On November 18, just days after Dealey’s White House showdown, after General Walker’s resignation and Bobby Kennedy’s blast at the crooks and right-wingers in Dallas, President Kennedy flies to California for a speech at the Hollywood Palladium. There are twenty-five hundred Democrats assembled inside. Outside some three thousand anti-Kennedy protesters are picketing. Kennedy is finally ready to publicly rebuke Ted Dealey, Edwin Walker, power-hungry generals, and the entire far right movement. Though he is in Los Angeles, it is almost as if he is talking directly to Dallas, to the things welling up in that city:
“There have always been those fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat… convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our finest churches, in our highest court, and even in the treatment of our water.9
“They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with communism. They object, quite rightly, to politics intruding on the military, but they are very anxious for the military to engage in politics.”
Kennedy asks that America refuse to succumb to hysteria: Let “our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence rather than crusades of suspicion.”
Kennedy even reaches across the political aisle for support. Former President Eisenhower agrees to make a public show of solidarity by joining Kennedy when the president returns to Washington.
Eisenhower also goes on television to make his case against political extremism:
“I don’t think the United States needs super-patriots. We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don’t need these people that are more patriotic than you or anybody else.”
Eisenhower lashes out at General Walker and Kennedy’s restless military command. It is “bad practice—very bad,” Eisenhower says, for any military officer to express opinions on “political matters or economic matters that are contrary to the president’s.”10
Stanley Marcus is reading the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times—there is a lengthy story about the extremists, about “the Rampageous Right.” It includes a photo of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch—and Welch is pictured speaking to adoring admirers in Dallas.
For weeks, Marcus has been paying increasingly close attention to the way people, including Ted Dealey and General Walker, are joining forces against Kennedy. Marcus strongly supported JFK’s and Johnson’s campaign and even grew friendly with the president. After taking office, Kennedy appointed Marcus as a trustee of the new National Cultural Center/Kennedy Center. Kennedy also appoints Marcus to two other presidential committees dealing with the arts.
Marcus grins and tells people he knows what’s behind the appointments: “I guess this is what you would call a political payoff.”11
Still, from his position near the front lines of Kennedy opposition in Dallas, Marcus can see things moving beyond the usual partisan political games. It is as if he is witnessing the very wellspring of the most aggressive resistance to the president.
And as he sees the spiked anger at Kennedy, Marcus is deciding to move further from his ambivalence than ever before. He has defended the “communist” artwork in the museums. He has pushed for peaceful integration in Dallas—and admitted his own restaurant needed to be in the vanguard. He has obviously thrown his shoulder behind LBJ and then Kennedy. And he has even told Dealey to make his newspaper more moderate.
Now he wants the full support of the other citizen kings in the city—he wants them to step forward, boldly, and renounce whatever the hell is percolating in the city. Marcus quickly makes several copies of the New York Times article showing the Birch Society founder in Dallas and sends it to various Dallas Citizens Council leaders, including the mayor. Marcus’s message should reverberate loud and clear: People in other parts of the country are beginning to equate Dallas with intolerance. It’s not good for business.
After his secretaries have mailed out the copies of the article along with his cover letter, Marcus waits to hear back—surely, some leaders in the city will realize how the extremism is blackening Dallas’s image.
Marcus hears from no one.
DECEMBER
Fresh out of the army, with the entire country to choose from as he starts his bold new life, Edwin Walker chooses the place that seems most hospitable to him. He is shopping for a home in Dallas—and looking at houses just down the road from one of the grandest monuments ever to General Robert E. Lee.
He is arriving in the city at a time when the local news reports are seemingly filled with one sensational story after another, and some people are worrying that Dallas is in mortal danger of unraveling:
A mother of three young children beats her husband to death with a baseball bat.1 A woman shoots her boyfriend at point-blank range—and he is dying because no white ambulances will come for him and he has to wait for the Friendly Ambulance for Negroes. A seventy-eight-year-old white grocer reaches into a candy box behind his counter, pulls out a .32 pistol, and pumps three shots into what the Dallas Morning News calls a “Negro bandit.”2 The police say there are thousands of sodomites organizing homosexual rings in Dallas. A Dallas radio reporter is insisting he has a tape recording of Russian cosmonauts dying in outer space—and that he wants the State Department to use his “death rattle” tapes as anti-Russian propaganda, to prove that the Russians are killing their own people.3
Walker is not deterred. And the mayor of Dallas and other city leaders have arranged for him to give his first public speech in America—in the grand Dallas Memorial Auditorium. Workers have been busy arranging the enormous letters on the marquee outside: TEXAS WELCOMES GENERAL EDWIN WALKER.
He decides to hold a press conference before the event. Before he speaks, he issues ground rules: Only Texas reporters are allowed to attend—no national media. Walker has a list of approved questions—they are the only questions he will agree to answer. He has already written out, in longhand, his answers to each of his own questions. One reporter asks Walker a pre-approved question about censorship. Walker is pleased that the conference is going the way he wants, the way it should—otherwise the media will distort everything. He responds:
“I feel that censorship is very important… Censorship can be a line through words or a line through a country. Both have affected preparedness and the national security. Censorship can also be accomplished by little or no funds, and has been for 16 years in fourth-dimensional warfare training.”
