Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  His Joint Chiefs don’t agree. And Curtis LeMay is only in his post a few days before he causes his first big stir. He attends a fashionable dinner party in Georgetown and is seated next to the wife of a leading senator. He tells her that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union is coming soon—probably before the end of the year. He calmly explains that every major American city—Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—will be reduced to glowing ash. For his part, LeMay plans to be safely ensconced inside an underground bunker, directing the U.S. strikes on the USSR.

  The woman is shocked. She’s heard the doomsday scenarios before, but not from the top air force general. LeMay’s belief that such an event is imminent is terrifying to her. She mentions her children and grandchildren and asks if there is anything she can do to guarantee their safety. LeMay advises her that the best course of action is to pack a tent and head for the open desert in the West.3

  When LeMay’s comments make the papers, the general denies everything. But Kennedy’s generals are planning for a nuclear war.

  JULY

  Kennedy walks into the newly created “Situation Room” located underground beneath the White House’s West Wing. It is July 20, and alongside him are his closest aides and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The Joint Chiefs have prepared a special presentation.

  General Lyman Lemnitzer begins by explaining that the military has a plan to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the Russians. Using a series of flip charts on easels, Lemnitzer points out which cities will be blasted off the face of the earth. He concedes that a few retaliatory bombs will strike American cities, killing millions of people in this country. He also admits that the resulting radiation will have untold consequences for the planet as a whole. But this is the price America needs to pay in order to win the war against communism.

  Kennedy taps his front teeth with his thumb and runs his hand repeatedly through his hair as Lemnitzer speaks. JFK’s aides know that these signals usually indicate his intense irritation.

  When the general finishes his presentation, Kennedy gets up and stalks out of the room.

  He turns to his secretary of state: “And we call ourselves the human race.”1

  Kennedy really does seem anxious to avoid nuclear war at all costs. He later tells his advisers: “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.”2

  To counteract the Soviet threat in Europe, he instead calls for a massive buildup of conventional forces. At the same time, he wants to send signals to Khrushchev that he is interested in negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty.

  Curtis LeMay and other high-ranking officers are convinced Kennedy is naive. LeMay is certain that America will eventually have a nuclear war with Russia—so why not start it now, while we have an overwhelming advantage in weaponry?

  And one of LeMay’s former bomber pilots during World War II, Congressman Bruce Alger, agrees completely. Alger is one of two congressmen to vote against Kennedy’s proposal to strengthen the United States’ conventional forces while seeking to tamp down nuclear hostilities.

  “We must stop the farce of pretending that we can negotiate with Russian leaders,” Alger is saying. The United States, instead, should resume nuclear testing and begin issuing ultimatums to the Soviets.3

  As other congressmen listen, some are shaking their heads. Alger has often been too extreme, too isolated. This is no different. But even though his views ostracize him in Congress, he finds full support from the unwavering powerbrokers in Dallas:

  “Alger is eminently right in thinking that we must look for victory primarily through use of nuclear arms,” says Dealey’s Dallas Morning News.

  “Our wisest course should be reliance primarily on strength for nuclear warfare. If, with the first crossing of the West German border by Soviet troops, we can sweep over their heads and strike Moscow with atomic devastation, the Kremlin leaders will have something to think about—if they are still alive to think.”4

  SEPTEMBER

  Rhett James fears the worst. It is a scorching day, headed to ninety-six degrees, and the thick mat of warm air is like an advance warning for marauding Hurricane Carla, which is just entering the Gulf Coast and taking dead aim at Texas.

  The long summer passed by with almost daily, stunning turns of the wheel: Following the mandates of the Dallas Citizens Council, blacks are now allowed to eat at lunch counters. They are allowed inside any sections of the movie theaters. Those who could afford it can even dine at Stanley Marcus’s Zodiac restaurant. The newspapers have barely said a word about the sea changes in Dallas. It is as if an invisible lever was just pulled—and all without any “outside agitators,” including the odious Martin Luther King Jr., coming to the city.

  But today is the final, perhaps ultimate, test in Dallas: James is trying to integrate the city’s schools for the first time in its history. The preacher understands that the handful of wide-eyed children he has helped to handpick are wondering: Why are there so many white policemen, why are my parents coddling me as if they never want to let me go?

  As James stands outside Travis Elementary, there are at least 750 Dallas police scattered around the city… waiting, watching for how the city will respond. The first-graders stare up at James—they are unaware of the mad swirl of history they are making. They are in their carefully cleaned and pressed clothes, their faces scrubbed and shoes shined. Some of the little girls have bows in their hair. They look, for all the world, as if they are about to go to church—as opposed to marching into the annals of history.

  Dallas has fought it, cleverly and then without subtlety. City leaders, from Congressman Alger to former Mayor R. L. Thornton to the new mayor, Earle Cabell, have talked for years about the dilemma: It is the Supreme Court’s law, but it is not what anyone really wants. But the federal orders that General Walker once enforced in Arkansas have finally been too much to ignore in Dallas—the city has been drawing national attention for being more resistant to the laws of the land than even the deepest Southern cities.

