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A damp, gray autumn sky hung over Dallas-weather to match my mood.
Friday, November 22, 1963.
President John F. Kennedy was coming to town.
There'd be a motorcade, and then JFK would address a luncheon at the
Dallas Trade Mart.
The president's visit was the local news story of
the week, or even of the year for that matter, and my paper, The
Dallas Morning News, was deploying every available hand to cover the
event-everyone except me.
So what if science and aviation was my beat-not
government or politics. All my buddies at the paper had been talking
about the Kennedy visit for days. Now they'd all be part of a story
big enough to tell their children.
"Where you gonna be?" grinned photographer
Joe Laird, juggling several cameras.
"Oh, Hugh's off today," columnist Larry
Grove answered for me. "He lucked out."
Grove, my best buddy on the paper, and I had just
returned from our first coffee break in the cafeteria, where I had
told him I felt like all the staff members except the copy boys were
going to be with the president at Love Field or at the Trade Mart
luncheon.
"You may be the lucky one," Grove grinned.
"I guess I'll get a good column out of it, but…"
Grove and a handful of beat reporters especially
assigned to various aspects of the JFK visit soon took off for
various staging areas. Though the newsroom already was starting to
thin out, the incessantly ringing phones and the faster-than-usual
pace of those "involved" only made me feel more excluded.
I guess I was somewhat spoiled. I had been covering
all the U.S. manned spaceflight launches, the nation's underground
nuclear testing program and various military stories, and I'd been
to Cuba just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I was
used to action-and there seemed none for me here today.
Tired of answering the phones and running down
reporters for editors-and vice versa-I drifted back down to the
cafeteria, got another cup of java, and picked up the day's paper. I
had at least three hours before I was scheduled to interview an
aerospace scientist at Southern Methodist University.
The News that morning carried a Metro section
interview by reporter Carl Freund with former Vice President Richard
Nixon, who was in town under his lawyer's hat for meetings with
Pepsi-Cola bottlers, whom Nixon's New York law firm represented.
A sidebar noted that Nixon's Baker Hotel suite was
right down the hall from that of actress Joan Crawford, who had
married into the company. We further informed our readers that Nixon
would fly out of Love Field two hours before the man who barely
edged him for the presidency in 1960 landed in Air Force One.
At a Baker Hotel press conference, Nixon predicted
his old rival might drop Vice President Lyndon Johnson from the
ticket in his 1964 re-election campaign if the Texan proved to be a
political liability-as Nixon said he believed Johnson already was.
As for his own prospects of running in '64, Nixon said, "I
cannot conceive of circumstances under which that would
happen."
Politics was in the air.
An Associated Press dispatch, quoting the Houston
Chronicle, adroitly explained the major reason for Kennedy's Texas
trip. Three years earlier, JFK-LBJ carried the state over Nixon and
Henry Cabot Lodge by a razor-thin 46,000-vote margin, a critical
electoral college triumph for which Lyndon Johnson deserved most of
the credit.
Now the Chronicle reported a new statewide poll that
showed Kennedy trailing Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, his likely
opponent in the 1964 election, by about 100,000 votes if the
election were held that day. Although the most recent Gallup Poll
showed the president pummeling the conservative Goldwater
nationwide, 58 to 42 percent, Kennedy clearly needed to shore up his
support in this important swing state.
A high-visibility, two-day, five-city tour of Texas
accompanied by popular Democrats such as Gov. John Connally, Sen.
Ralph Yarborough, and the vice president must have seemed just the
thing to boost his standing.
Kennedy also knew that to have any chance at all
against Goldwater in Texas he needed to forge at least some unity
among the Lone Star State's fractious Democratic bickermeisters.
Liberal Ralph Yarborough, for example, detested
centrists such as Connally and Johnson-and with some reason. The
governor and the vice president were never seen doing the senator
any favors. Just the opposite. On this trip they seemed determined
to put Yarborough in his place.
Connally was scheduled to host a private reception
for JFK at the governor's mansion in Austin that Friday night:
Yarborough was absent from the guest list.
Yarborough's response to that snub: "I want
everybody to join hands in harmony for the greatest welcome to the
President and Mrs. Kennedy in the history of Texas." Then:
"Gov. Connally is so terribly uneducated governmentally, how
could you expect anything else?"
On Thursday afternoon in Houston, Yarborough had
defied Kennedy by refusing to ride in the same car with LBJ. He
chose instead to be seen with Congressman Albert Thomas. In San
Antonio that morning, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood was
gently nudging the senator toward Johnson's limo when Yarborough saw
Congressman Henry Gonzalez, a political blood brother, and bolted
toward him. "Can I ride with you, Henry?" he asked.
That evening, employees at Houston's Rice Hotel
heard JFK and LBJ arguing over Yarborough in the presidential suite.
Kennedy reportedly informed Johnson in strong terms that he felt
Yarborough-who had much better poll numbers in Texas than
Kennedy-was being mistreated, and the president was unhappy about
that.
