American Values: Lessons I Learned From My Family by Jr. Robert F. Kennedy

Author:Jr., Robert F. Kennedy [Jr., Robert F. Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, Politics
Amazon: B01JYVJS08
Goodreads: 39074272
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2018-05-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

A Farewell to Camelot

IT SEEMED ODD TO ME HOW A DARKNESS CLUNG TO ANY MENTION OF Dallas in our home after Jack’s death; Los Angeles never bore that stigma after my father’s assassination. There was something mad about that Texas city—a poisonous hatred approaching zaniness that seemed to have set the stage for the murder. Notoriously corrupt, Dallas was a mecca for wing-nut racists, oil billionaires, and the fringe lunatics of the John Birch Society. The Ku Klux Klan sited its headquarters as Dallas in the 1920s, and the Dallas police department was still lousy with KKK members; its officers mingled also with local gangsters at venues like Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, buying drinks for so-called B-girls provided, at times, by the Mafia overlord Carlos Marcello. During the Warren Commission investigation, witnesses told the FBI, “Jack Ruby was well acquainted with virtually every officer of the Dallas Police Department,” and that he was the mob’s “pay off man for the Dallas Police.”

Along with the Mafia, the CIA was a shadowy but potent force among Dallas’s power elites and the city’s law enforcement arm. CIA records released in 2017, pursuant to the JFK Assassination Records Act, show that Dallas’s then mayor, Earle Cabell, was a CIA agent active since 1956. JFK had fired Mayor Cabell’s brother, General Charles Cabell, the CIA’s deputy director, after the Bay of Pigs. Mayor Cabell was the commander of the Dallas Police Department, which, according to historian and journalist Russell Baker, included over a hundred officers with intelligence-agency affiliations. The city’s large Cuban refugee community was a ferment of anti-Castro activism and seething anger toward the Kennedys.

Dallas’s outskirts, clustered with military bases and oil fields, made the city a confluence of Wall Street interests, oil tycoons, and defense contractors, who saw the Kennedys as their mortal enemies. The reactionary petroleum and military oligarchs who ruled Dallas thrived on a dark symbiosis with a legion of fire-breathing fundamentalist preachers and hate radio and television bigots, virtuosos at wielding tribal rage, religious fervor, and zealous nationalism. Three weeks before Jack’s murder, hecklers pelted United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson with stones and rotten fruit, spat on him, and beat him with picket signs at a UN Day speech in Dallas. “Mad things happened,” reported historian William Manchester. “Huge billboards screamed ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant ‘Stevenson’s going to die—his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!’” Public schools distributed radical right broadsides to their pupils; students booed the Kennedy name in classrooms; corporate CEOs fired and blackballed junior executives who refused to attend right-wing seminars. When Dallas’s public school PA systems announced Jack’s assassination, children as young as fourth-graders applauded. There was hatred elsewhere in the Old Confederacy, too; white children in Montgomery and Birmingham classrooms also cheered. A Birmingham radio caller declared that “any white man who did what he did for niggers should be shot.” But in Dallas the malignancy had metastasized.

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