A Thousand Days
Page 116
In the afternoon they gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. “Even though we still face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., the last of the speakers, “I still have a dream. . . . I have a dream that on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom. . . . I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” The crowd, joining hands, rocking back and forth, cried, almost ecstatically, “Dream some more.” Then in the dusk the vast assemblage quietly dispersed. Snatches of the poignant old Baptist hymn which the movement had made its own hung in the air:
We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome, some day.
Oh deep in my heart I do believe,
We shall overcome some day.
6. THE REVOLUTION
The President congratulated the leaders at the White House in the evening. Publicly he said, “This nation can properly be proud.” But the March, though so splendid an affirmation, worked no miracles on the Hill.
Liberal Democrats in the House, backed by the civil rights leadership, continued to think the administration bill inadequate; for its part, the administration feared a stronger bill would face trouble in the House Rules Committee and later in the Senate. Then the civil rights forces, arguing that the House had to send the Senate the strongest possible bill to give the Senate leaders room for maneuver in face of a filibuster, attracted the support of southerners, who felt that, the stronger the bill was, the less the chance of passage. After long weeks of discussion and infighting, the President called in the House leaders in late October and, with the help of Charles Halleck, the Republican leader, personally worked out a compromise—FEPC was retained with enforcement in the courts; the Attorney General, while not given all the authority the civil rights people had proposed, received power to enter any civil rights case in federal courts and to initiate suits to desegregate public facilities; and the bill was strengthened in other ways. Robert Kennedy called the result a “better bill than the administration’s.” The Judiciary Committee approved it on October 29 and reported it to the House on November 20. The best civil rights bill in American history thus passed the first obstacles on its road to enactment. The House vote in January 1964 was the fulfillment of the agreement the Democratic and Republican leaders had made with Kennedy in the October White House meetings.
Yet, even when enacted, the new program would meet only part of the causes of the growing unrest. Its provisions were designed for the Negroes of the South. To the Negroes of the North the rights it offered were those they nominally possessed already. And to the heart of the now boiling northern unrest—to the frustrations in the black ghettos of the cities—it offered nothing.
Negroes had been moving north in increasing numbers since the First World War. By 1963 probably more than half lived outside the old Confederacy. They had drifted mostly into the great northern cities in search of jobs, hopes, excitement, oblivion. The 1960 census showed Washington more than half Negro, Baltimore and St. Louis a third, Philadelphia and Chicago a quarter, with the proportion steadily growing as the last wave of white immigrants, moving out to the suburbs, left the newcomers the decaying tenements, the filth and rats of the central city.
For the Negro the North was different from the South—more freedom but less purpose. The northern ghettos lacked the institutions which had to some degree stabilized life in the South. Ironically the very rigidity of the Jim Crow system had given a certain awful definition to the life of the southern Negro. “The northern Negro,” James Baldwin wrote, “is much more demoralized than the southern Negro is, because, there being no signs [“white” and “colored”], you have to play it by ear entirely. . . . Negroes do, in the north, go mad for just that reason.” Moreover, there was still, Baldwin continued, “the Negro family in the south, and there is no Negro family, effectively speaking, in the north.” All this was relative; the southern whites in slavery days had done their best to destroy the Negro family, and it was never strong in cities anywhere; but disintegration was taking place much faster in the North. Nearly one-fourth of all Negro children born in the sixties were illegitimate; in Harlem, two-fifths.
The South, moreover, still had the Negro church with its quietist traditions and devout following; it still had preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr. But in the ghettos the old-time religion was losing its potency, at least among the young, or else becoming an instrument for racists or racketeers. And in the South the mass action of 1963—in Birmingham, Nashville, Raleigh, Greensboro, Albany—had nourished Negro self-discipline and given shape to the sense of a Negro community negotiating with a white community to secure Negro rights. But in the North the sense of a united Negro community had perished in the long distances between the Negro upper class, with its prosperous insurance men and bankers and doctors, and the apathetic, despairing mass. The well-to-do Negro could now take advantage of the guilt of white society and enter universities and professions, hotels and golf courses; he could begin to identify himself with prevailing values. But the poor Negro, hedged in by de facto segregation in the schools, watching the gap between his own and the white worker’s income and employment steadily widen, felt he was falling further and further behind and was losing his remnants of loyalty to the existing order. The angry Negro intellectuals could not hold the northern ghettos together; and the civil rights leaders had few ties to the rootless Negro urban proletariat.
The ghettos thus lacked internal structures of self-discipline and self-help; here they differed from the communities of European immigrants with their strong family ties and their networks of internal organization. They were swamps of incoherent resentment and despair, responding to prophets and demagogues, seeking identity in crime or surcease in a slug or a fix. Civil rights bills had little to say to the unemployed, undereducated, untrained Negroes wandering aimlessly down the gray streets of Harlem or Watts, to boys and girls in their teens abandoned by their fathers and adrift in a desolation of mistrust and corruption, to the hoods and junkies and winos and derelicts.
