Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  “Never!” she shouts. “Not in any country that would stab my country in the back!”1

  Later in the day, the news from Vietnam takes a grim turn. Saigon radio is reporting that Diem and Nhu have both committed suicide.

  While events in Southeast Asia spiral out of control, Kennedy’s aides huddle to map out plans for his Texas trip—and, in particular, for Dallas. They, too, want to avoid any headaches in the city. And they want to ensure that Kennedy leaves Dallas with a political plum, that he is sent off with hosannas in a city that, by now, so many people think of as the epicenter of the right-wing, anti-Kennedy resistance. If Kennedy is embraced by Dallas, if triumphant images of him being engulfed in cheers are broadcast around America, it will be proof that Kennedy can overcome any kind of resistance. His aides devote time to studying the city, reading Dealey’s newspaper, looking for clues about what to expect and how to prepare. For one thing, there has been an explosion of money in the city—the rich there seem to keep getting richer. They have only to look at the outrageous pages of the latest, famous Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, which has just appeared and is making its usual splash from coast to coast—just the way Stanley Marcus wants it.

  The store is selling cowboy chaps in white mink. A Shahtoosh muffler, made from the chin hairs of the ibex goat that lives in the Himalayas. Ten-gallon hats for dogs. A wastebasket made from an elephant’s foot. And a personal submarine for around $20,000. It’s fourteen feet long, weighs 975 pounds, fits two people, and cruises at three to seven miles per hour. “The ultimate in togetherness.”

  But today Stanley Marcus looks unusually preoccupied.

  He is in a meeting with his top executives where the talk is of the publicity the Neiman Marcus catalog is getting and about forecasts for holiday sales season.

  Marcus seems ruminative, detached, and he suddenly blurts out:

  “I think we ought to see whether or not we can persuade President Kennedy to change his mind about visiting Dallas.”

  The women and men grouped around the conference table stare at him.

  Marcus adds, “Frankly, I don’t think this city is safe for it.”2

  President Kennedy is expected to arrive at Chicago’s O’Hare Field at 11 a.m. He will be greeted by Mayor Richard Daley and then enjoy a grand motorcade through the city. It is November 2, and Kennedy says he’s coming to town to watch the Army-Navy football game, but the trip has obvious political overtones. Illinois, along with Texas, is one of the two states the president barely carried in the 1960 election. It will be crucial to keep it in his column in 1964.

  Before leaving for Chicago, Kennedy closely monitors the situation in South Vietnam with his top national security advisers. In Saigon, people are taking to the streets in jubilation after learning of Diem’s and Nhu’s deaths.

  Then disturbing news arrives: Diem and Nhu did not commit suicide, after all. They were murdered. After surrendering, the two men were placed inside an armored vehicle with their hands tied behind their backs. When they were next seen, both had been beaten and shot several times. Nhu had also been stabbed repeatedly.

  Defense Secretary Robert McNamara notices Kennedy blanch when he hears the report.

  Kennedy has been assuming that Diem and Nhu would go into exile, not be assassinated.

  Kennedy gets up immediately and walks out of the room, obviously distressed.

  As he leaves, General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mutters under his breath: “What did he expect?”3

  Within minutes, a brisk announcement is made. The president’s trip to Chicago will be canceled because of the crisis in Vietnam.

  Texas’s Democratic national committeeman has a problem with President Kennedy’s upcoming visit to Texas. The issue is Dallas. Byron Skelton can’t shake the feeling that something bad will happen to the president there. It’s more than a sense of foreboding. It feels like a premonition. He suggests to friends that the climate in Dallas could easily inspire an unstable person to take action against Kennedy.

  Skelton has been reading news of a recent speech by General Walker that seems to practically invite violence against the president.

  Skelton carefully clips out a newspaper story about Walker and includes it with a letter he has decided to send to his best contact in the Kennedy administration, Attorney General Robert Kennedy:

  “Frankly, I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed trip to Dallas. You will note that General Walker says that ‘Kennedy is a liability to the free world.’ A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President… I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.”4

  Bobby Kennedy knows Skelton, and he knows that Skelton is not a man given to histrionics. He also understands that showing the letter from Texas to his brother will be a waste of time.

