An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  Mordant humor aside, the Kennedy brothers—already under fire from liberals for their failure to propose civil rights legislation—now worried that they would take political heat in the coming midterm elections for the Ole Miss crisis and their failure to keep order. Days later, the president’s pollster, Louis Harris, reported just the opposite—that Kennedy’s political support had spiked all over the key northern industrial states. Harris added, “Every Democrat running for major office should put front and center that this country needs firm and resolute leadership such as the president demonstrated in the Mississippi case.”

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 1963, ROBERT Kennedy prepared a status report on civil rights for the president, in which he argued that—grim headlines from Ole Miss notwithstanding—future historians would “find, on the contrary, that 1962 was a year of great progress in civil rights.” By some benchmarks, this was true. Before the Kennedy administration took office, the Justice Department had taken action to secure voting rights—ranging from inspections to lawsuits—in just thirty counties around the country; now that number was 115. Segregation in interstate commerce—on trains and buses—had been virtually eliminated (thanks in large part, of course, to pressure from the Freedom Riders). Sixty schools had been desegregated in the past year, bringing the total to 972. Of the 350 assistant United States attorneys appointed by the Kennedy administration to date, thirty-two were black, and half of them had been appointed in 1962 alone. Of 114 federal marshals appointed since January 20, 1961, fourteen were black—eleven of them appointed in 1962.

  But these measures, however real, paled in comparison with the principal demand of civil rights supporters: comprehensive new federal legislation to outlaw segregation. And on this front, John Kennedy was once again found wanting. On February 28, 1963, two weeks after the Lincoln’s birthday event at the White House, he sent his first civil rights message to Congress, calling for a strengthening of voting rights provisions, abolition of literacy tests, appointment of federal voting referees, new technical and financial assistance for school desegregation, and a four-year extension of the federal Civil Rights Commission, whose mandate was set to expire.

  “Let it be clear in our own hearts and minds, that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity,” the president declared. “The basic reason is because it is right.”

  But civil rights groups saw Kennedy’s message as so disappointing—no mention of public accommodations, no real legislative follow-up—that they raised the threat of cooperation with Republican legislators, who had already introduced various civil rights measures of their own. Even though the Republicans could not pass a bill by themselves, if they were seen as seizing the initiative on civil rights, they might pry away some northern and black votes in the 1964 election and weaken Kennedy’s prospects. Kennedy wanted to forestall any such effort by the opposition party, even as he insisted that the time was not ripe on Capitol Hill for a comprehensive bill. “We go up there with that and they’ll piss all over us,” he told his aides. It was Kennedy who had got the ball rolling, of course, with his promises in the 1960 campaign, and his resolute enforcement of the court orders at Ole Miss and in the school desegregation cases. Now he seemed frozen in place by the growing gulf between his stirring words and his cautious actions. And no less resourceful a goad than Martin Luther King himself had resolved to do something about that paralysis.

  By April 1963, King had decided that the time had come for another campaign of direct action. And while his stated goal was the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama—the nation’s largest Jim Crow city—his true target was the Kennedy administration. It was no accident that he began this latest campaign at a moment of rising expectations. In March, a reform candidate, Albert Boutwell, had placed first in an election for the newly created post of mayor of Birmingham, the city having eliminated its board of commissioners. But “Bull” Connor, the belligerent public safety commissioner who had allowed the beatings of the Freedom Riders to go unchecked, ran in second place behind Boutwell in the March balloting and in a runoff on April 2, and he refused to surrender his post. So on the morning of April 3, groups of protesters sought service at the lunch counters in five stores in downtown Birmingham, four of which promptly stopped serving food altogether. In the ensuing week, some 150 demonstrators were arrested, but the protest was not generating much heat until a judge granted Connor’s request for an injunction barring King from further marches. On April 12, Good Friday, the drama intensified when King was arrested with his deputy, Ralph Abernathy, and placed in solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail.

  There, on scraps of paper and in the margins of newspapers, he would write his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And though its words would not become public for another month, they were among the most damning ever used to sum up the status quo for American blacks. “For years now I have heard the word, ‘Wait!’” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait!’ has almost always meant, ‘Never.’” He expressed special disappointment with the “white moderate” who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

  King was released from jail on April 20, and almost immediately he began planning the next round of action. James Bevel, one of King’s top aides at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had a daring, dangerous idea, a “children’s crusade.” Bevel had spent weeks organizing and training elementary and high school students in Birmingham in the techniques and strategies of nonviolence. King was ambivalent about using the children, but he was desperate for a display that would shock the nation’s conscience and move the president to action at last. And so on Thursday, May 2, hundreds of young people marched out of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to face Connor’s police force, waiting across the street. By day’s end, nearly a thousand protesters had been taken to jail, only a handful of them adults. The next day, as the first children again set out from the church, Connor’s forces warned them to disband or face high-pressure fire hoses. King’s army refused to budge, and soon hundred-pound-per-square-inch blasts of water knocked the marchers to the ground, tearing the clothing from their backs. When a group of blacks alarmed by such tactics began tossing bricks toward the police, Connor let loose five snarling German shepherds. In a flash, the resulting images—terrifying even in grainy black-and-white news film and photographs—galvanized the world. “Look at those niggers run!” Connor crowed.

