Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  “These state meetings with the press should not be social meetings. You cannot proselyte the newspapers of America and win them to your side by soft soap…

  “We are not morons to be led around the nose by an invested bureaucracy.”23

  Dealey finishes and leans back in deep satisfaction as the luncheon erupts.

  Several people begin speaking at once. Some of the publishers rise to their feet and yell: “No, no.”

  Others begin shouting at, apologizing to, Kennedy: “We don’t agree, he’s not speaking for us.”

  One livid publisher lights directly into Dealey: “Ted, you’re leading the worst fascist movement in the Southwest and you don’t realize that nobody else is with you.”

  Another publisher is waving his arms, trying desperately to calm everyone down while his admonitions are lost in the din: “This is the dining room of the President of the United States!”24

  Finally, Dealey’s voice rises above the commotion. He is turning back to Kennedy. The room, just as suddenly, is quiet again. Several of the publishers crane their necks, trying to get a good look at Dealey, trying to hear what he will say next.

  “My remarks were not meant to be personal in nature,” Dealey murmurs. “They are a reflection of public opinion in Texas as I understand it.”25

  The men in the room swivel to look at Kennedy. The president has lost his smile. He is clearly no longer relaxed and friendly. He speaks quietly, forcefully, as he rebuts Dealey. When the stories about the luncheon appear, the two men will have vastly different memories of Kennedy’s rejoinder.

  As the luncheon breaks up, Kennedy turns to his press secretary. He is speaking half in jest, but the humor is cold.

  “Don’t subscribe to that newspaper,” he tells Salinger, pointing toward Dealey. “I’m tired of reading its editorials.”

  Salinger shrugs: “But I have to read them.”26

  News of Dealey’s face-off with Kennedy sweeps the nation.

  Dealey tells reporters: “I may have stuck my neck out, but the President wanted the grass-roots opinion, so I gave it to him.”27

  Privately, Dealey is happy with the notoriety. He’d used “weak sisters” and “Caroline’s tricycle” in “a deliberate attempt to swipe some headlines.” He tells a friend: “And apparently in that I was eminently successful.”28

  The Morning News publishes the complete text of Dealey’s statement along with a photo of Dealey offering a rare smile as he descends from his plane after returning to Dallas. Dealey prints his own version of events in the paper—there will be other versions, far different, in the upcoming days and weeks. Dealey leaves out any mention of a response by Kennedy. His account reinforces Dallasites’ worst impressions of Kennedy: The boyish president, so flummoxed by Dealey’s courageous attack, was apparently unable to muster a single word in his own defense.

  Dealey eagerly follows the way other publications cover the incident, ordering his staff to send him updates of how the story is being reported around the country. But aside from a few sympathetic editorials in right-leaning papers, Dealey finds a wave of denunciation, even among other papers in Texas. He is derided as a boorish crank, a man so lacking in basic civility that he can’t even be trusted to have lunch with the president of the United States.

  Dealey fires off telegrams to the other Texas publishers, asking for their opinion of his behavior. The telegrams come roaring back, one after another, almost every single one of them critical.

  “I think you were rude to President Kennedy,” responds Jim Chambers, publisher of Dealey’s major competitor, the Dallas Times Herald. “We were his guests in his home. You could have had your say in your paper, in a letter, or at a regular press conference without embarrassment to anyone.” From Waco, Pat Taggart writes: “Your truculence and phrasing were inappropriate.”

  El Paso Times publisher Dorrance D. Roderick tells Dealey: “I did not vote for Mr. Kennedy but was encouraged that he did not blow his top at your remarks… I think this restraint will stand the president in good stead in future prolonged negotiations with Khrushchev. Probably Harry Truman would have taken your [lunch] plate away from you.”

  Houston H. Harte, who owns a chain of newspapers across the state, writes, simply: “Please let the matter die. Texas has been embarrassed enough.”29

  There is only one conclusion for Dealey to make: These other publishers in Texas are also weak sisters.

