A photograph, signed for a fan, shows Tague standing beneath the underpass near the grassy knoll minutes before the bullets fired.
People of a certain age remember exactly where they were on November 22, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. James Tague remembers the day better than most. At the moment of the shooting, Tague was standing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, and was struck on the right cheek by fragments from a ricocheting bullet meant for Kennedy. Tague suffered only a superficial wound that day, but in a way, the injury is still fresh, 47 years later.
“I can’t forget November 22nd,” Tague says. “Everybody reminds me of it. I’ve probably told the story two or three hundred times. And the closer it gets to November 22nd, the more people ask me to tell it.”
These days, Tague, now 74 and retired from a career as a car salesman and dealer, lives outside Bonham, Texas, not far from the Oklahoma border. The JFK assassination is still part of Tague’s daily life, in part because he runs a store on eBay that’s stocked with hundreds of books about Kennedy’s killing.
“It started out as a hobby and turned into a little ol’ business,” says Tague in his honey-thick Texas drawl. “What happened is when I wrote Truth Withheld (his 2003 book about the Kennedy assassination), a couple months later someone says, ‘You know, your book’s bringing $60 on eBay. And I said, ‘What’s eBay?’”
As soon as Tague figured out the online auction business, he started doing a brisk trade in JFK assassination books, some drawn from his vast personal collection. The store features rarities like a $400 first edition of Forgive My Grief IV by Penn Jones Jr., the assassination researcher who brought to light the now discredited notion that witnesses to the assassination were being knocked off by a shadowy murder squad. Other books in the 500-plus item store include The Killing of a President by Robert J. Groden, which contains shocking autopsy photos of JFK, the original 1964 Warren Commission Report, the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and Tague’s own Truth Withheld, signed by the author. Tague’s eBay store is, if nothing else, a testament to the remarkable life of JFK’s death.
“The main thing is keeping those books available to the younger generation,” Tague says. “What fascinates me is that not a day goes by that I don’t get one or two requests for autographs. I hit a record about three months ago with 19 requests in one day. It’s usually young kids, high school or college age. It blows my mind.”
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