Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  Dawson caused other logistical difficulties as well. Shriver had set up the Civil Rights Division office on a whole floor of a building on K Street in Washington, and he arranged it in an open style, without closed individual offices. This was a practice he had experimented with and found successful at the Merchandise Mart, because it fostered camaraderie and good communication. But when Dawson flew in from Chicago to visit and saw that he would be given no private quarters but only a desk and a phone like everyone else, he balked. It was, Dawson said, “totally impossible” for him to work in the open like that. Shriver failed to convince him otherwise and in the end had to construct a single enclosed office for the congressman, right in the middle of the open-floor plan. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” some of the blacks in the division derisively called it.

  THE CALL TO KING

  On Wednesday, October 19, Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of Negro activists into the Magnolia Room restaurant, located in a giant department store in Atlanta, Georgia, and demanded to be served lunch. The Magnolia Room was a segregated facility, as were many other Atlanta restaurants that were occupied by Negro protesters that day. King refused to leave the restaurant when asked and was arrested with his fellow protesters. Charged with trespassing, he declined to post bail. “I’ll stay in jail a year, or ten years,” King said, “if it takes that long to desegregate” the restaurant. Over the next few days, Negro occupations of segregated facilities continued. More arrests were made. The Ku Klux Klan began marching up and down Atlanta’s streets. Tensions in the city threatened to boil over into widespread civic unrest.

  Meanwhile the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the group King headed, had telegraphed both Kennedy and Nixon, hoping that one or the other (or both) would make a public statement against the arrests or intervene in some way. At the Kennedy campaign headquarters in Washington the feeling was that something had better be done soon: The incident was proving an unwelcome reminder of Southern Democrats’ racist past. Shriver feared that Negro voters, after witnessing this episode—and the persistent racism of the Georgia Democrats—would turn against the party. But no one in the campaign seemed to know quite what to do.

  Harris Wofford called his friend Morris Abram, a prominent civil rights lawyer, urging him to get Bill Hartsfield, the Atlanta mayor, to do something. Mayor Hartsfield reacted strongly by holding a press conference in which he announced that in response to “the personal intervention” of Senator Kennedy, he had reached an agreement with Negro leaders and the prisoners would be released. This infuriated Kennedy’s political advisers, who perceived correctly that this would be seen as an unwarranted intrusion by a federal political candidate into Georgia’s affairs. Kenny O’Donnell and the Irish Mafia savaged Wofford for acting imprudently and sought to control the damage, issuing a tepid press release giving Kennedy credit only for making inquiries into the arrest and assuring reporters that the senator had no intention of meddling in Georgia’s affairs.

  Because Hartsfield had already declared the prisoners’ release, members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who was five months pregnant, descended on the jail to celebrate their freeing. But when they arrived at the jail, King was not there.

  As it turned out, several months earlier the Kings had driven a white friend of theirs to a hospital in De Kalb County, Georgia, a bastion of the Ku Klux Klan. A policeman saw them driving with a white woman, stopped the car, and, although Martin had his Alabama license, charged him with driving without a Georgia license. As a penalty, King was fined $25 and placed on a year’s probation. Now a De Kalb County judge had ruled that the trespassing charge put him in violation of that probation. King was sentenced to six months’ hard labor in state prison.

  Shriver urged Kennedy to make a public statement criticizing the imprisonment and urging King’s release. Wofford went so far as to draft such a statement. But Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver and Kennedy’s Georgia campaign manager Griffin Bell said that if Jack were to make a statement like that, he would be guaranteed to lose Georgia to Nixon. After multilateral negotiations, Bell prevailed on Vandiver to get King released as long as Kennedy made no further public statements to embarrass Southern Democrats. Kennedy agreed, and everyone thought that would be the end of it.

  But three days later, King was still in jail. Wofford had become good friends with the Kings through his work in the civil rights movement, and on this day he received a call at home in Virginia from Coretta King in Georgia. “They are going to kill him, I know they are going to kill him,” she said in a tearful voice, and she expressed her fear that her baby would be born without a father. Wofford told her that the Kennedy campaign was doing what it could, but he knew that “this was not very reassuring to a wife who felt her husband’s life was in danger every minute he remained in jail.”

  That night, Wofford and Louis Martin went out for beers to discuss the situation. (Shriver was traveling through the Midwest with Jack.) “Who cares about public statements?” Wofford recalled saying. “What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal, like picking up the phone and calling Coretta. Just giving his sympathy, but doing it himself.” “That’s it, that’s it!” Martin responded. “That would be perfect.”

  It wasn’t until the next morning that Wofford was able to reach Shriver on the phone. “If Jack would just call Mrs. King down in Atlanta,” Shriver remembers Wofford saying, “and tell her he’s very sorry about what has befallen her husband, that gesture will be incredibly important to Negro voters.”

