by Scott Farris
What degree are Kennedy and Reagan responsible for these divisions? Scholar Garry Wills, biographer of both Kennedy and Reagan, has noted, “People want leaders whose responses are predictable, not erratic, who reflect a social consensus, who represent more than they enlighten.” Kennedy did not instigate the social changes associated with his administration, but as a young Catholic he did represent the growing consensus that there were things in American society that needed changing. His election broke a significant barrier and cheered other Americans who felt they were being excluded from full participation in society because of their religion, race, gender, or age. Other barriers would soon be broken.
Reagan embraced tradition. Yet he was unable to roll back the societal changes that occurred in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. If anything, new attitudes toward sex, marriage, gender roles, and many other things became more entrenched during the 1980s. And there is no evidence that political ideology predicts personal behavior. How we vote and how we behave are often two different things. Reagan’s rhetorical defense of traditional values, sincere but not often vigorously pursued in policies, did not return America to a supposedly better past, but by the very act of articulating the benefits of such values, he “made a dizzy rush toward the future less disorienting . . . [and] made it possible to live with change while not accepting it.”
CHAPTER 20
CIVIL RIGHTS
For most of his adult life, the only African American John F. Kennedy regularly spoke to was his black valet, George Thomas, who “had literally been a gift” from New York Times columnist Arthur Krock. Throughout most of his political career, Kennedy evinced little interest in civil rights or empathy for the plight of African Americans. As president, he continually urged blacks not to push too quickly for change; he worried that racial incidents embarrassed the United States abroad. He even tried to cancel the August 1963 March on Washington, now considered the high-water mark of the civil rights movement. Yet Kennedy ended up strongly identified with the civil rights movement, with some African Americans viewing him as “the Great Emancipator of the twentieth century.”
Ronald Reagan attended an integrated high school and an integrated college, where he played football with African-American teammates. He once had those black teammates stay at his parents’ home when the players were denied accommodations at a local hotel. A passionate opponent of anti-Semitism, one of the first political speeches Reagan made was to protest the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Still, as president, Reagan is most identified with “white backlash”—the belief that the civil rights movements changed from a struggle for equality to a demand for racial preference. Surveys conducted during Reagan’s presidency showed a majority of African Americans considered Reagan and his policies to be “racist.”
Despite these two very different life experiences and political legacies, for much of their lives Kennedy and Reagan held similar views on race and discrimination. While neither man had any close minority friends, in their dealings with African Americans and others they were known to be courteous, respectful, and free of personal bigotry. But they believed that there was little government could do to force racial conciliation. Change would take time, they believed, and their suggested remedy for African Americans who wished to improve their lot in society was for them to exercise their right to vote.
Kennedy and Reagan’s views on civil rights did not diverge until June 1963, when Kennedy had an epiphany five months before his assassination. Like much of the nation (and the world), Kennedy had been sickened by televised images of African-American children being attacked by police dogs during peaceful demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. On June 11 of that year, Kennedy finally defined civil rights as a moral issue that the nation was obliged to address in a meaningful way, and he announced that he would propose the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.
What became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not passed into law until eight months after Kennedy’s assassination, when a much more passionate advocate of civil rights, Lyndon Johnson, was president. While campaigning for the Republican presidential nominee that same year, Reagan opposed the legislation as being unconstitutional. Reagan believed, as Goldwater had articulated in his landmark treatise, The Conscience of a Conservative, that because the U.S Constitution said nothing about the federal government having a role in enforcing racial equality, there was nothing the federal government could legally do to end segregation. Only because of the Fifteenth Amendment could the federal government act, and that was only to protect the right of all citizens, including African Americans, to vote.
The debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, more than any other event, led African Americans to begin supporting the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers, while white Southerners began abandoning their generations-long loyalty to the Democratic Party and migrating to the Republican Party in droves.
This political realignment was radical and sudden. As recently as 1956, Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the black vote, while Nixon won nearly a third of the black vote in 1960. Goldwater won but 6 percent of the black vote in 1964, and no Republican has won more than 15 percent of the black vote since—and that was the percentage Reagan won in 1984.
A 1962 National Election Studies (NES) survey asked respondents which party they believed would do the most to ensure African Americans received fair treatment in jobs and housing; 23 percent said Democrats, 21 percent said Republicans, and 56 percent said there was no difference between the two parties. Just two years later, in 1964, NES asked the same question and 60 percent now said the Democrats would do the most to safeguard the rights of African Americans, 33 percent saw no difference between the two parties, and only 7 percent believed Republicans would do more to help African Americans.
