Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  Now Dealey wonders how anyone found out about the incident and whether a liberal drone like Drew Pearson was in fact working on behalf of the Kennedys. The story is being seen in hundreds and hundreds of papers, from coast to coast.

  He has carefully built an image of himself as the newspaper publisher who is also the sturdy social and political conscience of the city. Looking out the newspaper window into a wintry Dallas, anyone could see a city wrestling with itself.

  When his secretary peeks her head in the door and then brings him the morning mail, there is often another story tucked inside the handwritten letters to him—this one a syndicated column that is appearing in various newspapers or magazines, clipped out and put in those envelopes simply addressed: TED DEALEY, DALLAS MORNING NEWS.

  This article is a long piece suggesting it has the “real story” of the showdown between Dealey and Kennedy in the White House. In Dealey’s version, published in his paper, he left the impression that the young president had been so wounded by Dealey’s attack that he had been unable to muster any intelligible defense.

  This new story, however, indicates that Kennedy had actually eloquently rebutted Dealey: “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey, is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of 180 million Americans, which you have not.

  “Mr. Dealey, I may not be in the White House more than four years but I do not want it ever said that a Kennedy brought war to the United States. I have been in a war myself. I lost a brother in the war and a brother-in-law, and I know what war is. 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.”4

  This spreading story stings Dealey. And it is one he is convinced is being peddled by Kennedy’s willing media servants. Dealey decides to do some digging, ordering his own reporters, again, to find out what the hell the Kennedys are up to. His staff sends him confidential memos: The columnist who reported Kennedy’s alleged remarks to Dealey is a well-known friend of the Kennedy clan named Charles Bartlett. Dealey’s sources tell him—incorrectly—that Bartlett was JFK’s best man at his wedding to Jacqueline.

  Dealey writes a note to Bill Steven, an old friend and the editor of the Houston Chronicle, and tells him that he has been doing some digging into the Kennedy media machine. That he has found things out about the minion who was no doubt summoned by Kennedy to savage Dealey in a story about how Kennedy had rebuked the Dallas newspaper publisher: “It is my understanding that this (reporter) was the best man at President Kennedy’s wedding and that he is at the present time engaged in forming an all nigger club in Washington…”5

  Dealey then dictates a note to his champion Washington correspondent, Bob Baskin, thanking him for keeping him posted on all the Kennedy machinations in Washington. He tells Baskin to alert him if Kennedy is planning group meetings with any other American publishers. Dealey says he wants to “encourage them to speak up like I did instead of sitting around the President like a bunch of graven images.”

  Dealey signs off on his note to his bureau chief: “Regards to you and all the other folks in nigger town.”6

  To the women watching him inside Dallas’s grand old Baker Hotel, the ex-general Edwin Walker seems to be losing control, fighting some sort of battle within himself. Hundreds of well-dressed members of the Dallas Public Affairs Luncheon Club and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution are fixed on him:

  “I am convinced that a soldier, to live a full life, must know how to live—and how to die,” says Walker.

  His voice has broken and he is trembling, quavering, clearly on the verge of tears. Through misty eyes, he looks down at his prepared speech and then at the audience. The words refuse to come. He blinks, trying to regain his focus.

  The women have heard speeches from decorated veterans before, and some of them are married to men who served in the military. This doesn’t seem to be the stiff-backed man from Dallas who is becoming the face of the anti-communist movement in America—the man who stormed the Nazis during the war, the one who wants to bomb communist Russia into submission, the one who has the spine to stand up to the prancing Kennedy.

  Trying to gather his composure, to stop from bawling like a baby, Walker looks out over the friendly faces—these women had just passed a resolution, earlier, to condemn the “military censorship” of Walker. He is, of course, inside the same hotel where the Judas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was attacked by the mink coat mob in November 1960 when one of Walker’s staunchest political allies, Bruce Alger, tried to blow up the Kennedy-Johnson presidential election bid.

  Maybe if Alger had actually succeeded, maybe if some of these very same women had succeeded back then, Walker wouldn’t be here right now. He’d still be in the military, on the road to bigger things—and a greater hand in controlling U.S. foreign policy. He wouldn’t be feeling his own voice grow faint and weak, fighting back tears—because Kennedy would never have won. And Kennedy wouldn’t have forced him out of the military, out of the mission he had given his entire life to.

  Sometimes, when Walker tries to articulate his deepest fears, he gets lost. He drifts, loses concentration, stumbles and stares at the notes in front of him as if they are suddenly blank. Finally, haltingly, he begins to speak again—about his soldiers, the ones who served with him in Europe, or who are still facing down the communist menace and guarding the borders and checkpoints in Berlin and Eastern Europe. They are not bending toward socialism:

  “The man standing near the barbed wire is not too liberal,” Walker tells the women.

  Then Walker goes after LBJ—who has been traveling to Asia, monitoring the United States’ relationships with China and Vietnam: “When Lyndon Johnson comes back to this country from Asia and says that changing the standard of living is the answer to communism, then he is badly misinformed.”

