Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions

  Now it is time to lay our burden down.</span>

  While everyone was religious, some were <mark>superreligious</mark>, and they thought of themselves as a spiritual vanguard. They were <mark>contemptuous</mark> 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.” ...

  What was more surprising was that the sign carriers and catcallers were for the most part well-groomed women from some of the finest homes in the city, and yet as soon as the Johnsons waded into Commerce Street the women in red, white, and blue began to <mark>curse</mark> them and to <mark>spit</mark>. (Later, some members of the “Mink Coat Mob,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly—they were frothing.)

  Why? What accounted for the hostility (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 unfocused ambition, intensely competitive 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. ...

  <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>". ...

  During his presidency the atmosphere in Dallas approached hysteria. “The historical conservatism of the city,” wrote Dallas’ most prominent merchant, Stanley 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. For the lack of courageous firemen in the business and intellectual segments of the community, the fire raged on.” ...

  Dallas was gaining notice. The leader of the American Nazi party, George Lincoln Rockwell, opined that Dallas had “the most patriotic, pro-American people of any city in the country.” The compliment may have embarrassed a few, considering its source, but we believed that about ourselves. To the radical conservatives, Dallas had become a kind of shrine, a Camelot of the right. ...