The day began on a note of keen anticipation. Friday, after all, would take the presidential entourage into Dallas, that unrivaled bank and bastion of anti-Kennedy sentiment. It wasn't simply the distinction of having been the only large American city to favor Richard Nixon over John Kennedy in the 1960 election that indelibly tagged Dallas. No, it was the sheer emotion and staggering wealth of its opposition in the three years since then that made the city synonymous with Kennedy's bitterest critics. Above and beyond its role as a wellspring for anti-Communism, and anti-Communist paranoia, Dallas was the fount of some of the ugliest anti-Kennedy vitriol in circulation.
Foremost in everyone's mind on the morning of November 22 was Adlai Stevenson's visit to Dallas on October 24. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, an experienced politician in his own right, had encountered hostility before on the campaign trail. But it was nothing compared with the mob that descended on him as he left the Dallas municipal auditorium after delivering a speech in favor of U.S. participation in the UN. One well-dressed woman hit him on the head with a placard, and a college student spat in his face. "Are these human beings or animals?" Stevenson muttered as he wiped the spittle off. Afterward he pretended to treat the incident with aplomb, but privately he was shaken to the core. He had never encountered the kind of mindless, raw hate he saw on display in Dallas.
The Stevenson incident might have remained an isolated black eye but for a coincidental development. In a telling reflection of their growing influence and reach, the national news shows sponsored by CBS and NBC had recently expanded their nightly broadcasts from fifteen to thirty minutes. Just a few weeks before, the shoving and spitting would in all likelihood have remained a local story, filmed as it was by a local TV station. But the networks' suddenly larger appetite for graphic footage turned the story into a lead item, in the new way that many Americans were getting their news. Virtually overnight Dallas awoke to find itself stigmatized, its reputation for intolerance indelibly fixed in the national imagination. It was a revealing clue as to the stunning power of a new medium.
The White House's script for the day called for a direct, ideological assault on the president's right-wing critics; in a sense, it was to be Kennedy's opening salvo against the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination in 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, easily the most conservative GOP candidate since Robert Taft. The White House press corps seemed poised to play its role in propagating the day's message, too. The advance text of the luncheon speech to be delivered at the Dallas Trade Mart pointedly criticized "voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties," and was generating the desired buzz among the reporters. There was every reason to believe they would take the bait and make the president's challenge the lead of every story datelined Dallas. Only one possible development threatened to intrude on this Daniel-walking-into-the-lion's-den theme, and that was a replay of the previous day's public feud between Texas Democrats.
Since the end of Reconstruction, Texas had been a one-party state, like much of the South, and therein lay the true origins of the Democrats' internecine sniping, even though it was often portrayed as a clash of personalities. The state Democratic Party's hegemony was unnatural and increasingly untenable; the Texas GOP, once a political oxymoron, was growing larger by the hour. (After Lyndon Johnson was elected vice president, a Republican had won the special 1961 election to fill his Senate seat, the first GOP senator elected in Texas since the 1870s.) In the meantime, liberal and conservative Democrats were engaged in a tenacious, bitter brawl over the presumed soul of the state party, and this ferocious struggle had been bared for everyone to see during the first hours of President Kennedy's visit.
Texas senator Ralph Yarborough, a devout liberal, had quickly become furious about his treatment at the hands of Governor Connally, the conservative Democrat hosting the president's visit. They had already been feuding for weeks about such trivialities as who would stand where in receiving lines, and who would sit next to whom at banquet tables. With good reason, Yarborough believed that Connally was still scheming to diminish his visibility during the president's visit, to a point where Yarborough was not even being accorded the courtesies that a state senator from Amarillo would receive. The lack of an invitation to a reception at the governor's mansion in Austin was particularly grating, and Nellie Connally, always fiercely loyal to her husband, didn't help matters with her own sharp comments. Unable to take revenge against the governor directly,
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