Why Do They Hate Us So Much?
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Dallas was my hometown. For twenty years my neighbors and I have suffered the world’s blame. Now it is time to lay our burden down.
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NO, IT WAS NOT JUST DALLAS, but my hometown was already gaining the reputation of being the capital of this new world. The only elected Republican of any consequence in Texas was Dallas congressman Bruce Alger, a handsome fanatic with wavy hair and a heavy chin, who was ridiculed in his own party as a hopeless extremist. Alger had already survived political challenges by two of the most popular Democrats in the city, first by district attorney Henry Wade and then by Barefoot Sanders, a state legislator who became a federal district judge. In all of his contests Alger was carried along by a formidable cadre of angry right-wing women. His relation to those women was a matter of legend and speculation in the city. Alger was their prince; it didn’t seem to matter to them that in the ten years he represented Dallas there was never an important piece of legislation passed with his name on it or that the prevailing leadership in Washington was so hostile to his presence in Congress that Fort Worth was growing fat off of the pork-barrel projects that might have gone to Dallas.
Four days before the general election Lyndon Johnson came to town. We hated Johnson there. The rest of the country might have viewed Kennedy’s running mate as a hard-shell Southern conservative, an instinctive racist, a drawling, backslapping political whore with no guiding lights other than the oil-depletion allowance, but in Dallas he was called a closet socialist, a leftover New Delaer, a bleeding heart in domestic matters, and a weak sister when it came to standing up to communist aggression. Was there ever a man in political life with such a divided public image?
It was November 4, 1960, Republican Tag Day in Dallas, and the downtown lunch crowd was being canvassed by three hundred women in red-white-and-blue outfits. They were Bruce Alger’s women. Many of them were in the Junior League, and they looked disarmingly girlish in their red coif hats with ribbons in the back. They were passing out literature for the Nixon-Lodge campaign. Some of them wore their minks.
Johnson had spoken earlier that morning in Arlington, and as he entered Dallas a city policeman pulled him over to warn of a “little disturbance” awaiting him at the Baker Hotel, where the Johnsons traditionally stayed. Commerce Street in front of the hotel was filling up with Tag Girls, who had suddenly transformed themselves into an angry demonstration, complete with placards that Alger had stored in the Baker overnight. The cop advised Senator Johnson to use the Akard Street entrance.
Several Tag Girls spotted the Johnsons arriving and rushed over to surround the car. As Lady Bird was stepping out of the Lincoln one of the pickets impulsively snatched her gloves from her hands and threw them into the gutter. Lady Bird went white. It was still a time when incivility was rare in politics, when public figures felt safe in crowds. No one, perhaps not even the Tag Girls themselves, was prepared to understand the ferocity of the anger in those otherwise happy and well-cared-for women.
Johnson rushed Lady Bird into the lobby of the Baker, which was packed with jeering Tag Girls. As he entered the elevator Johnson turned and said, “You ought to be gald you live in a country where you have the legal right to boo and hiss at a man who is running for the vice presidency of the United States.”
There was an instant of silence, then a voice in the back of the crowd responded,” Louder and funnier, Lyndon.”
Johnson was to speak at a luncheon across the street at the Adolphus Hotel. Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth had accompanied the Johnsons, and he forayed ahead. As he passed through the mink-coated rabble in the street, he encountered his colleague Bruce Alger grinning hugely and holding a sign that said, “LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists.” Wright told him that it was inappropriate for a United States congressman to be standing in the middle of a mob, and no matter what Alger might think of a man’s politics, Johnson was Senate Majority Leader and due the respect of his office.
“We’re gonna show Johnson he’s not wanted in Dallas,” Alger replied, and the Tag Girls cheered.
As the Johnsons made their way through the Baker Lobby the crowd closed ranks behind them, becoming bolder, but it was nothing compared with the mob that waited in the street and, beyond that, the packed crowd of Tag Girls in the lobby of the Adolphus. It was an odd political gauntlet to pass through, recalling the stoning of Vice President Nixon’s motorcade in Caracas. But this wasn’t South America; this was Lyndon’s own state. We knew him here.