It is improbable that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have become law—at least not in 1964—had Kennedy not been assassinated. Succeeding Kennedy, Johnson skillfully used the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination to convince a still hesitant Congress to approve the legislation as a memorial to the martyred president. Johnson then pushed through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Kennedy had played no part in developing prior to his death. But in popular memory, Kennedy is given credit for much of the civil rights legislation that occurred under Johnson’s leadership.
It did appear in the months preceding his murder that Kennedy had made an “irreversible commitment” to integration. But whether Kennedy would have been as successful as Johnson in shepherding the civil rights legislation into law had he lived cannot be known, nor can we know how far he was prepared to go in redressing the grievances of African Americans.
Kennedy was murdered while white consciousness regarding the extent of racial discrimination in America was still evolving. Had he lived, his views may have continued to evolve through the 1960s and 1970s and been identical to those held by the bulk of the liberal political establishment in that time. That was the path his brother Robert seemed to be taking until his own assassination in 1968. It is the dream of many Kennedy admirers that had one or both Kennedys lived, race relations in America would be very different today. But that is purely speculation.
At the time he was elected president, Kennedy’s views on race were not radically different from those held by Reagan and Goldwater. Author Nick Bryant, who has produced the most comprehensive analysis of Kennedy’s approach to civil rights, said Kennedy, as did conservatives, “remained chronically uneasy about using federal authority to engineer changes in race relations, much preferring self-correction over government compulsion.“
“You know what’s important?” Kennedy once told an African-American aide on one of his congressional campaigns. “Voting. It’s imperative that your people realize the importance of the ballot.” When, in 1961, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. urged Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation and to take a firm moral stand against segre
gation, Kennedy refused. Instead he offered King an alternative solution that sounded similar to what Goldwater or Reagan might have suggested: King and others should support voter registration projects. When blacks in the South and elsewhere began voting in significant numbers, politicians would respond and dismantle legalized discrimination. King responded that this was “not enough” and despaired whether Kennedy understood that the patience of African Americans was at an end.
In finally acceding to King’s proposed March on Washington (with the proviso that the federal government would handle the logistics in order to control the crowd), Kennedy warned King and fellow march organizer A. Philip Randolph that civil rights leaders should make no new demands beyond what was in the proposed Civil Rights Act, nor should they request any compensation for the past injustices of slavery and discrimination. Kennedy underscored there were limits as to how far he would go in redressing the grievances of African Americans.
At a news conference the week before the March on Washington, Kennedy was asked whether blacks should receive special government assistance or whether there should be quotas for black employment. “I don’t think we can undo the past,” Kennedy said, adding, “I don’t think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to begin to assign quotas on the basis of religion, or race, or color, or nationality. I think we’d get into a good deal of trouble.” All that his administration was trying to do, Kennedy said, was to give qualified people a “fair chance.”
It was nearly the same language Reagan would use two decades later in arguing for “race neutral” policies and against “affirmative action” programs that provided special assistance to minorities to help them enroll in college, land jobs, or win government contracts.
Neither Kennedy nor Reagan can be labeled a bigot, but they were products of their time. As president, Kennedy told this “joke” about the coming integration in housing: “Knock-knock.” . . . “Izya!” . . . “Izya who?” . . . “Izya new neighbor.” Reagan, while president, told a story privately to friends in which he intended to praise one of his black teammates on the Eureka College football team. Reagan said that William Franklin Burghardt, who later became a physician, was often the target of racial slurs from opposing teams, but that he played so hard and so well that one of his tormentors once sought him out after the game, extended his hand in friendship, and offered what the man, and Reagan, considered a tremendous compliment, “I just want you to know that you’re the whitest man I’ve ever met.”
Reagan claimed that his father had been adamant in teaching his sons to be free of racial prejudice. He said his father prohibited the family from seeing the film Birth of a Nation because it glorified the Ku Klux Klan (though Reagan himself would have been only four years old when the movie was released). His father also slept in his car one night, allegedly during a snowstorm, when a hotel owner bragged that the hotel did not admit Jewish guests. Reagan’s brother, Moon, had a best friend who was African American. Always bolder than Dutch, Moon was said to sit with his black friend in the balcony of the segregated movie theater in Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Illinois. Despite recalling these incidents in his own memoirs, Reagan still said that the America of his youth, “didn’t even know it had a racial problem.”
The story that Reagan most enjoyed telling to underscore his opposition to prejudice occurred during his days at Eureka College when the football team was on a road trip and, by chance, had to spend the night in Dixon. The hotel where the team was to stay refused to admit Eureka’s three black players. At first the Eureka coach intended to have the team spend the night on the bus, but Reagan intervened and volunteered to take his three black teammates home with him, where they would all be welcome to spend the night at his parents’ house.