  Finally, the white men on the Dallas Citizens Council agreed to meet a carefully coordinated group of seven black leaders who came bearing a proposal: Begin the integration or Dallas loses face. Begin the integration before Dr. King is invited to town. Begin the integration before Freedom Riders, Northern activists, begin occupying the city.

  There were more meetings in the tall buildings, and then Reverend James and the others were told that Dallas would integrate its schools—but only one grade at a time. Starting with the first-graders. Then, the next year, the second grade. And so on, and so on. It was, for people in black Dallas, quintessentially just like white Dallas… slow, hesitant, cautious, and with plenty of time for white residents to move the hell away from any school that had black children in it. It was, in the end, the only way Dallas would ever bend toward integration—it was the only palatable plan for the Dallas Citizens Council.

  For the last several weeks, James has carefully helped select these eighteen bright little children, ones who promise to be firm and polite and attentive. There are ten girls and eight boys. He has met with their very wary parents, and he has counseled them about what to expect: At the best it would be a tension-filled but violence-free day. At the worst… well, all he could promise was that he would do his best to protect their babies.

  He has studied all the precedents, the perversely insidious ways that school districts across the South have tried to block black students—sometimes by claiming they didn’t have the proper health certificates, suggesting that they are like filthy animals carrying communicable diseases. James has made sure that all eighteen Dallas children have been vaccinated, that they have the proper paperwork.

  The first integration will take place at William B. Travis Elementary—a name familiar to many of the children in Texas who are required to study Texas history, as if Texas is still its own nation. Travis was, many children can tell you, the c
ommander of the doomed forces at the Alamo, the site of the defining battle in Texas history. He is famous for sending out his letter: “To the People of Texas & all Americans in the world—… The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch… Victory or Death.”

  At 8:45 a.m., fifteen minutes after school opens, the Dallas school superintendent makes a public announcement: All eighteen Negroes assigned to previously white schools are inside the schools. But four children were not allowed inside classrooms. One didn’t submit a birth certificate. One had siblings in a Negro school—and the Dallas School Board will not allow children with siblings in Negro schools to go to white schools. Two were prevented from taking classes because “there was no reason for them to transfer from their school area.”1

  But the majority of the children are in class with white children, and they are safe. Dallas has, in its paternalistic way, done its job. James begins thinking about the next step: Is it really integration after all? Is it really equal footing and equal education? What will the children hear, what will they be forced to read?

  At that very moment, there are also many people in Dallas who are thinking about the next steps—ways to stem any more integration, any more socialism. Maybe they can pursue a kind of intellectual segregation. Maybe seize control of the classrooms and the books being distributed to children in Dallas.

  The hawk-faced sixty-year-old J. Evetts Haley, the prominent Texas historian who once waged a racist campaign for governor, has formed a group called Texans for America. Even as James leads the children into the schools, Haley and his group are insisting that the state ban schoolbooks that are “not American enough” and that are “too soft on communism.”2 His group assails any textbooks favorable to racial integration, the United Nations, the Supreme Court, Social Security, nuclear disarmament, the New Deal—and even the use of the word democracy to describe America. That is a charged word, a false word, a word that the billionaire H. L. Hunt in Dallas loathes as well: America is a republic, not a democracy. And a republic honors the rights of its states. A republic respects the aims, the ideals, of the states with blood ties to the Confederacy.

  A handful of little black children have walked up the steps to Dallas’s white schools, almost seven years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

  Now, James knows, there are people trying to make sure that children never read about integration—or even democracy. Instead, they are demanding that the Texas Education Agency assign textbooks that extol Christianity, anti-communism, and carefully selected patriots and their heroic acts: J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, General Douglas MacArthur, even Chiang Kai-shek. Virtuous acts—like MacArthur’s plan to drop atomic bombs on communist China—should be praised in Texas schoolbooks.

  Right now, though, James is relieved for those eighteen children.

  Somehow there has been no violence. But still, Dallas is going to stair-step its integration, drag it out for years and years. It is as if the city is still bound by some clutching ambivalence. It is as if there is something holding Dallas back from, once and for all, condemning its worst impulses.3

  OCTOBER

  A thin moon hangs on the horizon as a convoy of three automobiles arrives at Perrin Air Force Base, seventy miles north of Dallas. The cars are carrying a small contingent of John Birch Society members. The group is closely followed by reporters from Dallas who have been alerted to their moves.

  Just yesterday, the Dallas Morning News broke a major story: This modest base is training communist pilots from Yugoslavia to fly F-86 interceptors. The News was tipped off by a Dallas insurance man who doubles as a major in the Texas Air National Guard.

