Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “Oh, they’ll do that,” Barnett assured him. He said his 220 highway patrolmen, backing up the local police, would “take positive action, Mr. President, to maintain law and order as best we can…and they’ll absolutely be unarmed.”

  Kennedy stumbled over this surprise twist: “I understa—”

  “Not a one of ’em’ll be armed,” Barnett said proudly.

  But the problem was, said the President, “what can they do to maintain law and order and prevent the gathering of a mob…What can they do?” Kennedy wanted the state forces armed to the teeth when it came to quelling the mob, and nonviolent only in confronting Meredith, but Barnett refused to be so discerning. He stuck blithely to the previous negotiating scenarios in which Robert Kennedy had addressed the reality being screamed in the headlines—that the state forces were lining up against Meredith. The President found himself in the backwash of earlier deals, and the demands of secrecy made his predicament the more vexing. He was like a farmer trying to convince a sly mule that the way to the feed house went through the plow fields. Nevertheless, Kennedy and his advisers concluded that Barnett’s ruse promised a step forward. Once Meredith was registered, the game would shift in their direction. When Barnett’s next call came in, the President undertook again to move him off the nonviolence idea as applied to the mob at Oxford.

  There were rumblings of movement at the White House soon thereafter. Pierre Salinger called the television networks to cancel President Kennedy’s scheduled address that night. Burke Marshall called the Justice Department to tell the lawyers to stop drafting the emergency proclamations. “We’ve got a deal with Barnett,” he said. As happy as the draftsmen were to hear that they could go home on a Saturday evening, Marshall’s glad news left them with doubts. Norbert Schlei’s premonition was so strong that he kept his secretary there until nearly midnight typing up the required presidential documents, just in case. Meanwhile, Ross Barnett went to see the Ole Miss Rebels play the Kentucky Wildcats at Jackson’s Memorial Stadium. The war fever of the political crisis boosted the normal emotions of the football rite to the heights of pandemonium, and by halftime the crowd was shouting “We want Ross!” in a deafening roar. Barnett made his way to the fifty-yard line, where he raised a fist of defiance and cried out over the loudspeakers: “I love Mississippi!” The roar intensified, and Barnett, nearly overcome, rose above it to let loose another shout: “I love her people!” Then at the peak: “I love our customs!” These three short sentences were enough to ignite pre-battle ecstasy. People were ready to die. This was as close to, and yet as far from, the fervor of a Negro mass meeting as segregationists came. No one could know that this football game would be the last militant race rally among respectable whites for at least a generation.

  In Washington, Norbert Schlei had just gotten home when Burke Marshall called to say that the deal was off again. Barnett could not go through with it. “The President wants to sign those documents,” said Marshall. Schlei made it down to the White House and upstairs into the residential quarters by midnight Saturday. President Kennedy, looking over the proclamations necessary to call out the troops, asked, “Is this pretty much what Ike signed in 1957 with the Little Rock thing?” Told it was, Kennedy signed, handed the documents back to Schlei, and rapped the table as he stood up. The moment engaged his sense of history. “You know,” he remarked, “that’s General Grant’s table.” He said goodnight, but then stopped Schlei on his way down to face the White House press corps with the documents. “Don’t tell them about General Grant’s table,” Kennedy cautioned. He did not want to antagonize the South any further with reminders of the Civil War.

  Robert Kennedy and Barnett resumed the search for a way out on Sunday, while the Pentagon was relaying notice to Mississippi Guard units that they had been placed under the President’s command. It was difficult to tell whether the great swell of segregationist sentiment had fortified or encumbered Barnett, who told Robert Kennedy that now he required a truly spectacular show of force to camouflage a retreat. He proposed a large-scale version of the gun-drawing plan, this time with some three hundred Mississippi lawmen and three hundred “soldiers” (apparently some sort of honor guard drawn from the volunteer vigilantes) arrayed in three lines at the Ole Miss gate to block Meredith. Barnett would stand at their head. If Kennedy would send a superior force of federal agents to confront them with guns, he said, he could order them to step aside without losing face.

