For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.
It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.
But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.”
What a horrible article! Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist whose politics were at odds with most of the people of Dallas. Maybe instead of using the JFK anniversary to bash Texans, the New York Times should use it as an opportunity to look into the dangers of communist ideology.
Bruce you beat me to it. This is just part of the left’s attempt to coverup the very inconvenient fact that the man they have tried to turn into a martyr for liberalism was in fact killed by a radical leftist. That’s why so many of the kooky conspiracy theories that people spout off about originated among liberals who just refuse to believe the evidence. To them it will always be some kind of right wing conspiracy.
And both of you guys beat me to it. It’s one of the weird perversions of history that a tax-cutting anti-communist who went slow on civil rights is now an icon for so-called “progressive liberalism.”
Well, partly because he was targeted as such by the radical right. Dallas was awash in violently anti-Kennedy rhetoric before the assassination. For example, there was a flyer that had a picture of Kennedy in a big black border (like a death notice) that said “WANTED FOR TREASON” which was posted all over Dallas the day before the visit. In fact, Kennedy had been warned not to go to Dallas because anti-Kennedy feeling was running so high among the right wing. In the preceeding month, administration represenatives had been spat on and hit with pickets in Dallas. It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise for the Kennedy party to see the warm welcome that they received. This is why Nellie Connelly said, moments before the assassination “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
The pre-visit anti-Kennedy rhetoric was one of the things that Jack Ruby became obsessed with. He had seen a “wanted for treason” flyer the day before the assassination and had gotten extremely worked up about it, considering it beyond the bounds of acceptable political discourse. When Kennedy was killed, he wanted to do something to show that Dallas did not hate Kennedy and wasn’t responsible for his death.
How silly this editorial is. In addition to the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a far-leftist, Mcauley also ignores or is ignorant of the fact that Oswald himself attempted to assassinate Major General Edwin Walker, considered by many to be ultra conservative. That President Kennedy–who, along with all the Kennedys considered the Johnsons as ill-bred country bumpkins–considered Dallas “nut country” reveals at least as much about his own east coast snobbery and arrogance as it does about the City of Dallas at the time.
Rather than ignoring the fact that the assassination occurred in Dallas, the leaders of the city have over the years actually wallowed in the guilt thrown at the city by other more enlightened places such as Washington DC, the city that killed two presidents (Lincoln and Garfield); and Buffalo (McKinley). Forget they did not. They could have razed the Texas School Book Depository; they could have painted over the X in the street where Kennedy was shot; instead they embraced the fact and turned the place where Oswald was perched into a museum.
It is awfully easy to say that Dallas has never come to terms with its role in the death of JFK without saying exactly what would cause the city to do so. It’s like complaining about the lack of communication: I usually complain about the lack of communication when I am the one outside the loop.
The current mayor has simply said that Dallas has groveled enough. Now it’s time to move on. Mr. Mcauley should take his advice.
I was reading the article thinking this is the sort of article that some goofy friend on facebook would link to and not a serious anglican scholar. But I notice several readers have beat me to punch in highlighting the weakness of the article although it’s source should have clued me into expecting so little.
The most interesting thing is how the left has made Kennedy into a leftist. If he were living today the Democrat party would consider him to the right of Ronald Reagan (which he was). Huge tax cuts. Murder/assination of Diem. “Bear any burden, pay any price”. “Ask not what your counrty can do for you…” Douglas Brinkley says, and I agree, that had Kennedy lived, Viet Nam might (and that’s a BIG “might”) not have gotten out of hand and the Great Society, Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act would never have happened, or at least not for many more years. So how is Kennedy a leftist?
Well, the right-wing in Dallas (and eleswhere) certainly thought he was a leftist. Here is the text of the “wanted for treason” flyer:
[blockquote] This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold). He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations. He is betraying our friends (Kuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
He has been WRONG on innumberable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations, Berlin wall, Missle removal, Cuba, Wheat deals, Test ban treaty, etc.)
He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office: Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce.) [/blockquote]
Interesting that at least four of these items are almost verbatim what is said by the right-wing about Obama. Does anyone here think Obama is not a leftist? Or would it take 50 years to have a different persepective?