The fulfillment of the Negro revolution plainly demanded much more than the achievement of the Negroes’ legal rights. In April 1963 the unemployment rate for non-whites was 12.1 per cent, for whites, 4.8 per cent. Poverty afflicted half the non-white population, less than one-fifth of the white population. Three out of five non-white families lived in deteriorating or dilapidated buildings or without plumbing. The racial and social problems were inextricably intermingled. As A. Philip Randolph told the AFL-CIO convention in November 1963, “The Negro’s protest today is but the first rumbling of the ‘under-class’ As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the unemployed of all races take to the streets. . . . To discuss the civil rights revolution is therefore to write the agenda of labor’s unfinished revolution.” Bayard Rustin observed that the civil rights movement could not succeed “in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure.” The deeper problems of inequality were “the result of the total society’s failure to meet not only the Negro’s needs, but human needs generally.”
The President was keenly aware of the larger contexts. When civil rights leaders had reproached him in 1961 for not seeking legislation, he told them that an increased minimum wage, federal aid to education and other social and economic measures were also civil rights bills. He knew that a slow rate of economic growth made every problem of equal rights more intractable, as a faster rate would make every such problem easier of solution. In 1963 he counted on his tax cut to reduce Ne
gro unemployment; he reviewed and enlarged his educational program—vocational education, adult basic education, manpower development, youth employment—to help equip Negroes for jobs; and his concern for the plight of the Negro strengthened his campaigns against juvenile delinquency, urban decay and poverty.
The Negro leaders had never doubted that Kennedy was on their side. But they had feared he regarded the civil rights problem as only one among many problems. By the summer of 1963 he had clearly made it the major problem next to the pursuit of peace itself. Martin Luther King, Jr., later spoke of his “ability to respond to creative pressure. . . . He frankly acknowledged that he was responding to mass demands and did so because he thought it was right to do so. This is the secret of the deep affection he evoked. He was responsive, sensitive, humble before the people, and bold on their behalf.” Beside him in the affection of many Negroes stood the Attorney General. “He has done more for us personally than any other public official,” said Charles Evers, the brother of Medgar Evers. “Had it not been for him, there would have been many more murders and many more beatings than we have had in Mississippi in the last four years. Mr. Kennedy did more to help us get our rights as first-class citizens than all other U. S. Attorney Generals put together.”
Every great period of social change in American history has been set off by the demand of some excluded but aggressive group for larger participation in the national democracy: in the age of Jackson by the frontier farmer, the city worker, the small entrepreneur; in the progressive era by the bankrupt farmers of the middle border and the by-passed old upper classes of the cities; in the New Deal by labor in mass-production industries, the unemployed and the intellectuals. The uprising of the Negroes now contained the potentiality of ushering in a new era which would not only win Negroes their rights but renew the democratic commitment of the national community. It also contained the potentiality, if the anger of the Negroes exceeded the will of the government to redress their grievances and the capacity of their own leadership to retain their confidence, of rending and destroying the fabric of American society.
By 1963 the revolution was enlisting the idealism not only of the Negroes but of the universities and churches, of labor and the law. It was also attracting some who, as one put it, if they could not get their places around the table, threatened to knock its legs off. A generation ago Roosevelt had absorbed the energy and hope of the labor revolution into the New Deal. So in 1963 Kennedy moved to incorporate the Negro revolution into the democratic coalition and thereby help it serve the future of American freedom.
XXXVII
Autumn 1963
THE SUMMER OF 1963 ended in sadness. In early August Jacqueline gave birth prematurely to a five-pound boy. Young Patrick Bouvier Kennedy came into the world with respiratory troubles. After thirty-nine hours of struggle, the labor of breathing proved too much for his heart, and he died in a Boston hospital. The President’s anguish for his wife and their dead son gave August a melancholy cast. Early in September he and Jacqueline quietly observed their tenth wedding anniversary in Newport.
But in public policy the Presidency of John F. Kennedy was coming into its own. He was doing at last in the summer of 1963 what he had been reluctant to do before: putting the office of the Presidency on the line at the risk of defeat. He was staking his authority and his re-election on behalf of equal rights, the test ban, planned deficits in economic policy, doing so not without political apprehension but with absolute moral and intellectual resolve. As he had anticipated, the civil rights fight in particular was biting into his popularity. In November Gallup would report that national approval of his administration was down to 59 per cent. Most of this decline was in the South; there, if the Republicans, as he came to believe they would, nominated Barry Goldwater, Kennedy expected to carry only two or three states. Moreover, this had been the hardest of his congressional sessions. At the end of July, according to the Congressional Quarterly, 38 per cent of the administration’s proposals had not yet been acted on by either house. Civil rights and tax reduction were making very slow progress. Knives were sharpening for foreign aid. Even routine appropriation bills were held up.
Then Senate ratification of the test ban treaty in September gave his leadership a new access of strength. “There is a rhythm to personal and national and international life,” he had said in the winter, “and it flows and ebbs.” It had ebbed for many weeks. Now perhaps it was beginning to flow again.
