Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  Marcus puts the letters down and mulls his decision, and the way Dallas has been changing, and the way he has envisioned its future. For years he’s been a lonely voice on the Dallas Citizens Council, quietly lobbying the other men to consider integration. The others have continually put him off, refusing to even discuss the matter.

  Marcus has been negotiating a tightrope. He knows that many of his best customers will abandon his store if he is the first to cross the color line. So even as he retains Neiman Marcus’s official apartheid, he makes private financial contributions to Negro causes, perhaps hoping to assuage his guilt. And now the walls are crumbling. Everyone can feel it. Organized protests against segregation are spreading across the South, and newspapers are filling with stories of mobs and violence.

  The Dallas Citizens Council is coming to a consensus built on enlightened self-interest: We’ll have to bend… or risk destroying what we built in Dallas.

  MARCH

  The movie Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, is generating fanfare, and critics are already predicting it will win Academy Awards. President Kennedy has seen the film twice in Washington. And today, the Adamson High School band is assembled in front of the Capri Theatre as local dignitaries join the crowds lining up to see the movie. The dignitaries’ names are printed in the papers.

  Over the next several days, letters begin arriving at their homes:

  I’m shocked that a good American such as you would attend the showing of this Communist-backed movie.

  Meanwhile, a grocery chain in Dallas is found to be selling small wicker baskets made in Yugoslavia—and the stores are besieged by letters, phone calls, and visits from angry people demanding that “the communist products” be stripped from the shelves. The store managers anxiously confer and decide to comply.

  The Dallas Freedom Forum, tied to a national organization called the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, is planning its next meeting at the Baker Hotel—the same majestic hotel where LBJ and his wife were cornered last fall by the mink coat mob. The leaders in Dallas are drafting the themes for the meeting—ridding the State Department of socialists, outlawing the Communist Party, imposing a 100 percent trade block on the Soviet Union, and ending foreign aid. The guest list is being drawn up: The lead attorney for H. L. Hunt will be invited. So will the Dallas School Board president—a staunch anti-communist who has already readily agreed to allow national officers of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade to address high school students.1

  And the John Birch Society is racing ahead. In dens and living rooms all over the city, more and more groups of up to twenty-five people are gathering for coffee, doughnuts, and recruitment and indoctrination sessions. Prospects are shown a film of Robert Welch reading from his Blue Book, and Birch publications are offered for sale. Dozens of new members are joining every week. Welch is prophesying that his organization will soon have one million members.

  The negative publicity from the mainstream media toward the Birchers has had the opposite effect among so many in Dallas: “Maybe the Communists didn’t like what the society was doing,” muses one Dallas member, “and ordered this rash of bad publicity.”2

  All over the city, people watch as Welch appears on NBC’s Meet the Press and offers his critique of the Eisenhower presidency: “In 1953, internationally, the nearest Communist dominion to us was probably East Germany, 3,500 miles away… but go ahead for eight years to the end of 1960 and see what had happened. The Communists were 90 miles from our shores.”3

  Hearing Welch, several people in Dallas suddenly feel that they have finally found a group, a patriotic organization that understands their frustrations and fears about where America is headed. For some, it anchors men and women in a common belief.

  “I was tired of just sitting around and talking about it,” says one Dallas member. “I wanted to do something—something concrete—and the society gives me the opportunity and the encouragement.”4

  In Dallas, hundreds of people quickly respond when Welch begins asking for something more from his members—their help compiling a master blacklist:

  “The most complete and most accurate files in America on the leading Communists, Socialists, and liberals… who are trying to change the economic and political structure of this country so that it could be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia in a one-world socialist government.”5

  One Dallas homemaker knows her life has changed since this new crusade began taking hold in her city. It has given her purpose and deep meaning:

  “I just don’t have time for anything,” she says. “I’m fighting communism three nights a week.”6

  APRIL

  Major General Edwin A. Walker’s Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division leads the Seventh Army in combat readiness. The Texan requires daily calisthenics for all thirteen thousand men under his command—even the desk jockeys and once overweight majors are now in top physical shape. A roaring lion, which paces in its cage near headquarters, serves as the Twenty-Fourth’s mascot. The animal is said to have the rank and pay of a sergeant.

  Walker’s division is equipped with nuclear weapons: MGR-1 “Honest John” missiles mounted on the backs of trucks. His well-drilled men can have the rockets ready to fire in five minutes.

  There are at least three hundred thousand communist troops massed across the East German border, but the general is increasingly focused on the communist subversion back home. Quietly, some of his soldiers believe that the bachelor general’s obsessions are bordering on madness: They’ve attended his fanatical lectures where he shows a giant map depicting the world’s communist penetration—every single country, including the United States, is shaded red. The soldiers have seen Walker lose his temper—shouting that newsman Edward R. Murrow is a communist. They’ve seen him, eyes glowing with anger, as he rips up a copy of MAD Magazine—the children’s spoof publication—denouncing it as a subversive influence on American schoolchildren. Walker is speaking constantly about psychological warfare, about brainwashed Americans, about the soldiers he knew who had been tortured by the communists during the Korean War.

