Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Army officials would later explain that it was simply a case of bad planning, resulting from the Kennedys’ original desire to avoid a dramatic display of military force in the South and the Army’s inexperience in domestic operations of this sort. The 503rd’s frantic road trip that night produced the comic spectacle of Army officers in full battle gear rolling into backcountry gas stations in their jeeps and demanding Tennessee-Mississippi highway maps.

  Henry Gallagher, a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant who was leading an Army convoy to Ole Miss, was so desperate to find his way there that he ordered his jeep driver to kidnap a Navy shore patrolman with a Southern accent who seemed to know the area. “I said that we were all from up north and didn’t have the foggiest idea where the town of Oxford was. I said that he had to come with us,” recalled Gallagher. “He was incredulous. ‘Sir, I can’t do that. I’m on duty here at this gate. My captain will go crazy wondering where I am.’ I said something to the effect that we were all under orders from President Kennedy and he had to go with us. I motioned to [my driver]. He came around and picked up the startled SP in a bear hug and placed him in the back of the jeep.”

  But in the Cabinet Room that night, which throbbed with the taut nerves of a war room, the Army’s stumbling performance seemed more than a comedy of errors. It felt like insubordination. This was how far relations between the White House and Pentagon had sunk by this point in the Kennedy administration. In their high-anxiety mood, the Kennedy brothers and their advisors sensed something sinister in the military’s farcical incompetence. They were outraged by how indifferent the Army seemed to presidential orders.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch if the president of the United States calls up and says, ‘Get your ass down there,’” said O’Donnell, his Irish rising. “Yeah, I would think they’d be on that fucking plane in about five minutes.”

  “I have a hunch that Khrushchev would get those troops in fast enough,” he added, with bitter sarcasm.

  JFK expressed his disgust at once again being jerked around by men in uniform: “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.”

  Robert Kennedy had never seen his brother so angry during his presidency—not during the humiliations of the Bay of Pigs and the Vienna summit, not during the nerve-wracking showdown over Berlin or tense negotiations over Laos. “People are dying in Oxford!” JFK erupted at General Abrams. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen in forty-five years. I want the military police battalion to enter the action. You are to proceed to the campus forthwith.” Bobby himself told a reporter the next morning that “last night was the worst night I ever spent.” He was his brother’s point man on civil rights, he was supposed to be in control of volatile situations like this. But the night seemed on the verge of exploding into the most spectacular nightmare of the Kennedy presidency, a racial bloodbath that would tear the country apart and savage America’s image abroad as a beacon of freedom.

  O’Donnell later offered a riveting, you-are-there account of the rising feelings of calamity in the Cabinet Room as the Mississippi night burned on: “Clearly, we are very panicked by all this right now, that [Meredith] might be killed, federal marshals killed and troops potentially killed, [it’s] going to be a political catastrophe as well as a devastating set of events for everyone who is directly involved…. The implications both at home and across the globe are enormous…. Nick is on the phone from Oxford and Bobby is on the phone from the Cabinet Room. The president is pacing back and forth in the Cabinet Room listening to the conversation. He is as upset as I have ever seen him. The president is now seeing the full portent of this problem, all the implications if things go terribly wrong and a real fear that there will be a blood bath there…. The president and the attorney general were, to say the least, a little unhappy with the military. The president required a memorandum explaining to him in detail why they had failed to mention what was really critical information to us in deciding the strategy for deployment. The president was just livid, absolutely livid…. The tempo of violence is increasing minute by minute now in Oxford. It becomes clear that the most horrible possibility is now in existence—that the marshals will be overwhelmed and that Meredith and now really the president’s own men, meaning Nick and the others, are in danger of their lives. The marshals are clearly being overwhelmed and many of them have been very seriously injured at this point.

  “The president is on the phone almost every minute now. First he began with the Pentagon to get some answers. He quickly became exasperated with this conversation, so he hung up and called the base in Memphis again to find out what is going on. He gets the general [Abrams] directly and the guy finally admits that they have not loaded the helicopters, they are all there now, but there is a new problem. The president can’t imagine, what is the new problem? Well the problem is, the general admits, they are not sure where they are going or how to get there. The president is stunned. You know, we are sitting staring at each other. This is supposed to be the greatest military in the world! They explain to the president that when they laid out all these plans and briefed the attorney general, it was all based on a mission during the daytime. That now it has become a nighttime mission, they are not sure they can get there in the helicopters at night and they do not know where to land. I mean, here we are sitting in the Cabinet Room of the White House and they are literally saying to the president, ‘Where should we land? We do not know where to land.’ He could not believe it.”

  During the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy had learned that he could not safely delegate responsibility for a high-stakes operation to the CIA. On the night of Ole Miss, he and his advisors discovered that they could not rely on the military to carry out even a domestic operation against “a few hundred students and rednecks,” in Sorensen’s caustic words. Surveying the frantic scene in the Cabinet Room, O’Donnell was struck by the grotesque absurdity of what he was witnessing: the president of the United States forced to play the role of air traffic controller, conferring with his staff on where to land the helicopters and then dialing a lowly sergeant on the ground in Oxford to make sure there would be trucks to pick up the troops when they landed. The uniformed grunt on the other end of the president’s phone proved to be the most proficient military man with whom Kennedy talked that night. “The president joked maybe we should put him in charge,” O’Donnell observed.

