Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  Thirty minutes after his arrest, FBI Agent Forrest Sorrels sits down with him. Ruby tells the agent that his name was formerly Rubenstein, and that he changed it after coming to Dallas. Sorrels wants to know why Ruby gunned down Oswald.

  He stares at Ruby and asks: “Jack—why?”

  Ruby looks up at him and rambles about how he closed his club as soon as he heard the news, how he went to the synagogue and heard a eulogy for Kennedy, how his sister had recently had an operation—and how she had been hysterical. And how, when he saw that Mrs. Kennedy was going to have to appear for the trial, he thought that there probably wasn’t anyone in Dallas who could do what needed to be done.

  “Somebody had to do it. You all couldn’t.”18

  As the days and weeks pass after the president’s death, Bruce Alger perhaps begins to fathom that any backlash against Dallas will crack directly down on him. That he will be consumed by, or thrown into, the drowning pool of repulsion toward Dallas. He issues another statement, saying that he is still going to fight Kennedy’s legacy, his programs, if Johnson insists on carrying them forward. Loyal opposition is a hallmark of America, argues Alger. That opposition to the president “is not based on hate, nor does the mere fact that a legislator opposes certain legislation make him a breeder of hate or an accessory to murder.”

  He is, of course, talking about himself: He is not a murderous accomplice—not an accessory to the murder of the president of the United States. In the city, there are already discussions that, within the year, Alger is to be dethroned and replaced by the trusty old-guard Mayor Earle Cabell, whose father had been mayor of Dallas, whose grandfather had been mayor of Dallas. And Alger decides he will remain inflexible, that he will spend the year embracing what he said in the past. Extremists really did kill Kennedy—left-wing extremists. And their goal hasn’t changed. It is rather simple:

  “The destruction of America.”19

  Word is spreading that when Jack Ruby was searched, there were those copies of scripts from Hunt’s Life Line program in his pocket.

  Someone drives by Mount Vernon, the Hunt estate in Dallas, and begins blasting gunshots at it. Hunt is still listed in the Dallas phone book, and now there are also ominous phone calls coming to his home in the dead of night. Threatening letters begin arriving in the mail.20

  From the safety of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Hunt decides to go on the offensive. To write his own explanation for what had happened in Dallas, for what happened to the president he loathed. Two days after Ruby killed Oswald, Hunt pens an open letter to newspapers: “Grave warnings that patriots are more dangerous and do more harm than communists are outmoded.”

  And then he tells the FBI that he is sick of Washington, sick of being away from home. He damned well will be celebrating Christmas back in Dallas. He will never erect a real security fence around his house, hire extra bodyguards and watchmen, or remove his addresses and phone numbers from public listings. He will be, he says, as safe and welcome in Dallas as ever.

  General Walker returns to Dallas and, like Hunt, refuses to abandon his house, despite the hate mail and death threats.

  He also decides to make a broader statement about the assassination, one that he will personally take to the airwaves. He wants to lay the blame where it belongs. And he wants people to know that Dallas itself has been victimized—that the city was a patsy, that it has been turned into a pawn in a deadly game. He wants to thank the Dallas Morning News for its long-standing history of defending the right, of being unafraid to speak truth to power in Washington. A week after the assassination, Walker goes on the air:

  “Pravda, Castro, and The Worker started malicious and deceptive attacks on the conservative right. That continues to spread, holding Dallas responsible.”

  Walker has one final, simple thing to add. He knows exactly what happened in Dallas. The assassination was a plot against the super-patriots, a way to besmirch, exile, and blame them. The assassination, in a way, might finally validate him—and prove the truth to those people claiming that he is a mad paranoiac.

  “Dallas,” Walker insists, “has been set up.”21

  Juanita Craft remains in a daze for two, maybe three days. She tries to follow the news, the way the stranger named Oswald was gunned down by the Jewish man who runs the girlie clubs downtown. Her friends from around the country reach out to her, asking her if she is doing well. And then it dawns on her that she still has the “Bombingham Tea” scheduled at the Methodist church. Now, of course, it almost seems absurd. It was always meant to be a slightly mocking thing—a way to show the evil bombers, the racists who had killed children, that Dallas was resilient and that it could show grace and mercy. It was meant to show that life could go on—and that, at least in a place like Dallas, people were unafraid. Now what could she say to her children in Dallas? The hundreds of idealistic young people she had conscripted in Dallas over the years?

  They could read, they could see it all spelled out over and over again in the national stories: Dallas is a city of hate. Dallas is the city that killed our president.

