by Larry Tye
Those actions came just in time to prevent calamity. As bad as the bus beatings had been, the state capital now looked as if it could become the scene of a massacre. Martin Luther King, Jr., who six years before had inaugurated the modern civil rights movement by leading a boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus lines, had returned and rallied fifteen hundred supporters at the redbrick First Baptist Church. Angry whites gathered in a park across the street, howling rebel chants and, to show they meant business, setting fire to a car as they advanced on the church with bottles, rocks, and Molotov cocktails. Byron White, Bobby’s deputy attorney general and man on the scene, dispatched his marshals in a surreal caravan of cars, postal delivery vehicles, and a prison truck. The marshals wore business suits (another bid by Bobby and his brother to distinguish them from the paratroopers who were called up in Little Rock), but their armbands, nightsticks, sidearms, and tear gas grenades clearly revealed their purpose. They temporarily fended off the demonstrators, but as the tear gas ran out and their cordon seemed about to be breached, Governor Patterson finally declared martial law and sent in the Alabama National Guard.
Back at the Justice Department, Bobby fielded frantic phone calls and eased the stress by tossing a football with some of his very anxious aides. He sensed that this was the end of his honeymoon, and of his innocence, and he knew that the precedent of federal intervention in Montgomery would set the pattern for everything in this conflict that came after. “It’s a bad situation,” he murmured. “Trouble could spread all over the South.” A month before, he and a handful of advisers had sat down with King for an off-the-record get-acquainted lunch in a private dining room at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, with waiters barred so word wouldn’t leak to the press and Bobby assuring Martin he could call “any hour of the day or night” if there was trouble. Now the two were on the phone, and Kennedy was losing patience as he tried to reassure an understandably nervous King. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals. Patterson’s National Guard won’t protect us,” King said. Bobby: “Now, Reverend, don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals you’d be as dead as Kelsey’s nuts*4 right now!” Minutes later, Patterson called from Alabama to berate the attorney general and insist the melee was Bobby’s fault. Holding the phone away from his ear so others could hear the governor’s tirade, Bobby finally broke in: “Now, John, you can say that on television. You can tell that to the people of Alabama, John, but don’t tell me that.” When Patterson complained that sending in the marshals was “destroying us politically,” Kennedy claimed the high ground: “John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically.”
Yet Bobby never entirely forgot about politics during the crisis. He placed federal troops on standby but did everything in his power to avoid dispatching them to a situation where their numbers and training would have been welcome relief to his ragtag army of law enforcement officers. He wrote to all of Alabama’s congressmen and senators, promising to deploy the marshals only as “a last resort” and not for “a minute longer than is necessary” and deceiving them with the assurance that he’d never so much as considered inserting federal troops. He repeatedly urged the Freedom Riders to “cool down,” saying they had already made their point. (James Farmer’s response: “We have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we will be in a deep freeze. The Freedom Ride will go on.”) And in more than thirty calls back and forth with Senator Eastland, Bobby brokered a deal whereby the powerful Mississippi lawmaker would guarantee the riders’ safety on the next leg of their journey, from Montgomery to Jackson; in return, the federal government wouldn’t raise any objections—under either the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment or the undisputed rights the Supreme Court had guaranteed interstate travelers—when the police arrested the protesters for violating a Mississippi law that made a crime of “refusing to disperse and move on when ordered to do so by any law enforcement official.” Days after the Jackson arrests, Bobby took to the airwaves to try to counter the news on America’s racial unrest now splashed across front pages from Nairobi and New Delhi to London and Moscow. While the beatings of Freedom Riders are “a matter that disturbs us tremendously,” he said on a Voice of America broadcast beamed in thirty-seven languages to more than sixty countries, the white mobs are “just a small minority group” that “doesn’t represent the vast majority of the people in the South….and it certainly doesn’t represent the feelings of the United States Government or the American people.”
