God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (19 page)

In my speech, I said that I saw Dallas as a city of paradoxes. When two contradictory propositions appear to be equally true, they may contain an inner truth, a mystery that holds opposing realities together in a strange and powerful dynamic. For instance, in 1963, when I was a junior in high school, I was governed by two such unreconcilable convictions: nothing would ever happen in Dallas, and the world as we knew it would soon come to an end. We were living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, which infused the overheated religious atmosphere of the city with a giddy sense of apocalypse. The city was experiencing all the usual turbulence of a boomtown, including high rates of suicide, murder, and divorce, along with a right-wing political culture that had run off the rails. And yet, to a sixteen-year-old virgin, Dallas seemed frozen, unchangeable, and stultifying. Everybody dressed alike and thought alike and voted alike, which added to the sense of cultural paralysis. The only black person I knew was our weekly maid. In such a racially segregated environment, the main dividing line in the white community was between the Methodists (which we were) and the Baptists. I scarcely knew any Episcopalians. The first man I knew to sport a beard, other than Santa Claus, was Stanley Marcus—the city’s great merchant—whose decision to grow one caused an uproar.

Political violence was already a feature of the city before Kennedy came to town. In November 1960, during the presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson was making a speech at the Adolphus Hotel downtown. He and Lady Bird were greeted by a group of wealthy white women, later termed the Mink Coat Mob. This was a time in American politics when civility was still a part of public life, so the assault by these enraged women—spitting, cursing—was a shock. Bill Moyers, Johnson’s former press secretary, later told me that he actually believed these cosseted society ladies were going to tear him to pieces right there in the lobby of the hotel. The extreme partisanship that would eventually overwhelm American politics was beginning to come of age—here, in my own city.

Then, in October 1963, Adlai Stevenson, at that time the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared in Dallas to speak on United Nations Day. The United Nations was seen as a communist front in Texas. There were billboards and bumper stickers all over the state demanding Get the U.S. Out of the U.N. Earlier that same year, the state legislature had passed a law criminalizing the display of the United Nations flag.

Stevenson had split the Texas Democratic Party when he ran for president in 1952 against Dwight Eisenhower. The main issue in Texas at the time was whether the state’s boundary extended from the shore at low tide to three marine leagues—about nine miles—into the Gulf of Mexico, an area called the tidelands. For a hundred years, Texas’s claim to the tidelands was uncontested. Then oil was discovered in the Gulf, and the federal government asserted ownership.

Other states had similar claims, but Texas had a stronger case: it had entered the Union as an independent country, with its seaward boundary clearly accepted. The tidelands issue became the greatest conflict between the states and the federal government since the Civil War. Stevenson opposed ceding the tidelands to Texas, but Eisenhower, who was born in the state, supported the claim of Texas and other coastal states to their submerged lands. He signed a bill to that effect, but the dispute wasn’t resolved until 1960, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas’s favor, and the 2,440,650 underwater acres finally belonged to the state, free and clear. So much wealth has come into Texas as a result. Our public schools were built in part by oil leases from the Gulf.

In Texas, Stevenson embodied the egg-headed intellectuals of the Eastern Establishment. Governor Allan Shivers’s wife, Marialice, observed of the Democratic candidate, “No man who wears white shoes will ever be elected president of the United States.” Governor Shivers then led a faction of Democrats supporting Eisenhower, called Shivercrats. It was a foreshadowing of the great political pivot that would turn Texas red.

Stanley Marcus had urged Stevenson not to come to Dallas, but he didn’t want to appear craven to the daring New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy administration. Heckled off the stage, Stevenson left the auditorium, guarded by a cordon of police officers, who pushed through a crowd of a hundred protestors. For whatever reason, Stevenson decided to step outside his zone of protection, attempting to reason with a woman, the wife of a prominent insurance executive. She was carrying a sign that read If You Seek Peace, Ask Jesus, which she brought down on the ambassador’s head, a spectacular expression of the Dallas paradox.

One month later, on November 22, my father was waiting for Kennedy at the Trade Mart along with other city leaders, who were expecting the president for lunch. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s motorcade was driving past our church, First United Methodist, at the corner of Ross Avenue and North Harwood Street, where our pastor and staff were standing on the sidewalk. The motorcade turned onto Main Street, where thousands of Dallasites were waving and cheering. It was a lovely fall day. As they entered Dealey Plaza, Nellie Connally turned and remarked, “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.” They were the last words he heard in life. The Dallas paradox.

In my speech, I said that if John F. Kennedy was fated to be murdered somewhere, I was glad it happened in Dallas. Yes, the city was wrongly held responsible for the president’s death. Nearly everyone in the country, and certainly everyone in Dallas, immediately believed that Kennedy’s killer must have been a right-wing fanatic. How confounding it was to learn that Oswald was a Marxist—this in a city where there were scarcely any Democrats. And yet the city was taken down, humiliated, in a way that few places in our country have ever been, made to take the blame for a tragedy caused by someone who was, if anything, the opposite of the Dallas mentality, the Anti-Dallas.

