The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (28 page)

BARNETT: You do that. . . . Good to hear from you.
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Initially, the effort to find a political solution miscarried in the extreme. When Meredith showed up to register accompanied by federal marshals on September 20, he was accosted by the governor and a surly crowd of students and Oxford townspeople. Barnett read a lengthy proclamation in purple prose that set forth the reasons for denying Meredith admission. He handed a copy to Meredith. “Take it and abide by it,” he told him.
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Kennedy then turned up the heat by citing Ole Miss’s three top administrators for contempt of court. In court the administrators agreed to allow Meredith to be admitted. Although Barnett was still recalcitrant, telling Kennedy he was going to only “obey the laws of Mississippi,” the attorney general surmised that for political reasons Barnett was looking to play the victim. The next day, Justice attorneys obtained a restraining order enjoining Barnett from preventing Meredith’s registration. Led by former Kennedy political operative James McShane, federal marshals brought Meredith to the campus. Again Barnett and a noisy mob barred their way. Kennedy and Barnett spoke later that evening. “It’s best for him not to go to Ole Miss,” Barnett said. “But he likes Ole Miss,” Kennedy replied softly.
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On September 28, the Justice Department mobilized some four hundred deputy marshals and border patrol personnel at the Memphis naval station to airlift them into Oxford. Kennedy additionally ordered army units to go on alert that afternoon at the naval station.
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The contest was now all over the national news. Barnett’s defiance of the federal court order coincided with the national celebration of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The president’s message to a gathering at the Lincoln Memorial on September 22 was eloquent, but no one was really listening. The issue was James Meredith. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and other black leaders were calling for armed enforcement of the court order. Klansmen all over the South were rallying with rhetoric as well as arms to the cause of Mississippi’s rights. “THOUSANDS READY To FIGHT FOR MISSISSIPPI,” cried the
Jackson Daily News.
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In Dallas, General Edwin A. Walker, who had commanded the U.S. Army detachment that had intervened in the Little Rock, Arkansas, crisis of 1957 but was later relieved of his command in West Germany in June 1961 for publicly calling for war with the Soviet Union, promised guns and volunteers: “Barnett, yes. Castro, no,” he said on radio. FBI intelligence from several states did in fact reveal that weapons and racist volunteers were heading for Oxford.

Whether because he was duplicitous, desperate, or demented (he had been struck in the head by an airplane propeller earlier that summer), Barnett proved completely unreliable. At one point he proposed to Kennedy that when the marshals brought Meredith on campus they should draw their sidearms and arrest Barnett himself. In another exchange, he suggested that he and other Mississippians would raise money to send Meredith to college outside the state. Kennedy continued to try to talk him down, but to no avail. Meredith, even with his escort of marshals, was turned back a third time. As Kennedy later explained, it was obvious that what Barnett was “trying to accomplish was the avoidance of integration at the University of Mississippi, number one, and, if he couldn’t do that, to be forced to do it by our heavy hand; and his preference was with troops.”
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With racist gunmen and provocateurs now on the Ole Miss campus, and with the newspapers and radios ringing with revolt, the attorney general asked his brother to intercede with Barnett. A conversation between the president and Barnett was scheduled for Saturday afternoon, September 29. Presidential special assistant Arthur Schlesinger attended the strategy session that preceded the telephone conversation. When the phone rang, the president, “as if rehearsing to himself,” said before picking it up: “Governor, this is the president of the United States — not Bobby, not Teddy, not Princess Radziwill.” Once on the phone, Kennedy was matter-of-fact: “I am concerned about this matter as I know you must be. . . . Here’s my problem, Governor. I don’t know Mr. Meredith, and I didn’t put him in there. But under the Constitution I have to carry out the law. I want your help in doing it.” Barnett said that his attorney had a new plan and was coming to Washington to work it out with the attorney general. The president pressed him: there was a court order that gave the governor until Tuesday to permit Meredith to be admitted. Barnett claimed the new plan would address that. The president promised to call the governor back after the attorney general had conferred with Barnett’s attorney, Tom Watkins.
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That Saturday the Kennedy brothers spoke to Barnett twice. The president demanded to know “whether you will maintain law and order — prevent the gathering of a mob and action taken by a mob. Can you stop that?” In reply, Barnett said he would do his best but had another idea: to register Meredith in secret in Jackson, Mississippi. The president accepted the deal, but three hours later, Barnett phoned the attorney general to tell him it wouldn’t work. It was at this point that Jack gave the order to federalize the National Guard and to move army troops into Memphis. He decided to make a statement on national television the following night. Burke Marshall then put the president’s requests to Barnett in writing, asking him to state once and for all whether he would honor the court order and, above all, whether he would use state law enforcement officials to stop the mobs from collecting in Oxford and especially on the campus. The president asked for his reply in writing by that evening.
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There was no reply.

The next day — Sunday the thirtieth — a deal was worked out between the attorney general and Barnett. In their twenty-third phone exchange, Bobby told him that the president was going on TV and effectively informing the country that “you broke your word to him.” Barnett seemed overcome at this: “Don’t say that. Please don’t mention it . . . please let us treat what we say as confidential. . . . Let’s agree to it now and forget it. I won’t want the president saying I broke my word. . . . We will cooperate with you.” The agreement was that Meredith would be flown in from Memphis by helicopter, brought on campus, and placed in a dormitory for his safety. The marshals would take their places in front of the Lyceum (the campus’s main building). Barnett would thereafter issue a statement informing Mississippians of these facts and announcing that state law enforcement officials were under orders to prevent any disturbances.
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The statement that the governor’s mansion later released did set forth those two items of information, but added some incendiary touches of its own: “To the officials of the federal government, I say: Gentlemen, you are trampling on the sovereignty of this great state and depriving it of every vestige of honor and respect as a member of the Union of States. You are destroying the Constitution of this great nation. May God have mercy on your souls.”

