November 1983
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.
My first sighting of the new world came from the back of the family station wagon, in the late city skyline with fierce and brilliant color. Now, of course, the vista of skyscrapers that awed mea s a child that seemed so monumental then against the flat horizon were the pale blue Southland Life building, the Mobil building with the neon winged horse atop, the Republic Bank, largest bank in the Southwest—as I come upon those structures now they seem petite and almost historical. Foremost, as we approached the city, was an unpretentious cubical edifice with an enormous billboard on top advertising Hertz rental cars and blinking the time and temperature. The building itself was anonymous, and afterward, when the world knew it as the Texas School Book Depository, people in Dallas identified by the Hertz sign and said, “Oh, that one.”
We were moving from Abilene, where my father was vice president of the largest bank in town. My sisters had been crying for weeks, since Daddy had returned from his mysterious trip and announced that he had gotten a new job—at last he would be president of his own bank. It was small, he warned us, but it was in Dallas, and Dallas was growing, and as the city grew so would his bank. Dallas was a place where dreams like my father were given a chance.
Dallas was a boom town, full of promises. As in all boom towns tension was high. Some people were zooming through society like race cars, giving the world an impression of Dallas as a city of affluent hicks—you could see them suddenly flaunting their greenbacks at the gaming tables from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo or talking too loudly in their drawling nasal voices in restaurants that were really too good for them—monied, naïve, too eager, democratic yes but socially pretentious. For an astounding number of people Dallas was just such a jackpot, and they formed a rough society of nouveaux millionaires; they would build a gorgeous Gatsby-like mansion on the north side, enroll their children in Hockaday or St. Mark’s, open a Neiman-Marcus charge account, buy a mink coat and two Cadillacs, and join the Republican party. The winners were easy to spot.
The losers made their own headlines. Dallas was the murder capital of Texas, which led the United States in homicides. We were reminded that Dallas killed more people some years than all of England did—a statistic with little effect, for wasn’t England a sound-asleep society, and weren’t we exploding with new force, building a new world, making millions by the minute, and did you expect a new world to be born without death and broken hearts?
In many respects my father was typical of the kind of man who made that new world. He went to a one-room schoolhouse in central Kansas, watched his family farm blow away in the same wind that brought the Depression, and with no apparent resources other than his own unbending will put himself through Central State Teachers College in Edmond, Oklahoma, then through law school at the University of Oklahoma. When World War II broke out he dutifully joined the infantry, spent seven years fighting in Europe, the Pacific, and Korea under conditions that twice turned his hair completely white, and was discharged as a major in 1952 at the age of 36; a civilian now, with a family of five, and he had not even begun to make a career. He hit the ground running.
After eight years he learned the frustration of small-town banks with sleepy family management, so when he was finally offered the presidency of the Lakewood State Bank in Dallas he accepted at once. In 1960 it was a small and troubled storefront bank in Gaston Avenue, between Doc Harrell’s drugstore and Kirk’s Beauty Salon. To see it now—three city blocks of land, a tower, a parking garage, fountains, expensive art on the walls, a boardroom table that would have made King Arthur blush, and a modern amalgamated name, Allied Lakewood—is to realize my father’s own aspirations in their most tangible form. He build this bank, with the help of people like him, people who came out of nowhere with nothing, who came to Dallas because Dallas would give them a chance.
For my parents, leaving the close social quarters of Abilene was like getting out of jail. They were not true West Texans; they had not come to love the unending monotony of mesquite barrens or the high, hot blue sky that made sunsets a matter of prayerful thankfulness. To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea—remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers. By comparison Dallas seemed wide open, but it wasn’t really, as we soon learned. Politically it was shut up tight. Ambitious newcomesr like my father found the leadership of the city distant and mysterious, a cabal, and it would not do to crash the secret circle. You must prove yourself, endure probation. If you do, you will be noticed; you’ll be brought along slowly, like a colt being trained to a bridle. One day someone will approach you. You’ll be asked to “do something for Dallas.” You’ll get an assignment. For my father it was to head up a bond election to air-condition the public schools. People were surprised when the bond passed; the secret circle opened and admitted my father and of course quickly closed behind him.
And why shouldn’t he be glad to do something for Dallas? Hadn’t the city shared its bounty with him? Later, the civic-mindedness of Dallasites would seem cold hypocrisy to the rest of the world, but most people in Dallas had the same gratitude and protectiveness that an immigrant has toward a place that opens itself to him and allows him success. If this new world was not perfect—well then, how did it compare with the old? Outsiders would point to the slums on Dallas’ west side and say it was a city that didn’t care; it was true. They would point to the peaceful integration of the city and say that it was done simply because it was good for business; there was no argument. Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient. Its mission was not to tend the needy and unfortunate but to expand, to spew out opportunity. As a political model it ruled from the top down, but by and large the city was well ruled.
However, it was that same firm rule that caused life in Dallas to go, subtly, quite wrong. If you had come to Dallas in 1960 from any other American town of comparable size, you would have found it much the same as your city. Its people dressed alike, talked alike, thought alike, as the preponderance of middle-class citizens did in any other town; the country had after all a very homogeneous culture in 1960. What would have struck you, if you were keen enough to observe it, was that similarity had been carried too far in Dallas. America was a conformist society, perhaps, but conformity went to extremes in Dallas. I don’t remember ever seeing a bearded man in the city, other than Santa Claus, until Stanley Marcus decided to grow a beard two years after the assassination. When Commander Whitehead came to Neiman-Marcus for a British Fortnight celebration, Marcus decided to give a party for bearded men. He found he scarcely knew any; he wound up serving a roomful of strangers.
Dallas was a city of believers, a city of eight hundred churches, among them the largest Methodist, the largest Baptist, and one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the world. In the face of so much belief, honest doubt quickly hid itself; skeptics and heretics were one and the same. In 1960, when Kennedy was contending for the Democratic presidential nomination, Reverend W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church in Dallas declared in a sermon that “the election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious freedom in America.” One of Criswell’s 18,5000 parishioners was billionaire H. L. Hunt, and he took the trouble to have 200,000 copies of Criswell’s sermon mailed to Protestant ministers all over the country. Criswell later told Ronnie Dugger and Willie Morris of the Texas Observer that in his opinion Catholics should be barred from holding any public office.
While everyone was religious, some were superreligious, and they thought of themselves as a spiritual vanguard. They were contemptuous of the rest of us—we might as well have been agents of the Devil. It was the same with politics. The political scale in Dallas began with Eisenhower conservatism and ran well past fascism to a kind of conservative nihilism. Earle Cabell was a far-right Democrat, present at the founding though not a member of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society, and yet he was routinely described by the farther right as “the socialist mayor of Dallas.”
It was the politics of the new world. When people spoke of right-wing politics they were thinking of the archconservatives of Southern California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida—it was not just Dallas, in other words. Money was flooding south and west; new cities were forming, cities without traditions, with only the blind instinct to grow, to add wealth. Across the country, but particularly in this new world, there was a certain adolescent bitterness, a suspicious feeling of betrayal, a willingness to find conspiracy lurking in every corner. “The mood,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described it, “was one of the longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners—a world in which Chief Justice Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of dirnking water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.”