#8 Those people were nuts. I grew up in Texas and that was not the norm. Those were people who thought Nixon was too liberal. They wanted Goldwater, but he would have been too liberal for them. You can’t reason with crazy people. We were thrilled that he was coming to Houston. When he was killed someone at my school called him a N—- lover and he was cold cocked in the hallway. I saw that with my own eyes. After the Cuban crisis most people really liked him. The main people that didn’t like him didn’t like him because he was Catholic and because he favored greater civil rights. But they simply weren’t the norm. Keep in mind that Texas has always been wide open economically and that is the basis of most racism. Texas desegregated very easily and quietly. People on the far right AND the far left are generally just semi-crazy people. Getting them to be reasonable is like teaching a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and wastes your time!
It’s fine to cite the opinions of the crazy fringe in Dallas in 1963, but that doesn’t change the fact that the assassin was a Communist, not a Bircher or a KKK type. All rational evidence indicates that Oswald shot Kennedy because Kennedy was trying to eliminate Castro.
[blockquote] Those people were nuts… Those were people who thought Nixon was too liberal. They wanted Goldwater, but he would have been too liberal for them. You can’t reason with crazy people.[/blockquote]
OK so they were Tea Party people. But yeah, it was a commie that shot Kennedy.
Of course. But the fact is that there was a loud and vocal group in Dallas that violently hated Kennedy and Kennedy was killed in Dallas and putting those two things together resulted in a lot of shame for Dallas. It was to reduce that shame that Ruby shot Oswald.
Of course, the irony is that killing Oswald meant that he never went to trial and, as a result, a huge segment of the US population has come to seriously doubt that Oswald was solely, or even partly, responsible for Kennedy’s murder. So Oswald essentially got away with it, thanks to Ruby. Marina Oswald, who provided so much of the damning evidence against Oswald, including acknowledging that she was the one who took the picture of him with the rifle, and that he told her he had tried to assassinate (John Bircher) General Walker, has now been surrounded by conspiracy nuts for so long that she says that she now believes that Oswald “didn’t kill anybody” (including Officer Tippit).
#11 Please read the last two sentences of my prior post.
#12, “putting those two things together” was mostly done by the national news media, which beat the drum of “right wing hate” without regard to Oswald’s clear communist background.
#11, huge numbers of people with “Tea Party” leanings are not nuts, as you describe them. They prefer the constitutional system we’ve had for a couple of centuries to what is now replacing it.
Re #14
You are probably right. But huge numbers of Tea Party types ARE nuts. Birtherism, seccession, 2nd amendment solutions to the Obama Administration etc. Just take a gander over at http://www.FreeRepublic.com sometime if you wanna see right wing craziness.
All of which said, the lefties have their loons too. And back to the point at hand, it was a lefty who shot Kennedy.
#15, you’re right, there are nuts out there, and I could point to a number of lefty sites where the denizens are just as nuts, or often worse, than the right wing crazies. Just remember the insanities all over the web when Bush was President, and some of that was incredibly vicious. But I hate to equate the majority of left-leaning voters with their crazies, and don’t like to see the Tea Party and other conservatives treated as all being nuts, either.
“Putting those two things together” was done by people in Dallas and done immediately after the assassination without the help of the media. People in Dallas were extremely aware of the virulent anti-Kennedy rhetoric, which was widespread in print and on the radio. The fact that Kennedy had been warned not to go to Dallas was being mentioned in the news the day *before* the assassination. Then he ends up dead. Of course people put the two things together.
This was irrational, of course, since it wasn’t the fault of “Dallas” and it wouldn’t have been the fault of Dallas even if he’d been killed by a right-winger. But many Dallas-ites felt that their city was under a cloud of shame because of the assassination. And the fact that Oswald was a Communist was not known to the general public until much later. Ruby felt that he was somehow restoring the honor of Dallas by killing Oswald – showing that “Dallas” repudiated the murder of Kennedy. Of course it only fueled 50 years of conspiracy insanity and was an enormous blot on the reputation of the Dallas police which, up until that moment, had been performing flawlessly.