The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

  House Republicans were also pressing forward with their own legislation. Two days before Johnson’s meeting with the three GOP leaders, thirty House Republicans had introduced a civil rights bill that included a strong Title III provision, precisely the element that Kennedy was so averse to including in his own legislation. Yet on June 4, when they tried to explain their bill on the House floor, Democrats had churlishly and repeatedly interrupted them; eventually two leading liberals, James Roosevelt and John Bell Williams, moved to adjourn before the Republicans could finish (the motion lost by an overwhelming vote).74

  Nevertheless, the Republicans used their bill to attack the administration, and to call attention to the lack of bipartisan cooperation on civil rights. “There has been no legislative submission on the Birmingham question, and on the question of public facilities as yet by the administration,” said Representative John Lindsay of New York during a June 6 Today show interview. “I’ve sent word to a highly respected member of the Democratic side in the House that on the bill [Clark] MacGregor, [William] Cahill, and [Charles] Mathias, myself, others have been pressing for, we’d like the administration to help us get it through the House of Representatives.”

  “Did you get a response?” the reporter asked.

  “We haven’t gotten any response as yet,” Lindsay said.75

  But the biggest challenge facing Kennedy that early June was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Governor Wallace had declared that he would block two black students, Vivian Jones and James Hood, from registering for admission to the University of Alabama, despite a May 21 court order commanding him to allow them in. Indeed, one of the reasons Kennedy had delayed introducing the bill was that Marshall and John Doar had to pull out of drafting sessions to go to Alabama on June 1 to start preparing for the showdown with Wallace, which was set for June 11.76

  The White House had known of Wallace’s plans as early as November 1962, when Frank Rose, the president of the university, had called Marshall to tell him about the impending court order and Wallace’s intentions. He appeared serious: Wallace had told the state’s education leaders that if they dared integrate their schools, “there won’t be enough state troopers to protect you” and that he would even cut off state financing to them. Wallace continued to stand firm through the spring; on June 2, despite the court order, he went on Meet the Press to reaffirm his intention to “stand at the door,” though he promised “the confrontation will be handled peacefully and without violence.”77

  As the day of the students’ admission approached, White House and Justice Department officials debated how best to ensure they got safely into the school. Some proposed a rehash of Ole Miss, with federal troops escorting them bodily into the registrar’s office. But Katzenbach, having learned more than a few lessons during the Mississippi crisis, had a better idea. Wallace, he realized, was all bluster, a man who might believe his racist convictions, but acted on them mostly to appease voters. Katzenbach would go to Tuscaloosa himself, he decided, and let Wallace have his show, then insist on escorting the students to register. Wallace, through a back channel provided by Alabama senator Lister Hill, told Kennedy he would comply, and he brought in 825 state troopers to keep order.78

  On the afternoon before the confrontation, Ted Sorensen suggested to Kennedy that the next day, fresh from his presumed victory over Wallace, he should go on TV to mark the occasion. The idea for some sort of presidential address—a “fireside chat,” in Rooseveltian parlance—had been bouncing around the White House for months. It had been suggested at the president’s meeting with the ADA on May 4, at the height of the Birmingham crisis. Soon after a reporter had asked whether it would help for the president to give a national speech on race relations. “If I thought it would, I would give one,” the president demurred. “I made a speech the night of Mississippi at Oxford to the citizens of Mississippi and others that did not seem to do much good.” At a meeting in the Oval Office on June 10, Kennedy expressed skepticism, saying, “It just really depends on whether we have trouble at the university, then I would; but otherwise, I don’t think we would at this point.” But his brother replied forcefully: “I think it would be helpful. I think we have reason to do it, you don’t talk about the legislation, you talk about unemployment, talk about education, you do it for 15 minutes, I think it would alleviate a lot of problems.”

