Dear Miss Craft… It deflated my ego, hearing the statements of Dr. Criswell. But I have news for him. It will be a sad commentary on our life and time if future historians can write that the last bulwark of segregation based on color was God’s church.7
Craft folds the letter and puts it back in the box.
She knows that Criswell isn’t the only one in Dallas who has been using the Bible as a weapon—and equating integration with communism… and the end of a certain way of life in Dallas, Texas.
Another Dallas preacher, a cousin to the governor, has written a popular book called God the Original Segregationist. He is shipping thousands of copies from his Dallas church office. That preacher says that black people are made black by God, on purpose, to keep them segregated by color. They are descendants of a wayward tribe in the Bible. Too, race mixing will weaken the nation:
“There is absolutely nothing the Communists would love more than a mongrelized America that they could easily enslave… When those meddlesome white politicians and troublemakers leave them alone, the Negroes are quite happy and satisfied in their segregated condition… God knows my heart, and He knows I am anything but a ‘nigger-hater’… the land of Dixie has always been a veritable Paradise for the Negro.”8
Sometimes Craft reads these booklets, these pamphlets, and instead of throwing them away, she will take her scissors from the room where she likes to do her arts and crafts, and she will carefully cut out some pages and put them in other folders or in boxes… sometimes right next to the treasured mementos from her life.
Spring is coming on. Some things in Dallas, bad and good, are worth remembering.
APRIL
Lady Bird Johnson is arriving at Dallas’s soaring, brand-new downtown office complex, the Southland Life Center. Many locals compare it to New York’s Rockefeller Center. Two box-shaped skyscrapers rise from a concrete slab, straight grids of blue glass obediently fastened to the sides. Dallasites proudly inform outsiders that the forty-two-story north tower, which houses an insurance company, is the tallest building west of the Mississippi.
Mrs. Johnson’s destination is the south tower, the gleaming twenty-eight-story Sheraton Dallas Hotel. She is scheduled for an early April coffee with five hundred women in the grand ballroom.
A pageant of red, white, blue, and yellow greets her. The yellow is for the roses placed around the room in her honor. American and Texas flags are everywhere. Many of the women are debuting the “Ladies for Lyndon” spring ensemble: white skirts, white shoes, white gloves, red-and-white candy-striped jackets, blue scarves, and white “straw boater” hats with white-and-blue bands reading LYNDON B. JOHNSON.
Stanley Marcus has commissioned his designers at Neiman Marcus to create the outfits for the 1960 LBJ campaign—even though Johnson, maddeningly, still won’t announce that he is a candidate for president. Marcus has to wonder why LBJ remains hunkered down in the Senate while John F. Kennedy tours the country, charming delegates.
Lady Bird is delighted with the outfits. “I just got a whole costume for my 16-year-old Lynda Bird,” she tells everyone. “She’s gonna look right sharp in it.”1
At age forty-seven Lady Bird has jet-black hair and a kindly, intelligent face. Her expressive, sparkling eyes radiate calmness and competence. The daughter of wealthy Texans, she received her first Neiman Marcus charge account at fourteen. Today she manages the Johnson family’s business interests, now worth millions of dollars.
She is an exceptionally loyal wife; she has long ago acclimated herself to her husband’s sexual dalliances. It is a sacrifice that she sees many wives of public men make. She has certainly heard the wicked gossip about the Massachusetts playboy her husband is battling for the Democratic nomination.
Although she is a petite five feet, five inches, she also knows how to handle a .28-gauge shotgun during dove hunting season, and a rifle during deer season. She dropped an eight-point buck on her very first hunt at the LBJ Ranch. When the similarly slight Robert F. Kennedy paid a visit to the ranch in December 1959, Lyndon took him deer hunting and handed him a high-powered weapon. Bobby fired and the recoil knocked him to the ground. Johnson looked down at him. “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”2 Now, of course, Bobby Kennedy is managing his brother’s presidential campaign and is steadily outmaneuvering Lyndon for the Democratic nomination.