The attorney general had meanwhile dispatched Katzenbach to manage the move on the ground. With his usual dark humor he told Katzenbach as he was leaving, “If things get rough, don’t worry about yourself. The president needs a moral issue.”
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But Bobby Kennedy was in fact very worried.

In the early afternoon, as planned, Katzenbach, Ed Guthman, and the marshals escorted Meredith onto the campus and put him in a dormitory. Later, the large contingent of state troopers took up positions near the Lyceum but did nothing to otherwise secure the area. As the raucous crowd grew to over 2,500, shouting racist obscenities, throwing rocks, bottles, and in one instance a firebomb, the marshals stood impassively, holding their line. A tall figure in a white ten-gallon hat — former general Walker, with his contingent of gunmen from Dallas — was seen walking through the mob, which was now within an ax handle’s distance of the line of marshals. Suddenly, the state troopers withdrew. Katzenbach telephoned an immediate protest to the governor’s office. Shortly before the president went on the air, there was a volley of rifle fire. The attorney general called down to Ole Miss from the Oval Office and managed to reach Guthman, a decorated veteran of World War Two, who told him that all hell had broken loose. “It’s getting like the Alamo,” he said. There was a pause and then Bobby said wryly, “Well, you know what happened to those guys, don’t you?”
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Katzenbach, Guthman, and the rest of the federal contingent asked that army units be flown in immediately. If the mob found Meredith in his dormitory, they would kill him.

President Kennedy immediately called Deputy Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, who was acting as liaison between the army and the Justice Department, and asked him to move troops from Memphis with all possible dispatch. Vance relayed the order, but the units in Memphis had gone off alert after hearing the president’s televised statement. Then it was discovered that they were armed only with nightsticks. General Creighton Abrams ordered the soldiers to be equipped with full combat gear. Two hours went by. Katzenbach put in a desperate call to the Oval Office from a pay phone — sniper fire audible in the background — to find out why the army had not arrived.

Bobby Kennedy remembered:

That happened six, eight, ten times during the course of the evening. “They’re leaving in twenty minutes.” We’d call twenty minutes later and they hadn’t even arrived to get ready to leave. “They’re ready to go now,” and they hadn’t been called out of their barracks to get into the helicopters yet. “They’re in the helicopters now.” They were just forming up. “The first helicopter’s leaving and will be there in forty minutes.” The first helicopter went in the air and then circled and waited for the rest of the helicopters.

The president uncharacteristically went white-hot, blistering General Abrams and Vance with profane abuse. But still no troops. There were two more conversations with Barnett. The Kennedys demanded that he order the state troopers back to the campus. Privately, Jack and Bobby rued their decision to base the effort to enroll Meredith on the assurances of a prevaricator like Barnett. But what choice had they had? If he resorted to full rhetorical rebellion, the chances of a bloodbath would only be enhanced. And so they waited. Midnight. 1 A.M. 2 A.M. For Jack, the situation was another Bay of Pigs — only this time on American soil. He and his brother had based their policy on the best-possible scenario and now were dealing with the worst. They had accepted the tidy assurances of the experts only to discover, as before, an astonishing level of incompetence. Bobby felt that he himself was responsible for “botching things up”: “[W]e could just visualize another great disaster, like the Bay of Pigs, and a lot of marshals being killed or James Meredith being strung up. How do we explain that? I don’t care what excuses you have; the troops didn’t arrive.”
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Having landed at 3:45 A.M. at the Oxford airport, a half-mile from the campus, the commanding officer waited for the entire battalion to disembark and fall in before proceeding. The president had by now lost all patience, wiring the officer in charge: “People are dying in Oxford. This is the worst thing I’ve seen in forty-five years. I want the military police battalion to enter the action.”
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In all it took the troops five hours to reach the campus. The army had formally assured the attorney general it would take two. When the army troops (and Mississippi National Guardsmen) finally made it to the campus, the fighting had all but ceased, and there was an eerie and tense calm. Later that morning, Meredith was registered. A fellow student shouted: “Was it worth two lives, nigger?” Throughout the ordeal, Meredith was unflinching. For weeks he was protected by five hundred troops. For months he was accompanied to classes and activities by an escort of marshals. He was to graduate from Ole Miss in August 1963.

As for General Walker, who made no effort to leave Oxford, he was arrested by federal authorities on four counts, including insurrection, and flown to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation. The John Birch Society and other far-right groups immediately heralded this as an example of the “Kennedy police state.” Congressman Bruce Alger of Texas telephoned the attorney general, demanding to know on what psychiatric grounds Walker was being held. Kennedy replied that it was out of his hands. “I do not have anyone on the line,” Alger assured Kennedy, “no secretary or anything.”
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The attorney general, however, did and said nothing further to Alger. Henceforth, the practice of either taping or transcribing sensitive exchanges would become widespread in the Kennedy administration.

Critics of the administration, then and later, would charge that the whole crisis could have been averted if the federal government had moved the army in before the Klansmen had the marshals in their gunsights. The accusation relies essentially on hindsight. As Burke Marshall has commented, from both a legal and political standpoint the federal government had to deal with the state government in the person of Governor Barnett as long as there was the prospect that the state government would assist federal authorities in maintaining order.
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Bobby Kennedy’s exchanges with Barnett from September 15 to September 30 suggested that the government of Mississippi would play such a role. Had federal troops arrived earlier, they might have touched off an even more destructive result. The failure in the end was not one of planning but of execution.