Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  A dejected President Eisenhower, stunned by what he regarded as a “repudiation” of his eight years, first blamed Henry Cabot Lodge for promising a Negro cabinet member. By “sticking his nose into the makeup of the cabinet,” Eisenhower fumed privately, Lodge “cost us thousands of votes in the South, maybe South Carolina and Texas.” Soon, however, the President reversed himself to say that the Nixon campaign had been too little concerned with Negro votes, not too much. He then blamed the loss on “a couple of phone calls” by John and Robert Kennedy in the King case.

  What happened between Eisenhower’s instinctive reaction and his considered one was a nationwide detective search for the secret of the 1960 election. Everyone seemed to have a private theory about what had been the decisive factor—whether stolen votes in Chicago or Nixon’s makeup man for the first debate. As legions of analysts sifted the results, it did not take them long to discover that the most startling component of Kennedy’s victory was his 40 percent margin among Negro voters. In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30. This 30 percent shift accounted for more votes than Kennedy’s victory margins in a number of key states, including Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the Carolinas. On the day after the election, Republican National Chairman Thruston B. Morton declared that his party had taken the Negro vote too much for granted.

  The crucial switch was easier to identify than to explain. Kennedy had entered the election year as the declared Democratic contender least popular among Negroes—certainly less popular than the Republican opponent, Nixon, whose civil rights record was generally considered creditable. In the summer, Nixon had insisted upon a strong civil rights plank in the most visible dispute at the Republican Convention, whereas Kennedy angered Negroes by choosing Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. During the campaign itself, neither candidate had said anything dramatic about civil rights. Kennedy might have pulled closer to Nixon on the strength of his looks and polished demeanor, analysts figured, but to have trounced him so soundly begged for a cause of glaring, magical strength.

  The King case leaped to national attention during the postmortem as the overlooked master clue. Most people in the country first learned of the saga retrospectively, as capsule summaries of the Kennedy phone calls were told and retold to establish the difference between the two candidates on civil rights: Kennedy had acted in response to King’s plight, whereas Nixon had not. Some reporters unearthed the essential facts of the Kennedy pamphlet. Others wrote stories clarifying that there had been two separate Kennedy calls—one by Senator Kennedy to Coretta King and another by Robert Kennedy to Judge Mitchell. The New York Times, still pursuing both sides of the story a month after the election, published a statement that had been drafted but never released by the Eisenhower White House, calling King’s Reidsville sentence “fundamentally unjust.”

  It turned out that many people inside the Nixon campaign—Attorney General Rogers, E. Frederic Morrow, and Republican Negroes in Georgia, among others—had implored Nixon to say something supportive of King, but Nixon had declined. When news of King’s Reidsville sentence had broken, Nixon had been on his way to South Carolina in the hope of an upset there and elsewhere in the Deep South. His response had been to hide Rogers within his entourage, as a man unpopular among Southern whites because of the Justice Department’s voting rights suits, and to say nothing about King. For Nixon, the unfortunate result was that he still did not carry South Carolina, Georgia, or Alabama, but he lost enough Negro votes to suffer defeats in larger Northern states. In later statements, Nixon implied that the Eisenhower White House had been at fault for failing to issue a statement drafted by the Justice Department. Such an authoritative but indirect response, said Nixon, would have neutralized Kennedy’s call without risking Nixon’s white vote in the South. His explanation was faulty, however, because the statement to which he referred was not even drafted until four days after King was released from Reidsville, by which time it was already useless.* Politics and personal beliefs aside, the Nixon campaign was fatally encrusted with the incumbent Eisenhower bureaucracy in Washington. It moved by memo, letter, and clearance, whereas the Kennedy people moved by telephone.

