The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (38 page)

His management style was to swarm over a problem from a variety of directions. He summoned and deployed his lieutenants at will, according to need and ability, not job description. Thus, Lou Oberdorfer, head of the Tax Division, was the leader of the Cuban prisoner exchange; Ramsey Clark, the head of Lands, found himself in Mississippi, as did Harold Reis, a career attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel who had stuck his head into the attorney general’s office one Saturday afternoon in October 1962 and was aboard a plane heading south thirty minutes later. Not long after he took a job as the Kennedys’ special assistant, John E. Nolan Jr., the Washington attorney who had assisted William Donovan in the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, went to work for Kennedy. Bobby told him to go down to Gadsden, Alabama, to settle some racial trouble, which Nolan did. After a few days, he called Kennedy and told him things were okay, whereupon Kennedy invited him out to Hickory Hill.
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The range of Bobby’s decision-making and crisis management would not have been possible — and could well have miscarried in the extreme — were it not for his top lieutenants. Of the Kennedy administration’s recruitment of the “best and the brightest,” these were arguably the best — superbly trained at Yale and Harvard, tempered by war service (Katzenbach and Guthman were decorated heroes), profoundly dedicated to the constructive use of legal power, and fanatically loyal to their commanding officer. Their fearlessness about physical engagement — Seigenthaler and Doar beaten bloody in Birmingham, Guthman and Katzenbach standing among the dead and wounded at Oxford, Sheridan. braving Hoffa’s thugs in Nashville, and Roemer and company shadowing the Chicago Outfit — was extraordinary.

But no one could match Bobby in pure physical stamina. When Jack dusted off a Teddy Roosevelt challenge to walk fifty miles, the question arose of who in the administration was up to it. (Certainly not Jack, who told Dave Powers that he preferred to confine his movement to walking to the refrigerator to get another Heineken.)
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So of course it fell to Bobby, who after a sixteen-hour Friday decided he would attempt it the next morning. At 5 A.M. Kennedy met up with his deputies Jim Symington, Lou Oberdorfer, and Ed Guthman as well as his prep school friend (and star athlete at Milton) Dave Hackett on the Chesapeake and Ohio canal. The idea was to walk to Camp David. It was twenty degrees, and the towpath was covered with ice and snow. Slipping and sliding on the frozen surface, they set out. Symington remembered that he, Guthman, and Oberdorfer, with their World War II experience marching long distances, were wearing sturdy walking shoes with heavy socks. Bobby had loafers on. Several hours later, one by one — exhausted, feet freezing — Hackett, Oberdorfer, Symington, and finally, Guthman dropped out. Kennedy kept trudging on, commenting to Guthman when he quit, “You’re lucky, your brother isn’t president of the United States.”
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By the time he got to Camp David, completing his fifty miles, Bobby was hobbling painfully. The next day he left on a fact-finding trip to investigate firsthand how the poor and the mentally ill lived in America.

June 11, 1963

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.

E
arly in the afternoon of June 11 the president gave the go-ahead: he would speak on national television that same evening on civil rights. The fact that no speech had yet been drafted was not the only reason his key advisors opposed the idea. The administration had provisionally reserved the spot for a telecast, expecting to announce that federal troops had taken over the campus of the University of Alabama to enforce the admission of black students, or possibly that Governor George Wallace had been arrested for physically blocking their entry. But the tense standoff had been resolved peacefully. Why give a speech, his advisors asked, when polling showed that the majority of white Americans felt that the president was moving too fast on civil rights? That afternoon Jack called Bobby and said he would do it anyway.

The attorney general and assistant attorney general Burke Marshall showed up at the White House at around seven and sat down with the president in the Cabinet Room. Jack scribbled notes on the back of an envelope in preparation for his remarks. Shortly before airtime Sorensen produced a draft, but it had no concluding section. The president read the draft, wrote in some changes, then got up and walked into the next room. He would conclude his address extemporaneously, something he had never done before in a speech on national television. On so explosive a subject as civil rights, it seemed risky to speak off the cuff, but Kennedy seemed to have reached a personal synthesis regarding the historical moment at hand. As he would tell a friend shortly before his trip to Dallas, there was “no going back.”
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The issue, Kennedy told the nation, was primarily a moral one, “as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” It could not be resolved by “repressive police action”:

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. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials to represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed?

Kennedy went on to depict discrimination in terms of the average black baby — who had half as much chance to complete high school as his white counterpart, would earn half as much in wages with twice the chance to be unemployed, and whose life would be seven years shorter. For seven minutes on prime time, he asked what no president before or since has asked white Americans — to put themselves in the position of African Americans. Then he turned to the matter of moral hypocrisy before the world community:

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except for Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes.

In the coming week he would ask Congress “to make a commitment it has not fully made in this country to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

Bobby watched as his brother paused, placed his hands on the speech text, and extemporaneously concluded his remarks. It was — and remains — a statement of unusual eloquence and passion, a
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communication that swept away the denials and pierced through to the heart of racism in America. Reaction from Africa and black America was thunderously positive; from the white South, widespread anger. A Gallup poll found that most white Americans thought their president had gone too far.
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Several hours after Kennedy’s speech, a white gunman murdered Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi NAACP, in front of his home in Jackson. Bobby went to Evers’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery. “Bobby sat with me during the funeral and consoled me,” Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother, said. “The president carried Mrs. Medgar and I and the children back to the White House. We stayed there for the rest of the day.”
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By 1963 Jack was at the forefront of change. And Bobby had brought him there, against the better judgment of all of his brother’s advisors. Just as Jack had subscribed to his brother’s passionate attack on the Mafia in 1957, and his opposition to the air strike on Cuba during the missile crisis the previous year, he now found in Bobby the moral compass that would direct them forward.

