An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (99 page)

He described denial of the franchise as especially egregious. Five southern states had “over 200 counties in which fewer than 15% of the Negroes of voting age are registered to vote. This cannot continue,” Kennedy declared. “I am, therefore, recommending legislation to deal with the problem.” He also urged the fulfillment of the Supreme Court’s nine-year-old decision on desegregation of public schools, the enforcement of fair hiring and other labor practices, and the end to racial segregation in all places of public accommodation—hotels, restaurants, theaters, recreational facilities, airports, rail and bus stations, and all means of public transportation. “Surely there could be no more meaningful observance of the centennial [of Lincoln’s Proclamation]” Kennedy concluded, “than the enactment of effective civil rights legislation and the continuation of effective executive action.”

Yet, since he was still thinking of the consequences for his overall agenda, Kennedy’s actions did not match his words. It was still only in the realm of voting rights that Kennedy actually offered legislation. He refused to risk his 1963 congressional program by supporting reform of Rule XXII, which would reduce the votes needed to end a filibuster from two-thirds to three-fifths—relevant since a filibuster seemed likely in the case of civil rights but not in response to his other reform proposals. Nor did he follow his February message to Congress with specific recommendations for ending southern segregation.

In March, a reporter asked Kennedy to comment on Governor Rockefeller’s assertion that he had been “appointing ‘segregationist judges’ to the Federal bench in the South.” The reporter also pointed out that “that had blunted [to] a certain amount the aggressive stand that the executive branch had taken against segregation.” Kennedy responded defensively: “No. I think that some of the judges may not have ruled as I would have ruled in their cases. In those cases there is always the possibility for an appeal.” Overall, he said, the southern judges appointed by him and Eisenhower had a “very creditable record.” In a telephone conversation the next day with Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Kennedy and Katzenbach were more candid, naming several judges who were problematic. But instead of trying to do something about it, they thought of short-term political equations. Katzenbach pointed out that they had “as much trouble from Republican appointees down there as . . . from the Democrats.” Kennedy said he wanted the Justice Department “to get up a memo on . . . the Republicans and Democrats ’cause . . . this might get to be one of those issues they keep talking about. So I’ll be able to talk about [the Republican segregationist judges] in case it comes up again.” The strategy was to mask his administration’s shortcomings on judicial appointments by demonstrating that Eisenhower’s were even worse or, at least, no better.

At the end of April, Kennedy was on the defensive again about his refusal to accept a Civil Rights Commission recommendation that the federal government cut off funds to Mississippi until it complied with court orders protecting blacks from violence and discrimination. Since Kennedy would not follow the commission’s recommendation, a reporter asked, “Could you discuss with us what alternative steps the Federal Government might be able to take to bring some of these [southern] States into line with the law of the land?” Kennedy replied that his administration had instituted lawsuits to remedy the problems. But he accurately described it as “very difficult,” because “we do not have direct jurisdiction.” He said that “a blanket withdrawal of Federal expenditures from a State” was beyond his powers, but he was using every “legislative and legal tool at our command to insure protection for the rights of our citizens.”

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy’s frustration over civil rights was greater than ever. He felt he had exercised stronger executive leadership in support of equal racial opportunity than any administration in U.S. history. His Justice Department had filed forty-two lawsuits in support of black voting rights. He had fought the battle of Mississippi to enroll Meredith in the university. He had appointed forty blacks to important administration posts and elevated Thurgood Marshall to the federal Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Though belatedly, he had signed the Executive Order barring discrimination in federally financed public housing. He had also recommended a voting rights law, but public and congressional apathy had stalled it in committee. But his failure to request a ban on segregation in places of public accommodation had been glaring and evoked continuing complaints that he was too timid and that only a bold proposal for change could end the injustices of discrimination and produce real progress for African Americans.

Tensions in the administration over how to handle civil rights problems produced a running battle between Bobby and Johnson. Bobby was convinced that unless the administration delivered on greater equality for blacks, it would miss a chance to advance simple justice for an oppressed minority, lose liberal support, and alienate millions of voters by appearing ineffective and weak. Fearful that his brother could lose the 1964 election over a failure to produce enough gains on civil rights, Bobby pressed everyone in the administration to do their utmost. Burke Marshall recalls that Bobby “fussed and interfered . . . with almost every other department of the government in 1963 . . . on their employment policies, and on whether or not Negroes were allowed to participate in federally financed programs.” As head of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, Johnson became a principal target of Bobby’s prodding. Johnson was proud of the committee’s record in 1962 after Troutman had resigned and Hobart Taylor, Johnson’s appointee, had replaced him. The committee had increased black job holding in the federal government that year by 17 percent and doubled the number of remedial actions taken by private contractors in response to complaints from black employees. Johnson also took pride in public statements echoing the president’s call for an end to segregation and racism. Yet Johnson’s rhetoric, like Kennedy’s, was an inadequate substitute for effective action. The gains made by the CEEO resulted in no more than an upward blip in black employment. Moreover, newspaper stories during the first half of 1963 describing the CEEO’s Plans for Progress as “largely meaningless” persuaded Bobby that Johnson’s committee was “mostly a public relations operation” and that Taylor was “an Uncle Tom.” Bobby worried not only about the limited gains in black employment but also about the committee’s impact on the 1964 campaign. “I could just see going into the election of 1964,” he said later, “and eventually these statistics or figures would get out. There would just be a public scandal.” Bobby also recalled that when he spoke to the president about the problem, he “almost had a fit.”

