, Cuban elements (both pro- and anti-Castro), organized crime, U.S. intelligence agencies.

``It's not our mission to solve the crime,'' said Jeff West, the museum's executive director. ``We can't get in the middle of that. We see ourselves as a threshold experience. People visit here and go out and learn more about it if they're interested.''

The museum's presentation is certainly tasteful. Although many of the frames from Zapruder's film are presented as blown-up still photos, nowhere in the exhibits (or in the gift store's publications, for that matter) will you find the frame in which Kennedy's head is blown apart by the fatal gunshot.

It's by design, West said, noting that the museum endeavors to be family- friendly. If you must wallow in the grisly specifics, you need only venture out onto the sidewalks of Dealey Plaza. West rolled his eyes and said, ``Sleazy guys selling autopsy photos.''

Yep, they're here. The conspiracy enthusiasts maintain a suffocating presence at Dealey Plaza. They sell bright-colored picture books and even DVDs of footage shot that day. During my weekend visit, one guy had a computer set up near the picket fence that tops the grassy knoll, and he was playing the 26-second Zapruder film continuously. I found it faintly disquieting to see 7- and 8-year-old kids standing there with their parents, watching Kennedy's head splinter apart again and again and again and again.

And boy, do the stories fly. Early one morning, Miguel Bolden approached me the instant I arrived at the plaza, and promptly launched into a wildly exhaustive narrative: ``The first shot was an intentional miss, to freak out the crowd and divert their attention from Kennedy.'' ``One of the shots came from on top of the jail over there. People found shell casings up there later.'' ``Oswald couldn't hit a thing.'' ``The kill shot came from behind that fence, so you should go back there and get a picture from there with your camera.''

Bolden, who described himself as ``an independent contractor tour guide,'' came up for breath only long enough to ask for $5 for breakfast.

Around the plaza, information is dispensed with proselytizing zeal - never as theory, always as incontrovertible fact. Challenge these folks only at your peril. One guy hawking books was exhibiting a picture of a bystander with an umbrella, noting that it was a clear and sunny in Dallas that day and ``this was a signal to the snipers that the car was coming.''

I made the mistake of countering that the bystander, Louis Witt, has since been interviewed repeatedly and asserts that his actions were a mild protest of Kennedy; the umbrella was a symbol of appeasement, since former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain always carried one. I was shouted down in midexplanation.

The museum is weighing the idea of having some kind of presence in the plaza - staffers or walking tours - to counter this. Said West: ``You have to balance freedom of speech with the right of the public not to be confused.''

The plaza can be circuslike for other reasons, too. A white ``X'' on the pavement marks the spot where the fatal shot struck Kennedy's skull. Some visitors wait for breaks in the traffic, dash into the middle of the street, and stand on that spot while grinning toward their camera-toting friends.

And it seems as if some tourists just can't help playing amateur sleuth here. They peer into storm drains, check firing angles and examine white-paint swaths on the curb where bullet marks are identified.

Dealey Plaza seems infinitely more worthy of being a place of reverence, where flowers are laid and tears blinked back, but the sense of an active crime scene prevails instead.

Quiet reflection comes more readily a couple of blocks away at the Kennedy Memorial, which was dedicated in 1970. Designed by architect Philip Johnson, the centograph (empty tomb) is a stark, roofless box of 30-foot walls that seems to float on eight pillars. The floor is slightly inclined toward a simple granite block that bears Kennedy's name. A single rose lay across it on the Sunday morning of my visit.

Across Market Street from the memorial is the Conspiracy Museum. I was intrigued to see what it had to offer, but a hand-scrawled sign in the window read, ``Closed due to A.C. problems.'' Hmm. I wasn't buying it.

The Sixth Floor Museum doesn't limit its presentation to the what-ifs of Kennedy's assassination, or even to a chronicle of the day's events. It is more a museum to JFK himself, encompassing his life, times, presidency and legacy.

There are reminders of just how troubled a world Kennedy inherited when he won a razor-thin election over Richard Nixon in 1960. His three-year presidency would see a disastrous bid to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion, a successful stare-down with the Soviet Union over missile bases in Cuba, a civil rights struggle that included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s ``I Have a Dream'' speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial (just three months before the assassination), and a disturbing escalation of hostilities in a far-off place called Vietnam (for which Kennedy increased the number of American ``advisers'' from 5,000 to 17,000).

