Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  And again, the couple of thousand faithful in Dallas roar their approval. King is waving his hands in the air:

  “The Declaration of Independence does not say some men… it does not say all white men… it does not say all Gentiles… it does not say all Protestants… it says all men are created equal! If the American dream is to be a reality, the idea of white supremacy must come to an end now and ever more.”

  Sometimes, the nightmares come back in crystalline detail. A short, solid-looking man named Jack Oran, who now runs a small bicycle and motorcycle shop in Dallas, always remembers what happened to him in the concentration camps:

  He is pushing out of a bunk bed filled with six people. There is a dead man in the camp, someone whose pockets can be picked for scraps of moldy food. A piece of old bread, covered with lice, is on the floor and people are fighting for it.

  And then he is being summoned, one painfully gaunt man among hundreds, to see Dr. Josef Mengele—the Nazi monster at the Auschwitz death camp. Oran is castrated. No anesthetics are used. He is sewn up, blood is running down his legs, and he is ordered back to work. He is certain his parents, his four sisters, and his brother have all been killed.

  Now it is eighteen years later and he is thirty-nine years old.

  After the Russians opened the gates to Auschwitz, he found his way to the United States. He got a job as a dishwasher in the Jewish ghetto in New York City—and then followed the promise of jobs, and an American Dream, to Dallas. He met a woman and they adopted three children. He opened up his bike store—he was good at fixing things, working patiently on broken parts and putting them back together.

  He has been reading the papers, following what General Walker has been saying, what Reverend Criswell has been preaching, what H. L. Hunt’s Life Line program has been airing, and what the Dallas Morning News has been printing. In the paper, just a few days ago, there was a man from a Dallas suburb named Jimmy Robinson, someone swearing allegiance to an organization founded by an American who thinks Hitler was too lenient. Robinson had come out to protest against a preacher, Dr. King, who is professing equality—and love—as an alternative.

  Jack Oran has seen political extremism develop before. Although reticent to discuss his past, he decides that he should no longer be silent: That was the great failing in Europe—too many people were silent. He begins scheduling talks before local groups, to churches, to synagogues, to civic organizations, to veterans’ groups, to the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. He tells people how he came to have the death camp number 80629 scratched into his body… and about how evil really does exist… how hatred exists… how it is allowed to fester and then it is fed by indulgence, by some sort of swelling fervor and hysteria. That is how it all begins—until all sense of humanity is ended.

  He has been speaking in public for several months now, telling his story. Each time he talks he is flooded with the same emotions and nearly breaks down. Some people hug him, others are racked with tears. Some just bow their heads and pray.

  Be aware. There is hatred, extremism, and it is feeding itself like a fire. It is the way it began with the Nazis. Please don’t let it come to Dallas.

  It is January 25, and it is near freezing, brutally cold. Oran is through with work, finally returning to his modest home. His neighbors like him; he is a dignified but friendly man. A few of them know his history, have seen his death camp tattoo. And a few realize that something is troubling him about Dallas, and making him feel obligated to do something he avoided for years. To talk in public, to address strangers, to warn people.

  As Oran pulls onto this street, there is a strange, unnatural glow coming from the direction of his house. There are wisps of smoke and dancing embers blowing over the grass and sidewalk.

  He stops and stares. Someone has jammed a giant wooden cross into his lawn and set it on fire. It is roaring, blazing, and people are coming out of their homes to see it, to gape at it. Oran is almost dizzy as he goes inside and calls the police.

  It takes days, but Oran finally learns that the police have picked up a suspect. His name is Jimmy Robinson, the same man who was leading the angry protest against King’s visit to Dallas.

  Oran learns that the man grew up in deep rural Texas and was only drawn to Dallas a few months earlier. Robinson defiantly, almost proudly admits to the police that he set the large cross on fire at the Holocaust survivor’s house. He did it, he said, because he didn’t like what Oran was saying in his speeches. He pays a $10 fine and is released.

