Lyndon Johnson was the one INSISTING that JFK go to Texas, while so many other people were WARNING JFK not to go to Dallas, TX because of the Hard Right atmosphere there.
Within 20 minutes of the JFK assassination, Lyndon Johnson, who for weeks had been acutely aware that the Kennedys were out to utterly destroy him in the fall of 1963, was weirdly blaming the JFK assassination on a COMMUNIST while scores of other people, across the political spectrum, were immediately assuming that JFK had been murdered by the Right Wing.
Why was Lyndon Johnson, who hated JFK and RFK, immediately blaming the JFK assassination on a communist in ultra right wing Dallas? Wasn't Lyndon Johnson friends with ultra right wing businessmen oil men and defense contractors like like H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Sr., D.H. Byrd and Ed Clark?
Why was LBJ the first person to publicly announce that JFK was coming to Texas in April of 1963 when he knew the Kennedys were going to drop him from the 1964 Democratic ticket, as he told journalist Robert Novak in summer, 1962?
Was LBJ a man known for doing shady things?
Lyndon Johnson was the one insisting that JFK go to Texas
From Jeff Sheshol’s Mutual Contempt, p.137:
Jeff Sheshol:
QUOTE
Among
the late president’s inner circle, this was the conventional wisdom: the Dallas
trip was nothing but a political errand for LBJ. “Absolutely, absolutely,” said
JFK aide Ralph Dungan. “Kennedy made that trip, I can say for all history and
posterity, without a doubt, as a favor to Lyndon Johnson,” as a party-building
exercise at “Lyndon’s strong urging.” So persuasive was Johnson, by this
account, that his influence outweighed the reservations of the White House
staff. Noting the rise of the right wing in Texas and recalling the ugly
reception to Adlai Stevenson’s recent visit to Dallas, staffers sparred over
the merits of a trip. This was hostile territory, protested Ken O’Donnell. But
to each objection Kennedy’s response was reportedly the same: “Lyndon Johnson
really wants me to do it, and I’ve got to do it.”
UNQUOTE
[Jeff Sheshol, Mutual Contempt, p. 137]
Bill Minutaglio, writing in 2013, on
the Hard Right Atmosphere of Dallas in the Fall of 1963
QUOTE
The meaning of the
Kennedy assassination, to me, is that we have lost the meaning – that we have
lost the lessons, the messages inherent in his death. When he came to Dallas in
1963, the city's microphone had been hijacked by a very small handful of rabid
extremists. The group – which included the wealthiest man in the world,
preachers, politicos, lunatic military men, and a media mogul – stole the civic
discourse, and built a toxic, anti-Kennedy trap, as the president neared the
city in November 1963. They created a vitriolic, hateful environment – and they
were clearly not speaking for the majority of people in Dallas. But they had
access to the pulpits, the airwaves, the news pages – and, together, they serve
as a cautionary reminder of what happens when a small, strident group can push
the public debate to the fanatical, extremist fringe.
UNQUOTE
Web link https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2013-11-22/writers-on-kennedy-fear-and-distrust/
Bill Minutaglio: Dallas was the HQ of the Hard Right “Overthrow
Kennedy” Movement
Bill Minutaglio 2013: “Dallas
had just simply become, in an almost initially unlikely way, the headquarters o
fthe anti-Kennedy, ‘Let’s overthrow Kennedy movement,” Minutaglio said in an
interview with NPR. “He was perceived to be a traitor. He was a socialist, he
was on bended knee to so many different entities communism, socialist and even
the pope.”
Web link: The
Evidence | CIA did not kill JFK
Writers on Kennedy
What we think about when we
think about JFK
Journalist Robert Novak: Goldwater’s
press secretary Tony Smith immediately thought that the John Birchers
had killed JFK
“Novak: Kennedy’s death ‘something I’ll never
forget,” CNN, 11-22-03.
QUOTE
Rowly and I were having lunch at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel with
the director of the Goldwater for President campaign and Sen. Barry Goldwater's
press secretary.
We had finished the lunch and all four of us got in the same cab
and as we got in the cab we heard the news on the radio that the president had
been shot. And Goldwater's press secretary -- Tony Smith -- blurted out,
"Oh my God, I'm afraid the Birchers did it," meaning the radical
right-wing John Birch Society.
UNQUOTE
George Packer on the Hard Right Atmosphere
that was Dallas 1963
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/leaving-dealey-plaza
“Leaving Dealey Plaza,” George Packer, The
New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2013
QUOTE
My hosts in Dallas seemed unsurprised but unhappy
about my interest in Dealey Plaza. They suggested that it might be better not
to mention it at the talk I had come to give. As the city prepares to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, with a coming flood of visitors and
media people, the shame of the President’s murder is starting to throb again.
Unfair as it might be, to some Americans Dallas is the assassination,
the city that killed the President—a view that will surely be enhanced by the
publication of “Dallas 1963,” by Bill Minutaglio, a former Dallas Morning
News writer, and Steven L. Davis (also discussed by Adam Gopnik last week).
The authors describe the potent brew of
right-wing passions, much of it well organized and well funded—Bircher anti-Communism,
anti-Catholicism, racism (Dallas was the last large American city to
desegregate its schools), Kennedy hatred—that suffused many people in Dallas
with the spirit of dissension and incipient violence during the early sixties,
including some of its leading citizens: elected officials, Baptist ministers,
the billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, the right-wing zealot General Edwin Walker,
even the publisher of the Morning News, Ted Dealey. During the 1960
Presidential campaign, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the state’s most powerful
politician, and his wife, Lady Bird, were spat upon in Dallas; Adlai Stevenson,
J.F.K.’s Ambassador to the United Nations, was assaulted there just a month
before the assassination. “welcome mr.
kennedy to dallas …,” ran the headline of a black-bordered, full-page ad
in the Morning News on the morning of November 22, 1963, with
a bill of particulars that stopped just short of accusing the President of
treason. Kennedy had warned his wife, “We’re heading into nut country.”
UNQUOTE
Some of Dallas 1963’s major financial, media, and
religious leaders were insisting Kennedy was a “traitor.” Don’t forget military
– Gen. Edwin Walker!
“Extreme words no longer left of fringe,” Joe
Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, 11-19-2013:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/san-francisco-chronicle/20131119/281672547719965
QUOTE
The authors describe how the intense antiKennedy
atmosphere in Dallas at that time created a “hothouse” where an unstable,
malleable loner like assassin Lee Harvey Oswald could germinate. It was a place
where some of the city’s major
financial, media, and religious leaders insisted that Kennedy was a “traitor.”
UNQUOTE
Top LBJ aide Horace Busby and his
wife Mary V. Busby were horrified that JFK was going to ride in an open top limousine
in Dallas due to the Kennedy-hating hard right atmosphere of Dallas. Not only
that Busby says that Gov. John Connally, Cliff Carter and “all the Johnson men”
were against an open-car motorcade.
QUOTE
Mary V. handed me the front page of a recent
issue [of the Dallas Morning News]. “Read this,” she said. “Someone has
lost their mind.” It wa a story announcing that, on his visit to Dallas,
President Kennedy would ride in an open-car motorcade from Love Field to the
site of his luncheon address.
“I
can’t imagine your friends in the Secret Service letting the president do that,”
she said. I agreed with her. The thought of physical danger to the president
did not occur. Our memories were still fresh, though, of 1960, when the vice
president and Mrs. Johnson were mobbed in a Dallas hotel lobby. An ugliness had
crept into Dallas politics which perplexed many Texans. Only a few weeks
earlier there had been a nasty attack on Ambassador Adlai Stevenson when he
spoke there. An open-car motorcade was an obvious invitation for more episodes –
ugly signs, jeering chants, or perhaps an egg tossed at the presidential
limousine.
The
next day I voiced my concern to Walter Jenkins and learned that he shared it. In
fact, he told me, Governor Connally, Cliff Carter, and all the Johnson men
participating in plans for the Kennedy visit were counseling against the Dallas
motorcade.
UNQUOTE
[Horace Busby, The Thirty-First of March,
p. 140]
Unlike LBJ, Richard Nixon’s first comments
were that a “right-wing nut” had killed JFK
QUOTE
Although Lee Harvey Oswald would not be charged
with the president’s murder until 2:30 the following morning, J. Edgar Hoover had
already decided that Oswald was guilty. Late that afternoon former Vice-President
Richard Nixon had called the FBI director and, getting right through, had asked,
“What happened? Was it one of the right-wing nuts?”
“No,”
Hoover replied, “It was a Communist.”
UNQUOTE
[Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and
the Secrets, p. 542]
Earl Warren,
CIA director John McCone and Jackie Kennedy and FBI agent James Hosty all
immediately assumed that JFK had been killed by a right-winger.
https://www.newsweek.com/real-cover-191292
At the time, Hosty did not regard
Oswald as a threat to the president. He was more worried about the right-wing
crazies he had also been assigned to investigate. On Nov. 22, as he was sitting
in a Chinese restaurant eating a cheese sandwich (it was Friday, and Hosty was
a good Roman Catholic), he heard a wail of sirens. Weeping, a waitress told
Hosty that President Kennedy had been shot. Hosty, stunned, immediately blamed the right. He was
hardly alone. Chief justice Earl Warren, CIA Director John McCone and Jackie
Kennedy all assumed at first that the president had been targeted by a fanatic
right-winger.
[“The Real Cover-Up,” Evan Thomas, Newsweek,
11-21-93]
Peter Pringle essay on Dallas 1963, The Independent 11-20-93: We’re heading
into nut country
The
Dallas Morning News was in the front line of outrage against the nation's
capital, suggesting it was inhabited by 'an unknown number of subversives,
perverts, and miscellaneous security risks.' But the real security risk was the
President's visit.
Dallas
already had a reputation for roughing up Democrats. In the 1960 campaign, Lyndon
Johnson and his wife, Lady Byrd, were spat on by a group of housewives. A month
before Kennedy's arrival, the UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, was assaulted in
a crowd. Kennedy had been advised against the visit by several aides,
unsolicited Dallas residents and by the Texas governor, John Connally, who said
people in the city were 'too emotional'. In that year, a kind of fever lay over
Dallas, wrote William Manchester in his book Death of a President. People
carried huge billboards calling for the impeachment of the Chief Justice, Earl
Warren. Cowboy-booted executives placed 'KO the Kennedys' bumper stickers on
their cars. Jewish stores were smeared with swastikas and Kennedy's name was
booed in classrooms. The Dallas city council rushed through an ordinance
banning attacks against visiting speakers, but many still feared the worst, especially
in a town where guns could be bought without a licence or any kind of registration.
There
was more than gunfire. The day of the assassination, 22 November 1963, the
Dallas Morning News printed a full-page advertisement, ominously bordered in
black, accusing Kennedy, again among a long list of other complaints, of being
a Communist patsy. It was signed by the American Fact-finding Committee, which
eventually was identified as a group of right-wingers led by Nelson Bunker
Hunt, of the oil-rich Dallas family. It was this advertisement that prompted
Kennedy's remark: 'We're heading into nut country today'.
