Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions

  Why? What accounted for the <mark>hostility</mark> (or to use her word, indignation) of the <mark>fashionable and affluent</mark> Dallas woman? In part she was simply a prisoner of her age: a women of <mark>unfocused ambition, intensely competitive</mark> but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), <mark>lonely at home</mark> and given to <mark>causes</mark>. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some <mark>unnamed fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash away her American dreams [fairy tale]</mark>. She named the tide International Communism, or '''<mark>Creeping Socialism</mark>'''. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted to the West, “We will bury you,” the conservative Dallas woman believed him. Earlier that autumn Khrushchev had come to the United Nations and pounded on the table with his shoe—a gesture of such swaggering boorishness that it justified every qualm the Dallas woman felt about Russia, the United Nations, and American foreign policy. She worried about the missile gap and the spread of communism to Cuba. Moreover, people in her own country were talking enthusiastically about social change—Kennedy was already speaking of the “the revolutionary sixties”—and the Dallas woman knew those changes would come at her expense. She worried about the erosion of liberty caused by recent Supreme Court decisions (often delivered by <mark>Chief Justice Earl Warren</mark>, who was the <mark>creeping socialist personified</mark>). The court was <mark>taking rights away from the Dallas woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, communists, and Negroes</mark>. The Dallas woman felt herself to be under attack at home and abroad. ...

  Although Nixon carried Dallas County by a landslide, Texas went for the Kennedy-Johnson. ...It was the <mark>closest presidential election in the nation’s history, and it was decided that day in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel [where the Johnsons being accosted by the rich Republican Tag gals received television coverage]. People said afterward that they were not voting for Kennedy so much as they were voting against Dallas.</mark>

  There was, in fact, a <mark>chip of defiance on the city’s shoulder, encouraged by the ''Dallas Morning News''</mark>. The ''News'' is the oldest business institution in the state, having been founded in 1842 when Texas was still a republic and Dallas little more than a heady presumption. Under George B. Dealey the ''News'' had been a <mark>progressive newspaper, leading the scourge that drove the Ku Klux Klan out of Texas</mark>. The name “Dealey” would become famous because of the queer, fan-shaped park known as Dealey Plaza, directly across the street from the Texas School Book Depository, where a bronze statue of G.B. Dealey stares at the now magnificent skyline of downtown Dallas. Many citizens believe it is perfectly appropriate that Dealey’s name should be irrevocably tied to the assassination, even though it is his son they blame. ...

  <mark>E.M. "Ted" Dealey</mark>, the son, succeeded his father as publisher of the ''[Dallas Morning] News'', and in his hands it became the <mark>most strident, red-baiting daily paper in the country</mark>, excepting only occasionally William Leob's ''Union-Leader'', in Manchester, New Hampshire. <mark>Like many intensely conservative people, he found his paragon in the movies and politics of John Wayne</mark>. As a matter of fact, <mark>reading the ''News'' each morning was like watching a brawl in a saloon</mark>, in which the newspaper's <mark>editorials flattened the "socialists" (read: Democrats), the "perverts and subversives" (liberal Democrats), the "Judicial Kremlin" (the U.S. Supreme Court), and virtually every representative of the federal government '''whose views differed''' from those of Ted Dealey</mark>. Immediately after the election the ''News''’s principal object of contempt became President John F Kennedy, who the paper suggested was a crook, a communist sympathizer, a thief, and "fifty times a fool".