1. JOURNEY TO THE WEST
On the day the Senate ratified the treaty, Kennedy left Washington for a trip to the West. It was ostensibly a non-political tour, its pretext conservation. This was a genuine, if somewhat abstract, concern, and he welcomed the chance to see the condition of the national estate at first hand. But the trip had other motives too. Of the eleven states on his itinerary, he had lost eight in 1960; with the South turning against him, he needed new sources of support. Furthermore, ten had senatorial contests in 1964, and in several the John Birch Society was active. Above all, he considered Washington overexcited in its response to public issues; impressions lasted longer “out there”; and the trip offered him a chance to reestablish contact and purpose with the people.
He conscientiously pursued the conservation theme for several speeches. Then late on the second day, at Billings, Montana, he struck, almost by accident, a new note. Mike Mansfield was present and in his third sentence Kennedy praised the Senate leader for his part in bringing about test ban ratification. To his surprise this allusion produced strong and sustained applause. Heartened, he set forth his hope of lessening the “chance of a military collision between those two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill 300 million people in the short space of a day.” The Billings response encouraged him to make the pursuit of peace increasingly the theme of his trip. In Great Falls, Montana, he discussed the illusions of isolationism. “You must wonder when it is all going to end and when we can come back home,” he said. “Well, it isn’t going to end. . . . We have to stay at it. We must not be fatigued.” The competition with communism would dominate the rest of our lives, but we must not let it become a competition in nuclear violence. Let us, he said, show the world which society could grow faster, which could educate its children better, which could produce more cultural and intellectual stimulus, “which society, in other words, is the happier.”
Then to Hanford, Washington, and on September 26 to Salt Lake City, where he defined America’s role in the modern world. I had worked on this speech. The President, recalling that the Mormons had started as a persecuted minority, originally thought of it as a discourse on extremism; then, after seeing a draft, he decided that he wanted to concentrate on extremism in foreign policy—a masked comment, in effect, on Goldwater. Though he eventually cut out direct allusions to the ‘total victory’ thesis, the point of the speech was nonetheless unmistakable; and he delivered it in a city which, because of Ezra Taft Benson and his son as well as Mayor John Bracken Lee, Washington regarded as a stronghold of the radical right.
The President’s unusually cordial reception on the streets belied this impression. Then, before an immense crowd at the Tabernacle of the Latter Day Saints, he began his speech. “We find ourselves,” he said, “entangled with apparently unanswerable problems in unpronounceable places. We discover that our enemy in one decade is our ally in the next. We find ourselves committed to governments whose actions we cannot often approve, assisting societies with principles very different from our own.” It was little wonder that in a time of contradiction and confusion we looked back to the old days with nostalgia. But those days were gone forever; science and technology were irreversible. Nor could we remake the new world simply by our own command. “When we cannot even bring all of our own people into full citizenship without acts of violence, we can understand how much harder it is to control events beyond our borders.” Our national interest was “best served by preserving and protecting a world of diversity in which no one power or no one co
mbination of powers can threaten the security of the United States.”
The forces of diversity, he added, were “in the ascendancy today, even within the Communist empire itself. . . . The most striking thing about our world in 1963 is the extent to which the tide of history has begun to flow in the direction of freedom. To renounce the world of freedom now, to abandon those who share our commitment, and retire into lonely and not so splendid isolation, would be to give communism the one hope which, in this twilight of disappointment for them, might repair their divisions and rekindle their hope.” At the end the audience stood at their seats and cheered for many minutes.
He had hit his stride, reached the deeper concerns of his audience, and the rest of the journey was a triumphal procession. He always found journeys “out there” refreshing, but this time he returned in a state of particular exhilaration. Whatever the stalemate in Congress, he knew now that he had immense resources of affection and strength in the people. He knew too that peace, economic growth and education would be powerful themes for 1964.
Before his departure, when pressed at a news conference about a Goldwater suggestion that the test ban treaty contained secret commitments, he simply denied the assertion; asked then if he cared to comment further on “this type of attack by Senator Goldwater,” he said, “No, no. Not yet, not yet.” Now the time had come. On his return, discussing a complaint of Eisenhower’s that he was unclear where Goldwater stood on issues, Kennedy observed with evident relish that the Arizona Senator was “saying what he thinks as of the time he speaks. . . . I think he has made very clear what he is opposed to, what he is for. I have gotten the idea. I think that President Eisenhower will, as time goes on.” Thereafter the inevitable Goldwater question filled each news conference with expectant delight. So, on October 31, when Kennedy was asked to comment on a Goldwater charge that the administration was falsifying the news to perpetuate itself in office, the gleam came into his eye, and he said that Goldwater had had such “a busy week selling TVA, and giving permission to or suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons, and attacking the President of Bolivia while he was here in the United States, and involving himself in the Greek election. So I thought it really would not be fair for me this week to reply to him.” Plainly the President could not wait for 1964. “Politically the country is closely divided,” he told Sidey when queried (as a matter of form) whether he planned to run for a second term, “so it will be tough. But then everything is tough.”