Wrapped in the Flag (24 page)

Around 12:30 the next afternoon, while I crossed Main Street, John Kennedy’s motorcade turned right onto Houston and left on Elm toward the Triple Underpass. Five minutes away at the Dallas Trade Mart, 2,500 dignitaries waited to lunch with the president.

Unknown to me, at that moment, Nellie Connally, the wife of Texas governor John Connally, turned toward Kennedy and said, “You certainly can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
¹⁹
A second later, a bullet hit its target. Another shot and the thirty-fifth president of the United States was dead.

While hell broke out just a few blocks away in Dealey Plaza, my friend and I were maneuvering through the crowd toward our car. We had decided that it was too congested downtown to either eat or shop; to compensate, we headed to a favorite burger joint, Kip’s on Mockingbird Lane, home of the Big Boy. I had never tasted a Big Boy and had no idea where Mockingbird Lane was, but my friend was undeterred. “I’ll get us there,” he said. “You find music on the radio.”

“Easy,” I laughed as I tuned the dial to 1190 KLIF, the popular Top 40 station.

Instead of music, however, I heard about “the dastardly deed done” and “a priest summoned to Parkland Hospital.”
²⁰
Then it was “no official word that the President is in critical condition at this time,” followed by “Father Huber has administered the last rites to the President.”

Fifteen minutes later, at 1:45 p.m.: “The president is dead, ladies and gentlemen. The president is dead.”

In the recaps that followed, I could only absorb a smattering of the reports: “Everyone fully exposed . . . three bursts from a rifle . . . wild pandemonium . . . shots rang out at Elm and Houston . . . priest summoned . . . blood rushed to Parkland . . . orderly crowd except for one person who pumped bullets into the president . . . manhunt across Dallas . . . Kennedy is dead.”

“I don’t understand. Who did this?” I asked.

“Everyone hated him,” my friend said.

“Did you?” I asked.

“No. You?”

“My parents hate him with a purple passion,” I said. “But I don’t.”

“I’m surprised. I thought you were a Bircher.”

“My father’s the Bircher,” I said. “I don’t know what I am.”

By the time we got back to campus, I needed aspirin more than food.
Then, when I phoned home and my father terrified me with the idea that Birchers could be implicated in this disaster, I reconsidered my choice of drink. “Bourbon, that’s what I really need,” I thought.

Having no booze, however, I had to settle for a Coke and a candy bar, the two major food groups available in the rec-room vending machines. I arranged my treats and myself on one of the sofas and picked up that day’s
Dallas Morning News
.

No one else was in the room. In fact, the whole dorm was as quiet as a tomb. I imagined that everyone was as shocked as I was; the unthinkable had happened. Whether you liked Kennedy or not, he was dead, and Dallas had a big black mark next to its name.

The
News
, the archconservative Dallas daily, had a reputation for savaging President Kennedy, a reputation enhanced when Ted Dealey, the paper’s publisher, attacked the President during a luncheon at the White House. Dealey said, “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government. . . . You and your Administration are weak sisters.” The country needed “a man on horseback,” but “many people in Texas think you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”
²¹

This episode enshrined Dealey as a hero across the right-wing world, and his newspaper claimed a high spot in the pantheon of anti-Kennedy media. William Manchester wrote, “As the most venerable voice in Dallas, the
News
, under Dealey’s leadership, had made radical extremism reputable.”
²²

Kennedy recognized the growing power of the Far Right. He realized the threat it posed to his presidency and the country at large. Two years before his death, Kennedy pushed back against the conspiracy-minded, saying that they “call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. . . . They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, socialism with communism.”
²³

The speech did nothing to quiet Kennedy’s critics; it may have inflamed them even more. In Dallas, where the right wing ruled, the anti-Kennedy drumbeat increased.
²⁴
Given this, I was not surprised to see a big anti-Kennedy ad in the paper that day, but, given the terrible events, the thick, black border seemed to resemble a funeral announcement more than a political ad.

An ominous tone marked the content: twelve WHYs marched down the page followed by accusations about the policies of President Kennedy and his administration, including: “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?” and “Why is Latin America turning either anti-American or Communistic, or both, despite increased U.S. foreign aid,
State Department policy, and your own Ivy-Tower [
sic
] pronouncements?”
²⁵

This language sounded so JBS that I was grateful when someone I’d never heard of, a Bernard Weissman, was listed as the ad sponsor. A “non-partisan group of citizens who wish truth”—the American Fact-Finding Committee—had placed the thing in the paper. “No one can pin this on the Birchers,” I told myself with relief.

