Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions

  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 curse them and to spit. (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 fashionable and affluent Dallas woman? In part she was imply a prisoner of her age: a women of unfocused ambition, intensely competitive but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), lonely at home and given to causes. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some unnamed fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash away her American dreams. She named the tide International Communism, or Creeping Socialism. 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 Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was the creeping socialist personified). The court was taking rights away from the Dallas woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, communists, and Negroes. 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> to lead this nation", he concluded "and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are <mark>riding Caroline's tricycle</mark>". ...