  She decides that the tea will go on. But the theme will change. She gathers her children in the education building at her church in South Dallas. It is a beautiful day, soothingly cool and clear, and with just the slightest breeze. She has arranged for a life-size portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be placed near the front door. She supervises as some of her children carefully, gently drape it in black. Others quietly move around the room and place large black cloths over each table. She has asked that every member of her precious NAACP Youth Council find black ribbons and black armbands to wear on their finest Sunday suits and dresses.

  When the mourners begin to arrive, they stop for a second to stare at the image of the dead president—his face is creased into that easy smile, the same one that had once graced all those holiday cards distributed in Dallas when he was first running for the presidency.

  As the mourners settle into the burnished church room, there are speeches, prayers, and songs. And Craft listens as her children in Dallas vow to stay the course, because that is the only way to find peace:

  To remain dedicated to the principles for which this great man lived and died… freedom for all mankind, and dignity for all.22

  For many in America, Ruby’s public gunning down of Oswald inside police headquarters confirms their worst impressions of Dallas—a lawless, violent city careening out of control. Mayor Cabell insists that Dallas is innocent, still a hospitable place that remains open for business. He notes with disdain that Oswald wasn’t a permanent resident of the city. Of the tragic sequence of murders, Cabell says stiffly: “It could have happened in Podunk as well as Dallas.”23

  After the assassination, a group of Dallas businessmen begins fretting that out-of-state sales will be drying up for the city. They decide on an ambitious plan—they will contact Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, to ask if she will sign a testimonial to Dallas hospitality.

  She never responds.

  Stanley Marcus, like so many others, retreats to his home to try to make sense of the assassination. He cloisters himself in the book-lined study of his sprawling nine-thousand-square-foot estate. He will travel to Washington to attend the funeral. He is already hearing and feeling firsthand how Dallas is being blamed, how everyone from the city is being assailed as somehow complicit in the president’s death.

  In a way, Marcus felt he really did see it coming, that his own fears about what was waiting for Kennedy in Dallas have come true. Some people in the city were twisted, coiled, in hysteria, in abject fear. They saw communists and socialists creeping into power, seizing the reins. And if you weren’t a red-blooded patriot, then surely you were a communist sympathizer. The city was in the grip of a handful of “absolutists”—men, including those who ran the newspaper, who refused to allow for opposite opinions about patriotism.

  Marcus decides to write an open letter. He’ll pay for it to be published in Dallas newspapers and around the nation. I
t will have to be more than delicate—partly an apology, partly a path forward.

  The irony of using newspapers for his message isn’t lost on him—after all, it is a lone newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, that he blames especially for the vitriol, the toxicity in the city. And it is Ted Dealey whom Marcus blames most of all: “Ted was a difficult person to voice your differences to, because he was part of the bigoted crowd himself… Had (his father) G. B. Dealey been at the helm, he would have said: ‘We cannot permit a racist or a bigot of any type to stand up and twist the community into a false position.’ ”24

  The truth of the matter is that no one can get to know a city in a day, a week, or a month. Those of us who have lived here for a lifetime are so close to the picture that we too sometimes fail to see either some of the pertinent details or the entire composition….

  We think that our citizens are friendly and kind-hearted human beings who extend genuinely warm welcomes to newcomers to our city.

  All of this doesn’t mean that there aren’t things about Dallas that couldn’t be improved… a city, like individuals or business institutions, must take an honest look at its inventory and be willing to consider its faults as well as its assets….

  The rejection of this spirit of “absolutism” and the acceptance and insistence by all citizens on toleration of differing points of view seem to us to be essential for the future health of our community…

  When he is finished, Marcus wonders what else he can do. It occurs to him that there is at least one more thing, something he will pursue in a more private fashion: He will find a way to honor the words and spirit of President Kennedy. Marcus will commission five hundred copies of an exquisitely hand-typeset and bound edition of the message the president had planned to offer to the city of Dallas:

  We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.”

  That must always be our goal…

  The first copy will be given to Jacqueline Kennedy. Perhaps it will bring her some closure.

  John F. Kennedy campaigning in Dallas, September 1960. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  LBJ and JFK are delighted by the unexpectedly warm welcome they receive in Dallas during the 1960 presidential campaign. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  John F. Kennedy addresses a capacity crowd in the Dallas Memorial Auditorium while campaigning for president in 1960. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  Ultra-conservative billionaire H. L. Hunt of Dallas signs copies of his self-published utopian novel, Alpaca, as his two daughters sing in the background. Hunt’s novel called for apportioning votes based on income. The bottom 40 percent of wage earners—those who pay no federal income taxes—would receive no votes. Billionaires such as Hunt would receive up to seven votes each, and could purchase more. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  Stanley Marcus gives Coco Chanel a tour of his family’s store, Neiman Marcus, in downtown Dallas. Marcus tried to broker a peace between Dallas ultra-conservatives and President Kennedy. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  The Reverend W. A. Criswell of Dallas’s First Baptist Church—the largest all-white Baptist church in the country. His sermon lambasting Kennedy’s Catholicism became one of the most widely distributed pieces of campaign literature in 1960. Criswell had earlier denounced those in favor of civil rights as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.” Dallas Morning News.

