Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  He spent part of December on the highways along the East Coast, and then slowly driving his Buick by and scouting the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port—and the Kennedy homes in Georgetown and Palm Beach. He was taking photographs, looking for patterns, for any bit of information that could help him pull it all off. He had even been circling the churches and airports used by the Kennedy clan in Florida.

  He also went shopping and spent hours putting things together: There were several sticks of dynamite, plenty of blasting caps, enough wiring. He was getting rid of a lot of things as well. All of his furniture, his clothes. He didn’t need any of it anymore. He wasn’t coming back.

  One Sunday, he watched as Kennedy came out of his front door in Palm Beach, on his way to church. He watched from down the street, engine running, his car packed with dynamite. The Secret Service hadn’t noticed him. He was going to ram Kennedy’s car and blow everyone sky-high. But then he saw Kennedy turn back toward the door. He could see Kennedy telling his wife and daughter good-bye. And the wife was holding a newborn baby in her arms. He decided at that moment that while he was still going to kill the man, he wouldn’t do it in front of his family.2

  Later, driving through Palm Beach, he veered across a white line—something not that unusual with so many retirees in the city. But a nearby cop decided to turn on his lights and pull the man over. He stuck his head inside the car… there is the dynamite… the bombing gear. The word spread quickly at the cop shop, at the newspaper. Reporters managed to shout some questions at him as he was led into custody: Why’d you do it?

  “Kennedy’s money bought the White House and the presidency,” he yelled back. “I wanted to stop Kennedy from being president.”3

  Now the indictments against him are being drafted, and arrangements are being made to send him to the intimidating federal psychiatric evaluation center in Springfield, Missouri, a place where the government sometimes confines people viewed as serious threats to the president and the nation. The news about the would-be assassin will appear in papers around the nation, including the ones in Dallas.

  It has been weeks, but it is still as if many in the city refuse to believe that Kennedy has actually won. Ted Dealey at the Dallas Morning News is among those having the hardest time letting go.

  He has remained in regular contact with the defeated Richard Nixon, someone he has grown close to. He reminds the outgoing vice president that Dallas voted overwhelmingly for him. He also speculates that the Kennedy forces stole the election. He refers, mockingly, to Kennedy and Johnson as “friends”: “If the count in Illinois and Texas had been honest,” Dealey tells Nixon, “I rather think you would have been President today instead of our friend, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”4

  Dealey wants Nixon to know something else: Just because Dealey is from Dallas it does not mean he has any ties at all to someone like Lyndon Baines Johnson—or by extension John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He wants Nixon to know there is no “Texas loyalty” at work.

  “Just between you and me and the gatepost,” Dealey tells Nixon, “I doubt whether our friend Lyndon will turn in nearly as creditable a record as you did… and you can more or less read between the lines, as I say this, what I personally think of our South Texas friend.”5

  Day after day, Dealey’s paper relentlessly runs stories that are not just skeptical of the president-elect, they are barely contained personal attacks: KENNEDY CONSIDERS KIN FOR JOB, JACK PRESCRIBES BAD MEDICINE, JFK URGED TO GO AFTER DIXIE FOES, DANGEROUS THEORY OF GOVERNMENT, WHITE HOUSE WILL BE ONE OF MANY KENNEDY HOMES.6

  The News is also running a lengthy anti-Kennedy story that is sure to anger people in Dallas who vehemently hate unions, dating to the days when the ballsy, cigar-chomping vice president from Texas, John Nance Garner, battled like holy hell against FDR’s support of national labor unions. The Dallas newspaper story is guaranteed to make the anti-union core livid: LABOR VOTE KEY TO KENNEDY WIN.7

  Another incendiary attack on Kennedy suggests that the president-elect will take away the precious oil depletion allowance that has helped make so many people in Dallas rich, allowing them to buy ridiculously expensive baubles and furs at Stanley Marcus’s store, or to print anti-communist diatribes, or to fund billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt’s “Constructive” radio shows.

