"No one ever knew John Kennedy, not all of him."
-- Charlie Bartlett
The president doodled on a pad during his breakfast meeting with Democratic Congressional leaders.
Some of them thought his imminent trip was ill-advised; when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, had gone there in October, things had turned ugly. When he spoke at the Memorial Auditorium Theater, he was heckled and booed, and Frank McGehee, founder of the anti-communist National Indignation Convention, shouted questions at him through a bullhorn until police led him away.
"Surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I? " Stevenson asked as McGehee was led away. "For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance."
A few minutes later, as he was leaving the venue, wending his way through protesters, he stopped for a moment to speak to one of them. Cora Lacy Frederickson, a 47-year-old insurance executive's wife and admirer of Gen. Edwin Walker, slammed her sign--which reads: ADLAI, WHO ELECTED YOU? down on his forehead.
Stevenson, more stunned than hurt, reeled back.
"It's all right to have your own views," he said. "But don't hit anyone."
Later--as reported by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis in their book Dallas 1963--Frederickson claimed she didn't strike Stevenson intentionally, but that "[t]here were a bunch of colored people in back of me--I was pushed from behind by a Negro." (A Dallas Morning News photographer captured Stevenson and Frederickson at the moment of impact. Her tongue is sticking out, reminiscent of a mid-air Michael Jordan. There are no black folks anywhere in the photograph.)
Only then did Stevenson finally raise his voice, to tell the police not to arrest his assailant. As he was getting in his car, two men spat on him. The police got one, the other ran away.
But the president wanted to go to Dallas. To cancel the trip would be an admission that POTUS was afraid to go to a U.S. city. Just get through it, then Thanksgiving at Hyannis Port.
His brother Bobby didn't want him to go. Earlier in the month he'd gotten a letter from a Texas attorney and loyal Democrat named Byron Skelton, who thought that the president's proposed trip to Texas was a good idea in general, but that he should skip Dallas, which was a hotbed of far-right resentment.
"Frankly, I am worried about President Kennedy's proposed visit to Dallas," Skelton wrote. "You will note that General [Edwin] Walker says that 'Kennedy is a liability to the free world.' A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the president."
Skelton never received an answer to this letter, and the vice president didn't answer a similar letter he'd mailed to him, but Bobby didn't ignore it either. He'd passed it on to the president's special assistant and appointments secretary Kenneth O' Donnell.
O'Donnell worried he'd be seen as nervous and daft if he suggested removing Dallas from the itinerary, so he never brought it up to the president.
A 23-year-old law student who had just married a 65-year-old Supreme Court Justice was visiting the White House for the first time that afternoon, attending with her new husband the White House Judicial Reception. There was a private room upstairs for the justices and their wives, and the president was there, sitting in a rocking chair. According to Thurston Clarke's 2013 book JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, she was surprised to discover he was "not black and white, as he had seemed to be in pictures" but was "bright and glowing" and had "taken all the formaldehyde out of government."
After a while the president and the first lady moved downstairs to mingle--buffered by cabinet members and Justice Department officials--with the other guests. He stopped to talk with Treasury Secretary Douglas C. Dillon, who was about to fly off to the Far East with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and press secretary Pierre Salinger.
"You're going off to Japan," the president said. "I'm going off to Texas. I wish we could trade places."
Meanwhile, Bobby spent 45 minutes talking to Jackie at the reception. He was concerned about her--on Aug. 7, she had given given birth to a son who lived only 39 hours and 12 minutes. It was an auspicious date, the 20th anniversary of the president's rescue from a South Pacific island after the sinking of his PT boat during World War II. Among the doodles the president had made that morning were the words "August 7," a PT boat, and a sailboat.
All things considered, it was completely understandable that the president and first lady wouldn't be attending the party that evening. It was Bobby's 38th birthday; there would be others.
The first lady needed to be well-rested for the trip to Dallas. The president needed her to present well there: earlier in the day, he's asked the first lady's press secretary Pamela Turnure to make sure the first lady's hairstyle would survive the motorcade in an open limousine.
So they had a quiet dinner in the private area of the White House, and afterward they picked out the dress she would wear on Friday.
"There are going to be all these rich Republican ladies at that lunch," the president said, referring to a scheduled event at the Dallas Trade Mart, "wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you've got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple--show these Texans what good taste really is."
At least that's what she'd later tell William Manchester the president said.
Together the two of them looked through her wardrobe. She held several pieces up against her and he made his comments. They settled on a few old standbys. And for Dallas, she selected a strawberry pink Chanel suit with a navy blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/20/2018