As much as that terrible Friday devastated the nation, it rocked Dallas to its core. Even a newcomer like me could feel the usual rah-rah-rahs of the place give way to hand-wringing and questioning. People worried that the nastiness of Dallas politics had somehow, however unintentionally, contributed to Kennedy’s death.
²⁶

When Lee Harvey Oswald was identified as a Communist, Dallas caught a break.
²⁷
Civic leaders could place all blame squarely on that lone madman with Soviet ties. But when live television recorded Jack Ruby gunning down Oswald in the basement of the police station, the city suffered another black eye. The sheriff tried to defuse all criticism when he said, “If somebody wants to commit a cold-blooded murder and you don’t know he intends to do it, it is almost impossible to stop it.”
²⁸

In early December, Robert Welch offered his own interpretation of Kennedy’s killing. “The assassination of the President was not only to have been blamed in a general way on the spirit of hatred supposedly created by the so-called ‘right wing extremists’ . . . the wholesale arrests of anti-Communists was to have been carried out just as rapidly as possible,” he wrote.
²⁹

The formal inquiry into the assassination was set in motion five days after the tragedy when President Johnson named Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the investigation. Every detail of the events before, during, and after November 22 was studied. The Warren Commission interviewed 552 witnesses, studied 3,100 exhibits, and published 888 pages of findings. Supporting documentation filled another 26 volumes.
³⁰

Among the items the commission studied was the infamous “Wanted for Treason” poster that had appeared all over Dallas; the same one I’d picked up on November 22 and identified as something my father might have written. The Warren Commission found the man who created the handbill, Robert Surrey, a right-wing activist and associate of Major-General Edwin Walker, who still lived in Dallas.
³¹

Once again, the General—darling of the Dallas media, hero of the John Birch Society, and my father’s friend—was in the news. Thank God I’d never
gotten around to calling him.

The inflammatory handbill, with its links to General Walker and, by extension, to the John Birch Society, did not faze my father. He simply refused to acknowledge that there was such a thing at all. When I mentioned it, I was told to “stop telling tall tales.”

In 1964, my mother sent me an oversized booklet titled
The Assassination Story
, a compilation of articles published in the
Dallas Morning News
and
Dallas Times Herald
between November 15 and December 11, 1963. It was the work of R. A. Surrey and his American Eagle Publishing Company, and I learned later that this was the same Surrey who’d printed the infamous “Wanted for Treason” handbill. No surprise,
The Assassination Story
did not include a picture of or any reference to the handbill.

The Warren Commission also took an interest in the full-page “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” ad in the
Dallas Morning News
. After a lot of clarifications, misstatements, and restatements, Bernard Weissman finally admitted that the cash for the ad had been given to him by Joe Grinnan, a coordinator for the John Birch Society. Weissman explained the Birch connection this way: “To get anywhere in Dallas . . . you had to cotton to the John Birch Society because they were a pretty strong group, and still are.”
³²

My father refused to discuss the Warren Commission, dismissing the entire investigation as another diversion in the Communist plan to take over America. When I asked him about the Weissman ad, he snapped, “The Communists killed Kennedy. End of story. Do not mention this again.”

The Republicans are more and more taking their ideas from the reckless radicals of the far right and echoing the efforts of those extreme agitators to breed fear and suspicion in our society
.

—J
OHN
M. B
AILEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE
D
EMOCRATIC
N
ATIONAL
C
OMMITTEE,
1962
¹

Our opinion is that Robert Welch is damaging the cause of anti-communism. By the extravagance of his remarks he repels, rather than attracts, a great following.”

—W
ILLIAM
F. B
UCKLEY
J
R
., 1962
²

We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner
.

—S
ENATOR
B
ARRY
G
OLDWATER,
1962
³

Two days after President Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, President Lyndon Johnson, who’d been sworn into office ninety-nine minutes after John Kennedy died, addressed a joint session of Congress. In his speech, he pushed for passage of the civil rights legislation Kennedy had championed. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more,” Johnson said. “It is time now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law. I urge you again . . . to enact a civil rights law . . . to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.”
⁴

I knew that my parents, their Birch friends, and a lot of white Southerners would take President Johnson’s endorsement of civil rights legislation as a personal threat. Robert Welch had already painted a nightmare scenario of Communist-inspired race riots, insurrection, and, ultimately, civil war. I could imagine my parents thinking they’d have to fight against the federal government, the Communists, and a mob of African Americans.

Before I left Dallas for Christmas vacation, I promised myself that I’d
avoid any arguments with my parents. Luckily, Jay R. would be home, too; he was so much better at keeping Mother and Dad happy. “I’ll say what you say and do what you do,” I told him.

“That’ll be the day,” he said.

“I’ll try. You’ll see.”

My promises didn’t come to much. As usual, avoiding a fight with my mother or my father was nearly impossible. By Christmas Day, I was tired, depressed, and more than ready to go back to Dallas, but I faced another two weeks in Chicago.

The morning after Epiphany—the day the Wise Men found the Christ child—Mother ordered me to put away our Christmas things. “Get Mary and Larry to help you, and save the tinsel.”

My sister Janet had already been given her chores, and Jay R., as usual, had disappeared in time to miss all the fun. So, I was “on deck,” as my mother liked to say.

I didn’t point out the obvious: saving tinsel was a colossal waste of time. I just shut up and showed the little kids how to remove each strand from the tree and drape it over cardboard. “We’re saving it,” I told them. They rolled their eyes. While they were working, I brought down storage boxes from the attic.

When I returned, I found my brother Larry with a book, my sister Mary with a new toy, and a huge knot of silver on the floor. “What happened in here?” I asked. Larry shrugged and pointed to Mary. Mary pointed back.

“This is going to be a really long day,” I thought. I grabbed the mess and marched off to the garbage can.

“Save that,” Mother called.

“How?”

Mother didn’t answer. She turned back to doing whatever she was doing. In a few seconds, I heard the tapping of her pen and humming. Mom couldn’t sing a note and her humming was way off-key, but I recognized her rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”