  As the political side of the King arrests gained historic notoriety, pride and other human factors spurred those close to the events to embrace interpretations favorable to themselves. Kennedy’s inner circle of advisers—the realists who had resisted all suggestions of intervention in the King case, who had not known of either Kennedy call in advance, nor anything of the “blue bomb”—downplayed the importance of the entire matter. So great was their need to deny having been outsmarted by the softheaded bomb-throwers in the civil rights section that they argued, obstinately and fatuously, that Kennedy would have won a landslide victory among Negro voters even without the King affair, “as the result of economic issues.” Meanwhile, the staunchly Republican Ebenezer members who ran the Atlanta Daily World announced joyfully that Nixon had carried the Negro precincts of Atlanta in spite of the Kennedy-King dramatics. The editors offered these results in refutation of the theory that Kennedy fever had swept up those Negroes best informed about the King case, but the results more likely showed that King was less honored in his hometown than elsewhere, and that prestige Republicanism was strong enough in Negro Atlanta to survive one last election.

  Both Morris Abram and Daddy King warmed to a technicality that mattered to few others in the country besides King Jr.: that the younger King had declined to endorse Kennedy formally whereas Daddy King had agreed. Both Abram, who had engineered the endorsement, and Daddy King, who had delivered it, came to imply by either omission or emphasis that King’s suffering could not have influenced Negro votes on its own, as King had not instructed his followers how to vote. To the end of his life, Daddy King would attribute Kennedy’s victory to his own “suitcase full of votes” statement.

  In Washington, the hindsight attention to the King story troubled the President-elect, who worried that the new perception of him as a man beholden to Negro voters would impair his ability to govern the divided country. Within days of the election, Kennedy adjusted to this adjustment of his image by sending out word that his administration did not contemplate seeking new civil rights legislation or supporting challenges to the filibuster rule in the Senate. This reassured his Southern supporters but punctured the enthusiasm of Roy Wilkins, who promptly criticized Kennedy for surrendering the Democratic platform before taking office.

  The President-elect said nothing publicly about how the King case might have affected his victory. Robert Kennedy—every bit as competitive by nature, but possessed of a confessional, self-deprecating humor that lacked his brother’s hard deflective irony—said with a laugh some years later that he had called Judge Mitchell on the suggestion of Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver, King’s most aggressive political enemy of the moment. This revelation appeared to clash with both the Machiavellian and the humanitarian interpretations of the Kennedy calls. It made sense only if Vandiver, shrinking from his promise to get King out of Reidsville, had talked Robert Kennedy into assuming the political risk. Kennedy’s motivation remained a mystery, perhaps even to himself. After the election, his public comments on the matter reflected a keen ambivalence, as though the bizarre rebounds of the King case had put into question the entire relationship between winning and being decent. Asked by a journalist if he was glad he had called Judge Mitchell, Kennedy replied enigmatically: “Sure I’m glad, but I would hope I’m not glad for the reason you think I’m glad.”

  In the midst of the post-election excitement, Time correspondent Theodore White sat down to write The Making of the President, 1960. A spectacular success, the book sold more than four million copies and caused fundamental changes in campaign reporting, if not in the conception of the American presidency itself. White captured the swell of postwar confidence with his central thesis that the presidency had acquired the glow of a sacred romance. In the modern revol
utionary age, he argued, the awesome responsibilities of the office overwhelmed the traditional American skepticism of power and royalty. “A hush, an entirely personal hush, surrounds this kind of power,” he wrote, “and the hush is deepest in the Oval Office of the West Wing of the White House, where the President, however many his advisers, must sit alone.” White’s inventive use of capital letters for the Oval Office swept into standard usage in many languages, becoming a symbol of the modern United States.