  And, perhaps more alarming than anything else: NEGRO VOTES CREDITED FOR JFK WIN.

  Race, of course, is the shadow element in the now swirling anti-Kennedy fervor in Dallas. And as the first weeks of 1961 unfurl, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News feels liberated to sanction stories and editorials that are thinly veiled barbs at any Kennedy effort to promote diversity in his administration. When Kennedy announces that he will appoint a black man, someone who once served as an adviser to FDR, to be the head of the federal housing agency, Dealey’s paper runs an item titled: A NEGRO IS HOUSING BOSS. “No doubt the Negro can do the job. And maybe he can do it excellently. For that matter, a thousand others could do the job and do it excellently. Truth is, the appointment is a gesture to the race which played so vital a part in electing Mr. Kennedy… How do the Southerners feel now?”8

  Even as John Kennedy is inaugurated as president, the News publishes a cutting editorial referring to him as “our most promising young man.” The paper does not intend to be complimentary. Kennedy is simply peddling false hope of change: “Mr. Kennedy made 220 promises during his campaign. The News neither expects nor hopes that the new President will be able to make good on those promises.”9

  On a frigid Monday afternoon, Reverend Rhett James pushes open the doors to one of the city’s leading stores, Titche-Goettinger, and quietly leads five other black residents of Dallas into the segregated, all-white restaurant area. James, dressed in his usual suit and horn-rimmed glasses, tells his people to sit down and place their orders. They are refused service.

  James and his group do not budge. They are going to stay in their seats until the store closes that night. As the sit-in begins, James tries to fathom this small victory. At least he is not being thrown out of the store that is just a short stroll from his church. At least he is not being barred from entering the dining area: Just last Tuesday, when James tried walking past all the white customers in the store and heading to the restaurant, there was a line of store employees cordoning the place off. They raced to put up a rope so none of the black people, including James, could even get inside. James could no doubt feel the palpable hatred as people stared at him.

  It came the same week a drugstore owner sprayed insecticide over some college students, black and white, trying to integrate a lunch counter near the all-white Southern Methodist University. It is as if some boulder has started rolling and can’t be stopped. James has been walking on the downtown streets—a one-man protest, or sometimes he is joined by a few friends. Juanita Craft, the widow who heads the local NAACP’s youth council, is also rushing to be involved, organizing high school students to join the protests. Flyers and posters are being printed in black-owned printing shops, urging people to not spend their money at Neiman Marcus, at the drugstores, the candy stores, the Continental Bus Station, anyplace segregated.

  Now, all afternoon in the big department store, James and his five friends wait and wait. No one serves them. And when the store finally announces that it is closing, the preacher leads them into the night.10

  At the minimum, he has plenty to write about in his regular, popular column in the Dallas Express, the leading black newspaper. It is called “Dateline Dallas” and with it he hopes to scare the Dallas Citizens Council, or Dealey, or Criswell, or Alger. Maybe they’ll realize that sit-ins, even a wholesale economic boycott, are bad for the bottom line—the only thing the men downtown might understand. James begins writing his newspaper column, an open letter to Dallas:

  “If the people of Dallas shop at stores that discriminate… they do not want freedom… Freedom is always purchased with a price… Are you willing to pay your share?”11

  FEBRUARY

  It is two weeks a
fter John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, and at their offices, Congressman Bruce Alger and publisher Ted Dealey are opening the same letter that is deluging thousands of elected officials and journalists across America—each one written by members of an underground organization just seeping into public view: The John Birch Society, once known to only a small coterie, is unleashing a massive public campaign to impeach Earl Warren, chief justice of the Supreme Court. The group claims that Warren—a Republican appointed by President Eisenhower—has “voted 92 per cent of the time in favor of Communists and subversives.”1

  Envelopes carrying the letters are stamped with the Birch Society’s slogan: This is a REPUBLIC, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way. Many of the mailings include an incendiary tract depicting the chief justice on a WANTED poster. Among the charges against him:

