In 1963, Manchester was asked by Jacqueline & the Kennedy family to research and write about the assasination of JFK. Read this chilling passage and let me know if it reminds you of any recent events.
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Manchester also discovered that Dallas “had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists … the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of
H. L. Hunt and his activities.”
“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”
Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause. For Manchester, who revered Kennedy, such responses, encountered throughout Dallas, were deeply offensive and would influence the book he was about to write.
Manchester also learned that in 1963 there had been 110 murders in Dallas—“Big D”—in what he described as the city’s “dark streak of violence.” “Texas led the United States in homicide, and Big D led Texas,” he wrote. He would come to believe that Dallas’s charged political climate had been a factor in the assassination, helping to further unhinge the already unstable Lee Harvey Oswald.
He also discovered that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip. “Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy … about his own foreboding. The Dallas mood was no secret,”
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/10/death-of-a-president200910
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