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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My mother and I watched the news together that night. Before then she had been coy about whom she was going to vote for; we teased her that she was falling for the Kennedy sex appeal, but she insisted it was his mind she admired—she had read Profiles in Courage, which had won Kennedy a Pulitzer prize. And yet the notion of voting for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was almost heresy in our circles, so Mother was, until that moment, undecided. I remember her cry even now as we watched the humiliation at the Adolphus—“Shame! Shame!”
THAT EVENING THOUSANDS OF TEXANS like my mother decided how to vote. Although Nixon carried Dallas County by a landslide, Texas went for the Kennedy-Johnson. (Johnson also beat Tower in the senatorial race, although Tower would win the subsequent special election.) It was the closest presidential election in the nation’s history, and it was decided that tday in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel. People said afterward that they were not voting for Kennedy so much as they were voting against Dallas.
Against us. For the first time people in the city learned about guilt by association. Until then Dallas had had very little national identity, but we found ourselves now with a new minucipal image: a city of the angry nouveau riche, smug, doctrinaire, belligerent, a city with a taste for political violence. Many Dallasites were shocked to see our city represented that way, but it had little effect on the way we thought of ourselves.
There was, in fact, a chip of defiance on the city’s shoulder, encouraged by the Dallas Morning News. The News is the oldest business institution in the state, having been founded in 1842 when Texas was still a republic and Dallas little more than a heady presumption. Under George B. Dealey the News had been a progressive newspaper, leading the scourge that drove the Ku Klux Klan out of Texas. The name “Dealey” would become famous because of the queer, fan-shaped park known as Dealey Plaza, directly across the street from the Texas School Book Depository, where a bronze statue of G.B. Dealey stares at the now magnificent skyline of downtown Dallas. Many citizens believe it is perfectly appropriate that Dealey’s name should be irrevocably tied to the assassination, even though it is his son they blame.
E. M. “Ted” Dealey, the son, succeeded his father as publisher of the News, and in his hands it became the most strident, red-baiting daily paper in the country, excepting only occasionally William Loeb’s Union-Leader, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Like many intensely conservative people, he found his paragon in the movies and politics of John Wayne. As a matter of fact, reading the News each morning was like watching a brawl in a saloon, in which the newspaper’s editorials flattened the “socialists” (read: Democrats), the “perverts and subversives” (liberal Democrats), the “Judicial Kremlin” (the U.S. Supreme Court), and virtually every representative of the federal government whose views differed from those of Ted Dealey. Immediately after the election the News’ principal object of contempt became President John F. Kennedy, who the paper suggested was a crook, a communist sympathizer, a thief, and “fifty times a fool.”
Ted Dealey went to the White House in the fall of 1961 with a group of Texas publishers to meet the man he had maligned so frequently in his newspaper. He used the occasion to attack Kennedy in person. “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government,” he advised the president, to the discomfort of his colleagues in the room. He accused Kennedy and his administration of being weak sisters (a favorite Dealey phrase). “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation,” he concluded, “and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
It was Dealey style: bluff, personally abusive, and preposterous. He reported in his paper on his interchange with the president (Grassroots Sentiment Told), although he failed to include the president’s response. “Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight,” Kennedy had told him. “I’m just as tough as you are, and I didn’t get elected president by arriving at soft judgments.”
Afterward, the editor of the Dallas Times Herald, the evening paper, wrote to the president to say that Dealey was speaking only for himself, not for the other Texans in the room. Kennedy responded with a snap of wit: “I’m sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon comes.”
Kennedy was still thinking of his encounter with Dealey when he spoke later that year of people who “call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches in our highest court, in our treatment of water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.” With his prescient political eye Kennedy saw that the new world was being created, and it stood opposed to everything he represented: East Coast liberalism, mainstream Democratic party politics, Ivy League learning, the customary restraints of educated society. Although Kennedy was popularly understood as a man of his time, a thoroughly modern president, in many ways he was the last of the traditionalists. He called his administration the New Frontier, but his successors—Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan—would show that the real frontier in American politics lay for away in the new world.
