It’s the morning of Friday, 22nd November 1963.
President John F. Kennedy sits in a hotel room in Fort Worth, preparing for the short flight to Dallas. As he flicks through today’s edition of the Dallas Morning News, he pauses and looks up at his wife. With evident frustration, he says, “We’re headed into nut country.”
His weary comment reflects the tense political climate awaiting him there. Although the city had long been a Democratic stronghold, its politics began to shift during the 1950s. An influx of Republican-leaning voters from the North helped swing Dallas to the Republicans in 1952 and 1956. By the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy lost Dallas by a larger margin than any other major American city.
This new Republican enthusiasm in Dallas wasn’t just a consequence of shifting local demographics. It was also a product of the nationwide “Red Scare”, which fuelled suspicion of liberal institutions, organised labour, and perceived left-wing influences. It was the era of McCarthyism, of “Reds under the Bed”, and films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which suggested, through a metaphor involving pods, that your nearest and dearest could become a communist at any moment.
In Dallas, this mood was particularly intense. A group of powerful ultra-conservatives had taken centre stage, using their money and influence to ensure their message was heard. They bullied from the altar, the airwaves, and the editorial pages of newspapers, promoting a politics of fear and suppressing dissent in the name of patriotism.
At the forefront of these self-styled super-patriots stood Ed Dealey—the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
Dealey was a fervent anti-communist and outspoken critic of the United Nations, trade unions, federal aid, and social welfare – to list a few of his least favourite things. Under his leadership, the Dallas Morning News spearheaded a full-throttle shift to the right – attacking democratic institutions with a series of nicknames that would have made Donald Trump, a harmless child at the time, glow with pride. The American Civil Liberties Union became the “Swivel” Liberties Union, the Civil Rights movement the “Civil Wrongs” movement, and the New Deal the “Queer Deal.” Democrats, meanwhile, were variously portrayed as an assortment of “subversives, perverts, and miscellaneous security risks.”
On the morning of the assassination, a full-page advertisement appeared in the Dallas Morning News. Paid for by the American Fact-Finding Committee, a kind of analogue precursor to today’s online grievance networks, the ad carried the sarcastic headline, “WELCOME MR KENNEDY TO DALLAS.” Beneath was a series of rhetorical questions portraying Kennedy as a communist sympathiser and traitor to the Constitution. It was this ad that prompted Kennedy’s “nut country” comment.
Unbeknownst to Kennedy, five thousand “Wanted for Treason” leaflets had been distributed across Dallas. They displayed his image head-on and in profile, like a fugitive from justice.
At 12:30 p.m., Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, a downtown park named after Ed Dealey’s father.
He had been in Dallas for less than an hour.
Nine months later, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had been responsible for Kennedy’s death. In the course of its investigation, they also discovered that the Red Scare of the 1950s had produced the opposite effect on the alleged assassin.
In 1953, aged fourteen, Oswald was handed a leaflet protesting the impending execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – a married couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. The prosecutor in the case - a man named Roy Cohn – had insisted on the death penalty. Oswald sympathised with the Rosenbergs’ plight, and it sparked an interest in socialism that, in 1959, saw him leave the Marine Corps and defect to the Soviet Union. He lived there for nearly three years before returning in 1962, settling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The irony was striking. Kennedy had been killed in one of the most right-wing cities in America, yet according to the Warren Commission, the man who pulled the trigger was a communist.
However, like many of the Commission’s findings, this was either ignored or disputed. The Kennedy assassination became the template for modern conspiracy culture and the source of thousands of unanswered questions. How many shots? From which direction? Why did a man open an umbrella in Dealey Plaza on a clear day? Who were the mysterious three tramps? Did the limousine stop? Was the Zapruder film altered? The list goes on.
They are all part of assassination lore, questions I have examined for over forty years. In many cases, our need to create certainty from uncertainty reveals more about us than it does about those elusive six seconds in Dallas. In studying the images from that fateful day, sometimes we’ve zoomed in too far and lost focus.
After the events of November 1963, Dallas went on a fascinating political journey. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson rode a local wave of guilt and sympathy to carry Dallas. Thereafter, the city swung back to the Republicans and stayed that way until 2008, when Barack Obama won a majority - a result that would have seemed unthinkable in most American cities in the early sixties, but particularly in Dallas. Obama won in Dallas again in 2012, with a similar majority, and the city has remained Democratic ever since – voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala Harris in 2024. The super-patriots of Dallas’s past are, no doubt, turning in their graves.
Despite Dallas embracing a more moderate outlook in recent years, large parts of the country have travelled in the opposite direction. In 2016 and 2024 the country elected Donald Trump—a man who is no longer harmless but, somehow, still a child. Trump's political creed can be reduced to three rules: attack, deny, and claim victory. He learned them from his mentor Roy Cohn—the same Roy Cohn whose villainous pursuit of the Rosenbergs helped inspire a young Lee Harvey Oswald’s interest in communism.
In 1964, conspiracy theories occupied the political margins. Today, they often emanate from the centre of power. Birtherism, faked elections, immigrants eating people’s pets are just some of the outlandish theories promoted by today’s White House. Even Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has joined in, claiming without evidence that vaccines cause autism and that wireless technologies contribute to cancer.
The echoes from Dallas reverberate in America today: the pervading sense of paranoia and intolerance, the violence on the streets, at home and abroad, and the CAPS ON cheerleading on social media. The ultra-conservatives are again bullying from the airwaves, only this time it’s from the digital platforms they own and manipulate.
In the speech he never delivered on the afternoon of 22nd November 1963, Kennedy would have cautioned against those who confused "rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible.” He would have argued that, left unchecked, they “will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”
Two hundred and fifty years after declaring independence, America remains engaged in the same argument that has animated it from the beginning: whether liberty requires pluralism, compromise, and democratic institutions, or whether opponents are enemies whose legitimacy must be denied. Dallas in 1963 was one expression of that conflict. Today’s America is another.
On both sides of the Atlantic, and further afield, many of us can only hope that this politics of fear, grievance and conspiracy is temporary—and that America itself has not become Nut Country.
Martin Fitzgerald is the author of The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About the JFK Assassination, available here in hardback.
