›› Photos: 1963: President John F. Kennedy visits El Paso
›› Archive photos: El Pasoans learn of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
›› Photos: 1960: Senator John F. Kennedy brings his campaign for President to El Paso
›› Tales from the Morgue: 1963: El Paso leaders stunned by assassination of President John F. Kennedy

AUSTIN >> President John F. Kennedy was shot down 50 years ago today as his motorcade wound through Downtown Dallas. Five months earlier, the president began planning the trip in an El Paso hotel suite.

It was one of several fateful acts JFK took during his brief swing through El Paso June 5-6, 1963. Together, they helped define the final phase of his brief presidency.

Kennedy made the trip to El Paso in part to fulfill an important Cold War promise he had made a year earlier.

While he was at the Hotel Cortez, he also worked on one speech that helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war and another that set a civil rights agenda that his successor would be left to execute, said 34th District Judge William Moody, who has made a careful study of the trip.

Even so, politics was the primary reason for Kennedy's journey to El Paso -- and his subsequent trip to Dallas -- several prominent historians have written.

"By (former Texas Gov.) John Connally's account, President Kennedy had been pushing for more than a year and a half to come to Texas, extending back to a time even before Connally became governor" in January 1963, Connally's biographer, James Reston Jr., wrote in 1989:

"The state of Texas, whose native son was vice president and which had provided the margin of victory in 1960, had contributed virtually nothing to the national Democratic Party since his election, and the party labored under a $4 million debt. The flow of 'oil' into the tanks of the national party was long overdue. If the president was irritated at having to travel to Texas, his irritation lay in the necessity of the president himself having to unclog the pipes when his vice president or a strong governor should have been able to handle the job without him."

So during a June swing through the West, JFK made time for a jaunt to El Paso. After touring Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Kennedy's motorcade drove through El Paso with the president riding in the same Lincoln limousine he'd be shot in a half-year later, Moody said.

By mid-1963, Kennedy was seriously considering whether to dump his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, from the ticket when he ran for re-election in 1964, historian Robert A. Caro writes in the fourth volume of his monumental biography of LBJ.

Contrary to the claims of several court historians, Caro writes, Kennedy and his inner circle didn't have much respect for the former Senate Majority Leader. Behind his back, they referred to him and his wife, Lady Bird, as "Rufus Cornpone and his little pork chop."

Johnson had unparalleled legislative skill, but Kennedy was wary of handing too much authority to his domineering vice president. He'd put LBJ on the ticket in 1960 to help carry Texas and other southern states, but by 1963, it looked as if Johnson couldn't pull it off again.

President John F. Kennedy gets into a car in front of the Hotel Cortez.
President John F. Kennedy gets into a car in front of the Hotel Cortez. (El Paso Times file photo)

As civil rights became a more polarizing issue in the South, LBJ had taken a firmer stand in favor of it, thus diminishing his influence among segregationist, Democratic powerbrokers in Congress.

At the same time, Johnson was losing control of his former protégé, Connally, who would be shot along with Kennedy in Dallas.

Connally was eager to show that he -- not Johnson -- controlled the Democratic Party fundraising in Texas and he wanted to distance himself from the more liberal Kennedy. So in early 1963, Connally stalled the president, claiming he was too busy with his first legislative session as governor to host a fundraiser.

In the Hotel Cortez in El Paso in June, Kennedy got the vice president and the governor into the same suite.

"Well Lyndon, are we ever going to get this trip to Texas worked out?" Caro quotes the president as saying.

Johnson replied, "Well, the governor is here, let's find out."

Johnson tacitly was admitting that his former aide now was the master of Texas Democrats. That point was underscored on Oct. 4, 1963, when Connally flew to Washington, D.C., and worked out the agenda for Kennedy's November trip to Texas unbeknownst to Johnson. The itinerary included visits to Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas before an evening fundraiser in Austin -- the most liberal city in the state.

Politics wasn't JFK's only business in the Hotel Cortez, Moody said.

The president also wanted to make good on a pledge he made a year earlier on a trip to Mexico City. Kennedy had told Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos that he would cede land in El Paso along the ever-shifting Rio Grande -- the Chamizal -- back to Mexico and take steps to stabilize the river's course.

"It was the first time the United States ever gave back any land," Moody said.

The issue of the Chamizal was more important to Mexico than the United States. But Moody said it helped secure a crucial vote when the Organization of American States voted unanimously on Oct. 23, 1962, to endorse an American naval blockade of Cuba at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis.

The vote effectively isolated Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro in his own hemisphere after he allowed the Soviet Union to place nuclear weapons on his soil, Michael Dobbs wrote in his 2008 history of the crisis, "One Minute to Midnight."

In El Paso the following June, Kennedy still had work to do to carry out his promise to Mexico.

He met in his suite with Ambassador to Costa Rica Raymond Telles, an El Pasoan, and Mayor Judson Williams. Residents living in the area to be returned to Mexico were balking at the Chamizal Treaty, which was still being negotiated, Moody said.

"The president asked Telles, who grew up in the area, to go down and find out what the problem was," Moody said.

The ambassador later reported that residents weren't opposed to selling their homes, but the appraisal system being used -- the fair-market value method -- would not allow them to buy new ones outside their humble neighborhood, Moody said.

Kennedy ordered his staff to use a different method that would allow residents to relocate. The Chamizal Treaty would be ratified by both countries, but not until after Kennedy had been killed.

After the visitors had gone on June 5, Kennedy worked into the early hours of June 6 on two of the most significant speeches of his presidency, said Moody, who has interviewed JFK's principal speechwriter, the late Theodore Sorensen.

One would be delivered just four days later, on June 10, 1963, at a commencement at American University in Washington, D.C.

The speech was intended to announce Kennedy's willingness to open negotiations that eventually would result in the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The United States and the Soviet Union had been engaged in an orgy of nuclear testing, but the missile crisis in October 1962 sobered Kennedy and Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev.

In his book, Dobbs described how events began to spin put of leaders' control as the crisis reached its peak.

A nuclear-armed jet overshot a runway in Indiana. A U2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba without Khrushchev's permission. Lacking outside communications, a Soviet submarine commander had to be talked out of firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the American warships that were pursuing him. Soviet ground troops trained tactical nuclear missiles on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, just 15 miles away.

Kennedy and Khrushchev both knew that it would be almost impossible to keep a limited nuclear exchange from becoming general. So as Kennedy and Sorensen worked on the American University speech, they tried to underscore the devastation nuclear war would wreak on everybody.

"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet," one of the speech's most famous passages says. "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

Perhaps because of the speech and the treaty it led to, the superpowers never again came so close to nuclear war.

As they labored late into the night at the Hotel Cortez, Kennedy and Sorensen worked on another major speech, to be delivered from the Oval Office on June 11, just a day after the American University address. In it, the president called for major civil rights legislation.


As with the Chamizal Treaty, it wasn't until after Kennedy was murdered that that the civil-rights bill was passed and it can be argued that only someone with Johnson's legislative skills could have done it.

But when he ascended to the presidency, LBJ said his first task was completing the Kennedy program and the oval office speech was a fundamental part of it.

When news of the assassination broke, Moody said it seemed to hit El Paso harder than other cities.

"They just dismissed school," Moody said.

As it is today, it was a Friday, but all the night's football games -- and pretty much everything else -- was cancelled, Moody said.

"It's an event that probably couldn't occur again," Moody said. "For the world to stop like that, I don't think it's possible."

Marty Schladen may be reached at 512-479-6606.