It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

Half a century since the Kennedy assassination. Alas, more than half the people in America still think there was some conspiracy.  For this I mostly blame Jack Ruby, who prevented a trial where the public could have heard the whole case against Oswald.  But that's the way it goes.  To this day people still bring up the bad evidence suggesting a second shooter, apparently not aware how easily it's refuted.

But lately I've seen something new.  Not about a conspiracy so much as a mood.  That Dallas was a "city of hate." As if that has anything to do with the shooting of a president.

For instance, we get this in Slate (and elsewhere): a letter from a Nelle M. Doyle to Press Secretary Pierre Salinger warning JFK away from Dallas.  She writes about the "hoodlum mob" in Dallas, and ends her letter thus:

The people are crazy, or crazed, and I am sure that we must realize that their actions in the future are unpredictable.

Rebecca Onion (though maybe this should be in The Onion) in Slate runs with it.

As Steven L. Davis and Bill Minutaglio, authors of a book on Dallas politics in 1963, write, Dallas was a hotbed of right-wing activism in the early 1960s. The city had strong historical ties to the KKK; in the 1920s, Dallas had the highest per-capita rateof KKK membership in the country. In the 50s and 60s, resistance to school integration and civil rights catalyzed rightist sentiment in the city.

Dallas was also home to Edwin A. Walker, a one-time general in the Army whose involvement with the ideology of the anti-communist John Birch Society and vocal opposition to Kennedy intensified after his discharge. Reverend W.A. Criswell, pastor of the powerful Dallas First Baptist Church, campaigned against Kennedy on the basis of his Catholicism during the 1960 election. And the Dallas Morning News, the largest newspaper in the state, was consistently conservative in its editorial coverage, attacking the NAACP, running editorials by prominent red-hunters, and commemorating the Confederacy in the name of “states’ rights.”

What does "right-wing activism" have to do with it?  Kennedy was killed by one nut--a communist nut at that.

In fact, I have to wonder if Onion is messing with us.  She brings up Edwin Walker.  She must know that earlier in 1963 Oswald attempted to assassinate Walker for his anti-Communist beliefs.

Or is Onion, like so many others, of the mindset that hatred is some physical thing that descended on Dallas that day and killed the President?  And people keep making this mistake.  Whenever someone is shot or attacked, certain pundits quickly check if (or sometimes just assume) the person who did it was affected by the wrong politics and go on to condemn those politics. (And then they find out that person had beliefs closer to their own and say it's unfair to judge a crazy person by his politics.)