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 was driving across the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin on March 30, 1981, when I learned that President Reagan had been shot. By the time I crossed the river I was sobbing and pounding the steering wheel. By now I was truly educated in tragedy and sick to death of the freewheeling lunatics thrown up by our rambunctious society. For a person who had grown up in Dallas, the shooting produced a horrifying sense of déjà vu, first when the president was shot in front of the TV cameras, the way Ruby shot Oswald, and then when the details began coming out about Hinckley’s Dallas background. I remember being furious but not surprised.
Who was John Hinckley, Jr.? He was eight years old when Kennedy was killed. He ran home from school to tell his mother the news and was disappointed that she already knew. Like me, he saved newspapers from that day; he knew history was being made.
The Hinckleys, like my own family had come to the new world from a small town—Ardmore, Oklahoma—and like us they were blessed by the boom. Jack Hinckley, the father, was an oilman, an entrepreneur, exactly the kind of man Dallas celebrates and rewards with it admiration. He personified the city’s spirit—a stern, religious, political conservative who did good deeds and made money without apology. He worked hard, perhaps too hard, but if that was a sin, what hustling man in Dallas could blame him? He provided his family with comfort, opportunity, and eventually real wealth.
The Hinckleys moved to Highland Park, the most exclusive close-in neighborhood in the city. Many of Texas’ most prominent families live there, including Herbert Hunt and former Texas governor Bill Clements. The Hinckleys bough t a yellow-brick home on Beverly Drive, with a swimming pool in the back yard and a private Coke machine. They played golf at the Dallas Country Club and socialized with the city’s elite. On Sundays they went to St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church. “The Hinckleys fit into the pattern of the parish—redneck Republican, ultraconservative, as I am,” remembered their pastor, Charlew V. Westapher. “A solid family. I can see them in my mind’s eye, standing there with their children around them. There was nothing outstanding about John Junior. He wasn’t an outstanding achiever. He was not in trouble. He just fades into the mist of time.”
Who was John Hinckley, Jr.? there was something too familiar about him. He was, in some respects, any kid from Dallas. His family may have been more successful than most, but the Hinckleys’ values—their religious materialism, for lack fo a better term—were characteristic of the city, and those people who didn’t live as well or as properly as the Hinckleys did at least aspire to.
After Hinckley graduated from Highland Park High School, his parents moved to Colorado and he went to Texas Tech. He was assigned a black roommate—a big shock to a boy from Highland Park. “My naïve, race mixed ideology was forever lad [sic] to rest,” Hinckley wrote about himself. “By the summer of 1978, at the age of 23, I was an all-out anti-Semite and white racialist.” He read Mein Kampf and a lot of far-right literature, and then, like Oswald, he formed his own political group, with himself as the only member. Hinckley urged his prospective members to move to Dallas, where he kept his national headquarters. “There will be plenty of friendly help available to those of you who are unfamiliar with the city,” he wrote. “We are even considering opening a barracks.”
His parents were alarmed by their son’s inclination toward racism and Nazi thought, but the far right had always been a presence in Dallas; no one could say Hinckley’s politics were a great aberration there. Politically, he was little different from General Walker.
In 1980 Hinckley dropped out of school and told his family that he had a job on the copy desk of the Dallas Morning News. Instead, he soon began stalking President Carter. IN Nashville he was arrested when he tried to slip through airport security with a suitcase full of guns. He paid a $62 fine and flew back to Dallas—“back,” one of his psychiatrists testified, “to replenish the arsenal.” He went to Rocky’s Pawn Shop on Elm, the same street that runs past the Texas School Book Depository. There he bought two .22-caliber revolvers for $47 each. He used one of them to shoot Ronald Reagan and three other men on a rainy sidewalk outside the Washington Hilton.
Who was John Hinckley, Jr.? In the minds of us who were in Dallas on November 22, 1963, John Hinckley was the assassin we had imagined for ourselves, the right-wing Dallas killer we had thought was in the Book Depository. He was the monster of our guilty dreams, and isn’t that the nature of tragedy, that all our dreams come true?
