THURSDAY, JUL 24, 2014 10:08 AM EDT Texas gun nuts’ scary ritual: How hatred of a president turned profane The open carry crew is now spouting right-wing conspiracy theories and waving guns in the worst place imaginable HEATHER DIGBY PARTON Share 414 286 243 TOPICS: TEXAS, GUNS, OPEN CARRY, THE RIGHT, EDITORS PICKS, JFK, ASSASSINATION, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, DALLAS, DEALEY PLAZA, POLITICS NEWS Texas gun nuts scary ritual: How hatred of a president turned profane A plaque designating Dealey Plaza as a historical landmark is adorned with flowers after a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) (Credit: Associated Press) Three weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a concerned citizen from Dallas named Mrs. Nelle M. Doyle wrote a letter to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. She was worried about the president’s visit. This is what she wrote: Although I do not consider myself an ‘alarmist’, I do fervently hope that President kennedy can be dissuaded from appearing in the city of Dallas, Texas as much as I would enjoy hearing and seeing him. This ‘hoodlum mob’ in Dallas is frenzied and infuriated that their attack on Ambassador Adlai Stephenson on the 24th, backfired on them. I have heard that some of them have said they “have just started.” No number of policemen, plainclothes men or militia can control the “air” Mr Salinger — it is a dreadful thought but all remember the fate of President McKinley. These people are crazy, or crazed, and I’m sure that we must realize that their actions in the future are unpredictable. Unfortunately, her prediction wasn’t alarmist enough as it turned out. The right-wing hatred for John F. Kennedy was in some ways as extreme as the hatred for Barack Obama and nowhere was it more energized than Dallas in 1963. Three years earlier, right-wingers in the city had signaled their anti-Kennedy zeal by turning on its native son, Lyndon Johnson, after he accepted the nomination for vice president. He and his wife, Lady Bird, were accosted by a shrieking mob of conservative women in front of their hotel armed with signs saying he’d sold out to “Yankee Socialists.” It was downhill from there. Over the next three years the simmer burst into a full boil as various luminaries of the John Birch Society such as millionaire oil man H.L. Hunt and the anti-communist fanatic Gen. Edwin Walker, a zealot so far to the right that he even believed Eisenhower was a communist, fanned the flames of anti-Kennedy hatred. Walker was at the center of the plot against Adlai Stephenson to which Mrs. Doyle referred in her letter. He had exhorted his followers (some of whom belonged to group that unironically called itself the “National Indignation Convention”) to confront the U.N. ambassador when he came to town and they did, hitting him with signs and spitting in his face before he could be rescued by the police. At the scene he famously asked, “Are these human beings or are these animals?”
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 19:46:58 +0000