An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (86 page)

Although Bobby was able to delay commission hearings in Louisiana and Mississippi for a while, he lacked authority to stop them. The hearings, which refused to shade the truth and mute tensions between the administration and the white South, described Mississippi as using terror tactics against aspiring black voters. Kennedy himself lobbied against publication of the commission’s report, which recommended withholding federal funds from the state until it demonstrated its “compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” “You’re making my life difficult,” he told two commissioners. When he heard that the commission, including Harvard Law School dean Erwin Griswold, was unanimous in its determination to go ahead, Kennedy asked, “Who the hell appointed Griswold?” “You did,” the commission’s chairman replied. “Probably on the recommendation of Harris Wofford,” Kennedy said, acknowledging his inattentiveness to the commission’s operations.

In July 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. added to Kennedy’s difficulties with a public statement that the president “could do more in the area of moral persuasion by occasionally speaking out against segregation and counseling the Nation on the moral aspects of this problem.” Kennedy answered cryptically that his commitment to full constitutional rights for all Americans had been made very clear and that his administration had “taken a whole variety of very effective steps to improve the equal opportunities for all Americans and would continue to do so.” But the president’s words did little to advance the cause of civil rights or ease the tensions that were erupting in sporadic violence.

Kennedy’s frustration at the impasse between the growing movement of black activists practicing nonviolent opposition and defenders of segregation registered clearly in his response to clashes in the southwest Georgia city of Albany, where blacks had launched the “Albany Movement” to challenge the city’s segregation laws. On August 1, when Kennedy was asked his reaction to a Justice Department report on conditions in Albany, he explained that he had “been in constant touch with the Attorney General,” who had “been in daily touch with the authorities in Albany in an attempt to provide a solution.” He all but acknowledged a sense of powerlessness. “I find it wholly inexplicable,” he told reporters, “why the City Council of Albany will not sit down with the citizens of Albany, who may be Negroes, and attempt to secure them, in a peaceful way, their rights. The United States Government is involved in sitting down at Geneva with the Soviet Union. I can’t understand why the government of Albany . . . cannot do the same for American citizens.”

Bureaucratic infighting and limited advances added to Kennedy’s sense of frustration. By August, conflicts between Johnson and Robert Troutman, Kennedy’s Georgia friend who had originated Plans for Progress, and complaints of too few gains forced Troutman’s resignation from the CEEO. Although the president lauded the “immediate and dramatic results” of Troutman’s efforts, it was an open secret that he was leaving because he and the vice president were at odds over the CEEO’s poor performance. With Troutman going, Kennedy agreed to make Hobart Taylor Jr., a black attorney from Michigan with roots in Texas, where Johnson had known him, CEEO executive vice chairman. To draw attention away from the fact that he was replacing a white southerner with an African American, Kennedy delayed announcing Taylor’s appointment for several days.

But an appointment was far from enough. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later said, “The Kennedy civil rights strategy, however appropriate to the congressional mood of 1961, miscalculated the dynamism of a revolutionary movement.” It was clear to King and other civil rights activists that the president remained reluctant to take significant political risks for the sake of black equality. King released a telegram to Kennedy “asking for Federal action against anti-Negro terrorism in the South,” and one civil rights group threatened to picket the White House unless the president did more to protect blacks. In September, when reporters pressed him to say what he was doing about King’s demand for protective action, Kennedy’s frustration with the situation and southern resistance to black complaints of inequality and abuse was palpable. “I don’t know any more outrageous action which I have seen occur in this country for a good many months or years than the burning of a church—two churches—because of the effort made by Negroes to vote,” he told a news conference. “To shoot, as we saw in the case of Mississippi, two young people who were involved in an effort to register people, to burn churches as a reprisal” for asking for voting rights was “both cowardly as well as outrageous.” He promised that FBI agents would bring the perpetrators to justice and said that “all of our talk about freedom [was] hollow” unless we could assure citizens the right to vote. The rhetoric was all civil rights advocates and anyone devoted to the rule of law could ask. But conditions in the South cried out not for prose but for action, and action now.