  NOVEMBER

  The army is asking him to transfer to a command post in Hawaii. But there is something else happening, and fast, something tantamount to a movement, maybe a revolution welling up in the heartland. He is almost caught off guard. His phone has been ringing non-stop. Millionaires are offering jobs in the private sector. Some offer sinecures. Congressmen are asking him to come to their districts to speak. Dozens of organizations are calling for him to attend rallies. Thousands of letters are pouring in, many stuffed with dollar bills. The letters often say the same thing: Run against John F. Kennedy in the 1964 election. Some just say that Walker, radiating confidence and rugged handsomeness, is the “man on horseback” who can protect and lead the United States of America.

  He calls a press conference and announces that he is resigning.

  “My career has been destroyed,” he says, reading from a prepared statement. “I must find other means of serving my country in the time of her great need… To do this, I must be free from the power of little men who, in the name of my country, punish loyal service to it.”

  And Walker promises to continue his anti-communist crusade: “It will be my purpose now, as a civilian, to attempt to do what I have found it no longer possible to do in uniform.”1

  The far right movement, divided and even marginalized toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, is suddenly bursting wide open in reaction to Kennedy’s presidency. Membership in the John Birch Society skyrockets, and hundreds of other new organizations are springing up. The Minutemen preach armed resistance to the domestic communist takeover. The National States Rights Party and the American Nazi Party fight against court-mandated integration.

  And, without his ever pursuing it, General Edwin Walker from Texas has seemingly, suddenly, been propelled to the head of the movement. His coronation occurs when Newsweek places him on its cover under the headline: THUNDER ON THE RIGHT: THE CONSERVATIVES, THE RADICALS, THE FANATIC FRINGE.

  In Washington, Kennedy and his brother have been blindsided by the zealotry. They are not alone. Many political insiders had considered the extreme right reduced to a hodgepodge of often disconnected, amateurish activists in the wake of Joseph McCarthy’s censure in the mid-1950s. The far left had become a much bigger security concern, as evidenced by J. Edgar Hoover’s aggressive FBI investigations of political leftists. For many political watchers and journalists, the “rise” of a new far right “movement” just seemed, at first, like a benign irrelevancy: People believe that the government is attempting mind control by fluoridating their water? That Eisenhower was a communist dupe?

  But now the initial head-shaking and skepticism have given way to the startling reconnaissance arriving at the White House on a regular basis: Kennedy’s team is learning that there is something overtaking parts of America, boiling over into a rage, and a desire to not only defeat, but utterly destroy opponents.

  For Kennedy and his brother, Dallas was a pivot point in the presidential election. And it was, especially for Bobby, a place he saw through the prism of crime—perhaps he was convinced that the city had a hidden criminal machine led by Mafia men. The kind that could only exist if some in the city simply didn’t pursue them hard enough. Either way, the Kennedys were becoming convinced that Dallas might be a threat for hard-edged political reasons.

  Whatever delay President Kennedy has experienced in recognizing the new political landscape, he catches up in a hurry after Ted Dealey’s stampede through his White House luncheon, and the wave of popular support for General Walker, the rogue general who is already approaching her
o status in Dallas.

  Immediately following his resignation, Walker gives his first-ever interview—an exclusive to the Dallas Morning News. In the conversation, Walker hints strongly that he would like to make Dallas his permanent home.

  An office has already been set up for him on the seventeenth floor of a downtown skyscraper. Enthusiastic volunteers are sending out fund-raising appeals on his behalf. One missive reads: “Remember that if our grandfathers had fought the Indians and Red-Coats like we are fighting the Communists, we wouldn’t be alive today.”2 Letters of support are already pouring into Walker’s office in Dallas.

  Many of his followers, not knowing Walker’s address but understanding the link between him and Dealey’s Dallas Morning News, address their letters simply:

  GENERAL EDWIN WALKER, C/O DALLAS MORNING NEWS.

