An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (64 page)

Because Kennedy had been so cautious in backing the school and health bills, pollster Lou Harris urged him to understand the need for a more substantial domestic record. “Phase Two” of Kennedy’s administration “is now beginning and it is time for a new up-beat,” Harris wrote him in June. “The President needs some major and specific score-throughs. While the foreign policy crisis has dominated . . . [your] time and energies, the quickest, most easily understood, and most dramatic gains are likely to be on domestic issues.” Harris counseled him to make a September back-to-school fight for an education bill. It should become “a new number one domestic priority.” After an education bill passed, Harris urged him to announce “Medical Care for the Aged by ’62.” He suggested a three-pronged attack: “A frontal assault on the AMA as an obstructive lobby holding back progress,” a “grass roots” movement by “older people . . . who could make the Kennedy bill their rallying point,” and a direct appeal to a national audience “through three separate television shows.” Given the makeup of Congress in 1961, Harris’s advice was less a demonstration of smart politics than an expression of frustration, shared by Kennedy, at the president’s inability to make headway on two of the country’s most compelling social needs and on issues that could give the Democrats a significant advantage in the 1962 congressional campaigns. Although unwilling to bring either bill up again in the fall, Kennedy vowed another effort the next year.

NOWHERE, HOWEVER,
was Kennedy’s frustration more evident than on civil rights. Throughout the 1960 campaign and most of his presidency he felt underappreciated by civil rights activists. After watching Kennedy’s performance in the opening months of his term, Martin Luther King predicted that the new administration would do no more than reach “aggressively” for “the limited goal of token integration.” He told Harris Wofford, “In the election, when I gave my testimony for Kennedy, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership we’ve been waiting for and do what no President has ever done. Now,” after watching him in office, “I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.” James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was less convinced of the president’s good intentions, describing Kennedy on civil rights as nothing more than “quick-talking [and] double-dealing.” Bayard Rustin, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), believed Kennedy was “the smartest politician we have had in a long time.” At one minute, according to Rustin, he called black leaders together and promised to help them get money for voter registration. The next he cozied up to “the Dixiecrats and gives them Southern racist judges who make certain that the money the Negro gets will not achieve its purpose.” Rustin added: “This is the way all presidents behave. They give you as little as they can. And one of the reasons for that is they’re president of all the people and they have to accommodate all segments. . . . So they are constantly weighing where is the weight of the problem for me if I don’t act?” Rustin believed that “anything we got out of Kennedy came out of the objective situation and the political necessity, and not out of the spirit of John Kennedy. He was a reactor.”

Much of the resentment during the first six months of Kennedy’s term concerned the fact that he would neither sign a promised Executive Order desegregating federally financed housing nor ask Congress for a civil rights law. He saw either action as certain to anger southerners and lose any chance of support for other reforms. Having criticized Eisenhower’s refusal to act on housing by emphasizing that it required only a stroke of the pen, Kennedy began receiving pens in the mail as a reminder of his words during the campaign. In response, Kennedy “kept muttering and kidding about how in the world he had ever come to promise that one stroke of the pen.”

In May, the African American deputy DNC director, Louis Martin, wrote Ted Sorensen to say that the president’s silence on the issue showed the administration as “timid and reluctant to put its full weight behind Civil Rights legislation. . . . His enemies are now being given an opportunity to charge him with inaction in a very vital area.” The criticism angered the president and Bobby. They believed that they were doing as much as possible for civil rights under current constraints. True, when a Gallup poll in January asked people in the South whether the day would ever come when blacks and whites would share the same public accommodations, 76 percent said yes. But all the other polling data suggested that neither the North nor the South had a majority ready to see this happen soon. If there were federal aid to education, should money go to all public schools, including those practicing racial segregation? Gallup asked. Almost seven years after the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional and two thirds of the country said it supported desegregation in public schools and all forms of public transportation, 68 percent of Americans answered yes. In May and June, when asked if integration should be brought about by every means in the near future, only 23 percent agreed; 61 percent preferred gradual change. The Kennedys shared majority sentiment that peaceful demonstrations challenging southern segregation laws would do more to hurt than help bring about integration.

But it was not simply public opinion that restrained them. The Kennedy lawyers in the Justice Department believed that there were distinct limits to what the White House could do about racial injustices. Burke Marshall, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, told Martin Luther King that constitutional federalism placed severe restrictions on the government’s power to intervene in school desegregation or police brutality cases. The only substantial latitude the Justice Department had was to protect voting rights, and even there they had to struggle against the resistance of local southern officials to enfranchising blacks.

In March and April, a controversy erupted over hotel accommodations in Charleston, South Carolina, for a black member of the National Civil War Commission planning to attend the commemoration of the battle of Fort Sumter. When Kennedy wrote a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant III, the head of the commission, urging equal treatment for all commission members, southern delegates to the ceremony decried Kennedy’s unauthorized intrusion into the actions of a privately owned hotel. Grant’s response that the commission had no business interfering in “racial matters,” Kennedy’s inability to persuade any Charleston hotel to satisfy his request, and a decision to move the commemoration dinner to a nearby U.S. naval base that segregated its personnel embarrassed Kennedy and reinforced his determination to shun “racial politics.”