  “In the sixties, the office of the Presidency, which John F. Kennedy held, was above all an intellectual exercise,” wrote White. More scientifically than most, he verified the Negro vote and the Kennedy-King calls as the critical ingredient in the outcome of the election. Having isolated the key to a seminal event at the gate of history, he was almost obliged to soar away upon his thesis, in safe disregard for the contrary facts of his own central illustration. White’s celebration of power had no room for the wrongheaded, race-wrapped disorder that stumbled through the King episode from start to finish. Discarding most of his evidence from Shriver, Wofford, and others, he described the expression of sympathy for King as the “master stroke.” Robert Kennedy’s call became an execution of “the command decision” by the Kennedy organization in the pursuit of the Negro vote. Going still further, White appraised the King maneuver as “the most precise response of result to strategy” in the entire 1960 campaign. A final, rhapsodic description of the King calls slipped all bounds of fact: “Decisions now not only followed crisply and unfalteringly in sequence, but where decision pointed, the organization followed—and the various parts of the organization had all passed through their break-in period, had been road-tested, and purred in the comforting hum of human machinery intermeshing with the same complete efficiency that one remembers of the American bomber crews flying out of Tinian and Saipan.”

  Many clouds distorted or obscured interpretation of the pivotal election, which emerged as a kind of mythological puberty rite for the United States as a superpower. Still, one plain fact shined through everywhere: two little phone calls about the welfare of a Negro preacher were a necessary cause of Democratic victory. This fact mattered dearly to Republican county chairmen as well as Democratic mayors, to students of politics as well as crusaders on both sides of the civil rights issue. That something so minor could whip silently through the Negro world with such devastating impact gave witness to the cohesion and volatility of the separate culture. That at the heart of this phenomenon was not just any preacher but Martin Luther King gave his name a symbolic resonance that spilled outside the small constituency of civil rights. Before, King had been a curiosity to most of the larger world—unsettling and primeval in meaning, perhaps, but as remote as the backseats of buses or the other side of town. Now, as a historical asterisk, a catalytic agent in the outcome of the presidential election, he registered as someone who might affect the common national history of whites and Negroes alike.

  TEN

  THE KENNEDY TRANSITION

  On the day after the election, playing touch football at Hyannis Port under the mass scrutiny of freshly encamped reporters, President-elect Kennedy received a telegram from the old lion of the British Empire. “On the occasion of your election to your office, I salute you,” wired Sir Winston Churchill. While tributes poured in from lesser figures, Kennedy presided over a family dinner giddy with triumph and exhaustion, during which the guests imagined how they might rearrange the world. One favored idea was to get rid of Allen Dulles at the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, on the grounds that these entrenched founding bureaucrats were incompatible with the Kennedy spirit of change. The President-elect enjoyed the sportive dinner talk, but the next morning he promptly announced his intention to reappoint Dulles and Hoover. Then, surrounded by Secret Service agents, he flew off to Palm Beach for a vacation.

  As the Kennedy plane headed south, John Lewis and two companions sat down with their ten-cent hamburgers at a Nashville restaurant called The Krystal, a pioneering chain of the fast-food industry. A visibly distressed waitress poured cleansing powder down their backs and water over their food, while the three Negroes steadfastly ate what they could of their meal. Lewis returned to the restaurant two hours later with his friend James Bevel, the new chairman of the Nashville student movement. Their request to speak with the manager met with the reply that the place was being cleared for emergency fumigation, whereupon the manager locked the front door, turned on a fumigating machine, and exited to the rear, leaving Bevel and Lewis alone amid the rising spray. The two of them endured for some time, with Bevel preaching quietly about the deliverance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Outside, the commotion and the escaping smoke soon attracted a roaring fire engine. A Negro preacher was pleading with the firemen to smash in the door, and a news photographer was snapping pictures of the two gasping figures inside, when the nervous manager reappeared with the door key. He tried to make light of the episode, but the fumigation dramatized his association of Negroes with insects and other vermin. For Lewis and Bevel, it was but another day of witness.