At the Sheraton, Lady Bird graciously greets the admiring women, even those she doesn’t know, as dear old friends. There are hugs and long periods of hand-holding. She makes some short public remarks. Modestly, she tells the assembled women, “My life is just so easy and pleasant and happy. The big decisions, the hard thinkin’, the heavy load are not mine. It makes me feel a little guilty sometimes.”3
Polite applause fills the room. Then the lights dim and a film projector cranks into gear. On a large screen appears her husband. His voice booms through the loudspeakers. He never mentions the presidency. He tries to appear statesman-like, telling everyone that while others chase the presidency he is remaining in the nation’s capital, guiding the U.S. Senate.
He has no other ambitions, no lust for power.
JULY
In those moments when he is truly alone, those meditative times building up to when he will be required to deliver his pre–Fourth of July sermon to an increasingly eager throng, W. A. Criswell can think about the biggest journey he ever took away from Dallas. It was a little like Saul going to Damascus—the journey turned him into a new man once he saw the insidious influence of socialism and communism firsthand:
He had spent four months traveling the globe on a trip funded by generous donations to the church. He stopped in Brazil, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Greece, Switzerland, North Africa, Israel, Italy, and India. He kept saying to himself: There are so many lost souls out there. Millions of lost souls. There were half-naked juju men outside of Lagos, who they decorated their places of prayer with dung. And all the time he was wondering if the six anti-malaria pills he had wolfed down had caused reality to stretch and bend in unnatural ways.
The juju men were especially pretentious animists. They were among the millions lost in a place he calls the Dark Continent. And then in Rome, he studied how the papists created golden altars for themselves, crafted something far beyond a cult of idolatry, and worshipped the bones and relics of saints. It dawned on him: These were just like the conjurers with their juju fetishes in the outback in Nigeria, all designed to control people they assumed to be ignorant.
Back home in Dallas in July, he tells people it is “ridiculous” the way Catholics—so obedient to their regal papal leader—cling to their rituals. If man allows himself such supremacy over God, how can he do God’s work? There is not really that much distance between the lost souls in Lagos and the Catholics in Rome. And in the end, he decides it is all a problem of gullible people surrendering their independence to some controlling hand: Millions of people around the world are moving toward the creeping control of either Catholics or communists.
One time when he was in Tripoli, he went to the outskirts of the city, where it gives way to the great desert, in order to watch the huge camel caravans. He stared at the long line of animals and their drivers.
A Bedouin stared back at him and asked: “Americano?”
Criswell yelled proudly, enthusiastically, in reply: “Yes, Americano!”
The Bedouin unleashed a gob of phlegm at Criswell and shouted: “Americano no good… Stalin good!”1
If guests arrive, Reverend Criswell likes to walk them through a tour of the global artifacts inside his inviting two-story mansion along one of Dallas’s finest streets. The houses on his block are stately, set back from the sidewalks by rolling lawns, so someone walking by can gain the true measure of the craftsmanship put into the stone-and-brick structures. Inside, guests can linger with the accumulated treasures, including some china he had bargained for in postwar Germany that had been commissioned by Adolf Hitler.
Now it is Sunday, the day before the
Fourth of July, and the congregation at the church will be standing-room-only inside the towering house of worship, as it has been every Sunday for the last few years.
In a few days, the Democrats will begin arriving in Los Angeles for their national convention. John F. Kennedy, fresh from winning several primaries—even in heavily Protestant states—is the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. It is, for Criswell, more than maddening.
Criswell rereads his sermon for today, “Religious Freedom, the Church, the State and Senator Kennedy.” He wants Dallas to know there is something tantamount to a holy war coming: Roman Catholicism “is not only a religion, it is a political tyranny” that “threatens those basic freedoms and those constitutional rights for which our forefathers died.” When Americans pay income taxes, they unknowingly are paying to prop up the Roman Catholic Church. And in South American countries run by Roman Catholics, dozens of Protestant churches have been destroyed or confiscated—and dozens of Baptist leaders have been murdered.
