Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis

Overview

Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction

Named one of the Top 3 JFK Books by Parade Magazine.

Named 1 of The 5 Essential Kennedy assassination books ever written by The Daily Beast.

Named one of the Top Nonfiction Books of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews.

In the months and weeks before the fateful November 22nd, 1963, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey, who raucously confronted JFK and whose family name adorns the plaza where the president was murdered. On the same stage was a compelling cast of marauding gangsters, swashbuckling politicos, unsung civil rights heroes, and a stylish millionaire anxious to save his doomed city.

Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis ingeniously explore the swirling forces that led many people to warn President Kennedy to avoid Dallas on his fateful trip to Texas. Breathtakingly paced, DALLAS 1963 presents a clear, cinematic, and revelatory look at the shocking tragedy that transformed America. Countless authors have attempted to explain the assassination, but no one has ever bothered to explain Dallas-until now.

With spellbinding storytelling, Minutaglio and Davis lead us through intimate glimpses of the Kennedy family and the machinations of the Kennedy White House, to the obsessed men in Dallas who concocted the climate of hatred that led many to blame the city for the president's death. Here at long last is an accurate understanding of what happened in the weeks and months leading to John F. Kennedy's assassination. DALLAS 1963 is not only a fresh look at a momentous national tragedy but a sobering reminder of how radical, polarizing ideologies can poison a city-and a nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455522118
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	10/08/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	85,667
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bill Minutaglio's work has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, Texas Monthly, Outside and many other publications. He has worked for The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News and is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including biographies of President George W. Bush, Molly Ivins and Alberto Gonzales, and a narrative retelling of the greatest industrial disaster in American history. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Steven L. Davis is the author of two highly praised books on Texas culture, and his work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, San Antonio Express-News, Southwestern American Literature, and Texas Books in Review. Davis is a long-time curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University-San Marcos, which holds the literary papers of Cormac McCarthy, Sam Shepard, and many other writers. He lives in New Braunfels, Texas and grew up in Dallas.

Read an Excerpt

Dallas 1963

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By Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis

Grand Central Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Bill Minutaglio Steven L. Davis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2209-5

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CHAPTER 1

1960

JANUARY

Over the brisk winter holiday, mailmen in Dallas are bundled against the biting winter chill as they place a series of carefully signed and rather unexpected cards into the mailboxes of the city's most influential residents—men living on the exquisitely manicured, tree-lined streets that filter north of the tall downtown buildings.

The front of the card features a crisp photograph of an attractive young family: A handsome, vigorous-looking man is seated in a comfortable chair, book-lined shelves visible behind him. His face is creased into a charming smile, and his posture projects an easy and sanguine confidence. Perched on his lap is his ebullient daughter, peering down at an open book. Standing behind him is his elegantly attired wife, leaning over her well-dressed husband and child. Her manner seems more reserved, nearly brooding. A strand of pearls frames her long neck. She is very attractive but appears as remote as a silent screen star.

The portrait of this young family radiates a sense of dynastic ease, of a kind of practiced and inherited status. On the inside of the card is the raised, gold-embossed Great Seal of the United States: the fierce eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other.

Below the seal appears a message: "Wishing you a Blessed Christmas and a New Year filled with happiness. Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy."

Each of the cards has been signed in the same careful handwriting: "Best—Jack."

Many of the people in Dallas are startled at the impressive, personalized card. Most of them have never met Kennedy. Many have never ventured into the Kennedy orbits on the East Coast—nor would they ever want to. In the powerful parts of Dallas, there is a mixture of old Southern families and the nouveau riche. And now, in the last few years, the oil money is flowing furiously into this New South city—sometimes seemingly despite men like Kennedy, despite the Northeastern establishment, despite the long and controlling reach of Washington.

Alongside the older mansions, there are newer thirty-room Taj Mahals where even the toilets are made with gold leaf. The most lavish store in the city, Neiman Marcus, specializes in making millionaires' dreams come true—it is preparing to debut its newest gift idea: His and Hers airplanes. People are flying out of Dallas's Love Field to New Orleans for lunch at Antoine's, or to Lake Tahoe to mingle with Frank Sinatra at the Cal Neva Resort. Or to Las Vegas to play poker with Benny Binion—once the most celebrated purveyor of illicit pleasures to the rich in Dallas, now their host at the famous Horseshoe Casino.

But just a few minutes from the mansions in Dallas, there are also clusters of falling-down shacks, with no running water, settling into the gumbo-soil bottomlands. The city's schools, country clubs, and stores are still perfectly segregated ... and bonded, through membership and memory, to ominous things that few speak about by name.