The reporters look up from their notepads, quizzical looks on their faces. Walker takes a long drag on a cigarette—and blows a cumulus of smoke at them.
One of the newsmen asks: “Does this mean you’re advocating censorship, or did I miss the boat some place?”4
Walker ignores him and ends the conference.
Inside the auditorium, there are almost six thousand fervid supporters. Former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, who serves as the chair of the “Texas Welcomes Home General Walker Committee,” warmly introduces the general.
Dressed in a suit, the lanky general strides onto the stage and is engulfed in a standing ovation.
Standing completely straight, Walker adjusts his black glasses, pulls out a sheaf of papers, and begins reading his speech. In the audience, people wave American flags and hiss when he mentions the State Department. Those close enough to the stage can see that Walker’s hands are shaking:
“Tonight I stand alone before you as Edwin A. Walker. I have been charged with nothing. I have been found guilty of nothing. I have been punished for nothing.
“I welcome the opportunity to stand before you as the symbol of the capability to coordinate the inspired and unchallengeable power of the people with the strength of our military forces. Such unity of purpose and spirit would cause an immediate capitulation o
f Reds and Pinks from Dallas to Moscow to Peking.”
Walker’s voice quavers and cracks. He mispronounces words and fumbles passages. He leans over his papers, his eyes darting up occasionally for a glimpse of the crowd. It is the biggest audience he has ever addressed as a civilian. But his followers don’t mind his halting delivery. He seems real, and they are cherishing every word.
But Dealey and some of the other men on the citizens council are also watching and wondering if this really is the man on horseback, the man who can overthrow the little boy Kennedy on his tricycle. The content in the speech is good, quite good, but Walker will have to work on his delivery. Kennedy’s cronies in Washington will eat him alive.
When Walker describes how he has resigned from the military because he “could no longer be a collaborator,” the crowd rises to its feet.5
He rails against the media. He warns that the international communist conspiracy will include the takeover of American churches and schools. And he insists that U.S. generals such as himself could have easily eradicated the Soviet threat a long time ago… if they hadn’t been throttled by meddlesome politicians in Washington.
“To this day,” he says, his voice rising in indignation, “the military are censored in their control of the nuclear weapons they need in combat. Every senior officer in your military establishment for the past ten years has been concerned or involved directly in the struggle to release atomic weapons from bureaucratic civilian control.”6
The crowd in Dallas goes wild.
“Russia… would be no threat to anyone.”7
As Walker drives his speech home, everyone is standing, applauding, shouting his name. It is overwhelming. After ninety minutes, he finally walks off stage having been interrupted with applause more than one hundred times.
Now it is time for an encore.
Dallas’s mayor, Earle Cabell, steps forward. Cabell, like Walker, has deep ties to the John Birch Society. Cabell was present when the first local branch of the society had been formed two years earlier. Cabell knows, from his own family experience, about how generals running afoul of John F. Kennedy are treated—and he shares Walker’s loathing of Kennedy: His brother, General Charles P. Cabell, was recently fired by Kennedy as deputy director of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The Dallas mayor, whose father and grandfather were mayors of the city, also has ancestral ties to the Confederacy. His grandfather was a Confederate general, and his likeness is enshrined in the grand Confederate Memorial just a short walk from the auditorium.
Cabell knows Walker is already receiving substantial financial support from people in Dallas, and that Walker has established his temporary headquarters in the city. The mayor is anxious to seal the deal—and he wants to do it in front of six thousand witnesses.
He steps to the microphone. As Walker stands proudly by his side, Mayor Cabell presents Walker with a fancy Western hat, along with a certificate honoring him with a “Dallas Citizen’s Award”:
“It is my pleasure and privilege, General Walker, to present to you at this time, this certificate endowing you with all the… privileges of honorary citizenship in this great city of Dallas.”
Walker clutches his cowboy hat and beams while listening to the mayor.
He is, truly, at home.
1962
JANUARY
Ted Dealey has arrived downtown and is placing a call to a new friend in the city: Robert Morris is one of the most dedicated communist hunters in America, and the former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security, where he formed a close alliance with Senator Joseph McCarthy.
One of Morris’s targets, a Canadian diplomat, committed suicide in the heat of Morris’s investigations. Some blamed him for a smear campaign, but to Morris, the man’s death was a vindication of the evidence he had amassed. After a failed bid to win a Senate seat from New Jersey, Morris was offered the presidency of the University of Dallas, and he moved to the city in 1960. Almost upon arrival, he was embraced by Dealey and others as someone worth knowing.
Morris still has superior connections in national security circles in Washington and New York—and Dealey hopes that Morris will jump-start some sleuthing into rumors that he has been hearing about Kennedy.
