by Larry Tye
*17 Truman had earlier explained that his doubts about JFK didn’t have to do with his religion but his genes: “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop!”
*18 The president’s popularity was sinking in the summer of 1962 in large part due to the plummeting stock market, dubbed the “Kennedy Slide,” and to lingering resentment over the steel crisis the previous April.
*19 Bobby would later offer Ted more sage advice, this time on what to do when you were a guest on the Sunday morning TV news shows: “You decide what you want to say and go in there and say it no matter what the questions are” (Littlefield and Nexon, Lion of the Senate, 270–71).
*20 Author Diane White-Crane worked on Bobby’s campaigns and in his office and was a friend of Mary Jo Kopechne, who would drown at Chappaquiddick Island when Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge. “The difference between Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy is not that he wouldn’t have taken Mary Jo out,” says White-Crane. “The difference is Robert Kennedy would have drowned trying to get her out of there….And he did. He had affairs” (Author interview with White-Crane).
Chapter 5
BREAKING BARRIERS
THE BEST CLUE to where the participants at the historic gathering stood was where they sat. All eleven Negroes lined up on one side of the Kennedys’ drawing room overlooking Central Park, the five whites on the other. It was Harlem vs. Hickory Hill. The partition was a fitting one for the spring of 1963, when demarcation of the races was written into law across the American South and into practice in the rest of the land. But it was not an auspicious beginning to an urgent conclave that the black novelist James Baldwin had pulled together, at Bobby’s request, to talk about why a volcano of rage was building up in northern ghettos and why mainstream civil rights leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t quell it as summer approached.
A second sign that the meeting was ill-fated was not who had been invited but who had not. Baldwin assembled a motley collection of fellow artists, academics, and second-tier civil rights leaders, along with his lawyer, secretary, literary agent, brother, and brother’s girlfriend. Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t welcome, nor were the top people from the NAACP and the Urban League, because Bobby wanted a no-holds-barred critique of their leadership. He also hoped for a sober discussion of what the Kennedy administration should do, with Negroes who knew what it already was doing. Having a serious conversation without the serious players would have been difficult enough, but Bobby made it even harder: What he really wanted was gratitude, not candor. Baldwin did his best given those constraints and only one day’s notice. Bobby may not have been inclined to take them seriously, yet everyone participating—whether a matinee idol or crooner, dramatist or therapist—had earned their stripes as activists.
After feeding his guests a light buffet and settling them in chairs or on footstools, Bobby opened the discussion on tame and self-serving notes. He listed all that he and his brother had accomplished in advancing Negro rights, explaining why their efforts were groundbreaking. He warned that the politics of race could get dicey with voters going to the polls in just eighteen months and conservative white Democrats threatening to bolt. “We have a party in revolt and we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them onboard if the Democratic party is going to prevail in the next elections,” said the attorney general. He had already implied that he was among friends by tossing his jacket onto the back of his chair, rolling up his shirtsleeves, and welcoming everyone into his father’s elegant apartment. Now he wanted these friends to explain why so many of their Negro brethren were being drawn to dangerous radicals like Malcolm X and his Black Muslims.
The first reaction was polite and tepid. Bobby assumed his audience was naïve about the real world of rawboned politics, while they took him to be too credulous on the even rawer realities of the slums. “He had called the meeting in hopes of persuading us that he and his brother were doing all that could be done,” remembered the singer Lena Horne, whose silken voice had earned her center stage at the Cotton Club and whose left-leaning politics had gotten her blacklisted in Hollywood. “The funny thing was that no one there disputed that. It was just that it did not seem enough….He said something about his family and the kinds of discrimination it had had to fight. He also said he thought a Negro would be president within 40 years. He seemed to feel that this would establish some sort of identification, some sort of rapport, between us. It did not….The emotions of Negroes are running so differently from those of white men these days that the comparison between a white man’s experience and a Negro’s just doesn’t work.”
Kenneth Clark, black America’s preeminent psychologist, came prepared to lay out studies and statistics to document that corrosive racial divide, but he never got the chance. Jerome Smith, a young activist who had held back as long as he could, suddenly shattered the calm, his stammer underlining his anger. “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you and your brother,” he began. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail-party patter.” The real threat to white America wasn’t the Black Muslims, Smith insisted, it was when nonviolence advocates like him lost hope. The twenty-four-year-old’s record made his words resonate. He had suffered as many savage beatings as any civil rights protester of the era, including one for which he was now getting medical care in New York. But his patience and his pacifism were wearing thin, he warned his rapt audience. If the police came at him with more guns, dogs, and hoses, he would answer with a weapon of his own. “When I pull a trigger,” he said, “kiss it goodbye.”
Bobby was shocked, but Smith wasn’t through. Not only would young blacks like him fight to protect their rights at home, he said, but they would refuse to fight for America in Cuba, Vietnam, or any of the other places the Kennedys saw threats. “Never! Never! Never!” This was unfathomable to Bobby. “You will not fight for your country?” asked the attorney general, who had lost one brother and nearly a second at war. “How can you say that?” Rather than backing down, Smith said just being in the room with Bobby “makes me nauseous.” Others chimed in, demanding to know why the government couldn’t get tougher in taking on racist laws and ghetto blight. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play A Raisin in the Sun, stood to say she was sickened as well. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing to Smith.
Three hours into the evening the dialogue had become a brawl, with the tone set by Smith. “He didn’t sing or dance or act. Yet he became the focal point,” said Baldwin. “That boy, after all, in some sense, represented to everybody in that room our hope. Our honor. Our dignity. But, above all, our hope.” Bobby had heard enough. His tone let everyone know the welcome mat had been taken up. His flushed face showed how incensed he was. As his guests were leaving he was approached by Harry Belafonte, the King of Calypso, whom he had considered a loyal friend. “I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you say something?’ ” Bobby recounted later. “He said, ‘If I said something, it would affect my position with these people, and I have a chance to influence them….If I sided with you on these matters, then I would become suspect.’ ” Before Belafonte could finish his thought, Bobby turned away, grumbling, “Enough.”
Neither side got nearly what it wanted from the ill-conceived parley. The blacks had grasped the chance to vent their rage, which was one reason they’d come on such short notice. They had also hoped to remake this well-meaning brother of the president into their ally not for his kind of incremental reforms but for breakthrough change. They believed they had not just failed but had burned the bridge they came to build. “We left convinced that we had made no dent or impact on Bobby,” said Clark, whose research on how color barriers harmed black children helped push the Supreme Court to outlaw segregated schools. “It may very well have been that Bobby Kennedy was more antagonistic to our aspirations and goals than he was before, because th
e clash was so violent….This was tragic.”
Bobby came away with even less. He had let his temper win out over his compassion. He had asked his guests for candor but had stopped hearing as soon as fingers pointed at him. What Smith and the others said should not have come as a surprise. It mirrored what Baldwin had written six months earlier, and Bobby had read, in an acclaimed New Yorker article that explained why, for today’s Negro, “it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils”—but the essayist offered hope that “we maybe able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare.” Neither the attorney general nor his guests that night sensed that he would soon be counted among Baldwin’s handful. A born fighter, Bobby’s first reaction after the meeting was to jab back. “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are—they don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You can’t talk to them the way you can talk to Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins,” he told Arthur Schlesinger, forgetting that it was his frustration with King and Wilkins that made him ask Baldwin to gather other black voices. And there was more. “None of them lived in Harlem. I mean, they were wealthy Negroes,” Bobby would complain to another interviewer. His own wealth, of course, dwarfed theirs, and their fame didn’t exempt them from the humiliations faced by every dark-skinned American. Worse still, to Bobby, three of his black guests that night “were married to white people,” which he said exacerbated their insecurities and encouraged them to talk tough. His conclusion: “I should not have gotten involved with that group.”
Both sides had agreed not to talk to the press but neither could resist. The New York Times reported that the “secret” meeting was a “flop.” The attorney general “didn’t get the point,” Baldwin told the paper, when he and others had urged that JFK address the nation on Negro rights and otherwise step up his engagement. Bobby didn’t talk to that reporter but he did speak to a friendlier writer at the Times. James Reston positioned him precisely where he saw himself—caught between the rock of “militant white segregationists” like his Democratic allies in the South, and the hard place of “militant Negro integrationists” like those at the Baldwin meeting. Reston worried along with Bobby “that ‘moderation’ or ‘gradualism’ or ‘token integration’ were now offensive words to the Negro, and that sympathy by a Negro leader for the Administration’s moderate approach was regarded as the work of ‘collaborationists.’ ”
Reston was partly right. The administration walked a calibrated and overly cautious middle path on civil rights in its first two years. JFK had promised during his 1960 campaign to sign with “a stroke of a pen” an order banning discrimination in housing, but he took so long that protesters launched an “Ink for Jack” campaign, mailing him hundreds of fountain pens. He and Bobby named too many racist judges, took too long to file a serious-minded civil rights bill, and left the black voters who pulled them to victory in 1960 looking for more forceful answers. While moderation might have been the smart approach for a White House hell-bent on reelection, it made less sense for the commander of the New Frontier’s riot squad.
In Bobby’s earlier years, the disastrous Baldwin meeting might have been the end of the story. But after a couple of days of fuming, Smith’s tirade began to sink in for Kennedy. Rather than repeating his refrain of “imagine anyone saying that,” Bobby now told friends, “I guess if I were in his shoes, if I had gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.” It was not empty talk. Earlier on that very day of the Baldwin get-together, the attorney general had urged the owners of national chain stores to voluntarily integrate their lunch counters below the Mason-Dixon Line. Days before that, he had helped broker a settlement on desegregation and employment that partly defused ongoing violence in Birmingham.
Bobby Kennedy was stretching himself. He still brooded, but he was learning to channel his rage into outrage. Instead of deriding critics like Baldwin and Smith, which was his first impulse after they attacked him, he found himself identifying with them. He could see the effects of racism and started searching for causes. Instincts like those had led him to spring Junius Scales and Martin King from prison. Increasingly his words and actions on race would take on the very element of moral indignation that Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry had pleaded for. He already knew that bigotry wasn’t confined to the South, but he now acknowledged for the first time that not just America’s laws but its soul needed redemption. Eventually he would emerge as the only white politician who could talk to Black Muslims and to black mothers. Looking back, Clark conceded he had underestimated the attorney general. “Our conclusion that we had made no dent at all,” the psychologist said, “was wrong.”
—
BOBBY’S FIRST PUBLIC signal of where he stood on civil rights had come in his first formal speech as attorney general, back in May 1961, which was carefully staged to show that justice for Negroes mattered to him and his brother. What better way to make that point than by giving a major address on race in Athens, Georgia, on a campus that just four months before had been racked by riots after a federal judge compelled it to take its first Negro students? The most iconic figure then in the Peach State and surrounding ones was Jim Crow, a song-and-dance caricature played by a white minstrel in blackface whose name had become shorthand for the amalgam of statutes and customs mandating the segregation of the races everywhere from libraries, beauty parlors, and baseball diamonds to public toilets, parks, and bubblers. Even after fighting for their country in two world wars, black men had to endure the indignity of whites addressing them as “Uncle.” Even after they were dead, Negroes couldn’t reside in the same burial ground as Caucasians. Any marriage between a black and white was automatically void, and interracial sex was forbidden. The U.S. government was slowly striking down such barriers, starting in the armed forces and public schools, but white southerners were even slower to yield and quick to harbor grudges against northern officials they thought were pushy and preachy.
The night before the attorney general arrived in Athens, protesters daubed YANKEE. GO HOME. in white paint on downtown sidewalks. Bobby wasn’t sure what to expect when he walked into the auditorium at the University of Georgia packed with sixteen hundred law students, faculty, and alumni. Noticeably absent were the governor and other public officials. “You may ask, will we enforce the Civil Rights statutes?” he told his anxious listeners. “The answer is: Yes, we will.” But he also promised that “we will not threaten, we will try to help.” Each word had been meticulously culled from seven different drafts offered up by a team of advisers, seeking the precise balance between tough and evenhanded. He feared the worst of reactions—and got the best. “Never before, in all its travail of by-gone years, has the South heard so honest and understandable a speech from any cabinet member,” observed Ralph McGill, the anti-segregationist publisher of The Atlanta Constitution. Jackie Robinson, never a fan of the Kennedys, called it “most encouraging.” Bobby’s audience seemed to agree, standing and clapping for a full thirty seconds. That response, according to one student reporter, “was as loud and as long as they gave the football team for winning the [Georgia] Tech game last fall.”
A closer listen to the talk, however, revealed that backbone and candor were not the only Kennedy civil rights credos foreshadowed that day. “We are trying to achieve amicable, voluntary solutions without going to court,” Bobby told his audience. In those early years the attorney general tended to move cautiously on controversial issues such as race. He reinforced that inclination by surrounding himself with gentlemen lawyers at Justice who, like their boss, favored incremental change over upheaval. Bobby remained a man of politics as well as his brother’s protector. He had witnessed President Eisenhower’s wrenching decision to send a thousand federal soldiers and ten thousand Arkansas National Guardsmen to enforce the integration of Little Rock’s schools, and he said, on that humid morning in Georgia, “we just can’t afford another Little Rock.” He knew, too, how essential the
South had been to Jack’s narrow election. “There are a lot of Kennedys in Georgia. But as far as I can tell, I have no relatives here and no direct ties to Georgia, except one,” he said. “This state gave my brother the biggest percentage majority of any state in the union and in this last election that was even better than kinfolk.” And, in words he hoped would help sustain that political bond between the president from Massachusetts and the Georgia electorate, he vowed that “the problem between the white and colored people is a problem for all sections of the United States.”
A comparable push-pull was evident in every civil rights decision Bobby made during his first two years in office, starting with voting rights. Securing the vote for black Americans was priority one because he was convinced that political rights could be a gateway to all the others, from housing to jobs and education. Elect a few Negro congressmen from the South, along with state legislators and county commissioners, he argued, and watch how fast things get better. That might have worked if the Justice Department had been armed with a voting rights law with punch like the one that would pass in 1965. But fighting for a bill like that early in JFK’s first term would mean taking on Congress’s powerful Southern bloc, whose Senate members chaired the Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Finance committees. In the House the obstructionists had all they needed in Virginian Howard W. Smith, who, as chairman of the Rules Committee, could bury any bill he opposed. Going up against such clout likely would require sacrificing other critical pieces of the administration’s congressional agenda, and civil rights wasn’t worth the risk to Bobby or Jack. Not yet.
