Seconds before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 47 years ago in Dallas, Nellie Connally, wife of Texas Gov. John Connally, turned and said to him, "Mr. President, you certainly cannot say that Dallas does not love you."
Those were the last words JFK heard before he was shot and killed.
The reception at Love Field and along the motorcade route was indeed quite positive that day, as the photo at right suggests and all media reports confirmed.
Even though Dallas was one of the regional capitals of the far-right, with lots of active Birchers backed by billionaire oilmen who hated paying taxes and what little environmental regulation there was back then.
The Birchers welcomed JFK to Dallas with a full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News and thousands of "wanted for treason" flyers.
Details, below.
That morning, JFK had seen the "Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President" ad, with its sneering Bircher questions like "WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the "Spirit of Moscow"?, and commented to his wife, "We're really in nut country now."
He presumably did not see the "treason" flyer, which was even worse.
The flyer was printed and distributed by Birchers connected to retired Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, a prominent Dallas Bircher.
Aside from the usual anti-communist paranoia, the flyer claimed that Kennedy committed treason because he has "consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office, upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings" and "has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce."
Back then, the far-right was also working in lockstep with the 1960s version of the Religious Right (Billy James Hargis, the original Bob Jones, etc.), like now mostly fundamentalist Southerners.
And the far-right was financially subsidized by billionaires like H.L. Hunt and his sons, of Dallas.
Walker got some of those subsidies, which he used to run a losing race for governor and promote the John Birch Society.
Here's some of what Walker said when he roused the racist rabble against the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962:
I call for a national protest against the conspiracy from within. Rally to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Federal troops. This today is a disgrace to the nation in "dire peril," a disgrace beyond the capacity of anyone except its enemies. This is the conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation.
For that, Walker earned federal sedition and insurrection charges that were dismissed by a presumably all-white grand jury.
Dallas was also the site, in 1961, of the National Indignation Convention, which Rick Perlstein relates to the tea partiers of today:
Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach (Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl) Warren. I'm for hanging him!"
Today, the tea-partying political descendants of early-'60s Birchers are spinning similar conspiracy theories and using practically the same extreme language about a young, non-WASP Democratic President, and played an important role in electing scores of like-minded neo-Birchers to office earlier this month.
On the occasion of an Obama trip to Texas this year, Texas Observer Editor Bob Moser wrote about the obvious connections between the Birchers of the early 1960s and the tea partiers of today:
The denizens of Texas nut country did not kill Kennedy that day. But many celebrated openly and joyously after Lee Harvey Oswald did. Birchers and Klansmen gloated. Elementary-school students in the Dallas 'burbs broke into spontaneous applause. In Amarillo, a reporter witnessed jubilation in the streets, with men whooping and tossing their hats in the air and one woman crying out, "Hey, great, JFK's croaked!"
Fast-forward 46 years and nine months. To a right-wing Texas that can once again be aptly described as "nut country." To another presidential visit, slated for Aug. 9. To another time when a vocal minority of Texans are expressing open, slanderous and rhetorically violent hostility toward a president whose greatest crime is not being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
snip
Back then, the right-wing extremists were backed by ultraconservative newspaper publishers, oilmen and preachers. Nowadays, the White Right's bigotry is openly shared and encouraged by the state's highest official, Gov. Rick Perry. Another notable difference: In the Texas of today, most of the state's leading Democrats are too puny and poll-driven to have their president's back.
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On July 31, the neo-Birchers rallied outside the state Capitol, cheering three hours' worth of lightly updated versions of precisely the same charges being flung in 1963. Just one example: The Kennedy "treason" flyers accused him of "Betraying the Constitution," abetting communism, and appointing "Anti-Christians to Federal Office." At the Tea Party rally, speaker L. Scott Smith of Corpus Christi declared that Obama's "goal is to do whatever he can to reinvent the United States of America into the aggressively, militantly, secular socialist and post-Christian state he wants it to be. This means ... deconstructing the Constitution however he pleases."
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That (the Secret Service would keep Obama "safe and sealed off from our wingnuts") won't change the fact that the sense of shame every decent Texan felt in late 1963 -- from the knowledge that plenty of folks in this state would have relished killing the president if they'd had the guts to do it -- should be felt afresh in 2010. And it won't change the fact that those who stay silent, in the face of this latest outbreak of un-American bigotry, are every bit as culpable as Perry and the Tea Partiers.
A new generation of white Texans has inherited the violent rhetoric, belief in absurd conspiracies, hatred of the other, and inchoate rage of the 1963 Dallas Birchers, with only somewhat less emphasis on the evils of communism and integration.
And, it's not just happening in Texas.