The Freedom Rides were a testing moment for Bobby. He and Jack “wanted to have a record of having some accomplishment in the segregation field…this was an opportunity to build a record,” argues Patterson, adding that half a century later the name Bobby Kennedy remains a cuss word in his home and many more across Alabama. Patterson says he and other savvy politicians in the South knew they were on the losing side of the race debate but wanted time to help voters adjust. “When he was dealing with me…he wasn’t dealing with an Orval Faubus,” Patterson boasts, referring to the Arkansas governor whose resistance touched off the crisis in Little Rock. “He could have dealt with me reasonably.” Bobby’s failure to do that, the ninety-year-old ex-governor adds, meant not just that Patterson would never again win elected office but that Alabama politics would mutate from Yellow Dog Democrat to staunchly Republican. Booker, the black journalist, was equally disillusioned yet for precisely the opposite reason: that Bobby was too cautious and accommodating to the reactionary Southern whites. “The Freedom Rides and the ensuing months erased the aura of Kennedy infallibility as far as blacks were concerned,” Booker maintained. “The vastly popular attorney general, for all the power of both his family and the department he headed, was now seen as just a human being—a white man caught in a web of racial passion and prejudice.”
Bobby angered both sides by walking a middle line, failing to see that the combatants were not morally equivalent and that half-measures were not enough. He proved in Alabama that he was prepared to act against violence, but not against the degrading segregation that spawned it, not even when the Supreme Court was on his side and activists were taking the lead. He took off the table the only leverage he had with Alabama officials when he vowed not to deploy federal troops, and he failed to see how ill-suited the well-meaning marshals were for riot control duty. The night the Freedom Riders reached Jackson safely, Bobby was in his Justice Department office, barefoot and wearing the shorts and dressing gown he’d had on when he was summoned from home. He offered a drink to the pair of sleepy aides there with him, pouring himself an Old Grand-Dad over ice and reflecting on his newfound appreciation that race really was the story of America. “These situations are something we’re going to have to live with,” he told his companions. “This is going on and on.”
The Freedom Rides did not go on and on, thanks largely to a behind-the-scenes move suggested earlier by King and initiated by Bobby just nine days after the marshals had marched into Montgomery. He asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to order an end to segregation in interstate bus terminals. While the famously slow-moving commission was independent of the White House, nudging bureaucracies was Bobby’s specialty, especially when he understood that it could save lives as well as soothe feelings. Less than four months later, the ICC agreed. Although some cities were slow to comply, Jim Crow all but vanished in bus stations, and shortly afterward in airports and train stations. Signs proclaiming WHITES ONLY or COLORED sections became collectors’ items. The only question was why it took the attorney general so long. The answer activists came away with was not one Bobby intended: that the way to pressure the Kennedys to act was to stage street-level protests, fill Southern jails, and shed their own blood the way the Freedom Riders had.
Mississippi had looked like friendly territory to Bobby as he did battle in Alabama in the spring of 1961. “The fact that there was no violence in Jackson, M
ississippi, shows that local authorities can keep order when they accept their responsibilities,” he said then. Sixteen months later he would see the Magnolia State for what it was: the most stubbornly segregated of the fifty states. And he came to regard Ross Barnett, its frosty-eyed governor who had seemed so reasonable next to Alabama’s John Patterson, as the most brazenly racist politician in Mississippi and “genuinely loony.” Entrenched southerners who resisted integrating their bus terminals held their all-white schools even more sacred. That is why every public school district in Mississippi remained segregated eight years after the Supreme Court declared the practice illegal. No school was closer to the heart of Mississippians than the hundred-fourteen-year-old, whites-only state university in Oxford fondly known as Ole Miss. That is why twenty-nine-year-old James Meredith, the grandson of slaves and a proud native of Mississippi, spent eleven months fighting in the courts until the highest in the land said he could enroll there in the fall of 1962.
