As the summer steams ahead, President Kennedy goes on television to make an impassioned appeal for civil rights legislation. A few hours later, on June 12, in Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers is returning home from an NAACP meeting carrying T-shirts stamped JIM CROW MUST GO. As Evers walks up to his house, a sniper guns him down, murdering him right in front of his two young children.
Evers had been at the forefront of many integration actions in the South, including James Meredith’s efforts to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962. His death sparks national outrage against violent segregationists. Even Ted Dealey’s Dallas Morning News expresses sadness and regret for the murder, while noting: “But the blame for any hotheadedness in the South can be put, in part, on those who are trying to change a way of life too quickly.”2
Yet in Dallas, Dan Smoot seems unmoved, even seeming to wonder why Evers had been turned into a “national hero.” He argues that John F. Kennedy is plotting with the racial activists, ones no doubt like Juanita Craft and Reverend Rhett James in Dallas, to establish a socialist dictatorship ruled by Negroes. Smoot even approvingly quotes Dallas congressman Bruce Alger in his newsletter, printing Alger’s claim that, under the Kennedy administration, blacks are receiving far more federal jobs than their population warrants.
As the summer heat expands and fears of violence surge, Smoot finally makes wide-open forecasts that Dallas, and the nation, will soon be drenched in blood because of the president and his insistent embrace of those “negro racial agitation groups”:
“John F. Kennedy, catering to this crowd, is sowing the seeds of hate and violence: the nation will reap a bloody harvest.”3
AUGUST
It’s been a hopeful summer for Jacqueline Kennedy. America’s First Lady is expecting the couple’s third child in September, and she looks radiant. In recent weeks she has been taking her two young children, Caroline and John-John, to Washington-area parks, enjoying picnic lunches while the children scramble over playgrounds. Now she is comfortably settled in a waterfront home on Cape Cod, near the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port.
The prospect of a presidential baby is delighting many Americans. Some are hoping that she will choose to have the baby inside the White House. But other arrangements are being made: The Dallas Morning News runs a story pointing out that Mrs. Kennedy will go to Walter Reed Army Hospital to give birth, where she will occupy an “elegantly furnished” suite on the fourth floor. The News wants its readers to understand one salient fact about Mrs. Kennedy’s accommodation: FIRST LADY’S HOSPITAL STAY TO BE FREE EXCEPT FOR FOOD.1
While his wife and the children are on Cape Cod, President Kennedy is negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. As the agreement is reached, Kennedy goes on television to address the nation: “The achievement of this goal is not a victory for one side—it is a victory for mankind.”2 The treaty is signed in Moscow on August 5. Now the president must convince a skeptical public and Senate to embrace the treaty.
The News runs a bitter editorial, lambasting Kennedy as 50 TIMES A FOOL.3 The News’s lead editorial writer, Dick West, asks, “Is the fear of death now the main foundation of our foreign policy? Are we to be asked, in future negotiations, to surrender some of our cherished institutions to avoid the possibility of 5 million fatalities a second?”4
On H. L. Hunt’s Life Line, the very idea of coexistence with the communists has been under attack for years: “We are told by mistaken spokesmen that if we coexist peacefully for a while, communism will mellow and change… The Marxist-Leninists have dedicated themselves to the task of obliterating from the face of the earth every trace of God… So in the Cold War it is God Himself who is ultimately at stake.”5
The Dallas Morning News wants everyone to understand that it’s not just high-level editors opposed to the president’s policy: The grassroots is angry as well. The News prints a “man-in-the-street” opinion poll that indicates massive resistance: “President Kennedy was censured on several occasions in the poll.”6
Just two days after the Moscow signing, as her husband is working to build support for the test ban treaty, Jacqueline Kennedy begins feeling sharp pains in her abdomen. She is raced to Otis Air Force Base Hospital in Bourne, Massachusetts. An emergency cesarean section is performed. The premature baby boy weighs just under five pounds, and he is struggling to breathe. He is immediately transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital in critical condition.
