The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (27 page)

All this spiteful and ineffectual activity had an unintended effect: it persuaded Castro and Khrushchev that America was preparing to invade Cuba again. Given America’s military superiority in the Caribbean, there was no way the Soviet Union could defend Cuba through conventional means. The only way to stop the Americans, Khrushchev reasoned in a conversation with First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan in the Lenin Hills in April 1962, was with nuclear weapons.
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Once Castro gave the go-ahead, these would be secretly emplaced. The Kennedy administration would be confronted with a fait accompli.

Sensing that missile deployment might be afoot, President Kennedy issued a warning on September 4 that if the United States had firm evidence of “offensive ground-to-ground missiles, the gravest issues would arise.” On September 13, following rumors of missile shipments to Cuba being spread by New York Republican senator Kenneth Keating, Kennedy reiterated the warning. If the Soviets established “an offensive military base of significant capacity . . . then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”
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But Khrushchev, perhaps as much for emotional as pragmatic reasons, “plunged” ahead.
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And Castro, whose revolution was based on violent defiance of the United States, took the warrior’s gamble. “We preferred the risks, whatever they were, of great tension, a great crisis,” he told Tad Szulc years later, “to the risks of the impotence of having to wait . . . for a U.S. invasion of Cuba.”

Khrushchev may have initiated the crisis by secretly planning to station offensive nuclear missiles in the Western Hemisphere, and Castro certainly facilitated it by agreeing to make Cuba a potential battleground, but ultimately the crisis was caused by the Kennedy administration’s assault on Castro. The conclusion that emerged from the historic symposium of former Cuban, Russian, and American policymakers that took place in Havana in January 1992 was that “Kennedy’s policy of isolation, harassment, and intimidation . . . forced Castro to turn to the Soviet Union for protection, ultimately in the form of nuclear weapons.”
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And no single person was more responsible for that than Bobby Kennedy.

September 30, 1962

Oxford, Mississippi, Washington, D.C.

O
n Sunday evening, September 30, President Kennedy went on national television to explain why he had sent federal marshals to Oxford, Mississippi, to enable James Meredith, a black air force veteran, to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Unbeknownst to Kennedy, a few moments before he went on the air, the campus had erupted in violence. A screaming crowd of over two thousand, some crying in unison “Kill the nigger! Kill the nigger!” converged on the line of white-helmeted, orange-vested marshals standing in front of the Lyceum, the Ole Miss administration building.
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As night fell, the cordon of Mississippi state troopers who, under an agreement hammered out between the attorney general and Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, would maintain order, vanished. The mob threw bricks and bottles, injuring several of the marshals. The federal officers were ordered by deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to fire teargas canisters. Suddenly, amid the rebel yells, came the sound of rifle shots. Several marshals fell to the ground wounded; two men, one a French reporter, were killed.

The president meanwhile was concluding his remarks to the nation by appealing to Mississippi’s sense of honor “on the field of battle and on the gridiron.” After Jack finished his speech, Bobby informed him of the bloody spectacle at Ole Miss, including the report that Klansmen had seized Meredith in his dormitory and were intending to lynch him. By this time, Katzenbach had gotten to a phone to call the attorney general to ask for permission to fire on the assailants with live ammunition if their position was about to be overrun. The president, who was listening to Bobby’s conversation with Katzenbach, said no — only if Meredith’s own life was at risk.
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At this point, Jack decided to do what his brother had done everything he could in the previous week to avoid — send in army troops.

Like the tenuous zone between the marshals and their would-be killers, the Kennedy administration had searched for every expedient in its twenty months in office to hold neutral ground between the rising tide of black protest and the white riptide of murderous opposition. But the administration — and the country — were now engulfed, and the Kennedys’ containment strategy on civil rights was itself about to be overrun.

When Jack took office, the administration’s strategy could be summarized by something the president-elect had told Harris Wofford in an early meeting on civil rights: “Minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.”
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The plan was to avoid Congress, where powerful Southern Democrats like Senate Judiciary Chairman James O. Eastland of Mississippi had used filibuster and committee trench warfare to mangle the civil rights initiatives of liberal members. Instead, the Kennedy administration planned to hire more blacks, make several key appointments, litigate votingrights violations in the South, and, through private suasion, open closed doors.

President Kennedy’s personal efforts to desegregate public and private facilities began as soon as he took office and, at least as compared to Eisenhower’s, they were impressive. The president resigned from the segregated Metropolitan Club in Washington (as did every other member of the administration) and ordered Pedro San Juan of the White House Protocol staff to push for the opening of segregated restaurants, terminals, clubs, apartment complexes, and residential neighborhoods in the D.C. area. Although these efforts were targeted to help Washington’s African diplomats, they had an impact on the lives of black Americans as well. In late 1961 the president went around the table at a cabinet meeting and asked each member to tell him how many black candidates had been appointed in each department. He was pleased with what he heard: in Labor, black appointments above grade 12 had risen from 24 to 41; in Agriculture, from 15 to 46; in Justice, the number of black attorneys had risen from 10 to 50 by the end of 1961. Kennedy had appointed a black foreign service officer, Clifton R. Wharton, as ambassador to Norway and had proposed Robert Weaver as the new housing secretary.

