Dallas 1963 Read online

  The Lone Star State is often like some rogue nation playing by its own political rules, as if it is about to secede and become its own country again. At the family retreat in Hyannis Port, at the place where the Kennedys feel most unfettered and clear-minded, Dallas probably seems at times like a place worth conceding, a place where there is more than just the usual political resistance to everything a Northern Catholic might embody. Some who have never been to Dallas summon up the easy stereotypes: It is where Bonnie and Clyde came from. Where big oilmen drive huge cars. A distant city populated by gun-slinging cowboys and snake-handling preachers.

  Even if they don’t succumb to those cartoon caricatures, the key advisers in the Kennedy inner circle surely share something: a raw sense of Dallas as an outpost for people particularly disconnected to the Kennedy family’s very personality, religion, and principles. And John F. Kennedy himself no doubt knows that it will take far more than a soothing family photograph and a handsome, gilt-tinted holiday card to even begin to erode distrust in a place like Dallas.

  One thing is clear this January. Kennedy is watching his major rival for the presidential nomination, Lyndon B. Johnson, the crafty Master of the Senate, the Texas boss who has gone below deck to run the Democratic Party machinery during the Eisenhower presidency. No one in party circles knows more about Texas, about Dallas, than Johnson. No one but Johnson has done more to help empower the men who really run things in Texas. For months now, Jack and his brother Bobby have watched and waited for the tall, clever Texan to make his move.

  There are certainly windows of opportunity for Johnson. There are coalescing, angry forces in Dallas and throughout the South. There are governors, senators, and mayors still rallying to resist so many things: the revolutionary integration edicts ordered by the federal government, by the Supreme Court, by political forces in the North… as if a modern version of the Civil War is unfolding. But Johnson is coy, refusing to announce his plans. He is both cunning and wary—and wondering if the nation is really ready for a president from the South, from that alternately celebrated and reviled place called Texas.

  While Johnson wavers, Kennedy decides to push forward.

  He has been visiting every state in the nation. And he and his team have decided to mail those holiday cards, to have him personally sign thousands of them and send some straight to Dallas, straight to the heart of the American resistance.

  On January 2, 1960, people in the city open their ultra-conservative morning newspaper and see the big story: John Fitzgerald Kennedy has announced that he is officially running for the White House.

  Inside those three-story mansions with the curving driveways in the exclusive quarters of the city, people now understand exactly what Kennedy’s lavish holiday greeting was all about. Later in the day, they are meeting, over coffee and eggs delivered by white-gloved black waiters in the private clubs downtown, and talking about the card—especially in light of the news.

  It is both foolish and flattering: Kennedy wants Texas.

  The Reverend W. A. Criswell, the burly and square-jawed pastor of the sprawling Dallas First Baptist Church, knows that the Lord God Almighty is providing him with a special blessing on this brisk initial Sunday in January 1960.

  A brazen bigamist, the craggy and philandering Dallas oil mogul H. L. Hunt, is bowing before him and whispering in his unusually soft and cottony voice that he is ready at last to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior… and Wallie Amos Criswell as his spiritual leader. Criswell looks down, staring at the large, oval-shaped man with the baby-soft skin and the snowy, thinning hair. It is a holy marriage—between the leader of the largest Baptist church in the world and the richest man in America.

  At age fifty, Criswell weighs two hundred pounds and has short, slightly curling hair parted close to the middle of his large head. He has a broad face, thin lips, and narrow but piercing eyes. He prefers a dark tie, a white shirt, and a gray three-piece suit. Like the seventy-year-old Hunt, he emerged in a part of the nation where there was nothing even remotely akin to inherited wealth—where a desperate, hungry man usually only prospered by muscling his way forward without waiting for benevolent figures in Washington to lend a hand.

