Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  He is now convinced, like the other men, that Dallas is a singularly remarkable place. You come upon it in the middle of the seemingly endless Texas prairie, hours and hours from other major cities. It emerges from the vast expanse of North Texas for almost no natural reason at all—no impressive waterfronts, no immediate natural resources. But Dallas has been willed into existence by creative, nimble entrepreneurs. They did it by remaining united, by tamping down divisiveness. If it is bad for business, it is not allowed to thrive. It is exactly why the KKK only reluctantly abandoned its national headquarters in Dallas in the 1920s—there were tens of thousands of members in the city, dozens of leading businessmen, but Dealey’s father had convinced the most influential men of all that all the brazen KKK displays and parades would doom the city’s long-range prospects, that it would chase away profit and all the things that would make the city grow for decades to come.

  For the last several years, Dallas has been quietly loping along with little fanfare, little infamy, few distractions. There have been no racial upheavals, no fitful bouts of integration. No outsize calamities making national headlines and tarnishing the city’s image. The mayor doesn’t talk about his years in the KKK. The district attorney, police chief, and sheriff have quarantined most of the slithering vice in the city—it’s still very much there, but instead of it spilling out all over the streets like it used to, you have to know where to find it once the sun goes down. Dallas seems tight, in order.

  But now it is a presidential election year, and there are profound choices. It seems like the entire nation is hurtling toward a searing crossroads. There are dangers at home, around the world. And Dealey sees Dallas facing its gravest challenge—just as the nation’s attention is turning to a charismatic Democrat named John F. Kennedy.

  And the fiercely protective publisher decides to move into action, to guard Dallas. Dealey and his paper want the city to know what dangers are lurking: “On the one side will be those who want to carry the nation farther along the road toward socialism. They will advocate expanded Social Security, federal health insurance and federal aid to the schools, bringing with it federal control.

  “1960 may be a crucial year in America’s history. It still is uncertain that most voters will have the discernment to choose freedom over candy-covered socialism.”13

  That same month, in Augsburg, West Germany, Major General Edwin A. Walker sweeps into one of the elementary schools on the sprawling military base he commands with unyielding precision.

  He is the tough-talking leader of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, at the very front lines of the Cold War. At age fifty, Walker is trim, with deep blue eyes and his hair neatly combed into place. He grew up on his family’s sprawling ranch northwest of San Antonio. His ancestors fought for the South during the Civil War, and his Confederate sympathies still smolder. At the behest of his devout, conservative mother, he attended West Point. A poor student, he was hell on the polo fields, and ultimately fearless in battle. During World War II he became a daring commando officer, parachuting behind enemy lines to lead bloody night raids. He rose quickly through the ranks. At the end of the war, he boasted a chestful of medals and a reputation as one of the finest, most reliable men in the military.

  At formal banquets, he dressed in his crisp uniform, and women gravitated to his side. He was considered a prize catch. But Walker has never married. Instead he is surrounded constantly by young, eager soldiers who serve as his personal aides. Word spread that Walker’s chauffeur recently committed suicide, and though there are whispers, no one knows exactly why.

  As Walker enters the school, he is quickly escorted to the cafeteria, where two hundred expectant people are gathered for a January Parent Teacher Association meeting. Walker steps onto the stage and approaches the microphone. Before he begins, he looks out at the soldiers, mothers, and children seated before him. They are attentive, eager. Walker is a no-nonsense warrior, and his quick temper is well known inside military circles—but everyone is expecting a version of the usual America-and-apple-pie homilies that go with an address to little children. Some inspiring words to the kids, some cheerful reminders and allusions to the general’s old days in the classroom. Maybe a story of self-discipline, courage, or camaraderie. Maybe a gentle joke or two.

  The auditorium grows quiet as Walker begins speaking in his loud, flat Texas monotone. He is blistering, withering: Despite the army’s best efforts, the enemy is taking over America. Some 60 percent of the U.S. press is already controlled by communists. The leading journalists—Walter Lippmann, Edward Murrow, and Eric Sevareid—are “convinced Communists.”