IN SEPTEMBER,
James Meredith, a black Mississippian, tried to break the color line at the state’s lily-white university in Oxford. Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old air force veteran with a sense of divine mission to overturn segregation, had been fighting since January 1961 to gain admission to Ole Miss. Supported by the NAACP in a series of court contests, Meredith won an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on September 10, 1962, ordering the university to end its “calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity,” and admit him.

Three days later, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, a devoted segregationist, whom Bobby later described as “an agreeable rogue and weak,” spoke on statewide television. Denouncing the federal government’s assault on Mississippi’s freedom to choose its way of life, the governor invoked the repudiated pre-Civil War doctrine of interposition, the right of a state to interpose itself between the U.S. government and the citizens of a state. Emotionally promising not to “surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny,” he theatrically declared, “we must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the federal government or stand up like men and tell them ‘NEVER.’”

The governor’s defiance, supported by the state legislature with resolutions blocking Meredith’s registration, forced the White House to enter the conflict. In twenty conversations with Barnett between September 15 and 28, Bobby expressed sympathy for Barnett’s political problem and raised no moral questions about the transparent unfairness of unequal treatment of blacks. Instead, he emphasized the need to obey the law and made clear that the president intended to enforce the court’s directives. Barnett shared an interest with the Kennedys in getting Meredith enrolled without violence. But his strategy—which he did not share with the Kennedys—was to submit to federal authority with a show of cynical resistance that would enhance his popularity in Mississippi. Barnett and the White House thus struggled for political advantage. Neither side doubted that federal authority would ultimately prevail, but how it occurred had large consequences.

Former Mississippi governor James Coleman, a moderate, urged Bobby not to use troops, which would be “fatal,” or to make Barnett a martyr by jailing him, but to cut off all federal aid to the state, including old age assistance. Because Mississippi received $668 million in federal monies—some $300 million more than it sent to Washington in taxes—a reduction in federal largesse was one means to force Barnett’s hand. Ted Sorensen counseled the president to threaten the businessmen backing the governor by holding up NASA, defense, and other federal contracts. The possible suspension of accreditation, disruption of the university’s football schedule, and loss of postseason eligibility for bowl games seemed like promising means to dampen student enthusiasm for mob opposition to federal authority.

But the threat of reduced federal outlays in the state was insufficient to bring Barnett into line. “I won’t agree to let that boy get to Ole Miss,” Barnett told Bobby on September 25. “I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.” The same day, Barnett, who was more interested in scoring political points than ensuring law and order, personally blocked Meredith’s registration in a confrontation at the trustee’s room in a state office building in Jackson, the capital. On the twenty-sixth, Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson, supported by state police and county sheriffs, stopped Meredith and federal marshals accompanying him from reaching the Oxford campus. On the twenty-seventh, a crowd of two thousand protesters blocked marshals, forcing Barnett to abandon a cynical plan to allow Meredith to register if it was done before cameras showing federal marshals with drawn pistols. By this means, Barnett had hoped to avoid violence, which would further blight Mississippi’s good name, and also obtain political cover with segregationists, who would see him and his state as the victims of superior federal power.

Believing that Barnett’s “defiance should be against the majesty of the United States” rather than against John Kennedy, the president had left private and public discussions of the issues to the attorney general. By September 29, however, he felt compelled to pressure Barnett directly. Despite coming across in telephone conversations as “a soft pillow” who would ultimately agree to Meredith’s registration, Barnett gave no guarantee that it would be done peacefully. Kennedy wired Barnett, citing the “breakdown of law and order in Mississippi” and asking if he intended to keep the peace when court directives were executed. Unsatisfied with Barnett’s responses, late that night Kennedy signed an order federalizing units of the Mississippi National Guard. After discussing the document with Norbert Schlei, a White House legal counsel, who assured him that it was like one Eisenhower had signed in the Little Rock crisis of 1957, Kennedy tapped the table they had been sitting at and said, “That’s General Grant’s table.” Eager as much as possible to soften the use of his authority against a southern state, he told Schlei not to tell waiting reporters anything about the furniture.