At CEEO meetings in May and July, after police attacks on black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, had put civil rights back in the headlines, Bobby gave clear expression to White House dissatisfaction with the committee’s performance. According to one observer, he treated Johnson “in a most vicious manner. He’d ridicule him, imply he was insincere.” In May Bobby “asked a lot of questions that were impatient, very impatient,” Burke Marshall said. “It made the Vice President mad.” Bobby blamed Johnson and Taylor for the 1 percent black federal employment in Birmingham, a city with a 37 percent black population. “I was humiliated,” Johnson said afterward. At the July meeting, Bobby made NASA’s James Webb the target of his complaints. Webb, who was working closely with Johnson on space plans, had no information on black employment at NASA, and Bobby castigated him for neglecting the issue. “It was a pretty brutal performance, very sharp,” one participant recalled. “It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits. . . . And then finally, after completely humiliating Webb and making the Vice President look like a fraud and shutting Hobart Taylor up completely, he got up. He walked around the table . . . shook my hand . . . and then he went on out.”

The clashes between Bobby and Johnson were partly personal. “No affection contaminated the relationship between the Vice President and the Attorney General,” Schlesinger remembered. “It was a pure case of mutual dislike.” Seventeen years, six inches in height, and “southwestern exaggeration against Yankee understatement” separated them. “Robert Kennedy, in the New England manner, liked people to keep their physical distance. Johnson, in the Texas manner, was all over everybody—always the grip on the shoulder, tug at the lapel, nudge in the ribs, squeeze of the knee.”

Both men were powerful, at times overbearing, tyrannical characters who did not treat opponents kindly. They were tough alley fighters, hell-bent on winning at almost any cost. Intimidation and hard bargains were weapons they carried into their political campaigns for high office and legislative gains. They also shared bold, indeed, noble dreams for the country of better race relations, less poverty, and security from foreign threats. They held a common regard for the national system that had allowed them both to gain prominence and power. But each self-righteously saw the other as less capable of achieving the great ends bringing them together in the same party and the same administration. Although the president kept his distance from the Bobby-Johnson tensions and had little taste for the personal abuse Bobby used against adversaries, he seems to have accepted his brother’s harsh treatment of Johnson as a necessary prod to making him a more effective member of the administration.

IN APRIL, MARTIN LUTHER KING
and the Alabama Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched a campaign in Birmingham to challenge the city’s segregated facilities and employment practices. TCI, the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, the city’s leading employer, had only eight black white-collar employees out of a workforce of twelve hundred. Most black men in Birmingham worked in the least desirable blue-collar jobs, while those black women who worked usually served as domestics. The city administration had no black policemen, firemen, or elected representatives. Because it was one of the most racist communities in the South, any sort of victory for equal treatment would represent an opening wedge in the struggle to change the mores of the whole region. And because Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s police commissioner, seemed certain to reply with repressive tactics likely to make the national news and draw the Kennedy administration into the struggle, the city became the ideal target for a renewed attack on southern racism.

Connor and the city fathers did not disappoint King and SCLC protesters. On May 3 and 4, when black demonstrators, including many high school and some elementary schoolchildren, marched in defiance of a city ban, the police and firemen attacked the marchers with police dogs that bit several demonstrators, and high-pressure fire hoses that knocked marchers down and tore off their clothes. The TV images, broadcast across the country and around the world, graphically showed out-of-control racists abusing innocent, young advocates of equal rights. Kennedy, looking at a picture on the front page of the
New York Times
and TV news coverage of a dog lunging to bite a teenager on the stomach, said that the photo made him “sick.”

Still, Kennedy’s initial response to the crisis was a moderate urge to compromise. For the sake of civic peace, America’s international reputation, and King’s public influence, Kennedy wanted to negotiate a quick halt to the Birmingham strife.

He viewed Birmingham’s power brokers as unreasonable reflectors of outdated social mores whose unyielding racism threatened their city’s civic peace and prosperity. He also saw an end to racial strife in the South as essential to America’s international standing in its competition with Moscow for influence in Third World countries. But at the same time, while he sympathized with the crusade against southern racism, Kennedy also saw King as self-serving and possibly under the influence of communists trying to embarrass the United States. J. Edgar Hoover fanned the flames of suspicion about King or, more to the point, about two of King’s associates, Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell, whom he accused of being communists. (Although Levison had ended his ties with the Communist Party in 1956, his history made him vulnerable to Hoover’s accusations. And because Hoover was so emphatic about Levison’s ongoing radicalism, and because the FBI had a reputation for successfully identifying subversives, Bobby and Burke Marshall found it difficult to ignore their warnings.) A drawn-out crisis in Birmingham might persuade Hoover to leak stories to the media that communist subversives were manipulating King in Alabama.

At a press conference on May 8, Kennedy declared that in the absence of violations of federal civil rights or other statutes, he was working to bring “both sides together to settle in a peaceful fashion the very real abuses too long inflicted on the Negro citizens of that community.” He intended to halt “a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.” A reporter wanted to know if “a fireside chat on civil rights would serve a constructive purpose.” “If I thought it would I would give one,” Kennedy replied. But he had his doubts. “I made a speech the night of Mississippi—at Oxford—to the citizens of Mississippi and others,” he said. “That did not seem to do much good.” Afterward, Civil Rights commissioner Erwin Griswold publicly complained, “It seems clear to me that he hasn’t even started to use the powers that are available to him.” An angry Kennedy said privately, “That son of a bitch. Let him try.”

Finding a middle ground between the segregationists and the SCLC seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Understanding that King was intent on full integration, in all the city’s public facilities, including its retail businesses, Birmingham’s white leaders viewed any compromises as opening the way to a social revolution repugnant to most whites in the city, state, and region.