JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

by Thurston Clarke

  During his first congressional race he had courted his district’s small black vote by praising the wartime heroism of black servicemen and recruiting black college students to work as volunteers in his campaign headquarters. His black valet George Taylor protested after noticing that only the white volunteers were being invited upstairs to share lunch with his sisters. “Jack, I think that’s bullshit,” he said. “They’re all giving their time. They’re all human beings. Why segregate in this way?” Kennedy called him “thin-skinned,” and justified excluding the black students as “one of the things of the time.” But at his inauguration fifteen years later he had immediately noticed that there were no black cadets in the Coast Guard Academy unit marching in his parade and told his aide Richard Goodwin, “That’s not acceptable. Something ought to be done about it.” Goodwin called Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, who oversaw the Coast Guard, and within the year the Coast Guard academy was integrated.

  During his first year in office Kennedy appointed more blacks to high-level positions in the federal government than any of his predecessors, yet he remained emotionally detached from the civil rights struggle. He persisted in viewing racial discrimination through the lens of the anti-Irish prejudice that had humiliated his parents, and so when a party leader urged him to seek the vice presidency instead of the presidency in 1960, he had said caustically, “Oh, I see, the back of the bus for Catholics.”

  The 1960 Democratic platform had a strong civil rights plank, and his speeches and gestures raised the hopes of African Americans that he would submit civil rights legislation to Congress and enforce the desegregation of Southern schools. A turning point came near the end of his campaign when King was imprisoned in a county jail in rural Georgia, and Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver suggested that he telephone Mrs. King to offer his sympathy and support. “What the hell. That’s a decent thing to do,” he told Shriver. “Why not? Get her on the phone.” Shriver had expected the call to pay political dividends, but Kennedy’s decision to make it had been spontaneous, motivated more by his good manners and humanity than political calculation. “The decent thing to do” won him 70 percent of the black vote, a crucial difference in some closely contested states.

  Because he had won the presidency by such a narrow margin, and opinion polls showed equal rights being a low priority for white Americans, he took office believing that it was an inopportune time to submit sweeping civil rights legislation to Congress. Instead, he used his executive powers to enforce the court-ordered integration of Southern universities and to pursue voting rights cases. He remained reluctant to use federal powers to protect civil rights workers and enforce school desegregation, arguing that submitting a civil rights bill would be a pointless exercise because Southern Democrats would stall it in the House, filibuster it in the Senate, and retaliate by sabotaging the rest of his legislative program. “I’m not going to just play at this business,” he told a journalist. “We can’t get any civil rights legislation through at this point, we don’t have any political muscle over there [in Congress] and until [then] . . . I’m not going to engage in just token show business.”

  Roy Wilkins called his decision to pursue executive action instead of legislation “an offering of a cactus bouquet to Negro parents and their children.” King criticized him for vacillating, and later spoke of “two Kennedys: a Kennedy [of] the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963 with . . . a great understanding of the moral issues.”

  King believed that events had changed him. The transformation began in April 1961, when white mobs attacked interracial groups of Freedom Riders attempting to desegregate bus stations and interstate buses in Alabama and Mississippi, firebombing one bus and pummeling one of Robert Kennedy’s aides. It continued in September 1962, when the registration of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi led to riots and two deaths, forcing him to send troops. The turning point came in May 1963, when police and firemen in Birmingham attacked civil rights demonstrators. Kennedy said that photographs and news footage of firemen blasting schoolchildren with high-pressure hoses and policemen loosing German shepherds on black teenagers and pummeling demonstrators with nightsticks had made him “sick.” King believed that Birmingham had convinced him that segregation was morally wrong. “Lincoln had real agonizing moments over this question of signing the emancipation proclamation,” King said. “He vacillated a great deal. But finally the events caused him to see that he had to do this and he came to the moral conclusion that he had to do it no matter what it meant.” Birmingham had also convinced Kennedy that segregation might lead to black violence that could threaten national security, and that civil rights had become the great domestic issue of his presidency, one he needed to tackle as courageously as FDR had the Depression.

  In a June 10, 1963, television interview that was reported the next day on the front page of the New York Times, King compared Kennedy’s civil rights record with Eisenhower’s, criticized him for substituting “an inadequate approach for a miserable one,” and urged him to discuss integration in moral terms. The following evening, Kennedy told Americans, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures, and is as clear as the American constitution.” He warned that America faced a “moral crisis as a country and a people,” and insisted that the crisis could not be solved (as he had previously tried to do) “by token moves or talk.” After delivering the speech he told a friend, “Sometimes you look at what you’ve done and the only thing you ask yourself is—what took you so long to do it?”

