His warnings to Washington hadn’t been inspired by partisanship, however. A National Committeeman doesn’t court votes by hiding his candidate. If Skelton had been determined to improve Kennedy’s showing, he would have wanted the people of Dallas to see the President. That wasn’t the problem. There was something else in the city, something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society. In Dallas this was particularly dismaying because for some time the city’s cherished image had been blemished by a dark streak of violence. The harlots and the grafters had gone, but the killers were multiplying. Texas led the United States in homicide, and Big D led Texas. There were more murders in Dallas each month than in all England, and none of them could be traced to the underworld or to outsiders; they were the work of Dallas citizens. In the past year the figure had grown by 10 percent. Furthermore, nearly three out of every four slayings (72 percent) were by gunfire, for Big D had no requirement for firearms registration, no firearms control of any sort; the one attempt at such legislation had been struck down by a local court. Before November 22 there had been 110 Dallas murders in 1963. Brutal death had become part of the way of life; it was discussed almost casually. The day the Presidential visit was announced Abraham Zapruder, a dress manufacturer who had moved down from New York, engaged a stranger in an informal civil rights debate. The man conceded that Washington had the power to back racial equality. “God made big people,” he said of Kennedy. Pointing to himself he added, “And God made little people.” Then he drawled, “But Colt made the .45 to even things out.” Zapruder was taken aback. He had never heard such talk in Manhattan’s garment district. He snapped, “People like you we don’t need.”
Nevertheless they were there. In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die—his heart will stop, stop, stop, and he will burn, burn, burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies, and the headquarters of H. L. Hunt and his peculiar activities. In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding—named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party—Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?”
This was more than partisan zeal. It was a chiaroscuro that existed outside the two parties, a virulence which had infected members of both. Undoubtedly many of the noisiest radicals were Republicans, and one of their popular local heroes in the city was Congressman Alger, best remembered for his presence during Mrs. Johnson’s spit shower three years earlier. But in Dallas County the other party wasn’t much different. Most Democratic candidates offered the voters, not a choice, but a radical echo. The Congressman at Large from Big D, a son of a bedding manufacturer, was technically a Democrat. It didn’t matter. In Washington Joe Pool was scarcely distinguishable from Alger. Heavily backed by Dallas’ big money, he fought civil rights, called for an end to all foreign aid, described the Defense Department as an insult to the Dallas Federation of Women’s Clubs (and demanded that it apologize), and told his constituents that the Kennedy administration had “turned my stomach.” Pool denied that he never did anything constructive; he was extremely proud of his perfect attendance record at sessions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. On the Hill he was regarded as a curiosity; at home he was just another typical Dallas Democrat. After all, it had been thirty-one years since the Dallas County Executive Committee had supported the national ticket. General Edwin Walker was a Dallas Democrat; so, for that matter, was H. L. Hunt. Mayor Earle Cabell had been elected on the Democratic ticket, which, in the Alice-in-Wonderland of local Republican oratory, made him “the Socialist Mayor of Dallas.” But that was just political pyrotechnics. Even Birchers knew Earle Cabell wasn’t really a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy. Five years earlier he had backed Alger; he was a past president of the ultraconservative Texas Manufacturers Association, and he had been present when the local chapter of the Birch Society was founded in a Dallas hotel suite. After November 22, 1963, when political fashions suddenly changed, the Mayor’s memory of his past associations became extremely hazy. He had been converted; he was now a Johnsonian Democrat on most issues. And he hadn’t actually joined the Society that evening. He and Elizabeth “Dearie” Cabell—the pet names of Texas politicians’ wives become part of the public domain—listened to the tape-recorded indoctrination lecture and left. But their friends were members, and he was as cognizant of, and as respectful of, the prevailing political winds as any German functionary of the early 1930’s. Cabell had attended the meeting because he had been told that the subject was to be anti-Communism. He and Dearie had to be concerned about that. Rightist enthusiasm was a civic responsibility, like the Dallas Council of Churches and the Dallas Cowboys, and thirty of the Mayor’s cronies, all businessmen, joined in a tribute to Robert Welch, the eminent candy manufacturer, at the Dallas Statler Hilton.
Two Congressmen, a mayor, a retired general, and a resident billionaire would form an impressive phalanx in any city. There were other spokesmen of Dallas’ rebellious mood: the stocky, cowboy-booted executives who affixed “K.O. the Kennedys” stickers to their chrome bumpers; the bleached-blond dowagers with their fun game, “Which Kennedy do you hate the most?” (correct answers: [1] Bobby, [2] Jack, [3] Teddy, [4] Jackie); and the prosperous, well-educated young marrieds who gathered over jumbo highballs in the suburbs of Highland Park and University Park to swap jokes about assassination, gags about the hot line to the Vatican that ended in a Rome sewer, stories about Jack walking on water while Jackie water-skied, and lewd gossip—best told by wags who could imitate a Boston accent—about the First Family.