The anguished president rushes to be with his child and remains by the baby’s side for two days. Finally, the boy dies from respiratory distress syndrome. The president and the First Lady had picked out a name well in advance—Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The baby is laid to rest after a private funeral mass.
SEPTEMBER
Larrie Schmidt is inside his favorite dark watering hole, a sad run-down little place called the DuCharme Club. It’s been a year since he moved to Dallas. He’s on a break from pushing life insurance policies to people in the city. As he nurses his drink, he has been thinking that the bar might be a good business opportunity, maybe a place to buy, maybe a place to use as a meeting headquarters. The mission, being embedded in Dallas, trying to infiltrate and command the conservative activist groups, is proving harder than he imagined. It’s certainly not helping his marriage having to juggle a job and trying to make Dallas his base of operations for his master plan. He is hearing less and less from the soldiers in Munich who were once so gung-ho to join him, to enlist in the cause, to fight for the same thing that General Walker believed in. He had expected at least one soldier, one ally, to join him each month that he was in Dallas. But by now, Schmidt knows that not many—if any—are coming. Even if Dallas is the right place, perhaps the only place in America, to start the revolution.
As Schmidt drinks another beer, he takes solace in the fact that his brother Bob has moved to Dallas and is joining the right-wing army.
Sometimes, Schmidt must wonder if he has been inadvertently outflanked by the conservative elite in Dallas. There is still a chain of command inside the inner circles. There are layers and then layers. Cracking through the layers is easier said than done. It is almost as if he is being tested.
After his exhilarating meeting at Robert Morris’s home, he perhaps felt that he had seduced the leading newspaper, the police, and even Morris—the liaison to the most powerful and wealthy conservatives in the city. At his apartment, after the meeting, Schmidt had quickly told his friends in Germany that he had agreed with Morris’s plan to form a Young Americans for Freedom chapter in Dallas—and by agreeing to join it, Schmidt and his friends would have the perfect organization to begin their master plan to seize control of the conservative revolution in America.
But later, Schmidt was in touch with the men from the Dallas Morning News who were the nominal heads of the chapter—and they told Schmidt that he and his followers would be required to pay $60 “founders” dues to the Dallas YAF.
It was a steep entry fee for military men making less than $100 per month in the army. Schmidt sent letters to his friends still stationed in Germany telling them that they should still come to Dallas. That once they set up a base of operations, they would soon be making far more income as members of the YAF executive board.
Only one soldier in Germany, Larry Jones, wrote back to express his complete faith in Schmidt. After his discharge over the summer, Jones made the journey to Dallas, lured by Schmidt’s promises of big money and major influence.
What he found instead was Schmidt living in a cheap apartment and spending most of his spare time drinking beer at the DuCharme. Among the DuCharme’s main charms, perhaps its only charm, was that it sold beer on credit—a practice that Schmidt took frequent advantage of.
As he settled into Dallas, Jones learned that there were no salaries for being board members of the YAF, so he took a job selling used cars. For a time, he listened patiently as Schmidt sat on a bar stool at the DuCharme, suggesting they pool their money, buy the place, and
hire some Arthur Murray dance instructors to be hostesses. The ladies could hustle drinks and bring in new customers. They approached a few women about the idea, but each was supremely uninterested. After a few weeks, Jones simply slipped out of the city.
Schmidt is down to one remaining soldier: Bernie Weissman, a Jew from the Bronx. After he was discharged in August, Weissman returned to New York City and found work selling encyclopedias. Schmidt has been pleading with Weissman, regaling him with tales of all the money he is making in Dallas. Schmidt claims to be averaging $342 a week on commissions, a salary nearly four times the national average.
