There was, in fact, a chip of defiance on the city’s shoulder, encouraged by the Dallas Morning News. The News bills itself as the oldest business institution in the state, having been founded in 1842 when Texas was still a republic and Dallas little more than a presumption. Under George B. Dealey the News had been a progressive newspaper, leading the scourge that drove the Ku Klux Klan out of Dallas, at a time when that organization controlled nearly every elective office in town. The name Dealey would become famous because of the fan-shaped park directly across the street from the Texas School Book Depository known as Dealey Plaza, with a bronze statue of the publisher beholding the now magnificent skyline of downtown Dallas. Many citizens believe it is perfectly appropriate that Dealey’s name should be tied so irrevocably to the assassination, even though it is his son they blame.
E. M. (“Ted”) Dealey succeeded his father as publisher of the News, and in his hands it became the most strident, red-baiting daily paper in the country, excepting only occasionally William Loeb’s Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire. Dealey was a crackpot on the subject of free enterprise; he even attributed the high rate of traffic fatalities in Texas to “the same human qualities that made America great—willingness to risk, driving energy, rugged individualism.” Like many intensely conservative people, Dealey found his paragon in the movies and politics of John Wayne. Indeed, reading the News each morning was like watching a big-screen brawl in a saloon, in which the newspaper’s editorials flattened the “socialists” (read: Democrats), the “Judicial Kremlin” (the U.S. Supreme Court), and virtually every representative of the federal government whose views differed from those of Ted Dealey. Immediately after the election, the News’s principal object of contempt became John Kennedy, whom the paper described on various occasions as a crook, a Communist sympathizer, a thief, and “fifty times a fool.”
Ted Dealey went to the White House in the fall of 1961 with a group of Texas publishers to meet the man he had maligned so frequently in his newspaper. He used the occasion to attack Kennedy in person. He accused the President and his administration of being weak sisters (a favorite Dealey phrase, with its vaguely homosexual charge). “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government,” Dealey advised. To the embarrassment of his colleagues in the room, he added, “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding on Caroline’s tricycle.”
That was typical Dealey guff: abusive, personal, and absurd. Dealey reported in his paper on this exchange with the President (GRASSROOTS SENTIMENT TOLD), although he failed to include the President’s response. “Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight,” Kennedy told him. “I’m just as tough as you are, and I didn’t get elected president by arriving at soft judgments.”
Afterward, the editor of the Dallas Times Herald, the evening paper, wrote to the President to say that Dealey was speaking only for himself, not for the other Texans in the room. Kennedy responded with a snap of wit: “I’m sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon comes.”
Kennedy was still thinking of his encounter with Dealey when he spoke later that year of people who “call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water. They equate the Democratic party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.”
With his prescient political eye, Kennedy saw that a new and dangerous challenge was arising; indeed, it was a vast political culture in the South and West, and it stood opposed to everything he represented: East Coast liberalism, mainstream politics, Ivy League learning, the customary restraints of educated society. Although Kennedy was popularly understood as a man of his time, a thoroughly modern president, he was in many ways the last of the traditionalists. He called his administration the New Frontier, but his elected successors—Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan—would show that the real frontier in American politics lay far away, in the new world.
Although we were filled with resentment toward the society Kennedy represented, it was a resentment born of envy and intense curiosity. We felt inferior. That Jacqueline Kennedy spoke French and Spanish was impressive to us. We admired her taste; we liked for her to be at home with the great artists of the world, and her breathy, seductive voice suggested she was not all white gloves and pillbox hats. The Kennedys invested the country with a self-conscious eroticism that was nicely balanced by the presence of children in the White House. We were reminded of the Lincolns, a parallel that became more closely drawn after little Patrick Kennedy died. It recalled the death of Willie Lincoln, and we looked at the Kennedys with a new sense of poignancy. My parents had lost a child as well.
