Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

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  For Bud Shrake, Shel Hershorn, and Gary Cartwright, who opened the doors to Dallas 1963 & to Francesco Xavier, who looked for the American Dream

  America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY,

  REMARKS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY IN DALLAS, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  Dallas, the city that virtually invited the poor insignificant soul who blotted out the life of President Kennedy to do it in Dallas.

  —A LETTER RECEIVED BY DALLAS MAYOR EARLE CABELL,

  DATED NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  President Kennedy has something important to say to each of us in his death… He says to all of us that this virus of hate that has seeped into the veins of our nation, if unchecked, will lead inevitably to our moral and spiritual doom.

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., NOVEMBER 26, 1963

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  DALLAS 1963 is not meant to address the many conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of President Kennedy. Our aim is to introduce and then connect the outsize characters and the singular climate in a city that many blamed for killing a president.

  Our book begins in early 1960 and ends in late 1963. A product of years of research, the work is informed by access to thousands of pages of archival material, thousands of documents released to the authors by the federal government, along with oral histories, local police reports, eyewitness accounts, interviews, newspaper and magazine accounts, unreleased photographs, dissertations, and film footage. The narrative is constructed with an acute eye toward accountability, toward documenting all the sources in the hundreds of footnotes. The book has been carefully scrutinized by several independent readers to detect and erase any unintended suggestions of political bias.

  In the end, Dallas 1963 is an exploration of how fear and unease can take root, how suspicions can emerge in a seemingly orderly universe. How, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, Everything That Rises Must Converge.

  How no one—including a doomed president—could have understood the full measure of the swirling forces at work in a place called Dallas.

  Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis

  Texas, 2013

  PRELUDE

  On a perfectly languorous Southern California day in September 1959, the bald-headed and bellicose leader of the Soviet Union seems to be bursting out of his skin. Things went so well with Frank Sinatra, but this is no good… no good at all.

  Nikita Khrushchev can’t get into Disneyland.

  Until now, his history-making tour of the United States has been a delicate balance of mirth and diplomacy. He met with President Dwight Eisenhower and he spoke to a group of senators, including John Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has been busy plotting his chances for the presidency. He visited New York City, where over three thousand policemen protected him from the mostly curious, but occasionally angry onlookers.

  Then he traveled the country—and it was great fun reaching out to clasp hands with a grinning Sinatra on the movie set for Can-Can. He even ogled Marilyn Monroe at a star-studded Hollywood luncheon, although another actor, Ronald Reagan, refused to meet with him, saying, “I believe that to sit socially and break bread with someone denotes friendship, and certainly I feel no friendship for Mr. Khrushchev.”1

  Khrushchev laughed while listening to Shirley MacLaine speaking Russian and then merrily rebuffed her teasing entreaties to dance. Days into his two-week trip, he seemed almost amused with America, with people scrambling to catch a glimpse of him. And perhaps he also sensed what some reporters were suggesting as they filed their stories about the first-ever visit to America by a Soviet head of state. That despite his wide smile, his five-foot-tall fire-hydrant physique, he carried a careening air of impending danger… maybe violence.

  Right now Khrushchev is glowering. His aides are huddling, quietly conferring and then relaying the same bad news to him over and over again: He is not going to be allowed into Disneyland. The police have said they cannot guarantee his safety. Someone already hurled an overripe tomato at him during his Los Angeles motorcade. Worse could happen. Khrushchev, frowning and fuming, is incredulous that he could be killed inside an American theme park.

  “I have been told I couldn’t go to Disneyland,” he sneers. “Why not? What is it? Maybe you have rocket-launching pads there?”2

  In Dallas, businessmen in their long, fine Neiman Marcus woolen overcoats stop at the Commerce Street newsstand to pick up copies of the morning paper. In the many weeks following the Soviet leader’s visit, they have grown accustomed to scanning the headlines for more unnerving news about the snarling Russian bear—and about the thousand other howling uncertainties that once seemed so far removed from the city gates.

  With papers folded and tucked under their arms, shivering men troop along the dark, chilly downtown streets toward the humming oil companies, the quietly efficient insurance firms, and the wood-paneled bank towers. Overhead, there is at least one reassuring glow: a fiery red Pegasus—the giant, rotating, neon sculpture that serves as the city’s sentinel atop the majestic Magnolia Oil Building.

  But for the last several weeks the calm, the soothing confidence often found inside some parts of Dallas, has become as elusive as smoke.

  The Dallas Morning News reads like a litany of unease. Back in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev is making ominous claims about his nation’s power: “I am emphasizing once more that we already possess so many nuclear weapons… should any madman launch an attack on our state or on other socialist states, we would literally be able to wipe the country or countries that attack us off the face of the Earth.”