Interview:
The Political Climate in Dallas Leading to JFK’s Assassination
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/interview-the-political-climate-in-dallas-leading-to-jfks-assassination/
Texas Standard’s David
Brown interviews Bill Minutaglio on Nov. 20, 2013
Walter
Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s assassination. The televised shooting of Lee
Harvey Oswald. The Zapruder film. The Warren Commission.
In that
avalanche of history, a new book suggests we’ve lost sight of something
important: specifically, the seedbed for the most momentous political tragedy
of 20th century America.
It’s the story
of “Dallas, 1963.” That’s the title of a new book by Stephen L. Davis andBill Minutaglio.
Minutaglio
talks with KUT’s David Brown about why he describes the book as a “biography of
a city,” and what lessons may have been overlooked by history.
“We felt
there was a welling toxic environment in Dallas,” Minutaglio says. “That there
was something that started as unease and dread in the community at large and it
really began building to a fevered pitch. It was waiting there for Kennedy, and
he didn’t know it.”
According
to Minutaglio, Kennedy had received reports that the environment in Dallas was
quite intense and maybe he should rethink his visit. Kennedy’s aides had
reported that there was a group of people who had “hijacked the microphone.”
These
“outsized figures” included billionaire H.L. Hunt, General Edwin A. Walker and
Ted Dealey, publisher of The
Dallas Morning News. However, as history states, Kennedy’s assassin
wasn’t some “right-wing radical.”
“People
were literally coming to Dallas to join this anti-Kennedy resistance,” Minutaglio
says. “Lee Harvey Oswald was there, and was kind of caught up in the swirl, and
might have been motivated as a disturbed individual to action, to be a part of
this maelstrom. Nothing like this could have happened, but in Dallas.”
Listen to
the interview in the audio player above.
This interview originally ran
Sept. 19, 2013.
“The City
With a Death Wish in It’s Eye,” James
McAuley, NYT, 11-16-2013.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/opinion/sunday/dallass-role-in-kennedys-murder.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms
with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on
Nov. 22, 1963. That’s
because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means
reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the
death of the president.
It will
miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international
spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas,
it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy
Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s
legacy.
But once
again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at
this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments
before his death, “nut country.”
Dallas — with no
river, port or natural resources of its own — has always fashioned itself as a
city with no reason for being, a city that triumphed against all odds, a city
that validates the sheer power of individual will and the particular ideology
that champions it above all else. “Dallas,” the journalist Holland McCombs observed
in Fortune in 1949, “doesn’t owe a damn thing to accident, nature or
inevitability. It is what it is ... because the men of Dallas damn well planned
it that way.”
Those “men of Dallas” — men like my
grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in
a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the
federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet
Union or Communist China. The country musician Jimmie Dale Gilmore said it best in his
song about the city: “Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye ... a
rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.”
For those men, Kennedy was a veritable
enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate
“Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the
presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The
Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate
confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well
within the realm of imagination.
The wives
of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes —
were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme. (After all, there’s a reason Carol Burnett
pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous “Big D” routine the two
performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. “What are ya,” she
screams, pulling the trigger, “some kinda nut?!”)
In the
years before the second wave of the women’s movement, many of these women,
affluent but frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow
and Highland Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation
they were otherwise denied. With time and money at their disposal, they would
outdo their husbands, one another and even themselves.
During the 1960
presidential campaign, it
was a well-heeled mob of Junior League women who heckled and spat on Lyndon and
Lady Bird Johnson outside the storied Adolphus Hotel downtown (a scandal
that actually helped Johnson politically by showing the distance between the
Texas senator and his more ardent constituents).
In
October 1963, just weeks before the president’s visit, it was the wife of a downtown insurance executive,
not a derelict, who struck Adlai E. Stevenson, then the United Nations
ambassador, over the head with a picket sign.
And in the
annals of my own family history, it was my charming grandmother, not some distant
relation without a Neiman Marcus charge card, who nevertheless saw fit to found
the “National Congress for Educational Excellence,” an organization that
crusaded against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks
and the distribution of literature on homosexuality in Dallas public schools.
In a
photograph taken not long after the assassination, my grandmother smiles a
porcelain smile, poised and lovely in psychedelic purple Pucci, coiffure
stacked high in what can only be described as a hairway to heaven. Her eyes,
however, are intent, fixed on a target — liberalism, gender equality, gays.
Dallas is
not, of course, “the city that killed Kennedy.” Nor does the city in which the
president arrived 50 years ago bear much resemblance to Dallas today, the heart
of a vibrant metroplex of 6.7 million people, most of whom have moved from
elsewhere and have little or no connection to 1963.
But
without question, these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the
city’s elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have
left an indelible mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on
Memphis or Los Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968
assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
For the
last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to
outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it. To be fair,
pretending to forget has helped Dallas achieve some remarkable accomplishments
in those years, like the completion of the Dallas-Fort Worth International
Airport, the development of the astonishingly successful Cowboys franchise and
the creation of what remains one of the country’s most electric local
economies.
But those
are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what
the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,”
on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’
generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive
in Dallas. Look no further than the troop of gun-rights activists who appeared
just days ago, armed and silent, outside a meeting of local mothers concerned
about gun violence. If this is what counts as responsible civic dialogue, then
Dallas has a long way still to go.
This year
Dallas has a chance to grapple with the painful legacy of 1963 in public and
out loud. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen, although the city did quietly
host a symposium on whether it really deserved to be labeled “the city of hate”
earlier this month.
But when
the national cameras start rolling on Nov. 22, Dealey Plaza, the abandoned,
almost spectral site of the assassination and now of the commemoration, will
have been retouched in a fresh coat of literal and figurative white paint.
Cosmetics seem to be all we can expect.
“This is
not a group psychology lesson,” Mike Rawlings, the mayor, told me over lunch
recently. “We can do what we can do. I guess I could bring up all the relatives of the people that said bad
things. But why would you do that?”
To which,
of course, there is nothing to say.
Correction: Nov.
24, 2013
An earlier version of this
article misspelled the first name of a Texas country musician. He is Jimmie
Dale Gilmore, not Jimmy.
James McAuley is a Marshall
scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.
Author Phil
Shenon describes the Hard-Right Atmosphere of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy
Assassination
QUOTE
The
two-day, five-city fund-raising trip was the talk of much of official
Washington because, to many, it seemed politically risky. The president had
been warned that he might face protests from right-wing demonstrators,
especially in Dallas. “The Big D,” as the city’s boosters liked to call it, was
home to several far-fight extremists groups and had a reputation for discourteous,
even disgraceful, treatment of prominent visitors. Only a month earlier, Kennedy’s
UN ambassador, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, had been heckled
outside his Dallas hotel by anti-UN protestors, including a scowling Texas
homemaker who hit him over the head with a cardboard placard that read: DOWN
WITH THE UN. During the 1960 campaign, then Senate majority leader Lyndon
Johnson of Texas, Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate, and his wife Lady
Bird, were swarmed by dozens of screeching anti-Kennedy protestors as they
tried to cross the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas to reach the hotel’s
ballroom for a luncheon rally. One protestor carried a defaced copy of a Johnson
campaign poster with the words SMILING JUDAS scrawled across it, while another
spat on Mrs. Johnson. She described the nearly thirty minutes it took to cross
the lobby as among the most frightening of her life.
UNQUOTE
[Phil
Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act: The
Secret History of the JFK Assassination, pp. 28-29]
In the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination,
Richard Nixon was asking J. Edgar Hoover if a “right wing nut” had killed JFK while Denison Kitchell, a top Barry
Goldwater aide said “My God, one of the Birchers did it.”
https://libertyconservative.com/masochism-left-camelot/
QUOTE
On November
22, 1963, Left and Right came together briefly in an awful contemplation. A
hostile mob surrounded the headquarters of Barry Goldwater, the prospective
Republican nominee against John F. Kennedy in 1963, chanting “Murderers!”
On the
other side, the Eastern Republican establishment also got into the act. Immediately
after Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Nixon phoned FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover and asked, “Was it one of the right-wing nuts?” Even in the Goldwater camp,
there was suspicion that Kennedy had fallen victim to a right-wing assassin.
Denison Kitchel, the manager of Goldwater’s senatorial campaign, muttered, “My
God, one of the Birchers did it.”
UNQUOTE
[Ron
Capshaw, “Masochism: The Left After Oswald,” The Liberty Conservative,
March 5, 2017]
Robert Dallek –
People close to JFK concerned about is travel to Dallas because of it was a
bastion of the right-wing.
https://www.centerforpublicsecrets.org/post/the-strange-love-of-dr-billy-james-hargis
“There were
concerns among people close to Kennedy about his traveling to Dallas,” says
historian Robert Dallek. “Because the city had a reputation for being the bastion
of the right-wing.”
JFK himself
discussed the possibility of his assassination by the Right Wing on the morning
of his assassination
QUOTE
We’re
entering nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a
window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?
UNQUOTE
[O’Donnell,
Powers, and MacCarthy, 1972, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye]
Snopes
on this topic - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-john-f-kennedy-predict-his-own-assassination/
Both Ruth and Michael Paine immediately assumed
that Far Right of Dallas had assassinated John Kennedy
https://www.swtimes.com/news/20200920/paine-interview-raises-more-jfk-assassination-questions---part-ii
[“Paine interview raises more JFK assassination
questions – Part II,” Jeff Meek, Village Voice Sept. 20, 2020.]
And there is the matter of phones being tapped
and the hearing of a Ruth – Michael conversation in which one of them said they
knew who was responsible for shooting Kennedy. Allegedly Irving Police Chief Paul
Barger knew about this. Have you talked to Barger about the assassination? “Not
that I recall. I don’t recall the name either,” she said. What about your phone
being tapped? “That’s an interesting question. I’ve tried to figure out where that
report came about, Michael and I talking to each other and being heard by
somebody. We talked on the
phone after Kennedy was shot, but before we knew Oswald was involved. We both
were thinking it was the far right, which had been very prominent in their
hostility toward Kennedy. We were both assuming that’s who it was (that shot
the President). I’m wondering if someone in Michael’s office heard him
say it, (that) we know who was to blame for shooting the President, rather than
it being tapped.”
Scores of people told author Leslie
Warren that their first thoughts were that the Right Wing had killed JFK
QUOTE
The
first thought in the minds of the scores of people I’ve seen since the assassination
was that it must have been done by a
member of the right wing. Many of the local rightists themselves thought so. I
watched the color go completely from a man’s face at the Imperial Club when the
murder was announced. Politically, he stands well to the right of Goldwater. At
that moment, he was convinced that one of his colleagues had committed murder.
UNQUOTE
[Leslie
Warren, Dallas Public and Private, pp. 153-153]
Also
quoted in [Pierre Sundborg, Tragic Truth: Oswald Shot Kennedy by Accident,
p.499]
William Manchester, in Death of a President,
stated that after JFK was shot, nearly all conjecture was that the sniper and
his confederates (if any) were agents of the Radical Right
"When the news first
broke that JFK had been shot, people all over the world prayed that he had just
been wounded.
"Prayers continued.
