An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (65 page)

The ordeal of the activists and the administration’s struggle to protect them resumed in Montgomery, where a white mob carrying ax handles, baseball bats, chains, and lead pipes assaulted the Freedom Riders at the bus terminal. In the absence of city policemen, who shared local antagonism to the riders, the unrestrained mob beat the activists, reporters, photographers, and Seigenthaler, who tried to protect two women being pummeled. John Doar, a Justice Department attorney on assignment in Montgomery, was watching from a federal building window. He described the melee to Burke Marshall on the telephone in Washington. “Oh, there are fists, punching!” he shouted into the phone. “There are no cops. It’s terrible! It’s terrible! There’s not a cop in sight. People are yelling, ‘There those niggers are! Get ’em, get ’em!’ It’s awful.” Rioters with pipes clubbed Seigenthaler to the ground, where he lay unconscious for half an hour before being taken to a hospital.

Patterson refused to discuss the latest riot with Bobby, and after a conversation with Jack, who was away for the weekend in Middleburg, Virginia, Bobby decided to send federal marshals to Montgomery to protect the “interstate travelers.” News that King was also heading for Montgomery, to preach to the Freedom Riders at black minister Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, upset Bobby, who unsuccessfully tried to dissuade King from putting himself in harm’s way and adding to the local tensions. To guarantee King’s safety, fifty U.S. marshals met him at the airport and escorted him to Abernathy’s home. After Byron White, Kennedy’s old friend and a deputy U.S. attorney general, met with Governor Patterson, who demanded withdrawal of the U.S. marshals, White called the president to recommend just that. But Kennedy, who had issued a statement after the riot at the Montgomery bus terminal saying that the U.S. government would meet its responsibility to maintain public calm, rejected White’s suggestion.

Except for his statement issued from the White House press office, Kennedy remained out of sight, though Bobby consulted with him constantly during the weekend. On Sunday, May 21, a new violent confrontation erupted between the marshals and a white mob surrounding Abernathy’s church, where fifteen hundred supporters of the Freedom Riders had gathered to hear King speak. To continue insulating the president from the crisis, Bobby took the lead in deploying the marshals and negotiating with local law enforcement to keep the peace. During repeated mob assaults on the church, which the marshals repelled with tear gas, King and Bobby clashed on the telephone. While King and his audience waited for more marshals to arrive, he told Bobby, “If they don’t get here immediately, we’re going to have a bloody confrontation.” After Alabama National Guardsmen replaced the marshals and intimidated people inside the church by refusing to let them leave, King upbraided Bobby for having abandoned the congregation to the control of Patterson’s hostile guardsmen. “Now, Reverend,” Bobby replied impatiently, “you know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the U.S. marshals you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now.” Bobby’s reference did not amuse King, who had never heard the Irish expression describing impotence. “Who’s Kelsey?” he asked some aides. “That ended the conversation,” Wofford says, “but there were harder words to come.”

Although the people in the church were allowed to depart before dawn and the administration had a sense of triumph at having preserved law and order, the gulf between the Kennedys and civil rights advocates deepened. When Patterson had complained that the presence of U.S. marshals in Alabama was “destroying us politically,” Bobby replied, “John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically.” But on Monday, after the all-night crisis at the church, Bobby wanted the Freedom Riders to call off their campaign. “They had made their point,” he told Wofford. Publicly, Bobby called for a “cooling-off” period. James Farmer of CORE responded sharply. “Negroes have been cooling off for a hundred years,” he said, and would be “in a deep freeze if they cooled any further.” For his part, King told
Time
magazine, “Wait, means ‘Never.’” When a reporter asked Ralph Abernathy if he was concerned about embarrassing the president, Abernathy answered, “Man, we’ve been embarrassed all our lives.” King told some of his associates after rejecting Bobby’s request, “You know, they don’t understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don’t understand what we’re doing.”

