by Thomas Maier
EARLY IN THE ADMINISTRATION, Hesburgh remembered a telephone chat with Bobby in which he offered “free advice,” as a good pastor might tug at the conscience of a parishioner. The priest told him that civil rights was “the greatest moral problem facing our country” and that Kennedy, as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, could provide the necessary leadership. “Bob is for something, or he’s against it,” Hesburgh observed. “And normally, I think he’s on the side of the angels, and this is good.” Privately, Bobby complained about “second-guessing” from Hesburgh and the Civil Rights Commission, as if they were unaware of the political realities of dealing with the South. Over time, though, a succession of dramatic, often violent, events in the South transformed Kennedy himself. Once a zealous and often callous protector of his brother’s political fortune, the young attorney general became the administration’s catalyst for change. Bobby’s headstrong, almost pugnacious morality, now applied to civil rights in the same way he once tackled the Mafia and union corruption. This epiphany amused his older brother as it moved him. “Don’t worry about Bobby,” Jack teased as an old friend wondered about the attorney general’s dour mood. “He’s probably all choked up over Martin Luther King and his Negroes today.”
Within the administration, Robert Kennedy increasingly advocated the strongest case against discrimination, the toughest measures for ensuring liberties to all Americans of color. When James Meredith was denied entry as the first Negro to attend the University of Mississippi, he dispatched federal marshals in 1962 to ensure that a U.S. appeals court order opening the door was enforced. After a bloody confrontation that left two dead and many injured, President Kennedy was forced to send in the military to restore calm at the Ole Miss campus.“We could just visualize another great disaster, like the Bay of Pigs, and a lot of marshals being killed or James Meredith being strung up,” Bobby recalled. For all of their teasing and talk of toughness (“Go get ’em, Johnny boy,” Bobby cried mockingly before the president got on the phone with the recalcitrant Mississippi governor), the Kennedy brothers were shocked by the bloodshed in the South. They seemed taken aback, as if their own background had not prepared them for the severity of America’s race problem.
These battles disturbed Robert Kennedy’s restless soul, his fierce inner voice that had once prompted Alice Roosevelt Longworth to remark that “Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest.” By his own measure, Bobby, the devout Catholic, found his church wanting in racial matters. When he resigned from Washington’s Metropolitan Club because of its restrictive membership, critics pointed out that the attorney general’s kids attended a still all-white Catholic private school in Virginia. To the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate to the United States, Kennedy complained that some priests and Catholic laity were fostering discrimination as much as white Protestants, even though their immigrant forebears had been once so targeted. Kennedy told the Pope’s representative that the “most racist institution in the South is my own church.”With no sense of irony, the Apostolic Delegate claimed that he didn’t get involved in politics.
Though the history of Negroes in America was vastly different than the Irish, the attorney general continued to rely on analogies to better understand the injustice of their situation. Such an occasion arose during a tense situation in Montgomery, Alabama, when Martin Luther King and several hundred Freedom Riders found sanctuary in a Baptist church, away from an angry white mob twice their number. On the telephone to Washington, King pleaded with Kennedy to increase the small band of U.S. marshals protecting the Freedom Riders inside the church. During their conversation, as he assured King that he’d do everything possible to protect him, the attorney general seemed to find parallels between the Negro and Irish immigrant experiences, just as he had done with James Baldwin and his group. As the civil rights leader listened,Kennedy recalled stories his grandfather, Honey Fitz, had once told him about anti-Catholic mobs surrounding Boston in the nineteenth century, threatening immigrants’ lives and burning a convent outside of Boston. “As long as you’re in church, Reverend King, and our men are down there, you might as well say a prayer for us,” Bobby joked. Just like Baldwin, King wasn’t amused and didn’t appreciate the analogy. Peeved by King’s lack of appreciation, Kennedy reminded the civil rights leader that if he hadn’t called in the federal marshals to provide protection, King might have been “as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—a Kennedy variation of an old Irish phrase.