The nation's suspense continued. So did mute phone lines, official fears of a
plot, and, through the Joint Chiefs' global alert, the quick knotting of the
Pentagon's awesome fist. Erratic reactions also continued, triggered by
unsuspected inner quirks. The pathetic refusals to accept the facts persisted,
though they were being defeated as each passing minute eroded individual
defenses of denial and misunderstanding. Those who needed solitude paced their
lonely rooms and streets, those who required company forged intimate
friendships with strangers they would never encounter again, and those capable
of speculation wondered about the source of the shots. Nearly all the conjecture led in the same direction.
There was little doubt about the political convictions of the sniper. It was
assumed that he and his accomplices, whose existence was also assumed, were
agents of the Radical Right. This was true even of the surmises of members of
the John Birch Society...
[William
Manchester, Death of a President, p. ____ ]
A very concerned Cong. Henry Gonzales tried
to delete Dallas from JFK’s itinerary! Gonzales letter to Todd Wayne Vaughn,
dated June 8, 1992
http://jfk.boards.net/thread/283/henry-gonz-images-kennedys-parkland
QUOTE
As you may know, I was riding in the motorcade several
cars behind President Kennedy when he was assassinated. I had traveled with the
President from Washington on his trip to Texas, as he and I had been friends
since the early 1950’s. The President had enjoyed the opportunity to receive a
very warm and moving reception in my home city of San Antonio.
I had, however,
been apprehensive about going to Dallas all along and had tried to delete
Dallas from the agenda when the trip was still in the planning stage. My apprehension was still just as great when we began
the motorcade in Dallas. A few minutes later my worst fears were realized when
I heard gunfire.
UNQUOTE
Texas Gov. John Connally, Adlai Stevenson, Sen.
William Fulbright (D-AR) and Stanley Marcus all warned JFK NOT to go to Dallas.
Question: Did Lyndon Johnson?
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/11/19/gregory-clay-fifty-years-ago-in-dallas-journalist-hugh-aynesworth-was-on-the-scene-of-a-stunning-tragedy/
QUOTE
Bob Schieffer, anchor and moderator of CBS’ “Face the
Nation,” once said, “Hugh Aynesworth knows more about this tragic story and the
reporters who reported it than anyone I know.”
Kennedy believed Florida and Texas were crucial for re-election
in 1964. That’s why he embarked on a five-city swing through Texas: San
Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas … with Austin scheduled to be the final
stop. Dallas was viewed as hostile territory by some because of its right-wing,
anti-communist extremism and arch-conservative John Birch Society advocates.
“Adlai Stevenson (then-United Nations ambassador), John Connally (then-Texas
governor), Sen. William Fulbright (from Arkansas) and Stanley Marcus (of
Neiman-Marcus corporate fame) all warned Kennedy not to go to Dallas,”
Aynesworth said.
UNQUOTE
Dallas
reporter Hugh Aynesworth was expecting the hateful Dallas Right Wing would
“throw something” at John Kennedy to embarrass him.
QUOTE
Aynesworth understood the risk that
Kennedy had taken by visiting Dallas: the reporter felt the city deserved its
reputation as a hateful place that was full of racists and right-wing
extremists. Before the president’s trip, he assumed Kennedy might face some
kind of ugly protest in the city. “I never dreamed they would shoot him, but I thought
they would embarrass him by throwing something at him.”
Aynesworth was ashamed of his
employer, a newspaper that he felt brought out the worst in its readers. In his
view, the News fostered a spirit of
intolerance in the city that might have helped inspire the assassination. “I
felt badly beause the editorial page of my newspaper had really caused it, as
much as any other single thing,” Aynesworth said later. The paper’s shrilly right-wing political slant appalled and embarrassed
many people in the newsroom, including me… the News had criticized Kennedy mercilessly…
On the morning of the assassination,
the paper had run a black-bordered, full-page advertisement placed by a group
of right-wing extremists who identified themselves as the American Fact-Finding
Committee. The ad accused Kennedy of allowing the Justice Department “to go
soft on Communists, fellow travelers and ultra-leftists.” Jacqueline Kennedy remembered
that, as they prepared to drive into Dallas in the motorcade, her husband showed
her the ad and remarked, “We’re heading into nut country.”
UNQUOTE
[Phil Shenon, A
Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the JFK Assassination, p.
130]
Byron Skelton,
in 1963 the National Democratic Committeeman from Texas, was extremely worried about the hard right political
climate in Dallas and Skelton moved heaven and earth trying to get John Kennedy
to take Dallas off the itinerary of the Texas
visit.
QUOTE
But another guest, Ken O’Donnell, had departed
with fragmentary memories which would lie dormant and then arise phantom-like
over the weekend. David Brinkley’s wife had inquired about the unrest in
Dallas. O’Donnell, taciturn as always, said little.
Later Bob Kennedy had ask him, “Did
you see that letter from Byron Skelton?”
O’Donnell nodded. He had seen it.
All month the Democratic National
Committeeman from Texas had been troubled by a premonition. This in itself was
unusual, for no one had ever accused Byron Skelton of being skittish. Now in
his late fifties, he was senior partner of the law firm of Skelton, Bowmer, and
Courtney; director of the First National Bank of Temple, Texas; and past
president of Temple’s Chamber of Commerce. With his neat black suits, soft
voice, and abundant gray hair he was a poster of Southern respectability, and
three years earlier he had played a leading role in staging the historic confrontation
between the Roman Catholic Kennedy and skeptical Protestant preachers of the
Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Skelton’s performance in Houston had earned
the respect and gratitude of the President. Now Kennedy was returning for a
grand tour of the state’s urban centers. The National Committeeman should have
been proud, even elated.
He wasn’t. He was disturbed. The Presidential
schedule included a stop in Dallas, and lately Skelton had been eying that city
with growing uneasiness. The atmosphere there had become so highly charged by
inflammatory statements that he was genuinely concerned. An unstable,
suggestible individual - “a nut,” as he put it to his friends - might easily be
incited. And so, on November 4, he had decided to act. “Frankly,” he had
written the Attorney General that
morning, “I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas.” Quoting
a famous Dallas resident who recently declared that “Kennedy is a liability to
the free world,” Skelton commented that “A man who would make this kind of
statement is capable of doing harm to the President,” and concluded that he
would “feel better if the President’s itinerary did not included Dallas.” He
asked that cancellation of the stop receive “earnest consideration.”
Nor did he stop there. Two days later
he wrote Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, expressing further
misgivings about the city. He would, he told Jenkins, prefer that the President
and the Vice President omit it from their itinerary, and to make certain he had
touched all the bases he flew to Washington the following week and talked to
John Bailey and Jerry Bruno at the National Committee. In a long session with Bruno
he carefully reviewed the political climate in Dallas and his own apprehensions
about it. It wasn’t safe, he repeated; regardless of previous commitments it should
be avoided.
The upshot of all Skelton’s efforts was
an enormous zero. On November 8 the Attorney General, who knew him and took him
seriously, forwarded his letter to O’Donnell, who decided it was an unsupported
hunch. Both Jenkins and Bruno concluded that Skelton was merely annoyed because
he and Mrs. H. W. Weinert, Democratic National Committeewoman for Texas, were
not included in the Presidential party. In fact they were entitled to feel
slighted. The failure to consult either of them about the trip (they learned
about it from the newspapers) was a singular breach of political etiquette, arising from
Connally’s insistence that the White House deal with no one but him. Bruno
conceded as much to Skelton, and Jenkins took the matter up with the Governor.
Yet the snub was comparatively trivial. Presidential security was, or should
have been, the overriding consideration. Skelton had felt so, and had tried
very hard to make his point.
UNQUOTE
[William
Manchester, The Death of a President,
pp. 33-35]
Congressman Albert Thomas also told JFK on the
night of 11-21-21 to be wary of Dallas and careful about what he said there:
https://www.orwelltoday.com/jfkjbs.shtml
William
Manchester:
"He saw Thomas approaching and motioned
him into the bedroom, saying ... 'What can I do for you this morning,
Congressman?' and Thomas answered, 'Mr President, it's the other way round. If
I can't win after what you did for me in Houston, I don't deserve to get
elected.' There was a tap on the door. Dave Powers handed Kennedy his Trade
Mart speech. Thomas added gravely, 'But if I were you, I'd be
careful what I said in Dallas. It's a tough town.' Kennedy let it
pass. Nothing he had seen this morning had encouraged him to soften a word. The
Washington correspondent of the Dallas Times Herald, who had seen the
advance copy of the speech, had warned his office that it was 'a
withering blast at his right-wing critics.' The President intended
it to be just that. 'Why don't you give Kenny a hand?' Kennedy said, glancing
at the door. 'That's why I'm here,' said the Congressman, and went out.
Billie Carr, Democratic activist, told
JFK on 11-21-63 NOT TO GO TO DALLAS. Source: Shawn Leventhal in a Twitter post
on 11-22-20. The Albert Thomas tribute dinner was being held at the Rice Hotel
in Houston on 11-21-63.
https://twitter.com/shawnleventhal/status/1330504246144462856
QUOTE
Billie Carr told me that
she was at The Rice the night before and told him not to go to Dallas!
UNQUOTE
Molly
Ivins on Billie Carr: Billie Carr - The Texas
Observer
Billie
Carr would have been age 35 in 1963 because she was born in 1928.
Billie
Carr obituary - Billie
Carr Obituary (2002) - Houston Chronicle (legacy.com)
Billie
Carr in 1972 became the Democratic national committee woman (1972-2000) for Texas
and she helped to run the McGovern campaign in Texas.
Billie
Carr bio - Guide to
the Billie Carr political papers, 1956-2003 MS 373 (utexas.edu)
Billie McClain Carr (later known as "The
Godmother" for her work on behalf of the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party) was born in Houston, Texas, June 1, 1928. She grew up near downtown
Houston, graduated from Sam Houston High School in 1946, and married three
months later; she had three sons, and over the years took courses at South
Texas College and the University of Houston.
Carr's activities as a political organizer
began in 1952, when political issues in Texas stirred her to run for Democratic
chairman of her precinct and she unexpectedly won. Soon afterward she became a
protégé of Frankie Randolph, a leader and benefactress of liberal causes who
helped found the Harris County Democrats (a liberal precinct organization) in
1953. She taught Carr the art of grass roots political organizing, and over
time Carr assumed a leadership role in Harris County Democrats and began to
establish a statewide reputation as an organizer, convention strategist, and
spokesperson for the statewide liberal coalition.
In 1954 Carr was elected a member from her
precinct to the Harris County Democratic Executive Committee, serving in that
capacity until 1972; she
was also Harris County's member on the Texas State Democratic Executive
Committee from 1964 to 1966. She was a leader in efforts to achieve
proportional liberal participation in presidential conventions and became
nationally known in the Democratic Party for taking a rump delegation to the
1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, an action which helped initiate a party-wide
set of reforms abolishing the use of the unit rule by which conservative Democrats
had been able to minimize the election of liberals as delegates to presidential
conventions.