Criswell knows it: If John F. Kennedy becomes president, there is a very real possibility that “one church above all others will rule America.”2
As always, Criswell’s spellbinding sermon leaves his congregation excited and energized. One of his newest congregants is especially enthused. H. L. Hunt absorbs his new pastor’s broadside against the Catholic Kennedy—someone who might also want to destroy the precious oil depletion allowance—and it is like a call to arms. Criswell’s bold oratory, cloaked in biblical inviolability, might just be the way to destroy John F. Kennedy’s presidential ambitions.
On July 8, waving his tan Texas cowboy hat, Lyndon B. Johnson descends from a plane as a roaring crowd jockeys to see him. A brass band plays “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” while Lady Bird graciously accepts a dozen yellow roses. Daughters Lynda Bird and Luci are beaming in their candy-striped “Ladies for Lyndon” jackets.
An even larger crowd, over one thousand boisterous supporters, fills the block-long lobby of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles as Johnson arrives for the Democratic Convention. Dozens of “Ladies for Lyndon” join together to hold hands and form a human chain to keep the crowd from crushing the Johnsons and their daughters. A podium has been set up, and LBJ steps before it. Referring to his opponent, John F. Kennedy, he tells his supporters:
“I’m not against young people. I’m for them.”
Significant pause.
“For Vice-President.”3
The crowd goes wild. Many believe that they have a chance to nominate the first Southerner in a hundred years for president. The city is filling up with conventioneers. Campaign signs and buttons are everywhere. Even the new theme park, Disneyland, is getting in on the action: The Magic Kingdom is passing out campaign buttons for Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Tinker Bell.
The official Democratic platform is finished, and it contains the most bracing civil rights endorsement in party history—hammered into place over the vociferous objections of Southerners:
“The time has come to assure equal access for all Americans to all areas of community life, including voting booths, schoolrooms, jobs, housing, and public facilities.”
The platform pointedly endorses the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the ones that Dallas has never allowed: “The peaceful demonstrations for first-class citizenship which have recently taken place in many parts of this country are a signal to all of us to make good at long last the guarantees of our Constitution.”4
When John F. Kennedy arrives in Los Angeles on July 9, he is greeted by even larger crowds. His brass band pumps out “Anchors Aweigh,” a nod to the senator’s famous wartime service aboard PT-109. The senator’s glamorous wife, Jacqueline, has stayed behind in Hyannis Port to rest and avoid stress. She is four months pregnant and has suffered a miscarriage before.
As delegates arrive from all over the country, Johnson can finally see that while he was playing statesman in the Senate, Kennedy had been outflanking him—by rounding up votes. Johnson is pacing, trying to figure out the right moves. And the convention is buzzing with rumors that Kennedy may even win on the first ballot.
As noisy crowds mill around Johnson’s campaign reception room at the Biltmore, a spooky-looking older man with wispy white hair lingers near the free soda pop stand. He is wearing a dark blue suit and a white “Johnson for president” tie.
A woman walks up to him, holding her young son by the hand. Assuming he is in charge of handing out the sodas, she politely requests a beverage from him.
“I’m sorry,” the man says vacantly, nearly looking through her. “I can’t help you.”
The woman wheels around.
“Come on, Junior,” she says, pulling her son along. “They’re just cheap here.”5
H. L. Hunt watches her leave. He didn’t come to the convention to pass out soda pop. He is trying to find a way, any way, to stop Kennedy from winning the nomination—even if it means supporting Lyndon Johnson. Hunt hasn’t informed anyone that he’s coming, and when he tries to barge in on LBJ’s entourage, Johnson simply refuses to see him.
But without LBJ or his team knowing a thing, an increasingly sullen Hunt has a secret, alternative plan. He’s already begun putting it into place. When he heard his Dallas minister’s sermon last Sunday about Kennedy’s insidiously internationalist religion, a thought blinked on in Hunt’s mind: This is a potent weapon.