  Now Kennedy balked. Barnett was talking troop numbers larger than the garrison at Fort Sumter in 1861, and he was maneuvering so that Kennedy, unlike Lincoln, would appear to be the aggressor. The governor kept saying that all the Mississippians would be harmlessly unarmed, but there was a limit to what Kennedy would believe. He told Barnett that the grand surrender scheme was unacceptably dangerous. According to Burke Marshall’s record of the conversation, the Attorney General “said that he thought the matter had gone beyond the stage of politics.”

  What Kennedy meant was that it had gone beyond the stage of political courtesy, as he promptly fired a well-aimed dart at Barnett’s political nerve center. The President, he told Barnett, was committed to address the nation that night, and he would be forced to say that he had called out the troops because Governor Ross Barnett had broken yesterday’s agreement to register Meredith.

  “That won’t do at all!” Barnett roared.

  “You broke your word to him,” Kennedy insisted.

  Shocked into disbelief, Barnett asked, “You don’t mean the President is going to say that tonight?”

  “Of course he is,” said Kennedy. He said they had a complete record of the times of the phone calls, the circumstances, the words. “We have it all down,” he declared, springing the threat of phone intercepts he had compiled surreptitiously.

  Barnett fairly howled in pain. It got him nowhere to protest that the Kennedys had given him solemn promises of secrecy, as the Attorney General only replied that Barnett had lied too, and that a lie canceled a promise. Barnett pleaded. Couldn’t the feds at least storm fences and barricades around the campus? Couldn’t the Attorney General keep the President from mentioning the prior agreements? Kennedy said no, pressing his advantage. He knew that millions of Americans would consider it a grievous misdeed to lie to a President. He also knew that the governor’s fear was precisely the opposite: Barnett was petrified of the revelation that he had agreed with the President in a secret integrationist deal. He would have welcomed a thousand lies to keep this one truth hidden.

  A new idea popped up from the depths of Barnett’s misery. “Why don’t you fly him in this afternoon?” he asked suddenly. As a variation on the trick place idea, he suggested that they register Meredith at a trick time. They could sneak Meredith onto the Oxford campus while Barnett continued to rally all of Mississippi for the expected showdown on Monday or Tuesday. Then Barnett could claim he had been hoodwinked. This idea became the heart of a new bargain, although arguments erupted sporadically over lies that were told and lies that were ruined. Burke Marshall and Tom Watkins came on the line to soothe tempers and piece together a detailed plan. Kennedy agreed to keep Barnett well posted on all Meredith’s movements. Barnett, in return, agreed to let Kennedy clear the language of the statement in which Barnett, crying foul tyranny and pledging to fight on against integration, would recognize Meredith’s registration as a fait accompli.

  The Justice Department boiled immediately into action, having rehearsed this drill during the Freedom Rides. Any lawyer who happened to be strolling the hallways that Sunday was in danger of being flung aboard a military transport plane. Within hours, the head of the Tax Division found himself commanding a “communications center” in the basement of the post office in Oxford, Mississippi. Press spokesman Ed Guthman shuttled between telephones and troop bivouacs, as did legal draftsman Norbert Schlei. Airborne, the legal shock troops discovered among themselves even an old Harvard football chum of Robert Kennedy’s, who had been in Washington that weekend for a White Hous
e conference on narcotics. When they landed, Nicholas Katzenbach assumed the role of field commander of the combined civilian forces. Kennedy had stopped him on his way out of the Justice Department to say, “Hey, Nick. Don’t worry if you get shot…’cause the President needs a moral issue.” Katzenbach laughed at the warm irony and the taut grin. This was the Kennedy panache—bright amateurs dashing cavalierly into semi-war.

  James Meredith, plucked from the professional football game he was watching on television at the Memphis air station, flew south with Doar and McShane. At six o’clock that afternoon they looked down from their Cessna to behold the stunning transformation of the little Oxford airport. The field was lined with Army trucks, buses, jeeps, cars, and assorted government planes, plus piles of tents and riot equipment. Other supplies included dramatic items like giant searchlights. Katzenbach and Guthman met the plane when it landed, their Jetstar having cruised in from Washington two hours earlier. By then they had already posted the main body of three hundred marshals around the university’s administration building, known as the Lyceum. Katzenbach had assumed that Meredith would be registered there, but he advised Doar that university officials had talked Burke Marshall out of registering on Sunday, for religious reasons. This change confronted Katzenbach with the unhappy decision of whether to leave the marshals all night at the Lyceum, pending registration the next morning, or to move them. Nothing would be easy, he reported, as downtown Oxford was jammed and tense. The first sightings of the marshals, with their white helmets and yellow armbands, had touched off alarms by radio bulletin and word of mouth. A hostile crowd swelled across the tree-dotted lawn called the Grove, outside the Lyceum. Students chanted “Go to hell, JFK!” and other unfriendly slogans.

