JFK in the City of Hate: How Dallas earned its ugly label before the assassination
Fagin points to three incidents — all of which took place in Dallas — that preceded Kennedy’s assassination and helped fuel the City of Hate label. All stemmed from Dallas’s modest but powerful concentration of right-wing extremists who vilified Democrats as soft on communism and found a political home in one of Texas’s most conservative and wealthy cities.
The first took place on Nov. 4, 1960, four days before the election that put Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House.
On his last major campaign swing through his home state of Texas, Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, was due to give a speech at a downtown Dallas hotel. Republicans in town were also staging a major event that day, with hundreds converging outside the hotel “to show the Senate majority leader was not welcome,” Fagin said.
Johnson was given the option of taking a back entrance to reach the speaking venue across the street, but chose instead to walk through the crowd, Lady Bird at his side. Photographs circulated nationwide showed screaming, hostile protesters barricading the street to block the Johnsons from crossing. One grabbed Lady Bird’s gloves and tossed them in the gutter.
“They were a small group of demonstrators so extreme in their actions that they helped to characterize Dallas,” Fagin said.
The second incident to mar Dallas’s reputation took place at a White House luncheon hosted by Kennedy, now the president, for a group of Texas newspaper publishers in October 1961. At the table was Ted Dealey, then the publisher of the Dallas Morning News and the son of George Bannerman Dealey, for whom Dealey Plaza is named.
During the lunch, Dealey told Kennedy “that the country needs a man on horseback, and Kennedy is riding around on Caroline’s tricycle,” Fagin said. It was not so much the political criticism that irked Kennedy but rather the involvement of his 3-year-old daughter.
After Dealey’s confrontation with Kennedy, Jim Chambers, then the publisher of the competing Dallas Times Herald, told the president that Dealey didn’t represent all of Dallas and apologized on behalf of the city, Fagin said.
The final incident coincided with Adlai Stevenson’s visit to town in October 1963. Stevenson, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, came to Dallas to give a speech, and ultraconservative demonstrators infiltrated the crowd. One man used a bullhorn to chastise Stevenson and disrupt the speech’s broadcast.
Upon leaving the auditorium, Stevenson came upon roughly 100 demonstrators behind a barricade, including one particularly agitated woman. As Stevenson walked over to talk to her, a man nearby spit on him, and the woman whacked him on the head with her sign.
Stevenson cautioned Kennedy about the trip he would be taking to Dallas one month later, Fagin said.
Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said that after Kennedy’s assassination, history was often read in reverse by those who said “it makes sense that Kennedy was killed there.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/22/jfk-in-the-city-of-hate-how-dallas-earned-its-ugly-label-before-the-assassination/?utm_term=.df644d01db48