  * * *

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AT a half-hour meeting in the White House with representatives of the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action, the president was exasperated at the riveting photograph in that day’s New York Times of a police dog lunging at a protester in Birmingham. “Bull Connor just eats this up,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, that’s just what Connor wants.” Then Kennedy launched into a discursive, defensive soliloquy, the agitation and frustration in his voice echoing into the hidden tape recorder that he had installed to preserve conversations for use in writing his anticipated memoirs. “Now, we’ve worked as hard as we possibly could, given the laws we have,” he said at one point. “We’ve shoved and pushed,” he went on a few minutes later, “and the Department of Justice … There’s nothing that my brother’s given more time to.”

  But then he added, “I quite agree if I were a Negro, I’d be awfully sore.”

  The president reserved special scorn for the armchair pundits in Washington who bemoaned the situation in Birmingham, while continuing to eat at the elite Metropolitan Club, around the corner from the White House. The club had recently abandoned its long-standing practice of offering honorary memberships to all members of the diplomatic corps, to avoid having to admit black ambassadors from the newly independent African nations, and several top Ke
nnedy aides had resigned from the club in protest. “I had some newspaperman in here telling me about ‘Isn’t it outrageous in Birmingham?’” the president declared. “I said, ‘Why are you over there eating at the Metropolitan Club every day?’ You talk about Birmingham … Some of our distinguished columnists every day at lunch … They wouldn’t even let Negro ambassadors in … He said, ‘Well, we want to work from the inside.’ And I said, ‘Well, your one contribution is now they won’t let white ambassadors in’ … So I don’t know what the difference really is … It’s just one of degree.” Kennedy then pulled back, looking at the larger picture. “I think we have worked hard on civil rights,” he said. “I think it’s a national crisis and the Negro leadership is divided. And it isn’t because of any political reluctance. As far as I’m concerned, I doubt if the Democratic Party carries any more than perhaps two or three Southern states in 1964.”

  Finally, almost as if talking to himself, the president simply gave up. “I couldn’t agree with you more that this is…,” he said, not finishing the thought, before concluding: “I’m president of the United States and that’s a disastrous picture this morning.”

  Everything about the situation in Birmingham was disastrous. Later that day, Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, the meticulous, methodical lawyer who headed the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, to Alabama to try to arrange a truce. After days of shuttling back and forth between the city’s white business leaders and the protesting black groups, Marshall produced a tentative agreement on gradual desegregation of Birmingham’s public facilities, and a pledge by the city to hire black employees. But the effort collapsed when King and Abernathy were thrown back in jail, their bail on the earlier charges increased to $2,500 each, and the city fathers insisted on a total of $250,000 in bail money to release the more than five hundred children who were still clogging the city’s lockups. Secretly, with the help of labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, and Harry Belafonte—who had arranged for a $100,000 cash loan from Nelson Rockefeller himself—the Kennedys raised the bail money. A deal was struck on Friday, May 10, and King returned to Atlanta in relief and triumph.

  But the very next night, bombs exploded in Birmingham, tearing a hole through the living room of the Reverend A. D. King, Martin’s brother, and blowing the front off the Gaston Motel, just below the room where Martin King himself had been staying. Within minutes, angry black rioters began pouring into the streets, throwing bricks and bottles at the police and burning and looting stores in black neighborhoods. The situation was only inflamed when Alabama’s newly elected and defiantly segregationist governor, George C. Wallace, dispatched some three hundred “special deputies,” swinging clubs and brandishing shotguns, just as the local authorities seemed to be getting things under control.

  Once more, John Kennedy had to weigh sending federal troops into a southern state. At a tense meeting on Sunday evening, May 12, with Bob Kennedy, Burke Marshall, and others, the president asked Marshall, “This has a lot of Oxford in it, doesn’t it?” and Marshall responded in a way that crystallized why the administration considered the situation so explosive: “Yes, it does, but it’s different, because there we had a white mob against a Negro, a single Negro. Here we have a Negro mob…”

  “A Negro mob.” The very words meant that the slow, unfolding crisis of civil rights in the South had reached a new and even more politically dangerous stage for the president, and that he would have to act accordingly. Scrambling to defuse demonstrations or hustling to enforce piecemeal court orders would no longer suffice. It was becoming clear to both John and Robert Kennedy that the only way to end the demonstrations was to end the discrimination that prompted them. And the only way to do that, they reluctantly realized, would be with a broad new law.

  In the short term, the president decided to place Army units stationed near Birmingham on alert, and to federalize the Alabama National Guard if necessary. Just before nine o’clock that Sunday night, he went on television to declare, “The Government will do whatever must be done to preserve order, to protect the lives of its citizens and to uphold the law of the land.” Meantime, Martin Luther King, who had rushed back to Birmingham, toured the city’s black wards, preaching calm in pool halls and social clubs. The next day, the boxer Floyd Patterson and the baseball legend Jackie Robinson appeared at a mass rally aimed at calming nerves.

