It was beyond unfathomable. The ambush murder of a glamorous young president in the heart of this city was literally unspeakable.
“I’m not sure I can say what I have to say,” is how future Mayor J. Erik Jonsson addressed 2,500 VIPs gathered at the Trade Mart for a luncheon in John F. Kennedy’s honor. Jonsson could barely utter the news.
So stricken, so numbed, Dallas shared the nation’s loss but bore a much heavier weight — a confused shame and sense of responsibility for a crime committed by a brooding misfit.
The once-swaggering Texas town that fashioned itself as Big D read the overwrought press clippings about the disgraced “city of hate” that killed a president. William Manchester, in his 1967 best-seller The Death of a President, wrote that Dallas was infected by “a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.”
Indeed, this city had a broad streak of in-your-face right-wing politics born of Cold War anxieties and sectional resentments. The darker angels of our nature had stature and voice, so much so that Kennedy said his Texas trip was a foray into “nut country.”
What he found instead was an electrified, sun-splashed city delirious at the chance to glimpse the world’s most celebrated couple. With some Confederate symbols and Yankee taunts mixed in, Kennedy basked in adulation from upwards of 200,000 people for most of a 10-mile route, before reaching that fateful exit path from downtown.
Some in Dallas wanted to deny and forget. The implications were painful. Some would have erased the building where Lee Harvey Oswald took up his sniper’s position. Wrote one citizen to a memorial committee: “Destroy Texas School Book Depository. Rubble buried in an undisclosed spot or dumped into the sea.”
How fortunate that didn’t happen. History cannot be erased or compartmentalized but must be confronted, embraced, retold and reinterpreted.
In the five decades since Kennedy’s assassination, Dallas has evolved to where it understands itself and its history better. The past is less a threat than a touchstone. The city has a clearer perspective for the job of serving as host to millions who are drawn to the site of a national trauma and the source of enduring debate over a crime that many insist is yet unsolved.
Dallas’ self-consciousness and remorse over Kennedy’s assassination have faded naturally with the passing of generations. Millions worldwide came to know Dallas better for its football — for Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman — than for Dealey Plaza. For others, the reality of Dallas became more the fiction of J.R. Ewing, all oil all the time. And Dallas got its swagger back.
All of it can be found in this community’s mosaic, even remnants of the doubts and self-recriminations of the past. All of it is part of our history, and history is a powerful teacher.