These Truths
Page 71
The joint appearance between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 was the first televised general election presidential “debate”; another matchup would not take place until 1976. Nixon came to believe that the result had been rigged, and he may have been right; there appears to have been Democratic voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. Thirteen-year-old Young Republican Hillary Rodham volunteered to look for evidence of fraud in Chicago. “We won, but they stole it from us,” Nixon said.26
Nixon blamed Democrats. He blamed black voters. And, above all, he blamed the press.
II.
THE YOUNGEST MAN ever elected president, John F. Kennedy replaced the oldest man ever to hold the office. With his hand resting on a Bible carried across the ocean by his Irish immigrant ancestors, Kennedy looked more like a Hollywood movie star than like any man who had ever occupied the Oval Office. Wearing no overcoat, his every exhale visible in the freezing cold, he proclaimed his inauguration, on January 21, 1961, to mark the beginning of a new era: “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage.”27
Kennedy had taken that torch from Eisenhower. Three days before the inauguration, Eisenhower had delivered a farewell address in which he issued a dire warning about the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Kennedy, in his inaugural address, echoed his predecessor: “Neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.”28
One of the first acts of his administration was the announcement of the Peace Corps, in March 1961. But during a presidency that began with hope and ended with tragedy, Kennedy set the nation on a path not to peace but to war. In the world-stage struggle between communism and capitalism, Kennedy was determined to win over third world countries that remained, even if only nominally, uncommitted.29
In 1951, eyeing a run for the Senate, Kennedy and his brother Bobby had made a seven-week tour of Asia and the Middle East, stopping in Vietnam. Long colonized by the French and occupied by the Japanese beginning in 1940, Vietnam, led by the Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh—the man who’d tried to meet with Wilson at the Paris Peace conference in 1919—had declared its independence at the end of the Second World War, but France had launched a campaign to restore colonial rule. The United States viewed the spread of communism in Southeast Asia with alarm, chiefly for ideological reasons, but geopolitical and economic factors played a role, too. China and the USSR were plainly in the best position to exert influence in Southeast Asia, with its population of 170 million, but every Southeast Asian country that became part of the communist bloc threatened a loss of trade for Japan, which had already lost its trading relationship with China, its largest trading partner. The United States, attempting to exert its own influence in the region, redirected its foreign aid from Europe to Asia and Africa. Between 1949 and 1952, three-quarters of American aid went to Europe; between 1953 and 1957, three-quarters went to the third world; by 1962, nine-tenths did. When Indochina began attempting to overthrow French colonial rule, the United States supported France. The United States had been much admired after the war because of FDR’s staunch opposition to colonialism; its aid to France led to growing anti-Americanism. France lost the war in 1954. A treaty divided independent Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel; Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party came to power in the North and U.S.-backed Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Beginning in 1955, South Vietnam became the site of the largest state-building experiment in the world, training a police force and civil servants, building bridges, roads, and hospitals, under the advice of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group.30
In 1958, Kennedy was among a group of senators who handed out to every colleague a copy of Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, which told the story of American diplomats and military men stationed in the fictional Asian country of Sarkhan, lost in a mire of misunderstanding and failure. In a factual epilogue, Lederer and Burdick reported “a rising tide of anti-Americanism” around the world arguing that the United States could hardly hope to wield political influence when, for one thing, American ambassadors to Asia did not speak the language. “In the whole of the Arabic world—nine nations—only two ambassadors have language qualifications. In Japan, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere, our ambassadors must speak and be spoken to through interpreters.”31
Notwithstanding Burdick and Lederer’s caution, the U.S. government escalated its involvement when, by the late 1950s, a communist insurgency had begun in the South. Many people in Vietnam viewed the 1,500 American researchers and advisers in South Vietnam as an early signal that the United States hoped to place Vietnam under its own colonial rule, even though, by 1960, the American military presence consisted of only 685 American troops.32
Kennedy understood Vietnam through the lens of modernization schemes endorsed by intellectuals and above all by MIT’s Walt Rostow, whose Stages of Economic Growth (1960) helped convince Kennedy to commit more resources to Vietnam. Rostow’s MIT friend and colleague Ithiel de Sola Pool, having helped get Kennedy elected, turned to the project of using the tools of Simulmatics to help modernize South Vietnam. Convinced that, with enough data, a computer could simulate an entire social and political system, Pool would eventually earn a $24 million contract from ARPA for a multiyear research project in Vietnam.33 “Modernizing” South Vietnam meant building roads and airstrips. But guaranteeing the security of those roads and airstrips required sending and training soldiers, because the South Vietnamese were engaged in a war with North Vietnam. By the end of 1963, after Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered in a U.S.-sanctioned coup only three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, 16,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam. Eventually, winning the war became the mission.34