Reagan’s son Ron has noted that his father’s actions were perhaps not as admirable as he believed them to be. First, the black players, as they later confirmed, fully understood why they were being shuttled to the Reagan home, so their feelings at being discriminated against were not spared. Second, Reagan’s act of selflessness rewarded racism. The coach’s first instinct to have all the players sleep on the bus would have prevented the hotel owner from profiting from his prejudice. This would also have made the white players aware of the discrimination their black teammates faced on a daily basis, and it would have created team solidarity. While not doubting his father was sincerely offended by discrimination, Ron Reagan said his father’s offer was more likely made from his well-known aversion to confrontation and his desire to be seen as the hero who ensured his white teammates got a good night’s sleep. It was one more example, Ron Reagan said, of his father’s determination to “ease his way . . . around an unpleasant brush with the rawness of life.”
Reagan’s passionate opposition to anti-Semitism was demonstrated when, while still in the Army, he nearly came to blows with a man who made an anti-Semitic comment at a Beverly Hills party. He later resigned from the Lakeside Country Club when he learned it was restricted and tried to convince other members to do the same. Horrified by film footage of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, he made each of his sons watch the film when they turned age fourteen so that they could see the evil of racism.
One of Reagan’s first forays into politics after the war was a speech he gave at a “United America Day” rally at the Santa Ana Municipal Bowl to protest how returning Nisei veterans were being treated in Southern California. The rally honored a Nisei soldier, Staff Sergeant Kazuo Masuda, who had died in combat. Reagan, still in uniform, spoke after General Joseph W. Stillwell, but exactly what he said is a matter of dispute. In 1988, when Reagan was preparing to sign legislation to compensate the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II, the White House “discovered” a copy of Reagan’s remarks in which he said, “The blood that has soaked into the sands of the beaches is all one color. America stands unique in the world—a country not founded on race, but on a way and an ideal.” However, contemporary news accounts of the event made no such mention of such impassioned eloquence. The only news account has Reagan saying in simple words that actually convey more feeling, “Mr. and Mrs. Masuda, just as one member of the family of Americans, speaking to another member, I want to say for what your son Kazuo did—Thanks.”
Reagan could be outraged by injustice suffered by an individual, but that did not translate into an understanding that a group of individuals could be facing the same injustice, which demanded collective action to correct.
Just as his religious faith was rooted in the primacy of personal salvation, so he believed that individuals could effect change no matter the obstacles they faced. This opinion was reinforced by his own remarkable success—a small-town Illinois boy whose father was an alcoholic who became a movie star, a governor, and the president. If he could achieve such heights, it could only be through lack of initiative that others could not as well.
He further believed that the individual who could change his or her own position in life was also the force of social change—not the communal action of a government. He firmly believed, and was never persuaded otherwise, that the Armed Forces had been desegregated not as it happened, by order of President Harry Truman in 1948, but shortly after Pearl Harbor and because a black cook in the Navy had shown extraordinary heroism by grabbing an unmanned machine gun and firing away at attacking Japanese planes. (The heroism of the cook, Seaman Dorie Miller, was real, but it did not lead to any action that desegregated the military.)
When discussing welfare reform, Reagan liked to tell the story of a black woman in New York who cared for parentless juveniles as an example of how individuals could solve societal problems without need of government programs. Conversely, Reagan believed those who were poor were the architects of their fate. When discussing the food stamp program with Oregon senator Bob Packwood, Reagan told a story that he said exemplified “what’s wrong” with the program: “You know a person told me yesterday about a young m
an who went into a grocery store and he had an orange in one hand a bottle in the other and he paid for the orange with food stamps and he took the change and paid for the vodka.” To whatever degree Reagan accepted stories that would now be termed “urban myths,” it caused despair even among supporters. After Packwood related the story to journalists, New York Times columnist William Safire sighed that Reagan was in his “anecdotage.”
Despite his talk of “welfare queens,” who usually happened to be black, Reagan deeply resented insinuations that he was prejudiced. In 1966, during his first campaign for governor of California, Reagan and his Republican primary opponent, George Christopher, were invited to address a meeting of the National Negro Republican Assembly, which was gathering in Santa Monica. One of the delegates asked Reagan why blacks should support him since he had joined Goldwater in opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Reagan gave what biographer Lou Cannon termed a “boilerplate answer decrying racial bigotry,” Christopher then charged that Goldwater and Reagan’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act had done “more harm than any other thing to the Republican Party . . . unless we cast out this image, we’re going to suffer defeat.” At that, Reagan stood up and yelled at the surprised delegates, “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” and stormed out of the meeting. After cooling off at home for an hour, campaign aides convinced Reagan to return to the conference, where he apologized—for walking out.