  FEBRUARY

  A group of leading conservatives in Dallas is meeting on a cold Friday night at the elegantly appointed, comfortable home of Robert Morris—Walker’s attorney, the John Birch Society member, and the man who worked with Dealey to investigate whether President Kennedy had once had a secret marriage.

  There are several guests at Morris’s house, including one of Dealey’s top-ranking editorial writers from the Dallas Morning News. Also present is a man who has handled public relations for H. L. Hunt and a detective from the Dallas Police Department. And there is a stranger whom Morris has introduced as a former army soldier with an interest in political causes. The compact, intense man, new to Dallas, was serving in Germany when General Walker was being rebuked by Kennedy for speaking truth to power.

  For three hours, the men gossip and talk politics over drinks and snacks. At midnight, Morris approaches the ex-soldier, Larrie Schmidt, and asks: “Enjoying yourself, Larrie?”

  Schmidt answers briskly: “No, sir, I am not, to be honest with you. I thought we were getting together for business, not to socialize. I am terribly disappointed.”

  Morris calls for quiet in the room. “It is time to get down to business,” Morris tells the others.

  He tells the group that the real reason he has invited everyone to his home this evening is because of Larrie Schmidt and his mission. The men turn curiously to the twenty-seven-year-old with closely cropped black hair and dark, flashing eyes.

  Schmidt has been preparing for this moment ever since he arrived in Dallas. He tells them that, in his opinion, the conservatives in Dallas have been too passive, too timid. He has come to Dallas to unleash an aggressive action plan to build up conservative forces.

  The men stare at him, and Schmidt is basking in their attention. He has been telling people: “Whether I go down in history books as a great and noble man, or a tyrant, I am determined to at least be recorded in the history of our times.”1

  Schmidt was born in the heartland, in Nebraska. He studied journalism in college and dreamed of being able to reach millions of people. He signed up for two tours in the army and, while he was based in Germany, devoted himself to reading about the communist menace that was just out of sight but never, ever out of mind. The more he read the newspapers and magazines from the United States, the more it seemed as if people were in denial—particularly in Washington.

  As a specialist fourth class stationed in Munich, Schmidt sometimes envisioned his life after the army—concerned about the kind of country he would return to. He read books by Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater, and also read the same John Birch Society material that General Walker had given to his soldiers. The more Schmidt studied, the more he became disgruntled with Kennedy, with the way he was constantly appeasing instead of standing up to the communists.

  Sometimes, Schmidt wondered what he would do if he was president:

  If I were president, I would attack the Commies on every front, fighting them abroad and forcing those at home into concentration camps.2

  One night when he was still in the army, he was holding court in a crowded beer hall in Munich, confident in his outspoken anti-Kennedy condemnations—and one soldier after another gathered to hear him. The soldiers swapped cheerful news about what they were hearing. There was a conservative resurgence in America. But just as quickly, they were sobered by someone saying anti-communist patriots were actually only gaining news headlines… but not gaining any real traction.

  How could they with
someone like Kennedy in the White House?

  Schmidt listened to the soldiers yelling and debating. A thought bubbled up: Conservatives are too fragmented, and as long as they remain split among hundreds of individual groups they have no chance of becoming an effective political force.

  Somebody had to travel the nation and do the long, hard, slogging work of uniting the conservative organizations. He liked what Ayn Rand had written about unbowed men, super men who were seeking and living their destiny. Walker has been trying to live his destiny, but he was getting whipped, over and over, by Kennedy. Maybe Schmidt can try to pick up the pieces of the splintered movement, and maybe he can at last try to unite the anti-Kennedy forces.

  When he first told some fellow soldiers in Germany about his master plan, they thought it was just an amusing addition to chasing local women and steins of beer. Schmidt tried to organize them, tried to demand blood oaths to prove their loyalty. Most of the soldiers laughed and refused.

