November 22, 2013

Don't Blame Dallas for JFK's Assassination

By Ben Voth
  The nation remembers the 50th anniversary of one of the more stunning assassinations in world history. Riding in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. The effort to understand this staggering death as text has taken decades to study and yet remains enigmatic for many. In the midst of the historical revisionism, is the demonized city of Dallas -- "the city that killed a President." The pejorative shadow under which Dallas has dwelled for fifty years is undeserved and part of a larger ideological rejection of Texas and the conservative politics common to the city and the state. In the common revisionist telling of the assassination, Dallas was a city that hated President Kennedy for being too soft on Communism. Advertisements in the Dallas newspaper at that time argued strongly against the President's politics. The Dallas Morning News headlined the era this way recently, "Extremists in Dallas created volatile...(Read Full Article)