The Kennedy Half-Century (24 page)

Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, and the Birmingham police preferred the racist status quo and decided to arrest King’s followers for even the smallest legal infractions. By early May, violent cruelty had replaced arrest. When a crowd of protesters, including young children and high school students, marched in defiance of a city ban, Connor’s henchmen used German shepherds and pressure hoses to mow them down. The television images were flashed across the world; President Kennedy saw the pictures the next morning in the
New York Times
and told an aide they made him “sick.” Baseball great (and Republican) Jackie Robinson again blasted JFK for sitting on the fence. “The revolution that is taking place in this country cannot be squelched by police dogs or high power hoses,” he observed. “I must state bluntly that there will be grave doubts as to the sincerity of your administration unless you face this issue in the forthright manner with which you handled the steel industry and the Cuban situation. The eyes of the world are on America and Americans of both races are looking to you.”

In his heart, Kennedy must have known that Robinson was right. He sent Burke Marshall, an assistant attorney general, to Birmingham to negotiate a truce. Marshall found Birmingham’s white residents circling the wagons. In their eyes, King and his followers were outside agitators who were stirring up the local black population. Marshall Haynes, the vice president of a real estate and insurance company in Birmingham, probably spoke for many of his fellow whites in a letter addressed to Marshall:

In your interview it seems you made a statement that no official of the community had offered to meet with the Reverend Martin Luther King or the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth [King’s co-organizer]. I honestly do not see how any government official or business group or church group in the Birmingham area could with good conscience sit down with this element and discuss Birmingham problems. In the past several months there have been some community meetings in this area to which substantial Negro citizens have been invited and have attended; but Mr. King and his associates have made and are continuing to make a real effort to brand most of the local leadership “Uncle Toms” and to associate them with a moderate approach on integration.

Marshall forwarded the letter to RFK, adding “This shows how far we are from any understanding or tolerance.” By then, however, the Justice
Department had already brokered a fragile compromise. Unwilling to endure a permanent loss of profits, Birmingham’s business leaders agreed to gradually desegregate the city’s schools, lunch counters, and department stores.
⁴¹

But not every Alabamian was ready to surrender so easily. Bombs exploded in front of a black-owned hotel and Martin Luther King’s brother’s house. In response, blacks attacked the city’s police and firemen. At the same time, Governor George Wallace vowed to block the integration of the University of Alabama. The South was descending into a second civil war, this one undeniably about race. In late May JFK met with his civil rights advisers, who suggested that he urge black and white Southerners to convene jointly for a series of peace conferences. “The people in the South haven’t done anything about integration for a hundred years,” the president replied, “and when an outsider intervenes, they tell him to get out—they’ll take care of it themselves, which they won’t.”
⁴²
At last Kennedy jumped off the fence and fully into the fray, deciding to propose a comprehensive civil rights bill. Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door gave the president enough political cover to take his own stand.
⁴³

On June 11, 1963, regular programming on all networks was interrupted for a special address from the president. “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he began. “This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro.” JFK praised the students at the University of Alabama for their restraint, and then addressed the larger issue: “I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents,” reminding his audience that the United States had been “founded by men of many nations and backgrounds.” “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” Black Americans, he said, were citizens of the United States, and as such were entitled to the same rights and privileges that every other citizen enjoyed. How many white citizens, he asked, would be satisfied if they couldn’t vote for their elected officials, send their kids to the best schools, or eat lunch in certain restaurants? The crisis could not be solved through “talk,” “token moves,” “repressive police action,” or “demonstrations in the streets.” Instead, Congress needed to desegregate the country’s schools, provide additional protections for black voters, and “enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served” in public facilities. “This is one country,” the president declared. “It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to
develop their talents.” It was finally time to give black families the same chance.
⁴⁴

JFK adviser Louis Martin, who had been instrumental in persuading candidate Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King after her husband had been jailed, called the speech “the most forthright statement ever made on civil rights.” “I told the president the wonderful reaction to his speech among Negroes,” Martin recorded in his diary. “He asked me to read telegrams of protests from ‘nuts & [kooks].’ Then he asked Mrs. Lincoln [JFK’s secretary] to bring in congratulatory telegrams which I also scanned.” Kennedy’s speech reflected his maturity on the civil rights issue. Born into a white-run world where blacks were almost entirely powerless servants in the background, he had not given much thought to the problems of dark-skinned Americans for most of his life, and as president only when their difficulties crowded inescapably onto his plate. However belatedly, Kennedy came to understand the immorality and injustice of America’s deeply rooted racism and the legally and culturally sanctioned discrimination that enabled it.