Bobby was determined that it happen, too, and hoped to quietly work out an arrangement with Governor Barnett. He tried, in twenty-two separate phone conversations over a two-week period that tested his sanity as well as his endurance. Each call only strengthened the sixty-four-year-old Barnett’s conviction that he could talk his way around the thirty-six-year-old attorney general. Sometimes the exchange was over esoteric issues of federalism and how far a state could go in challenging federal authority:
Kennedy: Governor, you are a part of the United States.
Barnett: We have been a part of the United States but I don’t know whether we are or not.
Kennedy: Are you getting out of the Union?
Barnett: It looks like we’re being kicked around—like we don’t belong to it. General, this thing is serious.
Kennedy: It’s serious here.
Barnett: Must it be over one little boy—backed by a Communist front—backed by the NAACP, which is a Communist front?
Kennedy: I don’t think it is—
Barnett: We know it is down here.
Two days later the conversation turned to how the attorney general and governor could choreograph events to get Meredith registered without Barnett’s looking as if he was backing down:
Kennedy: I will have the head marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters. And then as I understand it [Meredith] will go through and get in and you will make sure that law and order is preserved…
Barnett: Oh, yes.
Kennedy: And then I think you will see that’s accomplished?
Barnett:…General, I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here and if one pulls his gun and we all turn it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?
Kennedy: I hate to have them all draw their guns as I think it could create harsh feelings. Isn’t it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?
Barnett: They must all draw their guns. Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside.
As deals were made and broken, and plans were executed then canceled at the last minute, Bobby played the one card he had left: threatening to have the president reveal, on national television, the private negotiations to bring Meredith to Ole Miss. Barnett was nearly speechless. “I don’t want the President saying I broke my word,” he told the attorney general. “That wouldn’t do at all….We will cooperate with you.” Once they pieced together a new agreement, the governor asked Bobby whether it was okay “if I raise cain about it.” Bobby: “I don’t mind that; just say law and order will be maintained.” That evening Barnett released a statement vowing, “I will never yield a single inch in my determination to win the fight we are engaged in. I call upon every Mississippian to keep his faith and his courage. We will never surrender.” Meredith, who knew something about fighting from his nine years in the Air Force, said he “considered such maneuvers as we were going through to be an utter waste of human manpower and intelligence. At the same time I realized their absolute necessity in the process of changing social patterns.”
The folly underlying all that back-and-forth was the notion that Barnett could control the crowds he was whipping into defiance. Or that he would even try. Two dozen U.S. marshals quietly moved Meredith into an Ole Miss dormitory on September 30, a sleepy Sunday, one day before angry demonstrators expected him to enroll. The main force of five hundred white-helmeted marshals, with tear gas canisters sticking out of their orange vests, ringed the stately redbrick Lyceum building. That was where Meredith would register and where, the marshals hoped, protesters would assume he was now. It worked. Throughout the afternoon the mob in front of the Lyceum got bigger and grew uglier. Student demonstrators were joined by agitators from as far away as Texas and Georgia, some of whom wore Confederate army uniforms. Many chanted slogans like “2-4-1-3, we hate Ken-ne-dy!” and, scarier, “Just wait’ll dark.” Most had armed themselves with stones, iron bars, jagged slices of concrete from smashed campus benches, Coca-Cola bottles converted into gasoline bombs, pistols, rifles, or shotguns. Later they added to their arsenal the campus fire truck and a bulldozer. The marshals had orders to fire their tear gas, not their riot guns. The eggs hit them first, then rocks and bullets. They were outmanned from the start, with most of Barnett’s highway patrolmen clearing out early or never showing up. The only reinforcements were a sixty-man troop of federalized National Guardsmen commanded by Captain Murry C. Falkner,*5 whose recently deceased uncle William Faulkner had written so eloquently about Gothic horrors like the one playing out now in his hometown. The informal commander of the racist army was former major general Edwin Walker, who had led the paratroopers who squashed the anti-integration insurrection in Little Rock. This time Walker himself would be charged with insurrection.
