The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (39 page)

In February 1963, Reverend King huddled with his advisors to plan a campaign in Birmingham. The plan was to organize sit-ins at segregated lunch counters and to boycott Jim Crow businesses. It was called Operation C, the C standing for confrontation.
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Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, had possibly the worst history of racism in the South. In 1956, singer Nat King Cole had been beaten on stage during a concert. On Labor Day 1957, a carload of drunken whites had grabbed a black man off a street corner, taken him to a country shack, and castrated him. In May 1961, Reverend King and the Freedom Riders had come close to losing their lives at the hands of a howling mob of Klansmen. King and his deputy Ralph Abernathy put out the word and traveled the country, raising money for the expected bail of the jailed protesters. The attorney general tried to stop the protest. Kennedy’s redoubtable deputy Burke Marshall made a personal appeal to King to leave Birmingham, at least until the newly elected mayor, Albert Boutwell, a moderate segregationist, took office. King refused.

On April 6, 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its demonstrations and sit-ins. Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, moved immediately on the demonstrators, using nightsticks and paddy wagons to get them off the streets. After two days of violence, Alabama circuit court judge W. A. Jenkins Jr. issued a court order enjoining 133 civil rights leaders from continuing the protests. In Room 30 of the Gaston Hotel, which was serving as the SCLC’s headquarters, there was uncertainty. Reverend King was supposed to subject himself to arrest on Good Friday, April 12. But the jails were full, the SCLC was out of money for bail, and there was the threat of increased violence by the Birmingham police. King went into his bedroom alone. When he emerged, he told his staff: “Look, I don’t know what to do. I just know something has to change in Birmingham. I don’t know whether I can raise money to get people out of jail. I do know that I can go into jail with them.”
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The next day, King went out into the street and was arrested before a crowd of press. Eight white clergymen in Birmingham took out a full-page ad denouncing King, who composed his reply on toilet paper and in the margins of the local newspaper. “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait.’ It rings in the ears of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”
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The Kennedys meanwhile were dealing with another front in the civil rights war. As Bobby had predicted, Governor George Wallace had announced his refusal to allow two black applicants to be admitted to the Huntsville branch of the University of Alabama. “I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state,” he told legislators the day he was sworn in as governor, “and I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this country.” Wallace, a former boxer with roundhouse racist rhetoric, was no Barnett. He
wanted
a confrontation.

On April 25, Bobby flew down to Montgomery with Burke Marshall and Ed Guthman to meet Wallace face to face. They drove up to the capitol, to find six hundred state troopers encircling the building. One trooper took his billy club and jabbed it in the attorney general’s stomach. “The point,” Kennedy later said, “was to try to show that my life was in danger in coming to Alabama because people hated me so much. ”
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Wallace greeted them by turning on a tape recorder and proceeded to try to extract a vow from the attorney general that he would not move federal troops into Alabama. Kennedy stuck to his Ole Miss line about how his duty was to enforce a court order. He tried to get Wallace to join him in a search for a peaceful solution. “I have a responsibility that goes beyond integration or segregation to enforce the law of the land,” he told Wallace, “and to insure that court orders are obeyed. As I said yesterday when I was here, I think if you were in my position, you would do the same thing. ”
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Wallace didn’t think so, and after an hour-long harangue on states’ rights, Negro “agitation,” etc., the meeting adjourned. The Kennedy style of negotiation was again evident: frame the exchange in terms of the most irreducible matter of principle and common sense and then slowly tighten the screw of federal power.

On May 18, the president made an attempt to court Wallace. At a Tennessee Valley Authority commemoration ceremony in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Kennedy rolled a barrel of pork in Wallace’s direction. This too brought no progress. During a helicopter ride, the governor firmly rejected Kennedy’s complaisant view of Dr. King, who, he told Kennedy, competed with Ralph Abernathy to see “who could go to bed with the most nigger women and white and red women too.”