Dallas had no corner on hate. Blaming the President is an American custom almost as old as bundling. He is, after all, the biggest target in the land, and the formation of every Presidential cult is followed by the congealment of an anticult. “Remember,” Woodrow Wilson warned his daughter when his first administration was sailing along smoothly, “the pack is always waiting to tear one to pieces.” Andrew Jackson was portrayed as an adulterer, Lincoln as a baboon, Harry Truman as an incompetent haberdasher. Thomas Jefferson was “Mad Tom,” and even Washington was scarred. “I am accused of being the enemy of America, and subject to the influence of a foreign country,” he wrote Mad Tom, “… and every act of my Administration is tortured, in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket.”
Some of the Lone Star faithful looked forward to the induction into the Presidency of a lanky, two-gunned nonfictional John Wayne. That spring Cuban exiles living in Miami received a broadside declaring: “Only through one development will you Cuban patriots ever live again in your homeland as freemen, responsible as must be the most capable for the guidance and welfare of the Cuban people.” This blessing would come to pass
if an inspired Act of God should place in the White House within weeks a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin Americans… though he must under present conditions bow to the Zionists who since 1905 came into control of the United States, and for whom Jack Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller and other members of the Council of Foreign Relations and allied agencies are only stooges a
nd pawns. Though Johnson must now bow to these crafty and cunning Communist-hatching Jews, yet, did an Act of God suddenly elevate him into the top position [he] would revert to what his beloved father and grandfather were, and to their values and principles and loyalties.
The dodger, decorated with cowpokes and a profile of the Alamo, was dated April 18, 1963, and signed, “A Texan who resents the Oriental influence that has come to control, to degrade, to pollute and enslave his own people.”
A strong President must expect abuse. Kennedy had established a vigorous Presidency, and the pullulation of radicals (who had been relatively quiet under his less assertive predecessor) had followed. In some small communities they dominated local society. But they were nearly always a conspicuous minority. When the Delaware State News of October 18, 1963, declared, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now happens to be Kennedy—let’s shoot him, literally, before Christmas,” the editor’s colleagues were shocked, and he was denounced. What set Dallas apart was its size and the lack of any effective opposition. There was no debate, because there was no rebuttal. Dallas was the one American metropolis in which incitement to violence had become respectable. Welch had been regaled by the local establishment. Stevenson’s visit was boycotted by them, and admirers of the President—indeed, of the Presidency, for the cancer had grown that malignant—had been few, dispirited, and mute. It is a remarkable fact that when President Kennedy had arrived in Dallas on October 10, 1961, to visit Sam Rayburn’s deathbed, he had been greeted by just one public official: the chief of police.
The apparent unanimity baffled outsiders, including fellow Texans. Congressman Gonzalez, whose Bexar County was as heavily Democratic as Dallas was Republican, came to Dallas to receive an NAACP award. He departed bewildered. The ceremony was held in a little Baptist church, and it was like a meeting of the underground. The hosts seemed terrified; they glanced nervously over their shoulders, spoke quickly, thrust the plaque in his hands, and disbanded. After returning to Washington Gonzalez had the impression that the whole experience had been a bad dream. He joked about it; he said he wouldn’t campaign there without a safe-conduct, and he told the President, “Dallas is like the Congo. It isn’t ready for self-government.” Actually he had things backward. Self-government was precisely what Dallas lacked. In its absence the community was ruled by a committee of powerful merchants. As the Justice Department report to O’Donnell put it, “Dallas leadership is now centered in a Citizens Council composed of its chief business executives.” Since 1937 key decisions had been made by the thirty members of this group and its political arm, the Citizens Charter Association. In the selection of local officials they functioned much like a Hanseatic oligarchy picking medieval burgomasters. Most of the lieges weren’t radicals themselves. They were merely distrustful of democratic disorder, confident that their benevolent despotism provided a more efficient substitute. Because they displayed an astonishing indifference toward radical excesses, however, they bore a heavy responsibility for the city’s political atmosphere. In that climate—in the vacuum which should have been filled by a healthy diversity of opinion—the strange ideology of the Right had sprouted and flourished. It was malevolent and nihilistic, and on American soil it had an alien look.