  “The DESEGREGATION DECISION, which aids and abets the plans of the Communist Conspiracy to (A): create tension between Negroes and Whites; (B): to transform the South into a BLACK SOVIET REPUBLIC; (C): to legalize and encourage intermarriage between Negroes and Whites and thus mongrelize the American White Race!”2

  Newspapers and magazines anxiously scramble to patch together any information they can find about the group. The stories are nearly too fantastic to believe: Birchers are convinced that a secret cadre of communists is taking over America through the guise of seemingly innocent programs: Social Security, the progressive income tax, membership in the United Nations. Even campaigns to add fluoride to city water supplies are regarded as a plot to prepare the populace for communist mind control.

  The top levels of the federal government and the news media are already communist-dominated, according to the Birch Society. Churches are suspect, particularly ones that advocate solidarity with other nations and cultures. The organization’s Blue Book claims, “Fully one-third of the services in at least the Protestant churches of America are helping that trend… And some actually use their pulpits to preach outright communism.”3 The last three American presidents—Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—are considered communist dupes at best. The Birch Society’s founder, a retired candy maker named Robert Welch, describes Eisenhower as a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.”

  Politicians from both parties denounce the organization. North Dakota Republican Milton R. Young says that Welch’s accusations are outrageous: “Far beyond anything the late Senator Joe McCarthy even thought of. To label some of our most loyal and dedicated people as Communists plays right into the hands of the Communists”4—and Welch is renounced as “a little Hitler” and a “right-wing crackpot.” President Truman growls that the Birch Society is easy to describe: “Nothing but the Ku Klux Klan without the nightshirts.” Even the rising conservative Barry Goldwater, sympathetic to many of the Birchers’ political positions, concedes that the Birchers “have hurt the conservative movement.”5 Around the nation, there are calls for a full-scale investigation into the secretive group. The nation’s new attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, even mocks the Birch Society: “It’s an organization that’s in the area of being humorous.”6

  As one of the most aggressive ultra-conservatives in Congress, Bruce Alger receives a personal appeal from Robert Welch, asking him to join the Birch Society and vote to impeach Justice Warren: “I can assure you that the favor will be appreciated by a lot of people besides me who are now giving their whole lives to supporting patriots like yourself, in an effort to save for our children and their children some semblance of the glorious country which we ourselves inherited.”7

  As the Birch movement begins its edgy, polarizing dance, Alger, Dealey, and other public figures in Dallas now have to weigh their options. Most come to the same conclusion. As much as they agree with the fundamental principles defining the Birchers, it’s political suicide to endorse them. In editorials and newsletters, Alger and Dealey try to map out a delicate distance between themselves and the John Birch Society.

  And almost instantly, other hard-core extremists in the city begin to castigate the two very men they had assumed would be at the forefront of the public anti-Kennedy armies: Alger and Dealey are deluged with angry letters from local Birch Society members blasting them for their lack of support. The letters are heated, severe, frightening. It is a wake-up call for Dealey and Alger. Maybe they’ve underestimated how resilient—and aggressive—the anti-Kennedy movement is in Dallas. Maybe there is more going on in the city, maybe there are far more people ready for more muscular action. The Kennedy administration has only been in office for a few weeks—but some people in Dallas are enlisting for a long march of resistance. Already the bumper stickers are appearing on cars: K.O. THE KENNEDYS.

  Ted Dealey’s Dallas Morning News is refusing to linger on the protests in downtown Dallas led by Rhett James and Juanita Craft. It is as if his paper believes that their demands will vanish by refusing to acknowledge them. The paper has even suggested that black Dallas is divided, splintered, that a few activists are presuming to speak for the entire black populace.

