Soon after we moved to Dallas my mother set out to become a “Dallas Woman.” The phrase carried freight in Texas, where it signified a stylishness and sophistication that were uncommon in the rest of the state. Women advanced themselves in the city through a network of clubs and auxiliaries, such as the Bankers Wives, which Mother joined as a matter of course, and bridge clubs, which were her passion. She loved society and bright talk. She had been a part of the smart set when she was growing up in Atlanta; her scrapbooks are filled with handsome athletes who played forward for Vanderbilt or wide receiver for West Point, and girls who wore slouch hats and smoked cigarettes and drove in open roadsters. At the University of Alabama she wrote a society column and briefly dated Bert Parks, before he became the perennial master of ceremonies of the Miss America Pageant (I’m unendingly grateful she didn’t marry him). She read The New Yorker and the novels of John Cheever. In her ideal life she would have been sipping Manhattans with Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin.
In Dallas she joined the Jane Douglas chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which was the largest DAR chapter in the country. There she learned about the politics of the Dallas Woman. It was a politics of paranoia. The female patriots of the DAR were obsessed with “Communist plots”—which, decoded, meant fluoridation of the drinking water and desegregation of the public schools. Once a week Mother attended the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women’s group sponsored by H. L. Hunt, which concentrated on bringing conservative speakers to town. George Wallace came, and Ronald Reagan, and Dr. Fred Schwarz, the right-wing California educator. Barry Goldwater came so frequently that he got to be known as the “third senator from Texas.” But the most popular speaker was the only elected Republican in Texas, Dallas congressman Bruce Alger.
Alger was a Princeton man, a bomber pilot in World War II, and the handsomest man in town. Even in his own party he was ridiculed as a hopeless extremist. In the ten years he represented Dallas in the House of Representatives there was never an important piece of legislation with his name on it. He was the only man in Congress to vote against giving free milk to schoolchildren. Pork barrel projects that might have gone to Dallas went to Fort Worth instead. It was said of Alger that he “couldn’t even get a streetcar transfer in Washington”—and that was during a Republican administration. In the last four years of Alger’s congressional reign, Dallas lost eight federal agencies. Despite his record, Alger survived political challenges by two of the most popular Democrats in the city, first by District Attorney Henry Wade, and then by Barefoot Sanders, a state legislator who became a federal district judge. In all of his contests Alger was carried along by a formidable cadre of angry right-wing women. His relation to those women was a matter of legend and speculation in the city. Alger was their prince. He was an extraordinary sexual presence, and he found power through the fears and the sublimated desires of the right-wing Dallas Woman.
In that season the entire country was learning about sex and politics through the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. We had heard about the Kennedy magic and glamour, but these terms only described his highly polished exterior self; they said nothing about the man inside, who was a mystery to us all. After a generation of old men in the White House, Kennedy suffused the country with the musk of vigorous youth. There was a phenomenon in the 1960 campaign known as “jumpers.” Newsmen noticed that as Kennedy traveled around the country, women in crowds would jump to get a look at him; this was mentioned in the newspapers, and soon it became a mass phenomenon, an almost involuntary response on the part of women as the candidate’s motorcade passed: jumping, some wildly, some, it seemed, obediently—even nuns would give a little hop. A sexual wave was running through America, and the candidate was Pan, and his music was visible in the oscillation of women’s bodies.
It is strange now to remember that there was actually a dispute in 1960 over who was the better looking, Kennedy or his opponent, Richard Nixon, who was greeted on the campaign trail by “Nixonettes.” Magazines spoke of him almost as a matinee idol. He had a beautiful “movie star” smile, and his eyes, which later became so hooded and furtive, seemed then warm, innocent, almost romantic. Perhaps he thought of himself that way. He had begun a modest career in community theater before turning to the larger stage of politics. It was in Whittier, California, while playing a small role in The Dark Tower, by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott, that Nixon met his future wife, Pat Ryan, a local actress who had occasional bit parts in Hollywood. He told her the first day they met that he would marry her someday.