  The Kennedy brothers have been hearing all kinds of warnings about Dallas ever since the trip to Texas was first announced. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas has already told the president: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”5

  Several letters have arrived at the White House pleading for Kennedy to avoid the city.

  One Dallas woman has written: “Don’t let the President come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.”6

  Bobby knows that his brother won’t call off the trip, especially after having to cancel in Chicago. Still, he can’t let Skelton’s letter rest. He decides to pass it along to his brother’s close aide Kenny O’Donnell, the man responsible for the president’s schedule.

  O’Donnell reviews the letter. He understands the issue as well as Robert Kennedy does, but there is no stopping Jack Kennedy from going to Dallas. The idea of him shrinking from a confrontation with General Walker is laughable.

  In fact, Kennedy has already decided to deliver a hard-hitting speech criticizing political extremists when he visits Dallas.

  Bernard Weissman’s 1957 Ford Fairlane convertible pulls up to the Eden Roe Apartments, home of his friend Larrie Schmidt. It is about 5 p.m. He has driven for two days, stopping only for a brief rest in South Carolina.

  Although it is six weeks into autumn, summer seems to be lingering in Dallas. Temperatures are still in the eighties as Weissman emerges from his car. The native New Yorker is a tall, slender, neatly dressed man who has just turned twenty-six. He wears black horn-rimmed glasses and keeps his thinning hair combed straight back.

  He has someone with him, a twenty-eight-year-old former soldier named William Burley, another friend from the old days serving in Germany.

  It wasn’t hard to convince Burley, who has been eking out a living selling hearing aids in Baltimore, to come along. Going to Texas, following Schmidt’s promises of chasing the money trail on the new frontier for ultra-conservatism, seemed like a far better future. Schmidt has been writing to them, begging them to come to Dallas and join him. He told them the time is right, that he has become quite famous in Dallas ever since the Adlai Stevenson incident: “I am a hero to the right… a storm trooper to the left.”7

  Schmidt is glad to see them, he welcomes them inside, and Weissman and Burley, weary from the long drive, spend their first night with Schmidt.

  The next day, Weissman finds a cheap apartment about a mile away. He explains to the landlady that he and Burley have just been discharged from the army and that they don’t have money for a deposit. He puts on his salesman’s charm and sweet-talks her. He asks if they can pay for just two weeks’ rent, and then pay the rest after they find work. The landlady agrees to accommodate the two former soldiers. She has second thoughts later when she sees them moving a keg of beer into the apartment.

  Weissman and Burley quickly find jobs as carpet salesmen, a thriving occupation in the rapidly expanding city. Weissman has always thought of himself as an idealist, and Schmidt as a politician, a mover and shaker. But they both believe
that it takes money, big money, to build a powerhouse conservative machine—and Dallas is the perfect place for that.

  H. L. Hunt’s chief of security is a former FBI agent, and he enjoys excellent contacts within the Dallas Police Department. He knows that the Dallas police have been monitoring some of the city’s “extremist” groups. Before it’s even filed he knows what’s going into an internal police report on security for Kennedy’s visit.

  The police have been doing their street-level reconnaissance, trying to figure out if any Dallas local extremists are preparing for violence. The bomb threat against Martin Luther King Jr., the swastikas on Neiman Marcus windows, the cross burning on the Holocaust survivor’s lawn, the Adlai Stevenson riot—they have all added up to a growing folder of information at police headquarters on extremist activists in the city.

  The police report is nearly ready, but before it is issued Hunt’s security head sends a memo to Hunt with the details: There are “unconfirmed reports of possible violence during the parade.”8

  He believes that Hunt will be anxious to avoid any incidents in Dallas—if only because people in Dallas, and around the nation, will likely try to blame Hunt for inciting it. He’s been blamed for plenty already: funding Senator Joseph McCarthy, spending millions on his right-wing radio programs, spending more money on distributing the anti-Kennedy screeds that featured the sermons of W. A. Criswell, and even donating cash to General Walker.