But, as the memoir of his civil rights assistant Harris Wofford reflects, Kennedy’s determined preference was to control the pace of civil rights progress, so that it did not spoil the administration’s working relationship with key segregationists on Capitol Hill.
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The first casualty of this go-slow strategy involved an executive order to desegregate federal housing. Kennedy and twenty-two other elected Democrats had boldly declared in 1960 that the next Democratic president would enact it “with the stroke of a pen.” Kennedy chose to put off signing it until November 1962, and the criticism from white liberals and black leaders was sharp. Civil rights activists began mailing in pens to the White House, first numbering in the hundreds and by late 1961 in the thousands. The president was both embarrassed and frustrated that he could not have it both ways. He reasoned that the do-or-die emotions of the civil rights activists and the fury of southern white reaction could only end in needless bloodshed, divide the country at a time of international reckoning, and endanger his own reelection chances. Kennedy’s challenge to Americans to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade inspired Eisenhower Civil Rights Commission appointee Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame, to offer a stinging rebuke of the administration’s priorities: “Personally,” he wrote, “I don’t care if the United States gets the first man on the moon, if while this is happening on a crash basis, we dawdle along here in our corner of the earth, nursing our prejudices, flouting our magnificent Constitution, ignoring the central problem of our times, and appearing hypocrites to all the world.”
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In an article in
The Nation
, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. offered a more measured view of Kennedy’s ambivalence:

The Administration sought to demonstrate to Negroes that it has concern for them, while at the same time it had striven to avoid inflaming the opposition. The most cynical view holds that it wants the votes of both and is paralyzed by the conflicting needs of each. I am not ready to make a judgment condemning the motives of the Administration as hypocritical. I believe that it sincerely wants to change, but that it has misunderstood the forces at play.
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The basic problem with the Kennedy strategy of containment was that it forced black leaders to provoke peaceful showdowns against Jim Crow in the South — on buses, at lunch counters, and in polling places. And white public officials — from Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright to Birmingham police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor — were waving the bloody flag of resistance not just to civil rights leaders but to all forms of federal judicial and military force. Reconstruction, though nearly a century old, was nearly as incendiary an issue as desegregation. Bobby Kennedy’s blunt communication in Athens, Georgia, in April 1961 that “if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act” was about to be tested again.

The issue was voting rights. By April 1962, the Justice Department had brought no fewer than one hundred cases against election officials throughout the South for preventing blacks from voting. Bobby had tried to keep civil rights action in-house. “You’re second-guessers,” he told members of the Civil Rights Commission. “I’m the one who has to get the job done.”
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Getting the job done involved a delicate political trade with the administration’s southern supporters like John Stennis, J. William Fulbright, and James O. Eastland: the administration would neither introduce nor put its weight behind civil rights legislation if these senators would countenance black judicial appointments and support other Kennedy legislation, principally trade expansion and an increase in the minimum wage. As Bobby later pointed out to journalist Anthony Lewis, Eastland would habitually delay appointments (such as that of Thurgood Marshall to the Circuit Court of Appeals) before letting them go through.
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The attorney general’s attitude toward the liberals was reflected in a comment he made to an attorney in Justice’s Civil Rights Division: “It’s easy to play Jesus and, it’s fun to get in bed with the civil rights movement, but all the noise they make doesn’t do as much good as one case.”

Kennedy had a point. The legal fate of James Meredith was at that moment winding its way through the federal courts. On the same day that John F. Kennedy took the oath of office, Meredith had written for an admission application to the University of Mississippi. When he was eventually denied admission, he brought suit in federal district court in Mississippi. Meredith’s suit was dismissed, but he successfully appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court, which reversed the lower court in June 1962. In September, the Supreme Court considered Mississippi’s appeal. The United States Justice Department had submitted an amicus brief supporting Meredith’s case. On September 10, the Supreme Court upheld the circuit court’s decision and ordered Meredith to be admitted to Ole Miss.
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Mississippi governor Ross Barnett publicly denounced the decision and promised to bar Meredith’s admission “by force, if necessary.” The attorney general made the first of twenty-eight phone calls to Barnett searching for a political solution. Their phone exchanges, which were recorded, reveal the essence of Bobby Kennedy’s negotiating style — simple and unmoving adherence to the principle that the court order must be obeyed, accompanied by an open-ended consideration of options.
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Although Barnett resorted to threats and flights of hyperbole, Kennedy drained much of the accusatory venom out of Barnett by asking practical questions about how together they might work this out, always leaving the door open to further exchanges. It was what the Harvard Negotiation Project would later characterize as “process” — as opposed to “power” — negotiation.
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BARNETT: A lot of states haven’t had the guts to take a stand. We are going to fight this thing. . . . This is like a dictatorship. Forcing him physically into Ole Miss. General, that might bring a lot of trouble. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to physically force him in.

KENNEDY: You don’t want to physically keep him out. . . . Governor, you are part of the United States.

BARNETT: We have been part of the United States but I don’t know whether we are or not.

KENNEDY: Are you getting out of the Union?

BARNETT: It looks like we’re being kicked around — like we don’t belong to it. General, this thing is serious.

KENNEDY: It’s serious here.

BARNETT: Must it be over one little boy — backed by communist front — backed by the NAACP which is a communist front? I’m going to treat you with every courtesy but I won’t agree to let that boy get to Ole Miss. I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.

KENNEDY: I have a responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States. . . . The orders of the court are going to be upheld. As I told you, you are a citizen not only of the State of Mississippi but also the United States. Could I give you a ring?