He writes Weissman: “We shall be able to find employment for you with excellent economic opportunities. We have powerful contacts and allies down here.”1
One day, he clips some help wanted ads from the Dallas Morning News and sends them with his next letter to Weissman:
“I have a lot of contacts, both professionally and in business and politics. I know bankers, insurance men, realtors.”2
As the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Dallas approaches, Schmidt finally dreams that he is coming closer to the top ranks—to meeting with Dealey, with Criswell, and especially with H. L. Hunt. The reclusive oilman is the one man in America who can instantly bankroll the new patriotic revolution.
Schmidt has met with a former CIA operative in Dallas who writes scripts for H. L. Hunt’s Life Line radio program. Schmidt knows that the ex-CIA officer, Warren Carroll, is being paid the princely sum of $700 per week by Hunt. It is what Schmidt dreams of—earning excellent money for being a patriot.
And, perhaps just as good as this entrée to Hunt, his brother has worked hard to infiltrate the ranks of the young men who are at the heart of General Walker’s circle in Dallas. Bob has been volunteering, showing up at Walker’s home. One day he boldly asks Walker for a job.
Schmidt receives the excellent news: His brother has been hired to work full-time for Walker as his chauffeur.
Suddenly, low-level insurance man Schmidt thinks he has solid connections to both Hunt and Walker, that he is beginning to seriously infiltrate the Dallas far right. Now that he has connections, he needs more men, and he needs an action plan.
Each time his plane touches down at Dallas’s Love Field, Stanley Marcus feels like he is an ambassador returning home—and that he is, in fact, bringing the United Nations straight to a city in the Texas heartland.
As his driver leaves the airport, Marcus can see the tall downtown buildings jutting up like spires on the pancake-flat prairie. His store is in the dead center of it all. He knows his famous emporium is the most visible symbol of globalism in the city.
He has funded major art exhibitions and cultivated his customers’ tastes for the finest things from Europe and Asia. And through his Dallas Council on World Affairs, Marcus has arranged the visits of hundreds of foreign dignitaries over the last ten years. Inarguably, he is the city’s most prominent internationalist—and the one high-profile figure in the city who fears his home is too often consumed by xenophobia.
Marcus is a world traveler, and he serves on a prominent national committee in support of the United Nations. He is the state chair for the United Nations Day Committee in Texas. One of his highest-ranking employees is president of the Dallas United Nations Association. Marcus is a fierce admirer of Adlai Stevenson, the cerebral U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
At Neiman Marcus, he has also created an extravagant October festival devoted to the world’s cultures. Known as the “Fortnight,” the two-week exposition highlights a particular country or region chosen specifically by Marcus. He carefully orchestrates the festival so that museums feature artists from the chosen countries, theaters stage just the right plays, and civic organizations host timely lectures. Marcus convinces foreign governments and his suppliers to underwrite the costs—by pointing out how new markets are being created for their products.
During the Fortnight festival the store remakes itself, immersing customers in a nod to a featured country. National magazines, like Time, gush when Marcus turns his attention to France: “From top to bottom the six-story building was like a Gallic birthday cake. The exterior became a reproduction of chic Paris shops. Inside, the first floor was transformed into a three-dimensional scene of the Place de la Concorde.” Even the store’s restaurant, the Zodiac, is converted into a facsimile of Paris’s famous Maxim’s restaurant.3
Ambassadors and royalty will descend on Dallas for the grand opening of the Fortnight. The ribbon-cutting ceremonies take place at the front door of Neiman Marcus, with a beaming Stanley Marcus shaking hands, posing for pictures, and welcoming high-profile visitors and a parade of eager customers.
He is a showman, really, someone who has learned to appeal to Dallas’s vanities—but he is convinced this mercantile angling is also nourishing Dallas’s soul, making the city realize that the things from the outside, from the other worlds, are not so threatening. It is enlightened self-interest—it is good for Marcus and it is good for Dallas. He is gifted with enormous profits and the city, in turn, is made more hospitable, more open, more tolerant. In the end, if it helps to tamp down the wicked extremism—the swastikas, the cross burnings, the almost knee-jerk hatred of Dr. King and President Kennedy and the United Nations—it is all good for the city.
