The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (40 page)

As registration day drew close, the Kennedys tightened the vice on Wallace. He was informed that the government would federalize the Alabama National Guard and that it would integrate its peacekeeping role with American army troops from Fort Benning. Chief Judge Seyborn H. Lynne of the Northern District of Alabama signed an order commanding Wallace to comply with federal law; in chambers, Lynne let the attorneys for both parties know that violation of the order would result in Wallace’s being sentenced to six months in prison.

On June 11, at a little before 11 A.M., Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach got out of his car at the edge of the Tuscaloosa campus and began to make the long walk to the registration building. Following a plan he worked out with Bobby, he left the two black students back in the car. “Dismiss Wallace,” Kennedy had said, “as a sort of second-rate figure.” Wallace was waiting for him at the entry to the building in front of a bank of TV cameras, a microphone draped around his neck. Katzenbach read the presidential proclamation, advising the governor to cease and desist from obstruction. Wallace then read from his own statement, decrying federal occupation. They remained there for some minutes, Katzenbach repeating his warning and Wallace, at least rhetorically, having none of it. They then both turned away, Wallace into the auditorium and Katzenbach back to the car. The students were then escorted to their dormitory rooms and registered later that afternoon. There was no violence and little disruption. Wallace had done his theatrical bit and raised the tattered flag of segregation. But the Kennedys had outmaneuvered him with a series of flanking actions that made the registration of the students possible.

July 25, 1963

Moscow and Washington, D.C.

J
ack Kennedy rarely indulged in open elation, but when Ambassador Averell Harriman called him from Moscow to tell him that Khrushchev would sign the test ban treaty, Kennedy’s voice rose. “Good,” he said. “Damn good.”
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During ten days of exchanges in Moscow, the president had personally directed the American negotiation, conferring with Harriman on the phone each day, shaping and reshaping the American strategy and reassuring the congressional leaders who had intimated they were opposed to “a secret deal with Khrushchev.” On July 25, the treaty was initialed in Moscow. The next evening the president went on television and told the American people, “Yesterday a shaft of light cut through the darkness. . . . This treaty is not the millennium. . . . But it is an important first step — a step toward peace, a step toward reason, a step away from war.”

For nearly seven months, Kennedy had tried to find some basis for negotiation. “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970,” he said in March, “unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty.” After receiving Khrushchev’s reply in May to his letter outlining the American wish for a test ban treaty, the president had noted wearily, “I am not hopeful. I am not hopeful.” But he had persisted and it had paid off. Still, the breakthrough in Moscow would mean nothing unless the Senate ratified the treaty, and to get that Kennedy knew he would have to rally the American people and put his political future on the line. There was, once again, no going back.

Washington columnist Joseph Kraft wrote that JFK’s political motto might have been: “No enemies to the right.”
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That might have summarized his first two years in office, but not the final one. The missile crisis had brought home to him the prospect of mass slaughter if the superpowers failed to change their dangerous game. It had also fortified Kennedy’s deep-seated skepticism about the overwrought pretensions of anticommunism. By 1963 he had changed and was willing to take political risks to find peace.
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During the Cuban missile crisis, the president had expected the generals and admirals to recommend war, but he had not expected the same conclusion from congressional leaders. Moments before he went on television to announce the “quarantine” of Cuba, he briefed leaders of the House and Senate, who, practically to a man, rejected the idea of a blockade. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, told Kennedy war was “our destiny”: “The time is going to come, Mr. President, when we’re going to have to take this step for Berlin and Korea and Washington, D.C., and Winder, Georgia, for the nuclear war. . . . We’ve got to take a chance somewhere, sometime, if we’re going to retain our position as a great world power. . . . A war, our destiny, will hinge on it. But it’s coming someday, Mr. President. Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances?”
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Kennedy was appalled.

For all the “eyeball-to-eyeball” talk in the wake of the crisis, the deal cut with Khrushchev was a diplomatic compromise. Kennedy and McNamara had kept a tight rein on military movements. The president had allowed several Soviet ships to pass through the blockade to give Khrushchev more time. He had also refused to retaliate against the downing of an American U-2 plane by a Russian surface-to-air missile.
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Air force general Curtis LeMay was not the only member of the Joint Chiefs disaffected by the “sell-out.”
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In January 1963, after Kennedy had conferred three times with senior advisors about relaunching negotiations to ban nuclear testing, and had approached Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to develop a joint Anglo-American approach to the Soviets, there was a barrage of criticism from both inside and outside the administration about the futility of trusting the Russians. Perhaps to deflect this criticism as much as to protect America’s huge strategic lead, the United States resumed testing in the Pacific in April. In true FDR style, the president developed two tracks — one diplomatic disengagement, the other anticommunist retrenchment — to keep his options open. Nonetheless, the breach between Kennedy and the right wing was widening.