  The wary parents in the audience can sense his anger. They begin to turn and murmur to each other: What is he talking about? Is something like this really happening?

  Walker presses on as the families stare at him: The communists are relentless, ready to topple America. People at the very top have subversive sympathies. Even former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and President Harry S. Truman are “decidedly pink.”14

  Inside his art-filled, book-cluttered office on the sixth floor of Neiman Marcus, the exquisitely dressed but gnomish-looking Stanley Marcus shakes his head in disbelief as he considers the latest chess moves by Dallas’s self-appointed super-patriots.

  Someone has just mailed out six thousand reprints of a January article in a conservative journal, the American Mercury. The story is mercilessly attacking Marcus’s invention, the Dallas Council on World Affairs: “In Dallas, Leftism’s most familiar masquerade is internationalism, in the seemingly innocuous guise of the Council on World Affairs.”15

  The Dallas Morning News is also piling on, running stories about the sweeping controversy, and copies of the Mercury are even sold out at local newsstands. Marcus is already well known in the city for his cultural inclinations—some that seem to skitter close, in some estimations, to outright socialism. He has used his immense wealth to become a noted art collector and he has also shaped Dallas’s symphony orchestra and arts museum.

  But sometimes he also can’t help but feel that he is in someone’s crosshairs, as if he has pushed for too many new things in old Dallas. Marcus co-sponsored, along with TIME, Inc., a Sports in Art exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, with works by internationally recognized artists, depicting figure skaters, baseball players, and fishermen. As the museum prepared for the opening, hundreds of prominent, angry people quickly joined forces to protest that the art was done by communists.

  Their spokesman Alvin Owsley was the former ambassador to Ireland and national commander of the American Legion, now living in one of the grandest homes in Dallas. “It is one of the basic premises of Communist doctrine that art can and should be used in the constant process of attempting to brainwash and create public attitudes that are soft toward communism,” he insisted.16 “The works of the Red hand and the black heart hating America do not deserve to be exhibited to our citizenship… Let those who would plant a Red picture supplant it with the Red, White and Blue. White for purity, blue for fidelity, as blue as our Texas bluebonnets.”17

  The incident humiliated Marcus when his worldly friends asked him exactly how intolerant Dallas could be. Marcus told them it was just an aberration, an anomaly. For years he had also been bringing in speakers from all over the world as part of his careful plan to elevate Dallas into a consequential city, more sophisticated, more urbane, and less of a down-market, forgettable place in the hot, remote backwaters of Texas.

  But now he is holding in his hands this damning screed in the American Mercury, and reading that he and his Dallas Council on World Affairs are being blamed for “trying to force their internationalist brand of collectivism on a community which doesn’t want it… Dallas is fortunate that it has citizens who are courageous enough to expose this creeping indoctrination and to combat it.”18

  Marcus is fifty-six, a Harvard-educated native of Dallas, and a marketing genius who has turned his family’s clothing store into an internat
ional symbol of opulence. As the oil boom flooded Texas with petrodollars, Marcus brought mink coats—and Coco Chanel—to Texas. He also brought legendary customer service to his richest clients. He is a soft-spoken man, yet a demanding perfectionist. It is not unusual for Marcus or one of his salespeople to hop into a plane and fly hundreds of miles to close a sale.

  Marcus is also a Jew and achingly excluded, along with blacks, from the city’s best private clubs. Yet outside the city, he might be the most welcome Dallasite in New York and Europe: He consorts with movie stars and is on a first-name basis with European royalty. He publishes articles in Fortune and the Atlantic. He helped outfit the wedding party at Grace Kelly’s ceremony to Prince Rainier, and he provided First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s inaugural gown. He has stayed overnight at Eisenhower’s White House. He is even friendly with Senator John F. Kennedy after they met while serving together on Harvard’s board of overseers.

