Dallas 1963

Grand Central Publishing

1960

JANUARY

Over the brisk winter holiday, mailmen in Dallas are bundled against the bitingwinter chill as they place a series of carefully signed and rather unexpectedcards into the mailboxes of the city's most influential residents—menliving on the exquisitely manicured, tree-lined streets that filter north of thetall downtown buildings.

The front of the card features a crisp photograph of an attractive young family:A handsome, vigorous-looking man is seated in a comfortable chair, book-linedshelves visible behind him. His face is creased into a charming smile, and hisposture projects an easy and sanguine confidence. Perched on his lap is hisebullient daughter, peering down at an open book. Standing behind him is hiselegantly attired wife, leaning over her well-dressed husband and child. Hermanner seems more reserved, nearly brooding. A strand of pearls frames her longneck. She is very attractive but appears as remote as a silent screen star.

The portrait of this young family radiates a sense of dynastic ease, of a kindof practiced and inherited status. On the inside of the card is the raised,gold-embossed Great Seal of the United States: the fierce eagle clutching anolive branch in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other.

Below the seal appears a message: "Wishing you a Blessed Christmas and a NewYear filled with happiness. Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy."

Each of the cards has been signed in the same careful handwriting:"Best—Jack."

Many of the people in Dallas are startled at the impressive, personalized card.Most of them have never met Kennedy. Many have never ventured into the Kennedyorbits on the East Coast—nor would they ever want to. In the powerfulparts of Dallas, there is a mixture of old Southern families and the nouveauriche. And now, in the last few years, the oil money is flowing furiously intothis New South city—sometimes seemingly despite men like Kennedy, despitethe Northeastern establishment, despite the long and controlling reach ofWashington.

Alongside the older mansions, there are newer thirty-room Taj Mahals where eventhe toilets are made with gold leaf. The most lavish store in the city, NeimanMarcus, specializes in making millionaires' dreams come true—it ispreparing to debut its newest gift idea: His and Hers airplanes. People areflying out of Dallas's Love Field to New Orleans for lunch at Antoine's, or toLake Tahoe to mingle with Frank Sinatra at the Cal Neva Resort. Or to Las Vegasto play poker with Benny Binion—once the most celebrated purveyor ofillicit pleasures to the rich in Dallas, now their host at the famous HorseshoeCasino.

But just a few minutes from the mansions in Dallas, there are also clusters offalling-down shacks, with no running water, settling into the gumbo-soilbottomlands. The city's schools, country clubs, and stores are still perfectlysegregated ... and bonded, through membership and memory, to ominous things thatfew speak about by name.

With the grand holiday cards from Kennedy in hand, the recipients place calls tofriends. They learn that many others have received the very same greeting fromKennedy, not just in Dallas, but all over the country. Some must wonder if it isgiving Kennedy some measure of satisfaction knowing that his cards are beingtalked about in a city like Dallas ... in a place like Texas.

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

Even if they don't succumb to those cartoon caricatures, the key advisers in theKennedy inner circle surely share something: a raw sense of Dallas as an outpostfor people particularly disconnected to the Kennedy family's very personality,religion, and principles. And John F. Kennedy himself no doubt knows that itwill take far more than a soothing family photograph and a handsome, gilt-tintedholiday 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 thepresidential nomination, Lyndon B. Johnson, the crafty Master of the Senate, theTexas boss who has gone below deck to run the Democratic Party machinery duringthe Eisenhower presidency. No one in party circles knows more about Texas, aboutDallas, than Johnson. No one but Johnson has done more to help empower the menwho really run things in Texas. For months now, Jack and his brother Bobby havewatched 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 revolutionaryintegration edicts ordered by the federal government, by the Supreme Court, bypolitical forces in the North ... as if a modern version of the Civil War isunfolding. But Johnson is coy, refusing to announce his plans. He is bothcunning and wary—and wondering if the nation is really ready for apresident from the South, from that alternately celebrated and reviled placecalled Texas.

While Johnson wavers, Kennedy decides to push forward.

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

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

Inside those three-story mansions with the curving driveways in the exclusivequarters of the city, people now understand exactly what Kennedy's lavishholiday greeting was all about. Later in the day, they are meeting, over coffeeand 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 sprawlingDallas First Baptist Church, knows that the Lord God Almighty is providing himwith a special blessing on this brisk initial Sunday in January 1960.

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

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

Criswell was born into wretched poverty near the sluggish Red River and thebarren Texas-Oklahoma border, where tornadoes routinely scrape away at people'slives. Baptized in an old galvanized tub, he found his calling under flimsyrevival tents, and waving his dog-eared Bible in dusty, hardscrabble villageslike Muskogee and Mexia. People say he acquired a holy gift for bridging theBible 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 peoplehear on the radio or see in the Dallas Morning News.