With the grand holiday cards from Kennedy in hand, the recipients place calls to friends. They learn that many others have received the very same greeting from Kennedy, not just in Dallas, but all over the country. Some must wonder if it is giving Kennedy some measure of satisfaction knowing that his cards are being talked about in a city like Dallas ... in a place like Texas.

The Lone Star State is often like some rogue nation playing by its own political rules, as if it is about to secede and become its own country again. At the family retreat in Hyannis Port, at the place where the Kennedys feel most unfettered and clear-minded, Dallas probably seems at times like a place worth conceding, a place where there is more than just the usual political resistance to everything a Northern Catholic might embody. Some who have never been to Dallas summon up the easy stereotypes: It is where Bonnie and Clyde came from. Where big oilmen drive huge cars. A distant city populated by gun-slinging cowboys and snake-handling preachers.

Even if they don't succumb to those cartoon caricatures, the key advisers in the Kennedy inner circle surely share something: a raw sense of Dallas as an outpost for people particularly disconnected to the Kennedy family's very personality, religion, and principles. And John F. Kennedy himself no doubt knows that it will take far more than a soothing family photograph and a handsome, gilt-tinted holiday card to even begin to erode distrust in a place like Dallas.

One thing is clear this January. Kennedy is watching his major rival for the presidential nomination, Lyndon B. Johnson, the crafty Master of the Senate, the Texas boss who has gone below deck to run the Democratic Party machinery during the Eisenhower presidency. No one in party circles knows more about Texas, about Dallas, than Johnson. No one but Johnson has done more to help empower the men who really run things in Texas. For months now, Jack and his brother Bobby have watched and waited for the tall, clever Texan to make his move.

There are certainly windows of opportunity for Johnson. There are coalescing, angry forces in Dallas and throughout the South. There are governors, senators, and mayors still rallying to resist so many things: the revolutionary integration edicts ordered by the federal government, by the Supreme Court, by political forces in the North ... as if a modern version of the Civil War is unfolding. But Johnson is coy, refusing to announce his plans. He is both cunning and wary—and wondering if the nation is really ready for a president from the South, from that alternately celebrated and reviled place called Texas.

While Johnson wavers, Kennedy decides to push forward.

He has been visiting every state in the nation. And he and his team have decided to mail those holiday cards, to have him personally sign thousands of them and send some straight to Dallas, straight to the heart of the American resistance.

On January 2, 1960, people in the city open their ultra-conservative morning newspaper and see the big story: John Fitzgerald Kennedy has announced that he is officially running for the White House.

Inside those three-story mansions with the curving driveways in the exclusive quarters of the city, people now understand exactly what Kennedy's lavish holiday greeting was all about. Later in the day, they are meeting, over coffee and eggs delivered by white-gloved black waiters in the private clubs downtown, and talking about the card—especially in light of the news.

It is both foolish and flattering: Kennedy wants Texas.

The Reverend W. A. Criswell, the burly and square-jawed pastor of the sprawling Dallas First Baptist Church, knows that the Lord God Almighty is providing him with a special blessing on this brisk initial Sunday in January 1960.

A brazen bigamist, the craggy and philandering Dallas oil mogul H. L. Hunt, is bowing before him and whispering in his unusually soft and cottony voice that he is ready at last to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior ... and Wallie Amos Criswell as his spiritual leader. Criswell looks down, staring at the large, oval-shaped man with the baby-soft skin and the snowy, thinning hair. It is a holy marriage—between the leader of the largest Baptist church in the world and the richest man in America.

At age fifty, Criswell weighs two hundred pounds and has short, slightly curling hair parted close to the middle of his large head. He has a broad face, thin lips, and narrow but piercing eyes. He prefers a dark tie, a white shirt, and a gray three-piece suit. Like the seventy-year-old Hunt, he emerged in a part of the nation where there was nothing even remotely akin to inherited wealth—where a desperate, hungry man usually only prospered by muscling his way forward without waiting for benevolent figures in Washington to lend a hand.

Criswell was born into wretched poverty near the sluggish Red River and the barren Texas-Oklahoma border, where tornadoes routinely scrape away at people's lives. Baptized in an old galvanized tub, he found his calling under flimsy revival tents, and waving his dog-eared Bible in dusty, hardscrabble villages like Muskogee and Mexia. People say he acquired a holy gift for bridging the Bible to the real world, for linking God's ancient words to today's headlines, for using the Bible as a literal tool to make sense of the news events people hear on the radio or see in the Dallas Morning News.