  In Dallas, his store is regarded by many as the social center of the city—and even a reassuringly elegant beacon of segregation, since blacks are barred from eating in the Neiman Marcus restaurant. Despite the segregation, city boosters always make a point of bringing Northern executives—ones thinking of relocating to warm-weather, low-tax Dallas—to the emporium. Maybe Marcus’s cathedral to the high life will reassure ambivalent magnates from New York and Connecticut that Dallas is on the brink of cosmopolitan splendor.

  Marcus always loves the chance to praise Dallas, to tell people the city is marvelously reinventing itself. Marcus can live anywhere he wants—but he loves Dallas.

  “It’s stimulating to live in a city that’s on the make,” he tells friends.19 But he also hears the stinging stereotypes when he travels: Dallas is an uninteresting, uncultured, xenophobic, anti-intellectual city where hoary Old Southerners mingle with the crass New West nouveau riche. For years, more than anyone in the city, Marcus has been on a mission to change the image. And with a presidential election year unfolding—one that offers truly defined choices—he is convinced it’s time for him to do more to dethrone the hidebound traditions and suspicions that men like Dealey, Criswell, and Hunt are clinging to.

  To Marcus, Dallas simply needs to be more worldly and welcoming… and maybe even integrated, even if it means finally opening his store’s restaurant to blacks. Something, someone, needs to change in Dallas, in the whole damned South.

  In January 1960, Marcus quietly wonders if it could be his old friend and big-spending customer Lyndon Baines Johnson: If LBJ is given power, will he usher Dallas, Texas, and the rest of the South into some sort of fresher, progressive phase?

  The two men go way back: Johnson is one of Marcus’s best—and most maddening—customers. For years, Marcus has put up with Johnson’s braying need for attention. The senator once returned an expensive monogrammed bathrobe to Marcus because the letters LBJ weren’t large enough to suit his taste.

  Marcus decides to call Johnson and have a guarded discussion even before Johnson publicly announces he is a presidential candidate.

  LBJ listens as Marcus offers to co-chair his Dallas campaign and raise money for him.

  And Marcus wonders if LBJ is really going to try to distance himself from the racist tendencies of the South—and if LBJ has bold plans to drag Dallas away from its past.

  FEBRUARY

  On a bitterly cold Monday afternoon, steam rises from city grates and a light rain falls outside the five-story, limestone-colored Cokesbury Bookstore in downtown Dallas. Cokesbury is just up the street from Neiman Marcus, and some like to suggest it is the largest bookstore in America. It regularly brings visiting writers to town—including John Steinbeck and William Faulkner—but neither the store nor the city of Dallas has ever seen an author event like the one unfolding today.

  Six hundred people are standing in a line that spills out of the doorway and stretches an entire block. In the damp chill, men have pulled their fedoras tighter over their heads. Women are congregating under umbrellas. Everyone is here for the same reason: a chance to see the reclusive Dallas billionaire reputed to be the wealthiest person on earth. He, as it happens, has just published a novel.

  Puffs of mist form as people talk in low, expectant voices, waiting patiently to take another step forward. Many have seen the advertisement for the February book signing in the Dallas Morning News, featuring an odd, blurry photo of an old man with glowing eyes and the look of someone trying to duck away from the camera at the exact instant the shutter clicked. The ad for his book Alpaca reads:

  “ALPACA is as real as today’s headlines about Cuba… H. L. Hunt, one of the financial leaders of the world, has taken time from a busy life to write this book. Of permanent importance, it makes a contribution to the welfare of our country and to the world.”1

  Hunt is, really, a phantom Midas that people exchange fantastic rumors about: How many wives does he really have? Did he really produce more oil during World War II than all the Axis powers combined? Can he really forecast the future?

