An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (83 page)

Limited actions and hopes to expand the number of African Americans on the bench, however, could not balance the five southern racists Kennedy appointed to federal judgeships: Clarence Allgood and Walter Gewin of Alabama, Robert Elliott of Georgia, E. Gordon West of Louisiana, and William Harold Cox of Mississippi. During their tenure, they did all in their power to obstruct school integration and deny voting rights to blacks. West dismissed the Supreme Court’s 1954
Brown
v.
Board of Education
ruling as “one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time.” Cox, whose opinions were often reversed by higher courts, was an even more outspoken opponent of civil rights. His injudiciousness was stunning. In open court, he shouted at black plaintiffs that they were “a bunch of niggers . . . acting like a bunch of chimpanzees.”

None of this should have surprised the president and attorney general. Early on, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins had wired the president about Cox: On the bench, he would stand for “the mores of 1861. For 986,000 Negro Mississippians Judge Cox will be another strand in their barbed wire fence, another cross over their weary shoulders and another rock in the road up which their young people must struggle.” Furthermore, Bobby had interviewed Cox at the Justice Department. “We sat on my couch in my office, and I talked to him. And I said that the great reservation that I had was whether he’d enforce the law and live up to the Constitution. . . . He assured me that he would. He was really, I think, the only judge whom I’ve ever had that kind of conversation with. He was very gracious. He said that there wouldn’t be any problem. . . . I was convinced that he was honest with me and he wasn’t.”

There was much more at work here than Bobby’s naïveté. The tradition of deferring to Senate prerogative and assuring cooperation on a legislative program were more compelling than anything Cox told him. Cox was a good friend of Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland, actually his college roommate, and Eastland’s power as chairman of the Judiciary Committee was enough to produce the deference Eastland expected for his choice. Though Bobby denied discussing Cox with Eastland, he later told an interviewer, “The President of the United States is attempting to obtain the passage of important legislation in many, many fields, and the appointment of a judge who is recommended by the chairman of a committee or a key figure on a committee can make the whole difference on his legislative program.”

Though Wilkins told Kennedy that he had not “gained anything [in 1961] by refusing to put a civil rights bill before” Congress, Kennedy hoped that his restraint might pay off in the Eighty-seventh Congress’s second session. “He wasn’t a man to give up easily,” Wilkins admitted, though it was more than stubbornness motivating Kennedy. In fact, Kennedy had few hopes his patience would now result in less legislative friction over civil rights. Instead, he felt that his deference to the southerners on civil rights might get them to act on education or Medicare, issues that politically would be much more advantageous for him.

But it was a hope misplaced. In October 1961, HEW secretary Abe Ribicoff had told him that “the passage of any broad-scale education legislation will be a most difficult task.” A personal survey of congressional and public sentiment had convinced Ribicoff not to expect any affirmative action. “A broad program of grants to States for public school construction and teacher’s salaries is virtually impossible to pass. There is substantial Southern opposition to any bill for elementary and secondary schools. . . . Republican opposition to any general aid bill is strong, and is overwhelming against teachers’ salaries.” Ribicoff saw three principal impediments to reform: southern determination to preserve segregated schools, opposition to eroding local control over education, and resistance to providing aid to private or religion-based schools. Although he suggested a piecemeal approach in the coming session as an alternative to the failed comprehensive one in 1961, Ribicoff also believed that another unsuccessful effort at a more comprehensive bill might turn out to be useful in the upcoming elections.

Kennedy agreed, which is not to suggest that he saw education as principally a political tool. He strongly believed in the need for federal aid to education at all levels as essential to progress at home and abroad. But taking a bold stand on education, despite its poor legislative prospects, seemed a good way to counter liberal complaints about his timidity on civil rights and win Democratic backing in 1962.