  Criswell was born into wretched poverty near the sluggish Red River and the barren Texas-Oklahoma border, where tornadoes routinely scrape away at people’s lives. Baptized in an old galvanized tub, he found his calling under flimsy revival tents, and waving his dog-eared Bible in dusty, hardscrabble villages like Muskogee and Mexia. People say he acquired a holy gift for bridging the Bible to the real world, for linking God’s ancient words to today’s headlines, for using the Bible as a literal tool to make sense of the news events people hear on the radio or see in the Dallas Morning News.

  Lately, when he sits inside his expansive, book-lined office in his sprawling brick church, he remains obsessed with liberals and socialists in the Northeast—how the men in Washington want to change traditions, push integration. Too, he has deep, lingering suspicions about Roman Catholics—about whether they would be more devoted to the pope than to the American Constitution.

  But when Criswell closes the door to his office and writes his fiery sermons, he knows one thing: He doesn’t want to risk the kind of agonizing, national blowback he endured the last time he attacked some big sea changes in America.

  Four years ago, the governor of South Carolina had insisted the nationally famous Dallas preacher come give a speech to the state legislature, and Criswell erupted in full-throated roar against integration and those Northern socialists: “The NAACP has got those East Texans on the run so much that they dare not pronounce the word ‘chigger’ anymore. It has to be Cheegro! Idiocy… Foolishness! Let them integrate! Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up! Let them stay where they are… but leave us alone!”1

  The lawmakers were mesmerized as Criswell rocked on his feet and raised both of his hands to the heavens:

  “They are not our folks. They are not our kind. They don’t belong to the same world in which we live… There are people who are trying to force upon us a situation and a thing that is a denial of all that we believe in.”

  The news about his blistering rebukes reverberated around the country, and some of the fallout was disastrous. Baptist preachers hissed that he had gone too far—even if he was saying what many of them believed. But in Dallas, the mysterious oilman H. L. Hunt listened and heartily approved. Hunt and Criswell both knew that the growing civil rights movement was just a way for soft-willed intellectuals and liberals to supercharge socialism, and open the door to a steadfast campaign by communists to infiltrate America. Hunt admires the way Criswell attacks the enemy. He’d like to entrust his soul and his money to the preacher who says:

  “Communism is a denial of God… communism is like a kingdom of darkness presided over by a prince of evil… the greatest challenge the Christian faith has ever faced in 2,000 years of history.”2

  Hunt can feel it. Criswell really understands who is leaving America so vulnerable: “The leftists, the liberals, the pinks and the welfare statists who are soft on communism and easy toward Russia.”3

  Evening is coming on, the January light is playing off the chilly waters of the Potomac River, and inside the House of Representatives chamber Congressman Bruce Alger can see his colleagues pushing out of their chairs and beginning to drift toward drinks and dinner with lobbyists. Still, this is something that the lawmaker from Dallas has to do, even if there is not a full audience.

  The smoothly handsome and impeccably dressed Alger steps to the front of the House chamber. Some people say the Princeton-educated, forty-one-year-old could have been a movie star, that he bears a striking resemblance to the actor Gary Cooper. His shined hair is combed to perfection, and he walks with a straight, easy gait.

  Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s 153rd birthday will pass entirely without notice in the House of Representative
s if not for Alger, the lone Republican in the Texas delegation and one of the most passionate conservatives in the nation. Invoking personal privilege, Alger begins a speech—his mellifluous voice rising and praising the legend and memory of the Confederate leader.

  This should play very well in certain parts of Dallas. The city was once the national headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan. The city’s famous Magnolia Building, once the tallest in the state and adorned with that giant sign of a glowing red Pegasus, was opened by a Grand Dragon of the KKK. A Dallas minister named R. E. Davis—someone well known to Dallas police—is claiming to be the new Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the KKK. He is saying ominously that he will combat integration and that “this Republic was founded by and in violence.”4 The current mayor of Dallas, R. L. Thornton, was named for Robert E. Lee and had once been an unabashed KKK member. There are two towering Confederate monuments to General Lee in Dallas, including one that is the tallest public structure in the city. There are statues of Confederate legends Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis—and all-white public schools named for rebel heroes. The Confederate cemetery in the heart of the city is always carefully tended.