By this time, there were rumors that the Klan was going to harm the imprisoned Reverend King. His wife, Coretta, called the White House to appeal to the president to protect her husband. Bobby returned her call, explaining that the president was with his father, who was ill, and promising to check into the situation. The next day President Kennedy called Mrs. King to tell her that her husband was safe and would call her shortly, which he did. Eight days after his jailing, Reverend King was released. The Birmingham campaign pushed on. On May 2, he sent six thousand Negro schoolchildren, marching and singing, through Birmingham’s streets. Bull Connor responded by firing on them with high-pressure hoses whose force sent some of the children flying into parked cars and curbs. Connor arrested 959 children that day. Despite Bobby’s plea to stop using children in the protests, King sent two thousand more children into the streets as well as his SCLC followers. This time Connor unleashed his police dogs on the demonstrators in full view of the cameras. The next day, images of snarling and biting dogs tearing at the arms and legs of the protesters appeared all over the country and the world. The effect was devastating.

Fearing a full-blown race riot, the attorney general sent Burke Marshall and Joe Dolan to negotiate a cease-fire between the parties. They found angry divisions within the white community. Race-baiters like Connor, Klan activists, and Governor Wallace wanted more of the same, but Birmingham’s white merchants feared their businesses would be ransacked or burned if the violence escalated. Thousands of blacks were now massing in the streets. King was demanding full integration of Birmingham, not just of lunch counters and downtown stores. Burke Marshall, in his subdued, probing way, proved superbly adept in calming things down. With his indefatigably correct demeanor, he jawboned the white merchants and local press into accepting most of King’s demands.

Bobby met with a group of Alabama newspaper editors at the White House to urge them, among other things, to drop their demand that King be federally prosecuted: “You have to understand this about Martin Luther King. If he loses his effort to keep the Negroes nonviolent, the result could be disastrous not only in Birmingham but all over the country. Remember, it was King who went around the pool halls and door to door collecting knives. . . . If King loses, worse leaders are going to take his place. Look at the black Muslims.”
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By May 9, Marshall and Dolan had brokered a deal that provided a measure of desegregation of eating establishments as well as promises to increase black employment. The night after the accord was announced, however, the Ku Flux Klan rallied outside the city, burning crosses and threatening whites who consorted with blacks with bloody reprisal. Two hours later, a bomb blew up the home of Martin Luther King’s brother. Then the Gaston Hotel, where King and his key leaders were staying, exploded. Blacks emptied into the streets and began rioting. Hours later, just when the Birmingham police had the rioting fairly contained, state troopers sent by Governor Wallace moved in and began attacking the protesters with rifle butts and clubs. Seven stores were set ablaze by enraged blacks and the battle went on into the night.

The next day, May 12, the attorney general, Katzenbach, and Marshall met at length with the president, Secretary McNamara, and General Wheeler. Bobby described the situation as dangerous — one death and there would be “chaos.” He recommended that the administration send in federal troops. The president was not so sure. Wouldn’t this just play into Wallace’s hands? he wondered. What if the governor, in the name of states’ rights, rejected the federal presence and even proposed armed resistance? Jack thought that the idea was to “get the Negroes off the streets” and the “agreement back in place.” He thought it preferable to move the troops to bases in the Birmingham area, which would communicate resolve without risking federal-state polarization. The tape recording from that meeting catches the president’s exasperated reaction to General Wheeler’s suggestion to send a “battle group” to Birmingham from Fort Benning in Georgia. Kennedy then ordered the general to airlift — “immediately” — troops to Fort McClellan for possible deployment the following day.
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The discussion revealed a critical difference between the Kennedy brothers when it came to framing a public statement about the crisis. The president wanted to make an appeal to restore order and get a resolution. The attorney general wanted an appeal to the hearts and minds of Americans. He believed that the president should first point to the “long abuse” blacks had suffered. Circumspection carried the day. The message dwelt on upholding order. Marshall went back down to Birmingham, shuttled between the disputants, and patched the agreement back together. The new mayor and council took their seats with an expression of reconciliation. But not the outgoing mayor of Birmingham: “I hope that every drop of blood that spills [Robert Kennedy] tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it.”

