wednesday
October 30, 2013
Wednesday High 75, Low 70 Thursday High 82, Low 52
VOLUME 99 ISSUE 30 FIRST COPY FREE, ADDITIONAL COPIES 50 CENTS
Bush Center
ELLEN SMITH / The Daily Campus
Pulitzer Prize Winning biographer Robert Caro discussed President Johnson’s unique view of President Kennedy’s assassination at the Tate Lecture Tuesday.
Caro talks LBJ, JFK KATELYN HALL Contributing Writer khall@smu.edu
The assassination of John F. Kennedy has been told thousands of times over the past 50 years. Every detail has been presented in books, movies and articles from an array of different viewpoints ranging from eyewitnesses to White House officials. But the story had never been told from the perspective of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Author Robert Caro changed that last year with “The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” which chronicles the 47-day period from the assassination to the State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964. Caro spoke about the Kennedy assassination from Johnson’s point of view at Tuesday’s Anita and Truman Arnold Lecture of the Tate Lecture Series. “November 22nd, we should not forget, was a day in which not
only was a president killed, but a president was created,” Caro said. As one might suspect of a biographer, Caro recounted the events of Nov. 22, 1963 to the soldout McFarlin Auditorium as if he were telling a story. He told the audience about Johnson’s demeanor in the hours after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, from the motorcade to the emergency room to the plane to Washington, D.C. Caro revealed little known details about the assassination from Secret Service reports on the incident and interviews with living members of the motorcade. This includes first-person accounts from Gov. John Connolly, who was riding in the motorcade next to Johnson. “There was a sharp cracking sound. Some people thought it was a firecracker, some people said a motorcycle backfire, Connolly, because he was a hunter, knows what it is,” Caro said.
Caro uses accounts from Rufus Youngblood, the special agent in charge of protecting Johnson, to paint a portrait of the vice president as a composed, collected man in the wake of the shooting. “Youngblood was to describe [his demeanor] in a single word: calm,” Caro said. Caro also offered the audience a view into dynamics between the Kennedys and Johnsons. “The Kennedys had a nickname for him, they humiliated him, they laughed at him,” said Caro of the Kennedys’ treatment of Johnson. Robert Kennedy, John’s brother, and Johnson hated one another, according to Caro. “As a historian you really hate to use loaded words like ‘hatred,’ or ‘hate,’” he said. “But hate is not too strong a word — it’s no exaggeration — to talk about the feeling between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They hated each other.” These feelings were exacerbated
Profile
Wheaton hopes to shape world changers as Faculty-in-Residence
when LBJ called the grieving brother on the plane from Dallas to Washington, D.C. to get the correct wording on the Oath of Office. “He could have gotten the oath from any one of 100 federal officials,” Caro said. “Was he trying to get revenge? Of course, we will never know.” Though Caro has written four books on Johnson, he never gets bored with his subject. “I don’t think of these books as being just about Lyndon Johnson,” Caro said. “I never had the slightest idea from the first time I thought of writing books of writing books just about the life of a famous man.” The more Caro learns, the more he sees Lyndon’s time as president and his first days as commander in chief as a remarkable achievement. “The more detail you learn about how Lyndon Johnson did it, about what he did with Congress and what he did to Congress, the more amazing the accomplishment seems,” Caro said.
Editors’ note: In August 2014 SMU will debut the Residential Commons on-campus living model. Eleven Faculty-in-Residence were selected to live among students. This is part 11 of 11 FiR profiles.