  As he was getting ready to be discharged, he thought long and hard about where to ignite his plan in America. He knew where Walker had gone to make his final stand—and where the bristling, action-oriented wings of the patriotic movement seemed so solid. Dallas seemed to be the most promising right-wing citadel in America, a place where the men in charge—the university president, the publisher, the preachers, the mayor and congressman—were more united than almost anywhere else.

  If they gave Walker the keys to the city, they may just do it for him, too.

  When Schmidt arrived in Dallas the previous fall, soon after the uneasy conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Walker’s arrest in the violent rioting in Mississippi, he instantly began trying to meet the real conservative heavyweights in the city—Dealey, Hunt, and Walker.

  He had saved a little money, enough to live on until he found a job, and he began by contacting the conservative action groups. Few in the city were hiding their allegiances: Walker flew several flags outside his home, the radio stations were filled with right-wing shows, and one of Hunt’s former employees was distributing, from Dallas, one of the most aggressive anti-Kennedy newsletters in America.

  From a bar stool in Munich, Dallas had seemed a veritable conservative paradise, a utopia overflowing with easy money and right-thinking people who were the only ones in America to so openly embrace Walker. It seemed like a place so gurgling with conservative principles that Schmidt could go right to the top floors, straight to where the Dallas Citizens Council manned the city.

  The garrulous Schmidt searched for clubs, grassroots organizations, and even watering holes where he could strike up conversations, make inroads. At first blush, on the street level, Dallas seemed surprisingly like “a hick town,” Schmidt wrote to his friends still in the military in Germany. “There are three kind of bars: straight beer joints; bars with beer and liquor (but no mixed drinks, you have to buy a whole bottle and buy mix); private clubs. No great night life.”

  It didn’t matter, really.

  He was in Dallas for other reasons—to try to see Walker, to persuade H. L. Hunt to open his war chest: “Am drinking very little. All business. This is no time for games.”3

  Schmidt’s first goal was to infiltrate Frank McGehee’s National Indignation Convention. It turned out to be far easier than Schmidt could have imagined. McGehee quickly agreed to meet with him. After a short conversation, McGehee suddenly offered to make Schmidt his vice president.

  Schmidt wrote to his allies in the military: “It got us everything we had intended to get, 18 months ahead of schedule!”

  Schmidt rhapsodized about what he could do with a membership fee of just one dollar for each of the three hundred thousand NIC members: “Think in terms of 300,000 members, $300,000.”4

  The more he learned about the NIC and Dallas, the more he was staggered by the ferocity exhibited by men like Frank McGehee, its founder: “Frank gives me the impression of being rather anti-Semitic,” he told others.

  This worried Schmidt. One of his allies from Germany, an army soldier named Bernard Weissman, was Jewish. Schmidt suggested that he should convert to Christianity. Religious fervor was one key to success inside the Dallas right wing: “We must all return to church. These people here are religious bugs.”5

  Some of them, too, were abject racists. Schmidt had grown up in Nebraska, far from the entrenched apartheid in the South. The enforced segregation in Dallas was something he had never witnessed before. “Down here a negro is nigger. No one—and I mean no one—is ever to say one kind word about niggers. Only liberals do that… On the other hand, the KKK is passé. Don’t praise it. Don’t preach race hatred. Don’t say anything good about niggers—but don’t talk about harming them either. The conservative isn’t ‘agin the nigras,’ he just wants to keep him in his place for his own good.”6

  But after a few heady days of enjoying his status as the new vice president for the National Indignation Convention, the truth began to dawn on Schmidt: McGehee’s organization did not have three hundred thousand members. It did not even have three hundred members. Those stories were all lies—generated by McGehee to attract media coverage.

  Just a few weeks before Schmidt came to town, the NIC rented Dallas Memorial Auditorium for a rally. Less than a hundred people showed up—“There’s too much hall here for the few of us,” McGehee remarked sadly.7

  Schmidt could see that the NIC was boiling down to a few hard-core stalwarts in Dallas. Maybe the whole damned movement was collapsing. Maybe someone needed to deal directly with the powers-that-be in Dallas—the real powers. Someone needed to connect the foot soldiers in Dallas with the moneymen.