Kennedy’s relationship with Martin Luther King in 1961 reflected the administration’s eagerness to avoid too much entanglement in civil rights struggles. King was not invited to the Inauguration nor to a meeting of civil rights leaders on March 6 in Bobby’s office. As King biographer Taylor Branch said, “King’s name was too sensitive at the time, too associated with ongoing demonstrations that were vexing politicians in the South.” In late March, after King asked for a private appointment with Kennedy, O’Donnell told King that the “present international situation”—Laos, Africa, Cuba, and Soviet difficulties—made it impossible for the president to find time for a meeting. Only at the end of April did the White House agree to a secret, off-the-record discussion in a private dining room at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel between King, Bobby, Louis Martin, and several Justice Department officials. King was so self-effacing and agreeable during the meeting that he got a few minutes with Kennedy at the White House afterward, and Bobby gave him the private phone numbers of Justice Department officials John Seigenthaler and Burke Marshall with instructions to call them any time voter registration workers in trouble could not get through to the FBI.

The gestures were of a piece with other administration actions the Kennedys believed gave them a claim on the appreciation of civil rights leaders. A White House “Summary of Civil Rights Progress for the Nine Months—January 20 Through October 1961” stated the Kennedy case. It described the president’s Executive Order establishing a “Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity with far greater power of enforcement than held by any predecessor agencies” and its record of having persuaded “about half of the fifty largest government contractors to undertake specific ‘plans for progress’ involving recruitment, training, hiring and upgrading of Negro employees.” The committee hoped to enlist all fifty contractors in this program of “affirmative action” by the end of the year. More than “fifty outstanding Negroes” had already been appointed to high-level policy-making jobs in the administration, and government agencies were actively recruiting “qualified Negroes for federal service in the U.S. and overseas.” The Justice Department had filed twelve voting rights suits and intended to “support in every appropriate way efforts of Negroes to . . . register and vote.” The administration had taken legal action and given moral and political backing to implement school desegregation across the South. And the president had set up a subcabinet group on civil rights to coordinate all federal civil rights actions. Finally, the administration stated its intention to end segregation and other forms of discrimination in interstate bus, train, and plane travel everywhere in the country within a year.

The claim about desegregating interstate transportation was a good example of why the Kennedys had limited credibility with civil rights leaders. The administration had been reluctantly drawn into the controversy. In early May, thirteen black and white members of CORE boarded Greyhound and Trailway buses in Washington, D.C., to travel to New Orleans through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. The goal was to reach New Orleans by May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling. Although CORE had notified the Justice Department of its actions and a reporter had told Bobby, the White House itself had no advance warning of the trip. On May 15, newspaper stories about violence in Alabama against the Freedom Riders caught the Kennedys by surprise. Kennedy, who was scheduled to go to Canada in two days, saw the headlines as another blow to America’s international prestige. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses?” he asked Harris Wofford. “Tell them to call it off! Stop them!” When the Freedom Riders, several of whom had been badly beaten, abandoned the bus trip to fly from Birmingham to New Orleans and found themselves trapped in the Birmingham airport by bomb threats, Bobby asked Seigenthaler to go help them. “What sort of help do they need?” Seigenthaler asked. Bobby, who a week before at the University of Georgia had made a forceful statement of the administration’s determination to enforce civil rights laws as a way to assist the fight against international communism, replied, “I think they primarily need somebody along just to hold their hand and let them know that we care.”

The Kennedys believed that Bobby’s Georgia speech, which had won praise from blacks and whites, and Seigenthaler’s presence in Birmingham, where he helped get the Freedom Riders to New Orleans, were ample demonstrations of their commitment to civil rights and entitled them to cooperation and support from activists. A Gallup poll showing that only 24 percent of the country approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing and that 64 percent disapproved added to the Kennedys’ conviction that their actions showed political courage.

Rights leaders, however, believed that the administration was doing as little as it could and much less than needed to be done. Consequently, a group of Nashville students, despite warnings that they might be killed and counterpressure from Seigenthaler, decided to go to Birmingham and then complete the bus trip to New Orleans. On their arrival, they were arrested and imprisoned by local police for violating segregation laws. The activists, held illegally in “protective custody,” demanded immediate release to resume their trip. To keep the president clear of “racial politics,” Bobby told the press that only he and his deputies were discussing how to proceed. But Kennedy met with this team in his bedroom, where he sat in pajamas before an uneaten breakfast. All agreed that they needed a plan for direct intervention. They ruled out federalizing the Alabama National Guard, which would add to the sense of crisis and engage the president beyond what they wanted. Instead, the president called Alabama governor John Patterson, his most reliable southern ally during the 1960 campaign. Patterson, who had no intention of falling on his sword for the Kennedys, replied through a State House operator that he was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and was unreachable. When another call to Patterson from Kennedy brought a more direct refusal to talk, Bobby told the governor’s aides that the president would be compelled to send in federal forces unless Patterson agreed to protect the Freedom Riders. Grudging agreement from Patterson to act and pressure from Bobby on Greyhound to find a driver who would risk driving an integrated bus finally got the protesters on their way to Montgomery.

In order to get Greyhound on board, Bobby had been forced to threaten a company supervisor in Birmingham. “Do you know how to drive a bus?” Bobby had asked with controlled rage. When the man said no, Bobby exploded: “Well, surely somebody in the damn bus company can drive a bus, can’t they? . . . I think you . . . had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is, and somebody better give us an answer to this question. I am—the Government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.” Eavesdroppers on Bobby’s telephone conversation leaked it to the press, which ran front-page stories across the South charging that Bobby was backing and abetting the Freedom Riders. In addition to the bad publicity in the South, the reports gave the Kennedys little credit with civil rights backers, who saw Bobby as reacting rather than leading on an important issue. And they undermined the administration’s political influence with southern congressmen and senators, who now seemed certain to make life more difficult than ever for Kennedy on the Hill. “I never recovered from it,” Bobby later said of the newspaper allegations.