The Kennedy Half-Century (17 page)

African Americans weren’t sure what to make of their new president. Even though an estimated 68 percent had voted for Kennedy, they wondered how committed he was to the cause of civil rights.
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Jackie Robinson, the sports legend who famously broke baseball’s color barrier in the 1940s, was a Republican at the time, and blasted JFK even before he took office for “doing absolutely nothing for the Negroes in the country.” But Robinson reacted favorably to Kennedy’s early signals on civil rights once he was in office. “I believe I now understand and appreciate better your role in the continuing struggle to fulfill the American promise of equal opportunity for all,” he wrote Kennedy in February 1961. “While I am very happy over your obviously fine start as our President, my concern over Civil Rights and my vigorous opposition to your election is one of sincerity. The direction you seem to be going indicates America is in for great leadership, and I will be most happy if my fears continue to be proven wrong.” Robinson urged Kennedy to take swift action: “I would like to be patient Mr. President, but patience has caused us years in our struggle for human dignity. I will continue to hope and pray for your aggressive leadership but will not refuse to criticize if the feeling persist[s] that Civil Rights is not on the agenda for months to come.”
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Yet civil rights was not a high priority for the new administration and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, recognized it. Ten days after the election, Wilkins received word that the new president would not be pressing Congress to pass new legislation. He was disappointed, since Kennedy’s timidity was at odds with his bold talk on some campaign occasions. Two months before he won, JFK had told the press that he would use the presidential bully pulpit “to get the broadly liberal Democratic plank [on racial equality] passed early in the next Congress.” That plank stressed “equal access for all Americans to all areas of community life, including voting booths, school rooms, jobs, housing, and public facilities.”
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Eventually, Kennedy’s hand would be forced by public opinion, after the news media extensively covered civil rights demonstrations and the often-violent reaction to them in the South. In May 1961 activists known as “Freedom Riders” boarded buses in D.C. bound for New Orleans, and the plan was to challenge the South’s segregation laws at various stops along the way. Robert Kennedy claimed that he didn’t learn about the trip until after an angry mob in Anniston, Alabama, firebombed one of the buses. In Birmingham, police turned a blind eye while Ku Klux Klansmen savagely attacked the riders with bats and metal pipes. When the news broke, JFK was focused on an upcoming summit with the Soviets. He ordered his special assistant on civil rights, Harris Wofford, to “tell them to call it off.” Wofford replied that he didn’t think anyone could stop the riders. Both Kennedys preferred a battle in the courts to a battle in the streets, so RFK sent Justice Department aide John Seigenthaler to see Alabama’s Governor Patterson, who promised to keep the peace. But it was too late; the situation in Alabama had already spun out of control. When the Freedom Riders reached Montgomery, they were ambushed by a bloodthirsty mob while the police looked the other way. Seigenthaler himself was knocked unconscious during the melee, while FBI agents watched from the sidelines and took notes.
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Vicious violence in the Deep South had the unintended effect of raising awareness of the Freedom Riders’ peaceful protest. “For the Kennedy brothers, domestic affairs were an afterthought,” observed Julian Bond, former chairman of the NAACP. “And civil rights movements were an afterthought beyond an afterthought. Now, all of a sudden, chaos has broken loose, attention is riveted, people are talking about this … The whole world is watching.”
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In fairness, Bobby Kennedy cared more about civil rights than some of his official actions suggested. As a young law student at the University of Virginia in the early 1950s, he had pressured the college into allowing Ralph Bunche, an African American diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to speak before an integrated audience—a social taboo during Virginia’s Jim Crow era. During a 2012 interview, RFK’s son Max described the dangers his parents faced on the night before Bunche’s address: “My mother says they were throwing things at the house all night; they were throwing rocks through the windows and they were throwing things that were on fire. And it was a really scary night in the house for my mother and for Dr. Bunche and for my father.” Max believes that this experience helped convince his father of the need for social change: “[It was] a critical period in my father’s growth when … [he was] beginning to look at the broader issues that [were] facing our country, but at a very communal level and at a place, quite frankly, where it was safe to do that.”
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On Sunday, May 21, 1961, hundreds of civil rights activists joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery to show support for the Freedom Riders. The Kennedys had taken the precaution of sending a group of federal marshals to provide security. When an angry mob surrounded the church, the marshals used tear gas to keep people at bay until National Guardsmen could arrive to establish order and place the city under martial law. John Lewis, one of the young men inside the church at the time who became an influential congressman from Georgia decades later, credited JFK with saving his life. “Many of us probably would have been killed that night,” Lewis believed.
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Max Kennedy noted that King mistrusted the Southern white marshals who had been sent to provide security, and he made his views known to the attorney general: “Dr. King got on the phone with my father and said, ‘Listen, these marshals you’ve sent aren’t worth a damn. They’re all racists and they all want to kill me.’ And my father said, ‘Dr. King, if you didn’t have those men there, you’d be as dead as Kelsey’s nuts.’ John Seigenthaler didn’t know what ‘Kelsey’s nuts’ were. He thought it was something kind of sexual which he’d never heard my father say in his life. [L]ater my brother Christopher talked to a Marine who said that they were the lug nuts on the jeeps that were very hard to loosen, and [the phrase] was supposed to be ‘tight as Kelsey’s nuts,’ but my dad got it mixed up.”
