“The most disgusting news I have read in a long time,” a Long Island Negro wrote Kennedy on hearing of his position. Negroes would not forget, he added.
When it came to the substance of the bill, however, Kennedy was all militancy. The acid test was Section 3, which authorized the attorney general to use injunctive power to enforce school desegregation and other civil rights, hence allowing greater use of civil sanctions instead of cumbersome criminal prosecution. The implications of Section 3 were enormous; it might become the device by which a liberal President could push school integration, as well as voting rights, throughout the South. Well aware of these possibilities, the Southerners were seething, and the White House itself had misgivings. One might expect, then, that the “moderate” Kennedy would shy away from it. But no—Kennedy not only backed Section 3 but took the floor to make his views clear.
The debate over Section 3, he told the Senate, had persuaded the nation and the watchful world, whether correctly or not, that the vote on it would be a stand for or against the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, “even though the Attorney General has recently given his assurance that it will not change in any way the deliberate pace at which this decision is to be implemented in the local courts.
“My own endorsement of that decision, and its support in the State I have the honor, in part, to represent, has been too clear to permit me to cast a vote that will be interpreted as a repudiation of it.” Kennedy then voted with liberal Democrats and Republicans in an effort to salvage this part of the bill. But a conservative Democratic-Republican coalition knocked Section 3 out of the measure.
Shorn of its strongest section, the Civil Rights Bill still looked eminently desirable to the civil-rights bloc, because of its buttressing of the all-important right of Southern Negroes to vote. But now a new road block appeared. Many moderates and some liberals were disturbed by the lack of a requirement for jury trials in criminal contempt cases involving voting rights. Other liberals, however, feared that inserting such a requirement would put the enforcement of voting rights into the hands of white Southern juries who would invariably rule in favor of white election officials. Senator Joe O’Mahoney plumped strongly for a jury-trial amendment, and picked up more support when a provision was tacked on in effect requiring that juries in such voting-right cases include Negroes.
Now Kennedy was caught in probably the severest pressure he had known in the Senate. The civil-rights bloc of labor, NAACP, and ADA leaders was dead set against the O’Mahoney amendment. Southern senators threatened to filibuster the whole bill unless the amendment went through. Southern governors wired Kennedy urgent requests to vote for the amendment; one of them added, unsubtly, “Still hearing good things about you and your future.” All factions were watching the Senator with a steely eye.
What should Kennedy do? In this dilemma he turned to several law professors who had concluded that the jury-trial amendment would probably not hurt the effectiveness of the amendment of the bill in a major way. One of these was Mark De Wolfe Howe, a noted civil libertarian and ADA leader who had urged Kennedy to take a strong stand against McCarthyism. Over the telephone, Howe advised Kennedy to support the O’Mahoney amendment. “The issue has aroused more legal fuss than it deserves,” Howe said, “and is certainly not a question which permits of too much dogmatic stubbornness.” Another leading authority, Paul Freund, of Harvard Law School, felt that the O’Mahoney amendment did not seriously weaken the bill. These arguments helped Kennedy take the position toward which he already leaned for political reasons.
As usual, he lost little time telling the Senate of his decision. The day of his telephone discussion with Howe, he declared on the floor that the major portion of the bill was still intact in that the civil-contempt power of federal judges could be used effectively in behalf of persons wishing to vote. Even in criminal-contempt cases, he went on, Southern juries, “mindful of the watching eyes of the nation,” would convict; if they did not, Congress could always strengthen the legislation in the future. Moreover, the amendment actually would broaden civil rights by inducing Southern officials to put Negroes on juries in order to have jury trials. Finally, Kennedy said candidly, as a practical political matter the Southerners might filibuster the bill to death unless they got jury trials.
In the face of scorn from civil-rights groups, Kennedy stuck to this position during the ensuing debate. A few civil-rights leaders came over to the view that the bill with the jury-trial amendment was the best that could be had, but most Senate liberals, including Humphrey, Symington, and Morse, and liberal and pro-Eisenhower Republicans, including Saltonstall and Ives, voted against the amendment. Kennedy, a few liberal Democrats like John O. Pastore, of Rhode Island, and Henry Jackson, of Washington, and the solid phalanx of Southerners gave the amendment enough votes to put it over, 51 to 42. The whole civil-rights bill—or what was left of it—passed by a heavy majority a few days later.
Had Kennedy, then, shown a profile in cowardice? His outspoken support of Section 3 and his pledge to help vote the bill out of Eastland’s embrace if necessary would indicate that the answer was no. Certainly, however, he showed a profile in caution and moderation. He walked a teetering tightrope; at the same time that he was telling liberals of the effectiveness of a bill that included the O’Mahoney provision, he was assuring worried Southerners that it was a moderate bill that would be enforced by Southern courts and Southern juries—Kennedy’s italics.
For moderate liberals like Kennedy, the issue boiled down to the practical one of how strong a bill could be gained in the existing legislative situation. He insisted that he would not surrender principle for the sake of expediency; indeed, the main question he directed at his civil-libertarian friends was whether the O’Mahoney amendment did involve a “betrayal of principle,” and he was assured by them that it did not.