  U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy steps to the podium at the Sheraton Dallas, waits for the applause to die down, and looks up at the dozens of editors and publishers at the national Associated Press Managing Editors meeting. Outside, six cars are repeatedly circling the hotel, filled with angry protesters from the Dallas-headquartered National Indignation Convention.

  By now, the Kennedy White House is redefining its relationship with Dallas. The city has become the home for a concentrated pocket of political extremists. Bobby Kennedy has been continually frustrated by spending the last several years trying to solve the mystery of the Dallas underworld. The president’s brother has been traveling the country, making speeches, pushing his brother’s domestic policies, and talking about two things: organized crime and communism. They are twin themes to talk about in Dallas. The APME meeting is also always a captive audience, a way to reach top editors, editorial writers who are gathering from around the nation.

  He decides to start with a joke. He knows everyone here will get it—everyone in the room knows how much Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey loathes his brother. And how Dealey insulted President Kennedy to his face, right inside the White House.

  “I would have liked to have had lunch with Mr. Dealey. Some of the gang and I had got together in Washington and written a memo that I wanted to read him,” Bobby says, his face breaking into a toothy smile.3

  The room rocks with laughter. After everyone quiets down, Attorney General Kennedy turns serious. “The situation now is that the major figures of organized crime have become so rich and so powerful that they and their operations are in large part beyond the reach of local officials,” he says, measuring his words.

  “We would rather work two or three years to bring a major underworld figure to justice than to bring a number of cases against less important hoodlums just to make the record look good.”

  It has to be a nod to the way he really feels about Dallas—“beyond the reach of local officials.” Kennedy has already tried to get anyone—crime bosses from New York to New Orleans—to talk about that underworld in Dallas. They have all invoked the Fifth Amendment. Kennedy moves on to something else—those six cars that have been circling the hotel, protesting the presence of a member of the soft-on-communism Kennedy family. He blasts the Dallas men protesting outside, their National Indignation Convention, and the John Birch Society.

  “I have no sympathy with those who are defeatists… Nor do I have sympathy with those who, in the name of fighting communism, sow seeds of suspicion and distrust by making false or irresponsible charges, not only against courageous teachers and public officials and against the foundations of our government—Congress, the Supreme Court and even the presidency itself.

  “The John Birch Society has been looking for Communists, and found only one—President Eisenhower.”4

  He lets his words settle on the editors and publishers. Anyone who has been following Bobby Kennedy’s arc, the way he is waging scorched-earth war on organized crime—and waging a running battle against people saying his brother is soft on communism—has to know that Kennedy has come to engage the battle here in Dallas.

  He makes one final appeal to Ted Dealey, urging him not to fall into league with men like General Edwin Walker:

  “As newspaper editors you have a special responsibility not to be hoodwinked or stampeded by the fearful Americans of our time.”5

  Joe Civello reads the story in Thursday’s Dallas Morning News: The attorney general of the United States is in town. Bobby Kennedy has come railing against the mob, talking about the unfinished investigations he started a few years ago. Civello, fifty-nine, is a short, slender man who likes to wear straw fedoras with wide cloth bands. He has black-framed glasses that make his eyes seem especially wide—and he often has a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he is looking at something only he can see.

  When he was thirty-five, he had been busted in Dallas for his role in the largest heroin, morphine, and opium operation in the South—and he was given a decade and a half in the federal prison at Leavenworth. He had also once fired a sawed-off shotgun into a man’s stomach as they stood inside a Dallas drugstore. The murder charges were somehow dropped. Now he tells people he helps run an imported food store and dabbles in construction. Bobby Kennedy, for one, is convinced Civello represents something rotten at the core of Dallas.

  He first heard about Civello four years ago, after the Dallas man had driven with friends onto the twisting country lanes a few hours north of New York City. The gang arrived at an imposing stone country mansion owned by a man named Joe “the Barber” Barbara, passed under the grand entryway, went inside, and began shaking hands and offering hellos to the dozens of men who were already there. The smell of expensive cuts of meat being grilled wafted through the air.

