AR Times: “Ernest Dumas looks back to 1963. The nation was roiling from the civil rights movement and an Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus, was nurturing his political power with defense of segregation.
Into the story step John F. Kennedy, not long before his assassination; Orval Faubus’ sister, a JFK admirer, and Faubus’ father Sam, a socialist who contributed letters under a pseudonym during that turbulent time to the Faubus-despised Arkansas Gazette.
With your forbearance, I shall recount an important and long-ago but poorly noted interlude in Arkansas and American history in which I was a callow spectator. It involved the soon-to-be-assassinated president of the United States, an aged leftist hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, his adoring daughter, the governor of Arkansas, and assorted politicians and journalists.
Those events of 58 years ago, in my mind, offer a good lesson and perhaps an antidote to the craziness that afflicts Arkansas and the nation this spring. I refer to the revival of so many old conspiracy myths that, at least since the Red Summer at the end of World War I, sometimes plagued but more often only enlivened the body politic. You know: The socialists/communists are coming.”