Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  Millions of Americans are opening their morning newspapers to find shocking photos from Dallas. Breathless reports describe a city that seems to have gone insane: Anti–United Nations demonstrators shoved, booed, beat, and spat in the face of Adlai E. Stevenson.

  Reporters summon references to 1960, when “a clawing, hissing, mink-coat mob held vice-presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson and his wife at bay in a hotel lobby for almost an hour.”24

  On the evening news, Walter Cronkite seems to frown in disapproval as the footage from Dallas airs. The images are played over and over, with slow motion and freeze frames. The Washington Post describes the crowd in Dallas as “creatures from a jungle swamp.”25 Time calls them “Dallas’ adult delinquents.” The lone liberal publication in the state, the Texas Observer, says: “If the Birchers had not been in the minority, the Stevenson Riot would have had blood as well as spit.”26

  Having been in Dallas less than twenty-four hours, Stevenson departs early Friday morning. A dozen uniformed police officers and at least six plainclothesmen stand guard as he makes the short walk from the airport terminal to his plane.

  Later in the day, after he lands in Los Angeles, Stevenson speaks about the Dallas incident: “I’m glad to be here at all, especially alive, indeed not even wounded.”27

  He decides that Dallas is being objectified—perhaps too much. There are people, like Stanley Marcus, who invited him, who supported him. The crowd of supporters was far bigger than the crowd that assaulted him. He remains gracious and complimentary toward his hosts in Dallas: “I’ve never had a more enthusiastic reception than in Dallas,” he says. The problem was “the violent behavior of a few.”

  A reporter asks him why he didn’t want the woman in Dallas arrested—or even the man who spat on him:

  “I don’t want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.”28

  Privately, Stevenson is very concerned about Kennedy’s safety in the city.

  He takes a phone call from Arthur Schlesinger, a senior White House aide. Schlesinger tells him that Kennedy admires how he had remained calm under fire in Dallas. The two men joke lightheartedly about the incident.

  Then, suddenly, Stevenson becomes serious:

  “There was something very ugly and frightening about the atmosphere,” he says.

  He mentions that he had talked to Stanley Marcus and other leading people in Dallas. There was uncertainty, some dread, in Dallas.

  “They wondered whether the President should go to Dallas,” Stevenson says. “And so do I.”29

  Back in Dallas, a group of one hundred civic and business leaders, led by Mayor Earle Cabell, quickly wires an official apology to Stevenson:

  “The city of Dallas is outraged and abjectly ashamed of the disgraceful discourtesies you suffered at the hands of a small group of extremists here last night,” the telegram reads. The attackers do “not represent the heart or the mind of this great city.”30

  Mindful of President Kennedy’s upcoming visit and the negative consequences for Dallas if the president decides to cancel, the city leaders forward a copy of the telegram to the White House.

  The more moderate afternoon newspaper, the Dallas Times Herald, publishes a front-page apology:

  “Dallas has been disgraced. There is no other way to view the storm trooper actions of last night’s frightening attack on Adlai Stevenson… this misconstrued, misguided brand of ‘patriotism’ is dragging the name of Dallas through the slime of national dishonor.”31

  At his home on Turtle Creek, General Walker is feeling magnanimous. He admits a group of reporters and allows them to ask his opinion about the Stevenson event. He reminds them that he had not been at the auditorium, though he did happen to catch the television broadcast.

  “Mr. Stevenson’s speech was typically naïve, innocent, and false… I don’t know who they’re learning from, or what they are learning, unless it’s how to be communists.”32

  When asked if he’d organized the picketing against Stevenson, the general suddenly points to the door:

  “I think you have all the information you need right now.”33

  Around the nation, and despite a begrudging apology for the incident from the Dallas Morning News, some observers are racing to link the attack on Stevenson with publisher Ted Dealey’s running war with President Kennedy.

  An ABC News commentator lays the incident directly at Dealey’s doorstep, reminding national viewers that spitting and railing at national leaders is nothing new when it comes to some people from Dallas: Dealey “figuratively spat in the eye of the President of the United States himself in the White House itself.”34

  From his executive office on the fifth floor of Neiman Marcus, Stanley Marcus, pen in hand, begins drafting one of the most difficult and important letters he’s ever written. The Stevenson incident has left him with “a heavy heart… ashamed for the city.”35

  All day long he’s been hearing from angry customers canceling their Neiman Marcus charge cards because of his obvious public support for the United Nations, and by extension for John F. Kennedy.

  He patiently answers each complaint in diplomatic tones. But Marcus has also decided to let Ted Dealey know what he thinks—and to do it as directly as possible.

  The divisions in the city have been building for years. Marcus is from the old guard, too. His family dates back decades, just like Dealey’s. But there are lines of demarcation now, things that Marcus can’t abide. He spends hundreds of thousands each year in newspaper advertising. He sees Dealey at all the important galas and Dallas Citizens Council gatherings. They have almost always been diametrically opposed on political things—and only united in their common interest belief: They both want what is good for business in Dallas. Dealey, of all people, should know that the extremism in Dallas has given the city a black eye. That it is exactly what people once told his father about the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas.

