Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The speech was written on a tight line, crafted to reach undecided white Southerners. Not mentioning Governor Barnett, he neither criticized segregationists nor embraced Meredith’s cause. He praised Mississippi specifically as the home of Lucius Lamar, of “four Medal of Honor winners in the Korean War alone,” and of Sergeant Jake Lindsay, who in 1945 “was honored by an unusual joint session of the Congress.” Then he spoke directly to Ole Miss: “You have a great tradition to uphold, a tradition of honor and courage, won on the field of battle, and on the gridiron, as well as the university campus…The eyes of the nation and all the world are upon you and upon all of us…I am certain the great majority of the students will uphold that honor. There is, in short, no reason why the books on this case cannot now be quickly closed in the manner directed by the court.”

  President Kennedy’s speech disposed of the Meredith case so convincingly that some troop commanders in Memphis released their men from DEFCON 2 alert (prepare to move immediately). Desire and pronouncement were being overrun by fact, however, as the President quickly discovered. Back in the Cabinet Room, he joined the Attorney General, Sorensen, O’Donnell, Marshall, and congressional adviser Larry O’Brien for a grim siege watch that was destined to last all night. Two or three of them talked on telephones at once, pausing to relay reports to the others. “They’re throwing iron spikes,” Robert Kennedy told the President. “And they’re throwing Coke bottles, and they’re throwing rocks.” The huddled leaders absorbed erroneous reports that the gassed highway patrolman had died, and accurate ones that it was almost impossible to get injured marshals through the mob to a hospital. One early idea was to enlist football coach Johnny Vaught, a sainted figure at Ole Miss, to make a speech urging the students to disperse. Periodic bulletins on this effort punctuated the early reports that the great cloud of tear gas was only spurring on the rioters: “He [Vaught] said he wants to keep this, all the football squad out of it…It’s a hell of a squad…His wife says he’s out…Listen, why don’t we get Bob to try to call him from here?…His wife may be lying to you…”

  Within an hour of the President’s speech, the first shotgun blasts rang out at Oxford. One marshal was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, and his colleagues, lacking either first-aid equipment or an ambulance, despaired for his life. A few minutes later the first high-powered rifle shot hit a border patrolman in the leg. As casualties mounted, the marshals placed their wounded along the wall inside the Lyceum. Outside, many of the student rioters fled the gunfire, giving way to the adult roughnecks who had converged on Ole Miss. The mob grew above two thousand around the Lyceum, with untold others roaming the campus on foot and in cars.

  Gallows humor prevailed at the White House, where the President quipped that he remembered “riots like this at Harvard.” During lulls in the incoming calls, the leaders fidgeted glumly. They discussed what to do about a tip that James Reston intended to write a column in The New York Times suggesting that the Kennedy Administration was more anxious to meet with the Soviets than were the Soviets to meet with Kennedy. The President attacked the story, ticking off Soviet invitations from memory. “We ought to knock it down tonight,” he said. “That’s just kicking Reston right in the balls, isn’t it…Do you want to call him up? Or is that just gonna make him mad?”

  The besieged Katzenbach called in again. Those in the Cabinet Room could hear only Robert Kennedy’s end of the conversation: “Do you want these troops in there?…He got hit by what?…Is he gonna live?…The state police have left?” Marshall broke in to announce that he had just had a talk with Barnett, who said the troopers “can’t have pulled out.” They had pulled out, Kennedy replied. Then Marshall repeated Barnett’s assurance that he had just talked with the highway patrol and that everything was under control. Frustrated, the leaders in the Cabinet Room began denouncing the insurrectionist harangues of General Walker, which led them into a discussion of the novel Seven Days in May, about a military coup in the United States. President Kennedy remarked that the book’s president seemed “awfully vague” to him, but that the coup-plotting general was “a pretty good character.” On the phone, Marshall almost plaintively asked someone whether Coach Vaught was “doing any good.” On another phone, the Attorney General quietly consoled John Doar, saying he knew Ole Miss was “a long way from Wisconsin.”

  “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” sighed President Kennedy. His brother, assigning himself comparable responsibility for this new disaster, wryly composed a press release for his own sacking: “The Attorney General announced today, he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton Univ—” Nervous laughter cut him off.

