The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 94, July 1990 - April, 1991 Page: 173
692 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Exhzbztion Reviews
weren't "such a damn hick." Hunt called me one day and asked me
what my annual salary was. When I told him it wasn't all that grand
(under 12K as a matter of fact), he said, "Well, Mr. Greene, you're cost-
ing me more every year than your salary. I have a high-priced secretary
and a lawyer who go over my letters, and my time's worth a little some-
thing ... then you chop up my letter and waste about two-thirds of
what I've invested in it."
On the other hand, Dallas contained a rather large and effective con-
tingent of active Democratic women (Ann Richards, then a beautiful
North Dallas housewife, was one of my first "backers"). As soon as it
became evident that our editorial pages and my personal columns were
going to be as fair as we could make them, a wonderful windfall of
letters and phone calls came in to bolster me and my staff, about as
many from partisan Republicans as Democrats. Dallas's only serious
Republican officeholder at the time was Congressman Bruce Alger,
and he was such a lightweight that in several years not one Alger bill
ever made it into the books. In 1964 the Tzmes Herald was a leader in
helping get him voted out of office.
In my professional case, things were even more interesting because
the editorial page of the opposition paper, the Dallas Morning News,
was run by two men with quite opposite political and social views to
ours. Things never developed into personal vendettas, but the extreme
positions of the two papers made it almost inevitable that our editorials,
our editorial columnists, and our analyses would spin the political com-
pass like a sunspot.
I still find it hard to convince people that I probably had an easier
time in Dallas with a so-called liberal career than almost any other
major city. The newspaper quickly picked up a lot of friends who had
been sitting on the sidelines when both papers were writing things the
same way.
I knew most of the principals in the assassination drama well before
the final episodes took place. As was the case with a good many Dallas
newsmen, I knew all the police and judicial figures who came to fame
during the time of the assassination and its aftermath: Will Fritz, chief
of detectives; Sheriff Bill Decker; District Attorney Henry Wade; Judge
Sarah T. Hughes, who swore in President Lyndon Johnson; and Judge
Joe Brown, who conducted Jack Ruby's trial. Jack Ruby had been intro-
duced to me earlier when I had been taken to his Carousel Club for
lunch, and for months I carried in my wallet one of the "Good for free
drink" cards given out by Ruby. He came to my editorial office one af-
ternoon and argued for thirty minutes that I ought to write about his
"exotic" (dancer), Jada, who, according to Ruby, had a college educa-
tion. I tried to explain to him that newspaper editorial pages just didn't173
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 94, July 1990 - April, 1991, periodical, 1991; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101214/m1/197/: accessed May 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.