  Marcus knows Dealey well enough to feel that he might simply toss his letter in the trash. He decides to address the letter to the heir to the Dealey dynasty—Ted’s son, Joe, who has recently become the president of the Dallas Morning News. Joe has a reputation for being more reasonable than his father. Maybe Marcus can reason with him, and maybe Joe in turn can influence his father:

  “I have a criticism to make… and I send it to you, not as an advertiser, but as a citizen of our community… we need to ask ourselves how and why incidents of this type occur in Dallas, for it is only possible to prevent their repetition if we can get the answers to the ‘how and why?’

  “In the opinion of many people, your paper has been one of the contributing factors to the development of a hard core of unreasonable people intolerant of any views opposed to their own. For many years… your paper has been preaching a doctrine of criticism of the Government and of the United Nations while at the same time giving solace to the extreme rightists like General Walker and his ilk.

  “I think that the constant sowing of seeds of intolerance has made it possible for the extreme rightist groups to grow in the city of Dallas with some aura of respectability.”

  Marcus pointedly reminds Dealey of his own success as a businessman: “I am for free enterprise as much as the Dallas News is. I am against communism as much as the Dallas News is.

  “We need to have a community that can live together and disagree amiably without the deep-seated bigotry and hatred that I sense is burning in the hearts and minds of too large a portion of our citizenship today.

  “The Dallas Morning News has a great responsibility… to lead as it did in the days of the Ku Klux Klan in bringing the state of reasonableness back into the bloodstream of Dallas.”36

  Once he finishes, Marcus signs his name and places the letter in an envelope, sealing it carefully. The letter goes out immediately. No one ever responds.

  In the wake of the attack on Stevenson, Rhett James must feel there is something deeply embedded among a handful of hard-edged people in Dallas, something that nurtures a bare
ly contained toxicity. The newspapers seem to echo it every morning. Day after day, people all over the city are picking up newspapers and reading one unsettling tale after another from the mean streets:

  The police fire a volley of shots into the back of a black man as he frantically scales a fence; they think he has stolen a car and now he is dead. White teenagers spit and curse at black students after a high school football game; a tossed beer bottle lacerates a cheerleader’s face. For no obvious reason, someone steps up to a woman sitting in a North Dallas café and shoots her in the mouth. A black laborer takes a bus to the home of his late white employer, a cotton merchant—and hammers the man’s widow to death. A seventeen-month-old baby is suddenly killed by a stray bullet. A fourteen-year-old black boy is in a coma after being hit and dragged by a speeding car driven by a middle-aged white man. In Oak Cliff, near where Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby both now live, a black man comes stumbling out of a one-story frame house. Eighty percent of his body is engulfed in flames and he is screaming: “Put me out, put me out.” Someone, a stranger, has doused him with a five-gallon can of gasoline and tossed a match at him.

  James returns to his pulpit at New Hope Baptist to preach unity and peace. The fact that despite the Stevenson attack, Kennedy is still coming to Dallas, with Johnson, is almost a sign, a miracle.

  Through LBJ’s urging, James has just been asked to be the Dallas representative at a meeting of President Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Employment in Los Angeles. With the appointment, James must feel as if there really are stronger bridges spanning straight from the Kennedy White House to ordinary people in Dallas like Juanita Craft, like himself. And that somehow, magically, those bridges are bypassing the normal hurdles, those hoary “traditions,” the Dallas Citizens Council, and even moments like the horrible attack on Adlai Stevenson.

  In their way, President Kennedy and his brother both seem unafraid of Dallas. They have to know that inviting black activists from Dallas to the White House—and then signing off on Adlai Stevenson’s visit to the city—is bringing the fight to certain intractable elders in the city.

  Mayor Earle Cabell has weighed the storm of negative publicity in the wake of the Stevenson debacle, the way people around the nation are now viewing Dallas, and he has made a decision: He is ready to publicly condemn the extremists.

  “Let us look these so-called patriots in the face, see who they are, what they have done and where they are leading us… These are not conservatives. These are radicals. Dallas cannot ignore the existence of this element any more than we can allow it to continue as our spokesman… This cancer on the body politic must be removed.”

  And maybe, despite the embarrassment and humiliation the city has suffered, Dallas will get another chance on November 22, when President Kennedy comes to town. “We have an opportunity to redeem ourselves when the President pays us a visit next month.”37

  The other longtime stewards of the Dallas Citizens Council—in the city, some refer to the twenty-five top leaders as “the Giants”—are taking no chances with Kennedy’s upcoming visit. In addition to Mayor Cabell’s speech, city officials are promising extra-vigilant protection for the president.

  “Any Dallas elements planning to give President Kennedy a reception similar to that accorded Adlai Stevenson may be in for a rude awakening,” the Dallas Morning News reports. The president’s security team “will compile a full report on who might be demonstrating, where and why… By the time the President arrives in Dallas, the men assigned to that segment of his Texas tour will be very knowledgeable about his zealous critics.”38

  The federal agents “are sharp-eyed, alert and cat-like in their quickness. They know what they are watching out for and, usually, whom.”39

  The News promises a veritable blanket of ironclad security:

  “Every inch of the President’s route from the time his plane arrives at Love Field to the time it leaves will be thoroughly explored.”40

  General Edwin A. Walker walks out into his front yard and looks up at the three American flags flapping in the breeze. Reverently, carefully, he brings each one down.

