An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (101 page)

Conversations with Louisiana’s Davis and Mayor Allen Thompson of Jackson, Mississippi, provided Kennedy with evidence that southern moderates wanted to reach an accommodation giving African Americans a greater sense of equality and economic opportunity. Thompson, who had been critical of Kennedy’s civil rights actions, urged the president to ignore what he said about him in public: “I really think the world of you,” Thompson told him. “I know you’re a marvelous man and have a terrible job, an impossible job.” “I give you full permission to denounce me in public,” Kennedy joked, “as long as you don’t in private.” More important, Thompson’s amazement “at the fine Negro leaders who have called me” and his conviction that “people are sick and tired” of the agitation troubling their communities helped give Kennedy hope for a reasoned outcome to southern racial strife.

On June 3, newspapers reported that Kennedy would ask Congress for a major civil rights law. The vice president, who prided himself on his mastery as a legislator and doubted that the administration had made adequate preparations to get a bill passed, told Ted Sorensen, “I don’t know who drafted it [the bill]. I’ve never seen it. Hell, if the Vice President doesn’t know what’s in it, how do you expect the others to know what’s in it? I got it from the
New York Times.
” Johnson counseled greater preparation before sending up a bill. Johnson also advised Kennedy to travel through the South. “If he goes down there and looks them in the eye,” Johnson said, “and states the moral issue and the Christian issue, and he does it face to face, these southerners at least respect his courage.” Kennedy would next have to invite in black leaders and persuade them that he was genuinely on their side. “The Negroes feel and they’re suspicious that we’re just doing what we got to,” Johnson said. “Until that’s laid to rest I don’t think you’re going to have much of a solution.” Kennedy accepted Johnson’s advice as “very wise” and delayed sending his bill to Congress for more than a week.

In the meantime, he looked for ways to make the moral case to the nation. The situation at the University of Alabama offered Kennedy a moral high ground. On June 2, after Wallace repeated his promise on
Meet the Press
to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama on June 11, the Justice Department obtained a court order prohibiting Wallace’s interference, though he was not barred from appearing on campus. Neither the administration nor Wallace wanted their differences to erupt in violence or for Wallace to go to jail over defiance of the court order, which seemed likely to deepen the crisis and increase the chances of disorder. In response to a request from Bobby, Averell Harriman asked business leaders with Alabama interests to pressure Wallace to restrain himself. Wallace, who was primarily interested in presenting himself as an opponent of federal intrusion in state affairs rather than as a martyr to a lost cause, was happy to comply. Remembering the difficulties in Mississippi in 1962, the Kennedys decided to federalize the Alabama National Guard to ensure against violence.

On June 10, one of Bobby’s deputies representing the Justice Department tried to convince a friendly journalist to publish a story about a “nervous disability” Wallace had suffered during World War II service in the air force. The objective was to demonstrate Wallace’s instability and suggest that segregationists like Wallace were unworthy of public support. The tactic failed when Wallace acknowledged his nervous condition and the reporter’s editors at
Newsday,
nevertheless fearing a libel suit, refused to run anything about it. The administration found other ways to put Wallace in a bad light and advance the argument for a civil rights bill. The White House agreed to allow a documentary filmmaker to record Bobby and the president conferring during the crisis. Wallace also agreed to let a film crew follow him around, but the advantage in this pictorial competition went to the Kennedys, who appeared sure of themselves, compared with Wallace, who seemed nervous, as if he were “on amphetamines.” This was the intent all along: Bobby had instructed Nick Katzenbach, who was sent to the campus to demand that Wallace step aside and allow the black students to enroll, “Make him look ridiculous. That’s what the President wants you to do.” And though Katzenbach looked frazzled in the summer heat, and though the five-foot seven-inch Wallace, standing atop a wooden box, measured up to the taller Katzenbach’s height and refused to step aside until ordered to do so by the general commanding the federalized Alabama Guard, what the camera crews ultimately recorded was clearly a Kennedy victory. Furthermore, when the university was integrated without violence, Wallace’s opposition registered on the country as pointless posturing.

Seizing upon their success in facing down Wallace, Kennedy decided to give a televised evening speech announcing his decision to ask Congress for a civil rights law. Except for Bobby, Kennedy’s advisers opposed the idea; he might, they worried, be investing too much of his personal standing in a measure likely to fail. But Kennedy believed that larger national needs required it. With only six hours to prepare, it was uncertain whether Sorensen would be able to deliver a polished speech in time. The president and Bobby talked about what he should say in an extemporaneous talk should no text be ready. Five minutes before Kennedy went on television, Sorensen gave him a final draft, which Kennedy spent about three minutes reviewing.

Though Kennedy delivered part of the talk extemporaneously, it was one of his best speeches—a heartfelt appeal in behalf of a moral cause. It included several memorable lines calling upon the country to honor its finest traditions: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. . . . One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. . . . Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. . . . The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. . . . A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. . . . Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

The following week, on June 19, Kennedy asked for the enactment of the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country’s history.He presented it against the backdrop of the murder of Medgar Evers, a leading black activist in Mississippi and veteran of the D-Day invasion, assassinated a day after the president’s speech by a rifle shot in the back at the door to his house in front of his wife and children.

The proposed law would ensure any citizen with a sixth-grade education the right to vote, and would eliminate discrimination in all places of public accommodation—hotels, restaurants, amusement facilities, and retail establishments. Kennedy described the basis for such legislation as clearly consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the Fifteenth Amendment’s right of citizens to vote regardless of race or color, and federal control of interstate commerce. He also asked for expanded powers for the attorney general to enforce court-ordered school desegregation; bring an end to job discrimination and expand funds for job training, which could help African Americans better compete for good jobs; and create a federal community relations service, which could work to improve race relations.