  It was not until 2:15 in the morning—when the first wave of heavily-armed MPs finally came storming through the flames toward the Lyceum—that the Kennedy war room could begin to relax. (By some calculations, the troops began arriving more than three hours after the Army promised they would. But Robert Kennedy later estimated the military’s delay at more than five hours.) A deep-throated roar went up from the battered marshals. Their tear gas supplies were all but depleted, and they were just minutes away from being overrun by the mob. The soldiers were thunderstruck by the scene that greeted them, with burning cars, the crackle of gunfire, and the moans of the wounded creating a hellish battlefield tableaux. “I could not believe what I saw,” recalled Lieutenant John Migliore. “I could not believe I was on the campus of a university in the United States of America.” But the worst was over now. Faced with the full might of the U.S. military, the rioters soon began to disperse.

  By then two men were dead—a reporter for Agence France-Presse and a local jukebox repairman—and a total of 166 federal marshals were wounded. Dozens of soldiers, students, and rioters were also injured in the Battle of Ole Miss. Some three hundred people were arrested, men and boys of all ages who had come from all over the Deep South and from as far away as California. They had flooded into the mossy, idyllic college town in response to the racist rallying cries of rebel leaders like General Walker, who urged them to “bring your flags, your tents and your skillets” and take a final stand for Southern sovereignty against the tyranny of federal race-mixing. The attorney general’s o
ffice even received an FBI report about a Wisconsin segregationist who planned to fly a surplus military plane to battle in Oxford.

  The Mississippi tempest left another cloud of ill will and distrust over White House–Pentagon relations. The attorney general vented his anger with the military by going after General Walker as ferociously as he pursued gangsters. The morning after the riot, Walker was arrested by federal marshals and flown to a Missouri psychiatric prison, where he was to undergo examination before standing charges on insurrection. The New York Times observed that committing the general to a mental hospital “was regarded as unusual.” But Bobby Kennedy was in no mood for judicial restraint. He summoned Cy Vance’s aide Joe Califano, who was considered the Pentagon expert on the zealous general, and made it clear that his job was to keep Walker behind bars. “There was no discussion of Walker’s rights,” Califano recalled in his memoir, “no echoes of the right to bail that was stressed in my criminal law course at Harvard. ‘Whatever it takes to keep him locked up in that hospital, that’s what we need,’ was the message from the attorney general as he stared at me. I knew Kennedy had mercilessly chewed out Vance for not getting Army troops to Oxford in time to avoid the violence. His chilling glare at me said, ‘Maybe you guys in the Army can at least get something right.’” But Walker’s attorney appealed to his far-right sympathizers in Congress, calling his client “the United States’ first political prisoner,” and the insurrectionary general was released seven days later.

  The Ole Miss crisis also drove a permanent wedge between the Kennedy administration and the white South, a political crack that the brothers had been desperately trying to caulk over, at least until JFK was safely reelected. But as the Kennedy brothers finally went to bed on the dawn of October 1, they knew a historic turning point had been reached. The old Democratic coalition could no longer be held together; it was a house divided and would soon fall.

  “The president, angry and distraught, goes home about six o’clock that morning,” remembered O’Donnell. “We all went home, I went home and Bobby did as well. We went home knowing for the moment that we had at least saved the lives of those involved—but in fact whatever cordiality that ever existed between the Southern states and the rest of us was now at an end. There was to be no more pretense and this issue [integration] would not and could not be detained any further…. The president, besides being just personally deeply disturbed, also realizes that this glossing over of the great national problem and the attempt to reach some sort of consensus with the Southern states, with its congressmen and senators, is now at an end. The bitter feelings from this incident will spill over for a long time to come.”

  Raised in a privileged world of country clubs and prep schools, the Kennedy brothers were slow to recognize that the entrenched evils of racism had to be fully confronted by the government in order for the American journey to continue. In the beginning, they saw the exploding demands for racial equality as a political problem that had to be managed rather than as a moral imperative. “The problem with you people,” a peevish and arrogant Bobby snapped at NAACP lawyer [and future Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall, “is that you want too much too fast.” During JFK’s first year in office, Martin Luther King Jr. famously remarked that President Kennedy seemed intellectually supportive of the civil rights movement, but emotionally disengaged. “I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill, but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.” But pushed and pulled by the heroism of the civil rights crusaders, and the righteous power of their cause, the Kennedy brothers—first Bobby, then the cooler Jack—began to change. By the time Ole Miss erupted, the Kennedys were viewed as hostile foreign leaders in the white South because of their growing support for civil rights. “If Khrushchev was running against Kennedy here, Khrushchev would beat him,” groused a Mississippi voter. “And if Bob Kennedy was the candidate, Khrushchev would beat him worse.”

  In the days following the bloody insurrection, Attorney General Kennedy ordered young Justice Department aides to roam the Ole Miss campus and the town of Oxford and report back to him on the mood of the smoldering battleground. Oxford was a seat of culture and learning, home of Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Faulkner, who had died the summer before the conflagration at his stately Greek Revival house, Rowan Oak.

