This is the first time I have heard that the United States and the United Nations are rivals.” “I understand that some of these fearful groups are trying to establish a United States Day in competition with United Nations Day. Who knows what Kennedy’s people would do to him if he showed up in person to challenge their damned United Nations ambassador?Ībove the stage hangs a large banner: WELCOME ADLAI. Walker knows enough, after being arrested by Kennedy’s people in Mississippi, to stay away from the affair. Walker is leaning in close to the television for the live broadcast of the Stevenson speech. In North Dallas, Walker is finishing a fine meal at a friend’s house. Davis's retrospective on the paranoia and rage of the era, from which this piece-chronicling an October, 1963 visit by Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the hated United Nations- is excerpted. As right-wingers label the president a traitor and the United Nations a communist front, locals like Neiman Marcus chief Stanley Marcus tried to present a more tolerant image and push back against critics of the "City of Hate." The era is the subject of Dallas 1963, Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Hunt, and National Indignation Convention founder Frank McGehee-and, on the other side, Lee Harvey Oswald. The most prominent qualities of the paranoid style, according to Hofstadter, are "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." Propagators don't see conspiracies or.In the years before the JFK assassination, Dallas emerged as the epicenter of America's extremist movements, the home to far-right figures like former gener Edwin Walker, oil baron H.L. To understand the JFK phenomenon, it helps to revisit the classic lecture "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," delivered at Oxford 30 years ago by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (and published in a book of essays by the same title in 1965). Astoundingly, though, the book won the majority approval of the 20 professors, including four historians, who served on the University of California's editorial committee in 1991-92. The manuscript apparently went unpublished for years, and one is mightily tempted to say that it should have remained so. The assassination, Scott writes (in typically opaque prose), was "the product of ongoing relationships and processes within the deep American political process." What is this deep process? A virtual political Disneyland: the CIA, drug dealers, Somoza, Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, Oliver North. Deep Politics is an unreadable compendium of "may haves" and "might haves," non sequiturs, and McCarthy-style innuendo, with enough documentation to satisfy any paranoid. Indeed, its outstanding characteristics put it squarely in the tradition of most books about the assassination. In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this work. Among the plethora of new offerings on the 30th anniversary of the assassination is Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at the University of California at Berkeley. This figure includes some who toil in the halls of academe. Today, however, approximately 90 percent of the public believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK. After the Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964, a Gallup poll indicated that 56 percent of Americans believed the report's main finding: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was President Kennedy's assassin. Here the passage of time has only heightened public disbelief in the official account of the assassination, commonly known as the Warren Report. The phenomena surrounding the JFK assassination could not present a starker contrast. (The latest accusation surfaced only three years ago.)īut distortions of the record and questionable logic have always helped relegate Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories to the political fringes the official story remains intact. As with the assassination, explanations based on conspiracy have dogged the official story about Pearl Harbor. Like the assassination of Kennedy, the surprise attack was the subject of an executive branch investigation followed by congressional hearings. Kennedy with the public and scholarly attitudes toward Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor-the other "flashbulb" event that seared America's collective memory. It is instructive to contrast the mythology surrounding the assassination of President John F.
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