  And in the United States, Richard Nixon and John Kennedy are beginning their sharp-edged joust for the presidency. For some, the future of the world might just be at stake. Nixon has already stood up to Khrushchev in Moscow at their “Kitchen Debate.” He is even hinting he will be more muscular than President Eisenhower when it comes to confronting communists. But Kennedy seems more deliberative, even cautious, when dealing with the Soviet menace—he says that only peace will breed freedom abroad.

  “There are no magic policies of liberation,” Kennedy insists. “This is no longer an age when minutemen with muskets can make a revolution. The facts of the matter are that, no matter how bitter some feelings may be, or how confident some are of a victorious war for liberation—freedom behind the Iron Curtain and world peace are inextricably linked.”3

  At almost the exact same time, a lean young ex-soldier named Lee Harvey Oswald is being personally welcomed by the mayor of Minsk and rewarded with both an apartment and a job. Oswald has left everything that he once knew in Texas so he can begin a new life in the Soviet Union. As the first U.S. Marine to ever defect to the Russians, Oswald expects that he will now be regarded as an important person, that he will finally receive the respect he deserves. Maybe, too, things will become more logical and clear in the Soviet Union than in his corner of Texas.

  In the cozy shambles of Sol’s Turf Bar downtown, more Dallas businessmen swap theories over pastrami sandw
iches and cold bottles of Lone Star beer. A nervous electricity is in the air—scrambling chatter about Eisenhower losing Cuba to the communists, atomic weapons and Soviet rockets to the moon, civil rights protesters, Red China, Supreme Court orders for Dallas to integrate its schools, and the presidential jockeying by Kennedy, Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

  But there is something else building in the conversations—and not just the ones held downtown, but also those in the houses of worship, the sprawling mansions, and the universities across Dallas. In key corners of the city, an urgent confederacy of persuasive, often powerful men is forming. Ministers, publishers, congressmen, generals, and oilmen are meeting—at first informally, and then by clear design—and coming to the same conclusions: Dallas and America are in danger. The East Coast liberals, the big-city Catholics, and the government-loving socialists are sapping the faith and eroding the bedrock of the Republic, weakening the country in the face of a very clear communist onslaught. It isn’t paranoia. It is real—and too many people are turning a blind eye to the threats.

  The members of this small, strong-minded set of citizens are hastily reinforcing each other—and insisting that Dallas should be the staging ground for the battles to protect the United States against all this unraveling, all this unholy unthreading of American traditions.

  It is unlike anything in the history of the country: A handful of people in a seemingly staid city begin to set the stage for one of the greatest tragedies in American history. And on that stage will appear Dallas’s most famous residents: the richest man in the world, the leader of one of the largest religious congregations in the country, a once revered military general, one of the nation’s influential publishers, and the most ideologically rigid member of Congress—all joining forces in what seems to them nearly a second Civil War, a righteous crusade to define and defend all that America stands for.

  Marooned in an outpost of super-patriotism, their first, cautionary discussions begin to morph into a cacophony of anger. And with it comes the beginning of a feverish march led by this citizen army… a march that will begin in earnest in the first days of 1960 and that will only subside, temporarily, in the bleak, waning days of November 1963.

  As 1960 looms, several Southern states and cities—including Dallas—are still brazenly defying the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision, refusing federal orders to integrate schools.

  Everyone knows that just three years earlier, the governor of Arkansas ordered the men in his National Guard to surround a high school in the state capital of Little Rock and block nine Negro students from joining two thousand white ones. The troops were reinforced by a mob waving Confederate flags and lustily singing “Dixie.” Residents rushed to stockpile guns and bullets. A car loaded with dynamite was stopped just one block short of the home where the black children and their parents were meeting. The governor had even issued a warning to the nation: “Blood will run in the streets.”4

  Finally, an anxious President Eisenhower unleashed “Operation Little Rock”—sending in an occupying army of battle-hardened federal soldiers led by Major General Edwin Walker, a tall, stiff-backed World War II hero who had grown up on a two-thousand-acre Texas ranch. Walker’s men dogtrotted through Little Rock’s streets, forcibly dispersing the civilians with bayonets clipped to the ends of their M1 rifles. Four platoons provided cover as the Negro students were escorted up the front steps of the school. The tense standoff came to an immediate end. Walker had broken down segregation in the soul of the South. Instantly, the national press praised him as a shining example of how Americans will fight for what is right.

  But what wasn’t reported in the dispatches from the domestic front lines was Walker’s aching, private anguish in the wake of the history-making moment—and the way the uncompromising Texan saw America spiraling out of control as it lurched toward 1960.

  Walker, like General Robert E. Lee before him, forever wanted to be loyal to the Union. But in the weeks and months after Arkansas, building toward the dawn of the new decade, he was increasingly worried that his country was becoming divided in stark, absolute terms. In Lee’s time, the abolitionists were the enemy. In Walker’s time, it was the integrationists—and the liberals who blindly refused to believe that the United States was in grave danger of being undermined, even attacked, by the Soviet Union.