As a liberal activist and strategist, Carr also
fought for civil rights. She protested the Vietnam War and fought for women's
rights in the 1970s, and for gay rights in the 1980s. She helped organize the
1966 campaign leading to the election of Barbara Jordan, the first black woman
elected to the Texas Senate, and was later described by U. S. Rep. Mickey
Leland as "the grand old lady of liberal politics" for her efforts in
helping a number of minority candidates (including himself) win political
office. She later established a business, Billie Carr & Associates, specializing
in campaign and other political services.
In 1972 Carr was elected to serve as a member
of the Democratic National Committee (a position she held until 2000); there
she was elected "whip" for the progressive-reform caucus and in June
1981 was elected chair of the newly-formed Progressive-Liberal Caucus. At
various periods she also served on the Credentials Committee, the Platform
Advisory Committee on Older Citizens, and the Executive Committee.
Billie Carr died in Houston on September 9,
2002.
William Manchester in The Death of a President
wrote about the Hard Right atmosphere of Dallas 1963
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2011/01/quote-for-the-day/177550/
- posted by the Daily Dish of the Atlantic of Jan. 8, 2011
"In
that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas
County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish
stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in
public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop
and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public
schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were
required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show
evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders,
the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .
In
Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of
his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted
right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named
by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children
were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted
by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not
just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?" - William
Manchester, Death of a President.
The Austin Chronicle’s Dick
Holland describes the Hard Right atmosphere of Dallas in 1963
DICK
HOLLAND – LONE NUTTER writing for the Austin Chronicle on Feb. 23, 2001
in his review of books by Gary Cartwright and Jan Reid, “Things They Used to
Do: Two Texas Journalists Who Stared Danger in the Face”
https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2001-02-23/things-they-used-to-do/
QUOTE
A lot of bizarre
things were happening in Dallas in the fall of 1963. Madame Nhu, wife of the president
of South Vietnam, bought a dozen shower caps at Neiman Marcus and tried to drum
up support for the Diem regime in Saigon -- even while the CIA, with Kennedy's
approval, laid plans to assassinate her husband. Members of the American Nazi
Party danced around a man in an ape suit in front of the Dallas Times
Herald building. ... Zealots from the National Indignation Committee picketed
a U.N. Day speech at the Adolphus Hotel by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson; they called
him Addle-Eye, booed and spat on him, and hit him on the head with a picket
sign. When a hundred Dallas civic leaders wired apologies to Ambassador Stevenson,
General Edwin Walker, who had been cashiered by the Pentagon for force-feeding
his troops right-wing propaganda, flew the American flag upside down in front
of his military gray mansion on Turtle Creek. Someone took a potshot at General
Walker about that same time. We
know now the shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The piety of the Dallas business
climate was perfect cover for all brands of extremism -- pro-Castro cabals and
anti-Castro cabals with overlapping membership, international arms smugglers,
con men who lived under assumed identities in the near North Dallas apartment complexes,
airline flight attendants who smuggled sugarcoated cookies of black Turkish
hash.
UNQUOTE
[“Things
They Used to Do: Two Texas Journalists Who Stared Danger in the Face,” Dick Holland,
Austin Chronicle, Feb. 23, 2001]
Lyndon Johnson was planning on opening his Austin fundraiser
dinner speech with the line “Mr. President, thank God you made it out of Dallas
alive!” on the night of 11-22-63
In the White House, concern over the
President’s safety had set nerves on edge. A committee of Dallas’s leading
citizens had alerted the President’s men to the danger of assassination, and
some White House advisors were urging Kennedy to cancel the trip. A Southern
senator, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, told him, “Dallas is a very
dangerous place …. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” And in a draft of a speech that Lyndon Johnson intended to
give in Austin after the Dallas leg of the tour - a draft that the President’s
advisors had presumably seen and approved - the Vice President planned to open
with the line “Mr. President, thank God you made it out of Dallas alive!”
[Edward
Klein, The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy has
Haunted America’s First Family for 150 Years, pp. 293-294, large print
edition]
Lyndon Johnson wanted JFK to take a
motorcade through Dallas! Source: AP journalist Jack Bell.
QUOTE
Jack Bell: “It was a wonderful day,
beautiful weather. He came down Dallas’ Main Street in a motorcade. Kennedy had
overruled the Secret Service, which wanted to take him directly from the airport
to the Trade Mart where he was supposed to make a speech. Johnson had not wanted
that. He wanted Kennedy to go through Dallas and demonstrate to these people –
and to the world – that Dallas loved Kennedy. The people did. Out on the streets
they gave him a terrific hand. Jackie was beautiful, and the people were
rushing out to lay a hand at least on the car if they couldn’t get to the president.
We turned a corner, and there was the Texas Schoolbook Depository.”
UNQUOTE
[Merle
Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, p. 312] Also this quote from AP reporter Jack
Bell comes from his oral history given to the JFK Library interviewer Joseph E.
O’Connor on April 19, 1966 in Washington D.C. Link: https://www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/archives/JFKOH/Bell,%20Jack%20L/JFKOH-JLB-01/JFKOH-JLB-01-TR.pdf
KUT interview: “The Political Climate
in Dallas Leading to JFK’s Assassination”
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/interview-the-political-climate-in-dallas-leading-to-jfks-assassination/
QUOTE
Minutaglio talks with KUT’s David
Brown about why he describes the book as a “biography of a city,” and what
lessons may have been overlooked by history.
“We felt there was a welling toxic environment
in Dallas,” Minutaglio says. “That there was something that started as unease
and dread in the community at large and it really began building to a fevered
pitch. It was waiting there for Kennedy, and he didn’t know it.”
According to Minutaglio, Kennedy had
received reports that the environment in Dallas was quite intense and maybe he
should rethink his visit. Kennedy’s aides had reported that there was a group
of people who had “hijacked the microphone.”
These “outsized figures” included
billionaire H.L. Hunt, General Edwin A. Walker and Ted Dealey, publisher of The Dallas Morning News. However, as
history states, Kennedy’s assassin wasn’t some “right-wing radical.”
“People were literally coming to
Dallas to join this anti-Kennedy resistance,” Minutaglio says. “Lee Harvey Oswald
was there, and was kind of caught up in the swirl, and might have been
motivated as a disturbed individual to action, to be a part of this maelstrom.
Nothing like this could have happened, but in Dallas.”
UNQUOTE
Post by “Mark”
on Dallas 1963 and its Ultra Right Atmosphere https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333436-dallas-1963
This book is an
appalling examination of the political landscape of Dallas in the years leading
up to the Kennedy assassination. Anyone looking for the roots of modern American
fascism would be well advised to read this book carefully, as it describes in
detail the toxic political culture that formed the breeding ground for modern
Republican lunacy. The utter savagery with which the Dallas populace greeted
vice presidential candidate LBJ and later U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson will
seem eerily familiar to the readers of the current sickening headlines
emanating from Iraq.
After the Stevenson visit, the more moderate afternoon
newspaper, the Dallas Times Herald, published a front-page apology: “Dallas has
been disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm trooper actions of last
night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson… this misconstrued, misguided
brand of ‘patriotism’ is dragging the name of Dallas through the slime of
national dishonor.”
Among the outright psychotics profiled in the book, Major
General Edwin Walker stands out as being one of the most interesting. This WWII
general, a committed John Bircher and dedicated segregationist, fired by
Kennedy, resigns his commission and runs for office. After failing miserably,
Walker resorts to outright treason, becoming a leader of the rabble protesting
the integration of University of Mississippi:
"The standoff represents the most serious challenge to
federal authority since the Civil War. Governor Barnett, belatedly recognizing
the seriousness of the situation, begins desperately negotiating in secret with
the Kennedy brothers to reach a face-saving settlement. And General Edwin A.
Walker of Dallas decides that this is a moment he should and will seize— it is
the perfect cause to use to personally confront John Kennedy, and to rescue
Dallas and the rest of the South from enforced integration."
Other howling lunatics haunting the pages of this book
include the well-known Howard Hunt, who, in addition to being an oil billionaire,
was a part time novelist. In his magnum opus, Hunt tells the story of
"Alpaca...his own country with the perfect form of
government. The men who amass the greatest wealth receive more votes than
anyone else—up to seven votes each. The bottom 40 percent of taxpayers get no
votes at all. The wealthy can purchase additional votes if they desire. Few
government services exist in Alpaca—not even public schools. And, finally, the
nation must enshrine the “oil depletion allowance”—a massively lucrative tax
break for Texas oilmen—as part of the constitution. It is, in fact, the highest
law of the land. “The people of Alpaca… were generally happy with the new
Constitution,” he writes. I'm pretty sure the Republican party would get right
behind this platform!
The reader of this book will understand all too clearly why
Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, but will be left wondering how Kennedy could
have been so blind to the mortal danger posed by that outlaw city. Adlai Stevenson
questioned the wisdom of Kennedy's planed Dallas visit: “There was something
very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere,” he says. He mentions that he
had talked to Stanley Marcus and other leading people in Dallas. There was
uncertainty, some dread, in Dallas. “They wondered whether the President should
go to Dallas,” Stevenson says. “And so do I.”
Well written book, with the brisk, driving pace of a thriller.
Essential reading for anyone looking to gain more insight into the modern
sickness that characterizes the Republican party.
Gus Breymann post on
Dallas 63 and the Ultra Right Atmosphere of Dallas in the years preceding 1963
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333436-dallas-1963
Gus Breymann:
QUOTE
Focusing on former
army general Edwin A. Walker, "Dallas Morning News" publisher Ted
Dealey, weird oilman H. L. Hunt, extremist Congressman Bruce Alger, and racist
Baptist preacher W. A. Criswell, this is a story of political power, rabid
racism, paranoia, anti-communism, ultra-right conservatism and wealth in Dallas
between 1961 and 1963. There are parallels in Texas in 2013, perhaps explaining
why the co-authors wrote this book in the present tense. For those of us who were
in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or nearby in Texas, the story is a refresher
course with new details. For others, it will be revelation. Particularly
interesting portions are: (1) Ted Dealey's offensive verbal attack on JFK at a
White House luncheon with publishers; (2) Lee Harvey Oswald's stalking of Edwin
Walker on Turtle Creek Blvd. in Dallas; (3) Adlai Stevenson's terrible
maltreatment by Dallasites; (4) Walker's arrest for sedition in Mississippi and
his subsequent, brief psychiatric hospitalization; and (5) Representative
Alger's role in the mink coat protest against LBJ at the Baker Hotel. The book
would have been even more interesting if it had expanded on an important reason
JFK went to Dallas at all: the political feud involving LBJ, Governor John
Connally, and Senator Ralph Yarborough. Narrative concerning Reverend Rhett
James and activist Juanita Craft, while interesting and positive, takes a clear
back seat to the main theme of the book: hatred and absolutism.
UNQUOTE
NBC News –
pictures from the day of the JFK assassination:
https://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/jfk-s-assassination-look-back-day-n813796
Pictures include JFK and entourage walking outside the
Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, JFK looking at LBJ at the Fort Worth Chamber of
Commerce breakfast
Signs at Love Field included “KENNEDY! Why are you
dedicated to Socialism” and “In 1964 Goldwater and Freedom” – one guy had a
Confederate flag above his sign which read
In ‘64
Vote Right
Vote White
Anyone but
The
NAACP’s KENNEDY’S
Another sign said:
2 or 4 Legs; Swims, Walks, Flies, or Crawls
ANYTHING
BUT
J.F.K.