As Morris pulls up to the newspaper building, he should be able to see the grand railroad passenger terminal and the viaduct that leads over the Trinity River into a part of Dallas called Oak Cliff—a leafy place with a few rolling hills. It is the part of town where strip club owner Jack Ruby is thinking of moving. Morris can also see, just a one-minute walk away, the steam heat rising by Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository.
Morris walks through the low-slung lobby and across the gleaming floors, takes an elevator up, and is ushered past the framed images of the newspaper’s founder, the bearded Confederate colonel from North Carolina whose wealthy family had owned several slaves, a foundry, grocery stores, and pieces of a railroad company.
Morris knows he is in his comfort zone whenever he visits Dealey. The publisher likes learning about the John Birch Society, where Morris is a high-ranking member. Dealey’s paper has been writing glowing stories about Morris, and about any ardent anti-communist in America. Dealey has also invited Morris to begin contributing editorial columns to the paper, and Morris has happily complied.
The News is still running commentary, news stories, and even cartoons supporting General Walker—including one showing Walker on his hands and knees, a gaping and bloody wound in his back, while a huge and mysterious hand clutches a knife adorned with the hammer and sickle. The unsubtle message is that a hero like Walker has been stabbed in the back by the powers-that-be… by the Kennedy White House. Only a few months ago, President Kennedy had urged Americans to consider building bomb shelters—and more than a few people in Dallas believed only Walker, not Kennedy, possessed the combative will to stand up to the Soviet nuclear threat.1
As Morris settles into a chair, Dealey tells him he is convinced that the president of the United States has been leading a secret life. He doesn’t have to tell Morris that he is also convinced that the Kennedys are out for retribution… against Dealey… and against Dallas.
The chance of exposing Kennedy as a fraud is almost too perfect not to pursue: A conservative columnist in New York named Victor Lasky has written to Dealey, congratulating him for his upbraiding of the president, and suggesting he has been doing spadework investigating the possibility that Kennedy has been married before. Dealey is instantly intrigued, he writes back, and the men begin an ongoing correspondence.
It is eating away at Dealey, to the point that he has ordered his most trusted journalists to investigate the rumors. He tells other staffers to make copies of all the Kennedy-related editorials and journalism that the Dallas Morning News has done over the last few years—and ship it free of charge to Lasky, who is working on his second attack-Kennedy book, one that will include suggestions that Kennedy has been deliberately exaggerating his military record.
The marital dirt about Kennedy has been bouncing around big-city newsrooms for a while. But it only gained a beachhead among the conspiracy-minded, anti-communist, anti-Kennedy stalwarts. The innuendo is tied to an alleged genealogy of “the Blauvelt family” that purports to show that a woman from Illinois named Durie Malcolm quietly married Kennedy in 1947—and that Kennedy’s unforgiving and calculating father wanted the marriage quietly dissolved and all public records of it expunged and destroyed.
Dealey orders his assistant managing editor Tom Simmons to make inquiries, to pull together some leads. He continues to stay in touch with Lasky. And now he has summoned Robert Morris.
In his office, Dealey explains what he is after. Morris has also heard the rumors about Kennedy’s secret marriage, and he personally knows those who are investigating the president. While Dealey looks on, Morris picks up the publisher’s telephone and makes a long-distance call to a trusted friend in New York, a publisher named Lyle Munson who spe
cializes in printing and distributing anti-communist literature.
The man tells Morris that, yes, he has heard the Kennedy marriage rumor: He has already done his own digging and has actually gotten the woman in question on the phone. He asked her point-blank: Have you ever been married to John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Without hesitation, the woman uttered four straight curse words before slamming the phone down.2
Morris thanks his friend and turns back to Dealey—and relays the news that the investigation has reached a dead end. The publisher is perhaps disappointed, but certainly not ready to give up.
Dealey keeps folders that are by now bulging with excoriating telegrams from the men he once considered part of his warm publishing fraternity—the men he would meet, every year, at the newspaper and publisher conventions around the nation, the men he’d sent Christmas cards to, the men who were part of his family’s whole inherited world of journalism. It is like a family shunning—and he is perhaps thinking, late into the night, that this is what it must be like to be the lone warrior. Even in Texas, where his family has been considered one of the enduring newspaper dynasties, there are people telling him that he has been an utter asshole. A moron. A boor. That he might be speaking for a few people in Dallas, but not for the rest of Texas.
Maybe worst of all, there are even people sending him copies of a nationally syndicated column written by the hugely popular journalist Drew Pearson. The column says that, eight years earlier, Dallas police had arrested Dealey for drunk and disorderly conduct and cursing like holy hell at the police.
His wife was driving their Cadillac when it slammed into another car. Dealey threatened to attack the policeman who arrived at the scene, and told the officer he would “whip” his ass if the officer took off his uniform. As the policeman tried to restore order, someone inside the Dealey car began screaming: “You can’t arrest him! He’s Ted Dealey and owns half of Dallas!”3 Dealey reportedly yelled at the officer over and over again—even at the police station. Fines were paid, some friends came to take the Cadillac, and the matter eventually went away.
Dallas 1963 Page 13