The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (18 page)

The next evening, Jack watched CBS News with Bobby and Kenny O’Donnell in the family quarters. The president stood several feet from the set, flanked by the other two. The sense of humiliation was almost palpable, O’Donnell remembered. Kennedy’s arms were crossed, one of his hands gripping deeply into the sides of his face, as he watched the report. CBS showed videotape of Castro (apparently from 1959), jut-chinned, screaming in high-pitched Spanish, as he stood over some wrecked and smoking armament, waving his arms to dramatize his invective. Walter Cronkite then quoted Castro as calling Kennedy “a coward.”

Bobby shouted “Fuck!” — and stormed out of the room.
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May 14, 1961

Anniston, Alabama, and Washington, D.C
.

A
fter the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy emerged as the most forceful man in the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy. Although he did not, as the president had proposed, take over the CIA, Bobby administered the replacement of its leadership (Dulles stepped down in favor of John McCone as CIA director in December 1961) and rammed Cuban policy into paramilitary motion. During the month of May, Bobby added five or six hours a day of deliberations on Cuba to his duties as attorney general. He worked on an emergency basis, walking in and out of meetings at will, excoriating top policymakers in the hall, and lashing out at the laggard work of the State Department. He told the president’s advisors, “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit.” The president sat there listening to this, tapping his front teeth with a pencil. It was then that Richard Goodwin realized, as he later wrote, that “Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the president’s own concealed emotions. ”
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In mid-May, a racial crisis erupted that put Bobby’s emotional endurance to the test and challenged the administration’s commitment to civil rights. On May 4, a group of six whites and seven blacks boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington with the purpose to “challenge every form of segregation by the bus passenger” in the segregated South. They called themselves the Freedom Riders. They passed peacefully through the first three states — Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia — entering washrooms, eating facilities, and waiting rooms in violation of Jim Crow laws. On May 14 in Anniston, Alabama, the situation changed. A mob of angry whites forced the Freedom Riders off the bus, beat them bloody with clubs and chains, and then burned the vehicle.

The administration, tense and gloomy in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, saw the incident as needless provocation that further undermined the president on the eve of his reckoning with Premier Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy called his special assistant for civil rights, Harris Wofford, and angrily told him: “Stop them. Get your friends off those buses.” But there was nothing much Wofford could do, and he told the president so.
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“The dream deferred,” as the poet Langston Hughes had once termed it, was about to explode.

Until May 1961, “defer” was precisely the Kennedy technique when it came to civil rights. As senator, Kennedy had zigzagged through the long obstacle course of civil rights legislation, siding in most cases, as a Ted Sorensen memo to Bobby proudly explained in December 1959, “with our friends in the South.” He meant white friends.
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Notwithstanding the strong plank in the 1960 Democratic platform and the September 1960 pledge to eliminate segregation in federal housing with the “stroke of the pen,” the Kennedys were engaging in electoral gamesmanship. “I didn’t lie awake at night,” Bobby later remembered in a particularly unvarnished phrase, “worrying about the plight of the Negro.”
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Powerful political realities militated against active support for racial equality. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory as well as the Democrats’ unsteady majority on Capitol Hill both depended on the “solid South.” The most entrenched and skilled leaders of that majority in the Senate — McClellan of Arkansas, Eastland of Mississippi, Ervin of North Carolina, and Fulbright of Arkansas — were all vehement opponents of civil rights as well as close friends of Bobby Kennedy. Eastland and McClellan had proudly shepherded his nomination as attorney general through the Senate.

Beyond this, Jack Kennedy simply did not like the “tar baby” issue, as he called it. He thought it messy and ultimately insoluble. He saw himself as a foreign policy president; everything in his formation led him to that self-concept. By the time he ran for Congress in 1948, Jack had probably crossed the Atlantic more times than he had the Mississippi. His growth as a public thinker had come in the course of extended trips through Europe in 1936 and Asia in 1951, trips that resulted in prescient statements on democratic preparedness in the face of aggression and the power of anticolonial nationalism, respectively.

In his inaugural address, with all its inspired rhetoric about sacrifice in the anticommunist struggle, there was scarcely a word about America’s challenge in undoing the systematized hatred within its borders. A few weeks later in his State of the Union speech, Kennedy invited his listeners in stark, almost metallic language to join with him in the country’s “hour of maximum danger.” In the pure, frozen twilight of the Cold War, there was the need and the space for a great president. In civil rights, there was only bitter trouble and the prospect of a ruined reelection. So when word came in of the racial violence in Alabama, the president did what he thought he had to do — duck.

Bobby was already charting his own course. In March 1961, he agreed to address Law Day exercises at the University of Georgia in Athens on May 6. As he worked on the speech in his lonely, dogged way, slogging through no fewer than four drafts with the assistance of his aides Burke Marshall and John Seigenthaler, something unusual happened: the speech changed from a statement about the challenge of organized crime to one about civil rights.
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Part of the reason may have been that ten days before the speech, Kennedy had used a court order to open the public schools of Prince Edward County, Virginia, to 1,700 black schoolchildren who had not been allowed in school for two years. But there was something in the method of his preparation that harkened back to the McClellan Committee days, when he would bear down over long hours and forge his way to a new level of understanding.