When ultra conservative J. Evetts
Haley ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor in 1956 most of his votes
came from either Dallas-Fort Worth or his base in West Texas
The vote
totals were:
Price Daniel
– 629,000 - 41% conservative
Ralph
Yarborough - 463,400 - 30% liberal
Pappy O’Daniel
– 347,750 - 23% very conservative
J. Evetts
Haley – 88,000 - 6% ultra conservative
Total
votes of top 4 candidates = 1,528,150
John Huntington:
QUOTE
Most of Haley’s
support came from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the site of Haley’s most
active headquarters, and from his own backyard, the parched plains of West Texas.
UNQUOTE
[“’The Voice
of Many Hatreds;’” J. Evetts Haley and Texas Ultraconservatism,” John S.
Huntington]
Sen. William Fulbright repeatedly warned JFK not to go to Dallas
because of dangerous anti-JFK sentiment there.
“Arkansas
connections to the JFK assassination and its aftermather” by Evin Demirel, blog
post on 11-21-2013 for Arkansas Times
https://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2013/11/21/arkansas-connections-to-the-jfk-assassination-and-its-aftermath
Dallas was an unusually dangerous place in the
months preceding President John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 visit
there. That month the Department of Defense had sent Kennedy aide Ken
O’Donnell a confidential, comprehensive report on the city noting its
population had recently surged to 747,000 residents primarily because of
newcomers coming from rural Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. These transplant Southerners
had sharpened what was already a politically and socially conservative climate.
The report went on, “Dallas’s political conservatism stems from a fundamentalist
religious training and years of conditioning,” William Manchester reported in “The
Death of a President.” In the early 1960s, “the maturity of independent
oil wealth” and recent industrialization had made the city’s climate “overtly active”
and “politically militant.”
The result was a city with no requirement for
firearms registration, no firearms control at all, and up till Nov. 22, 1963, a
toll of 110 murders — 72 percent by gunfire. Those closest to the scene didn’t
hesitate to warn Kennedy. A Dallas woman wrote Kennedy’s press aide: “Don’t let
the President come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible
will happen to him.” U.S. Attorney H. Barefoot Sanders, the vice
president’s contact in Dallas, told Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s aide the
city’s political climate made the trip “inadvisable.”
But it was Sen.
J. William Fulbright of Arkansas who likely served the most
clear-cut warning, Manchester wrote. The junior senator had himself felt the
glow of Dallas’ hatred a year earlier when during one of his re-election
campaigns he’d been the target of attacks in the Dallas Morning News, owned by
radical conservative Ted Dealey. Fulbright readily admitted being afraid of
Dallas and its past of political violence. Indeed, he’d turned down several
invitations to visit friends there, wrote Manchester, who interviewed Fulbright
in 1965. On Oct. 3, 1963, Fulbright and Kennedy spent the better part of a day
together, flying to Little Rock and then to Heber Springs for the dedication of
Greers Ferry Dam. During the trip and the following luncheon, Fulbright repeatedly
told Kennedy Dallas was a “a very dangerous place,” adding “I wouldn’t go there”
and “Don’t you go.”
Fulbright was not the only Arkansan, or person
with Arkansas ties, who played roles in the events before and after the Kennedy
assassination. Below are some others:
Some Schoolchildren in Dallas Cheered the day JFK was Murdered
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/daily-news/2013/11/dallas-schoolchildren-JFK
“In Dallas,
Some Schoolchildren Cheered the Day J.F.K. was Shot” by Walter Owen for Vanity
Fair, Nov. 22, 2013
Walter Owen:
When
my father, a loud man of infectious enthusiasms, moved us from Montreal to
Dallas in 1961, he said we’d be living next door to Mickey Mantle. We did, sort
of. But the real thrill was that we were now living in a country led by the most
urbane, glamorous, and witty president in history. Fifty years ago today, my
father was on his way to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart, where John F. Kennedy
was to give an address. I doubt the births of his five children excited him as
much as the possibility that he might shake hands with Kennedy that afternoon.
Whenever
my father was home, the air was full of talk of “promise” and “opportunity” and
“can-do” and “pragmatism.” You could not be a young boy in our house and not
think you ought to grow up to be like Kennedy. Once, stepping into the shower
in the middle of the day, my father advised me, “You know Kennedy showers three
times a day.” (Never mind the possible extramarital reasons either of them may
have had for midday showers.) We had moved to Dallas so my father could run the
largest downtown development in the city’s history. I barely remember that being
mentioned.
I
was in class at St. Marks School of Texas when Kennedy was shot. In the early
afternoon of November 22, 1963, my mother picked me up from school. The radio
was on. I don’t remember what was said, but I remember being very sad—and not knowing
exactly why this was so different from the feeling I had when they were packing
up the summerhouse at the lake. I suspect now that in my child’s mind, I was
sure that the death of this man Kennedy was in some way the death of something
in my father.
I remember only the black-and-white
images on television in the days that followed. My loud father was silent. In
line at the school cafeteria, some of the boys said they were happy about the
assassination. My mother told me they were only repeating what their parents
said. Later, she liked to boast that I had brawled with the sons of the “Texan Kennedy
Haters.” (I hadn’t. She was confusing them with sons of “the Texan Racists,”
whom I had scrapped with.) My mother’s finishing school in Switzerland had done
nothing to prepare her for Dallas society in the 1960s, and she did little to
accommodate what she called “the vulgarity” of the place. Fifty years later,
mention of Dallas still brings the color to her face.
But
my Canadian father loved America as only a striving and talented provincial could.
Kennedy’s promise that all men could be free, that even the moon was within
reach, gave the country—powerful, yet still young and crude compared to the
ones it had just rescued from barbarism, and uncertain in the face of the new
nuclear threat it faced overseas—the élan it needed to face the future with a
belief in its capacity for greatness. Kennedy was on the move. None of us
wanted to be left behind.
And
then, fifty years ago today, all of us were.
St. Mark’s
School of Texas is a private boys school located at 10600 Preston Road, Dallas,
TX 75230. It is located 8.5 miles, or 11 minutes by car, from the Grassy Knoll
at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, TX.
In Richardson, TX, second grade boys were cheering at the death of
John Kennedy - Source Judith Burch Bailey (age 76 in 2019, age 20 in 1963) who
was an elementary school teacher there while she was a student at SMU
Robert Morrow
Interview notes:
On Sunday,
April 7, 2019, I attended a book signing for Douglas Brinkley at Book People in
Austin, TX at 5PM. It was for Brinkley’s newly released book American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the
Great Space Race. Sitting to my left was Judith Burch Bailey who told me
she was an elementary school teacher in Richardson, TX on the day of the JFK
assassination, 11-22-63. Judith told me that after she had announced to her
second grade class that President Kennedy had been assassinated that certain boys
in her class started cheering. Judith also told me that she had attended SMU in
1963 and that she knew Ray Lee Hunt, the son of billionaire. H.L. Hunt, while
she was there. Judith also told me that while she was at SMU and in Dallas that
she was in general shocked at how hard right wing the environment was. She said
that it was to such a degree that it made her uncomfortable. Judith Burch Bailey
was born in December, 1942 and was age 20 on the day of the JFK assassination.
Wikipedia says “Richardson is an affluent inner suburb of Dallas.” Richardson,
TX is located 14 miles north of the Grassy Knoll (where JFK was assassinated) in
Dallas, about a 17 minute car drive away.
Debbie Nathan, then in eight grade
in Houston, says that when JFK was murdered
“every kid and adult in sight laughed, except for me and the Latin instructor.”
‘A Wonderful,
Glorious Place:” the true legacy is not live Kennedy but dead Kennedy. By Debbie
Nathan, Austin Chronicle, Nov. 22, 2013
QUOTE
I'm a Houstonian
from a Jewish, liberal family. In eighth grade, I attended junior high near the
headquarters of the ultra-right John Birch Society. Birchers roiled with conspiracy
theories. The civil rights movement was a commie plot. Water fluoridation to prevent
cavities was a commie plot. My teachers parroted these propositions in class.
They thought JFK was a plot. When word came on the intercom that he was dead,
every kid and adult in sight laughed, except for me and the Latin instructor.
UNQUOTE
Web link: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2013-11-22/writers-on-kennedy-a-wonderful-glorious-place/
I’m pretty sure Debbie Nathan was living in a
rightwing, upscale (Kennedy-hating) area of Houston in 1963.
50 years ago: Austin was ‘all agog’ to greet JFK by
Patrick Beach 11-22-13, Austin-American Statesman
https://www.statesman.com/news/20131122/50-years-ago-austin-was-all-agog-to-greet-jfk
LBJ was
going to OPEN his speech with a reference to Dallas not conclude his speech.
QUOTE
Johnson,
in his remarks at the Austin dinner, intended to mention the pockets of antipathy
directed at Kennedy from political extremists in Dallas and elsewhere. He was
to conclude: “And thank God, Mr. President, that you came out of Dallas alive.”
The line was sure to get a great reception.
UNQUOTE
“And, thank God, Mr. President, you
came out of Dallas alive.” - prepared remarks for Lyndon Johnson for a
presidential fundraiser in Austin the night of November 22, 1963
https://www.washingtonian.com/projects/JFK-AF1/layout1.html
Angel is Airborne
Aboard Air Force One—during one of
America’s most searing, perilous moments—a government was formed and a presidency
begun.
By Garrett
M. Graff
Introduction
“And thank God, Mr. President,
you came out of Dallas alive.”
The joke was prepared, the words typed, ready to place on the Vice President’s
lectern in Austin, Texas, later that evening. Lyndon Johnson was planning to
close his speech on November 22, 1963, with a punch line about how John F.
Kennedy had survived the city of hate.
Fears for Kennedy in Dallas had been widespread. The place was filled with
extremists who thought JFK was soft on Communism and the United Nations was a
red front. Just a few weeks earlier, Adlai Stevenson had been physically assaulted
during a speech there; in 1961, one of Bobby Kennedy’s speeches in Dallas had
been interrupted by circling cars full of noisy protesters; and in 1960, images
of a crowd jostling and jeering Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson as they crossed a
Dallas street had horrified the nation.
In the days leading up to the Kennedy visit, homemade posters bearing the
President’s face circulated with the headline “Wanted for Treason.” That morning
at their hotel suite in Fort Worth, after seeing a full-page ad in the Dallas
Morning News accusing him of being a Communist lover, JFK said to his wife,
Jackie, “We’re heading into nut country today.”
John Herbers was in Dallas reporting
for the NYT in the aftermath of the
JFK assassination
QUOTE
The first
place I went looking for an answer was the First Presbyterian Church just
blocks from where President Kennedy was shot, hoping to find some semblance of
sanity.
