JFK more than history in Dallas.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

DALLAS, Texas - For those of us alive on Nov. 22, 1963, the words "Texas School Book Depository" is etched into our psyches like a scar that we forget about but never goes away.

Until Saturday, however, it had always seemed little more than that - just words. Four cold words, forever linked with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Then, as part of a newspaper columnists' field trip, I stood on the building's sixth floor, a few feet from the glassed-off spot where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the rifle. I saw the notebook of KRLD News Director Eddie Barker who - not Walter Cronkite - first broke the news: "The word we have is that President Kennedy is dead." I spoke with former Dallas police Detective Jim Leavelle, now 84, who had been handcuffed to suspect Lee Harvey Oswald when he was gunned down by Jack Ruby.

Now, the name of that building means more. The event resonates with me at a deeper level than when Mr. Brown, my fourth-grade teacher, told us the news.

Seeing the television images as a 9-year-old boy - what I remember most vividly is the funeral salute from John Jr. - is far different from walking across the red `X's' on Elm Street, painted to show where the motorcade was when Oswald's two shots hit Kennedy. The "now" makes it more real.

And, oddly, nothing in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' tour of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza made it so real as listening to Leavelle's Texas drawl. We think of history as names and dates and photographs; and yet here it is, flesh and blood. Here is the man who, in the crack of a gun and the click of a shutter, is frozen in U.S. history: Ruby firing the gun, Oswald grimacing and Leavelle, wearing a light suit and Stetson hat, towering above both with a look somewhere between fear and "I told you so."

It was Sunday, two days after the assassination, and anonymous death threats had been made as soon as people learned Oswald was a suspect. Though, in hindsight, it was unwise to transfer Oswald from one prison to another through a throng of reporters, the police wanted to prove they hadn't roughed up the suspect.

`Cap' told me I'd better handcuff myself to him and put cuffs on him, too,' Leavelle says while flanked by the new museum exhibit, opening this Friday, that shows how the media covered the assassination. `I told (Oswald), `If anyone shoots at you, I hope he's as good a shot as you were.' '

Frankly, Leavelle was worried that something could happen. As they entered the basement room, he saw Ruby and the gun out of the corner of his eye. He tried to yank Oswald behind him, but it was too late. `It was one second from the time (Ruby) stepped to the time he fired. (Oswald) just groaned and slumped to the floor.'

The bullet entered Oswald about four inches from his naval, sliced a main artery, glanced off his seventh rib and lodged in his skin. "Had it not hit that rib, it would have hit me," says Leavelle.

The detective rode in the ambulance to Parkland Hospital with Oswald. Once there, "the bullet popped out like a grape seed." It was evidence, he figured, that needed tagging. `I handed a nurse my pocket knife and said, `Scratch your initials on there.' '

Leavelle believes that Oswald, like Ruby, wanted to be a hero - but had a twisted sense of what that meant. "Oswald didn't kill John F. Kennedy, he killed the president of the United States."

He pooh-poohs conspiracy theories such as one furthered in Oliver Stone's "JFK." Leavelle was a technical adviser on the film. "You set up a scene for him and then he'll shoot it the way he wants to - whatever makes a better movie."

The full truth, of course, followed Oswald to his grave in Fort Worth. What lives on at the museum - this is neither a shrine nor "JFK Soap-on-a-Rope" stuff - is a noble effort to preserve our history, tragic as it can be. And what lives on in our hearts is an enduring sense of loss.

Says one museum guestbook entry: "I am still sad, 40 years later."