The Kennedy celebrity was overpowering. There was nothing to compare with it, except perhaps the Lindbergh phenomenon in my parents’ youth, and the rise of Elvis in my own. Celebrity itself was rather new to us. My parents did not speak in personal terms about public figures; certainly they never discussed Eisenhower’s hair or Mamie’s dresses. We didn’t know them very well. However, by the time the Kennedys came onstage we were deeply into the television age. It was like adding a gene for vicarious living. We could see into people’s lives. We could peek into the Oval Office and see Caroline and John-John crawling under the President’s desk. There was Jack talking politics with Bobby (they didn’t even notice us, we were invisible). Jackie took us on a tour of the White House and showed us her bedroom. We knew the Kennedys in the same way we knew the Nelsons, the Ricardos, the Cleavers.
Eisenhower was a hero, not a celebrity; he did not have “charisma”—a word we were still struggling to define. It had something to do with an excess of vitality, and it was powered by sex. Kennedy obviously had a larger life than the rest of us; he was not only President, he was a star. He threatened the natural balance. He suggested that a person could rise out of our ant-colony democracy and acquire a superlife. It’s no wonder the young were drawn to such a man.
I can remember a photograph of the new President as he came out of the water on the beach at Santa Monica. In the picture he was being mobbed by women, and he was grinning. It was the photograph of a sexual idol, slim, muscular, potent. But it seemed strange and a little blasphemous to see a president’s body.
Daddy had his own dark thoughts about Kennedy. As a younger man he had had political ambitions of his own. Like Kennedy, he was a war hero; like Kennedy, he hoped to trade his wartime glory for public office. Kennedy was a young congressman from Massachusetts when my father made arrangements for him to speak in Oklahoma, at the Ponca City Chamber of Commerce, which my father chaired. Clearly there were advantages in an alliance between my father and this young political star. My father was expected to supply whatever the congressman needed, and what he needed was an ample and varied supply of Oklahoma women—no, not dinner dates, my father was instructed, just sexual companions. It was the moment my father’s own political aspirations died. He saw then the secret appetites of the public man, and he understood how his own appetite for power might lead him to violate his vows to God. He did not even go to hear Kennedy speak.
In Dallas, however, he had reached a grudging accommodation with Kennedy’s presidency. He was a different man than he had been as a young Oklahoma banker. He had witnessed political power and the aggrandizement of wealth at closer quarters. He was not so easily shocked. He had come to understand men whose needs were greater than his own, men who made promises only to themselves.
He had voted for Nixon, because he believed Republicans were good for business and business was good for the country, and he stayed suspicious of Kennedy despite the tax cut, investment credits, and liberalized depreciation—all hallmarks of a conservative administration bent on pleasing businessmen like my father.
But like most Americans, my father was affected by Kennedy’s youth and intense maleness. The world since the end of the war had been led by white-haired men—Adenauer, de Gaulle, Nehru, Macmillan, Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek—men of another time, born, as Kennedy reminded us, in another century. Kennedy made them all seem decrepit. His vitality became a national challenge. He didn’t sit, he rocked, and rocking chairs became an instant fad. “He Eats Up News, Books at 1,200 Words a Minute,” we read in Life, and soon I was taking a speed-reading course. My father refused to go on one of the fifty-mile hikes the Kennedys were popularizing—he’d had enough of hiking in the infantry—but he believed in the moral value of fitness. Kennedy phrases began to creep into his vocabulary. We did things “with vigor” now, and when I’d ask him a question he’d preface his response with “Let me say this about that.” Kennedy hated wearing hats, so my father, like every other man in the country, gave up wearing them. Everything Kennedy did or thought or wore or didn’t wear had immediate and penetrating effect on our lives.
People were stirred up. Like Roosevelt, Kennedy had reached into the symbolic regions of our brains, where fantasies play. Soon after his inauguration the mail to the White House increased by 50 percent, but the proportion of letters from lunatics increased 300 percent. He was a magnet for dangerous emotions. He was too strong, too attractive, too sexy, too potent as a father, too beguiling as a husband, too promising as a son, too many things to too many people. All lines of power concentrated in his hands. He was not only President, the leader of the free world, he was also Prince Jack of Hollywood, he held the reins of the Eastern Establishment, he was the darling of the intellectuals, he even (we later learned) shared a mistress with a Mafia godfather. He was simply the most powerful figure we had ever seen.