“We are proud of our heritage and our
image,” Dr. Thomas A. Fry told his congregation from the pulpit. “But something
has happened like a cancer you cannot quite put your finger on. We have allowed
the apostles of religious bigotry and the purveyors of political pornography to
stir up the weak-minded.” The pastor also denounced the literature branding
President Kennedy a communist that had been distributed by extremists
throughout the city before his arrival. I spoke to the minister’s wife after the
service, and she had a much simpler, and more direct explanation: “We think it’s
the western tradition. They are used to shooting at everything they don’t
like.” …
I also quoted another minister, this
time a Methodist, who said, “At a nice, respectable dinner party only two
nights before the President’s visit to our city, a bright young couple with a
fine education, with a promising professional future, said to their friends
that they hated the President of the United States - and that they would not
care one bit if somebody did take a potshot at him.
UNQUOTE
[John Herbers,
Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil
Rights Journalist, p. 121]
1978
HSCA Final Report on the JFK assasination, p. 36 - Many perceived Dallas as a
violent, hysterical center of right-wing fanaticism
Web link https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/report/pdf/HSCA_Report_1_Intro.pdf
Despite some obvious political reasons for a Texas visit, some
members of Kennedy's staff opposed it because the State was not favorably
disposed to the President. From 1961 to 1962, the Secret Service had received
34 threats on the President's life from Texas. Political embarrassment seemed a
certainty. The decision to travel to Dallas was even more puzzling. Many perceived
Dallas as a violent, hysterical center of right-wing fanaticism . There, in 1960,
then-Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had been heckled and spat upon. In October
1963, just a month before the President's scheduled visit, Ambassador to the United
Nations Adlai Stevenson was jeered, hit with a placard and spat upon. Byron
Skelton, the National Democratic Committeeman from Texas, wrote Attorney General
Robert Kennedy about his concern for President Kennedy's safety and urged him to
dissuade his brother from going to Texas.
Dallas 1963
atmosphere: George DeMohrenschildt told journalist and his friend Willem
Oltmans in 1970 - in half jest - that if he were involved in the murder of JFK
he would have been made a bank president in Dallas
George
DeMohrenschildt:
“You
know, Willem, if it were ever revealed that I actually did have something to do
with the assassination of President Kennedy, I would immediately be offered the
position of a major bank in Dallas.”
[Willem
L. Oltmans, Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination,
p.54]
The Kennedy
Administration and JFK personally were warned repeatedly not to go to Dallas
because the of Right Wing hatred for him there.
Web
link: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10024063978
Web
link http://westwingreports.com/jfk-elm-street#sthash.FvIbuB6X.dpuf
From West Wing Reports:
President
Kennedy, complaining about the slow legislative process, tells Congressional
leaders: “Things always look so much better away from Washington.”
Some lawmakers expressed concern that President Kennedy might encounter trouble
in Dallas. U.N. Ambassador Stevenson had been attacked there on Oct. 24, and
House Whip Hale Boggs told JFK: “Mr. President, you’re going into quite a
hornet’s nest.”
Kennedy replied: “well, that always creates interesting crowds.”
It is the latest in a long line of warnings about Dallas. In the wake of the
White House announcement that President Kennedy would visit Texas, there were
expressions of concern - even alarm - about his safety there; It is notable
that those who knew Dallas best were the ones who were most concerned. A sampling:
Senator Ralph Yarborough's two brothers, both Dallas lawyers, sent him
almost identical letters warning of widedspread local hatred for President Kennedy.
White House press secretary Pierre Salinger receieved a letter from a Dallas
woman: "Don't let the President come down here. I'm worried about him. I
think something terrible will happen to him," she wrote.
U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes feared an incident of some sort.
U.S. Attorney H. Barefoot Sanders, the ranking Justice Department official in
that part of Texas and Vice-President Johnson's point man in Dallas, told senior
LBJ advisor Cliff Carter that the trip was "inadvisable."
"I think we ought to see whether we can persuade President Kennedy to change
his mind about visiting Dallas," Stanley Marcus (of the upscale Nieman-Marcus
department store) told fellow executives. “Frankly, I don’t think this city is
safe for it.”
And President Kennedy was personally warned as well by a close friend, Sen. J.
William Fulbright (D-Arkansas), who told him “Dallas is a very dangerous place.
I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”
The President was not looking forward to the trip - telling friend Dave Powers
on Nov. 18 that he hated visiting Texas and that he had a terrible feeling about
going. Mrs. Kennedy also said that she would "hate every minute of
it."
Goldwater supporter and Right Winger Lee Edwards
and nearly everyone around him thought that a Right Winger had just murdered
John Kennedy. Media played up Dallas’ right wing nature in the aftermath of the
JFK assassination
https://townhall.com/columnists/leeedwards/2017/11/22/the-day-kennedy-died-n2411912
Lee Edwards
article, “The Day Kennedy Died,” for Townhall.com, Nov. 22, 2017
We “kids,” as Clif White called us, had been left to
answer the phones and take messages on what should have been a lazy fall day.
The traffic was light and the lunches were long as they always were when the
President was out of town.
But the city was jolted into a frenzy by the bulletin
from Dallas—“Kennedy Shot!”—and we were drawn into the vortex. Nearly everyone,
including me, thought that someone on our side, a Bircher, a Minuteman, a follower
of General Walker, had pulled the trigger…
None
of us wanted to go home and sit alone waiting to learn who had killed the
President. So we stood before the small TV in the dim light of an old brass desk
lamp and watched the networks try to bury Barry Goldwater and his campaign.
“President
Kennedy was in Dallas, the heart of Goldwaterland,” NBC’s Chet Huntley said,
“seeking to repair political fences.”
“The
ultra-right John Birch Society has become increasingly active in Dallas,” one network
reported. “Last month they made it clear they did not want UN Ambassador Adlai
Stevenson in their city.” There were pictures of angry middle-aged white men
and women crowding and jostling Stevenson.
The
anti-Goldwater rhetoric crested when Walter Cronkite said: “Senator Goldwater is
giving a political speech in Indiana and is not expected to attend President
Kennedy’s wake and funeral.”
I
was furious. Anyone covering Goldwater, and that included CBS, knew he was in Muncie,
Indiana, with Mrs. Goldwater for her mother’s funeral and burial. And every political
reporter in Washington was aware that Goldwater and Kennedy were good friends
although philosophically as different as Hayek and Keynes. I called the Washington
bureau of CBS News, but all the lines were busy.
Dallas still struggles to shake its reputation
as the ‘City of Hate’ - Globe and Mail, Nov. 16, 2013 - by Craig Offman
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/dallas-still-struggles-to-shake-its-reputation-as-the-city-of-hate/article15469543/
At the Hotel Joule on Dallas's Main Street, Dan Rather is
roaming the lobby with a small entourage. Like dozens of other journalists here
right now, he's in town to cover the 50th anniversary of the assassination of
president John F. Kennedy, and to put Dallas back in the spotlight.
Across Main Street, a nine-metre-tall sculpture of a
bloodshot eyeball stares blankly back at the Joule, and you can't help but project
a city's anxieties onto that strung-out pupil. Yes, this is the street where
the Ku Klux Klan once marched, where the Kennedy motorcade passed before reaching
Dealey Plaza, in the city whites fled to after desegregation. But we have
changed! We're artsy and liberal. Stop judging us for what happened 50 years
ago.
"McKinley was killed in Buffalo and Lincoln in
Washington," says the avuncular Texan and former CBS news anchor,
"but no city has had to overcome the stigma that Dallas had."
The Kennedy curse is upon Dallas again, yet another chance
for baby boomers, liberals, history buffs and conspiracy junkies to hold this
city hostage to the early 1960s. More than any other place in the world, Dallas
has been defined by a crime scene. Not even Sarajevo, the host to Archduke Ferdinand
when he was assassinated in 1914, bears such a burden.
As the country prepares for its national catharsis on Nov.
22, Dallas residents must be wondering if there is an expiration date on
contrition. Never mind that tens of thousands of locals lined up to see the
crown prince of Camelot roll by in an open convertible. And the inconvenient
fact that a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald, not a right-wing extremist, pulled
the trigger. The tyranny of demographics keeps Dallas frozen in time. While 9/11
or Oklahoma City may trump the assassination for younger generations, the death
of JFK is the personal touchstone for the bulk of an aging U.S. population.
Dallas did it, or it was at least an accomplice. It is the
City of Hate, the unforgivable city.
At the bar of CBD Provisions, the city's restaurant of the
moment, Phillip Jones, chief executive officer of the Dallas Convention and Visitors
Bureau, delivers the same spiel he has doubtlessly given to many curious rubes
like me, who land in his city with an overnight bag filled with stereotypes.
Dallas isn't what it was 50 years ago, the former Clinton
administration official says. It's an island of political blue in a sea of Texan
red. Its mayors are Democrats, and so are its judges. It has elected a Latino lesbian
sheriff. There is a thriving Arts District, world-class museums. It's a
convention hub that challenges Las Vegas and Atlanta.
"Like it or not, the assassination is part of our
history," says Mr. Jones over blasts of Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. "But
we don't want to be defined by one event."
Up and down Main Street storefronts – and wherever the
Kennedy motorcade went – there are children's drawings proclaiming Dallas to be
the "City of Love." Driven by Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist
Karen Blessen, the Love Project is meant to be proof her town has worked
through the pain and shame of the past. Around 18,000 schoolchildren contributed.
You can't blame
the city for being defensive. While the country's tens of millions of baby
boomers pick at the national wound, the majority of Dallasites may not befeeling
anything. It's a young city where many people seem to have come from elsewhere
– the Manhattan of the Southwest. Officials throw around the statistic that 95
per cent of residents neither lived here nor were born at the time of the
assassination. Though it's difficult to substantiate the claim, it's not a
Texas-sized boast, either. Census figures estimate that 65 per cent of Dallas
residents are between the ages of 18 and 65, with a median age of 30.
To them, Mr.
Kennedy's grisly end must feel as distant as Mr. McKinley's did to boomers.
An
unexpected gift
Arguably, the
death of Camelot was Dallas's greatest blessing. Pulitzer-Prize winning
journalist Lawrence Wright recently called the JFK assassination "a
gift," a pivotal moment that allowed a young city to correct itself.
"Dallas became a more open, tolerant and just city as a result," Mr.
Wright says over the phone. "It learned the lesson of humility."
Before the assassination,
Dallas didn't have much of an identity beyond its oil money and the right-wing
radicals who ran the place. There was E.M. (Ted) Dealey, the Dallas Morning
News publisher who told JFK at the White House that the nation needed a
"man on horseback," not someone "riding Caroline's
bicycle." There was the eccentric oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, widely believed at
the time to be the world's richest man, bankrolling much of the vitriolic
backlash against Mr. Kennedy's New Frontier.
Along with its
radical eccentrics, Dallas also had a reputation for crossing the line. Hateful
politics were one thing: There were John Birch Society members everywhere. Many
Southern states bristled at the idea of Yankees telling them to desegregate.
But these guys
in Dallas played it rougher than most. They were literally up in people's
faces.
Congressman Bruce Alger, the city's legendary Republican
congressman, spearheaded a 1960 protest at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas against
Lyndon Johnson, then the U.S. Senate majority leader, who was campaigning for the
vice-presidency.
Considered by some to be the spiritual forefather of the
Tea Party-affiliated Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Mr. Alger held a placard that
said, "LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists." The rally, supported by tony
women from North Dallas, grew confrontational, and a protester spat on Lady
Bird Johnson. Lady Bird later wrote that she had never feared for her life so much
as in those moments. One of the protesters snatched her gloves and pitched them
into the gutter.
A month before the assassination, another surreal attack:
While visiting Dallas, Mr. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai
Stevenson, encountered the virulent local opposition to the UN and was hit on
the head by a woman carrying a "Down with the UN" picket.
On the day of the assassination, the Dallas Morning News
printed a full-page advertisement, bordered in black, accusing Kennedy of being
a Communist stooge. The ad provoked Mr. Kennedy's ominous remark about his fatal
visit: "We're heading into nut country today."
Hours after the assassination, the Dallas-did-it theory
was front of mind. Jacqueline Kennedy was still wearing that pink Chanel knock-off
dress, soaked with her husband's blood, at Parkland Memorial Hospital when nurses
asked if she needed help cleaning up. "Absolutely not," she said.
"I want the world to see what Dallas has done to my husband."
Afterward, people wrote letters to the city. Some were empathetic,
others called for more transparency and criticized the way police made Mr. Oswald
vulnerable to his killer, strip-club owner Jack Ruby.
But for many
letter writers, Dallas was not the scene of the crime – it was a culprit.
"I think it would be fitting for you to have the name of Dallas changed to
DISGRACE, Texas," wrote one.
"What amazes
me is how personally people took the event," says Jeffrey A. Engle, the director
of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University,
sitting in the DeGolyer Library next to a collection of pristinely kept letters.
"I'm amazed that so many people felt a need to write about their own
personal connection to it from around the world."
That personal
connection would be felt when Dallasites travelled and got cold-shouldered or
insulted. Waiters wouldn't serve them. People wouldn't give them directions.
They were stigmatized. Not only was it bad for city morale, it might be bad for
business, always a chief concern for the Big D. The city needed to recreate
itself.
Within months,
it had begun to do just that.
When Dallas
became 'Dallas'
As young
newspaperman, Darwin Payne chased the assassination story for the now defunct
Dallas Times Herald. He interviewed a teary Abraham Zapruder, the balding,
middle-aged man who had filmed Mr. Kennedy being shot. Despite Mr. Payne's entreaties
to hand over the footage, Mr. Zapruder gave it to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
A year later,
Mr. Payne wrote an anniversary piece that examined the city in the aftermath of
the assassination. "I found that in the first nine months of 1964,
business activity had been much higher than it had been for the previous nine
months," he said at Peggy Sue's, a barbecue joint across from the campus
of SMU. "They were worried that economic problems would happen, but they
didn't."
Mr. Payne, who later became a historian and SMU journalism
professor, said the city's radical right-wing groups went underground after the
shooting. The Dallas Morning News transitioned to a new generation of leadership.
The mayor, Democrat Earle Cabell, ran for Congress in order to oust Mr. Alger,
and the Morning News turned on its former Republican ally.
In 1963, there were nine Democratic organizations in
Dallas; the following year, 21 new ones were formed. In the 1964 state election,
all Republican candidates from the Dallas area were swept out in favour of
Democrats. "It's as if Dallas, embarrassed by what had happened and having
sown such negativism, wanted to say, Look, we loved the president," Mr.
Payne recalls.
J. Erik Jonsson, the co-founder of Texas Instruments who was
elected mayor of Dallas in 1964, ushered in a civic renewal program that
included air-conditioning for public schools, a public library system and a new
city hall designed by I.M. Pei.
The crowning moment, however, was Dallas/Fort Worth Airport,
a partnership of two rival cities that would create the largest airport in the
world when it opened in 1973 with the sonic boom of a Concorde jet.
"Without the assassination, it never would have happened,"
Mr. Payne says.
In the early sixties, Fort Worth and Dallas were cross-town
rivals. They had their own separate airfields and just kept making them bigger.
But Mr. Jonsson wanted his city to be worldly and, with the help of the federal
government, pushed the project forward.
In the
seventies, Dallas's reputation diversified, for better or worse. There was the rise
of the Dallas Cowboys – "America's team" – a bold bit of branding for
the city, given its reputation elsewhere. And then came Dallas, the TV show that made the world forget
about Dealey Plaza.
Dallasites
might complain that they would never wear cowboys boots like the Ewings –
that's more Fort Worth – but no one bothered them much about the assassination
any more. The city was moving on. The bullet that killed J.R. was a more
riveting topic.
'People just
stand and stare'
Long before
Tony Tasset's giant eyeball sculpture fixed its sights on Main Street, Dallas
was a big booster of art and design. There is a long tradition of support for
avant-garde work in the area. When the Kennedys arrived at the Hotel Texas in
Fort Worth in 1963, local bigwigs installed works by Thomas Eakins and Franz
Kline and sculptures by Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso in the presidential
suite.
After the assassination,
the Dallas skyline became a tabula rasa for
I.M. Pei, who designed a symphony centre and what is now called the First
Interstate Bank Tower, along with the City Hall.
Today, the
Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University has one of the largest collections
of Spanish works outside Spain. Forbes magazine recently raved about the Dallas
Art Fair, calling it a welcome complement to the preening pretensions of New
York and Basel.
At the Dallas
Museum of Art, I am directed by various women with thick, black eyeliner to the
office of Maxwell Anderson, its director. That day, Mr. Anderson was set to
announce that an anonymous donor had given $9-million to keep attendance free.
The museum, which features 22,000 works, received $17-million earlier this year
to establish an endowment that would bolster the museum's collections of
European art from before 1700.
The former director of New York's Whitney Museum and the
Art Gallery of Ontario, Mr. Anderson says Dallas's transformation into an arts
hub is mix of recent self-made fortunes and booming population. "There is
a concomitant growth spurt, an energy level and drive, entrepreneurial quality
and civic-mindedness that is a great cocktail," he says.
AT&T Stadium, where the National Football League's
Dallas Cowboys play, is the biggest surprise. The $1-billion-plus leviathan looms
over the suburb of Arlington; as fans walk in, they are not greeted by a huge
bust of the late, legendary coach Tom Landry. Instead they are greeted by Sky
Mirror, a $10-million Anish Kapoor sculpture. It's a 21-tonne, 10.6-metre-diameter
stainless-steel disc that reflects the eastern sky on its concave side and
Cowboy fans on the stadium side. There is a pool below it.
"People just stand and stare," says Phil
Whitfield, the stadium's art ambassador, who oversees the collection of more
than a dozen mostly abstract murals and installations.
A Dallas resident his whole life, Mr. Whitfield remembers
going to see Kennedy's motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963. "I was three years old
and the crowds were eight people deep, so I didn't get a chance to see
him."
He says Dallas back then was a city where an African-American
kid had to be careful at night; where he had to be home by a certain hour or else
he'd invite trouble from the police or others.
Asked how the city has changed, he paused in the way people
do when talking about something that happened a long time ago.
"Most of those people have died out," he says.
The 'rememberers'
In spite of all
the civic improvement in Dallas, Dealey Plaza, named after the newspaper family
whose scion despised the Kennedys, isn't much to look at. If there weren't X's
marking the spots on Elm Street where the bullets hit the president, this patch
of green and cement could be an egress to any major highway. While the
"grassy knoll" looms large in the national imagination, it is a minor
patch of green.
Lurking above
Dealey Plaza in the infamous book depository is the Sixth Floor Museum. Itself
stigmatized, the building has struggled with the weight of its history. It switched
hands several times after the assassination. Some of the city's leading figures,
including Tom Landry, Mary Kay and Ross Perot, created a group called Dallas
Onward, hoping to raise enough money to buy the building and tear it down.
But in 1979, Dallas
County purchased it, hoping one day it would be a museum to commemorate the
event and the era. In 1989, the Sixth Floor Museum opened, which for many
brought closure to a difficult chapter. This museum, unlike others around town,
can't count on the largesse of patrons; instead, it relies on proceeds from ticket
sales. Around 350,000 visitors come though each year.
The museum is a
place of sacred silences and religious attention. On a precious visit seven
years ago, I saw teenagers weeping. It's also exhaustingly extensive. You can
stand by the blacked-out window from which Mr. Oswald took aim at the
motorcade; there is also an engaging panorama of the Kennedy era, riveting oral
histories of Nov. 22 and a collection of some 40,000 items related to the assassination.
These days, the
demographics of its visitors are changing, says museum executive director
Nicola Longford. Now, 60 per cent of its guests are "non-rememberers"
– people who were not alive during the assassination.
"It's
surprising how many people don't know who President Kennedy was or that he even
died here in Dallas," she says. "But once they come inside, it becomes
a mystery to them, a treasure hunt. They don't want all the answers provided to
them, but they're able to be critical thinkers and understand the power of this
place."
Stephen Fagin, the
museum's associate curator, says that part of its power is its ability to
bridge people's different experiences of catastrophe. Using his own family as
an example, for him the country's signal national tragedy was the explosion of
the Challenger space shuttle; for his brother it was the Oklahoma City bombing;
for his mother, the assassination. JFK isn't just about JFK. It's about sharing
catharsis.
Mr. Fagin is
also fascinated by the difference in how generations approach the museum.
"You have rememberers who are far more inclined to reflect on their own
lives and this moment that defined a generation," he said.
"Younger people
are interested in it as an ongoing murder mystery with lingering questions.
They explore the plaza, point to the building and think about bullet trajectories
and evidence."
Which would be
a great growth opportunity for the Conspiracy Museum, located around the
corner. I had visited the place seven years ago and planned a return, but discovered
it had been turned into a Quiznos.
'Everyone
loves a mystery'
At a class on JFK
at Southern Methodist University outside of Dallas, Camelot's toothy allure
isn't the draw. For these Gen Yers, it's the grit and fog of the assassination
itself: the lingering contradictions of the crime scenes, the frothy YouTube videos
that allege conspiracy, and the perplexing motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Or, as he's referred to several times in class by students, "Ozzie."
"Everyone
loves a mystery," said the class's lecturer, Tom Stone (no relation to
Oliver), who has been teaching variations of this course for 20 years. "It's
the crime of the century."
Or, more
accurately, the past century. The course, "Teaching JFK to Gen Y," is
billed as an opportunity to "experience the zeitgeist of that turbulent
time." Many of the students said they went into the course knowing little
about the 35th president, except the mistresses he took in the White House, the
way in which he was killed and maybe the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But they bore into
the grassy knoll with great relish. It's Kennedy CSI.
Every detail is
impressively micro-examined. Why on earth would Mr. Oswald go to Dallas, an odd
place for a communist sympathizer if there ever were one? (To get away from his
mother? posits Prof. Stone impishly.) And could that iconic photo of Mr. Oswald
holding that 6.5-mm Carcano rifle have been doctored or, worse, faked? They
study everything from Don Delillo's novel Libra to the Oliver Stone potboiler JFK.
