The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (101 page)

Bobby was not a natural orator, and he seemed uncomfortable before the University of Georgia audience. His hands shook, and he spoke in a high-pitched voice. He told his audience that at the Justice Department only 10 of the 950 lawyers were blacks. What he did not say, and he knew as well, was that at the FBI there were only three black agents, and they were the director’s chauffeurs. “Financial leaders from the East who deplore discrimination in the South belong to institutions where no blacks or Jews are allowed and their children attend private schools where no Negro students are enrolled,” he continued. “Union officials criticize southern leaders and yet practice discrimination with their unions. Government officials belong to private clubs in Washington where blacks, including ambassadors, are not welcomed even at meal times.”

Bobby was a truth-sayer, and his words resonated deeply within his audience, which responded in the end with sustained applause. He was so consumed with the cold war, however, that he attempted to relate everything to the struggle against the Soviets, as he did when talking about the first two blacks graduating from the university. “In the worldwide struggle the graduation at this university of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes will without question aid and assist the fight against Communist political infiltration and guerrilla warfare,” he told the audience.

As Bobby spoke, a group of black and white civil rights activists were traveling south in a Greyhound bus, not thinking that they were assisting in “the fight against Communist political infiltration and guerrilla warfare.” The Freedom Riders were confronting the South’s segregated system by sitting together, black and white, traveling deeper and deeper into danger. As they set out, they were not accompanied by reporters ready to celebrate their acts and, by their presence, help to protect them. Nor did helicopters fly overhead or federal marshals lead them down isolated macadam strips.

For a man who appreciated courage above all virtues and sought to exemplify both political and physical bravery, Bobby should have seen these activists as heroic figures. Instead, he saw them as endangering what he hoped would be the acceptance of federal laws by the South. As Bobby saw it, politicians like Alabama governor John Patterson might shout, “Never!” but if the federal law steadily nudged the South forward, the people would grudgingly, reluctantly assent.

To the Kennedy brothers, what was so maddening about the Freedom Riders was that instead of simply making their point and moving on, these young men and women pushed and pushed and pushed, sending new groups of nonviolent activists to pick up the bloody banner from those who could carry it no further. The first group of Freedom Riders got as far south as Anniston, Alabama, before their bus was overturned and burned. Those who were not hospitalized got onto a new bus and headed south again. When these Riders were brutally assailed in Birmingham, they flew to New Orleans while a new group arrived to get on a bus and travel farther south.

“Stop them!” Kennedy ordered Wofford, his special assistant for civil rights. “Get your friends off those buses!” The president’s command showed a woeful lack of understanding of the civil rights movement. Neither Wofford, King, nor anyone else had control over the Freedom Riders or could contain the moral imperatives of this movement. Kennedy believed in the advancement of civil rights in orderly ways but this was not a transcendent matter on which he wanted to rest his presidency.

During this period Bobby met with King for a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel. The young administration was worried that the minister might attempt to lead millions of his people to the barricades, destroying Kennedy’s plans for steady incremental advances and producing a white backlash that would cost the president his congressional majority.

King could be as uncompromising as any man when great moral principles were at stake, but this luncheon was not one of those times. He understood Kennedy’s political realities and knew that half a loaf of bread was as ample a meal as he was likely to receive at this table. King nonetheless wanted Kennedy’s support, and he was assured that he would have a private meeting with the president. “The meeting kept being delayed,” Wofford recalled, “And King’s patience began to run out.”

The president felt that he could afford to have his brother dine with King in a private dining room. But civil rights was the most volatile domestic issue, and the politician in the White House was worried that if he had a public identification with King, fears would arise that Kennedy was conspiring with the civil rights activists who so threatened the Old South.

King had his private meeting with Kennedy a few weeks later, and was led
into the White House family quarters by Wofford. Kennedy was not comfortable around priests and preachers who spoke in high biblical parlance, and he would never have a deep rapport with King. He listened to King’s high discourse and then took the conversation down to a nuanced, realistic portrayal of the American social and political realities. “It lasted at least an hour and was the most effective I ever saw Kennedy on civil rights,” Wofford recalled. The president explained to King in immense detail the problems the administration faced and why, though he agreed with King on this great issue, he could not move forward now with bold strides. He would put forth a civil rights bill and issue an Executive Order on housing, but not yet.

If King and the other civil rights leaders had had Kennedy’s profoundly realistic vision, then there would have been no great movement, no Freedom Riders, no sit-ins, and no massive confrontations. If Kennedy had had King’s moral passions and commitments on this issue, he would most likely not have been elected president. As they sat talking in the study by the Lincoln bedroom, each man had something to learn from the other. King was traversing a maelstrom of politics that no one had attempted before; he would have to be not only brave and true but also as calculating as Kennedy. As for the president, if he was to be the great leader that he aspired to be, he would have to show something of the moral passion of the man who sat across from him. King understood that as well as anyone. “In the election, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership we’ve been waiting for and do what no other president has ever done,” he told Wofford afterward. “Now I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.”

Kennedy was a general being forced to fight a battle on ground he did not want. He thought that his combat lay elsewhere, in confrontations with the Soviets, not in the streets of the South. But American history had a different timetable. In 1954, in
Brown vs. Board of Education,
the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated education was inherently unequal. American schools would have to be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” A few school districts in places such as Texas proceeded with admirable dispatch to follow the nation’s laws, but as Kennedy took office, only about 214,000 out of more than 3 million black schoolchildren in the South and border states attended integrated schools. Southern blacks drank water from fountains labeled
“COLORED ONLY
,” ate at restaurants relegated to their race, had their hair cut only by black barbers, and sat in the backs of buses. This “South” of institutionalized segregation spread far north of the Mason-Dixon Line in a belt of states that included southern Ohio and southern Illinois.