Years later, Yarborough told me that Maury Maverick,
Jr., a liberal state Democratic committeeman, had complained to him
that Maverick had been shut out of an airport greeting line for the
Kennedys. He also warned Yarborough that the Johnson-Connally forces
were out to embarrass him however possible.
"I already knew and could feel that,"
Yarborough said, "but they weren't going to find it any easy
task." He added that JFK took him aside during a testimonial
dinner for Rep. Thomas on Thursday night, and assured the senator,
"I don't think you're going to have any more problems on this
trip."
As it happened, Rep. Gonzalez also was nursing a
peeve. He carped to the president aboard Air Force One on their way
to Texas that Kennedy was spending only two hours in the Alamo City,
while three hours had been allocated to Dallas, then a Democratic
wasteland represented by the sulfurously right-wing Bruce Alger, the
sole Republican in the Texas Congressional delegation. Alger was
infamous for having once voted against free milk for kids.
Gonzalez had a point, but JFK was adamant about
showing the Democratic flag in Texas' second-largest city, even
though the president seemed unlikely to change many hearts or minds
in Dallas County. Nixon had steamrolled him by 60,000 votes in
Dallas. Goldwater promised to show even better in this black-earth
redoubt of red-meat conservativism.
A number of well-known national Democrats, including
U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Gov. Connally, and Arkansas Sen. J.
William Fulbright, advised the president to postpone or skip the
Texas trip. Reason: Groups of virulently anti-Kennedy Texans, some
extremely well-financed, planned to take advantage of the press
coverage to make their sentiments better known to the world.
They feared that something really ugly might occur,
especially in Dallas, where a long and vociferous list of Kennedy
detractors was headed by E. M. "Ted" Dealey, former
publisher of the News.
My boss.
The News, largest daily paper in Texas with a
weekday circulation of 236,000, routinely excoriated Kennedy in its
editorial columns, part of the paper's shrilly right-wing political
slant that appalled and embarrassed many people in the newsroom,
including me-as thoroughly apolitical as anyone on the staff.
In the autumn of 1961, Ted Dealey and a handful of
other Texas media bigwigs were invited to the White House for a
meeting with Kennedy. This was not a gathering of kindred souls. Yet
a mood of strained decorum prevailed until Dealey produced prepared
notes from which he addressed the president directly.
"You and your administration are weak
sisters," said Dealey, who admonished the president that the
United States needed "a man on horseback to lead the nation and
many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding
Caroline's tricycle."
Dealey's insults made front-page news across the
country. Kennedy wasn't Dealey's only target. The News had so
viciously attacked Fulbright during his 1962 re-election campaign
that the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now
declined invitations from friends to even visit the city.
On Oct. 3, aboard Air Force One with JFK on their
way to a dam dedication in Arkansas (and also later at the
dedication luncheon), Fulbright told Kennedy that he was physically
afraid to go to Dallas. He said he greatly feared the president's
upcoming trip.
"Dallas is a very dangerous place,"
Fulbright said. "I wouldn't go there-and don't you go!"
In Dallas, U. S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders and U.S.
District Judge Sarah T. Hughes sent word to the president's aides
that they, too, thought the trip "inadvisable."
The day before Kennedy arrived, "Wanted For
Treason" handbills started popping up around town. News
reporters Ed Cocke and Harry McCormick brought examples to work on
Thursday morning. The fliers depicted the president in full face and
profile, as in a mug shot. "This man," they read, "is
wanted for treasonous activities against the United States."
Among JFK's alleged crimes: "betraying the
Constitution (which he swore to uphold)"; giving "support
and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots"; and
telling "fantastic LIES to the American people (including
personal ones like his previous marriage [sic] and divorce)."
On Thursday afternoon, city editor Johnny King
assigned me to track the pamphlets to their source and to discover,
if possible, whether similar venom might be spewing forth the next
day during the president's visit.
Harry McCormick, an old pro who'd once been
kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde's gang, suggested I look for leads in
the paper's coverage of a "National Indignation
Convention" (NIC) held in Dallas a few weeks earlier, where NIC
delegates bitterly scorned Kennedy for allowing Yugoslavian pilots
to train at Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, about 75 miles north
of Dallas.
McCormick's idea paid off. I located an NIC
organizer who put me in touch with those who'd printed the
"Wanted For Treason" posters.
"We're going to show Kennedy what we think of
him," one of them said on the telephone. I reminded him that
after UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson's recent adversity in Dallas,
the city council had passed a resolution making it a misdemeanor to
curse or shout obscenities during a public event.
"Oh, we're not going to shout at him," the
caller assured me. "In fact, we're going to have our mouths
covered with tape so there's no possibility of such behavior. We're
going to be law-abiding. We don't want to harm anyone. We just want
Americans to wake up to what's happening in our country."
He closed, "Oh, by the way, you'll be able to
recognize us easily. We're going to be wearing Uncle Sam
suits."
Johnny King decided not to print what I'd learned.
"No laws broken apparently," he said. "One might
argue that they violated the laws of good taste [with the
pamphlets], but I doubt anyone will care about that. Let's not make
them heroes by writing about them."
God, I thought, it's going to be a zoo here
tomorrow.
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