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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We had drawn closer to Kennedy even as the rest of the country grew disenchanted. The disgrace of the Bay of Pigs actually helped him in Dallas; there was something noble and chastening about seeing Kennedy humbled. My father admired the way Kennedy accepted the blame. The Cuban missile crisis showed Dallas that Kennedy had learned the use of power; it also showed us the danger of Ted Dealey’s bluster. Mother bought canned goods and bottled water. WE got an extra store of candles, flashlight batteries, and a transistor radio that had the Conelrad stations marked with nuclear triangles. I remember writing to my Italian pen pal that by the time he received my letter we would surely be at war with Cuba, probably Russia as well, and who knows? Perhaps the world would be destroyed before I got his response. The world survived—it is still chilling to think how close we passed to the brink—but I never got another letter from Italy.
And in fact when Kennedy came to Dallas we gave him his warmest reception so far, a perfect confrontation between Kennedy’s vaunted courage (walking into crownds, stopping the motorcade to shake hands) and Dallas’ new willingness to make friends. The last words Kennedy heard in life were spoken by Nellie Connally, who turned and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” It was a true observation but also history’s goddamnedest ironty, for an instant later Jacqueline Kennedy had to respond, “They’ve killed by husband, I have his brains in my hand.”
She said “they,” and I assumed she meant us. That was an assumption the whole world shared.
Dallas killed Kennedy; we heard it again and again. Dallas was “a city of hate, the only American city in which the president could have been shot” (this from our own Judge Sarah Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One). And yet the values of the city, which the world condemned, were more or less my values; the image of the city, which was white, middle-class, provincial, and conservative, more or less fit my family. I had been unacquainted with tragedy, and now the entire globe was convulsed in grief and held me responsible.
But Dallas had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death. The hatred directed at our city was retaliation for many previous grievances. The East hated us because we were part of the usurping West, liberals hated us because we were conservative, labor because we were nonlabor, intellectuals because we were raw, minorities because we were predominantly and conspicuously white, atheists and agnostics because we were strident believers, the poor because we were rich, the old because we were new. Indeed there were few of the world’s constituencies that we had failed to offend before the president came to our city, and hadn’t we compounded the offense again and again by boasting of those very qualities? In that case we were well silenced now.
In church that Sunday, November 24, my father and I heard our minister preach a sermon entitled “Let’s Change the Climate.” The word “climate” had already acquired a supercharged meaning in Dallas. Where once it had been used only to describe the abundant opportunities for business growth, now it was appropriated by the newscasters and magazine writers as a sort of net that would be tossed across the entire city, implicating everyone in the crime. Yes, there were fanatics in Dallas, but weren’t we all responsible for creating a climate in which fanaticsm could take root? A climate of hate? A climate of intolerance? A climate of bigotry? AIt was an unanswerable charge. My father’s jaw set as we heard the minister accepting the blame on behalf of our city—his sermon was being broadcast nationally on ABC radio—the blame for the climate that was responsible for Kennedy’s death. At the end of the sermon, when we had sung the Doxology and were standing to leave, someone walked to the pulpit and handed the minister a message.
“Oswald’s been shot!”
The congregation slumped back into the pews. The police told us to leave downtown, to evacuate the area. What now? What was going on?
It was simply too much—a psychological breaking point for many of us, like my father, who had held out against the insinuations of the press, who had refused to accept blame for the climate in Dallas. But the more we learned about the circumstances of Oswald’s death and the background of his killer, the more we had to acknowledge our responsibility. Jack Ruby was one of ours, he did his deed in the very bowels of our own city hall, and he did it in a spirit of horrified civic-mindedness. Our incompetent police force let him do it. The defense we had established for our city in the death of the president didn’t apply in the death of the president’s killer. Dallas didn’t kill Kennedy, but in an awful undeniable fashion it did kill Oswald.