  H. L. Hunt lives in a replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon—though Hunt’s home is conspicuously larger—set on a ten-acre estate overlooking White Rock Lake. The acreage surrounding the mansion is not like those of Dallas’s other wealthy. There are no palace gardens, statues, or fountains. Instead, a few tame deer patrol the grounds, along with some chickens, a couple of peacocks, and a goat. The property line is marked by a standard-issue chain-link fence. But there is something else. As if to discourage visitors, a very large cannon is stationed at the front of the house, pointing out toward the padlocked gate.

  John Paul Getty tells people that Haroldson Lafayette Hunt is the lord among lords in the pantheon of the American rich. He makes more money, more quickly, than anyone else—an electric ability that doesn’t jibe with the fact that he looks like a dime-store owner and eats his lunch out of a brown paper bag. And who is surrounded by mystery as much as fact. People routinely pass along the gossip: He has not one, not two, but three wives and families in different cities. He believes he is from a superior race, someone whose genetic coding is so advanced that his gift to mankind is his offspring. He has a son, a savant, who has been lobotomized and kept hidden in the Dallas mansion—and whom Hunt has tried to cure by arranging for his son to have boundless sexual encounters with beautiful women. Hunt refuses to shake hands with people, fearing he will become contaminated by the contact. He travels in the company of young, blond, full-breasted women; he introduces them as either his “niece” or his “secretary.”

  A few things are clear: His various businesses earn him an average of $200,000 a day, but money is no longer the endgame. It is, he believes, best understood as the consequence of his profound genetic makeup. He could own every restaurant in Dallas, buy out Neiman Marcus, but he packs figs and beans in oily lunch bags and drives a bruised Pontiac to his downtown building six days a week, finding the cheapest lot to park in.

  His office on the seventh floor of the Mercantile Building is across the street from Neiman Marcus, but he rarely ventures inside. Instead, Hunt prefers saggy suits from off the rack, and drab bow ties that he buys in bulk for eighty-eight cents. He even trims his own hair. He was once a big Cuban cigar smoker, but he gave it up after he did the math in his mind: He had wasted $300,000 in time and money each year, with all the hours spent taking the wrappers off, lighting the cigars, and nursing them.

  Hunt has known from an early age that he possesses special powers. He taught himself to read by age three. He can endure great bouts of intercourse, drinking, gambling. He wagers $100,000 on football games. His belief in his own supernatural force is so strong that twice he’s tried to lift automobiles off people at the scenes of accidents. He has the genius gene, and it is his civic duty, his moral obligation, to seed planet Earth with his progeny. Hunt also has a vision for utopia, for what America should look like. And now he has published that vision in the form of a novel, Alpaca.

  “I am the best writer I know,” Hunt tells people.2

&nbs
p; He believes his book to be of “permanent importance.” Nevertheless it is printed in the cheapest manner possible. The paper is flimsy, just one grade above the kind used to print the Dallas Morning News. The binding is held together with a few dollops of crude wax, rather than glue. He has self-published the volume, listing the publisher as “HLH Press,” and his book is very small, only about four inches across.

  A novel, a cautionary fable, is the right way to reach ordinary Americans who might otherwise never understand what needs to be done. In Alpaca, he has created his own country with the perfect form of government. The men who amass the greatest wealth receive more votes than anyone else—up to seven votes each. The bottom 40 percent of taxpayers get no votes at all. The wealthy can purchase additional votes if they desire. Few government services exist in Alpaca—not even public schools. And, finally, the nation must enshrine the “oil depletion allowance”—a massively lucrative tax break for Texas oilmen—as part of the constitution. It is, in fact, the highest law of the land. “The people of Alpaca… were generally happy with the new Constitution,” he writes.3

  This February afternoon, the people lining up outside the bookstore are extremely eager but patient, as if their politeness will be acknowledged and maybe even rewarded when they buy the billionaire’s book. As people step inside and begin inching toward Hunt’s signing table, they suddenly hear tiny voices floating in unison. Hunt’s ten-and eleven-year-old daughters, Helen and Swanee, are holding hands. They sway together in time as they stand behind their seventy-year-old father and sing to the tune of “Doggie in the Window”: