The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (83 page)

Jack won his debate points, but in doing so he helped to entomb himself in a prison of rhetoric out of which he and his administration would never fully escape.

I
t said much about Jack’s marriage that in his acceptance speech in Los Angeles he had violated one of the most sacrosanct traditions by not even mentioning his absent wife. He had fit Jackie into a compartment in his complicated life, but now that he was running for the presidency, she had become a potential problem. “She … absolutely curled up at people shouting, ‘Hello, Jackie,’ who had never seen her before,” reflected Lord Harlech. “She’d just turn away, and you could feel a strong resistance to this kind of a life.”

The Democrats did not know quite what to do with Jackie, an exotic orchid set among daisies and marigolds. They feared that Jackie lived so far outside the world of middle-class America that most voters would be uneasy having her in the White House. The Republicans trundled out their “Pat for First Lady” campaign. Presumably most Americans could identify more with this cloth-coated, modest matron, a veritable Betty Crocker of a politician’s wife, than the elegant, sexy, baby-talking, foreign-sounding Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. That contrast had not yet sunk in when the Democrats announced that the Kennedys were going to have a second child. A pregnant mother trumped even a Bible-touting, cloth-coat-wearing matron. But there were still cynical whispers in some quarters “that it [the pregnancy] was planned that way to keep that supposedly lethal glamour out of circulation.”

Jackie’s seeming extravagance was such a problem that she appeared for one interview in a $29.95 maternity dress, wearing it as if it were a uniform
of the middle class. “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon on clothes,” Jackie said, a subject that, fortunately for the Democrats, was not pursued.

Jackie could not talk to Jack about just how difficult she found it being forced into the confining mold of a public person. She turned to Joe Alsop, whose insights into Washington social life were often deeper and truer than those found in his political columns. Alsop contrasted his cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, who in public managed “oddly humorous and even downright fantastic things,” with Pat Nixon, who created “false homey touches” that reeked of an “adman’s phoniness.” Alsop wrote Jackie of “things that can be done for public purposes without any departure from or falsification of your private self.”

Jackie was seeking to maintain her authenticity and to preserve her rich inner life. “You have been of more help than you can imagine,” she wrote Alsop. “And there is one more thing you have taught me—to respect power. I never did—possibly because it came so suddenly without my having had to work for it—(power by marriage I mean). But if things turn out right—I will welcome it—and use it for the things I care about.”

J
ack would have preferred to spend his campaign days talking largely exclusively about foreign affairs, but there was one domestic issue that would not wait any longer, not for him or for anyone else. That was the continued disenfranchisement of black Americans. Bobby at least had played beside a black teammate on the Harvard football team, but except for his gentleman valet, Jack had practically no contact with Americans of other races. That made him no different from most men of his class, but he was neither intellectually nor emotionally attuned to the great domestic moral issue of his time. He was, moreover, the titular head of a party that included as a crucial element segregationist southerners.

American blacks understood that fact full well, and in the 1956 presidential election, 60 percent had voted Republican, considering the party of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, if not the vehicle of their deliverance, then at least the lesser of two evils. They had voted Democratic during the New Deal, but that bond was now broken, and black voters appeared woefully slow in moving toward a Democratic Party that vowed to serve their interests. The prominent Atlanta minister Martin Luther King Sr. was one of a large number of the older generation of black southern preachers who had come out for Nixon, in large part in opposition to Jack’s faith.

Martin Luther King Jr. had followed his father’s calling, but unlike many of that generation, he considered his faith not a substitute for justice but the very engine of its enactment. The Reverend King was a disciple of Mahatma
Gandhi, the martyred Indian leader, and like his mentor, King was a man dangerous to all who looked on the world as it was and thought that was the way the world would always be. Despite what his enemies believed, in the first year of this new decade the Reverend King was not leading the black students across the South who had suddenly risen up, sitting in at lunch counters and picketing those who denied them their rights. He was wary of their endlessly confrontational politics and in some senses was pushed forward by the sheer energy and will of these young people. For King, the whirlwind of the 1960s had already begun.

Over his political career Jack had learned that it was at times impossible to shake the hands of black and other ethnic leaders in equality when many of them offered nothing but outstretched palms. Louis Martin, the one important black aide in the campaign, said that the way to win the black vote was through his colleagues at black newspapers. “And I know those papers aren’t going to do a damn thing for you unless you pay us some money.”

The most admired figure among the black minority was not the controversial Reverend King but the legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, and he had already endorsed Nixon. Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem congressman, was the most powerful political figure in black America, and the second-most-desired endorsement. His golden tongue could be had for a golden price, in this case an offering in the Reverend Powell’s collection plate of $300,000 cash to get out the black vote. Kennedy’s people knew that Powell would take most of that to get out his own vote, and they countered with $50,000 for ten endorsement speeches.

King was a leader of a different kind. He sought a harder currency for speaking positively of Jack’s candidacy. King was a figure with various constituencies to satisfy, and strategies beyond the grasp of almost any of them. He couldn’t afford to squander his moral capital by publicly endorsing Jack. Still, he knew that for his people Kennedy was a far better choice than Nixon. He wanted the minions of youthful protest to lie low during the election campaign, or they might give Nixon the election.

King asked for a meeting with Jack in the South, but Jack turned down that modest request when he learned that the civil rights leader felt that he should offer to meet with Nixon as well. “The hell with that,” Jack told Harris Wofford, a lawyer and campaign aide concerned with civil rights matters. “Nixon might be smart enough to accept. If he does, I lose votes. I’m taking a much greater risk in the South than Nixon, but King wants to treat us as equals. Tell him it’s off.”

King had been looking for a worthy excuse to be out of Atlanta, where the new wave of protests had already begun and his absence was so evident.

Jack’s intransigence led King to do what he did not want to do, to lead where he did not want to lead, and to become the leader he might not have become. He was left with no good excuse to stand apart from his young brethren in protest. On October 19, he joined eighty student protestors asking for service in the segregated Magnolia Room at Rich’s, Atlanta’s premier department store.

That morning the Atlanta police arrested King, and for the first time in his life he spent the night in a jail cell. King refused bail, and the matter threatened to create an embarrassing dilemma for a candidate who was trying to draw southern blacks to his banner while holding on to southern segregationists.

When Jack sought counsel on this matter, he turned to Sarge Shriver and Harris Wofford, who led the campaign’s civil rights efforts. Wofford reflected years later that Jack was not completely comfortable with his two “super idealistic” subordinates. Neither his brother-in-law Shriver, “a radical Catholic,” nor Wofford, who had become an advocate of Gandhian nonviolence in India, were likely to accede easily to the inevitable compromises of politics. Wofford wrote a strong statement for Jack to release in defense of King and condemning his arrest. Jack read the passionate statement with dismay. He had been talking to Ernest Vandiver, the governor of Georgia, politician to politician, and now, a few days before the election, Jack was not about to make such a statement.

“Look, our real interest is getting Martin out, right?” Kennedy told Wofford. “Well, I’ve been told that if I don’t issue that statement, the governor of Georgia says, ‘I’ll get that son of a bitch King out.’”

The Kennedys were not the only politicians worried that the political sky was falling. William Hartsfield, the mayor of Atlanta, deplored the dismal publicity his progressive city was receiving. He went ahead and arranged to have King and the other activists released and the charges against them dropped, an action he was taking, he said, only because Senator Kennedy had implored him to do so. Wofford had done all the imploring, and the Kennedy campaign staff backed away from the matter as best they could, lest they end up freeing King but losing the solid South.

That would have been the end of it, but just as King was to leave Fulton County Jail, Judge Oscar Mitchell in Georgia’s De Kalb County had him arrested again on a bench warrant for violating his parole on a traffic violation and carried away in leg irons. On the following day, less than a week before the election, the judge sentenced King to six months at hard labor. The judge had hardly banged his gavel a last time before King was taken to Georgia’s toughest prison at Reidsville to begin to serve out his term.

Early on the morning that King arrived at Reidsville, Jack called Governor
Vandiver. “Governor, is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail?” Jack asked. The two men had a perfect commonality of interests. They both wanted to end the relentless publicity about King’s imprisonment and focus on other matters. They both wanted to win the election. They both wanted to minimize the civil rights issue in the campaign. And they both wanted to keep their role in this matter as quiet as possible. The governor made no public statements but called a close friend, Georgia Secretary of State George D. Stewart, who in turn called his close friend Judge Mitchell, who in the end arranged to release King on bond.

While this was going on in Georgia, Jack had just finished speaking at a breakfast in Chicago and was in a suite at O’Hare Airport, where the candidate’s plane would soon be taking off. Wofford had talked to Mrs. King and knew that she was terrified after her husband’s midnight ride to a new prison. Wofford called Shriver. “The trouble with your beautiful, passionate Kennedys is that they never show their passion,” Wofford said, imploring Shriver to get Jack to call Mrs. King. “They don’t understand symbolic action.”

“It’s not too late,” said the terminally optimistic Shriver. “Jack doesn’t leave O’Hare for about forty minutes. Give me her number and get me out of jail if I’m arrested for speeding.”

Shriver sped to the airport and rushed into Jack’s bedroom, where he had retreated to get a few minutes rest. He made sure that he was alone, so he would not hear the other aides nay-saying his proposal.

“Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy,” Shriver said. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected. But they do want to know whether you care. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

Jack knew how close Wofford and Shriver were, how fervent their concerns, and he was not about to tell his brother-in-law that he had already called the Georgia governor and hoped that King might be out of prison in a few hours. He trusted Shriver only so far, for he was an ideologue committed to this issue. Instead of confiding in his brother-in-law, he listened, as if he were hearing this matter for the first time this day. “What the hell,” he said, as if he were acting impulsively. “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.”

Jack talked to Coretta Scott King, a call that in other circumstances would have been considered little more than a minimal act of decency. When Bobby heard of the action, he was infuriated. “You bomb-throwers have lost the whole campaign,” he told Wofford and Louis Martin. He warned them to issue no more statements. When Bobby was at his angriest,
he had a frigid fury, his eyes cold, his voice tightly controlled, his fists clenched. “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon?” he said as the campaign plane flew to Detroit. “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost if for us?”

Bobby decided, however, that King would have to be released. That evening from a phone booth in New York, Bobby called Judge Mitchell in Georgia because, as he told his aide John Seigenthaler, the judge was “screwing up my brother’s campaign and making the country look ridiculous before the world.” It was an intrusion into the judicial process that many lawyers would think violated professional ethics. Judge Mitchell recalled Bobby saying that if King stayed in prison, “we would lose the state of Massachusetts.”

Even after King was released from prison, he was still unwilling formally to endorse Jack, but his influential father was not so hesitant, saying that “if Kennedy has the courage to wipe the tears from Coretta’s eyes, he will vote for him whatever his religion.” Kennedy knew how important that statement would be among black voters, though he was not aware of the irony. “Did you see what Martin’s father said?” he asked Wofford. “He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic, but since I called his daughter-in-law, he will vote for me. That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers don’t we?”

While the Kennedy campaign did everything to downplay the role that Jack and Bobby played in King’s release, Wofford and Shriver went ahead and prepared two million copies of a small blue pamphlet to be handed out in black churches on Sunday, two days before the election. As extraordinary as it may seem, Wofford passionately asserts that neither he nor Shriver cleared this effort with Bobby or Jack. The pamphlet talked of Jack’s and Bobby’s calls and quoted King’s statement that he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.”