  Walker had made a career following orders, but now, for the first time, he is deeply regretting his devotion to duty. He begins vaulting from ambivalence, to skepticism, to a sense of outrage.

  And by 1960 he is becoming gratefully aware that he is not alone.

  There are other super-patriots beginning to realize that so many of their countrymen are dulled to the wicked threats from inside and outside the nation. That carefully masked conspiracies are snaking into and through the United States, and accommodating and unsuspecting politicians in Washington seem clueless. Too many good, ordinary Americans have become complacent while a rash of socialist ideas are taking root and metastasizing like a cancer. From Social Security to fluoridated water to membership in the United Nations. And then there’s the greatest threat of all: racial equality, spread by “communist” proponents like Martin Luther King Jr.

  Walker makes discreet inquiries and soon learns that at least one group, the John Birch Society, also believes there is a bona fide conspiracy—not an ensemble of coincidences, but an organized effort that reaches the highest levels of government.

  A dramatic, even frightening, thought blinks in Walker’s mind: that even Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, the president of the United States, has lost his way, and is falling prey to the enemy—unknowingly becoming a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.”5

  A burning idea persists with Walker: Eisenhower used federal troops—and used him—to forcibly integrate America. Walker had been used, by his own commanders, to unleash the very kinds of government-ordered social programming that would undermine the nation. In a stunning moment, Walker makes a fateful choice: He will abandon his abject loyalty to his superiors, including the president of the United States.

  By 1960, the Texan has enlisted in the John Birch Society—and he feels welcome, at home, part of a spiritual awakening. The highly decorated general writes to the Birch Society founder: “I can foresee your movement… equal only in magnitude to Christ’s teaching through the Apostles to heathens.”6

  In time, his devotion to the movement, to protecting America, will lead him directly to Dallas. And he will be far from alone.

  By the dawn of the 1960s, more and more super-patriots will come from around the nation to Dallas—as if they have been summoned to join a war.

  1960

  JANUARY

  Over the brisk winter holiday, mailmen in Dallas are bundled against the biting winter chill as they place a series of carefully signed and rather unexpected cards into the mailboxes of the city’s most influential residents—men living on the exquisitely manicured, tree-lined streets that filter north of the tall downtown buildings.

  The front of the card features a crisp photograph of an attractive young family: A handsome, vigorous-looking man is seated in a comfortable chair, book-lined shelves visible behind him. His face is creased into a charming smile, and his posture projects an easy and sanguine confidence. Perched on his lap is his ebullient daughter, peering down at an open book. Standing behind him is his elegantly attired wife, leaning over her well-dressed husband and child. Her manner seems more reserved, nearly brooding. A strand of pearls frames her long neck. She is very attractive but appears as remote as a silent screen star.

  The portrait of this young family radiates a sense of dynastic ease, of a kind of practiced and inherited status. On the inside of the card is the raised, gold-embossed Great Seal of the United States: the fierce eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other.

  Below the seal appears a message: “Wishing you a Blessed Christmas and a New Year filled with happiness. Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy.
”

  Each of the cards has been signed in the same careful handwriting: “Best—Jack.”

  Many of the people in Dallas are startled at the impressive, personalized card. Most of them have never met Kennedy. Many have never ventured into the Kennedy orbits on the East Coast—nor would they ever want to. In the powerful parts of Dallas, there is a mixture of old Southern families and the nouveau riche. And now, in the last few years, the oil money is flowing furiously into this New South city—sometimes seemingly despite men like Kennedy, despite the Northeastern establishment, despite the long and controlling reach of Washington.

  Alongside the older mansions, there are newer thirty-room Taj Mahals where even the toilets are made with gold leaf. The most lavish store in the city, Neiman Marcus, specializes in making millionaires’ dreams come true—it is preparing to debut its newest gift idea: His and Hers airplanes. People are flying out of Dallas’s Love Field to New Orleans for lunch at Antoine’s, or to Lake Tahoe to mingle with Frank Sinatra at the Cal Neva Resort. Or to Las Vegas to play poker with Benny Binion—once the most celebrated purveyor of illicit pleasures to the rich in Dallas, now their host at the famous Horseshoe Casino.

  But just a few minutes from the mansions in Dallas, there are also clusters of falling-down shacks, with no running water, settling into the gumbo-soil bottomlands. The city’s schools, country clubs, and stores are still perfectly segregated… and bonded, through membership and memory, to ominous things that few speak about by name.

  With the grand holiday cards from Kennedy in hand, the recipients place calls to friends. They learn that many others have received the very same greeting from Kennedy, not just in Dallas, but all over the country. Some must wonder if it is giving Kennedy some measure of satisfaction knowing that his cards are being talked about in a city like Dallas… in a place like Texas.