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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And yet back then there was something scary brewing in my city. People were demanding certitudes that no sane man could offer thme. Military solutions—invading Cuba, annihilating Russia—were crisp, definitive responses to problems that seemed too damned much trouble to understand. “Why don’t we just bomb the bastards back to the Stone Age?”—you could hear that hypothesis offered as a half-joke to most tangled questions of foreign policy, and people would half laugh, but the alternative solutions seemed so tentative, so compromised. “Fuzzy” was the word for any response other than a straightforward invasion of a foreign country when American interests—and there were always American interests—were threatened. Fuzzy responses were what you came to expect from the bow-tied intellectuals who filled the Kennedy cabinet. In the atmosphere strident attitudes, even crazy ones, were appealingly clear.
ONCE AGAIN—IT WASN’T JUST DALLAS. But we who lived there had the feeling that we were in the middle of a political caldera, a grumbling, reawakening fascist urge that was too hot to contain itself. I wonder what might have happened in Dallas if Kennedy hadn’t died there.
The most conspicuous and despised symbol of fuzzy intellectualism was Adlai Stevenson, a former Democratic presidential candidate and the current American ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson stood hand in hand with the Kennedy boys, Bobby and Jack, and with Earl Warren as the most hated men in Dallas—with the difference that while the people who hated Warren and the Kennedys usually professed to admire the institutions those men represented, they simply couldn’t tolerate the U.N. It stood for one-worldism, which was nothing more than communism; it stood for talk, not action. Nearly every car in the city with an “Impeach Earl Warren” bumper sticker boasted its companion “Get US out of the UN.”
There was also something intensely personal about the hatred of Stevenson. He was the last word in eggheads, Mr. Humpty Dumpty himself. His urbanity didn’t wash in Dallas. Intellectual charm was suspect; besides if you took the trouble to be witty you probably didn’t have it where it counted. Stevenson was a weak sister.
In fact he was a sincerely courageous man, and he decided to beard his enemies by marching straight into their camp. He agreed to speak at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium on October 24, 1963—United Nations Day.
It was a dare that couldn’t be ignored. Some right-wingers persuaded Governor John Connally to declare October 23 U.S. Day, and the National Indignation Convention promoted it into a small event. Bumper stickers around town said, “U.S. Day or United Nations Day—There Must Be a Choice” and “You Cannot Ride Both Horses.” The night before the Stevenson speech General Walker hired the same auditorium for the U.S. Day rally. Lee Harvey Oswald, always interested in the activities of the man he had tried to kill, went to hear Walker speak.
The following night Stevenson arrived to find the auditorium surrounded with pickets. (Among them, perhaps, was Oswald, according to people who later thought they saw him holding a sign. Oswald himself said he had attended Stevenson’s speech.) Of the two thousand people inside, many were supporters of General Walker, and they had brought placards and Halloween noisemakers. When Stevenson stood to speak, the auditorium was filled with tooting, clanging, ratcheting sounds, as well as waving American and Confederate flags, stomping feet, and loud boos whenever Stevenson’s voice rose to make an audible point. One man screamed, again and again, “Kennedy will get his reward in hell. Stevenson is going to die. His hear will stop, stop, stop. And he will burn, burn, burn.”
For the majority of the audience, both the ardent Stevenson supporters and those nonpolitical people who simply wanted to hear him speak, it was the most embarrassing public display they had ever attended. If there is one thing Dallasites have pressed into their cortex, it is a concern about their city’s image. That concern would come under worldwide attack one month later, but in the context of the Stevenson speech that civic protectiveness showed its best side. They cheered Stevenson wildly when he was introduced and several times gave him a standing ovation. They did what they could to police the disrupters in the audience. When Frank McGeehee, the head of the National Indignation Convention, stood up during Stevention’s speech and began a loud tirade, a small elderly man went over and tried to push the beefy McGeehee back into his seat. Police officers finally ejected McGeehee. In the face of the ruckus, Stevenson observed, “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”
Policemen formed a cordon around Stevenson when he left the auditorium. Outside there were still more than a hundred pickets waiting for him. One woman was quite hysterical. Stevenson should have disregarded her, but he couldn’t; he had to wonder how his mere presence could bring this woman to such a flight of frustrated despair. His instinct was to reason with her, perhaps to exorcise the demon that he was in her mind. He might also learn what quality about himself drew up such hatred from these people. He stepped out of the police line.
