|
The Kennedy assassination was a watershed event for the news
business. Up to then, television news was mostly a novelty. The era
of the celebrity network anchor supplanting a kid on a bike as
bearer of the evening news was not yet born. The national reflex
habit of tuning to cable TV to follow any breaking story still was
decades away. Daily newspapers were still the most common, and most
trusted, source of news in the country.
But Nov. 22, 1963, went far to change all that, even
if television coverage of the event and its immediate aftermath in
Dallas was spotty and amateurish by today's standards. Only Abraham
Zapruder, a local purveyor of women's fashions, caught the
assassination itself on film, using his 8-mm Bell & Howell home
movie camera.
The most vivid images of the weekend, in my view,
were Jack Beers' great picture-showing Ruby moving toward Oswald-and
the even greater Pulitzer Prize-winning still of the actual murder,
taken by Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson.
At its best, however, the TV coverage (particularly
of Oswald's murder) was more immediate and dramatic than anything
you could put in a news column.
A revolution had begun.
The first victims of television's newly-discovered
power to cover breaking stories would be the afternoon dailies. Yet
on November 22nd in Dallas, it was the afternoon paper, the Times
Herald, that scored a lot of the early newsbreaks.
The reason was simple. With an early afternoon copy
deadline already in place (and much of the boilerplate reporting in
hand), the paper could instantly mobilize.
The Times Herald got a special edition with a
150-point banner proclaiming PRESIDENT DEAD on the street by 2:30.
The frightened, jittery Dallas citizenry, hungry for any
information, paid as much as a dollar apiece for the nickel
newspapers, a circulation department's dream.
Across the way in Fort Worth, the Star-Telegram
began cranking out serial editions of its afternoon paper, remaking
page one over and over as more news broke and Fort Worth readers
lined up around the block to purchase the paper.
The News hit the streets overnight with a two-line
banner:
Kennedy Slain On Dallas Street
The News produced what I think was a comprehensive
and balanced 12 pages of coverage devoted to the assassination,
everything from a long Kennedy obituary to wire service reports from
around the world to my interviews with Nick McDonald, Earlene
Roberts, and others.
The centerpiece was a long narrative crafted from
staff feeds by Paul Crume, the best front-page columnist then
working west of the Mississippi, who was drafted into acting as a
sort of super re-write man that day. Johnny King later told me that
Crume filled three waste baskets with wadded balls of discarded copy
as he labored over his typewriter to create as seamless a story as
possible.
Unfortunately, two major errors crept into the
piece; one, that Oswald's assassination weapon was a 6.5 Mauser
rifle (actually Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, No. C2766) and, two, that
Kennedy died in surgery on the sixth floor of Parkland Hospital
(actually emergency ground floor, Trauma-1). Both mistakes soon were
twisted to the uses of conspiracy theorists.
Ever since, stories have circulated that the
president really didn't die that day, but survived and was placed on
permanent life support systems in persistent vegetative state on
Parkland's sixth floor.
Never mind that Parkland had no sixth floor. The
story never went away.
Painful as the errors were, they were mistakes of
inadvertence-Paul didn't mean to get it wrong. Not so our editorial
that day, a noxious blend of sanctimony and disingenuousness.
Calling the assassination a "shameful mark on
this city's history," the writer loftily continued, "We
join the rest of the nation in heartfelt sympathy and trust that the
warped and distorted who become unstable in their opposition will
retreat into darkness and not emerge until they regain the light of
reasonableness and balance."
The News' editorialist seemed almost gleeful the
following day for the chance to blame communists for Kennedy's
death. "In the first agonizing hours after the assassination of
President Kennedy," the editorial began, "the assumption
was made by many and openly expressed by a few that the blame for
this hideous crime rested at the doorstep of the 'radical right' in
Dallas. Quite the opposite seems to be the case, making these
assumptions and charges unfair. The man charged with the murder is
pro-communist with strong 'radical left' ties."
