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Why did the Dallas leadership fear Communism, Civil Rights, and John F. Kennedy?

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Dallas was a hotbed of conservatism and anti-Communist fear. The city became the regional headquarters of the John Birch Society, which espoused the idea that Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were pawns of the Communist Party. The founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, believed that Communists controlled the Civil Rights movement and John F. Kennedy. Right-wing extremists popularized the idea in Dallas that Kennedy had sold out to traitors, and, though these leaders represented a fringe group, they swayed public opinion against Kennedy.


Other leaders, such as H.L. Hunt, the Republican Texas oil tycoon, also helped sway public opinion against Kennedy. Hunt was anti-Catholic and had been active in circulating anti-Catholic literature during Kennedy's campaign. Hunt and other Texas oilmen were afraid that Kennedy would repeal the oil depletion allowance that represented a large tax break for them, and they were very opposed to his regulation of business. Edwin Walker, a former Army general who resigned in 1961, also lived in Dallas and propagated anti-Communist beliefs. With Hunt's backing, Walker ran for Governor of Texas as a rabid segregationist and lost. In April of 1963, a few months before Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald bizarrely also tried to kill Walker but failed. The right-wing leaders in Dallas were also opposed to the United Nations, and Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. envoy to the U.N., was heckled and harassed when he gave a speech in Dallas in October of 1963, a month before Kennedy was shot. By the time Kennedy visited Dallas in November of 1963, public opinion and opinion in the Dallas press was running high against him, though many friendly crowds showed up before his assassination on November 22, 1963.  

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