  James’s renegade campaign for the school board ended in defeat. But he’d gained more votes than any previous minority candidate. That symbolism, he knew, meant something to those who ruled Dallas. And now he is positioned as a clear leader of Dallas’s black community. James decides to take on Dealey and the Dallas Morning News: “When the local morning paper comes out… to infer a division in the Negro community, we see the head of the Southern Divider attempting to spread its influence into the Negro citizenry.”8

  One thing is clear: The first few weeks of 1961 are bringing extraordinary change in Dallas. And it isn’t just in the active protests at the downtown restaurants; it is also going to finally come inside the schools. After years of stalling, fighting in the courts, the local school board has just announced that Dallas will cease being the largest American city with completely segregated classrooms.

  Integration in the Dallas public schools will finally commence in the fall.

  When he hears the news, James sits at his typewriter and begins composing a headline that he knows will startle many already uneasy people in downtown Dallas: DALLAS PREPARES FOR THE INEVITABLE! INTEGRATION!9

  It is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, and Juanita Craft has organized her eager teenage volunteers for another protest: a “stand-in” outside the segregated Palace and Majestic Theatres in downtown Dallas. The students stand quietly in line, waiting for their turn to purchase a ticket at the box office. They ask for seats inside the theater—not in the segregated balcony. When they are refused, they simply walk back to the end of the line and start the entire process all over again.10

  Craft monitors the action and approaches every now and then to offer them drinks and snacks she has prepared for the long day. Dallas cops are watching, too. But they make no move to arrest or interfere with the students. Decisions have been made: The Dallas Citizens Council has decided that the city needs, at all costs, to avoid any mayhem, any rioting, any economic backlash.

  Many of Craft’s NAACP volunteers have brought Bibles. They read passages while waiting in line. As the hours go by, some young women in the group become tired of standing for so long, walking back and forth over the same few feet of pavement. They take off their shoes and walk in their hose or socks.

  By 3 p.m., fifty white college students from nearby Southern Methodist University arrive to offer support. The SMU students join the line. As they reach the box office, they ask if they can sit with a Negro friend inside the theater. When they are refused, they go back to the end of the line.

  Last year, Craft had begun sending her teenage volunteers into the big H. L. Green drugstore downtown. Blacks were allowed to shop there, but not eat at the lunch counter. She gave her teams enough money to make a modest, yet very visible purchase. They walked inside in pairs and bought a big tablet of drawing paper, or anything else that could be wrapped in a large paper bag. Holding their bags, they went to the lunch counter, took a seat, and ordered soda. When the waitr
ess told them they couldn’t be served, they held up their shopping bags: I just bought this over at the other counter. How come I can buy that there but can’t be served here? Meanwhile, two other young volunteers entered the store and did the same thing. The cycle was repeated, over and over, until the frustrated manager was called.

  Back then, and now today on Lincoln’s birthday, the police never interfered. There are ugly stares, some hateful shouts, from people passing by. But compared with the dangerous moments endured by activists elsewhere in the South, Dallas is quietly acquiescent. There is no violence, no thudding batons, no unleashed dogs. It is almost as if the powers-that-be are treating the protests like a benign irrelevancy—as if ignoring them will suck the oxygen from them.

  Craft has always followed politics with a keen interest. She wonders if Kennedy will really change things. She has seen politicians make promises before, and she has helped shape the NAACP, to give life to it, in the most dangerous moments in Dallas and Texas. She knows that Kennedy is forecasting a new future, even if some people feel he is being too careful.

  She has decided that she admires Kennedy. She likes his deliberation. She would like to meet President Kennedy if he ever comes to Dallas.

  A number of customers have been sending Stanley Marcus confrontational letters. Each of them is a variation on the same theme:

  I plan to visit your store soon and am bringing along a friend. However, I’ve been told that since my friend is a Negro we won’t be allowed to dine in your Zodiac restaurant. Could you please clarify your policy for me? I didn’t realize that Neiman Marcus is segregated. Should I take my friend somewhere else to shop so she won’t feel uncomfortable in your store?11