After he had issued his public statement on the disorders in Alabama, Kennedy met with a group of liberals, including the actor Harry Belafonte and Eugene Rostow, the dean of the Yale School and W. W. Rostow’s brother. Belafonte respectfully asked if the president “could say something a little more about the Freedom Riders.” No less respectfully, but more forcefully, Rostow urged “the need for moral leadership on the substantive issue of equal access to public facilities.” After they left, Kennedy asked Wofford, “What in the world does [Rostow] think I should do? Doesn’t he know I’ve done more for civil rights than any President in American history? How could any man have done more than I’ve done?” There was something to be said for Kennedy’s point, but not as much as he thought. He had gone beyond other presidents, but it was not enough to keep up with the determined efforts of African Americans to end two centuries of oppression.

When the Freedom Riders returned to Washington after serving time in a Jackson, Mississippi, jail, Kennedy refused to see them at the White House. Nor would he follow Wofford’s suggestion that he issue a statement, which “Eisenhower never did . . . to give clear moral expression to the issues involved. The only effective time for such moral leadership is during an occasion of moral crisis,” Wofford asserted. “This is the time when your words would mean most.” Black leaders and newspaper editorials were complaining that “despite your criticism of Eisenhower on this score, you have not chosen yet to say anything about the right of Americans to travel without discrimination.” Because making the moral case for a statement seemed unlikely to persuade Kennedy, Wofford also emphasized its impact on foreign affairs. “Some such vigorous statement and public appeal, on top of the effective actions of the Attorney General, past and planned, should have a good effect abroad. I note from reading the foreign press that some strong Presidential statement is awaited.”

Kennedy’s refusal to follow Wofford’s suggestion rested on his conviction that he had done as much as he could. He understood the sense of injustice that blacks felt toward a system of apartheid in a country priding itself on traditions of freedom and equal opportunity. Southern abuse of blacks, including physical intimidation of courageous men and women practicing nonviolent protest, was not lost on him. He knew this was not simply a five-or-ten-cent increase in the minimum wage but an issue that contradicted the country’s credo. Nonetheless, he gave it a lower priority than the danger of a nuclear war in which tens of millions of people could be killed and the planet suffer damages that would jeopardize human survival. He seemed to operate on the false assumption that openly and aggressively committing himself to equal rights for black Americans would somehow undermine his pursuit of world peace. Many civil rights activists justifiably concluded that Kennedy simply did not have the moral commitment to their cause, that his background as a rich man insulated from contacts with African Americans and their plight made him more an interested observer than a visceral proponent, like Hubert Humphrey, of using federal power to cure the country’s greatest social ill.

FROM MAY 16
to 18, in the midst of the strife in Alabama, Kennedy made his first trip as president abroad, to Canada. Although he knew that the timing of his visit might anger civil rights activists, he saw conversations in Ottawa as too important to be deferred. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who wished to separate Canada from U.S. Cold War policies, opposed Washington’s pressure for Canadian membership in the Organization of American States and requests to deploy nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. Because Kennedy had no hope of changing Diefenbaker’s mind through private conversations, he used a speech before Parliament to plead the case for U.S. policies. He described America’s historic friendship with Canada as the “unity of equal and independent nations,” and urged Canadians to join the OAS as one way to make “this entire area more secure against aggression of all kinds.” He emphasized how heartened the OAS would be by Canada’s participation. As important, he urged the deployment of nuclear weapons for the defense of all NATO areas, meaning Canada as well as Europe, and warned, “Our opponents are watching to see if we in the West are divided. They take courage when we are.”

Diefenbaker resented Kennedy’s attempt to force him into unwanted actions, and after Kennedy returned to the United States, the prime minister threatened him with the publication of a memo in which Kennedy allegedly described Diefenbaker as an S.O.B. Ted Sorensen claimed that the handwritten note included an illegible reference to the OAS and nothing about Diefenbaker. After the memo incident, Bobby recalled that his brother “hated . . . Diefenbaker—had contempt for him.” In a private, candid response to the flap over the memo, Kennedy said, “I didn’t think Diefenbaker was a son of a bitch, I thought he was a prick.” (“I couldn’t have called him an S.O.B.,” Kennedy joked. “I didn’t know he was one—at that time.”) Personal animus aside, the visit to Canada added to Kennedy’s foreign policy worries. Like Churchill during World War II, he could complain that the only thing worse than having allies was not having them.