The administration’s efforts to reverse the antinationalist tendency of American policy in the Third World began to succeed. In January 1963, the UN’s peacekeeping operation in the Congo — the most expensive in United Nations history — came to a successful conclusion when UN units overran secessionist Katanga. Kennedy’s determination in the wake of Premier Lumumba’s assassination to “keep the Cold War out of the Congo by keeping the UN in the Congo” had finally paid off. The effort, he wrote one of his advisors, had been “extraordinarily difficult” and they were all entitled to “a little sense of pride.”
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Elsewhere in Africa there was evidence the administration had decided to side with African nationalists and not the European colonial powers, despite criticism that such a policy would only strengthen communist subversion. The United States followed through on its commitment to fund the mercurial Kwame Nkrumah’s Volta Dam project, strengthened ties with the Algerian revolutionary leadership, and continued to pressure NATO ally Portugal into freeing its African colonies. When Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Wayne Fredericks called Bobby, suggesting he meet Mozambiquan nationalist Eduardo Mondlane at a non-official location, Kennedy instead insisted that Mondlane be brought to his office at Justice. Mondlane thereafter received covert support from the United States.
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“The strongest force in the world is the desire for national independence,” President Kennedy remarked to Finnish president Urho K. Kekkonen. “That is why I am eager that the United States back nationalist movements even though it embroils us with our friends in Europe.”
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The American right wing appraised these accommodations to nationalist reality in terms of treason. No place, it seemed, was so grossly chauvinist in its conception of America as Texas. At a White House luncheon for some of the nation’s newspaper publishers, the chairman of the board of the
Dallas Morning News,
E. M. Dealey, a rotund man with green-tinted glasses, called Kennedy a weakling to his face. “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” Kennedy confined himself to an icy reply. When the editor of the
Dallas Times Herald,
the city’s afternoon paper, later wrote the president that Dealey wasn’t speaking for all Texans, Kennedy added a postscript to his reply: “I’m sure the people of Dallas are glad when afternoon comes.” On a trip to the West, Kennedy decried those who call for “a man on horseback because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.” Earlier, in Seattle, Kennedy had said that the choice was not simply between “appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead. Let our patriotism be reflected in the creation of confidence in one another, rather than in crusades of suspicion.”
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If anything, these statements fueled the suspicions of the John Birch Society, the Christian Crusade, and the Minutemen, who loaded their guns and raged about treason. There were no fewer than thirty-four threats against Kennedy’s life in Texas from November 1961 to November 1963. When anti-Castro paramilitary organizer Gerry Patrick Hemming visited Texas on a fund-raising mission and briefed the rich men in attendance on his plan to murder Castro, one of them said, “Screw Castro, let’s get his boss.”

“Who’s that?” someone asked.

“Smilin’ Jack,” was the reply.
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Perhaps the most sociopathic of all these brave Texas men were oil billionaire H. L. Hunt and his son Lamar. Shortly before Kennedy arrived in Dallas in the third week of November, H. L. Hunt commented to several people that there was “no way to get these traitors out of government except by shooting them out.”
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Kennedy now had enemies to the right — and he was going to take them on.

Though at times openly angry at the talk of treason, Jack Kennedy was usually philosophical. He attributed the destructive instincts in men as having been “implanted in us growing out of the dust.” Arthur Schlesinger was later to describe the source of Kennedy’s fatalism as “an acute and anguished sense of the fragility of the membranes of civilization, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composition, so tense in its interior relationships, so cunningly enmeshed in underground fears and antagonisms, so entrapped by history in the ethos of violence.”
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The president feared that the “total victory” patriotism of General LeMay and Senator Goldwater exaggerated the evil of the other side and miscast the capacity of the United States to alter human destiny. It created a psychosis of siege and suspicion. The cruel invective of anticommunism, Kennedy felt, made a nuclear Armageddon a “moral imperative” and excused America in the name of national emergency from addressing the scarred and inhuman corners of its own society.
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Why is it, he asked Kenny O’Donnell one day, that being a warmonger enables you to be a complete racist?
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As the president struggled to get negotiations back on track with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear testing, he came to recognize that the brute logic of hatred could only be broken by an unusual overture for peace. In late May Kennedy told McGeorge Bundy that he wanted to make a major statement on the subject of peace. Sorensen produced a draft and Bundy, Schlesinger, and Carl Kaysen took turns editing it. In the course of a long trip home from Hawaii, where he had addressed American mayors on the subject of civil rights, Kennedy reworked the speech draft. He arrived dead tired at Andrews Air Force Base Monday morning, June 10. He proceeded to the White House to change his clothes and then went directly to the sweltering amphitheater at American University He was scheduled to give the commencement speech. Sweating in the humid 90-degree heat and struggling again with his aggravated back, he gave what the
Manchester Guardian
called “one of the greatest state papers of American history.”

Too many Americans, the president said, regarded peace as impossible and war inevitable. “We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade — therefore, they can be solved by man.” Rivalries between states did not last forever. “[T]he tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations.” Kennedy asked the American people to “reexamine our own attitude — as individuals and as a nation.” We ought not to, he said,

fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. . . . No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.

Kennedy concluded with a call for a treaty to end nuclear testing. “If we cannot end now all of our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Premier Khrushchev later told Harriman that it was the greatest speech by an American president since Roosevelt. On July 2, Soviet-American talks to ban atmospheric testing resumed.