NYT Op-Docs: The Umbrella Man →
On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site.
The Worlds of the Men Who Killed Kennedy
Researching the Kennedy assassination, one comes across strange outliers like Christian David, who in the mid 80s claimed to have been offered the job of eliminating the president by Corsican mob boss Antoine Guèrini. Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, who was serving two life terms before he died at the Florence Supermax in 2007, claimed to have shot Kennedy—suggesting that he was one of the Three Tramps found in a boxcar behind Dealey Plaza minutes after the assassination. In 1982, he said to a Dallas radio station:
Do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed president Kennedy, alone, without any aide from a rogue agency of the US govt. or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you are very naive if you do.
Do you believe? I believe that production of Other Oswalds is not only a permanent effect of the seductive conditions of the world of the Kennedy assassination, but such an inevitability that, just as Harrelson implicated himself by approaching the Plaza, every approach to the Plaza (the locus of the events) is necessarily productive of more Oswalds and implicated in production of more mirrors, evermore elaborate.