Our family was under the spell of Camelot like everyone else, and yet, like nearly everyone else, we felt ourselves to be outside its gates. Camelot was an American court where the rich, the glamorous, and the powerful congratulated each other. It was a pantheon of celebrity. In Kennedy’s Camelot there was nothing surprising about having Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in Madison Square Garden—and also become his lover. Marilyn was the self-appointed prize of ultimate celebrity; she had already given herself in marriage to Arthur Miller, our most celebrated playwright, and Joe DiMaggio, our most famous sports hero, and given herself sexually to numerous other cultural icons, possibly including Albert Einstein. Fame was a great adventure for her, but she suffered the consequences. A few months after the President’s birthday, Marilyn would be dead, ostensibly a suicide. “When you’re famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does,” Marilyn said shortly before her death. “You’re always running into people’s unconscious.”
The best-selling record album in 1963 was The First Family, starring Vaughn Meader with his dead-on impersonation of Kennedy’s halting Bostonian speech. My father thought it was disrespectful, but my mother and my two sisters and I would sit around the dining room table and listen to it over and over, until we were all doing Meaderesque imitations. The best cut on the album was the last one, when baby Caroline asks her daddy to tell her a favorite bedtime story. “The one about the tall man?” asks the President. “Yes,” says Caroline, “the tall man with all the hair.”
“Well, there was this uh tall man with a lot of hair, and he was a prince and a great wahriyah [warrior]. And the people of his uh country picked him to be their leader because he uh could protect them and lead them on to the uh new frontiers …
“Now one day the evil prince with the black beard from the island in the south, and the terrible fat bear from the cold north came and they tried to hurt the prince. But the prince was too smart and he uh chased them away. So the handsome prince and his people lived happily uh ever after.”
Caroline thanks him for the story, and we hear footsteps and a door closing, then she says, “These sessions do him sooo much good!”
When my mother first heard the punch line she laughed until the tears flowed. It was not such a funny story as all that, but it told us something about how we saw the world, and how we saw Kennedy, and how Kennedy saw himself. We were all like Caroline; we were helping Kennedy through his presidency.
Our humor was edged with hysteria. It seemed to us then that the world was turning away from us, that our enemies were cleverer than we, more resourceful, more ruthless. We were losing ground in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, even in our own hemisphere. We watched the Berlin Wall go up on August 13, 1961, and saw the East German police, the Vopos, slaughtering citizens when they tried to escape. We were stunned when the Russians suddenly sent a man into orbit after our own failures in the space program. And we were frightened when they began to rattle the globe with immense atomic explosions, thirty in one month alone, culminating in a fifty-seven-megaton device that knocked the needle off the microbarograph at the Lamont Geological Observatory. It was 2,500 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and according to one calculation five times greater than all the explosives of all the wars in history.
We resumed our own nuclear tests in spectacular fashion with a giant hydrogen bomb in space. Tourists lined up on Hawaiian beaches to get the best view of the blast. “The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green,” wrote Life reporter Thomas Thompson. “It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemonade pink … and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.” We lived on the brink of apocalypse.
Our insecurity was compounded by the sight of our own society tearing apart. Since the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, we had seen the civil rights movement become more aggressive, attracting a violent reaction that was really a kind of war—a strange war that could be waged only in our violent democracy, a war fought in courtrooms and city councils and state-houses and PTAs and unions and fraternities and boardrooms, but also in the streets, the kitchens, and in the small details of human exchange between a woman and her maid, in the nuances of speech (Negro, nigra, nigger—my own family used the middle term), and always in the complications of etiquette, such as an adolescent white boy on a city bus wondering if he should surrender his seat to an elderly black woman loaded down with arthritis and shopping bags.