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Bobby Kennedy’s “plan was to move the Freedom Riders out of Alabama as quickly as possible. ‘I thought that people were going to be killed,’ he said in 1964, ‘and they had made their point. What was the purpose of continuing with it?’ He called for a ‘cooling-off’ period. James Farmer [director of the Congress of Racial Equality] told a reporter, ‘We had been cooling off for 100 years. If we got any cooler we’d be in a deep freeze.’ Kennedy insisted the racial troubles would embarrass the president in his meeting with Khrushchev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s chief deputy in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, replied, ‘Doesn’t the attorney general know that we’ve been embarrassed all our lives?’ ”
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Mississippi officials threw the riders in jail when they reached Jackson. In public, JFK kept his distance, understanding that close association with civil rights demonstrators would hurt his agenda on Capitol Hill. But the Freedom Riders were hard for a president to ignore. While incarcerated they sang songs, lodged protests, and badgered their captors.
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For their part, some Kennedy administration officials wondered where the newfound activism was leading. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, some African Americans were turning to more radical figures such as Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed. On April 19, Louis Martin, one of JFK’s civil rights advisers and the only African American in his inner circle, sent a memo that
was widely circulated within the administration on the growth of the Black Muslim movement. Martin assured his colleagues that most African Americans still believed that it was “possible to achieve first class citizenship” in the United States and that most thought of the Black Muslims as a “lunatic fringe.” “It is inconceivable to me that such an anti-white separatist, pro-segregationist movement will ever win a dominant position in Negro life,” Martin wrote. But he added that the growth of the movement should not surprise anyone who paid attention to “the uneasy state of race relations here coupled with developments in Africa.” The best way to combat black extremism, he advised, was to give African Americans voting rights and equal access to jobs, housing, education, and public facilities.
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At that time, Kennedy appeared far more interested in containing Communism than in promoting civil rights. Two of his early policy initiatives, the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, were designed to lessen the influence of the Soviets and the Chinese in developing nations.
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On March 1, he established the Peace Corps through an executive order and appointed R. Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law, as the program’s first director.
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Shriver threw himself into the job, radiating “a sense of purpose that infused all who were drawn into his embryonic universe of peace and brotherhood. Dubious congressmen, a fretful Foreign Service, skeptical columnists, potential volunteers, and prospective host governments—all fell under the sway of his uncompromising idealism.”
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Even some of the Peace Corps’ harshest critics were eventually won over. When Senator Barry Goldwater first heard about the Corps, he thought it would serve as a sanctuary for beatniks and draft dodgers. Within a year, however, Goldwater had changed his mind. “I think the Peace Corps is beginning to remove the doubts from the doubters’ minds. I have been impressed with the quality of the young men and women that have been going to work for it.” Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush, was also impressed: “There were many who doubted whether the Peace Corps concept was feasible. Now, after a year of operation, there are few voices raised in criticism.” Shriver forwarded these glowing reports to the White House. “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote in March 1962. “When was the last time Russell Long defended a ‘foreign aid’ program? He has been a most unexpected but helpful booster.” Shriver delighted in telling JFK about one particular incident. Senator J. William Fulbright was astonished when he heard that Congressman Howard W. Smith, the exceptionally conservative chairman of the House Rules committee, supported the Peace Corps. Fulbright raised an eyebrow and said, “Shriver, I’m getting suspicious about you.”
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Kennedy unveiled his Alliance for Progress program—a Latin American version of the Marshall Plan—during a March 13, 1961, ceremony at the White House. The president promised to deliver health, education, work, land, and homes to Central and South Americans. Congress appropriated $500 million for the program right away and the following year allocated over $1 billion to Latin America. A river of Yanqui dollars flowed into Latin American coffers over the next decade.
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But Kennedy realized that money alone would not stop the spread of Communism in the region; force would sometimes be needed to protect national interests.
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One use of force went particularly badly. In April 1961, in what turned out to be one of the worst decisions of his political career, Kennedy allowed fourteen hundred CIA-trained paramilitary men to launch an ill-fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
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He had been under pressure to do something to confront Fidel Castro since the day after his election, when JFK’s transitional “Committee on National Security Policy” warned that a lack of “firm action” in Cuba would allow the country’s Communists to consolidate power.
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In late January, CIA officials ratcheted up the pressure by urging the president to launch an attack before Castro could fully align himself with the Soviet bloc and spread Communism throughout the Western Hemisphere. The attack, advocates claimed, would spark a homegrown uprising against Castro’s government. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell, deputy director of planning, assured the president that the invasion would be a slam dunk. Yet the scheme was so harebrained that some have since wondered whether top CIA and military officials pushed it on Kennedy in order to embarrass him, or force him to commit fully to overthrowing Castro once the poorly planned assault inevitably collapsed.

Most of Kennedy’s military advisers supported the invasion. Just as important, the president thought that the operation had already received the scrutiny and blessing of his predecessor. In reality, Eisenhower had only approved the
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of Cuban paramilitaries, not given the green light for a specific attack plan. While a distinct minority, a few people thought that the operation should be shelved. On February 11, 1961, JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger sent his boss a warning about the international consequences of a U.S.-sponsored attack on Cuba: “The result would be a wave of massive protest, agitation and sabotage throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa (not to speak of Canada and of certain quarters in the United States) … At one stroke, it would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration throughout the world.” Richard Goodwin (deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs), Chester Bowles (undersecretary of state), Dean Acheson (former secretary of state), and Senator Fulbright agreed with Schlesinger’s assessment.
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Fulbright denounced the
Bay of Pigs plan in the strongest possible terms. “To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere,” he railed. “The point will not be lost on the rest of the world—nor on our own consciences.” The senator counseled patience and reminded the president that the Castro regime was nothing more than “a thorn in the flesh” (not “a dagger in the heart”) that could be removed without causing an international crisis.
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