Both Nixon and Kennedy would come to represent profound trends in American politics that would divide the electorate for decades after the 1960 election, and yet during the campaign itself the great complaint was that there was no difference between them. Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev called them “a pair of boots—which is better, the right boot or the left boot?” Kennedy spoke of change, of moving forward, and yet he ran a campaign based on anti-Communism, military buildups, and economic growth—themes remarkably similar to those that Ronald Reagan would campaign for twenty years later. Kennedy spoke louder on the subject of civil rights, but his opponent’s record on the matter was as good as his. Nixon found little to attack in the Kennedy platform, so he concentrated his fire on Kennedy’s relative inexperience. The most prominent issue in the televised debates between the candidates was the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, two negligible islands in the Formosa Strait.
Had they exchanged parties we might have understood them better. Both men had joined the parties of their fathers. Joseph Kennedy had grown up in the Democratic ward politics of Boston, and married the mayor’s daughter. He was a Democrat in the same way he was a Catholic and an Irishman. It was part of his ethnic identity, almost an accident of birth. Frank Nixon’s Republicanism, on the other hand, was a peculiar conversion. At the age of thirteen he possessed a beautiful filly, which was drafted to ride in a parade behind William McKinley, then running for governor of Ohio. At the end of the parade McKinley commented, “I never did see such a fine, pretty horse.” Then he asked Frank Nixon to always vote Republican, and Nixon said he always would.
And so the sons took on their fathers’ politics, despite circumstances that might otherwise have inclined them in a different direction. John Kennedy was—far more than his father—a product of the liberal, moneyed, prep-school Eastern Establishment. In 1960 the backbone of that Establishment was still largely Republican. Richard Nixon grew up on the opposite side of the continent, the son of a man who, he said, “was a streetcar conductor in Ohio, worked on a wheat ranch in Montana, was an oil-field worker, a carpenter, ran a lemon ranch that failed and lived out his years as a small grocer.” All of his life Richard Nixon claimed to speak for the common man, what he called the Forgotten American.
It was characteristic of Nixon that the qualities he shared with Kennedy—his youth, his looks, his Irishness—seemed in him entirely unremarkable, but distinctive in Kennedy. One never heard, for instance, about Nixon’s religion, which was Quakerism, a pacifist sect that might have stimulated more controversy than Kennedy’s less exotic Catholicism. Like Kennedy, Nixon was Irish on both sides of his family, a fact that was scarcely noticed in the campaign—he seemed to have no ethnic coloration at all. With the Kennedy and Fitzgerald clans, being Irish had been a source of power, a political base in Irish Catholic Boston, but it was also a wellspring of resentments. Rose Kennedy complained that the “nice people of Boston”—that is, the Back Bay, Protestant, Republican Brahmins—had never accepted the Kennedys, despite the family’s money and political influence. Of course, to us in the new world, the Kennedys were the Eastern Establishment, no matter how much they felt themselves to be frustratingly apart from it.
There was still about the Irish the stamp of the immigrant, although again, one never thought of the Nixons that way. California washes away such distinctions, which are nursed in Boston. The Kennedys were upstarts; they threatened the social balance by being too successful. The Nixons, on the other hand, were quiet failures who threatened no one.
This should have been one of the great political contests; we were entering a decade of dramatic change, and yet it was a campaign in which real issues scarcely surfaced at all. “Of the great civil rights battle that was to mark the decade, of the war in Vietnam, of the surge of female consciousness, of the eruption of youth, of the changes in life-styles, of abortion, of drugs, of the vast revolution in the tax system—not a single memorable speech or text comes down to me, either in recollection or in my notes,” Theodore White would write in his memoirs. It was not, in any real sense, a political campaign at all. On the surface it was an apparent personality contest, and in that respect Nixon was absurdly overmatched. But under the surface—down, down among the primitive fears and prejudices—there were warning sounds, and they were evoked by Kennedy. These emanations had little to do with his politics. They had to do with his family, his religion, his education, his taste, his looks, his accent, his wife. Kennedy gave off threatening vibrations to millions of Americans, and no one was more finely attuned to that frequency than the right-wing Dallas housewife.