As LBJ tells his aides to not let Hunt into the room, Hunt has already arranged to have tens of thousands of copies of Criswell’s anti-Kennedy sermon reprinted and quickly mailed to Protestant ministers across the country. It will unleash a massive backlash against Kennedy. The Democratic Party will have to refuse to nominate a Catholic—and it will have to thank H. L. Hunt from Dallas.
Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters are stepping out of the long black cars in front of Los Angeles’s convention hall.
Tonight, July 13, is the culmination of years of hard work and delicate positioning, all those socials, teas, and luncheons in a thousand different places. Lady Bird has heard the predictions that Kennedy will win, but she still believes in her husband.
Lynda Bird and Luci are still wearing their “Ladies for Lyndon” outfits. Lady Bird is dressed with somewhat more dignity, as befitting a candidate’s wife: a gray plaid box-skirted dress from her favorite store, Neiman Marcus.
She and the girls are watching from their private box when Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, a longtime mentor to Lyndon, rises before the Democratic Convention and places his fellow Texan’s name in nomination. Southerners go crazy as a gurgling demonstration erupts in Johnson’s favor. Marchers parade across the floor carrying a huge thirty-gallon hat. Signs are waving: BLUE GRASS FOR JOHNSON, OKLAHOMA SOONERS FOR JOHNSON, GEORGIA PEACHES FOR JOHNSON.
Many of the delegates from the Northern states remain silent. As the pro-LBJ parade continues—ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty—a group of Texans abruptly storms the Massachusetts section and tries to rip the Bay State’s banner down. Fistfights break out as the Massachusetts delegates fight back. The Texans are forced to retreat to their seats.
A few minutes later, John F. Kennedy’s name is placed in nomination.
As the Kennedy-for-President demonstration springs to life, hundreds of balloons with the senator’s name are cascading in the auditorium.
The Texans begin scrambling after them, using the ends of lit cigarettes to pop the balloons. Other Southerners are joining the melee. It’s clear that plenty of people are drunk.
The resistance is futile: Kennedy is nominated on the first ballot.
Kennedy surprises nearly everyone when he chooses Johnson as his running mate. But the decision actually comes easily. Kennedy has done the electoral math and knows that he needs the South to win. Johnson is his best hope, and the two men have formed an uneasy political alliance. Kennedy and Johnson both realize that the pro-civil-rights stance by the Democrats will be an uphill battle in the South. And now, a week af
ter his July 13 nomination, Kennedy has just received an opposition research report on Texas. The number one problem, he learns, is Dallas:
1. Is the stronghold of Republicanism in Texas. It has the only Republican Congressman (Bruce Alger) in Texas.
2. the Dallas County Democratic Executive Committee is controlled and run by Alger—Democrats who are and have been anti-Johnson.
3. the world’s largest Baptist Church is located in Dallas.
4. the world’s largest Methodist Church is located in Dallas.
5. the world’s largest Presbyterian Church is located in Dallas.
6. one of the largest Masonic bodies in the U.S. is located in Dallas.
7. is the weakest labor city of large cities in Texas.
8. Dallas is Johnson’s weakest county in Texas.
The dirt-digging memo identifies other enemies in Dallas:
A) Baptist-Dr. Creswell [sic], the pastor of the largest Baptist Church in the world has already denounced Kennedy. This influence will drift out over Texas in all of the Baptist churches. They are well organized and have and will get plenty of money. The small country church members will be extremely vocal in their position, and, of course, will be effective in their communities.
1. Carr P. Collins, Sr.—is one of the outstanding lay leaders of the Baptist Church in Dallas [Criswell’s church] and in Texas. He is extremely wealthy. On Friday, July 15, 1960, Nixon called Collins, and the next day (Saturday, July 16, 1960), Carr was in Nixon’s office in Washington. This meeting took place before the Republican Convention and immediately after Kennedy and Johnson had been nominated—this is significant. It could be that Nixon discussed campaign contributions with Collins—also, to what extent the Baptist would oppose Kennedy, in Texas, could very well have been discussed. In any event, the meeting was significant, particularly, as to the timing.
Dallas 1963 Page 5