In the fall of 1962 President Kennedy and Mississippi governor Ross Barnett were facing off over that citadel of resistance to social change, the University of Mississippi. An Air Force veteran named James Meredith had applied for admission as “an American-Mississippi-Negro citizen,” and was turned away on four occasions. The campus swelled up with angry segregationists, many of them carrying guns, some undergraduates wearing Confederate uniforms, everyone giddy with excitement over the battle to come. In the middle of this riotous crowd was General Edwin Walker.
Five years before, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to desegregate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, he had placed General Walker in charge. It was the most distinguished act of Walker’s career. Later he was relieved of his command in Germany when he was discovered to be proselytizing his troops with right-wing literature. Walker resigned his commission and moved to Dallas, where he expected his politics to be more welcome. Newsweek placed him on the cover in 1961 as a symbol of the emerging radical right. Like Bruce Alger, he became a darling of the conservative Dallas housewife. He drew many of them into the local chapter of the John Birch Society. In return they helped to make him one of the city’s most prominent citizens—notable enough, at least in the mind of another citizen, Lee Harvey Oswald, to be worth assassinating.
Walker said he came to the Ole Miss campus to repent for Little Rock. “Now is the time to be heard,” he cried out in a muddled radio speech. “Ten thousand strong from every state in the Union. Rally to the cause of freedom. The battle cry of the Republic. Barnett, yes; Castro, no. Bring your flags, your tents, and your skillets.… The last time in such a situation I was on the wrong side.… This time I am out of uniform and I am on the right side and I will be there.”
The riot that followed was one of the bloodiest in the long history of civil rights struggles; two men were killed, hundreds were wounded. General Walker was charged with insurrection and seditious conspiracy and was sent to Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation at the U.S. prison and medical center. He returned to Dallas on a $50,000 bond, a hero of the resistance. Soon after that he joined up with the anti-Communist radio evangelist Billy James Hargis for a coast-to-coast speaking tour entitled “Operation Midnight Ride.”
Walker did have a certain appeal (his military rectitude and air of command recalled General Douglas MacArthur, and with his Southern dignity of manner he would have been well cast as a Confederate cavalry officer), but he played only a brief role in the events of the moment. In a few years he would be virtually forgotten—an eccentric but, to some newsmen, rather dear old biddy, who twice surfaced from obscurity in the 1970s when he was arrested on misdemeanor homosexual offenses.
On March 10, 1963, while Walker was out of town on Operation Midnight Ride, Lee Oswald went to the general’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard and snapped some photos. He also made sketches of the placement of the windows in the house. Two days later he sent a money order to a mail-order sporting goods company in Chicago for $21.45, along with a coupon he had clipped from American Rifleman magazine. It was payment for an antiquated Italian rifle known as a Mannlicher-Carcano. The weapon came with a four-power telescopic sight.
One month later Walker was back in town, seated at his desk, working on his income tax return. It was 9 P.M.; his head was in the sight of Oswald’s rifle, 120 feet away.
Walker thought that a firecracker suddenly exploded directly above him. He turned and saw a hole in the window frame and realized that he was covered with bits of glass and a pale wash of plaster. The police hypothesized that Walker had moved his head at the last moment. Walker disagreed. In his opinion the light in the room had flooded out the window frame from the assassin’s perspective. The bullet had struck the sash and been deflected. In the morning Walker showed the damaged window to newsmen and wryly remarked, “And the Kennedys say there is no internal threat to our freedom.”
I’ve often wondered what scale in Oswald’s mind would give General Walker and President Kennedy equal weight. To me this first assassination attempt is the strongest evidence against a conspiracy, although one could argue that by demonstrating his willingness to kill, Oswald certified himself as a real assassin to—whomever. But a person would have had to have been in Dallas, looking at the world through our own provincial lens, to have seen General Walker as anything other than a local crackpot. Oswald told his wife, Marina, that he shot at Walker because he was a fascist. “If someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.” Only in Dallas could Walker have been seen as a figure of such importance. He wasn’t even that notable in Texas. He had run for governor in 1962 and finished last in a field of six. To the world at large, Walker was just another right-wing Dallas fanatic, a curiosity.