  The only good news was that Barnett, true to the deal, had provided escorts of sullen but cooperative highway patrolmen. Some were helping to hold off the crowds at the Lyceum, while others escorted the prize onto the campus by a back road. By six thirty Sunday evening, little more than a half-hour after his plane landed, Meredith had picked out a room at deserted Baxter Hall. Katzenbach called Robert Kennedy to report the success, then posted marshals with orders to shoot anyone who tried to break into Meredith’s room. As he and Doar returned to the Lyceum to negotiate with university officials over the logistics of the next morning’s registration, Meredith pulled books from his briefcase and began to study.

  President Kennedy had postponed his national address until ten o’clock Washington time—eight o’clock in Mississippi—wanting to make sure that Meredith was safely at Ole Miss. There was nearly an hour and a half to spare when Robert Kennedy called Governor Barnett in Jackson to report that Meredith was safely installed in the dorm. The only deviation from the plan was that he had arrived by car instead of helicopter, and Kennedy advised the governor to revise his draft statement accordingly. Barnett replied glumly that it was too late to correct the minor error. He had no secretary to retype the press release. Within minutes, Barnett stunned Mississippi with his rueful announcement that the state’s defenders had been “physically overpowered” at Oxford.

  From this last smooth click of the complicated plan, events tumbled toward the abyss. By the time Katzenbach and Doar reached the Lyceum, the crowd outside had reached a thousand in number, mostly students. Anger was rising among them as dusk fell. While some shouted the rhythmic cheer “Go to Cuba, nigger lovers, go to Cuba!” others lobbed pebbles, then rocks, at the lines of marshals standing outside. Worst of all, a Mississippi state senator was inside the Lyceum with a proclamation, signed by Governor Barnett, authorizing him to take command of the highway patrol. Senator George Yarbrough was making no secret of his intention to withdraw the highway patrolmen from the scene. Now that the federal government had “invaded” Ole Miss and defiled it with Meredith, he told Doar and Katzenbach, the feds could defend themselves. Some of the highway patrolmen milling around were only too glad to hear it, but Doar and Katzenbach knew from the crowd’s ugly mood that withdrawal would invite disaster. Students were slashing the tires of the Army trucks parked outside. Somebody sprayed a truck driver in the face with a fire extinguisher. The darkness was making it harder for the marshals to dodge the flying rocks.

  Doar pleaded for time. Vainly hoping that the students would get tired, he asked Yarbrough to hold the highway patrol until nine, but Yarbrough said no. Each panicky report from outside made Doar desperate for more time and Yarbrough itchy for less. Meanwhile, Katzenbach relayed word of the emergency to Robert Kennedy in the White House Cabinet Room, and Kennedy leaped to the phone with the only proven threat he had: that a withdrawal by the highway patrol would break Mississippi’s promise to maintain order, in which case President Kennedy, who was preparing to go on national television, would announce that Mississippi leaders had made and then reneged on a deal. With raw warnings both to the Mississippi officials in the Lyceum and to Barnett in Jackson, he finally induced Barnett to order the highway patrol to stay. Doar and the others were masking their relief, so as not to provoke the mortified and rebellious Mississippians, when marshals burst in shouting that the patrolmen were drifting away. Now it was the Mississippians who masked their satisfaction, saying this could not be true. They pointed to some patrolmen still on duty.