Back in Washington, Bobby monitored the action from the White House Cabinet Room via his aide Nicholas Katzenbach, who had called collect from a pay phone at the Lyceum and never hung up.*6 Bobby knew that riots were inevitable in Mississippi, unlike in Alabama, and that federal troops would likely be required. But with midterm elections barely five weeks away, he and Jack clung to the hope that Governor Barnett would keep his promises; if he did, they could avoid the need for a federal invasion that would spell disaster at the polls for his fellow Southern Democrats. Throughout the evening, the Kennedys wavered. The president tried to buy time by pushing his speech to the nation back from 7:30 P.M. to 10:00 P.M., but that only assured that much of America would be asleep while Ole Miss was already on fire. Bobby assumed his familiar role as long-distance field commander, and he used his playfulness to boost the morale of his beleaguered and blood-splattered men on campus. “It’s getting like the Alamo,” press aide Ed Guthman reported. Bobby: “Well, you know what happened to those guys, don’t you?” Yet each phone conversation made it clearer that it really was like the Battle of the Alamo. First a French newspaperman was killed by an execution-style shot in the back, then a jukebox repairman, a mere bystander, took a deadly bullet to his forehead. The marshals came under increasingly heavy fire and repeatedly sought permission to fire back, but the Kennedy brothers said no, not unless Meredith’s life was imperiled. They worried that unleashing the marshals, who had modest arms and minimal training, would turn a melee into a disaster. “We could just visualize,” Bobby said, “a lot of marshals being killed, or James Meredith being strung up.” As the endless evening dragged on, a total of 166 marshals and 40 guardsmen were injured, with one shot in the throat and Captain Falkner suffering two broken bones from a flying brick. Now was the time, Katzenbach told his boss, to call in the Army.
It was a few minutes’ drive from the Oxford airport where the troops were supposed to be to the campus where they were needed, but after they heard JFK’s reassuring message on television the soldiers had returned to their barracks, eighty miles away in Memphis. Then they had
to wait for rifles and ammunition. The secretary of the Army had promised to have his men at Ole Miss within two hours, and he repeatedly assured the president and attorney general that they were on their way when they weren’t. It would be a full five hours before twenty-five thousand soldiers rolled onto campus, where they were greeted by rocks and firebombs. “The planning wasn’t that bad, but the execution was disastrous,” Bobby would say. “The idea that we got through the evening without the marshals being killed and without Meredith being killed was a miracle.”
Miracle or not, history would portray the battle of Ole Miss as the federal government standing up not just for the rule of law and against mob violence, but for racial justice. It was a kinder verdict than the Kennedys deserved. Rather than learning from his mistakes during the Freedom Rides of the previous year, Bobby compounded them in Mississippi. He continued to misread the lesson of Little Rock. It wasn’t to resist using federal troops, but to recognize early when they’d be needed and send them in numbers overwhelming enough to quell the violence. Eisenhower, the ex-general, understood that and had avoided the toll of deaths and injuries in Little Rock that made Oxford into an object lesson in how not to execute a federal intervention.*7 Bobby also let himself be played by Governor Barnett in Mississippi even more than he had been by Governor Patterson in Alabama. The attorney general’s vacillation on how to register Meredith was read by the governor and most Mississippians as weakness. His threats notwithstanding, Bobby had let Barnett get away with private barter while at the same time remaining publicly defiant. Worst of all, Bobby’s actions at Ole Miss suggested that he still considered racial injustice another in a string of crises he would confront only when forced to. Although President Kennedy deserved much of the blame for the administration’s missteps and indecision in Oxford, Bobby, true to form, shouldered full responsibility for the mess. “It was a nervous time for the president,” Bobby explained, “because he was torn then between, perhaps, an attorney general who had botched things up, and the fact the attorney general was his brother.” The bloody battle at Ole Miss, he said in its wake, was “the worst night I ever spent.”