  By now, it’s not just the rank-and-file soldiers who are looking at him. Walker has already been warned twice by the European commander, General Bruce C. Clarke, to stay clear of political proselytizing.

  But Walker has reached his critical crossroads, committed to do something that flies completely in the face of all that he has been trained to do during a lifetime as an unswerving soldier: He has decided to disobey his orders, his commanders. He is serving a higher cause. The future of his country—indeed, of all Christianity—is at stake. He begins telling his friends that the hour is late… that drastic and immediate action is needed.

  He’s developed a “Pro-Blue” education program for his division that is identical to the teachings of the John Birch Society. He brings in Birch-affiliated speakers for patriotic lectures, and he recommends his soldiers read The Life of John Birch by Robert Welch—the book is stocked in dayrooms throughout the division. The Twenty-Fourth’s newspaper, the Taro Leaf, reprints articles from the Birch Society’s official magazine.1

  During the buildup to the 1960 election, Walker became even more agitated about the direction of America. Despite pleas from his subordinates, he used his “Commander’s Column” in the Taro Leaf to urge his men to vote for conservative politicians.

  And then, shortly after Kennedy’s victory, Walker began experiencing massive headaches. The pain became so severe that he checked himself into the base hospital. Rumors have been circulating that Walker has a brain tumor. Many of his troops believe it’s the only way to explain his increasingly erratic behavior. He loses his temper frequently. He is becoming a chain-smoker, nervously lighting one cigarette after another as the puffs swirl around his head.

  For some reporters, the rumors about Walker are too good to ignore.

  The Overseas Weekly, a sensationalistic tabloid aimed at the enlisted men in Europe and created as a dishy alternative to the more staid Stars and Stripe
s, specializes in true crime stories and photos of half-naked women. The magazine is very popular—fifty thousand servicemen read it religiously. Army officers call it “Oversexed Weekly.” Walker is disgusted by the magazine and he’s tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent it from being sold at his base.

  Walker believes that a Weekly reporter has been spreading rumors about his mental state. He has the reporter kicked off his base. In turn, the newspaper’s publisher contacts General Clarke, the European commander, and demands that the reporter be reinstated. The publisher warns Clarke that the paper has plenty of information to run a damaging exposé of the general. Clarke feels blackmailed and curtly dismisses the publisher. Now, today, April 15, the newest edition of The Overseas Weekly hits newsstands.

  A sultry, beautiful blond woman is on the cover. She’s lying on a bed and appears to be wearing little more than a blanket. “She’s lovely, young, and single,” the headline advises.

  Above the photo is a larger, more serious headline: WHAT’S GOING ON AT 24TH INF. DIV?

  The story begins: “For the past year the 24th Infantry Division has been exposed to a propaganda barrage on the philosophy of the anticommunist John Birch Society.”2

  American newspapers have already been publishing exposés about the John Birch Society for weeks. And now it appears that a high-ranking U.S. Army officer is also involved in the organization. The Weekly has scooped the entire stateside press. Each of Walker’s political transgressions is detailed, including his contemptuous comments that President Truman and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt are “definitely pink.”

  And overnight, General Edwin A. Walker becomes the most controversial man in the American military. He is on the front page of the New York Times and he is the focus of headlines around the world, including Dallas.

  While President Kennedy grapples with the massive fallout from the CIA’s bungled attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, General Walker holds a press conference in Germany to blast the Overseas Weekly report. Walker begins calmly enough, reading a written statement denying that his Pro-Blue program is affiliated with the John Birch Society.

  But as questions mount about the details in The Overseas Weekly, Walker suddenly snaps and begins shouting heatedly at the astonished newsmen:

  “We have Communists and we have The Overseas Weekly. Neither is one of God’s blessings to the American people or their soldier sons overseas. Immoral, unscrupulous, corrupt and destructive are terms which could be applied to either. If the costs of the bad effects of Overseas Weekly could be accounted in dollars, it would be in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars—without including all the benefits to the enemy.”3

  By now, European commander Clarke is appointing a special inspector general to investigate the allegations against Walker. The investigator is a friend of Walker’s. General Clarke expects that the crazy accusations will die down and he will go through the motions of delivering a mild admonishment to Walker.

  Then, Clarke is told by an aide that there is an urgent phone call from Washington, DC. The secretary of the army is on the line, and Clarke listens as he tells him that President Kennedy is demanding that General Walker be relieved of his command—effective immediately.

  Clarke hangs up and decides, simply, to follow the executive mandates as quickly as possible: He sends news to Walker that he is being reassigned, summoned to work in Clarke’s European Army headquarters. Walker will be deputy chief of staff while the investigation is conducted. It is a subordinate position, a clear affront to the proud, feisty Walker.