"I've always
been into conspiracies," said Kevin, 19, from Houston. The Sixth Floor
Museum piqued his interest and also resonated with another national cataclysm.
"For my own life, the closest thing was 9/11."
For many of
these students, 9/11 is their 11/22. They want to bridge the trauma of the Dealey
Plaza with the World Trade Center and understand why their parents felt the event
was so pivotal.
Another student, Jackie Leylegian, was graced with a
particle of Camelot dust. Born a week after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy,
she was named after America's most glamorous first lady. Though she, too, said
she still didn't know many specifics about the event, she wanted to learn more.
Her grandmother in Montreal has shelves stacked with JFK books.
"I feel blessed to be taking a course near
Dallas," she says. "Where it all happened."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tea-party-has-roots-in-the-dallas-of-1963/2013/11/20/9cb59b4c-3cf4-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html
Tea party has roots in the
Dallas of 1963
By Bill
Minutaglio
November
21, 2013
The
president is a socialist. He is neutering the United States on the world stage.
He is spending us into bankruptcy. He is hellbent on expanding national health
care, which will surely lead to government death panels.
He is
advancing big-government agendas everywhere from Main Street to Wall Street.
And do we really know the truth about his personal history and religion?
Perhaps
the man in the Oval Office should be impeached — even tried for treason.
If
today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly
similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency.
And just
like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade.
w Photos
To find
the very roots of the tea party of 2013, just go back to downtown Dallas in
1963, back to the months and weeks leading to the Kennedy assassination. It was
where and when a deeply angry political polarization, driven by a band of
zealots, burst wide open in America.
It was
fueled then, as now, by billionaires opposed to federal oversight, rabid media,
Bible-thumping preachers and extremist lawmakers who had moved far from their
political peers. In 1963, that strident minority hijacked the civic dialogue
and brewed the boiling, toxic environment waiting for Kennedy the day he died.
As he
planned his trip to Dallas in November 1963, President Kennedy knew that hundreds
of thousands across Texas adored him — or at least, respected the office he held.
But he also knew that there was an increasingly hysterical fringe.
As
Kennedy approached Dallas, he turned to his wife, Jacqueline. “We’re heading
into nut country today,” he said.
Dallas
Morning News publisher Ted Dealey had a loathing that became particularly
deeply personal. At a social luncheon for Texas news executives in the State
Dining Room of the White House, Dealey berated Kennedy to his face: “We need a
man on horseback to lead this nation — and many people in Texas and the Southwest
think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
Back in
Dallas, Dealey ordered his reporters to investigate whether Kennedy had been
married to another woman and whether the Kennedy dynasty had somehow erased
evidence of that marriage.
Not far
away in downtown Dallas, oil billionaire H.L. Hunt was pouring millions into a
ceaseless anti-Kennedy radio campaign; it was the dawn of extremist radio in
the nation. Hunt’s program, “Life Line,” reached 10 million listeners a day
with its scorching attacks against “the mistaken,” the term Hunt’s announcers
used to describe the president’s supporters.
When
Kennedy proposed Medicare to provide health care for the elderly, Hunt’s shows
warned that government death panels would follow: “a package which would
literally make the president of the United States a medical czar with potential
life-or-death power over every man, woman and child in the country.”
Hunt’s
pastor in Dallas was the thundering W.A. Criswell, head of the largest Baptist
congregation in the country. Criswell was deeply suspicious of the president’s
Catholic religion, and he assailed Kennedy’s candidacy as a possible plot that
would undermine America’s true Christian values.
Dallas
was represented in Congress by an eloquent, Ivy League-educated ideologue regarded
by some as the most extreme politician in Washington. Bruce Alger had cast the
lone “no” vote against a federal program to provide free surplus milk to needy
children. Even among his conservative peers, Alger was considered on the outer
edge.
There was
also Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, the commander who had been hailed as a hero for
breaking the grip of segregation in Arkansas’ capital; he led the bayonet-carrying
troops who escorted African-American students to the doors of a Little Rock
high school and kept order in the streets afterwards. Within four years, Walker
had been relieved of his command by Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert S.
McNamara, after he was accused of trying to brainwash his troops with ultra-right-wing
propaganda. The defrocked Walker moved to Dallas and was welcomed by the mayor
in a grand public ceremony.
Walker promoted
anti-federal agendas as well as what were once quaintly called “Southern traditions.”
He made national headlines by instigating bloody riots against James Meredith’s
brave attempts to integrate the University of Mississippi.
Many
historians now agree that the blind absolutism of these powerful men of Dallas
in the early 1960s has been discredited.
But here
we are in 2013 and the echo is painfully clear:
The ad
hominem attacks against a “socialist president.” The howling broadcasters. The
mega-rich men from Texas funding the political action campaigns. There is even
another charismatic, Ivy-educated ideologue: Sen. Ted Cruz would have been quite
comfortable in Dallas 1963.
In the
days leading to Kennedy’s fateful hour in Dallas, the city experienced one dark
moment after another. Swastikas were plastered on the high-end emporium Neiman
Marcus. A bomb threat was made during a visit by the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. A cross was burned on the lawn of a Holocaust survivor. U.N. Ambassador
Adlai E. Stevenson II, in town for a speech, fled for his life after being surrounded
by a spitting mob.
It all
occurred in a place where a few powerful people had marched far from the political
center and erected a firewall against reasoned debate.
Fifty
years after Kennedy’s death, it is as if nothing has changed. As the nation continues
to sift for meaning in his tragedy, this is the most aching lesson of all.
Bill
Minutaglio is a University of Texas journalism professor and the author of “First
Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty.” He and Steven L. Davis are
the authors of “Dallas 1963” (2013, Twelve Books), from which this article is
adapted.
OPINION
The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye
By James McAuley for NYT – Nov.
16, 2013
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/opinion/sunday/dallass-role-in-kennedys-murder.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
FOR 50 years, Dallas has
done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous:
the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,”
grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the
“city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.
It will miss yet another
opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international
spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas,
it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy
Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s
legacy.
But once again, spectacle
is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about
what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called,
just moments before his death, “nut country.”
Dallas — with no river, port or natural resources of its own
— has always fashioned itself as a city with no reason for being, a city that
triumphed against all odds, a city that validates the sheer power of individual
will and the particular ideology that champions it above all else. “Dallas,”
the journalist Holland McCombs observed in Fortune in 1949, “doesn’t owe a damn
thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is ... because the
men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.”
Those “men of Dallas” —
men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated
in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the
federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet
Union or Communist China. The country musician Jimmie Dale Gilmore said it best
in his song about the city: “Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye
... a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.”
For those men, Kennedy
was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission
and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and
fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran
in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that
four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an
incident was well within the realm of imagination.
The wives of these men —
socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no
different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme. (After all, there’s a
reason Carol Burnett pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous “Big
D” routine the two performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. “What
are ya,” she screams, pulling the trigger, “some kinda nut?!”)
In the years before the
second wave of the women’s movement, many of these women, affluent but
frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow and Highland
Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation they were
otherwise denied. With time and money at their disposal, they would outdo their
husbands, one another and even themselves.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, it was a well-heeled
mob of Junior League women who heckled and spat on Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson
outside the storied Adolphus Hotel downtown (a scandal that actually helped
Johnson politically by showing the distance between the Texas senator and his
more ardent constituents).
In October 1963, just
weeks before the president’s visit, it was the wife of a downtown insurance executive,
not a derelict, who struck Adlai E. Stevenson, then the United Nations
ambassador, over the head with a picket sign.
And in the annals of my
own family history, it was my charming grandmother, not some distant relation
without a Neiman Marcus charge card, who nevertheless saw fit to found the
“National Congress for Educational Excellence,” an organization that crusaded
against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks and the
distribution of literature on homosexuality in Dallas public schools.
In a photograph taken
not long after the assassination, my grandmother smiles a porcelain smile,
poised and lovely in psychedelic purple Pucci, coiffure stacked high in what
can only be described as a hairway to heaven. Her eyes, however, are intent, fixed
on a target — liberalism, gender equality, gays.
Dallas is not, of
course, “the city that killed Kennedy.” Nor does the city in which the president
arrived 50 years ago bear much resemblance to Dallas today, the heart of a
vibrant metroplex of 6.7 million people, most of whom have moved from elsewhere
and have little or no connection to 1963.
But without question,
these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the city’s
elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have left an indelible
mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on Memphis or Los
Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968 assassinations of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
For the last 50 years, a
collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled
past without ever actually engaging with it. To be fair, pretending to forget
has helped Dallas achieve some remarkable accomplishments in those years, like
the completion of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the development
of the astonishingly successful Cowboys franchise and the creation of what
remains one of the country’s most electric local economies.
But those are transient
triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct
Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright
Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’
generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in
Dallas. Look no further than the troop of gun-rights activists who appeared
just days ago, armed and silent, outside a meeting of local mothers concerned about
gun violence. If this is what counts as responsible civic dialogue, then Dallas
has a long way still to go.
This year Dallas has a
chance to grapple with the painful legacy of 1963 in public and out loud. Unfortunately,
that’s unlikely to happen, although the city did quietly host a symposium on
whether it really deserved to be labeled “the city of hate” earlier this month.
But when the national
cameras start rolling on Nov. 22, Dealey Plaza, the abandoned, almost spectral
site of the assassination and now of the commemoration, will have been
retouched in a fresh coat of literal and figurative white paint. Cosmetics seem
to be all we can expect.
“This
is not a group psychology lesson,” Mike Rawlings, the mayor, told me over lunch
recently. “We can do what we can do. I guess I could bring up all the relatives
of the people that said bad things. But why would you do that?”
To which, of course, there is nothing to say.
Correction: Nov. 24, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of
a Texas country musician. He is Jimmie Dale Gilmore, not Jimmy.
James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the
University of Oxford.
Lyndon Johnson to Madeleine Brown on 12-31-63:
It was Dallas, TX oil and “renegade intelligence bastards” who murdered JFK
Madeleine Duncan Brown was a mistress of
Lyndon Johnson for 21 years and had a son with him named Steven Mark Brown in
1950. Madeleine mixed with the Texas elite and had many trysts with Lyndon Johnson
over the years , including one at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, TX, on New Year's
Eve 12/31/63.
Late
in the evelning of 12/31/63, just 6 weeks after the JFK assassination,
Madeleine asked Lyndon Johnson:
"Lyndon, you know that a lot
of people believe you had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination."
He shot up out of bed and began pacing and waving
his arms screaming like a madman. I was scared!
"That's bullshit, Madeleine Brown!" he
yelled. "Don't tell me you believe that crap!"
"Of course not." I answered meekly,
trying to cool his temper.
"It was Texas oil and those fucking renegade
intelligence bastards in Washington." [said Lyndon Johnson, the new
president.] [Texas in the Morning,
p. 189] [LBJ told this to Madeleine in
the late night of 12/31/63 in the Driskill Hotel, Austin, TX in room #434 which
is now known as the Governor’s Suite. LBJ kept this room on retainer for business
and as a place to tryst with his mistresses. LBJ and Madeleine spent New Year’s
Eve ‘63 together here.