POLITICS AND RELIGION were deeply woven into the civil rights debates of the Kennedy years. Although the administration’s decisions were essentially legal and tactical, King’s movement for racial equality was shaped by his own religiosity—a blend of Christianity with the nonviolent idealism of Gandhi. Robert Kennedy became a behind-the-scenes advocate for King’s efforts, despite reservations of his own. As the nation’s top cop, he disagreed with massive demonstrations of civil disobedience. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover convinced the attorney general that one of King’s top lieutenants was a secret Communist and put a wiretap on King’s phones. These transcripts also revealed that King was less than saintly in sexual matters. Bobby passed along this compromising information to his brother, who warned King that he was under surveillance and should be careful about Communists in his own ranks. Nevertheless, King’s words and actions had their effect on the Kennedys. His appeal to conscience was heeded by Bobby, who compelled his brother to act more resolutely on civil rights. If JFK felt he could ignore his civil rights promises until a second term, Bobby convinced him that they could no longer wait. As Martin Luther King Jr. noted, there were “two JFKs” during the thousand days of Kennedy’s tenure. As a candidate and early occupant in the White House, King thought “he [Kennedy] would compromise basic principles” and renege on his promises in order to maintain power. But over time, a second JFKemerged, the one who developed “a great understanding of the moral issues” surrounding civil rights. It would take another set of tragedies in the South to place both Kennedy brothers firmly in King’s camp.
IN SPRING 1963, national television showed black Americans engaged in peaceful protest against discrimination in Birmingham being blasted by water hoses, chased by K-9 police dogs and beaten by police. Scenes of pandemonium illustrated the evils of Jim Crow laws and institutional racism in the South far better than any speech or sermon. The Birmingham house of King’s brother, the Reverend A.D. King,was bombed, and so was the motel that King himself used as a temporary headquarters. Weeks later, four black girls were killed when a bomb ripped through a Baptist church, which brought unbearable sorrow to their families and horrified the nation. The events in Birmingham forced President Kennedy to place civil rights at the top of his political agenda, with a moral conviction evident in his words and actions. Kennedy’s television address in June 1963 condemned the violence and bigotry in the South and proposed a sweeping new civil rights bill. He spoke to the nation on the same day that Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway of the University of Alabama to incoming black students. Though one of the most historic addresses of the Kennedy era, the speech was put together so quickly and under such a short deadline that the president ad-libbed some parts and read some lines from the back of an envelope.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy proclaimed. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” He outlined some of the fundamental inequities facing Negroes in America—lower wages, less education, a shorter life expectancy than whites. He emphasized that the federal government wouldn’t tolerate the racial mayhem tearing apart Birmingham or any other place in the nation. “I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents,”Kennedy said.“When Americans are sent to Viet Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.
”This phrase echoed the reply Kennedy had made in the 1960 campaign about anti-Catholic bigotry in which he noted that no one had asked his religion when he served in the Pacific during World War II. His words about the second-class status of Negroes also carried a certain resonance with a president whose parents and grandparents had once told him about the “Irish Need Not Apply”signs in old Boston. As he asked, “Are we to say to the world—and much more importantly to each other—that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except for Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?” In response, Kennedy sent to Congress new legislation to ensure that public facilities—hotels, restaurants, theaters and stores—would be open to all Americans, regardless of race. He also promised that the federal government would seek more power to bring lawsuits against public school districts that segregated children according to skin color, and eliminate all Jim Crow barriers and obstacles to voting for Negroes.
“Therefore, let it be clear,” Kennedy concluded, “that it is not merely because of the Cold War, not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity. The basic reason is because it is right.”
If America, wracked by civil unrest throughout the South, needed any more convincing about Kennedy’s appeal to the nation’s collective conscience, it came that same night, shortly past midnight, when an assassin shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers outside his home. Evers was coming from a late-night NAACP meeting with a stack of T-shirts bearing the slogan “Jim Crow Must Go.” His three children, who had waited up to hear his opinion of Kennedy’s speech, instead saw their father bleed to death.
PLENTY OF DOUBTS lingered among Kennedy aides. Ranking members of the Irish Mafia—Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien—felt the president’s speech went too far, that their boss could not afford to lose any more Southern votes. White voters in the North, many of them Catholics and from ethnic immigrant backgrounds, were uneasy with the civil rights marches, the violence and the protests. Few saw parallels with their own experiences as minorities in American society, particularly as they became ensconced in the middle class.“This could cost me the election,” Kennedy conceded to one Negro leader,“but we’re not turning back.” By that summer, Kennedy’s civil rights proposals were “threatening to generate a large-scale revolt in the South,”warned U.S. News and World Report, and predicted that JFK “cannot draw enough votes alone from the big-city States to win” in 1964.
Within the White House, the president gauged the vehement reaction of Southern senators and congressmen and wondered whether he’d made a colossal mistake.“Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up?” Kennedy asked his brother, as though he needed reassurance. “Look at the trouble it’s got us in.”
