Before the Storm (48 page)

Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was spooked. He had received a letter on November 19 from a Dallas woman: “Don't let the President come down here. I'm worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.” Salinger answered the letter personally: “I appreciate your concern for the president, but it would be a sad day for this country if there were any city in the United States he could not visit without fear of violence. I am confident the people of Dallas will greet him warmly.” Richard Nixon, on a short visit to Dallas on November 21 for a board meeting at Pepsi-Cola, one of the legal clients that was making him, for the first time in his life, comfortably rich, urged “a courteous reception” for Kennedy.

It was too late for that. Extremists were distributing in the street a “WANTED FOR TREASON” handbill produced by General Walker's Dallas business partner, with face-forward and profile “mug shots” of the President. The
Dallas Morning News
editorialized: “If the speech is about boating you will be among the warmest of admirers. If it is about Cuber [sic], civil rights, taxes, or Vietnam, there will sure as shootin' be some who heave to and let go with a broadside of grapeshot in the presidential rigging.” A full-page ad was set in type for the next morning's
News,
but only after consultation with libel lawyers:

The newspaper hit the streets as H. L. Hunt, whose son had helped bankroll the ad, took to the radio in full-throated bray to predict that Kennedy's next move after passing the civil rights bill would be revoking the right to bear arms. “In dictatorships,” he said, “no firearms are permitted, because they would then have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.” The
Morning News
was joined on the newsstand by the second installment in a series by Teddy White in
Life
that intimated that the civil rights movement was heading toward racial Armageddon: Adam Clayton Powell was calling for “a Birmingham explosion in New York City” this fall; a “Communist effort” was said to be attempting to penetrate Martin Luther King's circles; civil rights leaders feared they would be labeled as “a front for the white man” unless peaceful marches were converted “into a violent
putsch
on government offices.” Some black protesters were calling for cash reparations for slavery, he wrote. “There is the warning that, if such sin-gold is not paid by white Americans to black Americans, the ‘power structure' is inviting ‘social chaos.'”

The President planned to address the mounting sense of national unease that afternoon in his speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. “In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations,” the text ran,

But the first morning stop was Fort Worth, a pleasing sojourn in Democratic territory. The President warned that “without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.” He repaired to his eighth-floor suite and relaxed with hapless vice president Johnson—who was spending manic hours working to vouchsafe a pleasant reception for his boss in Johnson's home state. Kennedy
was comfortable; the reception so far was fine. “We're going to carry two states next year if we don't carry any others: Massachusetts and Texas,” Kennedy, cheered, told Johnson in a rare moment of intimacy with the man who most often had been shunted ruthlessly into the background in the previous three years. Then they left for Dallas. And before the afternoon was through, the bottom had dropped out of the United States of America.

A
t the offices of the National Draft Goldwater Committee off Farragut Square in Washington, the new publicist was taking his lunch. Lee Edwards had been working his way up conservative movement ranks since signing on as press assistant for Maryland senator John Marshall Butler in 1959: the first editor of YAF's
New Guard;
speechwriter for the July 4 rally. Now he had landed the job of a lifetime. November 22 was his first day.

The secretaries started answering the phones to death threats.
“You sons of bitches, you killed him!”
—SLAM! “You'll get
yours.”
—SLAM!

They looked up: a mob was banging on the door.
“Murderers! Murderers!”
They shut the office down—locked the doors, turned off all the lights—and huddled in a back room to take in the broadcasts, nervously. Lee Harvey Oswald: they wracked their brains to remember if they had seen his name before, at some meeting, on one of their mailing lists.

Denison Kitchel and Tony Smith wound up a lunch at the D.C. Sheraton-Carlton with two columnists. The four hopped into a taxi. They heard about the shooting over the radio. It was a few stunned blocks before Tony Smith broke the silence. “My God, one of those Birchers did it.”

There was no radio in the cab Richard Nixon found after his flight back east from Dallas. A man leaned into the car window at a stoplight on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge and said that Kennedy had been shot. Nixon chose to write it off as a prank. When he got home his doorman rushed out to greet him with tears streaming down his cheeks. Nixon called J. Edgar Hoover. No small talk: “What happened, was it one of the right-wing nuts?”

Much of the country had already decided it was. The Voice of America's bulletin announcing the shooting had described Dallas as “the center of the extreme right wing.” Clips of Adlai Stevenson being jabbed with anti-United Nations picket signs a month earlier were shown again and again on TV. Under the headline “DALLAS, LONG A RADICAL'S HAVEN,” the
Herald Tribune
pointed
out, “Texas is one of the few states that has a Senator ranking with Arizona's Barry Goldwater in conservatism”—that was John Tower, who, in the wake of the assassination, had to put up his family in a hotel because of the threats against them. Senator Maurine Neuberger of Oregon fixed her gaze at the television cameras and pinned the responsibility on H. L. Hunt. Walter Cronkite, on the air nonstop, was handed a slip of paper amid the chaos of CBS's studios and read aloud that Goldwater's reaction to the news while hustling to a political function had been a curt “No comment.” (Cronkite skirted libel: Goldwater, in Muncie for the funeral of his mother-in-law, had given no such interview.) A deranged gunman pumped two shots through the window of a John Birch Society office in Phoenix, crying “You killed my man!” In man-in-the-street interviews, a lawyer told the
New York Times,
“We have allowed certain factions to work up such a furor in the South with fanatic criticism of the office of President that a demented person can feel confident that such atrocious action is justifiable,” and a Russian immigrant said, “I'm angry at these groups who call themselves Americans and don't know the meaning—the Birchers, General Walker. Is this what they wanted?”

