60 years after JFK’s killing, some urge Dallas to embrace ‘the shadow’ of its darkest day
Some critics are posing the question: Why is Dallas so focused on remembering the death of John F. Kennedy but not his life?
DALLAS — On the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, civic leader Gail Thomas surprised a public symposium convened to discuss the matter by saying: “We have not wanted to own the shadow of the assassination. In a sense, we’ve been a city without a shadow. There was that sense that the heaviness was not acceptable. We had to build and soar and achieve and be a powerful city.”
A close friend had advised Thomas, “Don’t talk about the darkness. Don’t talk about the shame.” But that, she said, “has been our problem. We must own the shadow of the assassination. In psychology, the shadow is what carries the soul of the place.”
In the grim aftermath of the city’s darkest day, Dallas became a dateline of infamy. Then-Mayor J. Erik Jonsson spearheaded a tsunami of civic development, leading to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, an I.M. Pei-designed City Hall and the ambitious Goals for Dallas. In the 60 years since, the city has changed radically, moving from red to blue politically and becoming far more culturally diverse. And yet, has it ever accomplished what Gail Thomas said it needed to? Has it embraced the shadow of its darkest day?
It’s a profound question and one not easily answered. As Thomas noted, the Dallas women who lobbied fiercely for the creation of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza were initially met with ferocious opposition.
Citizens such as Cowboys coach Tom Landry and cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash called for the building’s demolition.
As a result, the building the museum now occupies — the former Texas School Book Depository, where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have fired the fatal shots from a sixth-floor window — remained shuttered for more than a quarter century.
Decades later, a whole new debate is taking shape. Some critics ask why the city has succumbed to being a focal point of “conspiracy tourism,” while former state legislator Helen Giddings is among those posing an even deeper question:
Why is Dallas so focused on remembering the death of John F. Kennedy but not his life?
“Can we do more with our hearts,” Giddings said during a recent JFK panel discussion hosted by the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law, “and somehow find a way to get all of us to be willing to create and embrace a culture of civility and inclusiveness?
“His life obviously had great, great meaning. We were all devastated, of course, by his death, and we will always be. But I think we should take the positiveness of his life and see what we can do to expand on that, to make it part of the future of Dallas.”
For Giddings, owning the shadow of the assassination means doing something Dallas has never done — embracing the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy in a way that moves beyond the darkness and into the light. In a city that has shed much of its guilt over Kennedy’s death — and Oswald’s — but still feels some lingering effects, it is an attempt at finding closure. It is a suggestion for turning the page.
City of hate
In the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, a future Pulitzer Prize winner was sitting in algebra class at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas. In the six decades since, Lawrence Wright has ruminated often on his old hometown and how it’s different than it used to be.
“You have to go back to Dallas before the assassination to realize how profound the change was,” said Wright, 76, who has authored more than a dozen books, including his most recent, “Mr. Texas: A Novel.” “Dallas was spiraling into some kind of right-wing extravaganza — rejecting federal assistance for school lunches, digging up poppies in the parks because they were red.” Red in those days meant only one thing: Communism.
“Bizarre actions,” Wright said. “It had this fanaticism, fueled in part by H.L. Hunt and the extremists we had elected to office, who were leading us further and further into a hate-filled political culture that had trapped the city. It took the oxygen out of the city. It was a joyless, angry place.”
He calls it “a troubled boom town. The city was careening into some frightful future. No wonder people in America thought, when Kennedy was shot, that it was by some right-wing crank. Because that’s what the city had become, in some respects.
“What I especially remember about that period is the arrogance, the smugness of the Dallas attitude, the disdain we had for the rest of the country, for liberalism and the Supreme Court. The hatred directed at Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson,” who as Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations was heckled by an angry mob and struck on the head with a placard during a speech in Dallas less than a month before Kennedy’s parade.
The Stevenson incident alone prompted Stanley Marcus, the top executive at Dallas-based Neiman Marcus, to call Kennedy and warn him not to come to Dallas.
Wright refers to it as an “incivility that was unusual in our political culture at the time. All of that was before Kennedy was killed. And then it was shocking how the whole country turned on Dallas. And blamed Dallas for killing Kennedy. It was as if each of us was, in some respects, a murderer. Because we created this culture that empowered the mythical right-wing fanatic to kill Kennedy. And, of course, that’s not what happened.”
Oswald, an ex-Marine who happened to be an avowed Marxist, had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. When he returned to the United States in June 1962, he brought with him a Russian wife he had met on a dance floor in Minsk. She later photographed him in the backyard of a duplex on W. Neely St. in Oak Cliff, where he held in his left hand the mail-order rifle used to kill Kennedy and in his right hand a Communist newspaper. Strapped around his waist was the pistol used to gun down a Dallas police officer.
