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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I went to Tulane University for the single reason that it was in the city most unlike Dallas that I knew of. New Orleans was old and rotten, corrupt, depraved, licentious, a grand old whore who enjoyed herself too much but was still generous enough to give pleasure to someone else, someone new. It was a Chatolic town and indifferent to progress, whereas Dallas was the center of the Protestant universe and horrified by sensuality. After the charmlessness of Dallas, I feel in love with the overripe splendor of New Orleans. I walked its streets in a state of aesthetic liberation, every bit as much an émigré as Hemingway in Paris, and feeling at one with him and with all the great American writers. For hadn’t they all stopped in New Orleans on their way to immortality—Whitman, Twain, Faulkner, Anderson, Williams, Capote—and which of them had ever passed through Dallas?
But it was not only their city, it was Oswald’s city, his birthplace, and in coming to New Orleans I found that I had not left the assassination behind me. Rather, I had come into the heart of the madness. New Orleans was haunted by Oswald, and soon the city would be lit up in one of those queer American binges of lunacy, a paranoia of conspiracy that has become a part of the national psyche.
It was on Bourbon Street one day near the end of my freshman year that I met Delilah. I was making small talk on the sidewalk with a strip-joint pimp when I realized that the woman onstage was doing a belly dance to “Hava Nagila,” the Hebrew song of celebration. It was such a cultural malaprop that I demanded to be introduced to the dancer. I n a moment she came out on the sidewalk to talk. I introduced myself as a representative of the Cosmopolitan Committee at Tulane University. One of the committee’s purposes, I explained, was to find intresting cultural acts—such as hers—for performances at the student center. I had the idea of billing her as an Egyption ethnic dancer. She led me to a table inside.
She was in her mid-thirties, I calculated, with black hair and olive-toned skin, which was probably the inspiration for casting herself as a Middle Easterner. To complete the role she spoke with an accent borrowed from Zsa Zsa Gabor. “Vere are you from, dahlink?” she asked.
I admitted I was from Dallas.
“Oh, no kidding? Dallas?”
I noticed that her Hungarian accent had fallen away, replaced by the familiar nasal tones of North Texas. I asked if she knew Dallas. “Yeah,” she said, “I know that goddamn town too well.” We sat quietly for a moment. Being from Dallas was an awkward bond to share.
“I used to work for Jack Ruby,” she told me. He was a nice man, she remembered, but “a little crazy.” It was Ruby, the Jewish impresario, who had put her together with “Hava Nagila.” We exchanged telephone numbers, and I told her I would call next semester concerning her performance at Tulane. She said I could come to her apartment for coffee. All summer long I thought about that invitation.
I was more than a little alarmed about the direction my life was taking. When I left Dallas for the university I left behind a sweet Christian girlfriend. She had given me a Bible for my eighteenth birthday. “Cherish this book always, Larry, and diligently read it,” she admonished me on the flyleaf, but I had fallen into the hands of Sybarites and existentialists, and when I returned to Dallas that summer I felt like a moral double agent. Half of me was sitting with my girlfriend in church, underlining Scripture with a red pen, and half (more than half) was scheming of ways to lead my little Christian exemplar into one of life’s dark passageways.
I was lying on her lap, with that thought in mind, watching the ten o’clock news, when a photograph of a woman in a belly dancing costume flashed on the screen.
“That’s Delilah!” I said, sitting up.
“What?”
“Shh. I know her.”
Her name, it turned out, was Marilyn Walle. She had just been murdered in Omaha, shot six times by a man she had been married to for a month. Her association with Jack Ruby was noted. My girlfriend looked at me with an expression of puzzled decency. “Do you have something you want to tell me, Larry?”
I wasn’t the only one who marked Delilah’s death. The conspiracists were keeping a list of “witnesses” who had died since the assassination; by February 1967 seventeen other people had died, including two more strippers who had worked for Ruby (one was shot to death, the other was found hanging by her toreador pants in a Dallas jail cell). The deaths were all incorporated into the evidence for the great conspiracy, and soon they found their redeemer in the person of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison.
