Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions

  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>

  Against us. For the first time people in the city learned about guilt by association. Until then Dallas had had very little national identity, but we found ourselves now with a new municipal image: a <mark>city of the '''angry nouveau riche''', smug, doctrinaire, belligerent, a city with a taste for '''political violence'''</mark>. Many Dallasites were shocked to see our city represented that way, but it had <mark>little effect on the way we thought of ourselves</mark>. ...

  <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".  

  Ted Dealey went to the White House in the fall of 1961 with a group of Texas publishers to meet the man he had maligned so frequently in his newspaper. He used the occasion to attack Kennedy in person. "We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government", he advised the president, to the discomfort of his colleagues in the room. He accused Kennedy and his administration of being <mark>weak sisters</mark> (a favorite Dealey phrase). "We need <mark>a man on horseback</mark> [e.g. Johnson?] to lead this nation", he concluded "and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are <mark>riding Caroline's tricycle</mark>". ...

  Kennedy was still thinking of his encounter with Dealey when he spoke later that year of <mark>people who “call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.</mark>” With his prescient political eye <mark>Kennedy saw that the '''new world''' [of which Dallas is the "capitol"] was being created</mark>, and it stood <mark>opposed to everything he represented</mark>: East Coast liberalism, mainstream Democratic party politics, Ivy League learning, the <mark>'''customary restraints of educated society'''</mark>. Although Kennedy was popularly understood as a man of his time, a thoroughly modern president, <mark>in many ways he was the last of the traditionalists</mark>. He called his administration the <mark>New Frontier, but his successors—Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan—would show that the real frontier in American politics lay for away in the '''new world'''</mark>.

  During his presidency the atmosphere in Dallas approached <mark>hysteria. “The historical conservatism of the city,” wrote Dallas’ most prominent merchant, Stanley Marcus [of Neiman-Marcus], “had been fanned to a raging fire by the combination of a number of elements: the '''far right daily radio''' ‘Facts Forum’ program by Dan Smoot sponsored by the ultraconservative '''wealthiest''' man in town, '''H. L. Hunt'''; the '''John Birch Society'''; the '''oil''' industry’s hysterical concern for the preservation of what they considered a biblical guarantee of their '''depletion allowance'''; the ‘National Indignation League’ founded by a local garageman, Frank McGeehee, in protest of the air force’s training of some Yugoslavian pilots at a nearby air base; the '''consistently one-sided attacks on the administration by the ''Dallas Morning News''''' and the semi-acquiescent editorial policy of the ''Times Herald'', which had previously been a middle-of-the-road, fair newspaper.</mark> For the lack of courageous firemen in the business and intellectual segments of the community, the fire raged on.” ...

  The mob immediately closed him in [Adlai Stevenson]. The hysterical woman, who was the wife of an insurance executive, brought her placard down on Stevenson’s head. A college student <mark>spat</mark> upon him. When the policeman finally rescued him, Stevenson wiped the <mark>spit</mark> off his face with a handkerchief and asked aloud, “<mark>Are these human beings or are these animals?</mark>” ...