  By this time the federal officials and the Mississippians no longer trusted their own eyes, let alone each other, and dozens of contradictory rumors flew at once. At first, Doar and Katzenbach preferred to believe the telephone reports over what they thought they saw happening outside the Lyceum, because the telephones connected them with those in authority. Eyewitness accounts of the withdrawal flew from the bank of pay phones inside the Lyceum to Robert Kennedy or Burke Marshall in the Cabinet Room, or to Ramsey Clark in the Justice Department command center, only to be refuted by those talking simultaneously to distant authorities such as Barnett or an Ole Miss trustee. Under the circumstances, the facts of the incipient riot fought their way up the pecking order in remarkably good time. Historian Walter Lord later pieced together files showing that FBI agents first overheard the withdrawal order on the highway patrol radio frequency at 7:25. Within nine minutes the startling news was being shouted from the post office “communications center” to the Lyceum and up to the White House, steadily beating back contrary reports. By 7:40, it was generally established that most of the highway patrolmen had vanished.

  It was 9:40 Washington time, twenty minutes before President Kennedy went on the air. Network technicians were adjusting their equipment in the Oval Office. In the Cabinet Room, Ted Sorensen went over the speech with the President, while Robert Kennedy reacted to the mounting apprehension coming over the wire from the Lyceum. When Ed Guthman told him the marshals might have to use tear gas, Kennedy said he still hoped to avoid it. Guthman scrambled to fetch Senator Yarbrough and Colonel Birdsong of the highway patrol, who argued directly with Kennedy about how many patrol officers had received Barnett’s order to stay at the Lyceum. By now each minute was crammed with shouts, fresh advances by the mob, new injuries, and new forms of chaos.

  The first flesh-to-flesh violence victimized newsmen, as in the Freedom Rides. Beaten by students, a television cameraman from Dallas struggled to what he thought was refuge inside his car, only to have the windows and fenders kicked in. As the contagion spread across the Lyceum lawn, students attacked two other reporters. An Ole Miss professor tried to rescue one of them but was himself beaten to the ground. Molotov cocktails—gasoline in Coke bottles—spread flames at the feet of several marshals. Senator Yarbrough, racing outside from his phone call with the Attorney General, was horrified to see that the marshals had put on their gas masks. The whole idea of dressing the marshals in civilian clothes had been to make them appear less military, less antagonizing to the Ole Miss students, but now they looked like ghoulish space warriors. Chief Marshal McShane ordered the men to remove their masks in exchange for Yarbrough’s desperate promise to make personal pleas for an end to the violence. Yarbrough plunged out into the swirling mo
b, but his shouts had no greater effect than any other loud noise. The students, darting closer and closer to the Lyceum, added bricks to their projectiles, and when the first big piece of lead pipe felled a marshal, McShane shouted for the tear gas. Cannisters were fired into the crowd from the marshals’ line all around the perimeter of the Lyceum. Battle chaos curled backward, as some choking marshals had forgotten or lost their gas masks. And because there had been no warning to the few remaining highway patrolmen struggling against the mob, these most dutiful of the Mississippi officers were rewarded with a dose of gas from behind at point-blank range. A casing knocked one patrolman unconscious and the gas nearly killed him. Mississippi officials screamed with rage at their federal allies.

  Inside the Lyceum, Colonel Birdsong was still on the phone with Robert Kennedy, who did not think well of his suggestion that Governor Barnett fly in from Jackson to make a speech to the mob. Ed Guthman, standing next to Birdsong, grabbed the telephone when he heard the thumping report of the first tear gas grenades. “Bob, I’m very sorry to report we’ve had to fire tear gas,” he said. “We had no choice.”

  It was 7:58 in Oxford. A minute later, Burke Marshall left the Cabinet Room for the Oval Office with news that Ole Miss had deteriorated into a full-scale riot, but the President was frozen in the commanding glare of the television lights. “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he began, facing the cameras from behind his desk. “The orders of the court in the case of Meredith v. Fair are beginning to be carried out.” Meredith was safely on campus, he said. National Guard units had not been used. The rule of law was prevailing, and students and professors alike could return to their normal activities. “This is as it should be,” said the President. Twice he emphasized to the nation that the federal government had not been party to the Meredith case. He announced the name and home state of each Fifth Circuit judge who had voted to send Meredith to Ole Miss, adding that his responsibility to carry out their order was “inescapable.” “I accept it,” he said.