Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (68 page)

In taking this stand Kennedy disappointed many liberals, who considered his tax cut a boon to business and upper-income interests. They called instead for tax reform, increased social spending, and investment in public works. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith branded the cut as "reactionary Keynesianism" and labeled Kennedy's announcement as the "most Republican speech since McKinley."
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Still, the President conciliated some reformers by accepting, however cautiously, the central Keynesian idea that compensatory fiscal policies, including short-run budget deficits, could stimulate economic growth. No President before him had dared publicly to assume such a position.
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In this sense his quest for a tax cut, which ultimately passed in 1964, left an important legacy to policy-making.

Notwithstanding these varied legislative initiatives, Kennedy's record in the realm of domestic policies was hardly stellar, for three reasons. The first was his own uninspiring leadership in this area. As earlier in his career, Kennedy was a cool and unpassionate politician when he dealt with domestic issues. He identified with moderates, not with liberals, whom he disdained as "honkers." He also disdained congressional leaders, refusing to court them personally. Above all, he did not much care about domestic issues. He told Sorensen, hard at work on the inaugural address, "Let's drop the domestic stuff altogether." Sorensen did, and the address focused almost exclusively on foreign affairs, Kennedy's abiding concern. On other occasions JFK made no pretense of hiding his priorities. "Foreign affairs," he once remarked to Nixon, "is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn't it? . . . I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, compared to something like Cuba?"
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Second, Kennedy faced a line-up on Capitol Hill that he expected would defeat most major liberal initiatives. Conservative Democrats, many of them from the South, continued as since 1938 to dominate key committees and to form informal but effective coalitions with conservative Republicans. Johnson tried to overcome this coalition, but as VicePresident he was far weaker on the Hill than he had been while majority leader of the Senate. Congress defeated or refused to take action on a number of Kennedy proposals, including health insurance for the aged and creation of a Department of Urban Affairs.

When liberals urged Kennedy to fight for his programs, he reminded them of his lack of mandate in 1960 and of the political realities on Capitol Hill. Citing Thomas Jefferson, he said, "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." The President also hated to lose, for he recognized that presidential prestige depended in part on maintaining an aura of effectiveness. One had to conserve one's resources for major battles. "There is no sense in raising hell, and then not being successful," he said. "There is no sense in putting the office of the Presidency on the line on an issue, and then being defeated."
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Kennedy also failed to secure another key issue on the liberal agenda, federal aid to education. Although he supported the idea, he encountered stiff opposition from southerners such as Howard Smith of Virginia, head of the House Rules Committee. Smith proclaimed that the education bill sought to "aid the NAACP and complete the subjection of the South."
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Religious conflicts further hurt the bill. As a Roman Catholic Kennedy was politically sensitive to charges that he secretly favored federal support of parochial schools. When he refused to endorse such aid, liberal Catholics in Congress, including John McCormack of Massachusetts (who later replaced Rayburn as House Speaker), deserted the larger cause. The bill then failed to escape the Rules Committee. The fate of the school aid bill, like that of most important measures on the Hill, reflected the continuing power of special interests in American politics, in this case the organized Protestant and Catholic churches. It also exposed persistent divisions within American society: differences along regional lines, among others, frequently cut across more obvious "liberal" versus "conservative" splits and greatly complicated policy-making.

Third, Kennedy's programs reflected the wider limitations of liberal Democratic politics. Many of his efforts manifested an interest group politics that aided influential lobbies a good deal more than the poor and the powerless. An Omnibus Housing Act passed in 1961 that offered federal support for urban renewal did more to help developers, construction unions, and Democratic activists in the cities than it did to improve housing for the poor. A Manpower Development and Training Act in 1962 retained some congressional support in the next six years, but the act mainly subsidized officials and private interests who provided the training. It had at best a marginal impact on unemployment. An Area Redevelopment Act, approved in 1961, funneled federal money to Appalachia and other "depressed areas" but also had little effect, in part because it was ill funded. Worse, opponents came to perceive it as pork barrel legislation for key Democratic congressional districts. Congress refused to replenish the ARA's loan fund in 1963 and scrapped the program in 1965.
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Other liberal efforts were well intended but in some ways misconceived. The mental health law, for instance, assisted many not-so-sick people who were permitted to leave mental hospitals and gravitated to general hospitals, nursing homes, or community facilities. But it flung many severely and chronically ill mental patients onto the not-so-tender mercies of communities that lacked the will, the money, and the medical knowledge to care for them. In time, deinstitutionalization exacerbated social problems, including long-range drug addiction and homelessness.
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The tax cut especially revealed the limitations of Kennedy-style domestic policy. When finally approved in 1964 it marked a considerable change in federal tax policy. The top marginal tax rate on individuals was cut from 91 to 70 percent; the tax rate on the lowest bracket fell from 20 to 14 percent. Corporate tax rates dropped from 52 to 48 percent. The law was estimated to save taxpayers $9.1 billion dollars in 1964.
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Heller and others were delighted, crediting the law for the extraordinary economic growth and prosperity that characterized the mid-1960s. The tax cut, they reiterated, proved their contention that social science expertise could fine-tune public policy.