Before long the news of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union, was on the street. But the suspicion that the right was somehow to blame did not go away. In Kentucky the YAF chair resigned. “I am now satisfied that the climate of political degeneracy and moral hysteria masquerading as ‘true Americanism,' ” he said, “bears substantial culpability for the murder of the President of the United States.” Police had arrested a Communist; the public blamed conservatives. “When right wing racist fanatics are told over and over again that the President is a traitor, a Red, a ‘nigger-lover,' ” columnist Max Lerner wrote, “that he has traduced the Constitution and is handing America over to a mongrelized world-state, there are bound to be some fanatics dull-witted enough to follow the logic of the indictment all the way and rid America of the man who is betraying it.” As Bishop James A. Pike ruefully said, right-wingers, after all, “have consistently supplied the fuel which would fire up such an assassin.”

Partly the irrationality was rooted in fear; the thought that the killer was an agent of the Communist conspiracy was almost too awful to contemplate. (Desperate to close off such suspicions, which he thought might pin him to a commitment to retaliate against the Soviet Union, Lyndon Johnson spent much of his first weeks in office maneuvering hurriedly to close the books on the case by putting together a commission of inquiry led by Chief Justice Warren.) When the news of Oswald's arrest and Communist ties arrived, the public seemed almost willfully to forget the lessons of eighteen years—that Communism
was a devious, unitary global conspiracy that would stop at nothing to accomplish its aims—and gladly chose another, less threatening scapegoat. Against the shocks of the recent past—the civil rights uprising, the nuclear close calls—Americans had inoculated themselves by repeating ever more fervidly that we were a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe. The assassination was experienced as a sign that somehow America had let herself become the opposite. A word was repeated again and again, on the streets, before the television cameras, in the newspapers:
hate.
Americans read an indictment on themselves:
hate
killed Kennedy, our own hate—hate that might consume us in violence, hate rife on both sides of the ideological spectrum, hate bred precisely by the act of veering too close to the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Extremism had killed Kennedy.

A typical expression of the sentiment can be seen in a letter the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, wrote to his flock: “I know that very often each of us did not just disagree, we poured forth our vituperation. The accumulation of this hatred expressed itself in the bullet that killed John Kennedy. I think we know this, and I think it makes us realize just how dreadful we people can be.” A young journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote a friend, “The savage nuts have destroyed the great myth of American decency.” Senator Frank Church's Intelligence Committee hearings blamed a “conspiratorial atmosphere of violence” for the assassination. Chief Justice Warren—a prominent target of right-wing agitation—said in a service in the Capitol Rotunda that we might never know exactly why Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy, “but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence, such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for such fanaticism!”

With the far left but a feeble remnant in 1963, the right received the brunt of the outrage; they were the fanatics closest to hand. The fallout would do much to shape the politics of 1964.

 

The new president was a perfect match for a traumatized nation. Consensus was Lyndon Johnson's religion.

He was a liberal—a liberal in an older, Southern sense of the word: liberalism as
liberality,
as the large-souled dispensing of generosities. Only twenty-seven when he became Texas administrator for the National Youth Administration, a subsidiary of Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, he had been shaped by watching dirt-poor districts bloom under the touch of the New Deal. His forte became cultivating relationships with businessmen who could help broker the WPA's largesse. He saw nothing in liberalism
that need conflict with businessmen of goodwill, which was why, when he became a congressman in 1937, one liberal tenet he could never embrace was ending the oil depletion allowance. It enriched his district and gave him a hand with the power brokers; what was the harm in that? With business help, his district got the largest rural electrical cooperative in the country (Washington remitted $14 million in four years for the dams), four new hospitals, an air base, a highway. Lyndon Johnson, unlike the young department store owner in Arizona, saw no reason to resent the Southwest's special relationship with the federal government.

Johnson had lost a bid for the Senate in 1941 because of his loyalty to the New Deal. It did nothing to dull his ardor. In his mind, liberals were beaten not by an opposing ideology but by recalcitrant fat cats conspiring against the public interest—which interest was liberalism, liberality, the haves sharing with the have-nots and emerging better-off for doing so. By the time Johnson acceded to the Senate in 1948, the Employment Act of 1946 had formalized the federal government's responsibility to do what Johnson had tried to do in his congressional district: guarantee prosperity for all by rising the tide to lift all boats. His own ideology—in its substance as much as in its refusal to recognize itself
as
an ideology—was now the nation's. The
Dallas Morning News
marveled at this new species, the consensus politician: “Business tycoons, leftwing laborites, corporation lawyers, New Dealers, anti—New Dealers, etc.”—all, somehow, supported Lyndon Johnson. As Johnson somehow supported all of them.