The next morning Bobby told Barnett that the president would speak to the nation that evening and say that he had called up the guard because the governor had reneged on an agreement to let Meredith register. Barnett promised to cooperate if Kennedy did not mention their agreement. Kennedy thus believed he had assurances that Meredith would be able to register without incident. Consequently, on the evening of September 30, he told the nation that court orders “are beginning to be carried out” and that “Meredith is now in residence on the campus of the University.” This had been accomplished without the use of the National Guard, and he hoped that the combination of state law enforcement officials and U.S. marshals would be able to keep the future peace. His address celebrated American reliance on the rule of law and praised Mississippi for its contributions to the national good ahead of the sectional good. He saw “no reason why the books on this case cannot now be quickly and quietly closed.”

Kennedy’s speech demonstrated his limited feel for the passion and volatility surrounding race relations across the South. It was a mistake to trust Barnett’s promises, for one thing. In fact, the night of the speech, as soon as a mob showed up, Barnett withdrew the state’s highway patrol officers who were supposed to assist in the protection of Meredith. Left behind were the five hundred marshals, no match for a mob of between two thousand and four thousand people. Kennedy sent in the National Guard, but it took several hours to get to Oxford from Memphis, where most of them were quartered. Before they arrived, a local resident of Oxford and a foreign journalist had been killed and 160 marshals had been injured, including 27 with gunshot wounds.

Kennedy was furious at the army’s ineptitude in getting the troops to Oxford promptly. Bobby later recalled that “President Kennedy had one of the worst and harshest conversations with [Secretary of the Army] Cy Vance and with the general [in command] that I think I’ve ever heard.” The incident immediately intensified Kennedy’s distrust of the military, which kept saying the troops were on the way when they had not even left their bases, and reminded Bobby of the poor advice the chiefs had given the president about Laos. Kennedy himself said, “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” When he heard that retired general Edwin Walker, a right-wing extremist, was in Oxford encouraging people to oppose desegregation, the president said, “Imagine that son of a bitch having been a commander of a division up till last year. And the Army promoting him.”

“I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” Kennedy added with evident irony during a vigil lasting until 5:30 in the morning. Said Bobby, “We are going to have a hell of a problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better. . . . We are going to have to figure out what we are going to say. . . . We are going to take a lot of knocks because of people getting killed, the fact that I didn’t get the people up there in time.” Bobby later remembered how concerned they were about explaining “this whole thing, because it looked like it was one of the big botches.”

In fact, Kennedy escaped from the clash with relatively little political damage. True, some newspapers criticized his handling of Oxford. The press also described the vice president as unhappy with Kennedy’s failure to consult him. But the good news was that the administration got Meredith enrolled. “Forget the Monday morning quarterbacks and the myopic few among the journalists,” Phil Graham told Bobby. “Accept instead the feeling of a wide majority of thoughtful men: That the President and you deserve well of the Republic.” Johnson, who was out of the country, sent word to the president that “the situation in Mississippi had been handled better than he could ever have thought of handling it.” Polls of northern industrial states showed the president enjoying between 4-1 and 3-1 backing on Mississippi. Pollster Lou Harris advised him that every Democrat outside the South who was “running for major office should put front and center that this country needs firm and resolute leadership such as the President demonstrated in the Mississippi case.” Foreign press opinion showed a “startling similarity.” Whether in Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Middle East, South Asia, or Western Europe, the media cited the administration’s “firmness and determination . . . in enforcing law and order,” while also finding it difficult to understand how “racial tension could persist in an advanced country like the U.S.”