  Now Alger’s heartfelt ode to Lee echoes in the lonely chamber. He doesn’t care if there is no one to listen. This speech is, really, for the people who put him in Congress—the people who run Dallas. Alger’s ode to Lee floats across the emptying room:

  “A great soldier… a loyal Southerner… a noble American… and a Christian gentleman.”5

  After Alger finishes his speech, he heads to the airport. When his plane finally touches down in Dallas, he is greeted, as always, by a small army of adoring homemakers and young wives who have taken a sudden interest in politics. Alger seems so personally appealing. He seems fully aware of those unseen threats lapping at Dallas.

  Immediately, the Dallas Morning News issues an editorial thanking Alger:

  It was fitting, though ironical, that a Republican—Bruce Alger of Dallas—was the only congressman to get on his feet and salute Gen. Robert E. Lee on his birthday.

  Fitting, because Lee fought for the rights of the states. By resisting big government in Washington. So is Alger.

  Where were the Democrats—the so-called party of the South? Courting the support of… the NAACP?6

  At home, Alger is often regarded as a folk hero despite the fact that he has never passed a single piece of legislation. He has introduced doomed bills to withdraw from the United Nations, to break off all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, to privatize the federal government. He opposed the civil rights bill of 1957, condemning it as placating “the troublemakers of the NAACP who seek to incite race hatred and discontent which did not exist.”7 And, finally, he cast the lone vote against a federal program to provide surplus milk, free of charge, to needy elementary school children.

  The congressman was assailed across the country, but the leaders of the Dallas Morning News rushed to his defense: “Here we are telling ourselves that we must strain every nerve and conserve every penny to meet the assault upon our way of life by the Russians and the spend-it-all folk in Washington come in crying about the milk-hungry children.”8

  Alger has other stalwarts in Dallas. The billionaire Hunt sends out a mass letter racing to the support of the Dallas lawmaker: “His acumen, integrity and courage rate him as one of the 5 or 6 truly great men among the vanishing good men in Washington.”9

  But it is the prosperous stay-at-home wives waiting for him at the Dallas airport that really form the soul of Alger’s political vanguard. They constantly spring to his side, excitedly host luncheon forums and fund-raisers in their homes, work for hours on phone banks, and parade door-to-door with his yard signs. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, routinely appear at his public events, applauding wildly. To some skeptics in Dallas it is almost too much—and some are quietly speculating about what inspires so much passion. There are even rumors about his marriage, about why the congressman and his wife have recently separated.

  Now, in the city after his Capitol Hill salute to Robert E. Lee, Alger simply goes from one January appearance to another, engulfed by the well-dressed women who have braved the winter weather to welcome him back. As they listen, perched on the edges of their seats and clapping, they hear him hammer home what they know to be true: There is something poisoning the hallways of power in Washington. There is a cancer. Washington is filled with blind men, liberal men: “the most liberal since the heyday of the New Deal.”10

  Towering over the women, he lowers his head to tell them he has more work to do in Washington. And often, before he leaves the city to go back to Washington, Alger will do something else: drive downtown and take the elevator to the top floor of an office tower on Commerce Street for a closed-door meeting with his high-ranking backers from the Dallas Citizens Council—the group of fifty or so wealthy white businessmen who meet to chart the city’s fate, decide the next mayor, and map out the increasingly twitchy matter of race relations… and how to keep what is happening in Alabama, in New York, anywhere else where protests have occurred, completely out of Dallas.

  Alger probably knows that there are people in Dallas who have another name for these men, many descended from the city’s founding families, who hold his political fate in their hands: Some call the group the Dallas White Citizens Council—leaning in to whisper the word white.

  As waiters move in and out of the room with tumblers of cool beverages, Alger relays the news from the front lines in Washington: Insiders in the nation’s capital are beginning to worry that the Democrats are becoming increasingly soft on civil rights, and that there is something even worse—the Catholic, Jack Kennedy, is beginning to outflank his major rivals for the presidential nomination.