People have a wide variety of often strange, unique fears, from being chased by devilish horned clowns to unhinged surgeons hovering over an operating table. Some fear long dark hallways, chainsaw-wielding psychopaths or bats. Chances are, that whatever it is that haunts the deepest recesses of a person’s mind can be experienced at Cutting Edge Haunted House in a section of downtown Fort Worth appropriately dubbed “Hell’s Half Acre.” The spooky attraction is operating through Saturday, making it the perfect Halloween hotspot. The house is open from 7p.m. or 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. or 12 a.m. depending on the day. Emily Manney, 19, from Watauga, Texas, was one of the first in line to enter Cutting Edge one night recently. “There was this guy chasing me with a chainsaw, and I was like ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ But it was great,” she said. Started in 1991, and currently the Guinness record holder for
REBECCA KEAY / The Daily Campus
to be exposed to a variety of events, topics and success stories spanning a number of fields and areas of expertise. “Anything the students might be interested in, we probably have it here,” Wheaton said. “We have 11 Faculty-inResidence...[which will allow] the students to see those different pieces they may not see because they’re in their major.” In particular, Wheaton is looking to explore with students the concept of embodying SMU’s mission statement and growing to be a “world-changer.” From her
experience running her own nonprofit organization, Wheaton said, “a lot of the things [her organization does] is worldchanging.” “[Topics of discussion are] probably going to be...things perhaps a bit out of the normal,” Wheaton said. “Out-of-the-box ways you can do great things with whatever you’re doing.” One issue in particular related to “world-changing” that Wheaton wants to bring to the forefront of discussion is
WHEATON page 3
STAFF REPORTS Authorities investigated a “suspicious package” found by security near the Bush Avenue entrance of the George W. Bush Presidential Center around 7:42 a.m. Tuesday. The all-clear was given after a two-hour investigation which included Dallas Police, Fire-Rescue and Hazmat, SMU Police, a bomb squad, K9 bomb-detection team and University Park Police and Fire Department. Students, faculty and staff received an SMU Alert email around 8:30 a.m. announcing police action on campus and advising them to avoid SMU Boulevard and Bush Avenue. At 10:44 a.m. SMU Alert said that police action on campus had ended and that the area would
return to normal activities. Around 10 a.m. the Dallas bomb squad cut into and x-rayed the package. At 10:32 a.m. The Bush Center tweeted: “We have received the all clear from law enforcement personnel. The Bush Center has resumed normal operations.” Moody Coliseum and Crum Basketball Center, which were closed during the investigation, resumed activities as well. The George W. Bush Library is offering refunds to visitors who pre-purchased tickets Tuesday for between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. According to The Dallas Morning News, officials did not report the contents of the package, only that it was “non-hazardous.” There was also no comment on whether it was left intentionally or accidentally.
Local haunted house has record-breaking scares Brooke Bordelon Contributing Writer bbordelon@smu.edu
Professor Elizabeth Wheaton
‘Suspicious package’ ends with no threat
Halloween
KATELYN GOUGH Assignments Desk Editor kgough@smu.edu
Elizabeth Wheaton will join 10 other SMU faculty members to complete the Faculty-inResidence program as part of the new Residential Commons to open fall of 2014. An economics professor in Dedman College, Wheaton said she signed on to be a part of the program with the intention to further engage students across campus. “I have about 200 students a semester, so I’m looking for ways to interact with them,” Wheaton said. “You can only do so much in the classroom.” Wheaton sees this very specifically in working with firstyears, for whom professors “can influence their lives quite a bit” as they step into a completely new environment. The Faculty-in-Residence program will allow new students
RYAN MILLER / The Daily Campus
Police, a K-9 bomb-detection team, Hazmat and Fire-Rescue investigated the package outside the entrance to the Bush Center Tuesday.
“World’s Largest Walk Through Haunted House,” Cutting Edge occupies an abandoned 105-year-old meat packing plant — chosen specifically for its creep factor. Retired high school teacher Todd James, now owner and founder of the gargantuan house of horror, insists that size was never the goal. Cutting Edge emerged from a collaboration of haunted houses that Todd and his friends and family operated in the North Texas area and Austin, Texas. “It wasn’t about being the biggest, that wasn’t the decision,” said James. “Our decision was let’s pull the team back together and let’s all focus on doing one thing, one event, and just be the best at it. That was the goal. And the big just came out of it.” Due to its size and success, Cutting Edge has been featured on a myriad of “Best Haunted Houses” lists over the years and has received nods of approval from papers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Dallas Morning News. In 2009, the attraction was featured in Travel Channel’s “America Haunts,”
a show that profiles “the most terrifying, well-orchestrated haunted houses” in the United States. According to James, the creation of Cutting Edge is a product of a meeting of minds of everyone on the team — from ticket salesmen, to the people who work in the parking lot, to the actors who spook those brave enough to take the 55-minute walk through the attraction. “We have an idea board in the back and people come up and say ‘hey we’ve got this great idea’ and we put it on the board. It doesn’t matter where it comes from if it’s a great idea it’s a great idea,” said James. From the standard dead guy hanging from the ceiling to the more obscure psychiatric ward room with a single little girl standing completely still and wearing a bloody, torn white dress, cutting Edge definitely seems to have pretty much everyone’s fears covered. The attraction ends with an alarming pitch-black maze where patrons are told to find the door that says, “I want to live” before time runs out and they die. No one ever finds the