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.
Shel Hershorn/Hulton Archive — Getty Images
The Dallas skyline in the 1960s.
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."
Dallas — with no river, port or natural resources of its own — has always fashioned itself as a city with no reason for being, a city that triumphed against all odds, a city that validates the sheer power of individual will and the particular ideology that champions it above all else. "Dallas," the journalist Holland McCombs observed in Fortune in 1949, "doesn't owe a damn thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is ... because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way."
Those "men of Dallas" — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. The country musician Jimmy Dale Gilmore said it best in his song about the city: "Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye ... a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies."
For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate "Wanted for Treason" pamphlets before the president's arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed "Welcome Mr. Kennedy" advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It's no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.
The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme. (After all, there's a reason Carol Burnett pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous "Big D" routine the two performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. "What are ya," she screams, pulling the trigger, "some kinda nut?!")
In the years before the second wave of the women's movement, many of these women, affluent but frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow and Highland Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation they were otherwise denied. With time and money at their disposal, they would outdo their husbands, one another and even themselves.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, it was a well-heeled mob of Junior League women who heckled and spat on Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson outside the storied Adolphus Hotel downtown (a scandal that actually helped Johnson politically by showing the distance between the Texas senator and his more ardent constituents).
In October 1963, just weeks before the president's visit, it was the wife of a downtown insurance executive, not a derelict, who struck Adlai E. Stevenson, then the United Nations ambassador, over the head with a picket sign.
And in the annals of my own family history, it was my charming grandmother, not some distant relation without a Neiman Marcus charge card, who nevertheless saw fit to found the "National Congress for Educational Excellence," an organization that crusaded against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks and the distribution of literature on homosexuality in Dallas public schools.
James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.
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