  King praised him for addressing the “morality of integration,” and later called his speech “the most eloquent, passionate, and unequivocal plea for civil rights, for justice toward the Negro ever made by any President.” That same evening in Jackson, Mississippi, a white supremacist shot and killed the NAACP official Medgar Evers as he was walking to his front door. Kennedy invited his widow and children to the White House. Evelyn Lincoln told them that if you made a wish while sitting in the president’s chair it would come true. Evers’s eldest son climbed into the chair, bowed his head, and said he wished his father had not died in vain. The meeting left Kennedy so moved that he told Schlesinger, “I don’t understand the South. I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens [the firebrand abolitionist who wanted to punish and humiliate the South after the Civil War] was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But, when I see this sort of thing [the Evers assassination], I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” On June 19, the same day that Evers was being buried at Arlington with military honors, Kennedy submitted his civil rights bill and asked congressmen “to look into your hearts . . . for the one plain, proud, and priceless quality that unites us all as Americans: a sense of justice.”

  He reaped the whirlwind. Southern Democrats voted against other administration legislation, including a bill to establish VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps that had been expected to pass easily but barely survived. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi condemned the civil rights bill as “a complete blueprint for a totalitarian state.” The retiring president of the American Bar Association, the Mississippian James Satterfield, said its passage would mean “the destruction of the United States of America as we have known it,” which was of course the point. Kennedy’s approval rating fell, and a Gallup poll taken in late June found that 36 percent of Americans thought he was pushing integration “too fast,” a number climbing to 50 percent by late August. After reviewing the polls with Bobby, he looked up and said, “Well, if we’re going down, let’s go down on a matter of principle.”

  Although liberals in the North wanted a civil rights bill passed, many did not want blacks moving into their neighborhoods. When the speechwriter John Bartlow Martin visited his former hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, he reported finding “considerable anxiety over the President’s civil rights speech” in the predominantly Jewish and liberal suburb, and people
“alarmed over the pace of the integration movement.” James Lanigan, a New York reform politician, spoke to Schlesinger about “widespread and intense panic in the suburbs,” and said that “even good Democrats were appalled by the nightmare of an inundation of their neighborhoods and their schools by Negroes.” A survey of non-Southern whites by the pollster Oliver Quayle and the journalist Stewart Alsop, taken over the summer and reported in the Saturday Evening Post (which undoubtedly ended up on Kennedy’s desk), supported the anecdotal evidence that even Northern liberals who supported Kennedy’s civil rights bill had reservations about sharing their schools and neighborhoods with black Americans. A startling 42 percent said they would prefer that their children attend all-white schools, and 77 percent believed that whites should have the right to refuse to sell a house to a black on the basis of race. Quayle and Alsop concluded, “It is remarkable that any politician who has favored anti-discrimination statutes in housing survives in office.”

  • • •

  AS SOON AS KENNEDY LEARNED that the leaders of the march had not eaten since breakfast, he ordered sandwiches and beverages from the White House canteen. The food arrived, an official photograph was taken, and pleasantries exchanged. Minutes later, he and the leaders were at odds. Both sides wanted a civil rights bill passed, but he remained convinced that expanding its scope would doom it. He had submitted the most radical civil rights legislation since the Civil War, risking his reputation, presidency, and reelection. He had met with more than sixteen hundred governors, religious leaders, executives, attorneys, labor officials, and editors, urging them to lobby congressmen, energize their constituencies, write letters, and sign petitions, and having done all this, he was determined to win. The last two years had educated him about civil rights, and Birmingham and the Evers assassination had sickened him, but he still prized success and was unwilling to back a bill that stood little chance of being passed. But this appeared to be what the leaders wanted him to do. They had called their demonstration “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” His civil rights bill had addressed the freedom issue by prohibiting discrimination in places of public accommodation, but did nothing about jobs. Emboldened by their successful march, they pressed him to expand his bill to include a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which would prohibit racial discrimination in hiring.

  Speaking first, Wilkins said, “You made the difference. You gave us your blessings. It was one of the prime factors in turning it [the march] into an orderly protest to help our government rather than a protest against our government.” The compliments finished, Wilkins made his pitch: “It fell to my lot, sir, in this afternoon of superlative oratory to be the one to deal rather pedantically and pedestrianly with the hard business of legislation. . . . We would like to see included in your package . . . an FEPC bill for the reasons all of us outlined in our speeches.” Such a provision would not imperil the bill, he said, “if the right words could go to the right people.”

  Randolph said, “We feel it needs to have presidential backing, the presidential imprimatur for it to receive the recognition it deserves,” and he launched into a monologue about unemployment among young black men who were “running out of hope.”

  Kennedy cut in to say, “I thought we might go into a little discussion of the legislation, of how we stand—”

  Walter Reuther interrupted to praise him for submitting the bill, but to add that he considered an FEPC provision “a very critical element.” He rambled on for several minutes, promising that everyone would mobilize their constituencies to persuade Congress to pass such legislation. As he and the others droned on, Kennedy appeared to be taking notes, but his doodles showed that his mind was wandering. He wrote “Afghanistan” at the top of one page, and according to Evelyn Lincoln, who later deciphered his writing, he was thinking about his September 6 state dinner to honor King Zaher. He scribbled “Hanoi,” scratched a line through it and added, “Education,” “voting,” “progress,” and “Birmingham,” subjects he wanted to raise when the civil rights leaders yielded the floor.