The demonstration in Commerce Street waited with catcalls and accusations. Most of them were carrying Nixon-Lodge and Tower for Senate signs; one of the peculiarities of that election was that Johnson was entered in both races, thanks to a special dispensation from the Texas Legislature. “Think Once and Scratch Lyndon Twice,” said one sign. Also: “LBJ Traitor,” “Judas Johnson,” “Johnson Go Home.” The Johnsons moved inside a small capsule of personal distance that grew smaller and threatened to collapse entirely under the crush of the crowd. In retrospect it was that violation of private space that seemed to herald our new, tragic polical era. Years later as president, Johnson would become accustomed to seeing hateful signs with his name on them; indeed, he would know the fury of the public as few men ever have, but in 1960 it was something new, something unheard of.
What was more surprising was that the sign carriers and catcallers were for the most part well-groomed women from some of the finest homes in the city, and yet as soon as the Johnsons waded into Commerce Street the women in red, white, and blue began to curse them and to spit. (Later, some members of the “Mink Coat Mob,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly—they were frothing.)
Why? What accounted for the hostility (or to use her word, indignation) of the fashionable and affluent Dallas woman? In part she was imply a prisoner of her age: a women of unfocused ambition, intensely competitive but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), lonely at home and given to causes. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some unnamed fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash away her American dreams. She named the tide International Communism, or Creeping Socialism. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted to the West, “We will bury you,” the conservative Dallas woman believed him. Earlier that autumn Khrushchev had come to the United Nations and pounded on the table with his shoe—a gesture of such swaggering boorishness that it justified every qualm the Dallas woman felt about Russia, the United Nations, and American foreign policy. She worried about the missile gap and the spread of communism to Cuba. Moreover, people in her own country were talking enthusiastically about social change—Kennedy was already speaking of the “the revolutionary sixties”—and the Dallas woman knew those changes would come at her expense. She worried about the erosion of liberty caused by recent Supreme Court decisions (often delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was the creeping socialist personified). The court was taking rights away from the Dallas woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, communists, and Negroes. The Dallas woman felt herself to be under attack at home and abroad.
She was not the only one to feel those concerns. In many ways 1960 was an ideological turning point for the United States, a moment when conservative and liberal impulses were in nearly perfect balance, with mainstream presidential candidates representing both parties. It should have been one of the great political contests. However, the most prominent issue in the televised debates between the candidates was the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, two negligible islands in the Formosa Strait. It was a campaign in which real issues scarcely figured at all. On the surface the campaign was merely a personality contest, and in that respect Nixon was absurdly overmatched; although he was an amateur actor himself, a veteran of community theater, he was sharing the stage with a Barrymore. But under the surface—down, down among the primitive fears and prejudices—there were warning sounds, and they came from Kennedy. It had little to do with his politics. It had to do with his family, his religious, his education, his taste, his looks, his wife. Kennedy gave off threatening emanations to millions of Americans, and no one was more finely attuned to that frequency than the right-wing Dallas housewife.
But Kennedy was not in Dallas today; Johnson was—Johnson, the “Texas Traitor”—and he made his way through the placards in Commerce Street with his wife practically buried under his arm. Lyndon, of course, loomed over the Tag Girls, his huge hound-dog face visible even at the farthest reaches of the mob; Lady Bird was on their level, however, and she could see the hatred raging in the faces around her. She started to answer one of the women, but Johnson put his hand over her mouth and guided her into the lobby of the Adolphus.
They were waiting there—the Tag Girls and the hangers—on but also the press photographers and television cameras. Even in that mob it would have been a short walk to the elevators if Johnson had pressed his way through. But instead of rushing to the elevators Johnson did something quite surprising. He slowed down. He moved with excruciating slowness through the chanting mob, through the placards and the spit, all the while staring at the television cameras with a martyr’s embarrassed smile. For thirty minutes Johnson and his wife withstood the harangue of the crowd.
It was the most triumphant half-hour of Johnson’s career, because that evening in the television news millions of Americans met the new Lyndon Johnson. They suddenly understood him exactly as he understood himself. H was a liberal—in the Southern context. Overnight he became an acceptable candidate to big-city northern Democrats who had automatically hated him, traditional Democrats who had not (they now admitted to themselves) seen past the corn-pone mannerisms of LBJ to the winking FDR inside him.
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