The day after Kennedy’s speech, a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith shot and killed a thirty-seven-year-old civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was walking up the driveway to his own home when struck down. His murder was witnessed by his two young children. On June 13, JFK wrote a letter to Evers’s widow that in some ways would apply to the president himself in six months: “Although comforting thoughts are difficult at a time like this, surely there can be some solace in the realization of the justice of the cause for which your husband gave his life. Achievement of the goals he did so much to promote will enable his children and the generations to follow to share fully and equally in the benefits and advantages our nation has to offer.” In the margins of the letter, he scrawled a handwritten message: “Mrs. Kennedy joins me in extending her deepest sympathy.” Six days later, President Kennedy sent to Congress a civil rights bill that was more thorough than anything Lincoln ever contemplated. It banned segregated public accommodations and gave the Justice Department additional power to deal with school districts that were defying
Brown v. Board of Education
, the 1954 Supreme Court decision requiring public schools to integrate.
⁴⁵

With hope of pressuring Congress on the bill, civil rights leaders organized a march on Washington. The Kennedy brothers opposed the idea. They thought that a massive demonstration at such a delicate time would actually undermine congressional support and maybe even lead to violence. On June 23, 1963, Lawrence Spivak, host of NBC’s
Meet the Press
, asked Bobby Kennedy if he thought that a march on Washington would “hurt” the cause of civil rights or “help get civil rights legislation through.” Bobby said that he didn’t think that the president’s bill “should be discussed under an aura of
pressure” and called the announcement of a march “premature.” But he also expressed support for the people’s “right to petition” and said that black citizens “as well as others” had the right “to make their views known.”

Privately, RFK expressed contempt for the march and some of its organizers. During a Georgetown dinner party, he asked Marietta Tree, a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, if she were in town “for that old black fairy’s anti-Kennedy demonstration.” The “old black fairy” to whom he was referring was Bayard Rustin, one of the march’s organizers and a former member of the Young Communist League who had once been arrested on a sodomy charge. When Tree tried to change the subject to Martin Luther King, Bobby said, “He’s not a serious person. If the country knew what we know about King’s goings-on, he’d be finished.” Kennedy was referring to King’s extramarital sexual activities, which the FBI had learned about while ostensibly hunting for Communists inside of his organization. The hypocritical dimension of Kennedy’s comment, given JFK’s near-constant philandering and RFK’s knowledge of it, is obvious. The president eventually endorsed the march, but on his own terms. He and Bobby reserved the right to censor speeches that they thought were too inflammatory or critical of the White House. The brothers pressured John Lewis, the twenty-three-year-old president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, into watering down a passage in his speech that was critical of the Kennedy civil rights bill.
⁴⁶
They also convinced King and his associates to move the event from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. While the shift in locale was intended to get the demonstrators away from Congress, the Lincoln Memorial provided King with the perfect backdrop for his speech.
⁴⁷

On August 28, hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall for the “Great March for Jobs and Freedom.” The atmosphere was festive.
⁴⁸
High school groups sang and clapped their hands; well-dressed men and women, including many white and black college students, carried signs and shouted slogans; Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte, and other celebrities entertained the crowd. In the late afternoon, under Lincoln’s watchful gaze, King delivered for the ages his “I have a dream” speech, which, according to historian Robert Dallek, “genuinely impressed and moved” Kennedy. But the president knew that the fight for reform would involve more than just organizing a march or delivering a brilliant speech. He tried to lower expectations among civil rights leaders by describing the tough road that lay ahead. When one of the march organizers encouraged him to take his case directly to the people, JFK pointed to the political costs of such a move. Republicans, he said, would make inroads among disgruntled white voters by saying that the president was forcing them to accept a radical left-wing agenda. (Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” employed in 1968, demonstrated that Kennedy’s
political instincts were correct.) Instead, President Kennedy said, leaders should pressure the GOP to jump on the civil rights bandwagon.
⁴⁹

In mid-September, a bomb exploded in front of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black children including Addie Mae Collins, sister of Sarah Collins Rudolph. “Our city was known as the ‘Magic City’ but it became the ‘Tragic City.’ There were so many bombs going off there,” explained Rudolph, who had arrived at the church moments earlier with her sister. “BOOM! All I could say was ‘Jesus.’ It scared me so bad … The debris came in and I was blinded instantly from the glass of the stained-glass window. I stayed in the hospital about two months. They removed twenty-two pieces of glass out of my whole face, and [removed] my right eye.”

African American leaders urged the president to seize control of Birmingham. JFK refused and told them to remain patient while his civil rights bill wended its way through Congress. He hoped that the bill would buy much-needed time for the country to adjust to the realities of a less racially driven society. He was also optimistic about his chances for reelection, guessing that “local candidates would be hurt more than the national ticket—that passage of the bill would cool tempers off and let other issues rise—and that the explosive costs of inaction would have been greater than those of any action he had taken.” But the bill’s progress ground to a halt on Capitol Hill with many Southern Democrats determined to stop it. By the time JFK left for Dallas, it seemed unlikely that his legacy would include a new civil rights law, at least during his first term. Election years were not usually characterized by enactment of hugely controversial legislation.
⁵⁰

ⁱ
See Grant McConnell,
Steel and the Presidency
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).

^j
Fomin communicated with the State Department not directly but by using an intermediary, the television journalist John Scali. This was an era when reporters could sometimes play an inside game without professional retribution.

6
Europe, Space, and Southeast Asia

During the summer of 1963, even while the civil rights issue was paramount, the president began to rethink America’s Cold War objectives. The Cuban Missile Crisis gave him a greater appreciation for the precariousness of life in the nuclear age. He wanted to reduce tensions between the superpowers before it was too late. In June, on the day before his nationally televised civil rights address, Kennedy outlined his new vision for “world peace” in a graduation speech at American University in Washington. “What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”