Before the Storm (39 page)

At the White House, Kennedy dined with his friend Ben Bradlee,
Newsweek
Washington bureau chief. As was their custom, Bradlee told the President about next week's cover story: Barry Goldwater's bully prospects for the nomination. “I can't believe we'll be that lucky,” Kennedy exclaimed. “If he's the nominee, people will start asking him questions, and he's so damned quick on the trigger that he will answer them. And when he does, it will be over.”

The next day the Klan massed on the outskirts of Birmingham. Outgoing mayor Art Hanes refused to vacate his office, denouncing the businessmen who had negotiated with Washington as “gutless traitors.” Shortly before midnight explosions broke the heavy night air. The first bomb hit the home of Martin Luther King's brother, and the second hit King's hotel room (he was out of town). Dawn broke—Mother's Day—with Birmingham in full riot. And, for the first time since Reconstruction, America recognized a national racial crisis.

More stories on the subject of race showed up in the
New York Times
in two weeks than had in the previous year. “Wherever the problem of race festered,” declared a newsmagazine, “the name of Birmingham was invoked as a warning, a symbol, and an epithet.” In Chicago, blacks stoned policemen; in Nashville, white and black mobs did battle on the streets with knives; in Harlem, six thousand greeted black separatist Malcolm X with full-throated cheers and heckled a minister who praised integrationism. Civil rights protests broke out at Air Force bases in South Dakota and Nova Scotia; Cambridge, Maryland; Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee; Selma, Alabama; and Albany, Georgia; and by the next week it was news when a Southern city acceded to a court order
without
violence. Disturbances were reported only if they provided novelty—as in Jackson, Mississippi, where police ran out of paddy wagons and hauled hundreds of children to jail in fetid garbage trucks.

From Washington, Kennedy went on TV to declare that he would not permit the settlement “to be sabotaged by a few extremists”—that word again—“on either side.” He called up three thousand troops. The next day the
Newsweek
with Goldwater on the cover that had been so eagerly anticipated by the President was spoiled by the article that appeared on page 25: “Explosion in Alabama.” Kennedy's inner circle hunkered down to devise some way to cut
off the prospect of sending three thousand soldiers to every Cambridge, Raleigh, Greensboro, Harlem, and Knoxville in the country. The President first suggested legislating “a reasonable limitation of the right to demonstrate.” Only then did the discussion shift to the idea of a civil rights bill with teeth.

This was a novel proposition. At the beginning of the year King had implored President Kennedy to win his place in history by honoring the one-hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation by calling for an end to segregation in his State of the Union address; the event came and went with barely a word on civil rights. The Senate debated Rule 22—the filibuster, which, ever since the Supreme Court had nullified the Fourteenth Amendment's application to the states in the 1880s, had been used to stonewall hundreds of civil rights bills; Kennedy remained aloof. He defended a policy of pursuing racial justice through a few federal appointments; when it was observed that four of his judicial nominees were virulent segregationists, one of whom referred to blacks from the bench as “monkeys,” the President blandly replied that he thought they were doing a “remarkable job.” When he did propose some civil rights legislation, in late February, it was so meager it marked the nadir of the civil rights movement's expectations of him. Privately, Kennedy spoke of blacks mostly as a political constituency to be bought, appeased, or written off, as the occasion demanded.

The President's civil rights aides protected him from the facts; race was a Pandora's box they preferred not to open. One told him that blacks were “pretty much at peace.” Kennedy's own civil rights commission reported that in Mississippi, black businesses, then the Jackson office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were being burned to the ground, shots were fired at voting rights activists, and one hundred would-be voters had stood in line outside polling places for hours before being scattered by police dogs. When the President demanded an explanation, Burke Marshall of the Justice Department told him that the department had just entered suit on behalf of the one unfairly menaced registration worker of whom he was aware. (Marshall didn't add that the suit was to get a charge of disturbing the peace dropped against a man charged with disturbing the peace by getting whipped with the butt end of a pistol.)

But the President was beginning to get the picture. For his brother was involved in ongoing negotiations with George Wallace. Wallace's inaugural address was penned by the KKK man responsible for the 1957 Birmingham castration, Asa Carter. The new governor had changed the name of the Alabama Highway Patrol to the Alabama State Troopers, bolted Confederate battle flags onto their vehicles, appointed a ferociously cruel friend, Albert J. Lingo, to head the force, and mobilized it as a personal terror squad—a state
militia that could not be federalized. In late April, Bobby Kennedy traveled down to the state capital to impress upon Wallace the Justice Department's determination to integrate his university. He was greeted by protest signs reading NO KENNEDY CONGO HERE and the laying of a wreath, “to keep the enemy off sacred ground,” on the spot upon which Jefferson Davis (and George Wallace) had been inaugurated. On May 13 Wallace dispatched Al Lingo's troops to smoldering Birmingham. “Those guns are not needed,” pleaded Birmingham's police chief. “Somebody's going to get killed.” “You're damned right it'll get somebody killed!” Lingo responded, and then he led 250 men in a charge down the street clubbing any black man, woman, or child they could find.

By May 21—a day on which the White House dispatched greetings to a summit of African neutralists and got back an official protest against the “snarling dogs” of Birmingham—Kennedy was committed to a civil rights bill of unprecedented breadth, one that would ban discrimination in any place of public accommodations, a notion that struck political terror in the hearts of even many a liberal legislator. Senator Tower promised a lengthy filibuster unless the public accommodations clause, which “would take a virtual police state to enforce,” was struck—an ominous political portent, for Tower, a Republican, was out of reach of the political threats Kennedy could issue as a Democrat. White House strategists felt they had no choice. “Biting the bullet,” they called it, might be dangerous politically, but the alternative was worse: more protest, more chaos, more troops. After the introduction of the bill, Bobby Kennedy met with a group of key senators privately and desperately described the train of horrors that would follow if they failed to pass it.