A phenomenon remarked on by psychiatrists after the assassination was the dearth of dreams. The normal functions of the unconscious mind seemed to have been displaced by unending hours of television viewing. From 6 a.m. Sunday until 12:18 a.m. Tuesday the broadcasts never stopped, and as I play them back in my mind now—the death march, the half-stepping troops, the riderless horse, John-John’s salute—they have the quality of a remembered dream, haunting, full of meaning, experienced but unlived.
My mother and sisters stayed home on Sunday morning to watch the mass for the dead president. He was lying in state under the Capitol rotunda where Abraham Lincoln had lain nearly a century before. Americans have always had a secret love for pageantry, unfulfilled because of the absence of royalty, and it was this massive grandeur that made the experience strange and thrilling. I remember being struck by the vocabulary of the occasion, words like “bier” and “caisson” and “catafalque,” which had a sound of such special importance that they could be used only a few times in one’s life—like rare china dishes one sets out only for the king. Years later I happened to be looking over a list of names of children who were receiving government assistance, and I noted a child born in December 1963 whose mother must have been as enraptured as I was with the ceremonial language. She named her baby Rotunda Cathedral Jones.
After the mass the network switched to the Dallas City Hall, where the transfer of Oswald to the county jail was about to get under way. It was a scene of confusion and anticipation. Before now we had had only a brief glimpse of the accused killer (although according to our district attorney he was as good as convicted, so few of us doubted his guilt). Finally Oswald appeared in the doorway, dwarfed by the beefy detectives on either side of him but looking cool and in control of the situation while all around him chaos raged. I suppose it was the supreme moment of Oswald’s unhappy life, that instant before his death. He had always been the outsider, unaccepted, unloved, but he had turned the tables on the world. He was the man with the answers, his secrets were locked in his skull, and we were all outsiders now.
And as he entered the basement of the city hall, Oswald’s defiant glare seemed to fall directly on Jack Ruby. Was that an illusion, a coincidence? Or was there the surprised recognition of conspirators in that moment before Ruby stepped into Oswald’s path and gunned him down?
It is the irony of Jack Ruby’s life that he was the one to stop forever the answers to our questions, for he was himself both a lone nut (in my opinion) and the ultimate conspiracy buff. He was a compulsive glad-hander, a Big D booster who prided himself on knowing everybody in town—and on being known, especially to reporters and cops, who were always receiving free passes to Ruby’s strip joint, the Carousel Club. Psychiatrists at Ruby’s trial testified to his “voracious need to be accepted and admired…particularly by individuals in positions of authority and great social prestige,” and Ruby did seem to have at least a nodding acquaintance with most Dallas politicians. He was always reminding them, “You know me, I’m Jack Ruby!” He had a way of ingratiating himself. He once talked his way into a club sandwich with actress Rhonda Fleming at the Dallas airport. He liked to think of himself as a ladies’ man, and yet he dated only occasionally and had a reputation for being sexually prim. Although he dealt in flesh, he fired girls who agreed to go to bed with him. At the Carousel he was his own bouncer; he was heavyset but quick, and he kept in shape through constant dieting and frequent workouts at the YMCA. His mother had died in a Chicago insane asylum, and his father, a brother, and a sister had been treated for psychiatric disorders. Ruby may have been crazy as well, but he was also a shady character with mob connections, associations with anti-Castro Cubans, and a brief but ineffective history as an FBI informer.
Like many of us in Dallas, Ruby held the Morning News responsible for the president’s death. He was at the News placing an ad for his club when the bulletin came that Kennedy had been shot. “I left the building and I went down and I got in my car and I couldn’t stop crying,” Ruby later told the Warren Commission. In a fog he went back to his club and then to his sister’s house, where he turned on the television and cried again. He had an emotional attachment to the Kennedy family. A defense psychiatrist testified at his trial that Ruby’s “description of the President, of Mrs. Kennedy, of the former’s charm and manner cannot be reproduced in words here: essentially it was the speech of a man in love with another man. It was a love that passed beyond a rational appreciation of a great man, coming out of the unconscious. The prisoner [Ruby] said, ‘This is the end of my life’ when the President died, and in so doing he expressed more than mourning.”
My Library