Lately, when he sits inside his expansive, book-lined office in his sprawling brick church, he remains obsessed with liberals and socialists in the Northeast—how the men in Washington want to change traditions, push integration. Too, he has deep, lingering suspicions about Roman Catholics—about whether they would be more devoted to the pope than to the American Constitution.

But when Criswell closes the door to his office and writes his fiery sermons, he knows one thing: He doesn't want to risk the kind of agonizing, national blowback he endured the last time he attacked some big sea changes in America.

Four years ago, the governor of South Carolina had insisted the nationally famous Dallas preacher come give a speech to the state legislature, and Criswell erupted in full-throated roar against integration and those Northern socialists: "The NAACP has got those East Texans on the run so much that they dare not pronounce the word 'chigger' anymore. It has to be Cheegro! Idiocy ... Foolishness! Let them integrate! Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up! Let them stay where they are ... but leave us alone!"

The lawmakers were mesmerized as Criswell rocked on his feet and raised both of his hands to the heavens:

"They are not our folks. They are not our kind. They don't belong to the same world in which we live ... There are people who are trying to force upon us a situation and a thing that is a denial of all that we believe in."

The news about his blistering rebukes reverberated around the country, and some of the fallout was disastrous. Baptist preachers hissed that he had gone too far—even if he was saying what many of them believed. But in Dallas, the mysterious oilman H. L. Hunt listened and heartily approved. Hunt and Criswell both knew that the growing civil rights movement was just a way for soft-willed intellectuals and liberals to supercharge socialism, and open the door to a steadfast campaign by communists to infiltrate America. Hunt admires the way Criswell attacks the enemy. He'd like to entrust his soul and his money to the preacher who says:

"Communism is a denial of God ... communism is like a kingdom of darkness presided over by a prince of evil ... the greatest challenge the Christian faith has ever faced in 2,000 years of history."

Hunt can feel it. Criswell really understands who is leaving America so vulnerable: "The leftists, the liberals, the pinks and the welfare statists who are soft on communism and easy toward Russia."

Evening is coming on, the January light is playing off the chilly waters of the Potomac River, and inside the House of Representatives chamber Congressman Bruce Alger can see his colleagues pushing out of their chairs and beginning to drift toward drinks and dinner with lobbyists. Still, this is something that the lawmaker from Dallas has to do, even if there is not a full audience.

The smoothly handsome and impeccably dressed Alger steps to the front of the House chamber. Some people say the Princeton-educated, forty-one-year-old could have been a movie star, that he bears a striking resemblance to the actor Gary Cooper. His shined hair is combed to perfection, and he walks with a straight, easy gait.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee's 153rd birthday will pass entirely without notice in the House of Representatives if not for Alger, the lone Republican in the Texas delegation and one of the most passionate conservatives in the nation. Invoking personal privilege, Alger begins a speech—his mellifluous voice rising and praising the legend and memory of the Confederate leader.

This should play very well in certain parts of Dallas. The city was once the national headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan. The city's famous Magnolia Building, once the tallest in the state and adorned with that giant sign of a glowing red Pegasus, was opened by a Grand Dragon of the KKK. A Dallas minister named R. E. Davis—someone well known to Dallas police—is claiming to be the new Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the KKK. He is saying ominously that he will combat integration and that "this Republic was founded by and in violence." The current mayor of Dallas, R. L. Thornton, was named for Robert E. Lee and had once been an unabashed KKK member. There are two towering Confederate monuments to General Lee in Dallas, including one that is the tallest public structure in the city. There are statues of Confederate legends Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis—and all-white public schools named for rebel heroes. The Confederate cemetery in the heart of the city is always carefully tended.

Now Alger's heartfelt ode to Lee echoes in the lonely chamber. He doesn't care if there is no one to listen. This speech is, really, for the people who put him in Congress—the people who run Dallas. Alger's ode to Lee floats across the emptying room:

"A great soldier ... a loyal Southerner ... a noble American ... and a Christian gentleman."

After Alger finishes his speech, he heads to the airport. When his plane finally touches down in Dallas, he is greeted, as always, by a small army of adoring homemakers and young wives who have taken a sudden interest in politics. Alger seems so personally appealing. He seems fully aware of those unseen threats lapping at Dallas.

Immediately, the Dallas Morning News issues an editorial thanking Alger:

It was fitting, though ironical, that a Republican—Bruce Alger of Dallas—was the only congressman to get on his feet and salute Gen. Robert E. Lee on his birthday.

