While President Kennedy sought peace in the world, the Reverend Martin Luther King sought freedom at home. During the spring of 1963, the civil rights leader staged a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. He was continuing his politics of moral witness, seeking to confront evil segregation with the olive branch of nonviolence. The television cameramen and newspaper photographers were often the unwitting carriers of King’s messages, and when they capped their cameras, his voice was not heard. It was not heard beyond Birmingham until May 2, when King sent one thousand children marching out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to confront segregation by their presence in the restaurants and lunch counters where they were not allowed.
Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor sent out the bearers of his message too—dogs and fire hoses. The animals bared their teeth, and the sheer force of the water drove the protesters back, seemingly washed away into the streaming gutters. And while this one-sided confrontation went on, the television cameras rolled and the cameras clicked. Within a day the nation and much of the world knew Bull Connor’s name and bore witness to his deeds. With those images blanketing the world, Birmingham, Alabama, became synonymous with oppression. Hoping to restore Birmingham’s proud image, the city leaders agreed to begin desegregating the city’s restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places. The agreement was punctuated not by handshakes but by dynamite exploding both at the motel where King was staying and outside his brother’s home. The Reverend King preached nonviolence, but in a dozen cities across America there were confrontations that seemed to threaten the very fabric of civil society.
Bobby knew no more what to make of the rising black militancy than did most of his fellow white citizens. He asked the writer James Baldwin to set up a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the situation. The Kennedy attitude was that when you had a problem, you found the most prominent experts, brought them together, heard their opinions, and took the best of their ideas. Then after solving that dilemma, you went on to the next problem. There seemed to be no better expert on race in America than Baldwin, who in November 1962 had written a passionately apocalyptic essay in The New Yorker (published the following year as The Fire Next Time). In the controversial work, Baldwin condemned Bobby for his “assurance that a Negro can become president in forty years” as a prime example of the white American attitude that “they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”
Baldwin assembled a group of what he called “fairly rowdy, independent, tough-minded men and women” and brought them to Bobby’s apartment at the UN Plaza in New York City. The attorney general began by detailing what the administration was doing for blacks, and those in the room replied by saying that it should do more. This was all part of the civilized nomenclature of traditional American politics. Then a young man spoke out. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” he told Bobby. “Because I’m close to the moment when I’m going to pick up a gun.”
The speaker, Jerome Smith, bore the scars of the beatings he had received when as a Freedom Rider he attempted to enter the white bus depot in McComb, Mississippi, and had spent time in a Mississippi prison. By anybody’s account, he had paid more dues than these artistes and scholars who filled Bobby’s living room, and he intended to be heard.
“When I pull the trigger,” he stammered in rage, “kiss it good-bye.”
For all Smith’s profound feelings, if there were indeed a “fire next time,” it would burn the black minority more than it would the whites who dominated the country and ran the machinery of oppression with a firm hand. In Baldwin’s own essay he had accused white liberals of being full of “incredible, abysmal and really cowardly obtuseness.” In 1963 many liberals enjoyed being humiliated for their sins and accepted whatever penance was meted out as their due, but even they had only so much skin to be flayed. Despite whatever hidden racism may have darkened their souls, they were the natural allies of a revolution of equality. And it was perhaps not wise to alienate them. Bobby was not a liberal, and he listened to Smith’s nearly incomprehensible, raging sermon while feeling no compulsive need to flagellate himself.
Baldwin was the impresario of this drama. He sought in others an authenticity he perhaps did not have in himself. He had grown up gay in New York City, a morbidly sensitive young man. He was feted and dined at the well-set tables of highbrow liberalism, his presence an immunization against charges of racism. Like a prosecutor who knew how his witness would answer, Baldwin asked the young activist whether he would fight for his country. “Never! Never!” shouted Smith.
“How can you say that?” Bobby asked. This relationship between blacks and whites was a deeply troubled marriage in which the whites bore the brunt of the blame. But the largely blameless partner did not appear to realize that there were nonetheless certain things that could not be said, or threatened, without changing the relationship forever.
Smith was full of the pain of what he had seen and felt, but the other blacks in the room perhaps understood the world as he did not. They could have stepped forward and said that they felt the terrible injustice, but this was their country too and they would fight for it. Smith, however, held the moral trump card, and they sat and listened like a congregation taking in the weekly sermon. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General,” the playwright Lorraine Hansberry lectured Bobby, “but the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.”