But humiliation was exactly what Dallas needed. The city’s extreme partisanship, its militarism, isolationism, and America-firstness, were taking us into a dark place. Dallas was becoming the headquarters of a new kind of corporate fascism, which suppressed democratic checks and balances while bullying its opponents into silence.
The Dallas Morning News
, the most important paper in the state and one of the leading papers in the country, gave voice to the extremism and justified it. There seemed to be no force strong enough to resist this dangerous trend; as it turned out, though, one terrible deed changed everything. Dallas became more open and tolerant, more progressive, more “vigorous,” to use a favorite Kennedy word. Dallas is a far better city because Kennedy died there.

Now, I look out at the country and wonder if America is turning into Dallas 1963. That would be the greatest paradox of all.

Once again, the city was grieving, angry, and on edge. How would the world view Dallas now? At a candlelight vigil a few days after the killings, a detective next to me remarked, “One crazed person doesn’t represent the entire community,” although of course the lesson of Dallas in 1963 was that a single armed assassin could frame the reputation of a city for decades.

“We can choose to let the anger fester inside us,” said Senior Corporal Marie St. John, the partner of Michael Smith, one of those killed, “or we can take our agony and anguish and direct it toward good, toward fostering an environment of hope.” Officer Patrick Zamarripa was a navy veteran who had joined the police department in 2011 after three tours in Iraq. His fellow officer Josh Rodriguez recalled that the day his friend died, he had bought a meal for a homeless man who complained that his potato chips had been stolen. Zamarripa had sat with him while he ate and made sure he felt safe. “He wanted to be a hero to everyone,” his friend said.

The morning after the candlelight vigil at Dallas City Hall, Cindy Crain, the director of the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, escorted me to a couple of the tent cities under the highway overpasses. “There’s a lot of pressure to get the homeless out of town,” Crain told me, as we parked on Coombs Street under the I-45 flyway. A few months earlier, there would have been three hundred tents, but the city had ordered the encampment to be closed. When we visited, there were about 120 people remaining. Churches in the area had once provided food and tents, but their congregations had decided that they were contributing to the homeless problem by supporting the lifestyle. Crain was checking to see if the people under the flyway had found another spot to live. All of them had to be gone within a week, and yet the shelters around town were brimming. “I only have housing for four people,” she said. “I don’t know what the others are going to do.”

“This spot is ninety percent black,” Crain said as she hobbled across the rubbled ground. She had recently undergone a hip operation and was walking with a cane, which she mainly used as a pointer. “This is the drug section, this is the elderly section,” she said. “The average resident is an African American male, about fifty years old, touching the criminal justice system. Many of them are disabled.” I could see a few wheelchairs among the battered bikes and shopping carts scattered about. There were piles of trash and empty quart bottles of cheap beer. Traffic rumbled overhead. A woman squatted beside a small wood fire brewing camp coffee next to the railroad track.

Everyone I met was from Texas and most from the Dallas area. A man introduced himself as Cowboy, the only white person I saw in this camp. He said he’d been here the longest, four years. He had a
Playboy
tattoo on his arm and lived in a kind of fort made of plywood and cardboard. There was a woman named Tammy, who wore a sports bra and black slacks. She came from Plano, an affluent community north of Dallas, and she complained of liver problems. I asked her what brought her to this place. “I was in the Terrell State Hospital,” she said, mentioning a psychiatric facility. She was also in prison. “I finally got burned out in Dallas,” she said. Harold Dixon is a former high school athlete who has been homeless “a long time.” He’s sixty years old and has a bad knee. “I used to work for Toyota, in the car wash,” he said. That was his last job. Many of the older people among the homeless have never qualified for Social Security benefits because they were incarcerated, either in prison or in mental facilities. “Almost all these people have lived institutional lives,” Crain said. Unless they have family willing to take them in, or can find a temporary shelter with space, they have few alternatives to living on the street.

Crain dropped me off at CitySquare, a social services consortium housed in clean, utilitarian offices on Malcolm X Boulevard in South Dallas. There were kids playing ball in the yard. The facility offered a food pantry, a health clinic, job training, financial coaching, a literacy center, and a legal adviser. “This is a collective impact center,” Larry M. James, the director of CitySquare, told me. “Our mission is to help working families survive and move them toward thriving.” In the past year, the organization served fifty-five thousand people. In the distance was the city’s striking skyline, a beacon of opportunity that seems out of reach for so many.

“I grew up in a very different Texas,” James said, as we headed downtown to the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, where President Obama was going to speak. Now, he observed, “the things that draw people here are the same things that make people poor.” The low tax base entices industry but chokes off social services. The state’s refusal to expand Medicaid is an especially galling example, James believes. “It’s such low-hanging fruit and it could relieve so much misery.”

Later, I talked to Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, from Dallas, who expressed her frustration. The city has passed bonds to create what she calls “a model program” for housing the homeless. “But that doesn’t take care of the people who don’t want to live in shelters,” she said. “It tells me about the inadequacy of mental health care in Texas. Sometimes, I think we’re going backwards as a state. We are the leading state in technology. We’re the leading state in trade. Certainly, Dallas has the lowest unemployment of any big city in the country. Where we’re lacking is in mental health care and public education.”