It was much the same with medical insurance for the elderly. In February 1962, Kennedy reintroduced his bill to provide health coverage for the aged under Social Security. He encouraged public rallies to pressure Congress, publicly thanked a group of physicians favoring his program, spoke passionately in support of his bill before twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden, and took on the American Medical Association for opposing Social Security and calling his proposal “a cruel hoax.” But Kennedy’s passion (and that of organized labor and senior citizens) was insufficient to identify a formula that would disarm conservative opponents and satisfy a majority of liberal advocates. In July, the administration’s medical insurance bill failed in the Senate, where it fell short by 52 to 48. One newspaper summarized the defeat as “Kennedy’s Blackest Week with Congress.” Kennedy himself called the vote “a most serious defeat for every American family.” Once again, the only good news here was the political advantage it seemed to give Kennedy in pressing his party’s case for more congressional seats. (When asked if the fact that twenty-one Senate Democrats voted against him on the insurance plan would tend “to inhibit [him] in setting this forth as an issue,” Kennedy replied that it would not: “The fact of the matter is this administration is for Medicare and two-thirds of the Democrats are for Medicare and seven-eighths of the Republicans are against it. And that seems to me to be the issue.”)

Other domestic problems dogged him during the first half of 1962. In April, he sent Congress a special message on the nation’s transportation system, which he described as vital to domestic growth and productivity and the ability to compete abroad. “A chaotic patchwork of inconsistent and often obsolete legislation and regulation” burdened the country’s movement by air, ground, rail, and water. “Fundamental and far-reaching” changes in federal policies were essential to ensure the national well-being. And while he went on to describe in detail the many difficulties besetting everything from interstate highways to international aviation and inner-city traffic, he acknowledged that he had no clear answers and that Congress would need to “devote considerable time and effort” to identifying means to fend off “permanent loss of essential services,” which would then compel “even more difficult and costly solutions in the not-too-distant future.”

POLITICS WAS ANOTHER CHALLENGE.
After Kennedy’s election as president, the family had decided to run brother Edward—Ted, as he was called—for Jack’s vacant Senate seat. But Ted could not hold the office until 1962, when he would turn thirty, the minimum age required by the Constitution. In December 1961, Jack tested the waters with a rumor published in the
Boston Globe
about Ted’s candidacy. When House majority leader John W. McCormack called the president to propose his own nephew, Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, as an interim appointment, Kennedy had replied, “I’m putting someone in. I want to save that seat for my brother.”

Though the governor of Massachusetts technically held the appointment power, the selection was Kennedy’s call. The interim appointee was Benjamin A. Smith, Kennedy’s college friend, who was to stand aside for Ted in two years. Assumptions that Bobby was in line for the seat and that a likely political backlash against Kennedy nepotism would derail the plan both proved false. With regard to the former, Bobby’s collaboration with his brother inside the administration made him too valuable to send to the Senate. Besides, Ted was eager to run, and Joe insisted on it. Bobby remembered Joe as the moving force behind the decision. “He just felt that Teddy had worked all this time during the campaign and sacrificed himself for his older brother,” Bobby said, “that we had our positions, and so he should have the right to run.”

But Kennedy himself had doubts. Teddy was twenty-nine in 1961, with no credentials to speak of other than having worked on his brother’s 1958 and 1960 campaigns. He told Ted to test the waters in Massachusetts by speaking around the state. “I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there,” Kennedy told him. “I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.” But Joe saw no need for an apprenticeship or any test. “He felt that it was a mistake to run for any position lower than [U.S. senator],” Bobby remembered. “Certainly, he was as qualified as Eddie McCormack to run for the Senate or anybody else who was being mentioned in Massachusetts, [people] who were perhaps older but weren’t particularly outstanding figures.”