The structure of American liberty stood only half finished. If the administration
moved too timidly, the president might find himself the overseer of the breakdown of American freedom, crumbling in the storms. Yet if he moved too harshly, too precipitously, Kennedy might have to line the streets of the South with federal soldiers, creating a second Reconstruction and destroying that house of liberty by the sheer weight of the roof that he sought to erect.

Most politicians rarely stray from the arithmetic of democracy. The Democrats had lost two seats in the Senate and twenty-one seats in the House in 1960, and the conservative Republicans and Dixie Democrats could probably filibuster any civil rights legislation that the president tried to push through a reluctant Congress. The president thought that he would have been doubly a fool for pressing civil rights legislation: not only would he have lost but he also would have unnecessarily confronted members of his own party whose votes he needed on other vital matters. Early in his term he was doing what even a man of Wofford’s passion thought was the only thing to do. He was limiting himself to executive actions to push civil rights along, hiring blacks in unprecedented numbers, authorizing the attorney general to push for school desegregation, championing voting rights in the Justice Department. And while the administration was trying to uphold civil rights in this fashion, young men and women in the South who were trying to integrate lunch counters or register voters were getting not meals and ballots but jail cells and clubbings. And the Freedom Riders continued their journey.

Bobby called the Greyhound superintendent to try to get Greyhound to find a driver and a bus to carry the Freedom Riders out of Birmingham. “I think you should—had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is and somebody better give us an answer to this question,” he said. “I am—the government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.”

To many southerners, this was evidence that the attorney general was siding with these troublemakers and orchestrating this assault on what they considered their very liberty. Bobby was trying to get the Freedom Riders out of Birmingham and on to Montgomery and to end the shameful photos disgracing America in the world’s newspapers.

A
s John Lewis got off the Greyhound bus at the station in Montgomery, Alabama, with his fellow Freedom Riders, the young black activist began to address the reporters standing there. He stopped suddenly and stood transfixed. Coming toward the bus was a mob of whites carrying baseball bats, lead pipes, and bottles. To this rabble, the reporters and photographers were as much the enemy as the Freedom Riders, and the white mob battered away
ecumenically, striking out against anyone who came within reach of its weapons. Lewis and several others were brutally assaulted and knocked to the ground. When Bobby’s aide and emissary John Seigenthaler arrived in the midst of the melee, he attempted to use his federal authority to stop a group of white women from beating a white woman activist. As Seigenthaler insisted that they stop, a man smashed a lead pipe down on his head, rendering him unconscious. Floyd Mann, the chief of the Alabama state police and an official with no jurisdiction in the city, stopped the attacks by pulling his gun and ordering, “Stand back!”

Bobby’s close associates were even more a band of brothers than the president’s men. They were devoted to the attorney general and the causes he championed. They had not anticipated, however, that they were risking their very lives by signing on to come to Washington. As the former Tennessee journalist lay inert, half sprawled under a car, the stage on which this drama was taking place had grown immeasurably, for Bobby and his men as for everyone else.

Bobby was still interested in dimming the lights and hurrying everyone offstage, but this theater had become irresistible and new players arrived who sought to speak their parts. King had chosen not to join the Freedom Riders on their journey. He knew that he had to speak his lines or in the next act of this drama he might have no lines at all. He saw this as “a turning point and a testing point…. If we can break the back of opposition here, public facilities will be desegregated tomorrow.” Much to Bobby’s discomfiture, King insisted on flying into Montgomery, where he was met at the airport by roughly fifty federal agents who escorted him to the home of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a civil rights leader. King was a believer in moral witnessing, and he needed dramatic moments on which to make his stand. That evening fifteen hundred crowded into Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, while outside a crowd of whites twice that size stood and jeered and threatened, held off by a cordon of federal marshals. As the night went by, the mob pushed nearer and nearer, heaving Molotov cocktails and trying to break down the church doors. Time and again they were pushed back by the seriously outnumbered federal marshals.

While this was going on Sunday evening, Bobby sat in his sports clothes in his office trying to barter some semblance of peace. His brother wanted his administration’s history to be written on a world stage in a bold, steady hand, not scribbled in blood by a racist mob who would gladly have set fire to that church or bludgeoned King and others to death. In that event, others probably would have also picked up the gun and written their own bloody pages in the history of the time.

Governor Patterson was a segregationist and a savvy politician. The
Alabamian was trying by word and act to tell the Kennedys that if they sought to impose what he considered liberal mores on his state, they would have an uncivil war on their unclean hands. Patterson no more wanted bloody streets and marching troops than did the Kennedys, but he could not afford to be seen as caving in to the hated northern intruders. As the governor saw it, King’s arrival on the scene increased the dangers tenfold, for the black troublemakers were now led by the most hated black in the white South.

In the church hundreds of parishioners for whom the church was the sheltering center of their lives sat among the Freedom Riders and other activists. While King stood in the pulpit preaching to them words of faith and moral politics, outside danced a mad mob, dark, malevolent bearers of anarchy.

Late that night Patterson agreed to send in the Alabama National Guard to protect the church. Bobby was immensely relieved, but for King, the sight of Alabama National Guardsmen instead of the hoped-for federal troops surrounding the church deepened his fears and dismay. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals!” King yelled at Bobby with such force that he pulled the telephone back from his ear. “Now, Reverend,” Bobby rejoined, “don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals, you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now.”