  Walker reaches for a handkerchief. Choking with emotion, he suddenly begins talking again about the men from his old army unit in Germany. The Dallas women are rising to their feet and applauding him—and the troops.

  He shouts out: “If the men of the 24th could hear you today—they would raise the roof!”7

  General Walker’s towering home along bucolic Turtle Creek Boulevard is already becoming a tourist destination in Dallas. The house is impossible to miss. Three American flags are stationed on the outside perimeter of his front lawn, and his name is prominently labeled on the mailbox: GENERAL EDWIN A. WALKER. Two more flags—a Texas and a Confederate banner—are positioned near his front entrance.

  Walker has also installed a large sign in his yard—a billboard, some people call it—so that he can display a patriotic message. Today’s appeal reads: GET THE U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.

  Walker often patrols the grounds, allowing himself to be seen by those driving or walking past. Sometimes people stop and ask to take photographs with him. The two-story gabled house has about five thousand square feet, and its living room is dominated by a very large, gold-framed painting of his mother, Charlotte, looking strong and regal in a fine pink dress. Mrs. Walker personally delivered the painting when she came to help her son get settled into his new home.

  If people in Dallas think the mansion is too much for one person, the truth is that Walker has plenty of company. In addition to being his private residence, it also functions as his new command center. Inside, volunteers who have enlisted in Walker’s cause are busy opening letters with cash donations inside—or are sending out patriotic pamphlets and fund-raising appeals.

  Desks, filing cabinets, and stacks of booklets with Walker’s speeches are everywhere. Walker decides to set up what he calls a “Patriotic Telephone Service.” Callers receive a three-minute recorded message from the general, which ends with his plea for donations to his mission. Three hundred to four hundred calls are coming in every week.

  Visitors who ring the doorbell at the home, people who want to get him to s
ign one of his pamphlets, can’t help but notice that there is always a bustle of earnest, well-groomed young men inside the stately home. Walker has plenty of overnight company, many of them muscled, clean-cut former soldiers. As they march through his home, carry boxes, or move file cabinets, Walker affectionately introduces them to others as his “adjutants.”

  A patrolman in Fort Worth, the segregated twin city just thirty miles west of Dallas, is gunning his car toward the Ahavath Sholom Synagogue. It is close to 1:30 a.m. on a jet-black, chilly Saturday. The police department has just gotten a tip that someone is going to plant a bomb at the temple.

  Through the blanketing darkness, as he carefully pulls closer to the building, he can make out two figures moving furtively in the dark. They are carrying something.

  He yells for them to halt and the figures freeze as he carefully approaches. The officer is stunned: It is two young boys—and they are armed with charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, and gunpowder from fireworks. They are twelve and fourteen, a seventh-and a ninth-grader.

  They tell the police that they want to blow the synagogue up. But that they have “no ill feelings toward Jewish people” and that they “intended no harm.” One of the boys also has a knife and when the policeman examines it, he notices it has been etched with a Nazi emblem. He orders the children into his car.

  It is creeping toward 2 a.m. As the arresting officer drives them for booking downtown, one of the boys suddenly stabs his arm out the open window of the patrol car—and seems to let something flutter into the wind. The officer slams the car to a halt and runs back to where the object has landed. There is something dark at the side of the road. It looks like a piece of cloth. He reaches down, picks it up. It is an armband with a black swastika symbol.

  He climbs back in the car, with the Nazi armband, and continues to the police station. The building is infamous for having what some black residents in North Texas call “the Showdown Room”—a place where elderly black men are taken, told to drop their pants, and then whipped with belts by various cops… while being asked which of the policemen is whipping harder.8

  A booking officer picks up a phone, calls the children’s parents, and tells them their sons have just been arrested.9

  Walker is speeding from Dallas to West Texas, to the remote patch of desert where the Bush dynasty has sent George H. W. Bush with hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money for the family’s forays into the oil patch. Walker has been asked to give a speech in this remote northwestern corner of the state—there are loyal oilmen out there, people who hate the Kennedy family, who know Kennedy wants to take away the oil depletion allowances. This part of Texas, especially, is ready to go to war over socialistic regulation, Big Government, and attempts to tax the oilmen to death. They are convinced that they are producing the nation’s lifeblood—and they are doing it on their own dime, on their own goddamned faith and sweat.

  Going to West Texas is like visiting another country. You spend endless hours driving across flat expanses of nothing—until a West Texas oil town wells up like some sort of metallic Oz on the prairie. As he travels, Dallas is still very much on his mind. He has never broken down in public like that. It isn’t like him. The women in Dallas were so forgiving, accepting. They cheered him, comforted him.

  When he arrives in the rugged, industrial city of Odessa, there is a message that the National Indignation Convention in Dallas needs him to speak to the faithful—and now. He quickly agrees to be patched back by telephone.

  The NIC is anxious to expand into a national organization, and it is naturally turning to General Walker; it stands to gain more followers by enlisting him in the cause. At convention rallies, Walker is praised as a modern-day George Washington and his speeches are handed out along with the same John Birch materials that Walker once ordered his own troops to study.