Harry Belafonte listened to this rage with mounting disquiet. He cared as much about the civil rights of his people as anyone in the room, and in the years to come, no one there that evening would walk any further than he in searching for social justice. The singer knew that it would be a terrible thing to make an enemy of the second most powerful man in America. In his melodiously soothing voice, he began to tell the group about the hours he had spent at Hickory Hill talking to the attorney general about racial issues. Clarence Jones, the Reverend King’s attorney, brought up some of the ideas that King envisioned, such as the president making a Roosevelt-like fireside chat about civil rights and issuing a twentieth-century emancipation proclamation. These were good ideas, but the room was so fogged with anger and misunderstanding that the two groups could hardly see each other. A few minutes before, Bobby might well have seriously entertained such ideas. Now he dismissed them with disdainful laughter.
Hansberry walked out of the gathering with arrogant indifference, believing that in doing so she had accomplished something. And that was the end of an evening that the distinguished educator Kenneth Clark called “the most dramatic experience I have ever had.”
Bobby sat in the Oval Office talking with the president and other advisers about the civil rights situation. He had returned from New York City stunned by the level of vitriol. Baldwin betrayed the whole nature of the private discussion by telling the New York Times about the evening, saying that the attorney general had been “insensitive and unresponsive.” Privately, Bobby slammed Baldwin as a representative not of blacks but only of what Bobby considered Baldwin’s own depraved homosexual orientation. Yet he was not about to burn his brother’s presidency as well as his own political aspirations in the civil rights fire. He told his aides that if he had grown up black, he would have felt precisely like the blacks who had come to his New York apartment. That was probably a deeper insight into his own psyche than even he realized. If his skin had been Baldwin’s color, he probably would have fought against the evil that his people suffered and confronted racism in its very lair.
The president heard the footsteps in the night, and he knew that he could avoid a direct confrontation with the civil rights issue no longer. It was the Kennedys’ task to move the racial dialogue forward with speed and purpose, channeling that anger into engines of change.
“You know a black college graduate who applies for federal employment in the South can hope for nothing better than a job carrying mail,” Bobby said, suddenly seeing inequality wher
e he had not seen it before.
“Pretty good job for a Negro in the South, though, letter carrier,” Kennedy said, quieting the room. Part of the problem was that the president’s sentiments were more like those of most white Americans than Bobby’s were. “I’d like to bet he had never met a black person in his life,” his friend Ben Bradlee noted. He was wrong about that—as a young man at Harvard, Kennedy had a black valet.
The president felt a stronger affinity with some of the southern politicians like Governor Patterson of Alabama than he did with many of the black activists. “My impression of President Kennedy was that he wanted to do everything he could for the blacks, for the minorities,” reflected former Governor Patterson. “He wanted to integrate them fully into our society. At the same time he recognized the political ramifications of that, and the necessity in some areas for not going too fast…. Now Robert just wanted to do it overnight.”
Kennedy was uncomfortable with a passionate moral issue that could lead men to violence or the rhetoric of despair. He was living in a segregated southern city, the evil of which had largely been ignored by both political parties. For the most part, he knew blacks as deferential people who served drinks, made beds, and drove chauffeured cars. He was head of a political party that risked being torn in two between the conservative southerners and the more liberal northerners.
Kennedy had in fact gone far in trying to open important government positions to blacks and using the federal law to push ahead the integration of public facilities in the South. But to blacks, it was only a first step. The president was an astute politician who looked out across the expanses of America and saw that there was not a strong majority ready to push civil rights, not in the South and probably not in the North either. If he moved too slowly, however, he took the risk that frustrated black Americans would start setting fires in the night. If he moved too fast, he might have to put out brushfires of violence across America.
In June, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a pint-sized demagogue, said that he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent blacks from attending the University of Alabama. Wallace had vowed when he lost his first race that he would “never be out-niggered again,” and all those who heard him in those torpid days in Tuscaloosa would say that he had kept his pledge. Wallace, however, no more wanted federal troops and bloodshed than did the Kennedys. After his endless posturing in front of the cameras, he followed the order to step aside once federal officials and the federalized Alabama National Guardsmen arrived. Despite the ugliness of the scene, the covenant of government had not been broken, and Wallace bowed to the law of the land, even if he did so standing on a chalk line positioned for filming him from the best camera angle.
That evening the president decided that he had to give a television address to the nation boldly announcing his plans to put forth his civil rights bill. The political operatives in the White House opposed the legislation, but just as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two Kennedy brothers stood together. O’Brien and O’Donnell may not have been numb to the pain of black Americans, but they knew that the figures did not add up, not in Congress, not in the Democratic Party, and not in the life of an American president who would soon be seeking reelection. Great leadership is often not good politics, however, and Kennedy decided to go ahead.