  Hunt’s security chief has thought it through. He proposes a solution to his reclusive employer: “I have thought about the problem, and I am wondering if a few letters to the editor might not be a good way of pre-exposing this if, in fact, there is a planned incident.”9

  Hunt is never shy about writing letters to Ted Dealey and the editors at the Dallas Morning News. He’s sent several over the years. And he knows that when a letter from him arrives at Dealey’s newspaper, it carries some freight—the city’s richest man should be allowed space in his local newspaper.

  When he receives the private memo from his security chief, Hunt mulls it over. He has extraordinary means at his disposal, a preference for dealing in cash, and a tendency to employ former FBI agents. They are very good, loyal employees, and he pays them very well to keep his predilections private. Hunt finally decides against taking action.

  Maybe, just maybe, it would be useful for the president to see how little he is liked in Dallas.

  Lee Harvey Oswald’s name has been showing up again in some of the reports that a longtime FBI agent in Dallas is pulling together on extremists in the area. The local FBI first began tracking him and Marina in the summer of 1962, when they arrived from the Soviet Union. The FBI in New Orleans kept tabs on him until there was a sense that he and his wife were both headed back to Texas.

  When he returned to Dallas from New Orleans a month ago, he checked into a YMCA. He tried to land a job at a printing company but had no luck. Then he moved from one boardinghouse to another in the Oak Cliff section of the city—not far from the duplex where he had mapped out his assassination attempt on Walker.

  Two weeks ago he applied for a laborer’s job at the Texas School Book Depository, and began work the next day. Two days later he turned twenty-four. Two days after that Marina gave birth to Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald.

  Things are still not right between him and Marina. Wary as always, she and the babies are living with friends, and he is alone in his boardinghouse in Oak Cliff. A short bus ride takes him right past the Dallas Morning News and Dealey Plaza, not far from Reverend Criswell’s First Baptist Church, and straight to the School Book Depository. On weekends he visits Marina and the girls.

  Oswald is anxious to immerse himself back into the political climate in Dallas. He has attended a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union. He monitored Walker’s U.S. Day rally. And then, just a few days ago, he learned that a local, veteran FBI agent named James Hosty has started making inquiries in the neighborhood where Marina has gone to live with her friend. Hosty sat down with Marina and her friend and talked briefly to them. Marina seemed nervous and he told her she had nothing to fear, that he was not the Gestapo. He asked where Lee lived and Marina’s friend said that she only knew he was somewhere in the Oak Cliff neighborhood.

  Later, when Lee talked to Marina, he told her that if the FBI man ever returned, she should get his license plate.

  Plenty of people in Dallas say they are one thing when they are really another.

  A seasoned Dallas police lieutenant named Jack Revill has uncovered a plot to disrupt President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

  And now Revill has a growing pile of papers on his desk. He has been drowning in work ever since the Adlai Stevenson incident rocked the city. Word has come down from the chief’s office—and probably higher—that Revill, head of the Criminal Intelligence Section, has to find out what the city’s political fringe groups might be plotting to unleash on Kennedy.

  Revill’s officers quickly infiltrate several organizations. His detectives conduct surveillance, monitor conversations, and snap photographs of suspicious people and groups: The preacher who says he is the rightful leader of the modern Ku Klux Klan. The Indignant White Citizens Council. The National States Rights Party. The John Birch Society—hell, that could even include the mayor. The White Citizens Council. The General Edwin A. Walker Group. Revill’s men are also monitoring the few groups on the left, including the Dallas Civil Liberties Union.

  But now Revill is fixed on the one thing that seems tangible. Several college students from nearby North Texas State University have been visiting General Walker’s home.

  Many of them joined the heated demonstrations against Stevenson on UN Day. The cops ran checks on several of them, and their photographs are sitting on Revill’s desk.