  Without warning, someone shouted that the New York State Police were nearby. The troopers were staggered: They had caught dozens of the most infamous Mafia chiefs in America: Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, and others, from cities like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Cleveland, Tampa, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh—and Dallas. The meeting gave the lie to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s assertion that there really was no big organized crime syndicate in the United States, that the communists posed a far bigger threat. This was proof that there was something crooked in Dallas: probably a city where some of the “local officials”—the ones Bobby Kennedy talked about yesterday at the Sheraton Dallas—had looked the other way.

  Bobby Kennedy was the lead investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee—and his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, was a committee member. Bobby grilled Mafia figures, over and over again, about Civello. He told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News that he was watching Dallas, that Civello was someone he clearly wanted to investigate.6 He called people like Civello “the enemy within.”

  Civello was finally found guilty of “conspiring to obstruct justice by lying” about the national Mafia meeting. The judge said that he needed to be “segregated from society… he is a high-ranking criminal who cloaked himself with the facade of legitimate business.”7 Civello hired Percy Foreman, the most flamboyant attorney in Texas, to handle his appeal. Foreman was famous for representing a breathy Dallas stripper nicknamed Candy Barr, who was said to have made the first pornographic movie in America, filmed in a Dallas hotel when she was sixteen years old. Foreman got Civello’s conviction magically reversed.

  Bobby Kennedy could not have been pleased.

  Criminals were already leaving Dallas, one way or another. Benny Binion went to Las Vegas to open up casinos. Lewis McWillie, who used to help run the dice games at the Deuces and Top O’ Hill Terrace, went to Cuba to manage the Tropicana for Meyer Lansky. H. L. Hunt had especially liked coming to Top O’ Hill—he would arrive like a hurricane, ready to drop tens of thousands of dollars. He brought in groups of twelve buddies, headed to a private room, and made a beeline for the food spread. When Hunt finally went home, he never, ever left a tip.8

  In downtown Dallas, the only truly open nods to the slinky side of life are the girlie clubs by the Adolphus and the Baker Hotels. They are mostly a d
irty little circus within walking distance of Reverend Criswell’s First Baptist Church. And Civello, the local district attorneys, and several reporters and admen from the Dallas newspapers know all about the bustling, back-slapping Jewish guy who runs one of the soft-core stripper clubs: Jack Ruby is like some sort of giggling, manic gatekeeper—a grinning barker calling you inside, wrapping his arm around your shoulder, and leading you upstairs to a good table with a view of his “classy” girls. Ruby is always trolling brazenly for new talent to work at his clubs; he wants Candy Barr to dance for him.

  Civello might use an Italian word for someone like Ruby. He is pazzo. He is crazy, a buffoon. He hires a colored man named Andy to work the bar—and to take Polaroid pictures of drunk customers. He sells $2 bottles of champagne for $17. He sells pizza to beer-soaked out-of-towners, and he grins when another “Bus Station Girl” walks into his office—it’s another teenager off the ranch, off the farm, from someplace like Big Spring, Texas—and she wants a job, she needs money, and she came through Fort Worth and then into the bus station that’s a short walk from the Carousel Club in downtown Dallas.

  On the surface, perhaps, Ruby is no different from many of the people who have come to Dallas over the decades: He arrived on the new frontier and invented a life, a business. He almost willed his way into the nightclub arena, carving out his slice of the downtown action. As time went by, just like Civello, he attained a sense of comfort and ease in the city. Police routinely patronize his place. So do prosecutors. So do some members of the Dallas Citizens Council. Ruby makes sure to know their names, treat them to drinks and quiet introductions to the women.

  As long as things are kept relatively clean, Ruby is allowed to prosper. For a while, it seems good for him: He even dreams of bigger things, bigger clubs, more legitimate ambitions—anything that will allow him to really be taken seriously by the powers-that-be in Dallas.