The piece went on, "We have seen once again the
murderous demonstration that the size of the domestic communist
force is not the issue. Numbers mean very little in a conspiracy.
Too many have scoffed at the danger by insisting that we have a mere
'handful' of domestic Reds-forgetting that a single determined
pro-communist can murder the President of the United States and
plunge an entire nation into serious crisis."
Relying on pitifully weak evidence to elevate a
jack-leg Marxist such as Lee Harvey Oswald to membership in the
supposed international communist conspiracy was precisely the sort
of irresponsible straw man fabrication at which the News editorial
writers excelled. No self-respecting communist would have wanted
himself or his movement associated with the likes of Oswald.
Behind the News' editorial's bluster, however,
lurked a different truth. It wasn't political conservatism, but
intolerance-outright knee-jerk hostility to any opposing view-that
characterized the thought of Ted Dealey and his fellow believers on
the right. It was this brand of extremism that was discredited in
Dallas by the events of November 22nd.
Fear for their own safety gripped some of the
anti-communist crusaders after the shootings, possibly for good
reason. Larry Schmidt and Bernard Weissman left town, the dust of
The American Fact-Finding Committee settling to earth in their wake.
Gen. Walker grabbed a plane for Shreveport, La., where he hunkered
down for several days.
H. L. Hunt's daughter, Margaret Hunt Hill, later
wrote that the Dallas police advised her father to decamp for safer
precincts. "I do not get along well with being scared,"
the old man replied. "I am safe in my home."
Then the FBI called, "and warned him," Ms.
Hill reported, "that mobs were singling out all conservatives
who had been vocally anti-Kennedy, as Daddy had been in his radio
broadcasts."
H. L. departed Dallas "within hours," she
wrote.
The Hunt family went on high alert.
"We feared for anyone named Hunt. It was
traumatic for the family to wonder if somebody was going to seek us
out on revenge. In lock step, the media adhered to the story that
Daddy had created an atmosphere of hate around Dallas toward
Kennedy. It lasted two or three weeks. There were no attempts,
though we did receive some hostile phone calls and a lot of hate
mail, which naturally caused concern."
A more measured view of the assassination and its
impact on Dallas came from Stanley Marcus, whom I interviewed in
1973 for a tenth-anniversary assassination retrospective in
Newsweek.
Marcus was a marketing genius who transformed the
store his father and aunt founded in Dallas in 1907 into a high-end
retailing juggernaut. He was internationally respected as president
of Neiman-Marcus and a pre-eminent local arbiter of taste. More
important, his voice counted among members of the Citizens Council,
wealthy Anglo-Christian oligarchs who then controlled every aspect
of municipal affairs in Dallas.
I remember asking Marcus how a liberal Jew could
flourish so in mid-century Dallas.
"The fact that I've been successful
economically," he answered, gave him legitimacy in the Dallas
business community. "If I hadn't been successful economically
I'd have gotten the boot."
Marcus never shied from the fray. When it was
announced in early Oct. 1963 that Ambassador Adali Stevenson would
come to town on the 24th to address a UN Day celebration at the
Memorial Theater, Gen. Walker immediately booked the facility for a
"U.S. Day" rally on the 23rd, and even prevailed on Gov.
Connally to proclaim Oct. 23, 1963, as "U.S. Day" in
Texas.
Walker's event drew approximately 1,200 hard-right
loyalists, whom the general enflamed with his rhetoric.
The UN Day organizers, led by local businessman Jack
Goren, knew to expect trouble the next night after Walker
practically equated attendance at the Stevenson rally with being a
Communist. Worried about Stevenson's safety, Goren secured a promise
from Chief Curry of added police security on the 24th.
Stanley Marcus accompanied Ambassador Stevenson to
the meeting and introduced him to the large crowd.
"Dallas was festering," he remembered.
"There was tension, hate, and extreme bigotry."
