The incredible allegation that Ruth Paine did surveillance on Castro sympathizers

[Gene Kelly]

Reading about Buddy Walthers gave me more perspective on the law enforcement environment in Dallas.  There was animosity and jurisdictional friction between the DPD and Sherrif's Office.  And Bill Decker was a very different personality when compared with Wil Fritz.  

If you read the story about Eric Tagg's mother, I am more struck by the hostile reaction that Rev. Holmes received, so perhaps there is some truth to the 4th grade student reaction.  You should read the following account by Walter Own in Vanity Fair ("In Dallas, Some Schoolchildren Cheered the Day JFK was Shot"). It appears the author went to St. Marks, of all places (maybe he knew Hootkins).  Here is a quote:

 In line at the school cafeteria, some of the boys said they were happy about the assassination. My mother told me they were only repeating what their parents said. Later, she liked to boast that I had brawled with the sons of the “Texan Kennedy Haters.” (I hadn’t. She was confusing them with sons of “the Texan Racists,” whom I had scrapped with.) My mother’s finishing school in Switzerland had done nothing to prepare her for Dallas society in the 1960s, and she did little to accommodate what she called “the vulgarity” of the place. Fifty years later, mention of Dallas still brings the color to her face.

The Washington Examiner did refute the student cheering story in a March 2005 article, "Wrong from the Beginning" by Philip Chalk, which attributes its origin to Dan Rather, who is remembered (by the local Dallas CBS lead, Eddie Barker) as being "tendentious and unprincipled".  Apparently, Rather took the story from the Methodist minister and "irresponsibly put the hearsay on the air":

Approached earlier by the same minister with what was a second-hand account, Barker himself had run the story by the school's principal and some teachers, all of whom denied it outright. Because of the shooting, which took place at 12:30 p.m., the principal had decided to close the school early, though without telling the students why. The children at the school--including three of Barker's own--were merely happy to be going home early, he was told. There couldn't have been any spontaneous cheering at the news of Kennedy's murder, because no such news had been announced.

Michael Hogan raised this in a brief January 2011 EF thread, "Did Dallas schoolchildren cheer Kennedy's death?  In a 2013 interview with Austin Texas writer Jan Reid, she addresses this topic in a more balanced manner and states that that some respondents were extremely hostile to Rather (and Peter Jennings as well). While I don't know where the truth lies, I am sure there were crude reactions in many parts of the country where anti-Catholic and strong political sentiment existed.  I was 13 years old in a Philadelphia Catholic grade school when the news broke; we too were sent home early, but it was only an hour or two (since we usually let out at 3pm).  I don't recall being happy to get out of school a little early ... and everyone knew exactly why. The nuns were all crying (so was my dad when I arrived at home).  No one that I knew cheered that day ... 

Gene