By Harry Hantel

*“The sandwich and the assassin” - Harry Hantel*

I’ve always loved New Orleans. Both my parents are from there, and the city standard for good times and good food has always resonated with me.

Besides my family connections to the Big Easy, I also appreciate the city’s shadowy connections to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. With that in mind, I set out to make my most recent trip a fact-finding mission of sorts.

Could I get to the bottom of the end of American Camelot, or would I be too distracted by the bottom of my glass? Would my hunger for the truth outweigh my hunger for fried seafood?

But why should I have to choose? Consider this a handy guide for anyone who thinks there’s more to life than figuring out who killed JFK; there’s also the meals you eat while you ponder the question.

Stop 1 - Harrah’s Casino

There’s only one casino at which to legally gamble in New Orleans and that would be Harrah’s. I make a point of always stopping in for a few hands of blackjack and some spins at the slot machines. I rarely win and this time wasn’t much different. Maybe I was distracted since just across the street is a freshly opened Four Seasons. Before it was a Four Seasons, however, Harrah’s neighbor was the International Trade Mart. The Trade Mart was owned by one Clay Shaw AKA Clay Bertrand. Shaw was the only man in history ever formally brought to trial for Kennedy’s murder, as depicted in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Shaw was a known CIA associate and possibly had direct dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald during the latter’s stay in New Orleans in 1963. Sure, we all love to gamble, but is anyone consistently playing with higher stakes than the Central Intelligence Agency?

Stop 2 - Bar Marilou

My brother and I made it to Bar Marilou on a Wednesday night. The Central Business District bar is connected to the Ace Hotel down the street. The drinks are fantastic and the scene is hip. The water smelled strange the night of our visit, so we stuck to liquids of the fermented variety. Just a couple blocks away, across Lafayette Square, is 544 Camp Street. The unassuming office building stands on the site of the old Newman Building, home to Guy Banister (Retired FBI agent) and a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Perhaps more delicious than the drinks at Marilou, is the detail that Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pamphlets for his Fair Play For Cuba Committee (he was the only member) that listed 544 Camp Street as his contact address. Maybe it was just the booze, but it didn’t sound like a coincidence.

Stop 3 - Felix’s Oysters

I did mention seafood, didn’t I? Don’t let anyone tell you that you should avoid the chain oyster spots in New Orleans. I would never blame anyone for preferring a delicate west coast oyster to the cow tongues of the Gulf, but hot sauce and a buttered saltine closes the gap significantly. Felix’s Oysters in the French Quarter is solid, unassuming, and fair-priced. Oysters Rockefeller—molluscs grilled and topped with garlic, herbs, butter, breadcrumbs still in the shell—always satisfy, though nothing can satisfy the gnawing sense that the government was hiding something even as the Rockefeller Commission claimed otherwise.

Was Oswald the key? If he was, Felix’s was as good a spot as any to think things over since he was a food runner there that fateful summer of 1963. Thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald’s claim that he was “just a patsy” before his execution on live television, it was too much. One lone nut? Fine. These things happen. But then Jack Ruby came along. So two lone nuts? Technically three if you count Sirhan Sirhan. Suddenly, I lost my appetite. We’d finished the oysters, anyway.

Coda

I only scratched the surface of New Orleans’ many connections to JFK’s death. The Magic Bullet was fired in Dallas, but the plan was set in motion long before, and Oswald a NOLA resident that summer prior to that fateful autumn.

I hadn’t made any breakthroughs in the case and I hadn’t made any progress connecting those unconnectable dots. I hadn’t really learned anything new at all.

What I do know: Oswald and the CIA both had a busy summer in the Big Easy prior to Kennedy’s final motorcade ride, and even when retracing the steps of 20th century’s greatest supposed assassin, one gets a little hungry along the way. The mystery will still be there after lunch.

Harry Hantel is a writer living in Los Angeles and a graduate of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction or Non-Fiction.