Information boards and black-and-white video clips also capture the vitality and glamour of the Kennedy presidency. At age 43, he was the youngest man ever to be elected president, and was the first since Theodore Roosevelt to have small children scampering around his office. Wife Jackie captivated the nation with her elegance and grace.

Kennedy's quick wit also comes through here. After one of the crises of his term, the president fields a question from a reporter: If you could do it over again, would you work for the presidency, and would you recommend it to others? In that familiar New England brogue, Kennedy replies: ``The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second question is no. I wouldn't recommend it to others - at least for a while.''

It can be endlessly debated whether Kennedy's administration was marked more by style than substance - yes, the museum even addresses that issue - but much of the nation embraced his youthful energy and high hopes. His popularity soared to iconic proportions after his work and life were ended so early and so brutally.

That might be why the museum, amid the eyewitness observations and frame-by-frame photos and panicked news reports, ultimately gets an emotional hammerlock on its visitors. Especially in a darkened room where footage of the funeral in Washington plays on a screen.

At Arlington National Cemetery, a band is heard playing the Navy Hymn, ``Eternal Father, Strong to Save.'' Although no lyrics are sung, one passage from the hymn is certainly applicable for Dealey Plaza today:

``And bid its angry tumult cease,

And give, for wild confusion, peace.''

IF YOU GO

SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM: 411 Elm St. Open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $10 for adults, $9 for seniors (age 65 and up), students with ID and children ages 6 to 18. Audio tour an additional $3 per person. Opening Saturday in the museum's seventh-floor gallery: ``Remembering Jack,'' an exhibit of photos by Kennedy family photographer Jacques Lowe. Be advised that there is a lot of really crass merchandise in the museum gift store, including refrigerator magnets and T-shirts emblazoned with the Texas School Book Depository, as well as a book of Jackie Kennedy paper dolls. The store is otherwise something of a Kennedy shrine, with friendly biographies and suitable-for-framing portraits. But at least there are no gory assassination or autopsy photos. Museum information: [phone]; www.jfk.org.

CONSPIRACY MUSEUM: 110 S. Market St. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Admission is $7 adults, $6 for seniors (65 and up) and students. [phone].

LODGING: The Fairmont Dallas has the nondescript feel of a major chain, but its location is ideal for an exploration of the city. It sits at the northwest edge of downtown, wedged between the Arts District and the West End Historic District, where Dealey Plaza is located. It's a short walk to both. Web site rate quote for early December: from $159. 1717 N. Akard St. [phone]; www.fairmont.com.

DINING: Dallas' Deep Ellum District is known more for its scruffy clubs geared to 20-somethings than for its dining, but excellent gourmet fare was found there at the Green Room, 2715 Elm St. A starter of warm mozzarella, fresh tomatoes and a portobello pesto was divine. [phone]. For one of the most romantic settings in the city, head downtown to Dakota's, 600 N. Akard St., and ask for a patio table near the fountain. The restaurant, recently renovated, aimed for the feel of a classic high-end steakhouse, a couple of blocks from Dealey Plaza at 302 N. Market St. (and other locations). The restaurant dates to the late 1950s and serves up some particularly tasty pork ribs. [phone].

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART: The building, at 1717 N. Harwood St., isn't much to look at - a hideous, concrete block that resembles a prison. Or a mausoleum. But the collection within is strong, notably in the Arts of the Americas gallery, where works range from Mayan sculpture to contemporary paintings. This being Texas, some of the exhibition spaces are cavernous, which nicely accommodates towering, elaborate modern sculptures. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for seniors, $4 for children ages 12 and up. Closed Monday. [phone]; www.dallasmuseumofart.org.

INFORMATION: A good, all-purpose guidebook is the Lonely Plant's ``Texas,'' which devotes 63 pages to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

CAPTION(S):

5 photos, box, map

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Cars cruise through Dalla's Dealey Plaza on the route of President John F. Kennedy's motorcade in 1963. The former Texas School Book Depository looms behind the trees at left. At its Sixth Floor Museum, top, visitors look through windows next to the ``sniper's perch.''

(3 -- 4) A rose sits on a granite block bearing JFK's name, top, at the Kennedy Memorial in Dallas, two blocks from Dealey Plaza, above, where tourists today follow the route taken by Kennedy's motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963. A display at right shows graphic photos of the assassination.

(5) The Dallas Museum of Art features a gallery devoted to the Americas that includes this ceramic sculpture from Mexico.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

Box:

IF YOU GO (see text)

Map:

DALLAS

Jorge Irribarren/Staff Artist