He has to be cheered by this fact: The store always posts record sales during these salutes to “foreign culture.” People are spending money, to be sure, but perhaps they are also immunizing themselves and the city against the bilious xenophobia.
It is no coincidence that he plans this year’s extravaganza to overlap with the annual commemoration of United Nations Day. October 24 recognizes the founding of the international body in 1948. Despite the anti–United Nations resistance emanating from the Dallas Morning News, Alger, Walker, Criswell, and Hunt, many people in Dallas have been early and enthusiastic adopters of UN Day—and for years several civic organizations have tried to highlight UN contributions to world peace. Marcus tells people to remember World War II. To think of the United Nations as a bulwark for peace: “The best tool that I know of to prevent an outbreak of World War III.”4
It has been, thinks Marcus, a pivotal year for Dallas. Dr. King, the man who dreamed of a peaceful and united America, finally came to the city, and he survived his visit without any violence, with the protesters drowned out by the warm embrace of thousands of black and white residents joining together.
The lunatics who tried to kill Walker, who planted swastikas on Neiman Marcus window fronts, had to be just a tiny, seething, foaming minority. Marcus is an optimist, someone who hopes for the best, who assumes that the collective goodwill in the city will rule the day—and that most of the people in Dallas will never let it be hijacked by the bursting anger of men like Walker.
And he is also pleased at the way his ambitious international marketing campaign for Dallas is going. It is a place that he wants people to come to—not just from New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but from London, Madrid, Rome, and Paris. He wants people to think of Dallas as a top-tier city that has artfully blended its history with its promising future:
“A jet-age city with old-fashioned Southwestern hospitality and charm.”5
Bruce Alger has decided to write a confrontational two-page letter to John F. Kennedy—and then share it with the world. Maybe this last-ditch effort to publicize his extreme hostility toward Kennedy will help him survive in Dallas:
“Kennedy is operating as chief executive without regard to the rule of law and is, indeed, substituting his own judgment and will for the exercise of the constitutional powers by the Congress and the people. He does not trust the people to handle their own affairs, but rather believes in his own infallibility to do all things for them, using, of course, their money.”6
After three black men are promoted to supervisory positions in city post offices—in the wake of a Kennedy decree pushing for equal employment and promotion opportunities—Alger demands a congre
ssional probe.7 When an NAACP leader from Dallas comes to visit him in Washington, pleading for Alger to support President Kennedy’s civil rights bill, Alger bluntly refuses. He tells the man that the NAACP is helping clergymen incite Negroes into rioting and lawlessness—and it is cleverly staging demonstrations that will surely lead to chaos and violence.8 Alger knows full well that his powerful rebuke of the NAACP will play well in Dallas—especially for those who have been afraid of Dr. King, Rhett James, and Juanita Craft.
Finally, Alger has decided to launch his public letter at Kennedy. He wants Kennedy to read, and read closely, along with everyone else in Dallas:
“Is Dallas being punished because the people have elected me their representative? Do you deny me the right to criticize your policies, when, in my best judgment they are wrong?”
After his demands for answers, Alger says that he would like to meet Kennedy—soon, and man-to-man.9
It is hard to ignore John Birch Society billboards peppering the city: U.S. OUT OF THE U.N. And now the Texas legislature has even taken up a bill to outlaw the display of the United Nations flag or seal on any building funded with tax dollars. The proposal would effectively negate UN Day in Texas—and violators could be sent to a Texas prison for two years.
The Dallas Morning News gave a brassy endorsement to the bill, and all nine Dallas-area state representatives voted to support the ban on United Nations Day. The anti-UN bill sailed through the state Senate and seemed destined for certain passage in the House until one lawmaker rose to his feet and condemned it as: “Another attempt to appease the lunatic fringe which contaminates our public life and which holds that patriotism is not the quiet dedication of a lifetime but is frequent outbursts of emotionalism.”10
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