  “It’s not too late,” Shriver responded. “Jack doesn’t leave O’Hare [International Airport] for another forty minutes. I’m going to get to him. Give me her number and get me out of jail if I’m arrested for speeding.”

  Shriver rushed out to the airport motel where Jack was staying, getting there just a few minutes before Jack was to leave. The candidate was getting dressed. But the motel room was filled with his top advisers, who surely would have raised significant objections to Kennedy’s getting further involved in the King imbroglio. So Shriver anxiously bided his time, waiting for the right moment to present his message. He was prepared to take Jack forcibly aside if necessary, but he was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, since a private audience with the candidate would surely arouse suspicions among his advisers. Ted Sorensen went back to his room to finish a speech. Press secretary Pierre Salinger went off to meet with reporters for a preflight briefing. Only Kenny O’Donnell lingered, eyeing Shriver warily, knowing he wasn’t supposed to be there that morning. When O’Donnell stepped into the bathroom, Shriver seized his chance.

  As Jack folded his clothes and put them in his suitcase, Shriver explained to him about King’s plight and told him about the telephone call Wofford and Martin had proposed. “Jack,” he said, “you just need to convey to Mrs. King that you believe what happened to her husband was wrong and that you will do what you can to see the situation rectified and that in general you stand behind him.” “At first he seemed distracted,” Shriver recalled, “then, as he began to focus, he grew somewhat skeptical, but I pressed forward with my argument.” “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected. But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

  Jack zipped his suitcase and looked up at Shriver. “That’s a pretty good idea. How do I get her?” Shriver pulled the telephone number from his breast pocket and handed it to his brother-in-law.

  “Dial it for me, will you?” Jack said. “I’ve got to pack up my papers.” He began picking them up and piling them into a briefcase.

  As Shriver recalled,

  I sat down on Jack’s bed and dialed the number. Mrs. King came on the line. I told her who I was and that I was with Jack Kennedy in Chicago who was about to fly to Detroit to do more campaigning but tha
t he wanted to speak with her for a moment before he left. Would that be okay? She said it would be and I handed Jack the phone. He talked to her for only ninety seconds or so, but in that time he managed to convey his warmth and sympathy, and to explain that he would do what he could to see that justice was done. Then he ran out to catch his plane.

  Emerging from the bathroom, O’Donnell overheard the tail end of Jack’s conversation with Coretta King and intuited the gist of what had happened. “You just lost us the election,” he said to Shriver.

  Back in Washington, Wofford and Martin got blasted by Bobby Kennedy. On the plane to Detroit, Jack had remarked offhandedly to Salinger that he had called Mrs. King. Salinger had radioed word to Bobby, even before the plane had landed. Bobby erupted. “With his fists tight, his blue eyes cold, [Bobby] turned on us,” Wofford recalled. “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khruschev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon?” Bobby said. “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

  Bobby was right about the razor closeness of the election but wrong about the outcome and the phone call’s effect on it. Wofford had by now already received a grateful phone call from Mrs. King, followed by a call from Morris Abram, who reported enthusiastically that he just had had a visit from Coretta and her father-in-law, Martin Luther King Sr., the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Atlanta. “Daddy King,” as he was known, had been with Coretta when she received the call from Kennedy and, as he told Abram, “if Kennedy has the courage to wipe the tears from Coretta’s eyes, [I] will vote for him whatever his religion.” Daddy King had voted Republican in the past and had earlier in the year signed a newspaper advertisement for Nixon, on the grounds that he preferred a Protestant president to a Catholic one. But now he had reconsidered.

  Daddy King’s conversion, Shriver and his colleagues quickly realized, had potentially momentous implications; his influence in the Negro population was enormous. Not only did he have his own large congregation and followers in Atlanta, but he was also at the center of the network of Southern black churches. If word could be got out that Daddy King was strong for Kennedy, the impact could be significant.

  The next day, Coretta King was quoted in the Atlanta papers as saying that Kennedy’s phone call had made her “feel good.” “I have heard nothing from the vice president or anyone on his staff,” she added. Nixon and Eisenhower could have done something to intercede on King’s behalf at this point, but they stayed mute.

  By that afternoon, Bobby had apparently reconsidered his initial reaction to the Shriver-Kennedy phone call and had decided he ought to do what he could to capitalize on it on his brother’s behalf. Bobby called the De Kalb sentencing judge directly and made clear that he thought the judge had overstepped his bounds in imposing four months’ hard labor on King for a minor traffic violation. If you know what’s right, Bobby later recalled telling the judge, you will release King by sundown.

  The judge, citing public pressure, released King on $2,000 bail. Upon his release, King made a public statement thanking Jack Kennedy. “I am deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible. For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.”

  On October 28, nine days after his arrest and only ten days before the presidential election, Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed a joyous homecoming at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. King used his sermon to call for more civil disobedience in the fight against segregation. And he endorsed Kennedy in coded terms. “I never intend to reject a man running for President of the United States, just because he is a Catholic. Religious bigotry is as immoral, undemocratic, un-American and un-Christian as racial bigotry.”