Kennedy’s crowd included the Hollywood friends of his brother-in-law Peter Lawford. They were all, as one would say then, very advanced in their attitudes. Of course Nixon had movie stars in his entourage, but one never felt that he was at ease with them. Right after the election, Lawford’s close friend Sammy Davis, Jr., married a white woman, the Swedish actress May Britt. “How do you feel, Chicky Baby?” asked Kennedy’s sister, and Sammy Davis said, “Man, I’m electric.” We had never heard talk like that. Although Nixon was only four years older than Kennedy, with his boxy suits and homilies he was a thoroughgoing expression of the fifties. Kennedy, on the other hand, was sleek and cool and frighteningly modern. One sensed a chronological border falling between them—the boundaries of two ages, two sensibilities. With Kennedy, the sixties would break loose from the square, central, Nixonian values of the past and become morally unbound, experimental, open to change and sensation—in a word, hip.
In this feverish season John Wayne’s epic movie, The Alamo, came to the Capri theater in Dallas, after its world premiere in San Antonio. With its budget of $12 million, The Alamo was billed as the most expensive movie of all time, a fact that seemed entirely appropriate to Texans, since it celebrated the central event in our history: the deaths of Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and 180 some-odd martyrs who died to make Texas a republic. I didn’t know anyone who failed to see that movie. The Alamo became a talisman of our defiance. If John Wayne died to keep us from becoming Mexicans, who could doubt it was better to be dead than Red?
At the peak of the 1960 campaign, Nikita Khrushchev arrived at the United Nations in New York, loudly demanding the resignation of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, and even pounding on his desk with a shoe—a gesture of such swaggering boorishness that it justified every qualm the Dallas Woman felt about Russia, the United Nations, and American foreign policy. Castro came too. There was an air of mischief about the pair of them invading this sanctuary of high diplomacy. Khrushchev would hold court from the balcony of the Soviet mission, cracking jokes and scaring everybody to death with his casual chatter about nuclear war. Castro checked out of his fancy midtown hotel, claiming he’d been badly treated and overcharged, and moved into the Hotel Theresa in the middle of Harlem. He received guests in his pajamas. I secretly liked Khrushchev and Castro. They reminded me of two of the Three Stooges, Curley and Moe; they were obviously having a great time. After all his attacks on capitalism, Khrushchev left the country with a freighter full of merchandise, including a Cadillac limousine, an Oldsmobile, a Mercury Comet, two television sets, and a pair of washing machines.
Dallas liked Nixon because he stood up to Khrushchev in the kitchen debates. He had brought down Alger Hiss, the exemplar of the Eastern Establishment. Kennedy talked tough—a lot tougher than Nixon—but in Dallas the national Democratic party was thought to be weak on Communism. Former governor Allan Shivers, who had led Democratic defections in the last two presidential elections, claimed that the Democratic platform in 1960 promoted “socialistic measures that socialist Norman Thomas never dreamed of.” A group called Texans for Nixon took out an ad in the Morning News with a warning from Barry Goldwater about the influence of organized labor in the Democratic party, which he said was “something new, and something dangerous—born of conspiracy and violence, sired by Socialists, and nurtured by the general treasury of the UAW-CIO.” The enemy was Walter Reuther, head of the auto workers union, who had spent time in Russia during his youth. “The campaign for President in 1960 is not the usual contest between old-time political parties. It is a life and death struggle between Vice President Richard Nixon on the one hand, upholding American principles, and the candidate of the Walter Reuther party, on the other hand, with what this plainly implies.”
The Democratic candidate made an obligatory visit to Dallas, drawing a surprisingly large crowd, estimated at 175,000 people (Nixon, the day before, attracted only 100,000). Kennedy had just come from Houston, where he had spoken to a large group of Protestant ministers about the issue of his Catholicism. There was a widespread fear that Kennedy’s election would be tantamount to letting the pope rule America. Since Catholics believe the pope to be infallible (the argument went), Kennedy would have to do whatever he instructed. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the apostle of positive thinking, gloomily wondered if American culture could survive a Kennedy presidency. There was some irony in this, since Kennedy was, as his wife privately admitted, an awfully poor Catholic. In Houston Kennedy had given a fine, important speech that seemed to have settled the matter. He won over House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who was escorting the candidate through his native state. However, the Protestants in Dallas weren’t so easily persuaded. “The more I listen to him, the more I ‘ha-ha,’ ” said Dr. Criswell.
No Democratic candidate had ever won the White House without carrying Texas; Kennedy knew that—that’s why he picked Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, to the outraged dismay of the Eastern press and many of Kennedy’s advisers, who regarded Johnson as a hard-shell Southern conservative, a native racist, a drawling, backslapping political whore with no guiding lights other than the oil-depletion allowance. They despised Johnson in the East because he represented the insurgent Southwest. They had no idea how much more we hated Johnson in Dallas. Here he was called a closet socialist, a leftover New Dealer, a bleeding heart in domestic matters and a weak sister when it came to standing up against Communist aggression. Was there ever a man in public life with such a divided image?
Four days before the general election Lyndon Johnson came to town. It was November 4, 1960, Republican Tag Day in Dallas, and the downtown lunch crowd was being canvassed by three hundred women in red, white, and blue. They were Bruce Alger’s women. Many of them were in the Junior League, and they looked disarmingly girlish in their patriotic outfits and their red coif hats with ribbons streaming down the back. They were passing out literature for the Nixon-Lodge campaign. It was chilly, and some of them wore their minks.
Johnson had spoken earlier that morning in Arlington, and as he entered Dallas a city policeman pulled over his Lincoln to warn him of a “little disturbance” awaiting him at the Baker Hotel, where the Johnsons traditionally stayed. Commerce Street in front of the hotel was filling up with tag girls, who had now transformed themselves into an eager mob, complete with placards that Alger had stored in the Baker overnight. The cop advised Senator Johnson to use the hotel’s Akard Street entrance to avoid the demonstration.
Several women spotted the Johnsons arriving and rushed over to surround their car. As Lady Bird was stepping out, one of the pickets impulsively snatched Mrs. Johnson’s gloves from her hands and threw them in the gutter. Lady Bird went white. It was still a time when incivility was rare in politics, when public figures felt safe in crowds. No one, perhaps not even the tag girls themselves, was prepared to understand the ferocity and the anger of these apparently happy and well-cared-for women.
Johnson rushed Lady Bird into the lobby of the Baker, which was packed with jeering tag girls. As he entered the elevator Johnson turned and said, “You ought to be glad you live in a country where you have the legal right to boo and hiss at a man who is running for the vice presidency of the United States.” There was an instant of silence, then a voice in the back of the crowd yelled, “Louder and funnier, Lyndon.”
Johnson was expected to speak at a luncheon across the street in the Adolphus Hotel. Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth accompanied the Johnsons, and he forayed ahead. As he passed through the mink-coated rabble in the street, he encountered his colleague Bruce Alger grinning hugely and holding a sign saying LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS. Wright told him that it was inappropriate for a United States congressman to be standing in the middle of a mob, and that no matter what Alger might think of a man’s politics, Johnson was the Senate majority leader and was due the respect of his office. “I went to hear your man [Nixon] in my city this morning,” Wright said. “I listened with courtesy. I wouldn’t do what you’re doing even if I felt that way.”
“We’re gonna show Johnson he’s not wanted in Dallas,” Alger replied, and the tag girls cheered.
As the Johnsons made their way through the Baker lobby, the crowd closed ranks behind them, becoming bolder. There were more of them waiting in the street, and beyond that, in the lobby of the Adolphus. This was an odd political gauntlet to pass through. It recalled the stoning of Vice President Nixon’s motorcade by Communist students in Caracas, Venezuela. But this wasn’t South America; this was Lyndon’s own state.
The demonstrators in Commerce Street waited with placards and catcalls. Most of them were carrying Nixon-Lodge and TOWER FOR SENATE signs (one of the peculiarities of that election being that Johnson was entered in both races, thanks to a special dispensation from the Texas Legislature), THINK ONCE AND SCRATCH LYNDON TWICE, said one sign. Also: LBJ TRAITOR, JUDAS JOHNSON, and LET’S GROUND LADY BIRD. The Johnsons moved inside a small capsule of personal distance that grew smaller and threatened to collapse entirely under the crush of protesters. In retrospect it was that violation of private space that heralded our new, tragic political era. Years later, as president, Johnson would become accustomed to seeing hateful signs with his name on them; indeed, he would know the fury of the public as few men ever have, but in 1960 it was something new, something unheard of.
What was more surprising was that the sign carriers and catcallers were well-groomed women from the finest homes in the city. And yet, as the Johnsons waded into Commerce Street, the women in red, white, and blue began to curse them, and to spit. (Later, some members of the “Mink Coat Mob,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly, they were frothing.)
Why? What accounted for the hostility—or to use her word, indignation—of the fashionable and affluent Dallas Woman? In part she was simply a prisoner of her age: a woman of unfocused ambition, intensely competitive but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), lonely at home and given to causes. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some unfathomable fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash her away. She named the tide International Communism or Creeping Socialism. She worried about the “missile gap” and the spread of Communism. Moreover, people in her own country were talking enthusiastically about social change—Kennedy was already speaking of “the revolutionary sixties”—and the Dallas Woman knew those changes would come at her expense. She worried about the erosion of liberty caused by recent Supreme Court decisions (often delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was the Creeping Socialist personified). The Court was taking rights away from the Dallas Woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, Communists, and Negroes. The Dallas Woman felt herself to be under attack at home and abroad.
Now she was striking back.
Johnson made his way through the placards with his wife practically buried under his arm. Lyndon, of course, loomed over the tag girls, his huge hound-dog face visible even at the farthest reaches of the crowd, but Lady Bird was on their level, and she could see the rage in their faces. She started to answer one of the insults, but Johnson put his hand over her mouth and guided her into the lobby of the Adolphus. “Let’s just let them do all the hollerin’,” he said.
They were waiting there, the tag girls and the hangers-on, but also press photographers and television cameras. John Tower, Johnson’s senatorial opponent, was lurking in the stairwell, waiting for a chance to spring into Johnson’s path with a list of political charges; but Tower, despite his name, is a diminutive man and was easily shoved aside by the crush of women.
Even in that mob it would have been a short walk to the elevators if Johnson had bulled his way through. But instead of pressing ahead, Johnson did something quite surprising. He slowed down. He moved with excruciating slowness through the chanting mob and the rain of spit. For thirty minutes Johnson and his wife withstood the harangue of the crowd, as the senator stared into the television cameras with a martyr’s embarrassed smile.
It was the most triumphant half hour of Johnson’s career, because that evening on the television news millions of Americans met the new Lyndon Johnson. They suddenly understood him exactly as he understood himself. He was a liberal—in the Southern context. Overnight he became an acceptable candidate to big-city Northern Democrats who had automatically hated him and to traditional Democrats everywhere who had not (they now admitted) seen past the corn-pone mannerisms of LBJ to the winking FDR inside him.
That evening, watching the news, thousands of Texans and millions of Americans decided how to vote. Although Nixon carried Dallas by a larger margin than any other city in the country, Texas went for Kennedy-Johnson. (Johnson also beat Tower in the senatorial election, although Tower would win the subsequent special election.) It was the closest election in history, and it was decided that day in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel. People said afterward that they were not voting for Kennedy so much as they were voting against Dallas.
Against us. Until then, Dallas had had very little national identity, but now we found ourselves with a new municipal image: a city of angry parvenus, smug, doctrinaire, belligerent—a city with a taste for political violence. We were shocked to see ourselves portrayed this way, but it had little effect on the way we thought of ourselves.
Until the Adolphus incident, my mother had been coy about how she was going to vote. We teased her that she was falling for the Kennedy sex appeal, but she insisted that it was his mind she admired. She had read Profiles in Courage, which had won Kennedy a Pulitzer prize. And yet the notion of voting for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket was a heresy in her circle, so Mother was, until that moment, undecided. She and I watched the news together that night—she with horror, because the faces in the mob were familiar to her. They were the same faces she saw at her luncheons and bridge clubs. These were the women she aspired to know and emulate, for they were all Dallas Women, all fashionable, sophisticated, and financially well off; but they were also, Mother saw now, terrified, uncertain, and filled with hate. I remember her cry as we watched the humiliation at the Adolphus: “Shame! Shame!”