Its roots weren’t alien—that was what gave it such an enormous appeal for men bewildered by the complex challenges of the 1960’s. The origins of Dallas’ implacable hostility to the New Frontier lay in a profound longing for the values, real and imagined, of the old frontier. No one could successfully depict John Kennedy as a plainsman. Even the Moscow cartoonists, who liked to draw every American leader as a sinister cowhand, had to give it up. Chaps didn’t look right on him, tooled boots wouldn’t fit, and a five-gallon hat was preposterous. His legs weren’t bowed. He never loped or spat. His accent evoked no memories of the golden West—it was almost another language—and his Weltansicht was entirely lacking in yippee.
This, for knee-jerk absolutists, was the sticking point. Kennedy’s private wealth and starchy New England vowels were bad enough. The ultimate outrage, however, was his challenge to their tribal instincts. The President, for example, was a thoughtful man. That sounds harmless, even estimable. But on yesterday’s frontier the man who paused to think didn’t survive; he had to rely on ginger and instinct and attack his problems, not with reason, but with his bare fists. Kennedy refused to give the world a kick in the old kazzazza. Instead, he called for diversity, tolerance, nonconformity. For the man who kept faith with yesterday, this was a desecration. Pioneer society had demanded total conformity. Everyone had to stick together, wear the same label, and circle the wagons against disaster. It had to be that way; otherwise the Indians would have wiped out the lot.
So the Eastern stranger was a threat. In some cases “religion” had taught the sons of yesterday how to deal with such threats. On the evening of November 20, when the President was receiving the Supreme Court in the executive mansion, a snowy-haired man who described his occupation as “itinerant preaching” told the five thousand delegates to the Baptist General Convention of Texas that the American electorate had made “one of the greatest blunders in its history when it put a Roman Catholic President in the White House.” Religious convictions, said the Rev. J. Sidlow Baxter, must outweigh political loyalties. In 1964 he urged them “to vote not Democrat or Republican, but Protestant.” His audience rose in acclamation, cheering “Amen.”
That was the choice. It was as simple as that. Stevenson had told his Dallas hecklers, “I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance”; they believed in neither. Of course, they had no intention of killing the President. They didn’t even discuss it seriously. Dallas’ assassination jokes were meant as diversions. The germ of piety, however, was very real. The fundamentalist attacks on Kennedy carried strong overtones of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the thunder of moral indignation is clearly evident in the editorials of the Dallas Morning News, whose antiadministration crusade was the key to Big D’s absolutism.
The News was the oldest business institution in the state, dating back to 1842, when Texas was a republic. Nearly everyone read it—Lee Harvey Oswald pored over its columns, and even Byron Skelton subscribed so his wife could keep abreast of the Neiman-Marcus ads. The publisher and chairman of the board was E. M. “Ted” Dealey, a heavy man with green-tinted spectacles, a voice like a file, and an unflinching devotion to what he called “the spirit of Kit Carson and Daniel Boone.” As the most venerable voice in Dallas, the News, under Dealey’s leadership, had made radical extremism reputable in the early 1960’s. In the fall of 1961 he was one of a group of Texas publishers who had been invited to a White House lunch. To the astonishment of his fellow guests he had produced and read aloud a savage indictment of his host. He wanted everyone to know that Ted Dealey was no moron “to be led around by the nose” or lured “to your side by soft soap.” He had reached the conclusion that “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government.” Unfortunately for America, he said, “You and your Administration are weak sisters.” What was needed was “a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
The President had flushed. He could ignore incivility, but—and this was what Dealey would never understand—he resented the allusion to his three-year-old daughter. She had nothing to do with this, and introducing her name was the act of a clod. Frostily Kennedy replied, “Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are, and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.” That answer was omitted from the News account of the incident (“GRASSROOTS SENTIMENT TOLD”). Instead, the editors ran readers’ reactions (“COMMENT HEAVILY ENDORSES DEALEY STATEMENT TO JFK”), including tributes from Bruce Alger and H. L. Hunt. “Thank the Lord for a man with the guts to say what you said,” wrote one admirer, and another asked, “Why the kid gloves?” The News reported that i
t had received over two thousand phone calls, telegrams, and letters, and that over 84 percent of them had expressed approval.
There is no reason to doubt that report. To staunch subscribers—and to viewers of television station WFAA, which was owned by the A. H. Belco Corporation, which was owned by Dealey—the publisher’s stand had been unexceptionable. Roy S. Truly, superintendent of the Book Depository, disapproved strongly of Kennedy’s policies abroad and believed he was a “race mixer” at home. Ron Fischer, a young clerk in the nearby county auditor’s office, regarded the President as “a real leftist” who had “let those men get murdered” in Cuba. To Howard L. Brennan, a forty-four-year-old pipefitter working in the same neighborhood, Kennedy had been “too soft in the Cuban missile crisis.” Lee Oswald’s brother Robert had voted the Democratic ticket in 1960. Now, concerned about “socialism and big government,” he had become a Goldwater backer.
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