Before the Storm (47 page)

If Kennedy was moving to the right, he was only following the electorate. His approval rating was down from its usual perch in the mid-seventies to 57; even among Catholic Democrats he was down II points and falling. The political star of the moment was Louise Day Hicks, who was gaveling Boston School Committee meetings to adjournment at the very mention of the forbidden word “segregation”; with every
bang!
her favor soared. As she campaigned for reelection she rebuffed overtures from George Wallace. (“He's a segregationist,” she said. “I don't want to be connected with him.”) The White House offered her a judgeship—which seemed, at the time, like playing it safe, for cognoscenti were calling her appeal to racism political suicide. Two days before the school committee election, the NAACP held a march to one of the most tumbledown schoolhouses in the ghetto. The next day the building mysteriously burned to the ground. Now the cognoscenti prepared Hicks's political last rites; who would vote for a figure who inspired this kind of incivility? She ended up winning an unbelievable landslide. Many voted for her without even bothering to mark their ballots in the mayoral race. “Every time the Negroes demonstrated,” she trilled, “they campaigned for me.”

Evans and Novak called her victory a “glimpse of the iceberg.” The DNC began preparing for a massive voter registration drive among urban black voters to replace suddenly unreliable urban white ones. In New York City, demonstrations for immediate school integration, under the leadership of a militant preacher named Milton Galamison, were daily newscast fare. Soon Galamison's Parents Workshop for Equality had competition: Parents and Taxpayers, a white group formed to protest the board of education's plan to blend the student bodies of two neighboring Queens elementary schools, one white, one black.

In Albany, New York's state capital, protesters held sit-ins demanding equal employment in state-financed construction. “There is only one standard for entrance into the United Association and that is the man's qualifications,” the leader of the plumbers' union retorted. “We do not believe in rejecting an applicant because of his race, color, or creed, and we likewise cannot be expected to admit an applicant
because
of his race, color, or creed.” Governor Rockefeller concurred: “Their program would destroy the whole concept of free unions.” That sounded nice, but then, many building-trades locals automatically gave an applicant an extra ten points on the apprenticeship exam if a blood relative belonged to the union. Brooklyn's plumbers' local had only three black journeymen out of several thousand members. The carpenters'
union confined black members to a Harlem branch. The electricians refused them altogether.

In the Mississippi governor's race the Democrat Paul Johnson won only because he convinced the electorate he hated John F. Kennedy more than the Republican candidate did. George Wallace appeared at Kennedy's alma mater, Harvard, and as the flower of American youth approached the microphone to show up a yokel, one by one they were folded up into a master debater's pocket. (Outside, the flower of American youth slashed the tires of his limo.) In Berkeley, the Jaycees canceled the annual Festival of Football Queens because one of the chosen queens was black. Coming hard upon inflammatory addresses by James Farmer and Malcolm X, Berkeley activists, many of them veterans of the 1960 anti-HUAC campaign, got up an Ad Hoc Committee Against Discrimination and marched off to San Francisco to picket racist hiring practices at a drive-in owned by the Republican mayoral candidate; III were arrested. In Chicago, Mayor Daley was flatly refusing to push an equal housing law through the city council on what, for the leader of a machine, was the soundest of reasons: he wouldn't reward a voting bloc for threatening a school boycott. The blacks protested for their soundest of reasons: pleas for relief from calamitous school crowding had been answered with the deployment of a few mobile homes plunked in the middle of parking lots—called “Willis Wagons” after the dyspeptic school superintendent, Benjamin Willis. It was just as with Hicks in Boston: the more the blacks protested Willis, the more popular he became. Chicago voters scared Daley by giving him the closest Republican challenge he would face in his life; Democratic mayors also received reelection scares in Indianapolis and Philadelphia.

Jack Kennedy had to wonder what would happen in 1964 to the Chicago machine that had delivered him the presidency in 1960 if Dick Daley dared get behind his civil rights program. His nervousness showed when he was asked at his October 31 press conference about a Goldwater charge made earlier in the day that the President was attempting to control the news to perpetuate himself in office. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head in annoyance before finding his feet with a trademark dry—if, this time, defensive—witticism: Goldwater had had “a busy week selling TVA and to, ah, giving permission, suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons.... So I thought it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him.” A pleased grin; gales of laughter.

