As the 50th Anniversary Nears, Dallas Reflects Re "The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye" (Sunday Review, Nov. 17): James McAuley's evidence that Dallas was the "city of hate" that "willed the death" of President John F. Kennedy includes things like a lyric from a country and western song about Dallas, a line in a skit from an old Carol Burnett show and a picture of his Dallas grandmother taken shortly after the assassination with a look as if "fixed on a target." Oh, and the "Welcome Mr. Kennedy" ad that was published in a local newspaper had a black border. Sinister! As Dallas prepares for the 50th anniversary of that horrific day, Mr. McAuley writes that "pretending to forget has helped Dallas achieve some remarkable accomplishments" in the years since the assassination. "Pretending to forget"? It's been front-page news for months. The Sixth Floor Museum and John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza (designed by Philip Johnson) have been considered landmarks here for decades, and popular tourist attractions. Local theaters and talk shows are putting on all kinds of productions on the theme. A symposium on Dallas's reputation as "the city of hate" was held this month. Of all this, Mr. McAuley acknowledges only the symposium, but in passing, sniffing that it was held "quietly." Please. It was well advertised, drew 500 people, including the journalists Jim Lehrer and Hugh Aynesworth, and was prominently covered by the media. Dallas was no "city of hate": The crowds that greeted the president were large and friendly. And the city's right-wing establishment didn't "will the death of the president." That was done by an avowed Communist born in New Orleans who defected to the Soviet Union before returning here. One cannot argue with James McAuley's personalized portrait of Dallas's far right in the early 1960s and the negative publicity it generated for the city, but he unfairly paints the entirety of the Dallas establishment of 1963 with same brush. He doesn't mention that 2,600 of the city's "elite" gathered at a luncheon hoping to hear President John F. Kennedy speak on Nov. 22. Headline-grabbing John Birchers they were not. Yet penance was paid by all from "the city that killed Kennedy." Business contracts were canceled, and travelers from Dallas were treated rudely if they let on that they were from there. As a Yale freshman in 1972, I was branded "the fascist from Dallas" by an esteemed professor and humiliated by him before my classmates for an act that occurred when I was 10. The Kennedy assassination will forever be associated with our city; the stain will never wash away. Should our city officially apologize? But for those of us who lived through those dark days and the years of retribution that followed, we offered our apology with a pound of flesh.