  Juanita Craft boards a train and bids farewell to an unidentified friend. Craft was the longtime NAACP youth coordinator in Dallas, and her “kids” were often on the front lines of the battles against segregation. Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

  The Reverend Rhett James hands out literature in front of the H. L. Green drugstore in downtown Dallas while the Reverend E. W. Thomas carries a picket sign. James pushed for a more forceful approach to integration than most black Dallas leaders were comfortable with. Photograph by Marion Butts. Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

  Congressman Bruce Alger protesting LBJ in Dallas with the mink coat mob shortly before the 1960 presidential election. Richard Nixon would later refer to Alger as “that asshole congressman.” Photograph by John Mazziotta. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

  Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson move slowly through Dallas’s infamous mink coat mob. Photograph by John Mazziotta. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

  The audience reacts to denunciations of the Kennedy administration during a meeting of Dallas’s National Indignation Convention. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell, left, welcomes General Edwin Walker to Dallas with an official proclamation and a cowboy hat. Many ultra-conservatives viewed Walker as America’s “man on horseback” who could defeat Kennedy. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  Kennedy and Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey (seated two places to JFK’s left) regard each other during this luncheon hosted by the president for Texas publishers. Dealey’s raucous confrontation with JFK in the White House drew national attention—and reprisals from Kennedy’s team. Photograph by Abbie Rowe. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

  Supporters greet General Edwin Walker at Dallas’s Love Field after his release from a federal psychiatric prison, where he’d been confined by the Kennedy administration after leading the pro-segregationist riot at Ole Miss when James Meredith tried to register for classes. Photograph by Joe Laird, Dallas Morning News.

  Rhett James brings Martin Luther King to Dallas in 1963 for a rally against the poll tax. Left to right: the Reverend Rhett James, Rabbi Levi Olan, J. A. Stanfield, and Dr. King. Photograph by Marion Butts. Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

  Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. Photograph by Shel Hershorn. Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  Adlai Stevenson, ambassador to the United Nations, being assailed by angry protesters in the weeks before President Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas. Courtesy of Wes Wise.

  WANTED FOR TREASON flyer. (public domain) Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas.

  John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy arrive at Love Field, November 22, 1963. Photograph by Clint Grant. Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

  POST CREDITS

  Bruce Alger was defeated by Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell in the 1964 election. His teenage son died in a traffic accident in Washington, DC, that year. After his exile from Congress, Alger became a real estate developer and moved to Colorado, then Florida. In 1974, his ex-wife, Lynn Alger, was murdered in Dallas by a jealous lover. In 1979, Alger nearly drowned and was pulled unconscious from a hotel swimming pool in Boca Raton, Florida. In 1983 he donated his papers to the Dallas Public Library, where they are available for researchers. In 2012, the ninety-four-year-old Alger denounced Barack Obama as the worst president of his lifetime and warned against his reelection: “I consider this a crisis of our form of government. This could easily be our last gasp.”

  Earle Cabell became a U.S. congressman after defeating Bruce Alger in the 1964 election. He was successful in getting funding for the federal center in Dallas, which is today named the Earle Cabell Federal Building and Courthouse. He died in 1975 at age sixty-eight.

  Joseph Civello spent the rest of his life linked to the Kennedy assassination by researchers, conspiracy theorists, and writers. He
was highlighted in several books attempting to connect him to organized crime figures in New Orleans, to Jack Ruby, and to Lee Harvey Oswald. He suffered from heart troubles and died in 1970, after a short illness, at the age of sixty-seven.

  Juanita Craft remained active in the NAACP and many other local organizations. In 1974 she became the first African American woman elected to the Dallas City Council, serving two terms. She received many honors, including the Linz Award, the oldest civic award in Texas, in 1969—other winners include Stanley Marcus and the Dallas Morning News’s Joe Dealey. Craft was invited back to the White House on several more occasions, and President Jimmy Carter referred to her as a “national treasure.” She died in 1985, at the age of eighty-three, and her home in Dallas is now known as the Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House.

  W. A. Criswell was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1968 and formally renounced his earlier segregationist stance. He continued to be active in conservative politics and is regarded by many observers as a pioneer of the “Religious Right.” Although Criswell had called for a separation between church and state when John Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he changed his mind with the prospect of Ronald Reagan’s election, telling those assembled at the 1980 Republican Convention: “I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination.” Criswell’s First Baptist Church continued its dynamic expansion, and he remained active in its affairs until his death at age ninety-two in 2002.