  King experienced both the energized glamour of the Kennedy victory and the morally transcendent humiliation of Bevel and Lewis. He tasted of both worlds, and knew both sets of people. During the transition between administrations, he called both John and Robert Kennedy on behalf of Morris Abram, urging that he be made Solicitor General. Similarly, he asked the Kennedys to appoint Benjamin Mays to the Civil Rights Commission or to an ambassadorship, and he wrote private letters of protest on hearing that Georgia’s senators had blocked such an appointment. King did not succeed in these patronage requests, but the consultation itself was a lofty new role that he never had approached with Eisenhower.

  After the election, he crossed the Atlantic again—this time as a guest of the Nigerian government on the occasion of its independence from Great Britain. He returned to New York to defend sit-in demonstrations in a nationally televised debate against Richmond News Leader editor James J. Kilpatrick. “Truly America faces today a rendezvous with destiny,” King said nervously, “and I think these students, through their non-violent, direct, courageous action, have met the challenge of this destiny-paced moment in a very majestic way.” Kilpatrick, who had risen to prominence since the Brown decision by espousing Virginia’s right to “interpose” its sovereignty against federal integration orders,* asserted that the hidden goal of the sit-ins was sexual—universal miscegenation. “We believe it is an affirmatively good thing to preserve the predominantly racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two thousand years,” Kilpatrick told the NBC audience, “and we do not believe that the way to preserve them lies in fostering any intimate race mixing by which these principles and characteristics inevitably must be destroyed.” In addition to sex and civilization, Kilpatrick cited a host of legal precedents against the sit-ins and then denounced them as a “boorish exhibition” of “plain bad manners.” One of his subtler ploys was to speak of King in the third person, as though he were not there. King left the studio believing he had failed to parry the full range of Kilpatrick’s explicit and implicit attacks.

  He returned home to find his father marching in picket lines outside Atlanta’s downtown department stores. Time having expired on the truce that Mayor Hartsfield had negotiated before the election, Daddy King and the other Negro elders felt obliged to admit to the students that progress seemed to stall without the pressure of demonstrations. Daddy King, wearing a JIM CROW MUST GO! placard, took up marching alongside rock ‘n’ roll singer Clyde McPhatter. They made an unlikely pair. For a brief period, nearly all the elements of Negro society in Atlanta—hotheaded youth, academics, even the Republican stalwarts such as John Wesley Dobbs—were united in protest.

  During the changeover of administration, King and the Kennedy people had virtually no face-to-face contact, even privately. King was not invited to the Inauguration, nor was he, like Roy Wilkins, grant
ed a private audience with the President-elect to present his civil rights agenda. King’s name was too sensitive at the time, too associated with ongoing demonstrations that were vexing politicians in the South. As it happened, the two sides drifted into collusion more or less independently around two gritty requirements of politics: votes and money.

  Wyatt Walker noticed that a number of the country’s more aggressive, liberal philanthropists were expanding their commitments in the civil rights field, which was becoming recognized as a kind of institutionalized crisis. Responding eagerly to the prospect of large stipends, Walker and King quickly learned a whole new vocabulary: grant proposals, funding conduits, advance budgeting, program reviews. With the active encouragement of Stanley Levison, they met in New York with the heads of the Taconic and Field foundations, among others, and talked with numerous college deans about scholarship replacement funds for expelled sit-in students. From Highlander, Myles Horton suggested that the SCLC take over the endowment of Septima Clark’s thriving citizenship school. Horton wanted to protect Clark against the likelihood of Highlander’s demise.

  King and Walker were drawn to the vision of a multifaceted attack on segregation in a targeted town—with Clark training the registration workers and teachers, SNCC students sitting in, King preaching, and Walker coordinating the attack. More immediately, they liked the fact that some influential foundation officials already were devoted to Clark. If they sponsored her through the SCLC, they might also come to subsidize other SCLC projects, such as the money-starved voter registration drives. By January, Walker was at the center of several scholarship funds through which the SCLC was supporting the education of scores of arrested students.* Complex arrangements were begun to transfer Septima Clark’s citizenship school to the SCLC, and two major proposals were filed for voter registration money.