The pickets who greeted Stevenson and Marcus outside
the hall were noisy yet civil for the most part. But inside, as
Stevenson began to speak, "there were hisses and grumbles and
finally we thought we should end it and get out of there." said
Marcus.
As they hurried to their car, placard-waving
protesters chanted "US, not the UN! US not the UN!" A
young student spat on the ambassador. When Stevenson broke from his
police cordon to politely ask one woman why she was screaming at
him, she hit him with her sign.
Once safely in the limo, Marcus recalled, Stevenson
"was white as a sheet. His eyes bulged out. He said he couldn't
understand this, not in America. He said he had been involved in
many situations where pickets or opponents were present, but that
this was different."
As the ambassador wiped away the spittle with his
handkerchief, he turned to Marcus and wondered, "Are these
people or are they animals?"
Mayor Earle Cabell and the Dallas City Council
apologized to Stevenson and made it a crime in the city to curse or
to shout obscenities during a public event. Congressman Alger
thought that was overdoing things. He later said the boy who spat at
the ambassador simply "lost his head because of his resentment
against the UN that threatens his freedom and his country's
freedom."
"I was physically afraid," Marcus told me.
"I never want to go through anything like that again."
Yet he didn't back down.
On New Year's Day, 1964, Marcus bought half a page
in the News and Times Herald for an open letter to the city, titled
"What's Right With Dallas?"
The letter began by praising the city. "We
think that our citizens are friendly and kind-hearted human beings
who extend genuinely warm welcomes to newcomers to our city,"
Marcus wrote.
Then Marcus shifted gears: "That doesn't mean
there aren't things about Dallas that couldn't be improved."
Turning to his real theme, he denounced political
absolutism. "The rejection of this spirit of
'absolutism,'" he wrote, "and the acceptance and
insistence by all citizens on toleration of differing points of view
seem to us to be essential for the future health of our
community."
And he took a dig at the News. "We believe our
newspapers have an important contribution to make in regard to this
matter and we hope they will lead the way by the presentation of
balanced points of view on controversial issues."
Stanley Marcus took a lot of pride in his letter.
"I think [it] contributed to sobering the community," he
told me. "I think it helped put things in perspective.
"The community as a whole appreciated the
stance on that. But the fact was that we gave them hell without
saying so. If we had said, 'What's Wrong With Dallas?' the bricks
would have fallen down on me. But by saying, 'What's Right With
Dallas?'-leading off with the positive and ending up with the
negative-we got the message across in a sugar-coated form."
The ad prompted a rash of credit account
cancellations at Neiman-Marcus, particularly from hard right
Republicans in the West Texas oil towns of Midland and Odessa.
"Obviously, some preacher out there was
dictating a letter because they were all the same," Marcus
recollected. "They were saying I was a radical and had
supported a man opposed to the free enterprise system. They were
going to close their accounts.
"I wrote back to answer each, thanking them for
writing, but telling them that I thought we had one thing in common
and that was that we all believed in the democratic way of life and
the free enterprise system. I expressed surprise that since we
believed in the democratic form of government that they would take
the role of the dictatorship countries by employing economic
sanction.
"I didn't get any answer from most of them, but
a couple wrote back and said they hadn't really looked at it that
way before, and were now sorry that they'd written. Among those who
closed their accounts, about 95 percent reopened them within three
months."
In all, Marcus believed the assassination was a
wake-up call that Dallas generally heeded. "I think the
assassination brought about a spirit of moderation that wasn't there
before," he said. "It had reached a point where when
[Dallas conservatives] started talking about government, you
wondered who the monster was that was about to devour you. The
federal government was about to devour you. They built it up as a
great big monster."
Bruce Alger, adamant as anyone on this point, would
lose his congressional seat to Earle Cabell in 1964.
"The assassination sobered the community,"
said Marcus. "There was a recognition of the state of
absolutism that had existed, and it gave way to more
moderation."
|