Oswald did not make any further attempts on Walker’s life, but he did follow the general’s activities in the city. Walker was now partly martyred and riding high. When UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson announced that he would come to Dallas to speak on United Nations Day, October 24, 1963, it was a dare that Walker couldn’t ignore.
Some right-wingers persuaded Governor John Connally to declare October 23 “U.S. Day,” and they promoted it into a small event. Bumper stickers around town said U.S. DAY OR UNITED NATIONS DAY—THERE MUST BE A CHOICE and YOU CANNOT RIDE BOTH HORSES. The night before Stevenson was to speak there, General Walker rented the Dallas Memorial Auditorium for a U.S. Day rally. Oswald went to hear Walker’s talk.
There were twelve hundred of Dallas’s most radical citizens in the auditorium that night—Birchers, Minute Men, Christian Crusaders, and members of the National Indignation Convention, which had been founded in Dallas to protest the training of Yugoslavian pilots at a nearby air force base. The NIC was at that point the fastest-growing right-wing organization in the country, according to Newsweek. Walker reminded his audience that the United Nations was an instrument of the worldwide Communist conspiracy, and that on the following night they would have the opportunity to make the rest of the world know that Dallas was one place where the people weren’t fooled. Walker proposed to have a welcoming party for Adlai Stevenson.
Everyone knew that Stevenson was facing a hostile reception. The Dallas Times Herald published a cartoon on the eve of Stevenson’s visit, showing Kennedy telling his quaking ambassador to “Be Brave.” Stevenson stood hand in hand with the Kennedy boys and with Earl Warren as the most hated men in Dallas, with the difference that while the people who hated Warren and the Kennedys claimed to admire the institutions they represented, they simply couldn’t tolerate the United Nations. It stood for one-worldism, which was nothing more than Communism. It stood for talk, not action. It was a forum for anti-American complaints, which we didn’t care to hear. The Texas Legislature passed a bill that year making the display of the UN flag a crime. Nearly every car in the city with an IMPEACH EARL WARREN bumper sticker boasted its companion, GET US OUT OF THE UN.
There was, in addition, something intensely personal about the hatred of Stevenson. He was the last word in eggheads, Mr. Humpty-Dumpty himself. His urbanity didn’t wash in Dallas, where intellectual charm was suspect (if you took the trouble to be witty, you probably didn’t have it where it counted). Stevenson was the original weak sister.
He arrived to find the auditorium surrounded by pickets. Among them, perhaps, was Oswald, who claimed later that he had attended the speech (others thought they saw him holding a sign). Of the two thousand people inside, many of them were supporters of General Walker, and they had brought Halloween noisemakers and placards that had been stored in Walker’s house overnight. When Stevenson stood to speak, the auditorium erupted with tooting, clanging, ratcheting sounds. Protesters paraded up and down the aisles carrying miniature American and Confederate flags. One man screamed, again and again, “Kennedy will get his reward in hell! And Stevenson is going to die! His heart will stop, stop, stop! And he will burn, burn, burn!”
For the majority of the audience, both the ardent Stevenson supporters and those uncommitted citizens who only wanted to hear him speak, it was the most embarrassing public display they had ever attended. Already Dallasites had begun to grow concerned with their city’s image, and that night for the first time an aroused sense of civic protectiveness began to assert itself. The majority cheered Stevenson and several times gave him a standing ovation, despite the taunts and jeers. They did what they could to police the disrupters in the audience. When Frank McGeehee, a beefy garageman who was the founder of the National Indignation Convention, stood up and began a loud tirade, a small elderly man approached him and tried to push him back into his seat. Police officers finally ejected McGeehee. Above the ruckus, Stevenson coolly observed, “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”
The police formed a cordon around Stevenson when he left the auditorium, but outside were more than a hundred pickets waiting for him—a lynch mob, really—and Stevenson’s sudden appearance set them off. They crowded toward him, waving placards and screaming his name. Stevenson found himself penned in, facing mass hysteria. This was an episode completely outside his experience. He was himself well known for his civility. He had a gentle belief in the power of reason. One woman caught his eye. He should have disregarded her. He must have wondered how his mere presence could send this lady into such a flight of frustrated despair. Who was Adlai Stevenson that he had such emotional power over strangers? His instinct was to talk sense to her, to exorcise the demon he was in her mind. He stepped toward her, out of the police line.
