Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions

  While everyone was religious, some were superreligious, and they thought of themselves as a spiritual vanguard. They were contemptuous of the rest of us—we might as well have been agents of the Devil. It was the same with politics. The political scale in Dallas began with Eisenhower conservatism and ran well past fascism to a kind of conservative nihilism. Earle Cabell was a far-right Democrat, present at the founding though not a member of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society, and yet he was routinely described by the farther right as “the socialist mayor of Dallas.” ...

  Across the country, but particularly in this new world, there was a certain adolescent bitterness, a suspicious feeling of betrayal, a willingness to find conspiracy lurking in every corner. “The mood,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described it, “was one of the longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners—a world in which Chief Justice Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of drinking water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.”  

  <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> to lead this nation", he concluded "and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are <mark>riding Caroline's tricycle</mark>". ...