History has not preserved a detailed account of what the Kennedy brothers and seven others discussed on November 12, 1963, at the first White House strategy session for the upcoming presidential election. They may well have started with small talk: a consideration of the significance of Norris Cotton, the
moderate New Hampshire senator who was burning up the airwaves on behalf of Goldwater; or Goldwater's delirious reception at a massive Republican rally in Pennsylvania where Scranton barely mentioned Goldwater's name while Senator Hugh Scott used it for embarrassing puns; or the latest on George Romney, whose moral purity the President found surreal. Perhaps they discussed the Henry Luce editorial that accompanied a recent triumphant appearance of Goldwater's on the cover of
Life:
“Barry Goldwater represents a valuable impulse in the American politics of ‘64,” Henry Luce wrote. “ ‘Guts without depth' and ‘a man of one-sentence solutions' are the epithets of his critics. The time has come for him to rebut them if they can.” And what if Goldwater was able to march before Henry Luce and do just that?

It likely wasn't long before the Kennedy strategy session moved on to a discussion of race.
Newsweek'
s “What the White Man Thinks About the Negro” issue, out recently, concluded, “Except for civil-rights troubles, Mr. Kennedy could expect re-election by a landslide.” Now, the newsmagazine concluded, “he could lose.” A
Look
feature was headlined, “ ‘Never Wrong' Iowa Township Forecasts the 1961 race: JFK Could Lose.” The citizens were split down the middle on who they preferred for President—but they agreed that they held the White House responsible for racial violence. “I think Kennedy is too damned lenient with them damned niggers,” one local farmer was quoted as saying. George Wallace, back from his successful Ivy League tour, proudly read his mail for a
Time
reporter: “‘God willin' I won't vote for Martin Luther Kennedy.... You have my vote in the Presidential election.' That's from Detroit. Dayton, Ohio ... ‘Strongly recommend you to run for President Against Nigger Kennedy ...'” Wallace said he was thinking about entering some Democratic primaries.

Perhaps Kennedy and his men discussed the idea of Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to divert more of the economy's swelling resources to wiping out “pockets of poverty.” Kennedy had weighed, then tabled, the idea, for strategic reasons: the poor were loyal to him already, but the plan might lose him some votes in the new suburbs, where he and his advisers agreed the election would be decided.

Vietnam may have been on these Democrats' minds. Through September and early October, a flurry of cables between Washington and Saigon wrestled with a contradiction at the heart of the Pax Americana. American power wanted to be innocent. But once it became clear that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem would not be cowed into moving toward American-style democracy by threats of losing $1 million a day in U.S subsidies, arrangements were made with a cabal of Vietnamese generals for a “totally secure and fully deniable ” coup—to advance the cause of democracy, of course. Usually the CIA
carried out such orders at a remove from the presidential gaze; this coup, however, was directed from the White House. On November 1, a group of South Vietnamese generals secured Diem's surrender by promising him safe passage out of the country. Then they shot him in the back. Kennedy, incredulous, almost convinced himself to believe the generals' story that Diem had killed himself. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy brought him back to earth by reminding him of the photographs of the corpse with his hands tied behind his back—“not,” he quipped, “the preferred way to commit suicide.” It haunted the President's conscience, what had happened there, what he had not been able to control. Soon a
New York Times
investigation revealed American involvement in the plot. Now it was a political problem.

Surely during the November 12 White House strategy session they discussed the President's upcoming trip to Texas. If any looked to be a swing state in 1964, it was Texas. Goldwater—away on a ten-day hunting and fishing trip, mulling over his final decision whether to run or not—was still ahead there. Dick Maguire had been urging a visit to Texas for years to goose its share of the DNC's coffers: there was all that oil money to tap, if the faction behind liberal senator Ralph Yarborough didn't drive the folks behind conservative governor John Connally into the Republican Party at one of Pete O'Donnell's resignation rallies. The Kennedys planned a powerhouse fund-raising junket; even Jackie had set a goal of raising $1 million.