On May 6, before a crowd of 1,600, his hair combed and wearing a new blue suit (it was said that Ethel had forced him to be fit for it), the attorney general compared racial segregation to organized crime and explained why he had intervened to open Virginia’s schools to black children. “In this case — in all cases — I say to you that if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act.” He then offered a broader vision:

I happen to believe that the 1954 [
Brown v. Board of Education
] decision was right. But my belief does not matter — it is the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law. . . . On this generation of Americans falls the full burden of proving to the world that we really mean it when we say all men are created free and are equal before the law.
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The speech startled his listeners and drew a chorus of protest from across the South. The reaction had scarcely subsided when the Freedom Riders encountered the brutal gauntlet of racist attack in Alabama. Kennedy’s words were put to the test. His first move, after consulting the president, was to try to get the riders out of harm’s way by moving them from Birmingham, fifty miles west of Anniston, to Montgomery, the capital. Although Hoover had received word from one of his agents in Birmingham that the Ku Klux Klan was planning an ambush, he chose not to report it to his boss.

With a menacing crowd gathering around the Birmingham bus terminal, Kennedy telephoned the Greyhound terminal superintendent, George E. Cruit, and demanded in heated language that he find a bus driver to drive the Freedom Riders out. “We have gone to a lot of trouble to see they get this trip,” Kennedy told him, “and I am most concerned to see that it is accomplished.” Listening on another phone, Cruit’s secretary took this down and the next day Kennedy’s rather infelicitous choice of words was all over the country. In the view of many in the South, it indicated that the Kennedys had sent provocateurs to the South to crack Jim Crow.
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The besieged Riders were eventually flown out, but more kept coming in from the northern states, and tension mounted swiftly across Alabama. At a meeting at the White House on Friday, May 19, the president insisted that the federal government not step in until a “maximum effort” had been made to let local authorities handle the problem. Alabama Governor John Patterson would have none of this; he told the press that state law did not guarantee “the safety of fools” and resolutely refused to take the president’s calls.
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When a bus bringing Freedom Riders from Birmingham reached Montgomery on May 20, a crowd of white segregationists set upon the group and brutally beat them. When John Seigenthaler, the president’s representative in the crisis and Bobby’s good friend, tried to rescue a girl who was being beaten, he too was knocked unconscious.

Bobby called Jack and insisted on interposing federal officers. Several hours later, 303 federal law enforcement personnel moved into Montgomery. A tense state of calm ensued. After a couple of hours of sleep at Hickory Hill, the attorney general attended early morning mass before returning to his office. It was then that the second phase of the crisis erupted: thirty-two-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., despite Kennedy’s appeal to desist, drove to Montgomery to congregate with the Riders at the First Baptist Church. A white mob, this one with armed Klansmen, soon descended on the church, apparently intent on burning it down. The deputy attorney general on the scene, Byron White, could get only 150 marshals in position before the crowd closed in. With the Reverend King inside preaching and leading the congregation in prayer, and the white mob outside howling its discontent, Kennedy finally got through to Governor Patterson, who had himself gone apoplectic.

After several heated exchanges through the long night (the two knew each other from the 1960 campaign when Patterson had been an early and ardent supporter of Senator Kennedy), the governor finally pledged that the National Guard would be immediately called in to protect the church. At around 4 A.M., the Reverend King placed a call to the attorney general. “Well, Reverend,” Kennedy asked King impishly, “are you praying for us?” King reacted negatively to this. He told Kennedy he could summon 100,000 students into Alabama. “They will use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong. They will give witness by their lives if necessary.”

Bobby was angered by the melodramatic tone and tragic implications of such a claim. “Don’t make statements that sound like threats,” he told King. “That is not the way to deal with us. You’d be dead as doornails without those marshals,” he added.
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He called for a “cooling-off period” the next day, but this too was rejected by Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: “We’ve been cooling off for a hundred years.”

By the end of May, tempers did cool, enough for Kennedy to craft a disengagement strategy based on using the Interstate Commerce Commission to press for the desegregation of all bus facilities in the nation. It was a tactical victory made possible by Bobby’s detached judgment, which in turn derived from his prodding style of negotiation. As he once quoted Francis Bacon to one of his lieutenants, “A wise interrogation is half the knowledge.” When the president was asked in a press conference to state his opinion of the Freedom Riders, his response reflected not only a change in his own outlook toward civil rights but a recognition of the emerging locus of power within his administration: “I think the attorney general has made it clear that we believe that everyone who travels . . . should enjoy the full Constitutional protection given them by law.”
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July 13, 1961

Chicago, Illinois

D
uring most of 1961, Johnny Rosselli probed the perimeter of the Kennedy high command, looking for an opening, a way to neutralize Robert Kennedy’s war on the Mafia. In March, he fired a warning shot involving the president’s alleged adultery with actress Judy Meredith. In April, Sam Giancana, having joined Jack Kennedy as one of Judy Campbell’s lovers the previous year, told her to tell the president that they were a threesome. In May, Frank Sinatra visited Ambassador Kennedy in Hyannis Port and, according to the attorney general’s phone logs, called Bobby on two occasions. Later, there were offers to give Joe Kennedy a piece of the Cal-Neva Lodge and casino that Sinatra and Giancana were then building near Reno, Nevada.
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According to the FBI, the elder Kennedy, after having been “visited by many gangsters with gambling interests,” did indeed take a piece of the Cal-Neva through his son-in-law Peter Lawford.
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None of these overtures had any apparent effect on the attorney general’s war against the mob, although it is important to note that Hoover kept him in the dark about the damning disclosures the FBI had in its possession. Had Kennedy known of them he might have pulled back a bit. But he knew nothing, and after his May trip to Chicago, in which he heard Mafia capo Pat Marcy conspire with two Chicago cops to murder a third, Bobby opened up on the Chicago Mafia. In early July, he approved a Chicago federal grand jury subpoena to be served on Giancana’s girlfriend — in his presence.