At the heart of Garrison’s theory was the unoriginal notion that Dallas killed Kennedy: the city’s millionaire right-wingers financed the plot with the collusion of the Dallas police force and the technical advice of the CIA. Garrison’s investigation opened up a shaft into the crazed underside of American society, filled with mercenaries and mobsters, CIA agents, TMCA homosexuals, Cubans both pro- and anti-Castro, Russians both White and Red, Nazis, disaffected priests—all of whom seemed to a Dallas boy like the population of a Hieronymus Bosch painting let loose from the canvas, but which was, in New Orleans, an unsurprising sampling of characters ladled out of the New Orleans underworld. The most respectable person in the affair was the defendant, Clay Shaw, a wealthy, homosexual New Orleans businessman who was charged with conspiracy to murder the president. His trial made New Orleans the laughingstock of the nation. There was the feeling that this travesty could only have happened there, with a cast of characters that only New Orleans could have supplied. Like Dallas, the entire city was made to feel responsible for a tragic event—an unfair charge that was somehow too appropriate to deny.
Political murder has been a feature of American life since 1835, when Richard Lawrence tried to shoot Andrew Jackson, and between that time and Oswald’s murder of Kennedy, three presidents were killed and three others were the objects of assassination attempts. And yet there was a common assumption, frequently stated, that it all started in Dallas. The Dallas-killed-Kennedy theory swelled into metaphysics, until Dallas became responsible for assassination itself, as if we were the motive force that toppled the first domino in the murderous chain, as if the trail of bodies that have fallen all across America could somehow be traced back to the Texas School Book Depository.
Perhaps an outsider can understand how each new assassination was greeted with relief and resentment in Dallas—relief, of course, that it hadn’t happened in Dallas and resentment that no other city would ever know the opprobrium Dallas had endured. It was as if we had let the genie out of the bottle, as if we had provided the catalyst that caused Southern racism to kill Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis and California political craziness to murder Robert Kennedy and to try twice to kill Gerald Ford. You could walk through the world announcing “I’m from Los Angeles” or “I’m from Laurel, Maryland,” and receive an occasional dim acknowledgement that something tragic had happened in your town, but even then you would never expect to be held responsible. Waiters would not give you reluctant service. Telephone operators would not refuse to place your calls. But for years after President Kennedy’s murder, saying you were from Dallas was like saying you were from Nazi Germany. It had absurd power.
To be from Dallas meant, in the eyes of the world, that you were inherently more inclined toward murder than the next fellow. The assumption was unconscious, a stereotype, no different really from a racial prejudice. It’s no wonder that Dallasites were defensive and angry—people were telling loud lies about our city. It’s no wonder, either, that behind our anger was the fear that behind our anger was the fear that there must be a whisper of truth in those lies.
I happened to be in Washington in 1976 during Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, a frigid, brilliant day, the ground covered with new snow and the sky nearly Texas blue. I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the parade. At that point in my life I had seen only one American president, Dwight Eisenhower, who had ridden in a motorcade in the Boy Scout Jamboree. Eisenhower went by so quickly that I hardly got an impression of him, other than a smiling man standing in an open convertible, waving his arms over his head as he raced past thousands of silent boy scouts. But the power of the presidency is such that I doubt this is a single one of those scouts who does not remember nearly a quarter of a century later that he saw Eisenhower.
But now the simple American action of watching a presidential parade drummed up old and complex fears in me, and an instinctive defensiveness. As we waited for Carter I prepared to make a quick snapshot in my mind of the passing limousine and to note the president’s face. The bands came, and then the train of black Lincolns—and then a murmur in the crowd, a sound of astonishment that preceded the president and made people cry out excitedly, “He’s walking!” Before anyone could disbelieve it, there he was, holding he wife’s hand, walking down the center stripe of Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, only a few feet away from his amazed constituents. For many of us, it brought tears to our eyes. He was trusting us not to kill him.
In particular, I felt, he was trusting me. To grow up in Dallas, to have been accused as we all were of killing the president—however ridiculous that charge—was to know in some dark spot of your conscience what an assassin felt like inside. TO be accused of a crime is a quick education in criminal psychology. It’s humiliating, but one of the lessons of humility is to learn how subtle and fragile are the differences between people. It is to realize that the distinctions that law and psychology so boldly define as right and wrong, sane and insane, are like signposts in a for—little use to those of us who are lost. It is to know, as the preacher said, that we are all God’s children and that the child who grows up to be president and the child who grows up to kill the president are more alike in His eyes than we want to believe.
My Library