They had come a long way in just one year. The year 1962 may have been the year of triumph for the Kennedys, but it was, in the view of Martin Luther King Jr., a year of loss and delay and deep frustration for the cause of civil rights. Bobby’s maxim to “keep Negroes off the street and in the courts” conveyed the administration’s basic tactic. As King noted, “a sweeping revolutionary force is pressed into a narrow tunnel.” And as King predicted, it would break out unless something dramatic was done. “The essence of Kennedy’s civil rights strategy since inauguration,” Theodore Sorensen later wrote, “had been to keep at all times at least one step ahead of the evolving pressures, never to be caught dead in the water, always to have something new.”
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Thus, when there was violence in the South, the attorney general would dispatch John Doar or Burke Marshall or Joe Dolan to search for common ground between the disputing parties. Only in one area — voting — did the administration mount a concerted attack on the pillars of segregation. The thinking was that the vote would eventually vindicate African-American rights in other areas. On a progress report submitted to him, the president jotted: “Keep pushing those cases” at the top. The Justice Department did, bringing thirty in Mississippi alone.
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But progress was slow and often violent. No less a racist than Georgia’s senior senator Richard Russell had predicted in 1957 that the passage of a civil rights bill allowing the Justice Department to investigate voting rights violations would “confine the Federal invasion of the South to the field of voting and keep the withering hand of the Federal Government out of our schools.” It was his “sweetest victory” in his twenty-five years as senator.
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The FBI’s pace of investigation proved glacial, compromised as it usually was by attachments to local law enforcement. “It was unbelievable,” one civil rights worker wrote. “They would interrogate a black and scare him out of his pants. They’d interrogate a white sheriff and then report his version straight-faced without ‘evaluating’ it.”
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“The FBI comes in here every day and we have coffee every day. We’re good friends,” remarked Chief of Police Collins of Clarksdale, Mississippi, a man who regularly employed intimidation and brutality against civil rights voter registrars.
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When civil rights workers and local black activists were beaten, harassed, chased away, and even shot, Justice attorneys, with their limited mandate of keeping the peace while advancing their cases, stood silently by. Never, as Victor Navasky has noted, did the attorney general demand that southern FBI agents be reassigned, or that black agents be recruited and assigned to these areas, or that the widespread sweetheart arrangement between special agents and local law enforcement be investigated. Part of the problem, no doubt, was Hoover — a racist practiced at tying attorneys general into bureaucratic knots. But part of the problem, too, was Bobby, who sought to contain the cause of civil rights as much as to advance it.

In February 1963, the administration sent its first civil rights bill up to Capitol Hill. The bill contained a feeble array of token measures that were abandoned almost as soon as it arrived. The president also rejected the proposal made by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders to issue a second emancipation proclamation on the 100th anniversary of the first, declaring segregation a violation of human rights. Instead Kennedy threw a party at the White House for one thousand black and civil rights leaders. It was a huge success and dominated African-American media for weeks. The pictures of Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Roy Wilkins celebrating in the White House conveyed an impression that no proposed law could — namely, that blacks were making it. Some black leaders, such as Harvard professor Bayard Rustin, wanted none of it. He charged that the president was a smart, two-faced politician busy getting it both ways. According to Rustin, Kennedy would say to Negro leaders, “I want to help you get money so Negroes can vote,” and then be someone who “turns and bows to the Dixiecrats and gives them southern racist judges who make certain that the money the Negro gets will not achieve its purpose.”

There was truth to this. By deferring to Judiciary Committee chairman James O. Eastland on federal judicial appointments, Kennedy permitted racists like William Harold Cox to be appointed to the bench in Mississippi. Although Bobby had pressed Cox in an interview about upholding federal civil rights and had received the answers he wanted, Cox did precisely the opposite when he got on the bench. In voting rights litigation in Mississippi, Cox referred to the plaintiffs in court as a “bunch of niggers.”

There were, however, some good appointments: Griffin Bell to the Georgia bench, and the already legendary NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall to the Federal Court of Appeals (one of eleven black judges appointed). But this was institutional progress, not racial change.

It wasn’t just a case of appeasing the Dixiecrats. Federal efforts on voting rights for blacks, educational investment, and fair housing were all hostage to state and local governments. Since Reconstruction, these entities had perfected a system of apartheid in which federal money and administrative attention was diverted into the hands of corrupt and conniving local white officials. When blacks were threatened or beaten or shot, local law enforcement would look the other way, or if necessary impanel racist juries. In the major southern cities, FBI offices were deeply infected by racist preferences and practices and could be counted on to side with the locals. After all, the ultimate G-man himself, J. Edgar Hoover, believed that blacks had smaller brains than whites.

The president’s own thinking was slowly changing. Prior to the Oxford race riot Jack had regarded Reconstruction as a “black nightmare.” “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” he had written.
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At one Hickory Hill seminar, which was held in the White House because Bobby was in Asia, historian David Donald found that the president had not progressed very far in his concept of the postwar South.
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But Oxford had opened the president’s eyes to the incontinent fury of southern officeholders, their crude rhetorical replay of the War Between the States, and what he regarded as minimal compliance with a federal court order. On the night of the Oxford riot, Jack had asked Bobby if there would be “any more like this one coming up soon.” Bobby replied that a lawsuit to desegregate the University of Alabama was already in the works and would reach the enforcement stage sometime in the spring of 1963. “Let’s be ready,” the president said.