  When they ran out of tear gas at the Lyceum, and the volunteer who tried to drive through the mob to fetch new supplies was delayed—feared lost—the leaders in the Cabinet Room decided to move the regular Army units down from Memphis by air, and to move a Mississippi National Guard unit to the campus from the local armory in Oxford. Waiting anxiously for confirmation of troop movements by military officers of unproven loyalty, the President thought of the Shah of Iran. “This is what they must do every night in Teheran,” he remarked dryly. Then came a maddening disparity of communications: the cries of desperation arrived instantly from Katzenbach’s pay phone inside the Lyceum, but responding orders for help seemed to vanish into a maze of radio hookups. “Well, they have to call the Attorney General’s office to get the Attorney General’s office to call the Secretary of the Army,” Marshall explained in exasperation, “and the Secretary of the Army to call to Memphis, and then…” When he reported that one unit was known to be forming to receive orders, Sorensen objected that the unit had formed ten or twelve hours earlier. “I saw them form on television,” he said. Marshall said they must be forming again.

  Robert Kennedy’s voice chilled the room shortly before midnight. “They’re storming where Meredith is,” he said. “They’re storming where Meredith is.” Bands of rioters had discovered Meredith at Baxter Hall, and the battered marshals at the Lyceum were in no position to move across the campus to help protect him. The men in Washington clung to their telephones, scrambling for ideas. O’Donnell said he feared the riot might turn into a lynching. The President placed an urgent call to Barnett in Jackson. Robert Kennedy tried to reach Katzenbach on the pay phone, but Katzenbach was out rallying his men in the face of new shootings. The Attorney General wound up speaking with his old Harvard football friend, Dean Markham, who told him the marshals could not defend themselves with tear gas alone. O’Donnell, listening in, broke the news to the Cabinet Room that “the marshals are now going to start firing.” They had sidearms, he said.

  President Kennedy returned to report that Barnett had parried his demand for highway patrolmen, saying the best way to rescue Meredith was to remove him from Ole Miss.

  “I can’t get him out,” Robert Kennedy said miserably, hearing the President. “How am I gonna get him out?”

  “That’s what I said to him,” the President replied. “Now the problem is, if he can get law and order restored…” He paused, then said, “Okay, we’ll move him out of there if he can get order restored.”

  The decision to withdraw Meredith was impossible to carry out, which rendered it easier for Kennedy to make. And now fresh waves of chaos superseded the Barnett negotiations. Three more marshals had just been shot, Larry O’Brien announced. Listening in on the line, Ken O’Donnell remarked that Ed Guthman was “so scared he can’t talk.” Robert Kennedy tried to talk Katzenbach out of authorizing the marshals to return gunfire. “Can you hold out if you have gas?” he asked. “…Is there any way you could figure a way to scare ’em off?” Katzenbach’s anguished reply made the Attorney General back off this last suggestion. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, but the marshals held their fire.

  About that time a call came in from one of Guthman’s assistants. When busy men declined to accept an underling’s call, Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s secretary, agreed to take a message for the
Attorney General, whereupon she heard the assistant say in a precise, disembodied monotone that “a reporter for the London Daily Sketch, whose name is Paul Guihard, G-U-I-H-A-R-D, was killed in Oxford just now. His body was found with a bullet in the back, next to a women’s dormitory.”

  At midnight in Washington, Katzenbach told Robert Kennedy that he needed regular troops—as many as possible. Like Guthman, he spoke with soldierly remorse, blaming himself for failing Kennedy in his prolonged effort to avoid using soldiers. Kennedy took the blame, sent the troops, and summoned Guthman back to the phone to discuss what they would say to the press. “We’re gonna have a hell of a problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better,” he said.

  The riot went on all night, as the mob showed astonishing persistence. Rioters sent a bulldozer, then a car, crashing toward the Lyceum as a battering ram. They wounded 160 of the marshals—28 by gunfire—and sent a stray bullet into the head of a local juke-box repairman, killing him. In the Cabinet Room, the leaders absorbed the reports of injury one by one until dawn. They heard that flying wedges of students were attacking Baxter Hall, that flying wedges of marshals were trying to break out with wounded men. Robert Kennedy stressed “how important it is to keep Meredith alive.” The leaders adjusted stoically to the two deaths. O’Donnell suggested that the Administration “hit the London papers” with the death of Guihard, who, as a reporter, guaranteed widespread news coverage. “A good story over in Europe,” someone said.