Fitting, because Lee fought for the rights of the states. By resisting big government in Washington. So is Alger.

Where were the Democrats—the so-called party of the South? Courting the support of ... the NAACP?

At home, Alger is often regarded as a folk hero despite the fact that he has 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. He opposed the 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, free of charge, to needy elementary school children.

The congressman was assailed across the country, but the leaders of the Dallas Morning News rushed to his defense: "Here we are telling ourselves that we must strain every nerve and conserve every penny to meet the assault upon our way of life by the Russians and the spend-it-all folk in Washington come in crying about the milk-hungry children."

Alger has other stalwarts in Dallas. The billionaire Hunt sends out a mass letter racing to the support of the Dallas lawmaker: "His acumen, integrity and courage rate him as one of the 5 or 6 truly great men among the vanishing good men in Washington."

But it is the prosperous stay-at-home wives waiting for him at the Dallas airport that really form the soul of Alger's political vanguard. They constantly spring to his side, excitedly host luncheon forums and fund-raisers in their homes, work for hours on phone banks, and parade door-to-door with his yard signs. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, routinely appear at his public events, applauding wildly. To some skeptics in Dallas it is almost too much—and some are quietly speculating about what inspires so much passion. There are even rumors about his marriage, about why the congressman and his wife have recently separated.

Now, in the city after his Capitol Hill salute to Robert E. Lee, Alger simply goes from one January appearance to another, engulfed by the well-dressed women who have braved the winter weather to welcome him back. As they listen, perched on the edges of their seats and clapping, they hear him hammer home what they know to be true: There is something poisoning the hallways of power in Washington. There is a cancer. Washington is filled with blind men, liberal men: "the most liberal since the heyday of the New Deal."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis. Copyright © 2013 Bill Minutaglio Steven L. Davis. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

★ 09/15/2013
Not everyone in 1963 Dallas hated John F. Kennedy, but unfortunately the power brokers there who controlled politics, the media, and business did. In this absorbing account, Minutaglio (Sch. of Journalism, Univ. of Texas at Austin; First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty) and Davis (Witcliff Collections, Texas State Univ., San Marcos; J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind) reveal how those such as billionaire oil man H.L. Hunt; the Rev. Wallie Amos Criswell of the Dallas First Baptist Church; Ted Dealey, editor of the Dallas Morning News; GOP congressman Bruce Alger; and Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, united by their hatred of liberals, socialism, communism, and civil rights, welcomed right-wing radical movements, reinforced segregation, and stirred up contempt for the president. Together, they fanned the anger of their legions and made 1963 Dallas a city that Kennedy had been warned by Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson not to visit. However, not all of Dallas's leaders were against JFK. The authors portray Stanley Marcus, manager of the Neiman Marcus department store, sympathetically as a wealthy man who worked hard to bring integration and the arts to Dallas. The Rev. H. Rhett James and Juanita Craft of the NAACP toiled tirelessly for civil rights despite recurring death threats against them. VERDICT This engrossing narrative vividly captures the tensions in the Kennedy-Dallas crucible from 1960 until the president's death and will grip readers interested in the roots of Kennedy's political challenges and his assassination.—KH

Library Journal

A well-spoken Democratic president whose background and ethnicity raised reactionary suspicions. A new government health care plan denounced as anti-American social engineering. Accusations of treason and talk of insurrection. Militia-like groups recruiting members. A powerful media machine waging all-out warfare on the president and his allies. In Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's electric, frightening urban political history Dallas 1963, the authors don't need to draw parallels between the conservative panic that erupted during John F. Kennedy's presidency and the fears currently inflaming the far right wing. It's all right there on the page.

Minutaglio and Davis aren't interested in sifting the cold ashes of JFK assassination theories. "Our aim," they state, "is to introduce and then connect the outsize characters and the singular climate in a city that many blamed for killing a president." Dallas residents often carried a chip on their shoulder, resenting the belief that their home was just a jumped-up cow and oil town. But cattle and oil produced a lot of money. So when many of the city's leading men decided in 1959 to wage war on the northeastern liberals, big-city Catholics, commie appeasers, and civil rights agitators they knew were destroying America almost as fast as Medicare, the effect was felt nationwide.