THIS TIME, HOWEVER, DALLAS was treated more kindly in the press, in part because too many cities had been host to similar tragedies and in part because the country had changed. If Dallas was still conservative, it was now no more conservative than the country that had elected Ronald Reagan. If Dallas was still religious—well, hadn’t everyone been born again with Jimmy Carter? If Dallas was still provincial, wasn’t the country itself decentralizing?
In all of those respects, the country had become more like Dallas, but Dallas had also become more like the rest of the nation. It was growing up, diversifying; it had become a city of fine restaurants and galleries, international flights, compelling architecture, but also a city of funky nightclubs, arty movies, experimental theater—a city with texture at last. In the conscience of its citizens, the Kennedy assassination was a critical correction, one that had kept the new world they were building from becoming a brave new world of technological fascism. The assassination had given Dallas a guilt complex, and as a result the city had become a more human and a more tolerant place to live.
Although I was still in flight from the city, I watched it grow and change and noted on my occasional visits that the city was not only bigger, it was better. The newspapers had become the best in the state, sophisticated, profound, exciting. Dissent spoke in a loud voice now. The old Dallas defensiveness had calmed down. I stood amazed when the television show Dallas appeared, with a right-wing millionaire villain as its protagonist. Smug and cruel, J.F. Ewing personifies the evil that people associate with the city—and yet people all over the world love him. He represents their own grasping ambitions; he has become a hero of the id. When Dallas laughed at Dallas it was a sign that the city was ready to forgive itself, to lay its burden down.
I remember my surprise at finding my father the object o f community protests. When he first moved to Dallas he was dismayed, as everyone is, by its lack of natural beauty—physically, the city is like a mail-order bride. East Dallas, which stretches between Lakewood and downtown, had some of the most charming homes in the city, but they were decayed and chopped into tenements. My father decided to risk loan money in the area, which had been red-lined by every ending institution in the city. He made loans to young couples who had almost no equity except a willingness to rehabilitate those old homes. At the same time, the Lakewood Shopping Center, which encompassed his bank, was run-down and neglected, and my father went to every shopkeeper and asked him to spruce up his store, to remove the piles of trash in back, to consider planting trees and taking down obtrusive signs. He had an effect. He got the city to landscape the traffic islands. His lending program became a model for the nation. After a while Lakewood got to be a more attractive place to live, not lovely but respectable, with a small-town charm that was almost unique in the city, and to a considerable degree it was the result of my father’s efforts. So when he proposed to tear down a large portion of the shopping center to build a tower for his bank, he was stunned by the outcry he heard in the community. I listened to my father’s side of the story with mixed feelings, for I knew how much had poured himself into his community, but I was also sympathetic with his opponents. They have a vision different from my father’s. The new world they want is not one of glassy office towers but of old stucco hardware stores. It is a sign, I think, of a better city that such arguments are taking place.
On the other hand—it is still Dallas, still a white man’s town, in a time when cities all over the nation are changing the guard. The political establishment in the city has been challenged, but it is essentially unchanged. Of course the office tower would be built, because Dallas is still an urge toward the future. There is a price to pay for living in a city that is continually being born, and it can be measure in the lost feeling of rootedness that old hardware stores provide. To love Dallas is to be able to live without the consolation of the past, without the feeling of history underfoot. TO love Dallas is to celebrate the thrill of the new, to smile at the cranes always on the horizon and the bulldozers clearing the pasture beyond the last development. Dallas does not build itself incrementally but exponentially, and it takes a kind of courage to live in a city that never apuses. It’s a courage I don’t think I have.
And yet I have come to respect Dallas, in a way that I respect very few cities. In the melodrama that we made of Kennedy’s death it seemed that the promise of America had been extinguished in Dallas. But as I see that city now, I see the new world that Kennedy promised fulfilled in the place of his death. It is a human city, flawed and ambitious but with a self-knowledge that many another bustling town will never learn. It is both the burden and the nobility of Dallas that they shouldn’t have to.
* From Jack Ruby. Reprinted by permission of Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris and Scott Meredith Agency.
* Reprinted with permission from the book Dallas Justice, copyright 1964; published by David McKay Company, Inc.
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