In their conclusions the White House betrayed a constellation of unspoken assumptions about race relations—about social relations—in the United States: introduce bold legislation and the troublemakers would quit, like kidnappers who had been paid their ransom. Theirs was an almost desperate belief that America was by definition a placid place, if only “extremists” could be kept in check. That didn't just mean the racists who perpetrated the violence—but also those who “disturbed the peace” on the other side by
protesting
racism. The assumption was shared alike by Birmingham's liberal ministers and the
New York Times,
which implored Martin Luther King to give the city a chance to change slowly; by Birmingham's “moderate” mayor-elect, who proclaimed the citizens of Birmingham “innocent victims”; and by the Jackson, Mississippi, cops who charged pistol-whipped folks with disturbing the peace. All of them implied that everything had been just fine before irresponsible people began stirring the pot. It was the zeitgeist. “Responsibility” was a mantle even militants craved. Barry Goldwater was one of the very rare politicians who actually
welcomed
identification as a partisan. But his supporters on the Los
Angeles Republican Central Committee called themselves the “Responsible Republicans”—to distinguish themselves from Howard Jarvis's breakaway Conservative Party. “Americans for Democratic Action are more extreme than we are,” YAF's Richard Viguerie assured a reporter. Colonel Laurence E. Bunker, General MacArthur's old aide-de-camp, now a Birch leader, was quoted in the
New York Post
in a series called “Far Right and Far Left”: “We're right down the middle. Some groups advocate violence, others shrug their shoulders and read a book. We don't believe in either.” The editor of
The Worker,
the paper of the American Communist Party, was quoted as saying: “This is the headquarters for the responsible left. Over there”—pointing downtown in the direction of the office of the Trotskyist Progressive Workers Party—“is the irresponsible left.”

The zeitgeist, though, seemed to be beginning a retreat. On May 24 Bobby Kennedy was berated in a meeting with young Negro leaders who said they would sooner take up a gun to fight their racist countrymen than to fight on their nation's behalf overseas; tear gas marred the civil rights demonstrations on Memorial Day weekend in half a dozen cities; in Ohio two men chained themselves to furniture at the Capitol, vowing to stay until segregation was ended. And suddenly the White House seemed a little more worried about the political threat represented by Barry Goldwater. On the twenty-ninth—with a distressed-areas bill doomed to defeat at the hands of Southerners vowing not to deal with the Administration as long as it persisted in pushing civil rights—staffers staged an impromptu presidential birthday party. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger emceed (“Two score and six years ago there was brought forth at Brookline, Mass....”) and presented the gifts: a pair of boxing gloves for the showdown with Wallace and a model space capsule to be passed to Goldwater with a card reading “Hope you have a good trip, Barry.”

They were back to work within the half hour. The next day—Saturday—they worked through the night, scratching for a public accommodations clause that could quiet the snarling dogs. They comforted themselves with the assumption that their responsibility would make the extremism stop.

 

Sunday morning the snarlingest dog of them all showed up on
Meet the Press
and proved he could look as winsome as a puppy when occasion demanded. “I will stand in the schoolhouse door,” George Wallace responded confidently when asked what he would do on June II, registration day for new students at the University of Alabama. He proceeded to make it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world. He pulled out a card from his pocket and began reading: The Supreme Court had “improperly set itself up as a third house of Congress, a superlegislature.” FDR said that in 1937, Wallace explained with a
grin. “I concur in it.” Editorial pages around the country on Monday morning rang with praise for the governor's position. Declared the
Winona
(Kansas)
Leader,
“The very people who have the greatest stake in preserving the constitution” —Negroes—“are doing the most to destroy it” with their intemperate protests. Such editorials only made the Kennedys more determined in their belief that if they could only give the protesters what they were demanding, they could stop the George Wallaces of the world in their tracks.

The night before the showdown at the university in Tuscaloosa, Kennedy, speaking at a commencement at American University in Washington, D.C., gave one of the most magnanimous speeches of the Cold War. Intoning that “enmities between nations—and conflicts of ideology—do not last forever,” he announced the unilateral suspension of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. The decision brought a refreshing outpouring of good feelings from abroad. Perhaps that was on Kennedy's mind when he read over breakfast that Martin Luther King was promising a massive march on Washington unless the White House put its full weight behind the passage of civil rights legislation—then, hours later, when news filtered in that George Wallace had fulfilled the letter of his pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa—then the news, hard upon lunchtime, that cops in Danville, Virginia, had wielded their nightsticks and fire hoses to send forty-eight members of a city hall prayer vigil to the hospital. He proceeded to make what might have been the most portentously rash decision in the history of the American presidency: he decided to go on television that very night to introduce his civil rights bill to the nation. His aides remonstrated that there was no time to write a speech. He brushed them off. There was little calculation in his decision, little more in the outpouring of untutored emotion from the President that the American people saw on television that night. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said that June II. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Can we say to the world, he asked, “that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes?” No President had said anything like it since Abraham Lincoln.

In Jackson, Mississippi, an NAACP official coordinating a voter registration campaign—nonconfrontationally, self-consciously counterpoised to the supposed violence-provoking style of Martin Luther King—returned home from his evening's work well past midnight, as his family eagerly waited to tell him about the astonishing speech they had just witnessed on TV. Before he could make it to the door, Medgar Evers lay facedown in a pool of his own blood. His assassination rang in another week of violent civil rights demonstrations,
even riots. It wasn't supposed to happen. Kennedy thought he had given the civil rights protesters what they had demanded. What a nation thought it knew about itself disintegrated alongside John F. Kennedy's tidy notions about what it took to pacify a people four hundred years oppressed.