  In Dallas, in the cavernous Memorial Auditorium, the audience cheers as a telephone is held before a microphone and Walker’s voice comes crackling out of the loudspeakers:

  “The press in the United States were the willing servants and propagandists of the Soviet Union. If anyone needed to know that the press was filled with leftists, all they had to do was look at how magazines had named Nikita Khrushchev ‘Man Of The Year.’ ”

  He clamors on, name checking the media, confirming everyone’s worst fears that reporters and editors and publishers are entranced by the kind of liberalism that leads to socialism… and total government control:

  “The Soviet propagandists. The left wing press… The New York Times, NBC and CBS.”

  As Walker’s voice echoes in the Dallas auditorium, it is cold and icy out on the streets of the city. The neon lights on Commerce, near the slinky nightclubs with the showgirls, are beginning to blink on. There are Greyhound buses pulling into the nearby terminal. There is an old millinery shop that stays open late and when you walk by you can often see women leaning over, sewing into the evening. At the Dallas Farmer’s Market, just a few blocks from the auditorium, the wind will sometimes rattle the big metal sheds and the sound will echo in the night.

  Frank McGehee, leader of the National Indignation Convention, is disappointed that the audience isn’t larger—he blames it on bad weather. But the crowd is fiery, raucous—and people are yelling as Walker lights into the media. And it isn’t just Dallas that’s hearing Walker. His voice is also being transmitted to other meetings across the country—on the “National Indignation Committee Freedom Network.”10

  It is still hard for him to fathom that he can speak so freely—and even be paid for it. The requests for interviews and speeches are ceaseless. Walker is especially bold during one stop in Jackson, Mississippi: “Three decades of Potomac pretenders—New Dealers, Fair Dealers, red herrings, co-existence artists and U.N. One World New Frontiersman—have conspired in the liquidation of our constitutional government.”11

  Every time he returns to his home in Dallas, there are stacks of inquiries, more open invitations: Can he come to the Crown Theater in Chicago to speak to five thousand people attending a meeting of a new group called the Pro Blue Organization? Will he address the segregationists with the Capital Citizens’ Council in Little Rock, Arkansas?

  It is building, for sure, to another decision. He wants to file his name in the governor’s race in Texas. That should be a good prelude to running, from Dallas, his presidential candidacy.

  He suddenly decides to take a quick, begrudging trip to San Antonio to speak to two hundred members of the Texas Press Association. He dislikes most people in the media, except for Ted Dealey in Dallas. But he also presumes that there are far more conservative publishers in Texas than liberal ones—though maybe none ballsy enough to confront Kennedy the way Dealey once had.

  “I must compliment Texas. Texas has been very responsive to the difficulties and dire perils of our world crisis. Texas is a state much farther advanced than most. This the press deserves a great deal of credit for,” he tells the crowd.

  Walker still hates speaking to a civilian public, but he knows enough to understand that he has to plant some seeds. If there is to be a takeover of the corrupt powers in Washington, a takeover that he is framing as an overthrow of a totalitarian regime led by John F. Kennedy, then he has to simply go all the way:

  “One half to two-thirds of the thousands of letters I have received since I left the Army refer to some sort of elective leadership.”12

  The media people in the audience look at each other and know it can only mean one thing: Walker is going to run for office—and it is all aimed at ultimately removing Kennedy and his passel of liberal socialists from the White House.

  FEBRUARY

  It is going on hour four as Walker presses the phone to his ear at his headquarters in Dallas. It has been a grueling conversation, and it is going around and around in circles. Walker is quiet and attentive, but he is unbending. Two allied senators, one Democrat and one Republican, are still working hard to convince him to drop out of the gubernatorial race even befor
e he starts.

  Strom Thurmond from South Carolina and John Tower from Texas are two of Walker’s greatest supporters and perhaps the two most powerfully strident conservatives in the Senate. They have been rattling sabers, demanding congressional inquiries into the way Walker’s military career ended—they’re calling it the “muzzling of the military,” as if Walker has been silenced by taking away his freedom of speech. They desperately want to turn the congressional inquiries into an anti-Kennedy witch hunt, a way to show how the Kennedy brothers bullied a good soldier like Walker straight out of the military after a lifetime of fighting for America.

  Walker listens patiently as Thurmond and Tower employ every trick they know. They both tell him he is a super-patriot: Entering the governor’s race in Texas is going to steal conservative votes. It is going to make it easier for Johnson’s “boy” John Connally to win the governor’s office. That is not what the solid conservatives, in either party, want. Save your ammunition for bigger battles.

  If the nation really is beginning to see an avalanche of wholesale resistance toward Kennedy—and people are more willing to hear from a war hero who isn’t a career politician—then there is always a chance that Walker can join Tower in the Senate… or go all the way to the White House. He is in every major newspaper, on every major TV outlet, and he is the most valuable political chip in Dallas—and one that needs to be played at just the right moment.

  By the end, Thurmond and Tower are in unison: Now is not the time to run for governor.

  Walker finally thanks them and hangs up. Within minutes he receives another call, this one from an agitated Congressman Bruce Alger.