  “In view of the unprecedented reprimand of a patriot of the magnitude of General Walker, it is obvious that today the multiple criminality of communism is honored above God-fearing American patriotism. I remain an unreconstructed, unliberalized, unsocialized, uncommunized American!” the Dallas insurance man tells the paper.1

  The United States has supported and even armed communist Yugoslavia for years—ever since 1948, when Marshal Tito broke away from the Soviet Union. Tito became Yugoslavian president in 1953, and American policy makers now view Yugoslavian independence as a strategic asset against the Russians. But the Dallas insurance-man-turned-major is unconvinced: “All Communists, regardless of nationality, are enemies of America. This is a treasonous situation any way you look at it.”2

  The cars come to a stop at the front gate of Perrin AFB and ten protesters emerge. They have created three red, white, and blue picket signs on short notice. One reads: WE PROTEST THE TRAINING OF RED PILOTS IN THIS COUNTRY. The group begins marching in front of the gate. After forty-five minutes, press coverage assured, they climb back into their cars for the drive back to Dallas.

  Outrage is mounting as the news spreads that Yugoslavian communists are being trained on U.S. soil. An irate woman phones the Dallas Morning News and demands to know, “Are they making our airmen salute those Red officers up at Perrin?”3

  Congressman Alger doesn’t need to wait and hear from his constituents to know what to say. He summons his secretary and dictates a telegram to President Kennedy:

  “The American people are vigorously opposed to exposing our techniques and military weapons to representatives of nations which are part of the world-wide conspiracy dedicated to our destruction.”4

  One of the picketers at Perrin AFB is Frank McGehee, a burly, hard-drinking six-footer who piloted fighter planes in Korea. At age thirty-two, McGehee runs an auto repair garage in Dallas and is trying to put himself through law school. He’s a man of strong political convictions and great ambition. He understands that the ultra-conservative movement in Dallas is booming—and it is well funded.

  The city is now headquarters to several surging patriotic organizations, many of which have sprung up since Kennedy’s election: the Dallas Committee of American Freedom Rallies, the Committee for the Retention of the Poll Tax, the Committee for the Monroe Doctrine, the Dallas Committee to Impeach Earl Warren, the Conservative Independent Voters Information Service, and the Dallas Freedom Forum, which promises: “We’d reduce Russia to a mass of glass for a thousand years.”5

  Women’s clubs are also becoming politically active, including Women for Constitutional Government and the Public Affairs Luncheon Club. Even the Dallas Junior League is growing politicized: Its members have just forced the removal of a “communist-inspired” Pablo Picasso painting from a charity art exhibition.

  And the John Birch Society remains home to many of Dallas’s leading citizens—and there are dozens of individual chapters in the city. McGehee is as outraged about the Yugoslavian pilots situation as anyone else. He also senses a prime opportunity. He quickly arranges to rent the Dallas Memorial Auditorium and begins spreading the word among the Birch chapters: It’s time to come together as a unified force to express our outrage, our indignation.

  On Saturday evening, October 14, the day after the angry picketing at Perrin AFB, three hundred people show up for a meeting that McGehee calls the “National Indignation Convention.”

  As the self-appointed chairman, McGehee welcomes the crowd: “We want to demonstrate that we are sick and tired of traitors in our government.” Dallas, he says, is the beginning of a national crusade: “We must contact every conservative in the United States—that is, every patriotic American.”6

  McGehee appeals for donations because the fight against atheistic communists is too important to quit after just one night. He wants to keep renting the auditorium, and he needs everyone’s help to do so. Dollar bills begin filling the buckets McGehee has thoughtfully provided.

  The next day the crowd has quadrupled. S
ome twelve hundred people are now inside the big civic auditorium in Dallas. Clouds of cigarette smoke hang in the air, and many in the crowd are waving small American and Confederate flags. The occasional rebel yell can be heard above the din. The outrage over training communist pilots has struck a deep chord in America, and the National Indignation Convention is rapidly gaining national publicity.

  McGehee describes Dallas as the new front line in the war against communism: “The entire United States is looking to see how indignant and how resolute we are.”

  The chief speaker this evening is Sidney Latham, a senior vice president and chief counsel for H. L. Hunt’s oil company. Latham receives a standing ovation as he blisters the Kennedy administration for its treatment of General Walker: “I’m tired of seeing military officers busted out of command for teaching their men that the enemy is bad.”

  McGehee is awash in donations, and he’s now planning to rent the auditorium for a week straight.

  On the third night, the rapt audience hears a recorded message from Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who tells them, “The progressive income tax was spawned by Karl Marx a hundred years ago.” On stage is Dallas’s nationally known radio commentator and newsletter writer Dan Smoot, the ex-FBI agent who had once helped run H. L. Hunt’s Facts Forum. Smoot raises the Cuba issue: “Does it make sense that we are planning to fight Communists in Viet Nam and then not fight them 90 miles away in Cuba?” McGehee collects $3,500 in donations and predicts future crowds of up to twenty thousand people.

  On the fourth night, the large crowd is the most boisterous yet, with foot stomping and flag waving. The National Indignation Convention is drawing headlines around the country, and people in Dallas are proud to be at the forefront of the movement. Several politicians have expressed statements of support; even the Kennedy administration now says that it will “review” aid to Yugoslavia. The Morning News is also on the bandwagon: “Down in Texas, we may be a little dumb, but it seems to us that to arm an enemy amounts to inviting a rattlesnake to dinner.”7