  “Well, I suppose I could do it,” Kennedy replied.79

  By the morning of the eleventh, Katzenbach had been awake for thirty-six hours. He had spent the previous day at a nearby Army Reserve facility, walking through every possible contingency—he even found a soldier roughly Wallace’s height and build so that soldiers could practice picking him up and moving him out of the way, should the governor prove recalcitrant. It was an odd role in which to find this former University of Chicago law professor; then again, it was the second such crisis Katzenbach had managed in nine months, and he did so with a steely insouciance. On a phone call that morning, Robert Kennedy had put his daughter Kerry on the line. “Do you know what temperature it is?” Katzenbach asked her. “It is 98 degrees—you tell your father that we’re all going to get hardship pay.”80

  Later, on the way to the university at the head of an Army convoy, Katzenbach got a message that Robert Kennedy wanted to speak with him. When the radio in the truck went on the fritz, he stopped at a shopping mall and found a pay phone. Kennedy stood in his office, three of his children playing at his feet, his walls decked with maps of the campus and Tuscaloosa area. His last instructions for dealing with Wallace were brief. “The president wants you to make him look foolish,” Kennedy said.81

  That was the easy part. Wallace had scripted the event carefully. For the point of confrontation he chose an auditorium with a classical colonnade out front that he thought would look great on TV. He had a wooden lectern set up from which to deliver his speech, even drawing lines and circles on the ground in front of him to show Katzenbach and his aides where to stand for the cameras. But Katzenbach understood the power of the visual media, too; ignoring the lines, he got close enough to the five-foot-seven governor so that his own six-foot-two frame towered over him (though Katzenbach later said he was also trying to get out of the sun).82

  Katzenbach, his hands crossed under his armpits, told Wallace to step aside. By agreement, Wallace then gave a seven-minute speech in which he denounced the federal government and refused to budge. “The unwelcome, unwanted, unwarranted, and forced induced intrusion on the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government offers a frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges, and sovereignty of this state by officers of central government,” Wallace said.

  Katzenbach waited patiently, his arms still folded, his gaze condescending. “Governor, I am not interested in a show, and I don’t know what the purpose of this show is,” he said when Wallace had finished. “From the outset, governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.” Wallace was silent.83

  “Very well,” said Katzenbach. He returned to the truck for the students, then walked them to their dormitories and lunch. Meanwhile, Kennedy ordered the Alabama National Guard federalized. At three o’clock, with Katzenbach and Wallace back in position and a hundred troops, now under Kennedy’s control, ringing the scene, Wallace gave one last, short statement and backed off. When Robert Kennedy got word, back in Washington, he lit a cigar.84

  The crisis over, John Kennedy decided to go ahead with the speech anyway. Tuscaloosa may have ended peacefully, but that morning’s newspapers carried reports of mass arrests in Cambridge, Maryland. Earlier that day a telegram had come in from King urging the president to find a “just and moral solution” in Danville, Virginia, where police had attacked a group of civil rights protesters.85

  The president called each of the three networks to reserve fifteen minutes at the 8:00 p.m. time slot, but it was not until less than an hour before he was to go on air that the presid
ent’s aides started in on the text. In one room, Sorensen and White talked their way through a draft using notes from Kennedy and Martin; as they talked, Gloria Sitrin, one of Kennedy’s secretaries, simultaneously typed up a draft. Meanwhile, in the next room, the Kennedy brothers scratched down random notes that the president could draw on if he had to slide into extemporaneous speaking.86

  As the hour approached, the speech still was not ready. The cameras were being set up in the Oval Office; the president paced the Cabinet Room, starting to panic. He looked at Marshall. “Come on Burke,” he said, “you must have some ideas.” Sorensen came in with a draft, but Kennedy thought it was stilted. With no time to rewrite, the president grabbed the assortment of sheets, scratch pads, and scraps of paper and walked next door. He slid behind the desk, and the cameras started to roll.87

  “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” Kennedy 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.” He praised the university community for remaining calm, then shuffled through several minutes of his standard patter on civil rights—that America was founded on principles of equality, that the country was “committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” that troops abroad were sent to Vietnam and West Berlin “regardless of color.”88

  But then Kennedy hit his stride. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” he said. This was not about sectional or party politics, not about pitting one race against the other. Rather, it was about bringing all Americans together behind a set of principles upon which everyone, as Americans, should be able to agree.

  “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

  The ugly facts of racism in America undermined the values the country stood for. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

  These were sentiments drawn straight from the movement he had kept at arm’s length for so long, and from a vice president he had so often relegated, on purpose or not, to an embarrassingly marginal role in the administration. More than that, it was an expression of not just sympathy with the movement, but empathy for black Americans as Americans—not as charity cases, or as political problems, but as fellow citizens. “The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.”

  The answer, he said, could no longer come through repression—nor could it come through demonstrations alone. It must come through legislative action, first and foremost in the United States Congress. “I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments,” he said. “This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure, but many do.”

