Extremists in Dallas created volatile atmosphere before JFK’s 1963 visit

[struggle4progress]

34. I posted a factual article, from the Dallas Morning News, about the ugly rightwing environment

in 1963 Dallas. The article notes that some people at the time attributed some of that ugliness to the Dallas Morning News itself: back then, it had a far-right editorial line

The ugliness was real and pervasive

A month before the Kennedy assassination, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson gave a talk in Dallas, and he was repeated spat upon, as well as being smacked in the face by a sign on a post, by a woman who later claimed it was an "accident" -- the photos, however, show her smirking as she hit him and there's TV footage that shows her attempting to flee immediately afterwards

Here's a nice example of the climate there on 22 November 1963: it's a newspaper ad that appeared on the day of Kennedy's visit

And this was circulated in the streets the day before the visit:

It wasn't a handful of rightwing wackos: it was a whole city full of rightwing wackos

In 'Dallas 1963,' A City Of Rage, Seized By 'Civic Hysteria'
by NPR Staff
October 09, 2013 4:32 PM
... People were lured to Dallas, they were marching to Dallas. There was just this rising sense of anger and distrust toward Kennedy, toward perceived socialism, religion. People feared him as a Catholic ... For some reason out in the heartland in the middle of Texas, really powerful people coalesced around this notion that Kennedy was a traitor and in fact was guilty of treason. And these weren't just folks who were idly thinking these thoughts; they were acting on them and forming organizations and movements to essentially overthrow Kennedy ... These were the city fathers from every perspective, the leading preachers in town, the leading businessmen, the leading elected officials — the people who held the microphones, in a sense, on broadcast and in print media ...LBJ and Ladybird Johnson were attacked by a mob of Dallas' leading citizens during a campaign stop in downtown Dallas. In the lobbies of the two finest hotels in Dallas, it was a melee: people swinging signs at them, they were spitting at them, people were pulling hat pins out of their hats and trying to stab people ... Dallas had just simply become, in an almost initially unlikely way, the headquarters of the anti-Kennedy, 'Let's overthrow Kennedy' movement. He was perceived to be a traitor. He was a socialist, he was on bended knee to so many different entities — communism, socialism and even the pope ...

These are historical facts, whether or not you approve, and whether or not you think that mentioning them, or even remembering them, is somehow equivalent to pushing a conspiracy theory. For a long time, they were very good down in Dixieland at looking away



Should we continue to look away? Our problem today is that the Texas rightwing wacko coalitions still exist, still organize around the same issues, and still disrupting the American political body. The rightwing coalitions that brought Dallas to the point of rabid frothiness in 1963 took Bush II to the White House in 2000 and gave Ted Cruz the platform by which he recently took the US to the brink of default. That's not conspiracy theory:that's modern America; and it has a history that we forget at our own peril

I don't know who or what motivated Oswald; and I don't expect that after fifty years we'll ever have any more coherent account of the Kennedy assassination than the Warren Commission provided, despite all its warts. But Dallas in 1963 oozed and bubbled vile hatred. I can't prove that Oswald was motivated by that, so I haven't made that claim. It could be just a coincidence that the town, where LBJ and Lady Bird were attacked and spat upon during the 1960 campaign, and where Adlai Stevenson was attacked and spat upon in October 1963, was the same town where JFK was shot down. What matters to me, fifty years later, is to notice that the same enraged and dishonest rightwing movements that encouraged such activities then has continued to organize and continues to disrupt our democracy today