Because bipartisan support was essential to overcome southern Democratic opposition, Kennedy met with Republican House and Senate leaders and Eisenhower to enlist their backing. He asked every member of Congress to put aside sectional and political ties for the sake of the national well-being.

In asking Congress to put civil rights at the center of its deliberations, Kennedy believed that he was also putting his presidency at risk. “He always felt that maybe this was going to be his political swan song,” Bobby said. “He would ask me every four days, ‘Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up? Look at the trouble it got us in.’” The “trouble” Kennedy saw came from southern Democrats. After he sent up the civil rights bill, Kennedy said in a telephone conversation with Congressman Carl Albert of Oklahoma, “I suppose that civil rights thing has just got ’em all excited.” In explaining why a public works bill had failed, Albert replied, “We lost some of the southern boys that we would otherwise have had.” Albert thought that civil rights was “overwhelming the whole, the whole program.” He saw it “affecting mass transit and killing Kennedy’s farm bills.” “Civil rights did it,” Kennedy concluded.

Regardless of the legislative consequences, Kennedy felt that he had to act. As Everett Dirksen, quoting Victor Hugo, said in the following year, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality . . . in education and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.” Remembering
Profiles in Courage,
Kennedy told Luther Hodges, his southern commerce secretary, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.”

But more than moral considerations were at work in Kennedy’s decision. Bobby and the president understood that unless they now acted boldly, African Americans would lose hope that the government would ever fully support their claims to equality and would increasingly engage in violent protest. The alternative to civil rights legislation was civil strife, which would injure the national well-being, embarrass the country before the world, and jeopardize the Kennedy presidency. And since the South seemed likely to vote Republican in the next election, a show of political courage made good political sense and would probably gain him more than he would lose. “Kennedy will lose the segregationist vote,” a reporter for the
Chattanooga Times
said in May. “But he’ll get 110% of the Negro vote no matter how much Martin Luther King and others criticize him for doing less than the maximum for civil rights. In a close election in Tennessee, the Negroes hold the balance.” The journalist had it right, except for the part about King, who himself led a chorus of praise for Kennedy’s bill. King called Kennedy’s civil rights proposals “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president,” and predicted that they would “take the Nation a long, long way toward the realization of the ideals of freedom and justice for all people.” Yet the fight had only begun. If the White House were going to defeat a southern filibuster, Kennedy would have to go beyond earlier rhetorical appeals and fully assert his political influence before the end of the 1963 congressional session.

CHAPTER 18

New Departures: Foreign Affairs

While maintaining our readiness for war, let us exhaust every avenue for peace.

— John F. Kennedy, October 1963

KENNEDY UNDERSTOOD
that advances at home alone were insufficient to ensure America’s overseas success. Managing the Cold War remained as great a challenge as ever. And Kennedy left no doubt that this was still his highest priority. In a December 17, 1962, TV and radio interview with William Lawrence of ABC and George Herman of CBS, he spent most of the hour-long discussion on foreign affairs. Kennedy described the missile crisis as a turning point that had opened a new era in history. “Cuba was the first time,” he said, “that the Soviet Union and the United States directly faced each other with the prospect of the use of military forces . . . which could possibly have escalated into a nuclear struggle.” Its successful resolution now allowed him to set a more rational agenda on nuclear weapons and to encourage possibilities of Soviet-American détente, which would in turn free him to give more attention to other world problems threatening America’s long-term national interest.

Kennedy believed it essential to rein in the nuclear arms race. “There is just a limit to how much we need,” he told the newsmen. “[We have] submarines in the ocean, we have Minutemen on the ground, we have B-52 planes, we still have some B-47’s, we have the tactical forces in Europe. I would say when we start to talk about the megatonnage we could bring into a nuclear war, we are talking about annihilation. How many times do you have to hit a target with nuclear weapons?” He found it inconceivable that anyone could speak casually about a nuclear war, which some of the military and far-right politicians did. A massive nuclear exchange would bring 150 million fatalities in the first eighteen hours in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States. And displaying a greater confidence than ever to take on the U.S. military and the defense industry, Kennedy described the B-70 bomber as “a weapon that isn’t worth the money we would have to put into it,” and stated that, congressional pressure notwithstanding, spending $10 to $15 billion on an airplane that added nothing to U.S. security made no sense. Nor did he think it currently worth billions of dollars to build a Nike Zeus antimissile system until tests proved that it worked. And Polaris submarine and Minuteman ground-to-ground missiles made a Skybolt air-to-surface missile project obsolete, so building it would waste $2.5 billion.

Kennedy did not discount the continuing importance of East Germany to the Soviets in sustaining their hold on Eastern Europe, but he was hopeful that Khrushchev realized “the care with which he must proceed now, as do we.” (Khrushchev did. Within days after the missile crisis, Yuri Zhukov,
Pravda
’s foreign editor, told Salinger that Khrushchev would not renew difficulties over Berlin.) Although Berlin would remain a source of tension in Soviet-American relations, it did not seem likely to become a major point of contention again anytime soon—and indeed, for the rest of the Cold War it would remain a back-burner issue. Khrushchev believed that “the socialist countries have gained more in Berlin from the wall than they would have gained by a peace treaty, which would have provided that no wall could be built.”