Kennedy was with friends; perhaps he also noted that Texas would be his first trip with Jackie since the haunting premature birth and sudden death of their third child. Perhaps consideration was given to the wisdom of bothering to visit Dallas at all, a Republican town so inhospitable to Washington that the suburb of Richardson—an electronics industry stronghold—had raised a four-thousand-signature petition to refuse to receive its share of federal money for school lunches and milk. On October 20, UN Day (which the far right answered by declaring “U.S. Day”), Adlai Stevenson, leaving Memorial Auditorium after giving a speech, had been clomped on the head by a yelping picket wielding a sign reading “DOWN WITH THE UN.” Stevenson insisted on confronting the woman before policemen whisked her away. “What is wrong?” he asked. “What do you want?” Mrs. Cora Frederickson, forty-seven, her face contorted, responded with gnomic fury: “Why are you like you are? Why don't you understand? If you don't know what's wrong, I don't know why. Everybody else does.” “A City Disgraced” was
Time'
s verdict; “nut country” was Kennedy's. Perhaps he even laughed over the escalating shrillness of the attacks broadcast over billionaire H. L. Hunt's radio show after the Administration began toying with cutting the depletion allowance, oilmen's favorite tax break.

The evening of November 12, America was once again reminded of the well-organized underbrush of Washington-hating kooks in their midst when CBS aired a special called “Case History of a Rumor” on the UN-takeover-in-Georgia canard. The next day Dan Foley, the new National Commander of the American Legion, sat down to write his first editorial for the American Legion's magazine. He blasted the alarming rise in political extremism:

Just that week his critique could have referred to the Congress of Racial Equality, which was directing increasingly uncompromising anger at de facto employment segregation outside the South; in San Diego, the group's pickets against the San Diego Gas & Electric Company brought a temporary restraining order. (The demonstrators continued to picket until they were hauled off by the cops.) Or he could be alluding to far-right reaction to Kennedy's recent decision to sell surplus wheat to the Soviet Union; or the latest development in the case of Otto Otepka, the cashiered State Department security officer who embarrassed the Administration by claiming that Foggy Bottom was back to putting subversives on the payroll. Or perhaps to events at the University of Alabama, where one of two black students dropped out after suffering a nervous breakdown; shortly thereafter a bomb carved a crater out of the street in front of the dorm of the remaining black student. (How long, George Wallace lamented, would it take “to get the nigger bitch out of the dormitory?”) Foley's critique could even be taken to encompass the John Birch Society's tactic, on October 31, of dropping anti-UN leaflets into trick-or-treaters' little UNICEF boxes instead of coins.

Kennedy was grumpy, tired, feeling a bit alarmed as the trip approached. On November 20 the CIA had shown him a Cuban rifle that had been salvaged from the Venezuelan countryside—proof positive that Castro was violating the letter of the Missile Crisis settlement by disobeying his promise not to aid uprisings in South America (though the Kennedy brothers surely violated the
spirit of the agreement by engaging in an ongoing CIA attempt to assassinate him). Kennedy had been rather snappish on his unimpressive trip to Florida (“While the federal net debt was growing less than 20 percent in these years, total corporate debt—
your
debt,” he remarked superciliously to the chamber of commerce, “was growing nearly 200 percent!”). Perhaps intelligence reached him that the only thing keeping Goldwater from announcing his candidacy was a trip to Muncie, Indiana, to mourn the death of his mother-in-law. Perhaps he noted that
J. F. K.: The Man and the Myth
now topped the
New York Times
best-seller list, that
Publishers Weekly
reported that Putnam had paid an advance “on the high side of the five-figure bracket” to another ideologue from the conservatives' perfervid hack army, Ralph de Toledano, for his
The Winning Side: The Case for Goldwater Republicanism,
a mass-market restatement of the Draft Goldwater strategy, and was ordering up a second large printing before publication.