  Schmidt found work selling life insurance, mingled at more conservative events, and buttonholed anyone who would give him time, until he finally gained a meeting with some of the editors at Dealey’s Dallas Morning News—and it was a breakthrough, as if he was getting closer, moving to that sacrosanct world of the Dallas Citizens Council. Schmidt listened as he heard promises that if he was patient, he would also be eventually introduced to both General Walker and H. L. Hunt.

  First, though, he’d be invited to Robert Morris’s house to meet a select group of like-minded men, including someone from the Dallas Morning News.

  On this chilly Friday night, the men assembled in Morris’s living room lean in to listen to Schmidt’s specific plan. It is well past midnight and it must feel both grave and conspiratorial.

  Schmidt studies the faces of the hushed men in Morris’s home. He knows that this could finally be his entrée into the upper reaches of the Dallas firmament. Maybe the gateway to his being taken more seriously, maybe the chance to get the support of the men downtown.

  He shifts into high energy and tells the men that he has people, strong-willed soldiers, who are willing to relocate to Dallas to join them. He says it is, in a way, a team of loyal, action-oriented conservative fighters who will push Dallas to another level—and make it a pivot point for a changing America.

  The Dallas conservatives are sometimes too damned passive and disorganized. If we can marshal our united forces, we can bring real change to America.

  As he winds down, the skeptical men in the room seem a bit persuaded by his breathless, almost Bible-thumping speech. They instantly agree to help Schmidt launch a Dallas chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a national conservative organization. But they have their doubts about Schmidt, too—and he is not given the president’s position. That honor goes to Ken Thompson, the editorial writer from the Dallas Morning News.

  Schmidt, feeling very proud, shakes hands all around and basks in a final toast from Morris. He heads into the chilly North Texas night. Once he is settled back into his apartment, he begins typing a letter to his soldier friends in Munich:

  “We have succeeded, the mission with which I was charged in Dallas has been achieved. Friday night, I attended a gathering of the top conservatives in Dallas… I accomplished my task in Dallas. I need you here soon. I sold these people on each of you, and the
y are expecting you to come to Dallas and play an important role.

  “The days of leisure are over…”8

  On Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, over eight hundred leading black figures from across the nation arrive at the White House for a special gala luncheon to honor the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  The famous entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. is there, along with his very blond wife. There are leading officials arriving from many of the national civil rights organizations. Though Dr. King has been invited, he has sent his regrets; he is still somewhat impatient with Kennedy’s progress on civil rights.9

  And there are also two people from Dallas being shown inside: Rhett James and Juanita Craft. Like the other guests, in the preceding weeks they received a gold-hued, engraved invitation from President Kennedy and the First Lady summoning them to the special celebration in Washington.10 It is, really, as if they have been invited into an orbit that few people from Dallas ever experience—and that a handful would still have aggressively resisted.

  But surely this invitation, this trip to see the dazzling president and First Lady, are signs of a new beginning—just as much as Dr. King’s triumphant visit to Dallas last month.

  Finally, President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy arrive. She is resplendent in a ruby-red velvet-and-silk Oleg Cassini skirt and jacket. The president is smartly turned out in an impeccable suit.11 As they greet their guests, they are charming, radiant. It is a formal affair, among the most elaborate ever offered by the White House to so many black leaders at one time.

  James, for one, feels like he is in the moment but hovering above it. Amid the hubbub of well-wishers, clinking glasses, and camera flashes, the Dallas preacher’s mind is wandering. He admires Kennedy, he has been happy with the way the president and his brother moved quickly to address the situation in Mississippi. Even though some criticize Kennedy for being too hesitant on civil rights, he has already done more than many previous presidents. James says that Kennedy has an inner courage—and that he occupies “the loneliest chair in the world.”12