To one activist, Dallas seemed "a conservative paradise, a utopia overflowing with easy money and right-thinking people." The authors describe a "seemingly staid city" whose placid mercantilist exterior barely hid a seething stewpot of paranoia and racism. It was stirred by a tight clique whose spittle-flecked hatred of Kennedy and his NAACP-loving liberalism make Rush Limbaugh's commentary on Hillary Clinton seem tame by comparison. In clipped but striking prose, the book lays out a rogue's gallery of southern gothics twisted with the gnawing terror that their (white, Protestant, xenophobic) America was being torn away from them.

There was H. L. Hunt, the richest man in America and a Howard Hughes–esque eccentric whose checkbook supported a stream of anti-Kennedy pamphlets and the country's first wide-scale conservative radio show. Hunt's well-funded spiritual adviser was Reverend W. A. Criswell, head of the city's main Baptist church and a preacher whose thundering speeches furiously denounced liberals, Catholics, and desegregationists. Ted Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, made sure his paper fought a daily war against "all this unholy unthreading of American traditions"; founded by a Confederate officer, his paper even had a special term for Washington, D.C.: "The Negro Capital of the U.S." The authors also give space to more positive characters like Stanley Marcus, the head of Neiman Marcus, who catered to the city's wealthy while trying to boost the city's cultural profile, and Juanita Craft, an NAACP organizer who was the first black woman to vote in Dallas County.

But the book's landscape is more dominated by the likes of its dark star, General Edwin A. Walker. In one of history's great ironies, Walker commanded the federal troops enforcing the desegregation order at Little Rock in 1959, but in 1962 he called for armed resistance to stop James Meredith from registering at the University of Mississippi. His flag-draped denouncements of the president led a senator to decry the likely mentally ill Walker as a "fascist-minded" traitor. Walker's furious bigotry made him a hero to reactionaries across the South, especially in Dallas. That was where he made his home and where — in one of the stranger twists in history — Lee Harvey Oswald tried but failed to assassinate him in April 1963.

All of Walker and company's invective isn't tied directly to but laid alongside examples of an increasingly sour and hateful mood in Dallas. The twelve- and fourteen-year-old Fort Worth kids with Nazi armbands and bombs, stopped by a policeman before they could attack a synagogue. The "minkcoat mob" of wealthy conservative female protestors who swarmed Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in November 1960, screaming "Traitor!" and "Judas!" The cross burned on a Holocaust survivor's lawn. By the time 1963 comes around, more people than not were cautioning Kennedy not to travel to Dallas.

The crackling narrative that these Texas journalists lay out is strictly chronological, running from September 1959 up to November 22, 1963. While generally restricting themselves to a punchy tick-tock of can-you-believe-this events, the authors have an unfortunate tendency to place themselves inside people's heads: "As he ages, Dealey also likes to think?" This and the authors' sharp eye for details ("businessmen in their long, fine Neiman Marcus woolen overcoats") gives the story a novelistic sheen.

By brushing right past any theories about what shadowy cabal or band of assassins was behind JFK's killing, Minutaglio and Davis go beyond the stream of books that toss cold water on such X-Files fare (see Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History and Larry Sabato's The Kennedy Half Century) in order to point the finger at an even more disquieting target. Nowhere do the authors say that furies stirred up by some of Dallas's leaders were responsible for Oswald killing the president. But what this book strongly suggests is that while words can't kill, they can certainly help to pull the trigger.

Chris Barsanti is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He is the author of Filmology: A Movie-a- Day Guide to the Movies You Need to Know. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, PopMatters, In These Times, and The Chicago Tribune.

Reviewer: Christopher L. Barsanti

After 50 years, it’s a challenge to fashion a new lens with which to view the tragic events of Nov. 22, 1963—yet Texans Minutaglio (City On Fire) and Davis (Texas Literary Outlaws) pull it off brilliantly. The assassination in Dealey Plaza marks the end of their thrilling story, which traces three years of increasing militant extremism in Dallas, beginning even before Kennedy’s election. While many are familiar with the assault on U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in the city a month before the murder of the president, the November 1960 mob that swarmed native son and then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife is even more disturbing. The environment of hate is chillingly evoked, centered on radical ex-general Edwin Walker and billionaire H.L. Hunt. The toxic atmosphere extended to Washington, where J.F.K.’s Medicare legislation was vehemently opposed by some. The venom makes the impending tragedy seem inevitable, and though others have made dramatic use of the prophetic statements from J.F.K. himself, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and others just before the shooting, few have employed them to better effect. Photos. Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management. (Oct. 8)

Publishers Weekly

"Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's DALLAS 1963 is a brilliantly written, haunting eulogy to John F. Kennedy. By exposing the hatred aimed at our 35th president, the authors demonstrates that America—not just Lee Harvey Oswald—was ultimately responsible for his death. Every page is an eye opener. Highly recommended!"—Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and author of Cronkite

