Paul Schwietering
By Paul Schwietering

After reading a couple of the books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were published as the 50th anniversary of the assassination was observed, I think I can understand why so many people who had reached voting age by 1963 simply don’t believe the conclusion of the report of the Warren Commission, namely that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Every town of any considerable size is bound, by the law of averages, to have at least a few nuts. The problem for Dallas, Texas in the early 1960’s was that some of its nuts were among the most prominent and influential people in the city, people who shaped public opinion in the community. By 1963 Dallas had earned a reputation for being a hotbed for activists of the most extreme far right.

In 1960, the Texas Congressional Delegation consisted of 18 Democrats and one Republican. The lone Republican was Bruce Alger, who represented Dallas.

Alger was regarded as a folk hero by many in Dallas despite the fact that he never passed a single piece of legislation. “He has introduced doomed bills to withdraw from the United Nations, to break off all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, to privatize the federal government” (Dallas 1963). He opposed the (toothless) Civil Rights Bill of 1957, condemning it as placating “the troublemakers of the NAACP who seek to incite race hatred and discontent which did not exist.” “And, finally, he cast the lone vote against a federal program to provide surplus milk to needy elementary schoolchildren.”

Four days before Election Day in 1960 Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to make a speech in Dallas. The election had come down to Illinois and Texas, with both states considered “too close to call.”

Meanwhile, Bruce Alger has had a brainstorm. He has organized a group of his most dedicated fans, mostly housewives of the business elite, to disrupt Lyndon Johnson’s visit. Most of them are wearing red vests with NIXON stenciled across the back in large letters. Some are wearing mink coats. When the Johnsons arrived at the hotel, Alger’s group “screamed red-faced insults” at Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. Alger is whipping up the crowd, shouting, “We’ll show Lyndon Johnson he isn’t wanted in Dallas.” One of them ran up to Lady Bird and snatched a pair of gloves out of her hand and threw them in the gutter. A cheer went up from the crowd. On two separate occasions protesters carrying signs swing the signs at Lady Bird’s head, grazing her hat the first time and narrowly missing the second. In the hotel lobby, it is another gauntlet. The local NBC affiliate has a camera set up to capture the melee as Johnson and his wife make their way to the hotel elevator: “There is shoving, jockeying, and elbows are flying. Some people are pulling off their Nixon buttons and using the pins to stab at the handful of pro-Johnson supporters.” “Two women from the Kennedy Johnson campaign are clutching their faces, pressing their hands to their broken noses. Other people are limping, being helped outside to hospitals.” “Some of Alger’s mob are spitting. Johnson looks at the contorted faces and Lady Bird flinches.”

“Within hours television newscasts across the nation are running footage of Dallas’s best-dressed citizens rioting against Lyndon Johnson and his frightened wife.”

With only two days to the election Democrats circulate handbills featuring Bruce Alger at the protest, and prominent but reluctant Republicans are being forced to condemn the outburst. Momentum bleeds from the Nixon campaign, and Alger suddenly finds himself on the defensive.”

On Election Day, Nixon carried Dallas by a nearly two to one margin. But in the rest of Texas, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket stages a dramatic come-from-behind win, winning the state by forty-six thousand votes.

Winning in Texas sealed Kennedy’s election. Ironically, he won because a brawling mob in Dallas, Texas led last-minute voters to support Kennedy and Johnson.

Nixon watched it and knew it: “We lost Texas…because of that a**hole congressman, you know.”

The Reverend W. A. Criswell is, in 1960, the pastor of the sprawling Dallas First Baptist Church. At that time it was the largest Baptist church in the world. Criswell is not only a segregationist, but an anti-Catholic bigot as well. On a Sunday which, ironically, happened to be the day before the Fourth of July, Criswell delivers a sermon entitled “Religious Freedom, the Church, the State, and Senator Kennedy.” (The Democratic National Convention will begin in a few days). “He wants Dallas to know that there is something tantamount to a Holy War coming: Roman Catholicism ‘is not only a religion, it is political tyranny’ that ‘threatens those basic freedoms and those constitutional rights for which our forefathers died.’ When Americans pay income taxes, they unknowingly are paying to prop up the Catholic Church” (Dallas 1963). Criswell is not the only extremist minister in Dallas. “A Dallas minister named R. E. Davis – someone well known to the Dallas police – is claiming to be the new Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Another Dallas preacher, a cousin of the governor, has written a popular book entitled God The Original Segregationist. He is shipping thousands of copies from his Dallas church office. That preacher says that black people are made black by God, on purpose, to keep them segregated by color. They are descendants of a wayward tribe in the Bible. Too, race mixing will weaken the nation: “There is absolutely nothing the Communists would love more than a mongrelized America that they could easily enslave…when these meddlesome white politicians and troublemakers leave them alone, the Negroes are quite happy and satisfied in their segregated condition…God knows my heart, and He knows I am anything but a ‘Nigger-hater’…the land of Dixie has always been a veritable Paradise for the Negro.”

Next week: Dallas Morning News owner Ted Dealy, billionaire H. L. Hunt, General Edwn Walker, and an account of U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s visit to Dallas.

Paul Schwietering is a former Democratic state central committeeman for the 14th state senate district.