Echoes of Dallas’ reaction resonate nearly 50 years after JFK assassination

Echoes of Dallas’ reaction resonate nearly 50 years after JFK assassination
By JEFFREY WEISS
Dallas Morning News
05 January 2013

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In January 1963, if you’d asked people more than a day’s drive from Dallas what they knew about the city, lots of them would have come up dry. After Nov. 22, of course, that had horribly changed.

Around the world, Dallas was not simply the place a president had been killed. It was the “City of Hate,” the “City That Killed Kennedy.”…

Time for closure

Dallas residents who traveled in the months after the assassination tell similar stories of how they were treated.

Longtime philanthropist Ruth Altshuler remembers a phone call from a daughter visiting New York City. Her daughter’s credit card was rudely handed back by a clerk who realized it belonged to someone from Dallas.

These days, Altshuler chairs the committee planning the 50th anniversary memorial event. She’s setting up a brief ceremony long on somber dignity and short on discussions of Dallas’ reputation in 1963.

“I think we need and want closure,” she said. “It has just dragged on so long.”

Plans for the ceremony include two short speeches. One of the scheduled speakers is Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian David McCullough. The other is the current Dallas mayor.

Rawlings would like the world to see that Dallas has grown into the sort of “new frontier” that Kennedy aspired to so many years before.

But he doesn’t expect to talk much about what happened to this city after the assassination. This won’t be the time for that, he said.

“We need to be authentic and make sure we don’t try to do too much,” he said. “We want this to be more about Kennedy than Dallas.”