"All the great personalities of Dallas during the assassination come alive in this superb rendering of a city on a roller coaster into disaster. History has been waiting fifty years for this book."—Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear

"Minutaglio and Davis capture in fascinating detail the creepiness that shamed Dallas in 1963."—Gary Cartwright, author and contributing editor at Texas Monthly

"In this harrowing, masterfully-paced depiction of a disaster waiting to happen, Minutaglio and Davis examine a prominent American city in its now-infamous moment of temporary insanity. Because those days of partisan derangement look all too familiar today, DALLAS 1963 isn't just a gripping narrative-it's also a somber cautionary tale."—Robert Draper, contributor, New York Times Magazine and author of Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives

"The authors skillfully marry a narrative of the lead-up to the fateful day with portrayals of the Dixiecrats, homophobes, John Birchers, hate-radio spielers, and the 'superpatriots' who were symptomatic of the paranoid tendency in American politics."—Harold Evans, author of The American Century

"After fifty years, it's a challenge to fashion a new lens with which to view the tragic events of November 22, 1963—yet Texans [Minutaglio and Davis] pull it off brilliantly."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Chilling... The authors make a compelling, tacit parallel to today's running threats by extremist groups."—Kirkus

"A thoughtful look at the political and social environment that existed in Dallas at the time of the president's election... a climate, the authors persuasively argue, of unprecedented turmoil and hatred."—Booklist

From the Publisher

"Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's DALLAS 1963 is a brilliantly written, haunting eulogy to John F. Kennedy. By exposing the hatred aimed at our 35th president, the authors demonstrates that America--not just Lee Harvey Oswald--was ultimately responsible for his death. Every page is an eye opener. Highly recommended!"

Douglas Brinkley

"All the great personalities of Dallas during the assassination come alive in this superb rendering of a city on a roller coaster into disaster. History has been waiting fifty years for this book."

Lawrence Wright

"Minutaglio and Davis capture in fascinating detail the creepiness that shamed Dallas in 1963."

Gary Cartwright

"In this harrowing, masterfully-paced depiction of a disaster waiting to happen, Minutaglio and Davis examine a prominent American city in its now-infamous moment of temporary insanity. Because those days of partisan derangement look all too familiar today, DALLAS 1963 isn't just a gripping narrative-it's also a somber cautionary tale."

Robert Draper

"The authors skillfully marry a narrative of the lead-up to the fateful day with portrayals of the Dixiecrats, homophobes, John Birchers, hate-radio spielers, and the 'superpatriots' who were symptomatic of the paranoid tendency in American politics."

Harold Evans

"A thoughtful look at the political and social environment that existed in Dallas at the time of the president's election... a climate, the authors persuasively argue, of unprecedented turmoil and hatred."

Booklist

In a chronological, episodic narrative that grows somewhat tedious yet chilling, Minutaglio (City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle, 2004, etc.) and Davis (J. Frank Dobie, 2009, etc.) unearth the various fringe elements rampant in Dallas in the three years (from January 1960 to November 1963) preceding John F. Kennedy's assassination. These anti-communist and racist groups were essentially sanctioned by officials and created a dangerous climate for the president and first lady during their visit on November 22, 1963. Indeed, Kennedy had been warned not to come, especially after the violent reception of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson by Dallas crowds several weeks before. "Super-patriots" like Gen. Edwin A. Walker, formerly enlisted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in helping integrate Little Rock Central High School, had made an about-face and grown stridently pro-segregationist, distributing Wanted for Treason posters at the time of JFK's visit; billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt was bankrolling right-wing groups; Frank McGehee was organizing a National Indignation Convention; and publisher Ted Dealey, whose paper the Dallas Morning News routinely attacked the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, ran an incendiary full-page advertisement from Bernard Weissman's American Fact-Finding Mission on the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas. In this xenophobic, anti-liberal, anti–East Coast atmosphere, Lee Harvey Oswald purchased a mail-order rifle, which he tried out first by shooting at Gen. Walker through a window of his home. Minutaglio and Davis alternate their doomsday scenario with chronicles of the upbeat attempts at integrating and liberalizing Dallas--e.g., international marketing efforts by showman Stanley Marcus (of Neiman Marcus) and New Hope Baptist Church pastor H. Rhett James' engineering of Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to the city. Despite the calendar slog, the authors make a compelling, tacit parallel to today's running threats by extremist groups.

Kirkus Reviews