  The more important statement came that evening, when King’s father made a much less restrained pronouncement. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  Martin and Wofford brainstormed, trying to conceive how to reap maximum benefit from Daddy King’s conversion to Kennedy. Martin could easily have arranged to have the story published in Negro newspapers, but most of them came out only weekly, and with so little time remaining before the election, they wouldn’t be able to disseminate the story widely enough. Martin proposed publishing a pamphlet that could be printed by the hundreds of thousands and distributed through black churches across the country. But Wofford reminded him that after his brother’s call to Mrs. King, Bobby Kennedy had proscribed any further such freelancing by the Civil Rights Division. Bobby had specifically warned them not to make any new public statements.

  Martin called Shriver in Chicago, hoping he would know what to do, or that he might be willing to try to argue Bobby into allowing the publication of a pamphlet. After listening to Martin explain the situation, Shriver immediately outlined a plan of action. If the pamphlet only reproduced statements made by Daddy King and other Negro leaders and didn’t introduce any new editorial statements, Shriver reasoned, then it wouldn’t fall within the limits of Bobby’s proscription. “You don’t need to ask Bobby’s permission,” Shriver said. “What you’re planning is not within his ban. Let’s do it. If it works, he’ll like it. If we don’t do it, and we don’t get enough Negro votes, he and Jack wouldn’t like that, and we would all be kicking ourselves for a long time.”

  Within six hours The Case of Martin Luther King was being printed. To avoid conflict with the Democratic National Committee, the publication was officially sponsored by two black ministers calling themselves the Freedom Crusade Committee. The pamphlet reproduced the statements of Martin Luther King Jr., his wife and father, and several other black Protestant leaders. “I earnestly and sincerely feel that it is time for all of us to take off our Nixon buttons,” declared Ralph Abernathy in one of the statements. “Senator Kennedy did something great and wonderful when he personally called Coretta King.… Since Mr. Nixon has been silent through all this, I am going to return his silence when I go to the voting booth.”

  Shriver authorized the printing of an initial 50,000 copies of what he came to call “the blue bomb” (for its light blue paper), and by October 30 they were being mailed from Washington all across the country. Two days later (one week before election day) Shriver printed another 250,000 in Chicago for distribution throughout every Negro church in Illinois and Wisconsin. More and more calls came into headquarters from local Civil Rights Division workers across the country, and by Sunday, November 6, 2 million copies had been distributed. That day, the last Sunday before the election, Shriver strove to ensure that handbills were posted on the wall of as many Negro churches across the country as possible. When it got too late in the week for the postal service to deliver by Sunday, he arranged for printing on local presses. In a few cases, Wofford and Martin piled bundles of pamphlets onto Greyhound buses bound for important cities, where local civil rights workers retrieved and distributed them.

  Martin and Shriver also called on their friends to spread the word on foot. Shriver’s numerous connections on the Catholic Interracial Council and the school board spread the word of the Kennedy phone call to the farthest reaches of Chicago’s South Side and West Side neighborhoods. Martin called Northern Negro Democrats like Raymond Jones, recommending that they send “runners” into bars to make sure barroom denizens knew that Kennedy had helped spring King from jail.

  “When ‘Ray the Fox’ reported back that the bars of Harlem were all going our way,” Wofford recalled, “and when we got widespread reports of whole congregations of Negro Baptists and Methodists pledging to vote for Kennedy, we sensed that a tide was running for the senator in practi
cally every community, North and South.”

  As the results were tallied on election day, exit polls indicated that more than seven out of ten Negro voters had gone for Kennedy, and a higher total proportion of blacks had voted than in any previous election. As Theodore White wrote, “It is difficult to see how Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina or Delaware [with 74 electoral votes among them] could have been won had the Republican-Democratic split of the Negro wards and precincts remained as it was, unchanged from the Eisenhower charm of 1956.” If even two of those states had gone Republican, Kennedy would have lost.

  Even Kennedy’s key electoral victory in Illinois, which is reputed to have been delivered by the aggressive (and perhaps corrupt) vote-gathering tactics of the Cook County political machine, may owe more to the King phone call than to Dick Daley: In a state that Kennedy won by only 9,000 popular votes, some 250,000 blacks went to the polls. James Michener later called the King phone call and its aftermath “the single event which came closest to being the one vital accident of the campaign.” “In doing this,” Michener wrote, Kennedy “did not lose Georgia or South Carolina or Texas. Instead he won the Negro vote in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, and thus the Presidency.” Eisenhower grumbled that Kennedy’s phone call had spelled the difference in the election. Nixon himself later attributed his defeat to the King affair and lamented that if he, too, had made some kind of “grandstanding” action, he might have won the election.