  Faulkner had predicted something like the Ole Miss insurrection before his death, writing that white Southerners would embrace “another Civil War, knowing they’re going to lose,” rather than bow to desegregation of their schools. The writer’s nephew, Murry, had bravely and loyally led the local National Guard unit during the battle of Ole Miss, rushing to the aid of the federal marshals despite the outrage of his fellow Southerners and at one point scurrying with a squad to the defense of a black church that was on the verge of being torched by rednecks. He suffered two broken bones during the riot when a flying brick struck his arm.

  But even among the educated people of Oxford, the sentiments about the Kennedys were raw. When the attorney general phoned Captain Falkner (as his wing of the family spelled their name) after the uprising to congratulate him on a “job well done,” the reaction was far from soldierly pride. “Later I told the troop of my call and conversation,” Falkner remembered. “Rather than the compliment being a morale booster, it had an adverse effect, making us more disgusted than ever.”

  Robert Kennedy’s men brought back disturbing reports and documents from the Mississippi front, primitively racist artifacts that he stored in his Justice Department files like the archeology of a lost civilization. Much of it revealed the underlying sexual panic behind the anti-Meredith furor—the fear that incoming black male students would defile the pure white magnolia of Southern womanhood. (The president was “really disgusted” by the sexual phobias on florid display at Ole Miss, O’Donnell later remarked.) Leaflets depicting fresh-scrubbed, blonde coeds in the arms of grossly caricatured black “coons” littered the campus. “How would you like it if your exquisitely formed White child was no longer White?” read one. “Pink cheeks no longer pink. Blue eyes no longer blue…It’s [sic] sensitive mind no longer sensitive but ape like? It’s beautiful body no longer beautiful but black and evil smelling?” Another leaflet urged that Meredith be socially isolated like “a piece of furniture of no value,” while Klansmen meanwhile explored a more direct approach, plotting to kidnap and lynch him at the earliest opportunity. A student newsletter called Rebel Underground attacked the Kennedy brothers as “the KKK—Kennedy Koon Keepers,” while the Mississippi Junior Chamber of Commerce denounced the administration’s act of “tyranny,” branding it “one of the most tragic events in the history of [our] beloved country—federal force against a sovereign state…education at bayonet.” A bumper sticker read: “The Castro Brothers Have Moved into the White House.”

  One leaflet distributed to white soldiers stationed on campus tried to stir up mutinous passions in the ranks. “Do not be tricked into fighting your fellow Americans,” read the appeal to the Army troops. “KENNEDY is out to destroy AMERICA because he is a sick, sick COMMUNIST…. If you will join with your fellow Americans here in Mississippi, no force on earth can conquer us. Together with all other GOOD AMERICANS, we will remove RED JACK KENNEDY and all the other communist PARTY politicians from office, and go on from there to wipe the HELL-SPAWNED FILTH of COMMUNISM from the face of the earth.”

  James Symington, who had replaced John Seigenthaler as RFK’s administrative aide, was one of the young men Kennedy dispatched to Ole Miss. Symington, the son of Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, arrived in Oxford the morning after the riot in a small government plane. “The marshal who picked me up at the local airport told me to cover my head with my coat as we drove into town in case a brick came through the window,” Symington recalled in a recent interview. The young Kennedy aide questioned dozens of people who had been arrested during the riot, as well as preachers, newspaper publishers, judges, and other local dignitaries. The testimony he
collected from the Mississippi Delta was almost uniformly distressing. Young rioters told him they didn’t want to get into any trouble, but they were following orders from their daddies or preachers.

  “One preacher let me into his church,” said Symington, “and told me, ‘You represent a tyranny.’ I said, ‘How do you think black people feel living in Mississippi with no rights?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s better to have a lot of little tyrannies than one big one.’” Another minister told Symington that telephone linemen had observed “hillbillies camping in the woods, waiting for the troops to leave so they could come in for Meredith.” (The military occupation of Oxford would last for nearly ten months. A small squad of federal marshals stayed on to protect Meredith through his graduation.)

  Later Symington was asked to speak to a group of Ole Miss grad students. “I went to a little house in town. I brought my guitar to sing some old folk songs, which I did in those days. I was greeted at the door by a young man with a tall glass, the kind you’d fill with milk, but it was filled to the top with bourbon. I said, ‘How about a little ice in that.’ He said, ‘We don’t water our drinks in Mississippi.’

  “I walked into the kitchen and I saw a whole tray of skinned squirrels. Then I went and sat in the living room and played some songs on my guitar. They brought out the squirrels and gave me one to eat. One guy told me, ‘You’ve got to stick your fork right in there, like it’s a lobster, and get that white blob. What do you think that is, Yankee?’

  “And I said, ‘First of all, I’m not a Yankee—I’m from Missouri, and that’s a border state. And I think it’s the brain.’

  “And they shouted, ‘That’s right!’ I stuck it as far down my gullet as it would go so I wouldn’t gag on it and swallowed. And they whooped and hollered.