Other liberals like Humphrey disagreed. They believed that more could be won from the Senate by all liberals and moderates sticking together, and if they failed to pass a bill, the issue could be taken to the country in an election. If the Southerners filibustered a bill to death, so much the worse, but at least the issue would have been dramatically sharpened. Kennedy preferred a somewhat crippled bill on the books to a lively issue for the platform. He played with compromise for the sake of moderate, immediate ends.
Kennedy has often defended the necessity for compromise in politics. He told a Harvard audience in 1956 that “compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good.” The politician, he said, resents the scholar “who can with dexterity slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion.”
Both politicians and intellectuals can be, on occasion, insufficiently sensitive to important issues of principle, he said: “Politicians have questioned the discernment with which intellectuals have reacted to the siren call of the extreme left; and intellectuals have tended to accuse politicians of not always being aware, especially here at home, of the toxic effects of freedom restrained.”
Kennedy’s civil-rights beliefs were soon tested under fire. In the fall of 1957, he flew to Jackson, Mississippi, to deliver a campaign speech. He was told on arriving that the Republican state chairman had just challenged him to declare himself on the school-desegregation issue. The time was shortly after Little Rock.
“I have no hesitancy in telling the Republican chairman the same thing I said in my own city of Boston,” Kennedy told the crowd. “That I accept the Supreme Court decision as the supreme law of the land. I know that we do not all agree on that issue, but I think most of us do agree on the necessity to uphold law and order in every part of the land.”
There was no sound from the audience. “And now I challenge the Republican chairman to tell where he stands on Eisenhower and Nixon,” Kennedy said. This time the crowd broke into cheers.
Hooverism and Housekeeping
While Joe McCarthy had been using his Governm
ent Operations Committee as a vehicle for exposing “subversives” in government, Kennedy had taken it seriously as an instrument of government reorganization. His father had served on the Hoover Commission, and since the start of his legislative career, Kennedy had shown a strong interest in the managerial and housekeeping side of government. In the House, he had supported Hoover Commission proposals and had berated the Truman administration for its “confused” and “muddling along” operation of foreign-aid programs. In the House, too, with considerable assistance from Reardon, he had made an exhaustive study of methods of selecting Annapolis and West Point cadets, and he had proposed a system for a “politics-proof Academy selection system” that won widespread notice.
Later, as chairman in the Senate of the Reorganization Subcommittee, Kennedy served as a kind of receiver general for Hoover Commission proposals. Under his leadership, the Government Operations Committee, now back under the chairmanship of Democrat John McClellan, had reported favorably on twelve reorganization measures incorporating Hoover Commission proposals, and most of these ultimately were passed by Congress. Among the Reorganization Subcommittee’s proposals were those to centralize records management and disposal of surplus property in the General Services Administration, to expedite payments of certified claims where appropriations had lapsed, and to authorize donation of surplus property for civil defense.
Herbert Hoover watched admiringly. He wrote Kennedy from Palo Alto thanking him for “the way you have been carrying the ball” for the reports of the Hoover Commission. In a letter to his friend Joseph Kennedy, Hoover called his son “my favorite Democratic Senator.”
A key Hoover Commission proposal was a drastic reorganization of budgeting, accounting, and appropriations procedures. Sponsored by thirty-two Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, the proposal would put the entire financial structure of the government on an annual accrued-expenditure basis by requiring that budgets be based upon actual costs, that agency accounts be maintained on an annual accrued basis, and that appropriations be related directly to expenditures each fiscal year.
“Thus we will no longer see,” Kennedy remarked to the Senate, “the departments and agencies rushing to obligate their unused funds as the end of the fiscal year approaches.” Senate economizer Harry Byrd estimated that the measure would eliminate or substantially reduce carry-overs of unexpended balances estimated to amount to $74 billions, over which Congress had little control once the appropriations were made.
Some proposals, even of Hoover himself, Kennedy viewed with a critical eye. Eisenhower’s illnesses had focused interest on the organization of the White House, and the former President had suggested that Congress establish the position of administrative vice-president to relieve the President of some of his managerial burdens. After three days of hearings on the proposal, Kennedy rejected the idea. Not only were there enough officials in the White House to whom work could be delegated, but he was wary of making changes affecting the presidency. “The American Presidency,” he told the Senate, “was not intended by its creators … as primarily a ceremonial or coordinating job, with its most essential responsibilities delegated to non-elected officials. The Congress, therefore, should not take the lead in diluting the President’s responsibilities in order to lessen his burdens, unless such authority is actively sought by the President.”
Most of the Hoover Commission proposals involved humdrum matters with little attraction for the public. Even Kennedy could squeeze little political sex appeal out of them. But this did not bother him. The problems, which were controversial enough to legislators and officials, challenged his cool and intellectual approach to government. Moreover, his painstaking work on the bills proved that he was not interested only in glamorous, front-page issues, but could do his homework and provide leadership on internal problems of government. Probably nothing brought Kennedy more respect from the moderates who ruled the Senate.