  His squad has also developed a confidential informant inside the student group. And the informant has news: The group intends to have “well planned demonstrations during the President’s visit to Dallas.”

  The informant has no specifics, but the group’s association with Walker is ominous enough. And one of the students, apparently someone the others looked to as a leader, has already issued a verbal threat against President Kennedy: “We will drag his dick in the dirt.”10

  Revill confers with his commanders at the police station, returns to his desk, summons his squad, and tells them they are going to go hard after the students. The Secret Service is also being notified. And then, over the next few days, each student receives a visit from Revill and another officer. On some of the visits, a Secret Service agent joins the officers.

  The students abandon their plans.

  On November 7, Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announces that Jacqueline Kennedy will accompany her husband on the upcoming trip to Texas.

  This is big news—this is the First Lady’s very first political trip with her husband since his election. She, in fact, has never even been to Texas before. People in the state are delighted, and the state’s newspapers eagerly report the news.

  Lady Bird Johnson writes to Jackie from the LBJ Ranch:

  “The President’s on page five, Lyndon’s on the back page, but you’re on the front page.”11

  When FBI Agent Hosty returns to his office on November 8, the receptionist hands him a business envelope that is blank on the outside. Inside is a folded, handwritten note on bond paper. It is a short note, no longer than two paragraphs.

  Hosty studies the letter. He has gotten these kinds of messages, these complaints, before. This one pretty much reads like many of the others: You’ve been interviewing people I know, my wife, without my permission. You should stop. If you don’t stop talking to my wife, I’ll take action against the FBI.

  He notes that the letter is unsigned. Maybe it’s that Jew-hating Jimmy Robinson, the man who had protested Dr. King’s visit to Dallas—and then burned a cross on a Holocaust survivor’s lawn. Hosty was out interviewing Robinson’s wife over the summer.

  He puts the letter down and does n
ot share it with anyone else.12

  General Walker assumes that the enemy is everywhere: They’re listening every time he picks up his telephone, they’re “volunteering” to be his bodyguard, they’re eagerly distributing his literature.

  As the days count down to the arrival in Dallas of Kennedy, his worst political enemy, Walker is increasingly cautious. He never knows when someone will come for him again, in the middle of the night, just when he is comfortable or settled into his home. He never even considered moving out of his house after the assassination attempt. It would be a sign of fear. He’d have to live like H. L. Hunt, surrounded by ex-FBI agents, sneaking in and out of the city—and maybe, like Hunt, refusing to even shake a stranger’s hand. Walker has enough secrets in his personal life; he doesn’t need any more.

  His inner circle has grown tighter. Among his closest associates, there is just one man who has repeatedly proved himself—by going into battle with Walker in Mississippi, and by pulling bullet fragments out of Walker’s arm the night he was almost killed in Dallas: Robert Surrey.

  Surrey has never let the general down. And Surrey knows that Walker hates Nazis because of his experience in World War II. But Surrey is a patient man, and he is hoping for the right time to tell Walker that he has cultivated his own secret, other life.

  Surrey is fascinated by the racial purity doctrines of the American Nazi Party. He has finally, quietly, joined the group and started studying the beliefs of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, the man who showed up at General Walker’s Senate hearing and refused to remove his swastika. Surrey has a secret name inside the Nazi Party—Max Amman, in honor of one of Hitler’s favorite publishers and allies. Surrey is a publisher, too, just like Hitler’s comrade. He and Walker are the co-owners of American Eagle Publishing, the company that releases Walker’s books and pamphlets.

  Surrey sees the other super-patriots in Dallas as driven, committed “storm troopers” who are out to squelch communism and protect racial purity. As far as Surrey can see, there’s only one significant ideological difference between the American Nazis and Walker. He has never betrayed Walker’s secret. But the Nazi Party is officially anti-homosexual, and Rockwell has said: “If there’s one thing I’d rather gas than Communists, it’s queers.”13