Kennedy remained uncertain nevertheless. In January 1962, a reporter asked the president, “Your brother, Teddy, in Massachusetts, seems to be running for something but none of us are very certain just what it is. Could you tell us if you have had an opportunity to discuss this with him and whether you can tell us the secret?” Kennedy replied, “Well, I think he’s the man . . . who’s running and he’s the man to discuss it with.” In March, when Ted announced his candidacy, he stated his opposition to his brother’s involvement in his campaign. It was a strategy for reducing the president’s political liability. “Well, in part, I am aware of the campaign,” Kennedy told the press, “but my brother is carrying this campaign on his own and will conduct it in that way.” In May, when a reporter asked the president about reports of “administration aid and comfort to [Ted’s] senatorial campaign,” Kennedy reiterated his distance from the primary contest. “What about your associates, sir?” a reporter probed further. “No member of the White House staff is planning to go to the [state] convention, nor will be, to the best of my knowledge, in Massachusetts between now and the convention.”

But of course, JFK, Bobby, and the White House were deeply involved. For starters, they schooled Ted to talk of a Kennedy dynasty with good-natured humor. When Kennedy biographer James MacGregor Burns told JFK of his interest in the seat and declared, “I’m sure I’m about number 99 on your list,” Jack graciously, but evasively, replied, “Oh, no, Jim, you’re number two or three.” When a reporter complained of “too many Kennedys,” Ted joked, “You should have taken that up with my mother and father.” Reluctant to step on Ted’s line, Kennedy responded to the same complaint with the deadpan observation, as “my brother pointed out, there are nine members of my family. It is a big family. They are all interested in public life.” And the great issues were, after all, centered in the nation’s capital.

According to Adam Clymer, Ted’s biographer, Kennedy “made it clear that a defeat would be not just Ted’s loss, but his own, too, and would not be tolerated.” In March, as Ted prepared to go on
Meet the Press,
Kennedy brought him into the Oval Office, sat him down behind his desk, and questioned him like a prosecuting attorney. (Kennedy ultimately was too nervous to watch his brother’s performance, which was more than adequate.) At a secret White House meeting of Massachusetts politicians in April, some of whom flew in from Boston under assumed names, the president pressured everyone to advance Ted’s candidacy. He “suggested discreetly using patronage.” And though few jobs were apparently delivered, “the hope of them was certainly dangled before a lot of ambitious politicians.” Ted Sorensen provided quotes for speeches and one administration aide took a leave of absence to work directly on Teddy’s campaign.

Kennedy himself dealt with the most potentially explosive issue jeopardizing Ted’s candidacy. In 1951, during Ted’s freshman year at Harvard, the university expelled him for having a classmate take his final exam in Spanish. After a year in the army, he returned to Harvard, in September 1953. He graduated in 1956 and went on to the University of Virginia Law School. Fearful that the cheating scandal would become a prominent story in the
Boston Globe,
the Kennedys decided to keep control of the issue by revealing it themselves. The president invited a
Globe
reporter to the White House, where he offered to provide Ted’s Harvard file if the reporter would mute the incident by including it in a biographical profile. Though the
Globe
insisted on making the profile a front-page story, it buried the details of the scandal in the fifth paragraph of an account innocuously headlined “Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident.” Other papers featured the story the next day, but they were no more than echoes of the
Globe
’s report. And with the
Globe,
now the state’s leading newspaper, downplaying the incident, Ted’s vulnerability was greatly reduced. It was an emphatic demonstration of shrewd politics and the press’s friendly attitude toward a president they liked and were reluctant to undermine.

Kennedy worried nevertheless that the scandal would hurt Ted’s chances of election. “It won’t go over with the WASPs,” he told Ben Bradlee. “They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and bankers.” The president urged Bradlee to have
Newsweek
look into the record of Eddie McCormack, Ted’s likely primary opponent. “I asked him what he meant,” Bradlee recalled, “and [he] told me that McCormack had resigned his commission in the Navy on the day he graduated from Annapolis on a medical disability. ‘Half of it was nerves and half of it was a bad back,’” Kennedy explained, “‘and he’s been drawing a 60 percent disability ever since up until six months ago.’” It was a perfect example of Kennedy hardball politics. Bradlee never investigated the allegation, but it put him in mind of the maxim “Don’t get mad, get even.”