  The aging publisher negotiates the old roads leading to the west side of downtown—and to the Dallas Morning News building with the Texas and American flags out front, set on an entire block close to the murky Trinity River. The publisher can stare out the car window through the winter weather and consider how much the city has grown since what he calls “the diaper days of Dallas.”

  Day after day, Ted Dealey, sixty-seven, a short, wiry man with thick glasses, has told himself to be vigilant on behalf of Dallas and all that it stands for. Under his direction, the paper he inherited from his father routinely goes to war with the United Nations, the NAACP, labor, liberals, and—lately—the Supreme Court. In the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating America’s schools, Dealey’s paper charged that the justices had “surrendered to subversion.” His editorials mock the high court as the “Judicial Kremlin” and “Courtnik.”

  As the publisher commutes downtown in January, he is perhaps still marveling at the way that Dallas Congressman Alger invoked splendid references to the Old South and General Robert E. Lee, right in the heart of Washington, DC—a place that Dealey’s paper sometimes calls “the Negro Capital of the U.S.”11

  The Dallas Morning News was founded by a Confederate officer who served in the North Carolina Fifty-Fifth Regiment before making his way to wide-open Texas. There is a deep Confederate affection in the publisher’s family—he has fond memories of his father installing twenty extra beds in their mansion for old rebel soldiers and relatives coming to Dallas for the national Confederate reunion. He grew up with boys named for Robert E. Lee. When the Dallas Morning News built its new headquarters a little more than a decade ago, the governor of Texas and the citizens council members who came to the opening were handed a brochure underscoring the fact that the building had separate dining facilities for whites and blacks.

  By 1960, Dealey is the most outspoken keeper of the city’s history and what some call its Southern traditions. He is, beyond most of the men on the Dallas Citizens Council, the public protector of old Dallas. And he sees his paper serving a vital civic function: reminding readers of “the Dallas way of doing things”—one that he and the handful of those other entrenched leaders in the city’s boardrooms single-handedl
y shaped, nursed, and promoted with uncompromising passion.

  Dealey always liked to write. He grew up in the newspaper. As he ages, Dealey also likes to think about one day compiling his increasingly personal reminiscences—ones reflecting on the way things had been in what he felt were the truly innocent days of Dallas. They are nostalgic memories, including how he remembers the black people he had grown up with: Merity would deliver lunch to him wherever Dealey was in the city; jangly Boswell would drive him in the family Cadillac; Viola and Josh lived in a backyard bungalow when they were not cooking and cleaning; Miles polished cuspidors at the newspaper (but locked himself in a small closet to do it, because it reminded him of his close-quarters work as a railroad porter); the miniature, bowlegged, and bald Boykin would fetch things for him; Johnson was your man when you needed someone to check coats at a dinner party in Dallas… he had an uncanny ability to remember every fine coat and every owner.

  Yet a parallel universe exists in Dallas, a world seldom glimpsed in the pages of Dealey’s newspaper: The black janitor from Dallas castrated by a rural Texas mob in 1941. The president of an all-Negro junior college who tried to serve on a Dallas jury in 1938, but who went blind after being shoved hard down the courthouse steps. Thurgood Marshall, the prominent civil rights attorney for the NAACP, chased through city streets by the gun-wielding Dallas police chief, who was shouting: “You black son of a bitch… I have you now.”12

  When Dealey had assumed control of the paper in the 1940s, he began to see the persuasive editorial pages as an important and necessary bully pulpit. He had always felt that when he and the other city leaders gathered downtown at the famous Baker or Adolphus Hotel for power breakfasts, the highest goal was making the city prosperous, making it bustle with quiet, unflappable efficiency… because it is good for business, good for everyone. And there really is an order, a way, in Dallas: The citizens council sets the political and economic agenda. Alger then carries their messages in Washington. Criswell becomes the moral compass, the preacher who surrounds things in biblical inviolability. And, finally, Dealey spells them out inside the Dallas Morning News.