The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [478]
As Air Force One flew westward from the Maryland air force base, Kennedy was heading to a Texas that was a far different place from what it first appeared to be. From above, the state looked like a place of endless vistas and almost limitless horizons. As Kennedy well knew, political Texas was a narrow, convoluted, dangerous place rife with betrayals and mistrust. The Texas Democrats were feuding, wasting their energy fighting one another instead of their common Republican opponents. That was politics as it always was, an impossible brew of the sublime and the ugly, the passionate and the calculated, public idealism and private cynicism. Matters were so bad that the state’s liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and its conservative Governor John Connolly could hardly manage a civil conversation.
That was a matter that Kennedy would deal with, but he was traveling here primarily because a man who was running for president followed the scent of money, and Texas was big money. For months he had been pushing the Texas Democrats to set up a major fund-raiser, an event that would allow him to take home a million dollars or more, money that was fuel to power his campaign.
Every time Kennedy left the safe, confining presence of the White House, he had to know that someone might be out there looking at him with the eyes of a killer, if nor the hands and the will. Of the thirty-four presidents who had preceded him, three had been assassinated, and attempts had been made on the lives of three others. During the first thirty-four months of his presidency, the Secret Service had noted twenty-five thousand threats against the president and listed one million names on its “security index” of those who represented possible threats.
Early in November, the president’s trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Navy game had been canceled, possibly because the Secret Service heard that Cuban exiles were planning to kill Kennedy as he sat watching the game. His trip to Miami went on as planned, though an FBI informant had warned of a plan to assassinate Kennedy from a high building in a southern city and some of the former members of Brigade 2506 had boasted that they would kill him.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, Dallas was festooned with five thousand handbills headlined: WANTED FOR TREASON. The president’s face stared out like a criminal’s picture tacked to the post office wall. The papers declared that Kennedy was wanted for “treasonous activities” for such measures as giving up American sovereignty to the “communist controlled United Nations,” betraying the forces of a Free Cuba, and approving the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. There was a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News that made similar charges, the page bordered in black like a mourning card.
That morning the president was sitting in his suite at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth when he saw the advertisement. “Can you imagine a thing like that?” he said, looking at the page with distaste. Kennedy was frightened by the dreadful propensity of mass man to follow demagogues leading him to disaster with mindless slogans. “You know,” the president said, turning to Jackie, “we’re heading into nut country today.” As Kennedy paced the floor, his thoughts turned not to the surly protesters who might line the streets, stimulated by such fare as the advertisement, but to the previous evening, when he had been among enthusiastic supporters at a massive rally at Houston Coliseum. It had been a splendid evening, though one of the Texas advance men, Jack Valenti, had noticed that Kennedy tried to