The mob immediately closed him in. The hysterical woman, who was the wife of an insurance executive, brought her placard down on Stevenson’s head. A college student spat upon him. When the policeman finally rescued him, Stevenson wiped the spit off his face with a handkerchief and asked aloud, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”
Kennedy was proud of him. He had his speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., call Stevenson and congratulate him on his courage. It was the quality Kennedy once called “that most admirable of human virtues.” Stevenson joked about the incident, but he had been badly shaken. “There was something very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere,” he told Schlesinger. He advised Schlesinger to discourage the president’s scheduled trip to Dallas. That Schlesinger decided not to do. It was impossible for Kennedy to go to Texas and bypass Dallas—that would suggest that Kennedy was afraid to go. The cult of courage in the Kennedy White House was such that even to suggest such a course would be evidence of cowardice. As Schlesinger recalled: “I was reluctant to pass on Stevenson’s message lest it convict him of undue apprehensiveness in the President’s eye.”
YES, WE WERE SHOCKED BY THE STEVENSON INCIDENT. The city’s leaders signed a wire of apology, the city council adopted an anti-harrassment ordinance, and the mayor spoke out against the far right. On the other hand, Bruce Alger contended that the city had no reason to feel disgraced, that the protesters had lost their heads only because of their justified resentment of the U.N. General Walker put it more directly. He hung the American flag upside down outside his Turtle Creek home, signaling his distress at the city’s apology to Stevenson. “Adlai got what was coming to him,” he told reporters.
Since much of the country would hold the political atmosphere in Dallas responsible for the president’s assassination, it is interesting to discover how closely attuned Oswald was to the events of the moment. He was utterly out of place in Dallas. I recall that the biggest surprise of the assassination in my own mind was the evidence that the president had been shot by a Marxist. In Dallas? It was unusual to meet even a liberal Democrat. Oswald once related that he had become interested in Marxism when he was fifteen years old, after an old woman handedhim a pamphlet protesting the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. That was 1954, the same year as the Army-McCarthy hearings. It was a time when anti-communism had reached a peak of hysteria unknown in America since the witchcraft trials in Salem, when there was talk in Congress of launching investigations not only against civil servants but against high school students and Christian ministers. And yet by 1954 communism as a political force was extinct in America. The anti-communists were railing at a phantom that was everywhere in their minds but nowhere in reality. At that point, fifteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans decided to give form to the fears: he would become a communist, the national enemy. Psychologists would say he had joined a pseudo community, one that existed only in his mind. He told acquaintances that he was looking everywhere for a Communist cell to join; he wrote letters to the Socialist party. But even after he defected to Russia, he testified to the solitariness of his political beliefs in a letter to his brother, Robert: “I have been a pro-communist for years and yet I have never met a communist.”
He had an admirable feeling for the underdog. In highly segregated New Orleans he once provoked a fight when he chose to sit in the Negro section of a city bus. A group of white boys attacked him. “People who saw the fight said that Lee seemed unafraid,” Robert Oswald has written. “His fists flew in all directions, but he was outnumbered and thoroughly beaten up.”
Oswald fled to Russia, married a Russian woman, returned to the United States, and settled in the city where he wa most likely to be feared, despised and reviled. Like many villains he fantasized about being widely loved; he told his wife, Marina, that he would be president himself in twenty years (at 43, the same age Kennedy was when he was elected). And yet few people loved Oswald. “Everybody hated him,” Marina said after the assassination, “even in Russia.” In Oswald’s mind, hate was superior to indifference; he wanted people to feel strongly about him. In Dallas, they certainly would.
Like General Walker, Oswald was drawn to the volatile, violent politics of the new worl.d Such men always appear in the midst of social hysteria. Dallas would excuse itself because the assassin was not right wing—many of us could hardly believe our good fortune when we learned about Oswald—and yet the atmosphere of fanaticism in the city beckoned to chaotic and suggestible individuals and drew them near.
My Library