  Later, commuters traveling along Turtle Creek Boulevard notice a strange sight.

  Out in front of Walker’s gray mansion are three American flags, as always. Only now they are flying upside down.

  Photos of Walker’s protest flash across the country. Reporters predictably arrive at his grand home, and he tells them that there is an unseen hand at work in America. That “the invisible government” brought Stevenson to Dallas in order to spread communism.

  “Adlai got what was coming to him. He represents the U.N. and since the people can’t get to the U.N., they got to him.”41

  Larrie Schmidt is gurgling with energy, anxious to write to his old army ally Bernard Weissman.

  Schmidt is inspired by Walker’s steadfast resistance, still cresting in the wake of the Stevenson protests and all the national coverage.

  Maybe it will finally convince Weissman and others to relocate to Dallas and join the insurgency. It is the only city in America that would have the courage to confront Stevenson head-on—and imagine what it could do when Kennedy arrives next month.

  Schmidt writes: “What appeared at first to have been a great blunder of ours has rapidly turned into a great victory.”

  He has been in Dallas long enough to know who the specific enemies in the city are. He saw them with his own eyes, trying to protect Stevenson from the hard truths in Dallas: “The ultra liberals of Dallas, led by STANLEY MARCUS of Neiman Marcus went too far in pressuring for denunciation of ‘extremists’ and ‘Fascists’ in Dallas. As a result, a bomb has exploded everywhere here against them. This town is a battleground and that is no joke. Never before have the Dallas conservatives from the GOP to the John Birch Society ever been so strongly united.”42

  His letter arrives in New York, and Weissman has already seen what everyone else in America has seen—the images from Dallas, the way people were so determined, so unafraid. He packs his trunk with some clothes and points his car south, toward Dallas.

  Bruce Alger knows that Mayor Cabell has been essentially denouncing the very man—General Walker—that Cabell, Dealey, and most of the powerful men in Dallas once openly embraced as a heroic savior on horseback.

  But Alger decides to stick to his guns, and for a minute it seems as if Dealey’s Dallas Morning News is back in his corner, allowing him to vent about the weak-willed liberals and socialists who are painting Dallas as a dark-hearted fortress in Texas. The paper allows him space to defend the city: “Why should there be any discrediting of Dallas? Why are good people, with good intentions, taken in and assume a feeling of guilt where no guilt exists, and apologize for a community that has done no wrong?”43

  Alger also decides to send a special newsletter to his constituents titled “Dallas—proud, courageous—truly the home of the free and the brave.”

  And finally, he says the twenty-two-year-old man—a member of Walker’s organization, and the one who spat on the policeman at the Stevenson melee and had to be wrestled into submission—was really a patriot. He was driven mad by the truth. He “lost his head because of his resentment against the U.N., that threatens his freedom and his country’s freedom… If you disapprove vocally of such things, are you to be called intemperate?

  “The real issue is that the U.N. today is engaging in many actions harmful to peace, to the communist-captive peoples, to the sovereignty of the United States.”

  Alger denounces any need to apologize for Dallas: “The enemies of the United States are encouraged… this all fits with the Communist objective.”44

  Too, he adds that he is encouraged to hear similar stirrings from his voters in his Dallas district. An executive with H. L. Hunt’s oil company told him: “Obviously, Adlai was intent on starting something.”45 And another Alger supporter told him the Stevenson attack was just a big political charade, planned in advance to make Dallas look insane, just the way LBJ had “planned�
�� the mink coat melee in 1960: “You will note that the circumstances were so similar with the fiasco set up by Lyndon Johnson… that it could have been planned by the same people in advance… to try and goad those whom he knew to be his political enemies, to create an issue to use in the coming campaign.”46

  NOVEMBER

  It is 3 a.m. and President Kennedy is being told there is a phone call with some desperately urgent news: A coup has been launched against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, security chief Ngo Dinh Nhu.

  The well-coordinated revolt is being carried out by South Vietnam’s senior military command, with tacit support from the Kennedy administration. Tanks are rumbling through Saigon’s streets as key government ministries fall to the rebels. Diem and Nhu are trapped in the presidential palace, guarded by fifteen hundred loyalist troops. Fighter jets are strafing the building as the opposition forces advance.

  The intense fighting continues throughout the day. By 5 p.m. Washington time on November 1, coup leaders announce that Diem and Nhu have surrendered.

  As the crisis unfolds, Madame Nhu holds a brief press conference at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, where she has been staying ever since her visit to Dallas:

  “No coup can erupt without at least Americans inciting it or backing it,” she tells the jostling newsmen. “I believe all the devils of hell are against us, but I believe that we shall triumph eventually.”

  When asked if she might seek political asylum in the United States, Madame Nhu loses her temper.