  What nearly broke them was the waiting. Robert Kennedy, who blamed himself for waiting too long to summon the military, alternately joked, whimpered, seethed, and cursed when the night dragged on past the arrival times promised by the generals. Army Secretary Cyrus Vance* and Division Commander Creighton Abrams† had assured the White House that they could airlift soldiers from Memphis to Ole Miss within an hour, but it took that long for the sixty-five-man Mississippi National Guard unit‡ to reach the campus from the local armory in Oxford. After false sightings and interminable delays, the National Guard trotted loyally up to the Lyceum to stand alongside the battered marshals. (“One of them was just wounded,” Larry O’Brien finally announced to the Cabinet Room, “so they know they’re there.”) No more reinforcements arrived for some three hours, during which time most of the night’s injuries were sustained. Both Kennedys spoke sharply to the brass. “I have a hunch that Khrushchev would get those troops in fast enough,” O’Donnell sighed. “That’s what worries me about the whole thing.”

  A bone-weary Katzenbach was talking with President Kennedy when joyous shouts went up that regular troops had been sighted outside the Lyceum. “Just a minute, Mr. President,” said Katzenbach. “They may be here now. Please stay on the line while I confirm it.” Katzenbach dashed off, shouting back orders not to let anyone touch the phone because the President was waiting. Returning seconds later, Katzenbach was mortified to discover that the man holding the receiver was not his aide but a reporter. Far from seizing his scoop, however, the reporter was so awed by the thought that the President of the United States was on the other end of the line that he had been unable to move or speak, much less ask a question. Katzenbach grabbed the phone to say, “They’re here, Mr. President.”

  Meredith’s room smelled of tear gas a few hours later when Doar came to pick him up. With Guthman and McShane, they climbed into the same Border Patrol car that had carried them to the first registration attempt eleven days earlier. Then shiny and new, its doors now were pockmarked with bullet holes, its windows shattered by bricks. McShane put army blankets on the backseat to protect them from the shards of glass as they rode to the Lyceum for registration. Soldiers stood on the Grove, holding back students who had gathered to witness the surrender. Meredith—unknown and withdrawn, temperamental, practical, of military bearing and yet erratically sentimental—said it was then that he heard Mississippi whites call him “nigger” for the first time in his life. An hour later, escorted by marshals, he attended his first class in Colonial American history.

  The soldiers, once marching, proved even more difficult to stop than to start. Long after the campus had quieted to Meredith-taunting and petty vandalism, new units piled in on top of each other until there were some 23,000 soldiers—three times the population of Oxford. The Marines got in on it; so did the Air Force. No fewer than 10,000 troops scrambled for a riot alarm on the night of October 11, surrounding what turned out to be a pre-engagement “pinning” serenade on the porch of a sorority house. Ordinary soldiers, while dodging a few rocks and grinning at the blistering obscenities they received from otherwise demure coeds, found enough humor to relieve the tedium. They named their tents “Andersonville” and “KKK HQ.” A giant sign proclaimed one latrine the “Governor’s Mansion.”

  Political ramifications helped pin the troops down in Mississippi, as neither the generals nor the politicians wanted to look as though they were backing down from Governor Barnett’s torrent of indignant rage. All official Mississippi joined the governor in blaming the riot entirely on “trigger-happy marshals” and other federal intruders. Senator Eastland charged that the marshals had “provoked the students and others.” Lieutenant Governor Johnson, in a private complaint forwarded to Burke Marshall, charged that the tear gas “affected my lungs and my throat and caused, as the doctor put it, a blood clot upon my lungs.” The Mississippi senate passed a resolution expressing its “complete, entire and utter contempt for the Kennedy Administration and its puppet courts.” A Lafayette County grand jury indicted Chief Marshal McShane for inciting the riot. The Mississippi legislature’s official report, oozing with self-pity and trampled virtue, charged the marshals with “planned physical torture” and other atrocities against Ole Miss students. This document caught the attention of President Kennedy, who lamented that such a brazenly fantastic inversion might one day be taken seriously by historians. Firsthand experience with Ole Miss made the President doubt his old Harvard professors, who taught that Northern fanatics trampled upon an innocent South after the Civil War. “It makes me wonder,” Kennedy said privately to Sorensen, “whether everything I learned about the evils of Reconstruction was really true.”