  When Reuther paused, he interjected, “Very fine, but let me just say a word about the legislation.” But before doing that, he delivered a lecture about how black families should emulate the Jews by concentrating on education. “Isn’t it possible for the Negro community to take the lead in committing major emphasis on the responsibility of these families, even if they’re split and all the other problems they have, on the education of their children?” he asked. The Jewish community had suffered discrimination, but had found its salvation through education. Midway through this spiel he stopped and said, “This has nothing to do with what you’ve been talking about,” but resumed it anyway. But why was he asking these men, just hours after their historic march, why they could not be more like Jews? For someone who was usually so sensitive, it was a remarkably insensitive performance, an indication that his civil rights education remained incomplete.

  As he was saying “If we can get the Negro community to regard the education of their children as really the best way out . . . making education the same way that it’s in the Jewish community and to a degree in—” one of the leaders, whose identity is not apparent on the tape, interrupted to say that black college graduates were driving garbage trucks in California. Floyd McKissick of CORE chimed in that his organization had trained two hundred young people in North Carolina only to have them rejected for jobs for which they were clearly qualified.

  Kennedy responded with a lengthy tutorial on the political hurdles facing the bill, enumerating state by state how many Democratic members of the House were what he called “right,” “doubtful,” and “wrong” on the bill. Because there were roughly 160 Democrats “right” and 100 “wrong,” he needed 60 Republicans to pass the bill. Their votes would be hard enough to get for the bill as written, he said, but with an FEPC provision the bill would never attract enough Republicans. He ran through the Senate state by state. He could have summarized the results, but must have thought that a detailed recitation would be more sobering. There were 48 senators “right,” 44 “wrong,” and 6 to 8 “possible,” he said, and even if all the possibles supported the bill, there would still not be enough votes to stop a filibuster. Again, the key was attracting moderate Republicans. His point was obvious: instead of lobbying him to expand the bill, they should be lobbying the Republicans to pass it.

  A. Philip Randolph, the eldest and most experienced member of the delegation, resorted to flattery. “Mr. President, from the description you have made of the state of affairs in the House and Senate, it’s obvious that it’s going to take nothing less than a crusade to win approval for these civil rights measures,” he said. “And if it’s going to be a crusade, I think that nobody can lead this crusade but you.” He suggested appealing to the American people “over the heads of the congressmen and senators.”

  It would be “helpful,” Kennedy said delicately, if Randolph and the other leaders told the wavering Republicans that they “anticipated their support.” Knowing that reporters were waiting to interview them, he suggested they say it was their “strong judgment” that both parties should support the bill, and concluded, “Keep in touch, particularly in this question of a head count.”

  Thursday, August 29–Saturday, August 31

  WASHINGTON AND CAPE COD

  Kennedy spent the last week in August attempting to regain control of his administration’s Vietnam policy and to distance his administration from a coup that was sounding more and more like a potential second Bay of Pigs.

  On Monday, he worried that David Halberstam’s negative articles about Diem were having an undue influence on administration policy. “When we move to eliminate a government,” he told his advisers, “we want to be sure we’re not doing it because the New York Times is excited about it.” He scolded Forrestal for the slipshod way he had cleared Cable 243. When Forrestal offered to resign, he turned on him and said, “You’re not worth fi
ring. You owe me something, so you stick around.”

  On Tuesday, he suggested asking Lodge and General Harkins, the commander of the U.S. military assistance program in Vietnam, “what they feel their prospects are for success and do they recommend continuing it [support for the coup] or do they recommend now waiting.” Minutes later, he worried about the consequences of rescinding his approval for the coup, asking, “Ah, do we cut our losses in such a way where we don’t endanger those who we’ve been in contact [with]?” He added bleakly, “The response that we’ve gotten on the coup at this point does not give us assurances that it’s going to be successful.”

  The cables from Saigon were contradictory and confusing. On Wednesday, the CIA station chief reported that according to the chief plotter, a General Khiem, a committee of unnamed generals had decided to mount a coup within a week. The same day, Ambassador Lodge cabled, “As of now there are no signs, apart from Khiem’s receptiveness to initial approach, that these or any other generals are really prepared to act against the government.” Lodge continued to support a coup, cabling the next day that he believed its members were the “best group that could be assembled in terms of ability and orientation,” although “our knowledge of composition of coup group and their plans is derived from a single source.” He warned that “chances of success would be diminished by delay,” and said he was “concerned over possibility attempt by Nhu to preempt the coup by arresting its leaders.” The CIA station chief agreed, cabling, “Situation here has reached point of no return. . . . It is our considered estimate that General officers cannot retreat now.”