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s administration came close to deploying a nuclear weapon in a nearly catastrophic confrontation with Cuba. Eisenhower’s administration had developed a plan by which the United States would support an invasion of Cuba by forces opposed to Fidel Castro. Kennedy approved the plan, but in April 1961, Castro’s army destroyed the forces that came ashore at the Bay of Pigs. The following summer, American U2s flying over Cuba detected ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. They’d been sent by Khrushchev, the latest move in the worldwide Cold War game of chess. On October 22, 1962, in a televised address, Kennedy revealed the existence of the missiles and argued for action. “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,” he said, “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” The navy would quarantine Cuba. “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Two days later, sixteen of nineteen Soviet ships headed for the American naval blockade turned back. The Soviet premier then sent the White House two entirely different messages: one promising that it would withdraw its missiles from Cuba if the United States would end the blockade; the other saying something sterner. Urged by his advisers to ignore the second message, Kennedy responded to the first message. Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles.35
As ever, Cold War confrontations abroad formed the backdrop for civil rights battles at home. To test the U.S. government’s guarantee of desegregation in interstate transit, the Congress of Racial Equality (COR
E) sent thirteen trained volunteers, seven blacks and six whites—the Freedom Riders—to ride two buses into and across the Deep South. The riders were mostly students, like John Lewis, a theology student, who, although determined to finish his education, explained that “at this time, human dignity is the most important thing in my life.” They left Washington, DC, on May 4. Two days later, thirty-five-year-old Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, gave his first public address as attorney general, at the University of Georgia, throwing down a gauntlet to segregationists. “We will move. . . . You may ask, will we enforce the Civil Rights statutes. The answer is: ‘Yes, we will.’”36
That promise was soon challenged. Eight days later, in Anniston, Alabama, a white mob attacked the Greyhound bus on which one group of the Freedom Riders had been riding, shattering the windows, slashing the tires, and, finally, burning it. “Let’s burn them alive,” the mob cried. The riders barely escaped with their lives. A Klan posse was waiting for the second bus when it arrived at a Trailways station in Birmingham. Robert Kennedy ordered that the riders, badly beaten, be evacuated. But CORE decided to send in more riders—students from Nashville. Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had his troops meet them at the bus station and put them in jail before they could board the bus—there they were held, without having been charged—while the State of Alabama dared the federal government to act.
“As you know, the situation is getting worse in Alabama,” the attorney general reported to the president. He convinced the president to call the governor of Alabama, Democrat John Patterson, who’d supported JFK’s campaign in 1960. But Patterson, in a shocking act of defiance, refused to take the call. Before he’d become governor, Patterson, as the state’s attorney general, had sought to block the NAACP from doing business; in 1958, he’d won the governor’s office with the support of the KKK. Robert Kennedy sent an envoy to Montgomery to meet with the governor. “There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stick up to the goddamned niggers except me,” Patterson said to the man from the U.S. Justice Department. Told that if the state would not protect the riders, the president would send in federal troops, the governor reluctantly agreed to provide a police escort for the bus on its trip from Birmingham to Montgomery. But when the bus reached the station in Montgomery, another mob was waiting. John Lewis, the first off the bus, began speaking to a crowd of reporters and photographers, only to pause. “It doesn’t look right,” he whispered to another rider. Vigilantes hidden in the station emerged and began pummeling the press and setting upon the riders, attacking them with pipes, slugging them with fists, braining them with their own suitcases. When the badly beaten and bandaged Freedom Riders and 1,500 blacks met at the First Baptist Church, next to the Alabama State Capitol, to decide what to do next, 3,000 whites surrounded the church, eventually to be dispersed by the Alabama National Guard. The Freedom Riders decided to keep on, and rode all summer long.37
Even as 400 Freedom Riders were arrested in Mississippi, and schoolchildren across the South were beaten at the doors of elementary schools, CORE and SNCC and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council continued to press for integration, pursuing a strategy of nonviolence, but they had to answer, more and more, to activists who favored separation and were willing to use force. Elijah Muhammad, the founder and prophet of the Nation of Islam, a Muslim movement begun in Detroit in the 1930s, had called for a black state. His most eloquent disciple, Malcolm X, had been criticizing King since the mid-1950s. He soon gained a new audience.
