Recalling Kennedy's Death, or Life DALLAS - Looking through the window next to the sniper's perch, you can just make out the grassy knoll through the trees" branches. It seems inconsequential, mundane - certainly not as imagination pictured it. A "knoll"? There are no rolling English hillocks in Dealey Plaza. There is a one-way, three-lane road that curves under an overpass, with plots of lawn on either side. But the term is unavoidably associated with events 50 years ago Friday, when the president of the United States, the governor of Texas and their wives were riding past in an open-air limousine. And so is everything else here on the sixth floor of what used to be the Texas School Book Depository building, and which now contains the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Looking out, you pretty much have the same view Lee Harvey Oswald had when he held his $19.95 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to his eye, aimed and shot. Wait, though. Before looking at that event and the impressive museum devoted to it, consider another perspective at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. There, we emerge from an exhibition about Kennedy's campaign, his White House years and his family into an enormous atrium. I. M. Pei's geometric steel ribbings are 115 feet high, supporting soaring glass walls. You look outward, at Boston's harbor and skyline, or upward, into the light. There are no constrained views, no sense of the mundane. We aren't submerged in history; we may even, for a moment, be freed from it. And that must have been what the Kennedy family wanted. In the permanent exhibits in Boston, installed in 1993, aside from a darkened room with 1963 television newscasts, the assassination is not even mentioned. If the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas sees the life through the moment of death, the library sees the life as an idyll, as if detached from death. It celebrates the Kennedy years as if they were still with us and still should be. Now, there is a temporary exception for the anniversary: a modest show, "A Nation Remembers" opens at the Kennedy library on Friday, surveying the days of ceremonial mourning in Washington 50 years ago. At its heart is a powerful compilation of historical footage, without narration. Artifacts are sparse, and one especially haunts: a black saddle, saber and empty boots that were hung on a riderless black gelding that followed the caisson. But this simple display does little to change the library's main impression, and it is just the opposite of the Sixth Floor Museum's. In Dallas, history vividly grows out of the ordinary, the seemingly inconsequential. In 1963, the sixth floor stored cartons of textbooks that Oswald used to hide himself. Deed accomplished, he left behind the rifle, three empty cartridges, a palm print and other items and fled, killing a Dallas policeman who got in the way before his capture inside a movie theater. If you insist on grander stuff, you can head downstairs to the knoll (or view it on a webcam) where the faithful believe another shot was fired - implicating the Mafia or Castro or the Russians or the far right or the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. or Lyndon B. Johnson or other usual suspects. But you are likely to get a fuller perspective inside the museum, which includes a scale model created by the F.B.I. in 1964 to reconstruct the crime scene. Three white strips shoot out from the window where Oswald was seen - the trajectory of each bullet. As for the exhibition, it is inquiring, detached and careful. The displays range from a note scribbled in court by Jack Ruby to original Associated Press Teletype output. But the attractions are photographs, a new audio tour narrated by Pierce Allman, and the panel text, which visitors (340,000 a year) seem to read carefully. The exhibition's narrative begins describing the Kennedy era and aura and leads us to the sniper's window. Then it steers a course through the events, the evidence and the ever-proliferating conspiracy theories, noting inconsistencies, while using film footage and artifacts to bring to life the moments that led to the president's death. This exhibition, which has changed only slightly since it opened in 1989, with Conover Hunt as its curator is remarkable for its effectiveness. What is lacking? Some exploration of more recent investigations (including the engrossing reporting in Philip Shenon's new book, "A Cruel and Shocking Act," which raises significant questions about Oswald's trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination). And what is off key? Perhaps the heightened tone of eulogistic piety in the museum's new film applauding Kennedy's legacy in civil rights, space exploration and volunteerism. A similar kind of adulation is evident in the Kennedy library's permanent exhibitions. We have extensive detail about the 1960 campaign, and in presidential galleries, which are meant to recall the formal halls of the White House, the well-known Kennedy achievements. The revelations, though, are in television broadcasts, which show Kennedy as a brilliant speaker - at once a seducer and a rhetorician. Try walking away from his inauguration speech or dismissing his embrace of West Berlin in his 1963 speech (barely a generation after the words "Ich bin ein Berliner" would have been traitorous). Much of the permanent exhibition, unfortunately, is less interested in history than in surface (including the kitschy mini "Pietà" that Pope Paul VI gave the president). As for the complexities of Kennedy's involvement in the civil rights struggle, or perhaps just a vague hint of the medical issues and personality flaws that would have doomed a man less accomplished and less charismatic - well, that will have to await a more reflective celebration. Revisions are being planned. What may be possible can be glimpsed in a recent show by the current curator, Stacey Bredhoff. An exhibition about the Cuban missile crisis (which, after a brief hiatus next month, will be open through December 2014), devotes considerably more attention to detail and perspective. It is based on audiotapes Kennedy secretly made, which provide a remarkable account of the discussions during 13 days of October, 1962, as the Soviet Union was placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy, we are told, steered a careful course. He avoided the bomb-Cuba advice of some advisers. And he averted nuclear war with his blockade, which caused Nikita S. Khrushchev to blink and withdraw the missiles. Left unexplored here, though, is whether the secret agreement by the United States to withdraw missiles from Turkey meant that there was also much blinking on the this side. But at least we are engaged by the history. One theme, though, does emerge from the permanent exhibitions, one of the most overused Kennedy tropes: We are being shown a progressive Camelot whose life was cut short and are being asked to restore it. The result is a kind of nostalgic utopianism, an idealistic counter-history. This vision helps explain the proliferation of counter-histories involving Kennedy, extensive imaginings of what might have been. In some cases, too, they become nightmarish hidden histories, visions of elaborate conspiracies. Every patch of lawn becomes a grassy knoll, every villain becomes immense and mundane fact is displaced by the stuff of myth. History is left to fend for itself. The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza is at 411 Elm Street, Dallas; 214-747-6660 or jfk.org. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is at Columbia Point, Boston; 866-535-1960 or jfklibrary.org.