Two other projects that Kennedy took on during this period were of somewhat wider public interest. One was a proposal to create a National Library of Medicine. For years, the single greatest center of medical information, books, treatises, journals, periodicals, and unpublished research papers had been in the Armed Forces Medical Library, reportedly the greatest medical library in the world. But the library had long existed on a hand-to-mouth basis in the defense establishment, without an adequate physical plant. With the support of the American Medical Association and four other health groups, Kennedy secured passage of a bill that gave the new library independent, statutory power and a civilian as well as a defense role.
But nothing engrossed Kennedy more than the job he got of chairing a special Senate committee to choose the five all-time (and deceased) senators whose portraits would be placed in the Senate reception room. Acknowledged as the Senate’s “historian in chief” because of Profiles in Courage, Kennedy turned what might have been a lackluster formality into a widely publicized historical sweepstakes. He polled senators and several hundred historians and political scientists for nominees for the honor. The five finalists endorsed by Kennedy, his committee, and the Senate were Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Robert A Taft.
Picking the Big Five was no routine exercise. Since senators and scholars agreed that the immortal trio, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, had to be included, only two other places were left. It was agreed that one of the two remaining posts should go to a conservative, one to a liberal. Choice of the former was not difficult; Kennedy went along with the conservative majority on his committee, who insisted on Taft. On the liberal side, the committee had to choose among Norris, La Follette, and Borah, and picked La Follette. Various senators and scholars grumbled that Taft was too partisan for the selection, Norris was head and shoulder above all those selected—and how come not one Democrat got chosen?
Kennedy stood his ground, citing scholarly support. Actually, he was glad from a political standpoint to support Taft. At a time when his voting was becoming increasingly down-the-line liberal, he still wanted to keep some ties with the conservative camp. Doubtless he had noted that many conservatives, if denied the substance of right-wing policies, will settle for symbolic recognition of the justice of their cause. The success of the first Hoover Commission, for example, showed that many conservatives were willing for the government to spend billions if the billions were spent in “businesslike” ways. Right-wingers like Basil Brewer forgave Kennedy many a liberal vote as long as the Senator paid tribute to Bob Taft’s greatness.
Kennedy, in short, was acting as a kind of junior senator for all sections and major ideologies in the United States. His solicitude for Hooverism and governmental housekeeping was in part a result of conservative feeling, in part a political device to keep some ties with the right wing generally and with Southerners in his own party. Sometimes it was an awkward position; not surprisingly, Kennedy feels that in the Senate he was “so inhibited by all the pressures” that he was “not very much good to anybody,” compared to the House years, when he was “independent” and even “brash.” Still, even at this stage in the Senate, there was some direction to his policies and politics. Essentially, he was already sailing toward 1960 before winds of liberal doctrine; he had the helm fixed toward the port but he was still dragging a small anchor to starboard.
12SWINGING FOR THE FENCES
By 1958, Kennedy was becoming a national celebrity. Over one hundred speaking invitations a week streamed into his office; some came to him via friends, family, or even Catholic hierarchs in Boston. He accepted as many as he could of those that were politically profitable. He spoke to the National Conference of Christians and Jews on Middle East problems; to the Overseas Press Club on the need for closer relations with the satellites; to the American Jewish Committee on liberty; to the Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report, honoring Herbert Hoover. He addressed the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Baltimore, the American Gastro-Enterological Association in Colorado Springs, th
e Arkansas Bar Association at Hot Springs, Democratic functions in Kansas, Nevada, Mississippi, and Massachusetts. During 1957, he gave at least one hundred and fifty talks throughout the country, during the next year probably two hundred more.
Kennedy was saying nothing about his plans for 1960, but his admirers suffered no such inhibitions. At the Democratic dinner in Topeka, a huge homemade placard reading “Kennedy for President” was waved from a table directly in front of the Senator’s rostrum. At Reno, a University of Minnesota coed told the Young Democrats’ convention that she bore a message from her fifty-eight sorority sisters: “Every girl told me to give Senator Kennedy all her love and tell him they would all vote for him.” One Midwestern group gave him a plastic replica of the White House—“I’ll take it home to Caroline,” the Senator said. It was a rare Democratic chairman who could introduce Kennedy without allusions—arch, humorous, or eloquent—to the “next President of the United States.” Autograph-hunting students mobbed him after speeches. Gray-haired mothers gushed over him. Heads turned as he and Jacqueline walked through air terminals. A veteran campaigner by now, Kennedy took it all with aplomb, but Jacqueline sometimes found the uproar disconcerting. A middle-aged woman in a Western city embraced him on the sidewalk, murmuring, “God bless you, Joe.” In Ashland, Wisconsin, a teen-ager asked him to explain how he had become a war hero. “It was involuntary,” Kennedy said. “They sank my boat.”
The Kennedy family ambition and what one reporter had referred to as “Kennedy togetherness” were gently ribbed at a Gridiron press dinner in Washington in March of 1959. Joseph Kennedy was pictured singing to a familiar tune:
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