  The last four minutes of Kennedy’s speech were completely unscripted, and it showed. He repeated himself, circled back. “As I have said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or an equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves,” he said. At the point where he should have been plumbing his oratorical depths for a moving conclusion, he tossed a bone to the moderates and conservatives, who feared black violence was the driving force behind Washington’s sudden attention to civil rights. “We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law,” he said—but then added, “but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century. This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens.”

  Rhetorically, it was not Kennedy’s best speech; his delivery was awkward at times, rushed, halting, his peroration rambling. But in its content, it rivaled his most historic addresses. No president had ever taken on race as squarely as he did in those fifteen minutes. He both accused the country of moral hypocrisy and gave a rousing call to unity. He put himself behind transformative legislation, but also challenged the country to effect the sort of moral change that government action alone cannot realize.

  Millions watched the speech. From Atlanta, King sent a telegram to the president lauding it as “one of the most eloquent, profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom by any President.” Wilkins did likewise, calling it “a clear, resolute exposition of basic Americanism.”89

  The Southern Democrats, naturally, were none too happy with it. In a statement the next day, Richard Russell attacked the bill, saying if passed it would usher in “a socialistic or communist state.” Strom Thurmond proposed a general strike among Southern Democrats in order to block all of Kennedy’s agenda unless he gave up on civil rights.90

  Historians would later call Kennedy’s June 11 speech the beginning of the “Second Reconstruction.” At least within Congress, it certainly unleashed forces that Kennedy had a hard time controlling, let alone comprehending. Though the Southern Democrats declined to go in with Thurmond on a general strike, they did put the president on notice by defeating a routine bill to finance the Area Redevelopment Administration, which many of the House Southerners had backed when it passed in 1961. Later that day, Kennedy commiserated over the loss with House Majority Leader Carl Albert. “It’s just in everything, I mean, this has become everything.”

  “It’s overwhelming the whole, the whole program,’’ Albert said. “I couldn’t do a damn thing with them, you know.”

  “Civil rights did it,” the president sighed.91

  In Jackson, Medgar Evers had been at an NAACP meeting and had missed the speech, but his wife, Myrlie, had stayed up with their children to watch it. They were still awake at midnight when their father pulled into the driveway, his Oldsmobile packed with T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go.”92

  As Evers mounted the porch, a shot rang out. Hit in the back, Evers crumpled. “Turn me loose!” Evers cried. He died less than an hour later.93

  The impact of Kennedy’s speech cannot be separated from the national shock at Evers’s murder. Though he was hardly a household name, the assassination of the highest-ranking NAACP official in Mississippi brought the urgency of the civil rights question into a focus that no presidential speech could ever achieve.

  The ripples from Evers’s death even reached the White House. A few days later, Kennedy was talking with Schlesinger, his in-house intellectual and an on-again, off-again professor in Harvard’s history department, where Kennedy had first developed the anti-Reconstruction, anti–Radical Republican views that permeated his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Profiles in Courage. The South, he
had believed and written, was at war with itself and best left alone, so that in time men of wisdom and honor could bring their homeland into the modern era. The worst thing that could happen would be for intolerant moralists to force change upon the region.

  Now, finally—after Oxford, after Birmingham, after Tuscaloosa, and now Jackson—he told Schlesinger that his old views were crumbling. “I don’t understand the South,” he confided. “I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens”—a hardline abolitionist and architect of Reconstruction—“was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.”94

  Chapter 3

  An Idea Becomes a Bill

  The eight days between Kennedy’s speech and his submission of the civil rights bill to Congress on June 19 was an almost constant blur of activity at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, with frequent stops midway at the Department of Justice. On June 12, the day after the president’s speech, three aides to Senate Majority Leader Mansfield—Harry McPherson, Bobby Baker, and Ken Teasdale—sat down to think through the first of many conundrums facing the bill’s supporters: how to introduce it.1

  The trio knew that White House strategists had already decided that the inevitability of a long filibuster by Southern senators meant the bill should start out in the more liberal House of Representatives, where it could gather momentum before hitting the Senate. But there was no guarantee the bill would emerge from the House, let alone emerge in an acceptable shape—liberals might overload it with politically untenable planks, like a universal Title III, or Southern Democrats might find a way to gut it. As a backup, McPherson, Baker, and Teasdale decided Mansfield should introduce the bill simultaneously in the Senate.