  President Kennedy, while insightful about the effects of racial passions upon the perception of history itself, took steps toward a renewed mythology. To protect the racial sensibilities of Mississippi, he stripped Negro soldiers out of the military units at Ole Miss. Like Governor Barnett, he went out of his way to avoid mentioning that Meredith was a Negro. The President and his brother ignored most of Governor Barnett’s slanderous accusations, and in fact they tasked the best legal minds in the Justice Department to find a way not to collect the contempt fines imposed on Barnett and Johnson. There might have been persuasive tactical reasons, as they did not want to renew the constitutional crisis, but such small steps consistently beckoned the Administration to minimize both the significance and the racial texture of the Ole Miss crisis.

  President Kennedy’s most effective political response to the Ole Miss riot was to move on to other things. Almost never did he mention the subject in speeches, nor did he exercise his famous aptitude for reviewing and interpreting political events during informal interviews. His power to define what was news consigned the Ole Miss story quickly to the back pages. The soldiers remained practically unnoticed at Ole Miss until the last five hundred departed late in the summer of 1963, after Meredith received his degree. The climate of the times helped contain the story. Had the riot occurred later, in the era of the “live network feed,” synchronized scenes of the Ole Miss rioting before, during, and after President Kennedy’s national address might have been broadcast with jarring effect, making the President appear Pollyannish or incompetent. As it was, however, the sequence of events was blurred to his advantage, making the riot appear to be a rude answer to Kennedy’s timely appeal. Friendly newspapers went to great lengths to adjust the speech to the riot. The New York Times went so far as to report that Kennedy “qualified his optimism most carefully
” in his address, “and indeed made clear that the Government was waiting anxiously to see how Mississippi officials and citizens behaved.”

  The Ole Miss crisis left people feeling victimized on all sides. Mississippians and other Southern leaders howled against the invasion. The formerly deputized marshals recovered from their wounds and went back to regular duty at prisons and border crossings. Kennedy’s political advisers, realizing that all their efforts to accommodate Mississippi had served only to blanket the South with bumper stickers screaming FEDERALLY OCCUPIED MISSISSIPPI and KENNEDY’S HUNGARY, were reinforced in their belief that taking risks for integration invited political suicide. As for Negro leaders, all of whom praised President Kennedy in public for doing what was necessary to get Meredith registered, the sense of victory was hollow. NAACP lawyers, who had handled Meredith’s case alone for nearly two years, felt shunted aside by Justice Department lawyers who had taken control of their case and even physical custody of Meredith.

  Martin Luther King complained privately that President Kennedy had summoned the nation to nothing more positive than a grim obedience to law. In Kennedy’s nationwide address there had been talk of burdens and closed books but not a word of freedom, fresh beginnings, or renewed hope. For King, by contrast, the issue went far beyond his identification with Meredith to touch his core conviction that human beings could transcend enemy-thinking. At stake was nothing less than the capacity to lighten the stain of evil and demonstrate the possibility of justice in the world’s design, which for King was the realization of God’s presence. His moral intensity in this regard struck President Kennedy as narrow and stifling. King, on the other hand, had heard enough glowing talk of Mississippi’s gridiron traditions—and read enough of the political dickering between Mississippi and the Administration—to sink into profound depression. As much as he admired President Kennedy for his stylish command of the modern world, King knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him. Their performance at Oxford, he wrote, “made Negroes feel like pawns in a white man’s political game.” He blended this lament into a bleak assessment of 1962 as the year civil rights lost ground in national politics. No longer the “dominant issue” of domestic debate, it had receded since the year of the Freedom Rides and of the Kennedy Administration’s early cry, “We will move!” King too had receded, as measured by his ineffectiveness in Albany, and his criticism of the Administration no doubt reflected his fear that no matter how mightily he shouted and sacrificed, he remained a cork in Kennedy’s ocean, left to rise and fall with its tides.