The Warren Commission later concluded that in April 1963, Oswald tried to kill right-wing firebrand Major Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who was sitting in his Turtle Creek home, doing his taxes. The bullet narrowly missed his head.
Despite the nation’s initial impressions of the “city of hate” as Dallas came to be known, Kennedy was killed not by a right-wing fanatic but a left-wing fanatic.
On the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, then-Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings asked Wright to speak to the hometown crowd. “I remember saying that, if Kennedy had to be killed somewhere, I’m glad he was killed in Dallas. Because it broke the spell. And it’s a tribute to the city that it went from being humiliated to becoming … humble.” In Wright’s words, “That is the one thing that the city had really lacked.”
Over the years, he said, “I have been so struck by how the culture of Dallas has grown, in ways that I regard as noble. It’s a city that has accepted the suffering it had to endure. Everybody from Dallas had some experience after that, the hatred that other people felt for us. We were made to feel ashamed, whereas other cities that have had tragedies, such as Los Angeles or Memphis, those cities were not held responsible for the culture that killed the person inside it, in the way that Dallas was. And yet, Dallas grew from that. The city has accepted the consequences of the Kennedy assassination, and it made it a far better culture.” It is, he says, nothing less than “a profound development in the city’s psychology.”
Wright’s words echo those of Thomas, who has had even more time to think about “the shadow” and what Dallas needed to do to address the psychological trauma that engulfed it almost 60 years ago.
Thomas, who founded the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1980 and holds a doctoral degree in archetypal psychology, said the creation of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza was one example of the city coping with the so-called shadow — in a healthy way.
Museums dealing with shame offer, she said, a means of understanding how and why such crimes as slavery and the Holocaust snaked their way into history. In her view, the same need for understanding still exists in Dallas.
City of change
Thomas remembers traveling to Europe with her husband soon after Nov. 22, 1963, and “not wanting to say that we were from Dallas. It was the embarrassment. It was just a horror.”
In opening its eyes to the horror instead of looking away, Dallas has come a long way, as Wright contends.
Indeed, Dallas in 1963 was dramatically different from today. Sixty years ago, the city was overwhelmingly white and Protestant, so much so that the chief opposition cited in the city to Kennedy’s candidacy was that he was Catholic. Before Kennedy, a Catholic had never been president.
As the City of Dallas website reveals, the Dallas of 2023 is a “majority-minority” city (65.8% of the population), with 41.7% of its residents identifying as Hispanic and 24.1% identifying as Black.
Nowhere is the difference more striking than in the city’s politics. In the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden carried Dallas County by 31.7 percentage points, outpacing Republican President Donald J. Trump, 65.1% to 33.4%. Barack Obama carried Dallas County twice, in 2008 and 2012, as did Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy eked out a victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon, in large part by winning Texas by a razor-thin 2 percentage points. Kennedy’s victory was aided enormously by snaring Texas’ 24 electoral votes and naming Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas as his running mate — although the logic did not extend to Dallas.
In 1960, Democrats controlled the South — hence the term “Dixiecrats” — with all 22 U.S. senators from the South affiliated with the Democratic Party, making Dallas a true outlier. The evidence was glaring in the 1960 election, when Nixon outpaced Kennedy in Dallas County, 62.16% to 36.99%.
Evidence of the city’s open hostility toward Democrats surfaced during the 1960 presidential campaign, when LBJ was accosted by a “Mink Coat Mob,” organized by GOP congressman Bruce Alger, which, in the words of The New York Times, “spat in the direction of his wife, Lady Bird, and grabbed her gloves and threw them in a gutter.”
As Wright has said in the past, Dallas in 1963 was a “city on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” And it added to its own reputation as the “city of hate” two days after Kennedy’s death, when a strip-club operator named Jack Ruby wormed his way into the basement of the Dallas police station, firing a single fatal shot on live television.
“I don’t think that Dallas killed Kennedy,” Wright said, “but it was responsible for killing Oswald.”
Sixty years later, Wright is outspoken that the Dallas of 1963 is long gone. But he sees troubling hints of the city’s old political climate in the nation’s present atmosphere at large.
“I think there are very strong parallels between Dallas before the Kennedy assassination and America in its current form,” he said. “I often think about, what would it take to break the spell? What it took in Dallas was the murder of a charismatic, landmark president, whose blood spilled on our streets. Maybe it’ll take something as heinous as that to change America. I do have that same sense of this headlong rush toward catastrophe that I felt in Dallas — until the tragedy arrived.”
Where does that put us today? In the words of the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Much as his hometown has changed, Wright, like many, still remembers the past.
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