Today's liberal bashing reminds me of the vocal right-wing effort to discredit and demonize President Kennedy in the early 1960s. One of the leaders of this effort was Edwin Walker, a former World War II general who helped foment riots at the University of Mississippi when the school attempted to integrate by admitting James Meredith in 1962. Walker also ran as a fringe candidate for governor of Texas. Using language similar to the attacks President Donald Trump and his supporters would wage on his political opponents a half century later, Walker declared that civil rights demonstrations in Washington and Texas were “pro-Kennedy, pro-Communist and pro-Socialist.”
A
month before JFK was shot in Dallas, remarks by Adlai Stevenson were disrupted
by Walker supporters who held American flags upside down (a tactic Walker
encouraged), unfurled a banner that replaced the words Welcome Adlai with UN
RED FRONT, and tried to drown out Stevenson’s words with noisemakers.
The scene is recounted in masterful and harrowing
detail in the book Dallas 1963 by
Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis:
As one particularly combative heckler was escorted out, Stevenson
called after him: “For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the
redemption of ignorance.”
After the remarks, Stevenson was spit on and one protestor, Cora Lacy Frederickson, began hitting Stevenson with large sign. It read: ADLAI, WHO ELECTED YOU?
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