Author Examines How Legacy of JFK’s Assassination Affected Dallas

For author Tim Cloward BA’85, MA’92, PhD’02, visiting Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas can be a somber and disorienting experience more than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

“I feel all tongue-tied and stumbly, like I’m standing around and don’t know what to do with my hands,” Cloward wrote in his book, “The City That Killed the President: A Cultural History of Dallas & the Assassination,” which examines how the event ostracized and culturally stymied the city and its residents for decades.

A high school teacher, poet, performer and arts activist, Cloward has spent more than 30 years involved in the city’s arts and recently turned his writing talents to focusing on the assassination’s impact on Dallas’ arts and literary scenes.

Cloward’s research revealed that the assassination was such a horrendous event in the city’s history that its impact couldn’t truly be examined until 2013 when the city sponsored a 50th anniversary commemoration.

“My original intention was to write a literary history of Dallas, but I kept finding fascinating material brewing up around the assassination,” Cloward said. “This was intriguing because everything about the assassination was surrounded by a larger silence and a sort of tension. So, I inadvertently got sucked into the JFK assassination black hole.”

Before Kennedy’s Dallas visit in November 1963, the city had begun developing a national reputation for embracing extreme political views. Dallas soon became known as the “City of Hate.”

Cloward wrote that this reputation meant that Dallas was seen in the nation’s eyes as complicit in the assassination.

“Where the city got tarred was completely the result of the reputation that Dallas had built up for itself nationally,” Cloward said. “One thing that I tried to do in this book was point out that we did not truly address the conspiracy paranoia that dominated Dallas’ public life in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It’s worth looking at because what happened in the past is incredibly relevant today.”

Although the assassination is one of the most written about episodes in U.S. history, and thousands of previously classified documents have been released, there has been a lack of closure to the event.

“It’s interesting that the more information that comes out, we are nowhere closer to finding any evidence that there was a conspiracy,” Cloward said. “Yet the perception of the event to the public appears muddier and muddier.”

With fewer witnesses to the events of the assassination still alive, the current generation turns more to conspiracy theories. Even to Cloward’s high school students, the killing of the president remains less a tragedy than a conspiracy joke.

Cloward said the country’s current obsession with conspiracy theories can be traced to the assassination and warns that such theories make society less prepared for the next pandemic or for misinformation.

“Those 1963 events in Dallas have become the origin point for a newer, more infectious strain of conspiracy paranoia,” Cloward wrote in an opinion piece published last year in The Dallas Morning News. “In Dallas, we’ve borne an immense historical burden because of our conspiracy-mongering past.”

As a cultural historian of the assassination, Cloward has searched far and wide for examples of people’s reactions to the event. He continues to search for little-known works that have not found their way to the light of day.

“One of the big questions I play out in my mind is, knowing that many people write poems in moments of trauma, there are no doubt a million unpublished tomes in people’s attics and file cabinets from that time,” Cloward said.