In fact, however, the tax cut, as Galbraith and others had said, mainly assisted the well-off. Moreover, it probably had little to do with the great prosperity that arose by 1965. The American economy had already begun in 1962 to rebound from a largely cyclical downturn. Central to this recovery, aside from cyclical forces, were large and pre-existing developments, including the low cost of energy, such as oil; continuing technological innovation; the expansion of world trade; and heightened productivity. Certain sectors of the American economy further benefited from rapid increases in military spending during the Kennedy years. In many areas these increases boosted expansion more than did the tax cut.
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It is a little unfair to single out Kennedy for the limitations of liberals' assumptions about socio-economic policy. A partisan Democrat, he largely followed the advice of others, who dominated the northern-urban wing of his party. Moreover, Kennedy naturally sought to advance popular programs, such as a tax cut, that would help him develop a larger political mandate in the 1964 election. Still, the fact remains that he devoted only sporadic attention to domestic affairs and that his administration, hamstrung by Congress, accomplished little of significance in the realm of social legislation. In this respect, as in others, his record resembled those of his predecessors, Eisenhower and Truman. There were no new frontiers there.

T
HE MAJOR TEST
of domestic policy for Kennedy—indeed for American institutions in general at the time—was race relations. It was his fate to take office when more and more black people were losing patience with drawn-out legal strategies and were turning instead to direct action. Whites, mainly idealistic students from the North, began to join them in modest but increasing numbers. While still relying heavily on sitins and boycotts, the civil rights activists were developing an agenda larger than desegregating lunch counters and other facilities. Some gave thought to improving the conditions of black people in the North. In the early 1960s, however, they continued to focus mainly on ways to empower the masses of the black poor in the South.
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Stymied by their opponents, they were very, very angry. "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious," James Baldwin asserted in 1961, "is to be in a rage all the time."
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Activists, many of them connected with CORE, decided to step up the battle against racism only a few months after Kennedy had taken office. The new President, they thought, would show more sympathy for their aspirations than Eisenhower had. Their strategy was to embark on "freedom rides" through the Deep South. They would board interstate buses and try to desegregate bus terminals wherever the buses stopped. In so doing they now had the rule of law on their side, for the Supreme Court had decided in December 1960 that segregation of interstate bus terminals was unconstitutional.
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The riders, including CORE leader James Farmer, fully anticipated that whites would react violently.
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They therefore forewarned the President, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and FBI director Hoover of their plans. Robert later said that he knew nothing beforehand about the rides, which started when seven blacks and six whites climbed on two buses in Washington and traveled through the Upper South on their way to Alabama, Mississippi, and New Orleans. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, John Lewis, a leading activist, was clubbed and knocked down when he tried to enter the white rest room. When the riders reached Anniston, Alabama, a mob slit the tires of one of the buses, smashed its windows, tossed in an incendiary device, and attacked the riders as they fled from the smoke. This was when Kennedy—and many others in the nation—awoke to the action. A dramatic new phase of the civil rights movement had begun.

The other bus rolled on to Birmingham, where a Klansman who was a paid FBI informer had alerted Hoover earlier in the week that the KKK had worked out a deal with Birmingham public safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor that would allow the Klan fifteen minutes to attack the riders before Connor's police intervened. Hoover, although nominally under the control of Attorney General Kennedy, failed to inform his chief, and the riders had no federal protection when they got off the bus. There they were badly beaten by thirty-odd Klansmen wielding baseball bats, pipes, and bicycle chains. One of those attacked, a sixty-one-year-old, was left permanently brain-damaged. The battered riders then broke off their trip and were flown to safety in New Orleans.

As so often happened during the civil rights movement, the intransigence of whites stiffened the resolve of the activists. New riders, led by Lewis, Diane Nash, and other SNCC workers from Nashville, carried the campaign back to Alabama and Mississippi. CORE workers also returned. Some of the freedom riders, including Lewis and Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler, were savagely attacked in Montgomery.
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Other riders, including Farmer, were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, convicted of breaching the peace, fined $200 each, and (when they refused to pay the fines or to post bail) sent to jail for thirty-nine days before they got out on bond. Many of these activists were sent to the maximum security wing of the state penitentiary at Parchman, where guards attempted unsuccessfully to break up their unity by knocking them about with water from fire hoses, closing cell windows during the daytime to increase the already ferocious heat, and blasting them with cold air from exhaust fans at night.
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Segregationist southern officials such as the volatile Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi hoped that stern measures like these would stop the freedom rides. But other activists kept coming: 328 were arrested in Jackson alone by the end of the summer. Two-thirds were college students, three-fourths were men; more than half were black.
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The freedom rides ended only in September when the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), acting on an earlier request from Robert Kennedy, prohibited interstate bus and railroad companies from using segregated facilities. It had been a protracted and violent struggle.

While the freedom rides were attracting national attention, civil rights workers were busy elsewhere in the South. In the process they encountered some problems within their ranks. Intramovement tensions, especially of generation and of class, arose clearly in Mississippi, where Robert Moses and others began highly dangerous activities in August 1961. There, where racism flared as intensely as anywhere in the nation, many young blacks in their late teens and twenties had already joined the great mass migrations to the North, most frequently to the supposed promised land of Chicago.
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Their exodus left a growing generation gap, requiring civil rights workers to recruit among older farmers, young teenagers, and their parents. These people differed from the mostly urban, middle-aged, middle-class black people, such as preachers, porters, and educators, who had traditionally formed the backbone of the NAACP. These leaders, in turn, had risked much in their lifetimes to support the mainly legal battles against discrimination that the NAACP favored. They were often reluctant to embrace the militant tactics favored by the new and younger generation of civil rights activists.
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