Birmingham had shown the world that there was something new in black protest, which for so long had been muted and tentative. The new element was rage. Despite King’s blandishments, blacks had struck back in violence. In northern ghettos, Black Muslim leaders like Elijah Muhammed and his fiery disciple Malcolm X struck at the Christian ethos of forgiveness, calling it the expression of white hypocrisy and black delusion. America was a criminal place; black people were its victims. There was a turning as well among black intellectuals, who habitually had consorted with white liberals and now were echoing the despair and calls for violent separatism. Novelist James Baldwin claimed that “for the horrors of the American Negro’s life, there has been almost no language.”

Bobby not only read of despair and rage among African Americans, he felt it. On a trip to New York City to persuade chain store executives to desegregate voluntarily (during which several of the executives hid downstairs at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to avoid being seen discussing civil rights on camera with the attorney general), Bobby dropped by the Kennedy family apartment to meet with fourteen black entertainers, activists, and leaders.
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The meeting turned into what black psychologist Kenneth Clark called “one of the most violent, emotional verbal assaults and attacks that I had ever witnessed.” A young CORE field organizer, Jerome Smith, touched off the explosion by saying he was nauseated by the necessity of having to be in the same room as the attorney general and plead for the rights of Negroes. James Baldwin asked him whether he would take up arms to defend the United States and Smith said no. Kennedy was shocked. He spoke of the administration’s civil rights efforts and accomplishments. Kenneth Clark recalled:

Bobby became more silent and tense, and he sat immobile in the chair. He no longer continued to defend himself. He just sat, and you could see the tension and the pressure building in him. . . . And it went on for about three hours of this kind of searing, emotional interaction and confrontation. The point we were trying to put over was: Look. The Kennedys have a tremendous amount of credit with the American people. This credit must be used by them. You and your brother must use this credit to lead the American people.
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Before he left, Kennedy heard privately from Belafonte and Clarence Jones, King’s attorney, about the great job the administration had done in Birmingham. Why, Kennedy asked, had they not said this to the others? Because, Belafonte said, the rest would have thought he had “gone over to the other side.” Bobby was furious and later disgustedly told Schlesinger, “It was all emotion, hysteria. They stood up and orated. They cursed. Some of them wept and walked out of the room.”
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But Kennedy had sat through it, and at a basic level it affected him — much as the Alabama state trooper’s club to his gut had communicated the hate of white segregationists. Justice William O. Douglas, who had known and observed Bobby from early childhood, had said his central gift was his “unique capacity for growth.” But to grow, Bobby had to feel with his hands and see with his eyes and hear with his ears. This process was often jarring, but its effect was deep and telling.

By the summer of 1963, probably more than anyone in the American power structure, Bobby was absorbing the furious emotions, dark fears, and distant waves of longing that made up the political culture of civil rights. He communicated these to Jack, who, however detached, had never lost his ability to learn from his brother. Bobby’s message was that there was no easy way out. One day in the summer of 1963, the president concluded his remarks to his cabinet with Blanche of Castile’s speech from King John:

The sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both; each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me.

The administration had by this time mounted a massive effort to convince business executives in Alabama to pressure their governor to permit two Negro students to register at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Burke Marshall had distributed a list of 375 business leaders to cabinet members and agency heads, requesting that they telephone anyone they knew on the list. George Wallace broke off contact with the administration, and by early June nobody was really sure what would happen next. Some FBI reports suggested that Wallace would deploy the state police to stop the black students from registering; other reports claimed that Wallace would rhetorically raise the flag of states’ rights and “segregation forever” and then beat a tactical retreat. Unlike Ole Miss, the University of Alabama’s leadership was fully in favor of a peaceful admission of the students. Bobby stayed in active touch with Dr. Frank A. Rose, an old friend and president of the university. Reports from the university’s trustees about Wallace’s behavior at their meetings were discouraging. “They always reported that he was crazy, that he was scared; inevitably they’d say he was acting like a raving lunatic,” Kennedy recalled.
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