  A fragile peace prevailed in Birmingham. But demonstrations soon spread to more than half a dozen other cities in both North and South. John Kennedy was running out of time, and he knew it.

  2

  A Great Change Is at Hand

  TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1963

  AS THE CLOCKS IN the White House ticked toward 8:00 p.m. at the end of a hot early summer day, the president of the United States was fretting over the draft of a speech that he was supposed to deliver on national television in just a few minutes but that was still perhaps only three-fifths done. And he was, to the surprise of his aides, “awfully damn nervous.” For nervousness was by no means the natural state of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. After all, as a junior naval officer in World War II, he had swum through miles of open ocean—towing a wounded comrade by the straps of a life preserver held in his teeth, despite a chronic bad back—after a Japanese destroyer sliced his PT boat in two. He had published a Pulitzer Prize–winning book elevating Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure” into a personal and political creed. On this busy evening, Kennedy was under pressure, all right, but he was struggling to maintain grace.

  Hours earlier, Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, had peacefully arranged the integration of the University of Alabama, securing the admission of two black students pursuant to a federal court order, over the adamant objections of Governor George Wallace, after Kennedy asserted federal control over the Alabama National Guard. When the day began, such an outcome had been far from assured, and Kennedy had asked the three television networks to reserve time that evening, in case he needed to address the nation in the wake of violence—as he had done on that grim Sunday night eight months earlier when a riot erupted during the integration of Ole Miss. Now, with the Alabama crisis successfully resolved, most of Kennedy’s advisers believed a speech was unnecessary. He overruled them, instinctively knowing that the time had come at last for him to speak out on the topic that had consumed the country that spring.

  The previous month’s siege in Birmingham had made a huge impact on the president—and on the country at large—as civil rights demonstrations spread to Jackson, Mississippi; Cambridge, Maryland; Raleigh, North Carolina; Chicago; Philadelphia; and New Rochelle and Syracuse, New York. For days, the newspapers had been reporting that Kennedy’s response to the growing crisis would be the long-awaited comprehensive civil rights bill. Events had finally forced Kennedy’s hand, as he himself had implicitly acknowledged only the day before, in a commencement address at American University. The main thrust of the speech was the president’s announcement that the United States would suspend atmospheric nuclear testing, coupled with a plea for a new understanding of world peace. “For in the final analysis,” he had said, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” But then he had pointedly added: “In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete. It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government—local, State and National—to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within our authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever the authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate.”

  So now, as technicians strung lights and cable and set up their cameras in the Oval Office, a plain screen blocking the gray-green and gold drapes and the south-facing windows behind the president’s desk, Kennedy found himself in the Cabinet Room next door with his brother Bob, “quietly going franti
c,” as one aide would recall. Almost alone among the president’s top advisers, Bob Kennedy had urged him to make the speech, and now he was helping him figure out just what to say. Together, the brothers scratched notes on scraps of White House stationery. “Lesson—Committed to uphold system of law,” John Kennedy wrote in his swift, spidery hand. Bob Kennedy noted, “Uphold orders of court. Live under system of law,” adding, “Country as a whole must go far beyond symbols.”

  The president teased Burke Marshall, who was also standing by in the Cabinet Room. “Come on, now, Burke,” he said. “You must have some ideas.”

  Down the hall in his own office, Kennedy’s most trusted speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, who had been preoccupied for weeks with the American University speech, was now feverishly seizing on statistics and bits of past statements to compose yet another major address, whose pages were delivered to the president as fast as Sorensen’s faithful secretary, Gloria Sitrin, could type them. In the end, time ran out, and Kennedy had at best ten minutes of material in his hands as he took his place before the cameras in the Oval Office, a pillow propped behind his back to help his posture. Andrew Hatcher, his assistant press secretary and the highest-ranking black aide in his White House—in any White House up to that point—stood silently to the side, just out of camera range.

  “The monitor is all right, but the camera ought to be brought up,” the president said, nervously fidgeting with the papers resting on a small, slanted reading stand atop his desk, a glass of water at his right hand.

  All his life, Jack Kennedy had possessed an exquisite appreciation for the vagaries, frailties, and ironies of life, together with an uncanny sense of timing. At the beginning of his Senate career in 1953, Sorensen would recall, Kennedy favored civil rights legislation “as a political necessity consistent with his moral instincts.” Now, Sorensen judged, he was about to commit himself to such legislation “as a moral necessity inconsistent with his political instincts.” His civil rights adviser Harris Wofford would later remember that the president was fond of reciting the poetic passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes—the one proclaiming that there is a “time to keep silence, and a time to speak”—but adding his own mordant, Kennedyesque coda: “A time to fish, and a time to cut bait.” This muggy twilight was a time to fish.