Malcolm Little, who’d left a juvenile home in Michigan in 1941 to move in with his half-sister in Boston, had been arrested for armed robbery in 1945, when he was twenty. During his six years in prison, he converted to Islam, studied Greek and Latin, and learned how to debate. “Once my feet got wet,” he said, “I was gone on debating.”38 Paroled in 1952, he’d gotten a department store job in Detroit and become one of Elijah Muhammad’s most talented and devoted followers. Lecturing in Detroit in 1957, he’d drawn crowds 4,000 strong, and, disobeying a Nation of Islam directive not to talk about electoral politics (or even to register to vote), he’d asked, “What would the role and the position of the Negro be if he had a full voting voice?” He’d also drawn the attention of the press, having been featured in The Hate That Hate Produced, a five-part 1959 documentary narrated by CBS News’s Mike Wallace and reported by the African American television journalist Louis Lomax. (Appalled by the documentary, which he considered delusional to the point of inciting hysteria, Malcolm X compared it to Orson Welles’s 1938 adaptation of The War of the Worlds.) In the early 1960s, in a series of college-sponsored debates, Malcolm X had taken on integrationists. In 1961, as the Nation of Islam’s national spokesman, he debated Bayard Rustin at Howard University and James Farmer, the head of CORE, at Cornell. Farmer, who had spent forty days in jail during the Freedom Ride campaign, insisted on the importance of nonviolent struggle. But Malcolm X had little use for SNCC, CORE, and least of all, SCLC. “Anybody can sit,” he liked to say. “It takes a man to stand.”39
He first reached a national audience in 1962, after police in Los Angeles gunned down seven black Muslims, members of Mosque No. 27—a mosque Malcolm X had organized in the 1950s—who were loading dry cleaning into a car. Ronald X Stokes, a Korean war veteran, was shot with both hands raised. Malcolm X, speaking at a rally, framed the killings in racial, not religious, terms. “It’s not a Muslim fight,” he said. “It’s a black man’s fight.”40
Many in the black community called for armed self-defense, the argument of Negroes with Guns, published in 1962. King, preaching Christianity and a sanctified democracy, lamented that black Muslims had “lost faith in America.” Meanwhile, white moderates urged SNCC, CORE, and SCLC to slow down. In one poll, 74 percent of whites, but only 3 percent of blacks, agreed with the statement “Negroes are moving too fast.”41
In April 1963, King led a protest in Birmingham, part of a long-planned campaign in the most violent city in the South. Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city. King had gone to Birmingham to get arrested, but found that support for his planned protest had ebbed. After white liberal clergymen denounced him in the Birmingham News, calling the protests “untimely,” King wrote a letter from jail, in solitary confinement. He began writing in the margins of the newspaper, adding passages on slips of paper smuggled in by visitors. In the end, the letter reached twenty pages, a soaring piece of American political rhetoric, testament to the urgency of a cause.
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” he conceded, “but when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society . . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”42
George Wallace, Alabama’s new governor, more or less answered that King would have to wait until hell froze. In June, Wallace said that if black students tried to enter the campus of the state university in Tuscaloosa, he’d block the door himself.
Wallace, forty-three, ate politics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; he slept politics and he breathed politics and he smoked politics. He’d been a page in the state senate in 1935, when he was sixteen. At the University of Alabama, he’d been both a star boxer and class president. After studying law, he’d served as an airman in the Pacific during the war. He ran for state congress in 1946, the same year Nixon and Kennedy won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A loyal southerner, he’d never been a particularly ardent segregationist. As an alternate at the 1948 Democratic convention, he’d refused to bolt with the rest of the Dixiecrats. He’d endorsed Stevenson. But in
1958, running for governor with “Win with Wallace” as his motto, flanked by Confederate flags, he’d lost the Democratic primary to Patterson, who was more ardently opposed to desegregation; and, as the story goes, Wallace had pledged to his supporters, “No other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” In 1962, with a speechwriter who doubled as an organizer for the KKK, Wallace had won the governorship, with 96 percent of the vote. In his inaugural in Montgomery, delivered a week before Kennedy was inaugurated in Washington, Wallace stood in the shadow of a statue of the president of the Confederacy, who’d been sworn in on that very spot. “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people,” Wallace shouted. “And I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He’d followed by meeting with educational leaders in the state and telling them: “If you agree to integrate your schools, there won’t be enough state troopers to protect you.” In May, when Kennedy celebrated his birthday, his staff gave him a pair of boxing gloves, for his upcoming bout with the heavyweight from Alabama.43 But when the day came, on June 11, Wallace gave in only three hours after the arrival of the National Guard.
That afternoon, King telegrammed Kennedy that “the Negro’s endurance may be at the breaking point.” Kennedy, who had been deliberating for months, went to Congress to meet with House members. He decided the time had come to speak to the public. On television that night, he addressed the nation: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” He talked about military service. “When Americans are sent to Viet-Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.” He invoked history. “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.” And he asked Congress for new civil rights legislation.44 One hundred years had been too long. No longer would Kennedy counsel patience.