Lately, when he sits inside his expansive, book-lined office in his sprawlingbrick church, he remains obsessed with liberals and socialists in theNortheast—how the men in Washington want to change traditions, pushintegration. Too, he has deep, lingering suspicions about RomanCatholics—about whether they would be more devoted to the pope than to theAmerican Constitution.

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

Four years ago, the governor of South Carolina had insisted the nationallyfamous Dallas preacher come give a speech to the state legislature, and Criswellerupted 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 notpronounce the word 'chigger' anymore. It has to be Cheegro! Idiocy ...Foolishness! Let them integrate! Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts andmake all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying fromthe neck up! Let them stay where they are ... but leave us alone!"

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

"They are not our folks. They are not our kind. They don't belong to the sameworld in which we live ... There are people who are trying to force upon us asituation and a thing that is a denial of all that we believe in."

The news about his blistering rebukes reverberated around the country, and someof the fallout was disastrous. Baptist preachers hissed that he had gone toofar—even if he was saying what many of them believed. But in Dallas, themysterious oilman H. L. Hunt listened and heartily approved. Hunt and Criswellboth knew that the growing civil rights movement was just a way for soft-willedintellectuals and liberals to supercharge socialism, and open the door to asteadfast campaign by communists to infiltrate America. Hunt admires the wayCriswell attacks the enemy. He'd like to entrust his soul and his money to thepreacher who says:

"Communism is a denial of God ... communism is like a kingdom of darknesspresided over by a prince of evil ... the greatest challenge the Christian faithhas ever faced in 2,000 years of history."

Hunt can feel it. Criswell really understands who is leaving America sovulnerable: "The leftists, the liberals, the pinks and the welfare statists whoare soft on communism and easy toward Russia."

Evening is coming on, the January light is playing off the chilly waters of thePotomac River, and inside the House of Representatives chamber Congressman BruceAlger can see his colleagues pushing out of their chairs and beginning to drifttoward drinks and dinner with lobbyists. Still, this is something that thelawmaker 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 theHouse chamber. Some people say the Princeton-educated, forty-one-year-old couldhave been a movie star, that he bears a striking resemblance to the actor GaryCooper. 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 withoutnotice in the House of Representatives if not for Alger, the lone Republican inthe Texas delegation and one of the most passionate conservatives in the nation.Invoking personal privilege, Alger begins a speech—his mellifluous voicerising and praising the legend and memory of the Confederate leader.

This should play very well in certain parts of Dallas. The city was once thenational 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 redPegasus, 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 newImperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the KKK. He is saying ominously thathe will combat integration and that "this Republic was founded by and inviolence." 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 toweringConfederate monuments to General Lee in Dallas, including one that is thetallest public structure in the city. There are statues of Confederate legendsStonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis—and all-white public schools namedfor rebel heroes. The Confederate cemetery in the heart of the city is alwayscarefully tended.

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

"A great soldier ... a loyal Southerner ... a noble American ... and a Christiangentleman."

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

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

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

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

Where were the Democrats—the so-called party of the South? Courting thesupport of ... the NAACP?

At home, Alger is often regarded as a folk hero despite the fact that he hasnever passed a single piece of legislation. He has introduced doomed bills towithdraw from the United Nations, to break off all diplomatic relations with theSoviet Union, to privatize the federal government. He opposed the civil rightsbill of 1957, condemning it as placating "the troublemakers of the NAACP whoseek to incite race hatred and discontent which did not exist." And, finally, hecast the lone vote against a federal program to provide surplus milk, free ofcharge, to needy elementary school children.

The congressman was assailed across the country, but the leaders of theDallas Morning News rushed to his defense: "Here we are tellingourselves that we must strain every nerve and conserve every penny to meet theassault upon our way of life by the Russians and the spend-it-all folk inWashington come in crying about the milk-hungry children."

Alger has other stalwarts in Dallas. The billionaire Hunt sends out a massletter racing to the support of the Dallas lawmaker: "His acumen, integrity andcourage rate him as one of the 5 or 6 truly great men among the vanishing goodmen in Washington."

But it is the prosperous stay-at-home wives waiting for him at the Dallasairport that really form the soul of Alger's political vanguard. They constantlyspring to his side, excitedly host luncheon forums and fund-raisers in theirhomes, work for hours on phone banks, and parade door-to-door with his yardsigns. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, routinely appear at his public events,applauding wildly. To some skeptics in Dallas it is almost too much—andsome are quietly speculating about what inspires so much passion. There are evenrumors about his marriage, about why the congressman and his wife have recentlyseparated.

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