The trip to Canada and a special message to Congress on May 25, a week after his return from Ottawa, reflected Kennedy’s ongoing concern to restore confidence in his foreign policy leadership after the Bay of Pigs failure. Normally, he explained, a president spoke only annually on the state of the union, but these were “extraordinary times” confronting Americans with an “extraordinary challenge.” Delivering his speech from the well of the House before a joint session, Kennedy solemnly reminded the Congress that the U.S. had become the world’s “leader in freedom’s cause. . . . The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today,” he said, “is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East—the lands of the rising peoples.” The adversaries of freedom were working to capture this revolution and turn it to their advantage. And although they possessed “a powerful intercontinental striking force, [and] large forces for conventional war,” their “aggression is more often concealed than open.”

Since America’s advantage in numbers of nuclear weapons and capacity to deliver them was secondary in this “battle for minds and souls,” Kennedy omitted mention of it. Nor did he feel compelled to include the civil rights movement across the South as part of the struggle of oppressed peoples against “injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” It would be no selling point to southern congressmen and senators, whose votes were essential to increase appropriations for national defense.

The nation’s security, he explained, depended first on a stronger American economy. And this meant reducing unemployment through a Manpower Development and Training program that would give hundreds of thousands of workers displaced by technological changes new job skills. Second, business and labor needed to improve America’s balance of payments at the same time they held down prices and wages. He also proposed a new Act for International Development that could raise living standards in developing countries and make them less vulnerable to communist subversion. An increase in funding for the United States Information Agency would also combat communism in the propaganda wars being waged on radio and television in Latin America and Asia.

Expanded military assistance programs for Southeast Asian, Latin American, and African countries were no less important. In addition, spending on new kinds of forces and weapons would give the United States greater flexibility to fight either a traditional ground war or an unconventional guerrilla conflict. This was not a recommendation for diminished nuclear fighting capacity; Kennedy believed it essential to maintain the country’s nuclear arsenal at the highest level as well. Improved intelligence, especially after the Bay of Pigs, was yet another priority. It was “both legitimate and necessary as a means of self-defense in an age of hidden perils.”

Halfway through his speech, Kennedy came to even bigger ticket items. He wanted to triple spending on civil defense, with additional large increases in the future. “Apathy, indifference, and skepticism” had greeted past suggestions for a national civil defense policy, Kennedy declared. Indeed, comedians had ridiculed arguments that a “well-designed” program could save millions of American lives, facetiously instructing students during a nuclear attack to “move away from windows, crouch under desks, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye.” As for survival in a nuclear war, 83 percent of people polled saw their chances as poor or no more than fifty-fifty. Ninety-five percent of the public had made no plans to prepare their homes for a nuclear conflict. A majority was more receptive to building community fallout shelters, but overcoming national skepticism about an effective civil defense program was a hard sell. Soviet citizens were no less cynical about civil defense. “What should I do if a nuclear bomb falls?” a Moscow joke went. “Cover yourself with a sheet and crawl slowly to the nearest cemetery. Why slowly? To avoid panic.”

Initially, Kennedy himself had been skeptical of investing in a costly fallout shelter program. In early May, when he met with several governors urging an expanded program, he had doubts that a more extensive civil defense plan would “really do the job.” Marcus Raskin, an aide at the NSC, reinforced Kennedy’s skepticism. Raskin expressed “great fears for this civil defense program,” which he did not think would “decrease the probabilities of war” and might even increase them. Moreover, any proposal seemed likely to intensify an unresolvable argument over whether blast or fallout shelters would save more lives.