Kennedy began to prepare for this historic address only an hour before the 8:00 P.M.. televised speech. Sorensen hurried into the Cabinet Room where the president sat with Bobby and Burke Marshall. The president quickly sketched his ideas, and Sorensen left to try to piece together a worthy speech in a few minutes. As Sorensen worked elsewhere, Kennedy worried that he would have to give the address extemporaneously. While he was jotting down a bunch of notes on what Bobby remembered as “the back of an envelope or something,” Sorensen returned with the draft of a speech. Once again Sorensen had managed to channel himself into the president’s psyche, and the speech had all the resonance and depth that would have taken anyone else hours to try to match. As good as it was, Bobby felt that Kennedy should end with a few unscripted remarks—and so he did.
Kennedy was not comfortable with the moralizing of priests and preachers, but there was a difference between moralizing and morality, and he grasped that this was his nation’s great moral issue. A leader did not temporize and cut his words and meaning when he had prepared an important address in just one hour. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he told Americans. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He saw the urgency of this matter, and the tragic direction in which it might be heading. “Redress is sought in the streets,” he said, “in demonstrations, parades and protests which create tension and threaten violence and threaten lives.”
The Freedom Riders had irked him with their moral absolutism and their refusal to compromise, and the civil rights activists worried him still. He feared where their uncompromising passions were leading America. He believed that “a great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change peaceful and constructive for all…. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”
This president was above all a realist. Morality and the political imperative were one and the same, and he now proposed to the nation a civil rights bill that would help ensure that all Americans could go to hotels and restaurants and theaters and sit where they pleased, and that children could attend the schools that best served them, not facilities relegated to their race. He concluded in his own ad-libbed words, linked seamlessly to Sorensen’s eloquent phrases, “We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color-blind.”
The president had listened to Bobby and learned from him, assuming if not his brother’s passion then at least his brother’s insight into the black struggle. He had put his toe gingerly into this moral caldron, and he wondered aloud afterward whether he should have pulled it out immediately. “Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up?” he asked Bobby, knowing what his answer would be. “Look at the trouble it’s got us in.” Bobby recalled that Kennedy feared that “this was going to be his political swan song.”
When Kennedy learned that in August King was planning to bring hundreds of thousands of blacks to Washington for the largest civil rights event in the country’s history, he was appalled. He could envision the event turning into a riot in the streets of the capital, or an unseemly gathering of the unkempt and unwashed. “They’re going to come on down here and shit all over the monument,” Alan Raywid, a Justice Department official, recalls the president saying.
Both Kennedys were worried not only about the dangers of a mass march on Washington but about the influence of Communists on King, particularly Stanley Levison, the minister’s closest white associate and friend. Levison was a left-wing New York attorney, part of the diminishing circle of the American Left in the fifties. He unquestionably brushed shoulders with party members at rallies and meetings and raised money for left-wing causes. As a fellow traveler of the party, he had become, in the words of King’s biographer Taylor Branch, “a financial pillar of the Communist Party during the height of its persecution.”
There were a disproportionate number of Communists in the civil rights movement, as there were in almost all struggles for social justice. They may have attempted to push the agenda toward the current Communist line, but they were often brave men and women who spilled their blood and gave endless energy to the cause. Hoover had convinced the Kennedys that Levison was a Communist agent who was trying to turn King into a Soviet puppet and the civil rights movement into what would truly be the largest subversive movement in American history.
Levison may have been dangerously myopic when he looked at the realities of the Soviet Union. Hoover, however, made a case that Levison was a master spy when all the FBI director had against him was mindless innuen
do. The FBI director had no evidence that the attorney was involved with espionage or that he had ever been a Communist Party member. Hoover and his colleagues probably sincerely believed that Levison was a Communist spy and thought they were acting out of only the most patriotic of motives when they warned the president. In the eyes of the Kennedys, Levison was a red Svengali leading the dangerously naive King down the pathway toward Marxist revolution.
After meeting with civil rights leaders on June 22, Kennedy led King out into the Rose Garden for a private talk. “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” the president said. King was not sure whether the president was worrying about being bugged himself or meant that the civil rights leader’s movements were being monitored even in the White House. King did not say, as another man might have, that this was supposed to be an America where a man walked free and talked free, without fear of secret monitors.
“You’ve read about Profumo in the papers?” Kennedy asked. It was a curious analogy for Kennedy to make, telling King that if he was as loyal to Levison as Prime Minister Macmillan was to his defense minister, it was not a government that would be brought down but a noble cause. The president went on to tell King that Levison and another of his aides were Communists, and in a voice scarcely a whisper said that King would have to “get rid of” them.
King and his associates sought some way to placate Kennedy while continuing to do their work as they felt they must do it. King had faith in Levison’s judgment, both as a friend and an adviser; he would not walk away from him. Clarence Jones, King’s attorney, decided that to avoid having their conversations overheard on a wiretap; Levison would have to communicate with King through an intermediary. That rankled the attorney general, and on July 16, 1963, he told the FBI’s Courtney Evans that he wanted new wiretaps on both King and Jones.
The Kennedy Men Page 99