During his presidency the atmosphere in Dallas approached hysteria. “The historical conservatism of the city,” wrote Dallas’ most prominent merchant, Stanley Marcus, “had been fanned to a raging fire by the combination of a number of lements: the far right daily radio ‘Facts Forum’ program by Dan Smoot sponsored by the ultraconservative wealthiest man in town, H. L. Hunt; the John Birch Society; the oil industry’s hysterical concern for the preservation of what they considered a biblical guarantee of their depletion allowance; the ‘National Indignation League’ founded by a local garageman, Frank McGeehee, in protest of the air force’s training of some Yugolsavian pilots at anearby air base; the consistently one-sided attacks on the administration by the Dallas Morning News and the semi-acquiescent editorial policy of the Times Herald, which had previously been a middle-of-the-road, fair newspaper. For the lack of courageous firemen in the business and intellectual segments of the community, the fire raged on.”
The superheated political climate in the city brought ordinary life to a rolling boil. I twas hysterical, yes, but after a point there seems to be a little difference between hysteria and festivity. One sensed the appeal of fanatical movements. They begin like this, in a city where the opposition is cowed, where there is only one public voice and it is full of certainty and hate. The brakes were off in Dallas. We had the feeling that we were careening toward some majestic crack-up, but it was an exciting ride, and who had the nerve to say slow down?
Ddallas was gaining notice. The leader of the American Nazi party, George Lincold Rockwell, opined that Dallas had “the most patriotic, pro-American people of any city in the country.” The compliment may have embarrassed a few, considering its source, but we believed that about ourselves. To the radical conservatives, Dallas had become a kind of shrine, a Camelot of the right.
SOON AFTER KENNEDY’S ELECTION A U.S. Army major general named Edwin A. Walker was relieved of his command when he was discovered to be proselytizing his troops with right-wing literature. Walker resigned and promptly moved to Dallas, where he expected that his politics would be more welcome. He was right. He became a leader in the local chapter of the John Birch Society and quickly became one of the city’s most prominent citizens—notable enough, at least in the mind of another citizen, Lee Harvey Oswarld, to be worth assassinating. Here the story of Dallas begins, and might have ended.
On March 10, 1963, while Walker was out of town, Oswald went to the general’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard and snapped some photos. He made some sketches of the placement of windows in the house. Two days later he sent a money order for $21.45, along with a coupon he clipped from the American Rifleman magazine, as payment for an antiquated Italian rifle known as a Mannlicher-Carcano. It came equipped with a four-power telescopic sight.
One month later Walker was back in town, seated at his desk in his study, working on his income tax returns. It was 9 p.m., and his head was in the sight of Oswarld’s rifle, 120 feet away. Walker thought a firecracker had suddenly exploded directly above him; he turned and saw a hole in the window frame and realized that he was covered with bits of glass and wood and a pale wash of plaster.
The police said he had moved his head at the last moment. Walker disagreed. In his opinion the light in the room had flooded out the window frame from Oswald’s perspective. The bullet had struck the frame and been deflected. Later Walker showed the damaged window to newsmen and wryly remarked, “And the Kennedys say there is no internal threat to our freedom.”
Oswald told his wife, Marina, that he had shot at Walker because he thought the general was a fascist, another Hitler. At the time, I thought of General Walker as genial crackpot, and I think most people in Dallas felt the same. He had his appeal (a certain military rectitude and an air of command, which recalled General Douglas MacArthur, along with a Southern dignity of manner; he would have bene well cast as a Confederate officer), but he played only a small role in the events of the moment, and in a few years he would be almost forgotten—an eccentric but, to some newsmen, rather dear old fellow who twice surfaced from obscurity in the late seventies when he was arrested on misdemeanor homosexual offenses.
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