  Clarke admits that he knows Walker feels belittled: “The reassignment is very humiliating.”4

  Back in the States, the political establishment backs Kennedy’s action. Wisconsin Congressman Henry S. Reuss essentially calls Walker crazy: “Generals are entitled to whatever lunatic private views they wish to espouse. They are not entitled to use the machinery of the U.S. Army to try to corrupt our troops.”5

  Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire is even more scornful: “The incident shows that the fight against communism should be taken over by intelligent people and not left to morons.”6

  But the moves against Walker are also galvanizing plenty of people searching for something to cement their distrust of Kennedy. Thousands of letters and telegrams begin to pour into the White House. One complains: “This is a new low in American history—demoting a General for patriotism and, conversely, it certainly must have given aid and comfort to commies—to realize their insidious infiltration in high places.”7

  Another writer is more direct: “Our traitor president has committed treason against the United States.”8

  Among the messengers bombarding the Kennedy White House is Mrs. George Pinckney Walker of Center Point, Texas. She is General Walker’s mother. Her telegram reads: “Another Communist victory if Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker is not cleared of subversive accusations.”9

  And in Dallas, Dealey and the Dallas Morning News are running several pro-Walker stories and even conducting an investigation into The Overseas Weekly. The News describes how the magazine that brought down Walker “carries full page, nearly nude girlie pics.” Dealey’s paper pins down the Weekly’s motives:

  “Is it to besmear the GI and make him unwelcome and loathsome wherever in the world he may go?”10

  The News issues an editorial: HE SIMPLY TALKED TOO MUCH. It references Walker’s denunciations of President Truman and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt:

  “As to Harry Truman, he did the Reds a great service when he ordered MacArthur not to win in Korea and almost as great a service when he fired MacArthur. But Mr. Truman is no pink. He is definite, but not pink.”

  The piece continues, “As for Dame Roosevelt, it is wrong to say that she is definitely pink. It is kinder to say that her whole thought process is indefinite. She means well in a pastel shade, as it were—rubescent at times, but still it is merely pastel.”

  And Kennedy has not just erred by exiling Walker from his command, he has cracked the door open to far worse things: “If the Pentagon keeps issuing orders… to soften up instruction on how to counter the Reds, the conclusion is going to be widespread, whether it be accurate or not, that infiltration has been successful at the top.”11

  H. L. Hunt’s Life Line radio show runs three consecutive programs defending General Walker and his crusades. The program’s excitable host, the Reverend Wayne Poucher, reads aloud from the non-controversial portions of Walker’s Pro-Blue campaign. These excerpts, he cautions listeners, are presented “with the hope that you have been able to judge for yourself whether these Pro-Blue lectures have been detrimental to our men in the armed forces.”12

  In Texas, John Tower, the state’s new Republican senator, the first one since Reconstruction, resorts to religious imagery: “General Walker has been crucified for his patriotism.”13 Congressman Bruce Alger races to help form a Justice-for-Walker Committee. A petition begins circulating in the House of Representatives calling on Kennedy to reinstate Walker—and to even give the general a promotion.

  Just as quickly, the spreading backlash against the Kennedy administration moves from Texas to key allies around the nation: Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the Senate’s most ardent segregationist—and someone who once enjoyed listening to Reverend Criswell’s denunciations of integration—rises to attack the Kennedy administration for killing Walker’s career. Echoing Tower, he also says Walker has been tortured like someone from the Bible: “This brilliant officer and fine commander has been crucified for his patriotism and devotion to his country.”14

  In Europe, General Walker is overwhelmed by his rising celebrity status.

  He is busy ordering his young aides to send out thanks to the growing number of supporters—the generals, soldiers, politicians, and people across America writing him notes.

  He contemplates his next action.

  The general’s mother, interviewed at her family’s Texas ranch, isn’t quite sure what he’ll do. But she knows her son:

 
; “He’s aggressive and tenacious… and he doesn’t back down from a fight. Things will start popping as soon as he comes back.”15

  JUNE

  With John F. Kennedy looking on in the White House Rose Garden, General Curtis LeMay is sworn in as the new air force chief of staff.

  A pugnacious, cigar-chomping warrior, LeMay directed the bombing campaign against Japan during World War II. He is a big believer in airpower, and why shouldn’t he be? His planes ended the Pacific war by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay is already suggesting that he can solve America’s current troubles in Indochina by bombing Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam.

  Kennedy despises LeMay, but he has no choice other than to appoint the popular general to the Joint Chiefs. “We would have had a major revolt on our hands if we hadn’t promoted LeMay,” says Kennedy’s deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric.1

  The president’s relations with his military are at a nadir. His refusal to commit U.S. troops at the Bay of Pigs and his decision to relieve Walker of his command have made the military and its vocal supporters in Congress more than suspicious of him. Kennedy had campaigned as a fierce cold warrior, accusing the Eisenhower administration of letting a “missile gap” develop. Once in office, he realized the truth: A missile gap does exist—but it is overwhelmingly in the United States’ favor. The U.S. has 185 intercontinental ballistic missiles and over three thousand deliverable nuclear bombs. The Soviets have only four intercontinental missiles and a few dozen nuclear weapons.

  Kennedy also begins to learn that his top military commanders are jockeying to exploit the United States’ nuclear advantage, especially as tensions with the Russians mount in Berlin. But Kennedy refuses to issue nuclear threats to the Soviets in order to keep Berlin open. “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war,” he says.2