The mob swallowed him. While the police fought to retrieve him, the hysterical woman, who was the wife of an insurance executive, brought her placard down on the ambassador’s head. (The sign said, IF YOU SEEK PEACE, ASK JESUS.) A college student spat on him. When the police finally pulled him into the waiting car, Stevenson wiped the spit from his face with a handkerchief and asked aloud, “Are these human beings or animals?” The crowd responded by rocking the car. At that moment it seemed likely that Stevenson would be murdered on the streets of Dallas, but the driver gunned the car and burst through to safety.
What effect must this have had on Oswald? If he was standing there, as he claimed he was, did he despise the mob? Or was he rocking the car as well? Did he, in this moment of hysteria, feel a sense of permission, a license for political violence?
Kennedy asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to call Stevenson and congratulate him on his courage. It was the quality Kennedy admired above all others, what he called “that most admirable of human virtues.” Stevenson joked about the incident, but he was shaken. “There was something very ugly and frightening in the atmosphere,” he said. He urged Schlesinger to discourage the President’s scheduled trip to Dallas the following month. That, unfortunately, Schlesinger decided not to do. How could Kennedy go to Texas and bypass Dallas? People might say he was afraid of Dallas. Even to suggest such a thing in the Kennedy White House was evidence of cowardice. “I was reluctant to pass on Stevenson’s message lest it convict him of undue apprehensiveness in the President’s eyes,” Schlesinger recalls.
Yes, we were shocked by the Stevenson incident. The city’s leaders wired an apology, the city council adopted an antiharassment ordinance, and the mayor spoke out against the far right. On the other hand, Bruce Alger contended that the city had no reason to feel disgraced; the protesters had only proved that Dallas was “proud, courageous, and truly the home of the brave.” General Walker hung the American flag upside down outside his Turtle Creek home, signaling distress at the city’s apology to Stevenson. “Adlai got what was coming to him,” he told reporters.
Since much of the world would hold the political atmosphere of Dallas responsible for the President’s assassination, it is interesting to discover how closely attuned Oswald was to the events of the moment. He was everywhere, a political gadfly. He was incredibly exotic in Dallas—a man who called himself a Marxist, who actually had defected to the Soviet Union, but who lived now in Oak Cliff with a Russian wife. He thought of himself as a Communist spy. He wrote a letter to Communist party headquarters in New York describing General Walker’s speech. “As you see, political friction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is very great here.” He proposed to infiltrate the American Civil Liberties Union. “Could you advise me as to the general view that we had on the A.C.L.U. and to what degree, if any, I should attempt to highten [sic] its progressive tendencies?”
The night after the Stevenson riot, the ACLU met at Southern Methodist University. It was a small meeting, as any gathering of Dallas liberals was bound to be. Someone made the statement in the flow of discussion that just because a man was a Bircher didn’t mean he was an anti-Semite. “I disagree with that,” said a voice, and Lee Harvey Oswald stood up. He explained that he had attended General Walker’s rally and had heard a number of anti-Semitic as well as anti-Catholic remarks. People who heard Oswald speak that night had varying reactions to him. The Reverend Byrd Helligas, the associate pastor of the First Unitarian Church, thought Oswald “erudite.” A woman found him too sarcastic. Michael Paine, a research engineer and a Quaker, who knew Oswald slightly and who had brought him to the meeting, thought his companion had spoken “loud and clear and coherently.”
Afterward, a Dallas couple who had learned about Oswald’s background cornered him and grilled him about politics. The man recalled: “I said to him, ‘I know that you have communistic tendencies.’ He interjected, ‘I am a Marxist.’ It left me with the impression that it was decidedly different. Of course, Stalinist, Communist, Marxist—to me he’s a Commie.”
Oswald was utterly out of place in Dallas. The biggest surprise of the assassination was the evidence that the President had been shot by a leftist. In Dallas? It was unusual to meet even a liberal Democrat. Oswald once related that he had become interested in Marxism when a woman on a street corner handed him a brochure protesting the recent execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. That was in 1954, the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings, the peak of the Red Scare in America. The country was terrorizing itself with its obsessive fears of Communism. Congress was considering extending its witch-hunt into the classrooms and the churches. And yet Communism as a real political force was already extinct in America, a phantom. At that point fifteen-year-old Lee Oswald in New Orleans decided to give form to the fears: He would become a Communist, the national enemy. He would become a Rosenberg.
Psychologists would say he had joined a pseudocommunity, one that existed only in his mind. Oswald told acquaintances that he was looking everywhere for a Communist cell to join; he also wrote letters to the Socialist party. But even after he defected to Russia, he testified to the solitariness of his political beliefs in a letter to his brother, Robert: “I have been a pro-communist for years and yet I have never met a communist.”
He had an admirable feeling for the underdog. In highly segregated New Orleans he once provoked a fight when he chose to sit in the Negro section of a city bus. A group of white boys attacked him. “People who saw the fight said that Lee seemed unafraid,” Robert Oswald has written. “His fists flew in all directions, but he was outnumbered and thoroughly beaten up.”
Oswald eventually fled to Russia, married a pharmacist, then returned to the United States and settled in the city where he was most likely to be feared, despised, and persecuted. Like many villains he fantasized about being widely loved. He told his wife, Marina, that he would be president himself in twenty years, when he would be forty-three, the same age as Kennedy was when he was elected. And yet few people loved Oswald. “Everybody hated him,” Marina said after the assassination, “even in Russia.” In Oswald’s mind, hate was superior to indifference; he wanted people to feel strongly about him. In Dallas, they certainly would.
Like General Walker, Oswald was drawn to the volatile, violent politics of the new world. Such men always appear in the midst of social hysteria. Dallas would excuse itself because the assassin was not right-wing—we were enormously relieved when we heard about Oswald’s Marxism—and yet the atmosphere of fanaticism beckoned to chaotic and suggestible individuals and drew them near.
In November 1963 the cover of Life magazine showed Senator Barry Goldwater with his horse, Sunny. THE ARIZONAN RIDES EAST, said the headline. The month before, Time magazine conducted a state-by-state survey and predicted a “breathlessly close contest” between Kennedy and Goldwater in 1964. It would be Ted Dealey’s dream come true, a political showdown between the old America and the new. Was Barry Goldwater the man on horseback who would ride out of the West and take control—in our name?
Goldwater was idolized in Dallas. He would come to town and preach against welfare, Social Security, collective bargaining, and public housing. “The inescapable by-product of such operations,” he said, “has been the weakening of the individual personality and of self-reliance.” That was the creed of the new world. He took our breath away by saying things in public that even reactionaries only muttered in private. Goldwater’s solution to the war in Vietnam, which was suddenly becoming a nuisance, was to “drop a low-yield nuclear bomb on the Chinese supply lines.” As for the Russians, “let’s lob one into the men’s room of the Kremlin.” I was secretly thrilled when he said that “the country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and float it out to sea.” It was the first time anyone had touched that nerve. We were just beginning to realize the depth of our resentment against the bureaucracy, the media, and the dominating institutions of that part of the country.
Goldwater would not have won the 1964 election, even if Kennedy had been alive to contest it. The new world was not yet strong enough, but it was growing, expanding, extending itself. What was happening in Dallas was spreading throughout the South and the West. New forces were arising. Ronald Reagan, whose political career began with his nomination of Goldwater at the 1964 convention, would capture the California governor’s office by a million-vote majority two years later. George Wallace electrified the South in the spring of 1963, when he stood on the steps of the Alabama statehouse to take the oath for his first term as governor, and cried out, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
In Texas the ancient coalition that constituted the Democratic party was being pulled apart. John Tower had become the first modern Republican to win statewide office, which he did with the help of the liberals. (They thought he’d be easier to beat next time around than his conservative-Democrat opponent.) The state’s other senator, the liberal Ralph Yarborough, was engaged in a quarrel with conservative governor John Connally, which was splitting the party into warring factions. Connally himself was having second thoughts about supporting the national Democratic ticket in 1964, even though his mentor, Lyndon Johnson, was on it. But perhaps Kennedy could hold them all together through one more election if he would just come to Texas. And bring his wife, Yarborough advised.
Crowds in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth met the President with enthusiasm, but those receptions were eclipsed in the press by the rift between the party leaders. In Fort Worth, Kennedy had to order Yarborough to ride in the motorcade with the Vice President. In every other respect the trip was a big success. Kennedy was in great form, the audiences were enchanted, and his wife’s presence gave the trip an air of glamour and high occasion. The President joked in Fort Worth on the morning of his death, “A few years ago I introduced myself as the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I’m getting somewhat the same sensation as I travel around Texas. Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear …” He was irresistible, completely winning.
He left behind him an administration that was nearly paralyzed. His thousand days in power had been a complete failure in domestic matters. Spending for social welfare had risen less rapidly than it had during the Eisenhower years. His social agenda was blocked in Congress by Southern committee chairmen who were willing to bring all government to a halt over the single issue of civil rights. The signal accomplishments of his presidency were a tax cut, the test-ban treaty, and a military buildup that was proportionally larger than the one Ronald Reagan would initiate two decades later. “In the past three years we have increased the defense budget of the United States by over twenty per cent,” Kennedy boasted in Fort Worth, “increased the program of acquisition for Polaris submarines from twenty-four to forty-one; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than seventy-five per cent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over sixty per cent; added five combat ready divisions to the Army of the United States, and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States; increased our strategic airlift capability by seventy-five per cent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces which are now engaged in South Vietnam by six hundred per cent.”
Despite his reputation as a liberal, even in Texas we were beginning to understand that Kennedy was a conservative president. “The business record of this President,” Lyndon Johnson planned to say that afternoon, “is written in the terms of our highest gross national product, highest personal income, highest employment, highest corporate profits in history. If that record—plus the tax cut, plus liberalized depreciation, plus investment credits, plus trade expansion—is ‘anti-business,’ then it is time we rewrote the dictionary.”
Dallas was next. Although crowds everywhere else in Texas had been large and responsive, there was still concern on the part of the Texas politicians with the Kennedy entourage about what might happen there. After Dallas, the Kennedys would fly on to Austin. According to Stanley Marcus, Lyndon Johnson was going to conclude his welcoming speech the following night with the remark “And thank God, Mr. President, that you came out of Dallas alive.”
After his breakfast speech in Fort Worth, Kennedy was given a copy of the Dallas Morning News, which contained front-page articles about the spats among the Texas Democrats, and a full-page, black-bordered advertisement inside the front section. “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” it read. “A city so disgraced by a recent Liberal smear attempt that its citizens have just elected two more Conservative Americans to public office.… A city that will continue to grow and prosper despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for its non-conformity to ‘New Frontierism.’ ” The ad included twelve rhetorical questions that accused the President of going soft on Communism and betraying American allies. It was signed by Bernard Weissman, chairman of the “American Fact-Finding Committee,” a completely fictitious entity. Weissman turned out to be a member of a right-wing coterie formed by three American servicemen who had recently been stationed in Germany. Like Oswald and General Walker, the members of the group had gravitated to Dallas.
Kennedy read the advertisement and handed it to his wife. “Oh, you know,” he told her, “we’re headed into nut country today.”