Robert Kennedy instinctually knew the president’s actions were correct and showed the moral courage that John Kennedy extolled in his writings. As the prodding force behind the president’s embrace of civil rights, Bobby was vilified in the South. He became his brother’s biggest political liability, and seriously considered resigning from his job before the 1964 reelection campaign. Yet Bobby never lost his faith in the civil rights movement. He also saw to it that money went to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) rather than more radical black leaders who would inflame white opposition.
For the massive March on Washington that summer, Robert Kennedy acted like an organizer for King. Initially, President Kennedy tried to discourage the event, worried that it could threaten his civil rights success in Congress. But when King’s march became inevitable, Bobby directed a Kennedy advance man, Jerry Bruno, to oversee the public address system for the ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial. When Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, the archbishop of Washington, D.C.—who had desegregated Catholic schools in the late 1940s—balked at giving the invocation because of what he considered a violence-provoking line in the prepared text of another speaker, Bobby Kennedy fixed the problem and convinced the archbishop to stay. He was well aware of the need to keep Catholics, especially those who might remember the discrimination against their own families, from leaving the civil rights movement or being alienated by it. As Bobby later acknowledged, “It would have been very bad if the Catholic Church . . . I mean the Archbishop was pulling out of the civil rights movement.” Instead, the Kennedy brothers’ help set the stage for one of the most eloquent moments in American history— King’s “I have a dream” speech in front of thousands before him and an anxious nation watching on television. That night, King visited the White House. A visibly impressed President Kennedy reached out to shake his hand and told him, “I have a dream.”
THE CHANGES IN THE Kennedy brothers were remarkable to behold. Once indifferent to race, almost callously so, Bobby’s experiences in 1963— including the raucous meeting with writer James Baldwin and friends— had taught him that there was no turning back, that America must change, and without a bloody revolution. “As an authentic disaster, the Baldwin meeting made Robert Kennedy a pioneer in the raw, interracial encounters of the 1960s,” historian Taylor Branch observed. “What was intensely personal no longer seemed so distinct from policy, nor public from private.”
John Kennedy’s transformation was more enigmatic, far more difficult to trace than his brother’s emotional route. Some suggest Kennedy made the link between racial and religious prejudice well before he became president. In an oral history for the Kennedy library, Belford Lawson, an African- American political supporter from Washington, D.C., recalled his introduction to Kennedy during the 1956 Democratic Convention. He later suggested how the black vote might help Kennedy become the first Catholic elected to the presidency. “Being a member of a minority, I knew what his problems might be,” Lawson recalled.“He went on to tell me, as he had said several times since, about the problems the Irish have.”When Lawson asked Kennedy for a recommendation for his son’s entry to Groton, the New England prep school, Kennedy “went on to spell out how he couldn’t get into Groton” because of prejudice and instead went to Choate. Lawson wasn’t sure how seriously to take Kennedy’s comment, but he said the story “was indicative of our consensus regarding the problems of minorities.”
As president, Kennedy seemed to welcome comparisons to Abraham Lincoln’s dilemma over the Emancipation Proclamation, how that revered president had wavered for months in office until he took a strong stance for racial equality. Some biographers suggest that Kennedy’s enlightenment on race came from his innate faculties, nurtured in progressive citadels such as Harvard, and came shining through in splendid form during his televised civil rights speech, the product of a refined and detached intellect. “Contrary to some reports,Kennedy was not converted to this cause by the eloquence of some persuasive preacher or motivated by his own membership in a minority group,” contended Sorensen. “John Kennedy’s convictions on equal rights—like his convictions on nearly all subjects—were reached gradually, logically and coolly, ultimately involving a dedication of the heart even stronger than that of the mind.” As eloquent a Boswell as Sorensen could be to his boss’s memory, there was clearly more at play in this transformation than Kennedy revealed. This development, this moral struggle seemed better appreciated from a distance, especially by those who had once feared Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights would be merely rhetorical. “Historians will record that he vacillated like Lincoln, but he lifted the cause far above the political level,” Martin Luther King Jr. later said of the president with whom he’d cajoled and struggled.“You could see emerging a new Kennedy who had come to see the moral issues involved in the civil rights struggle and who not only came to see them but who was now willing to stand up in a courageous manner for them. . . . He came to see in a way that he had probably never seen—and in a way that many other people finally came to see—that segregation was morally wrong and it did something to the souls of both the segregato
r and the segregated.”
By appealing to America’s collective conscience, with actions and imagery that struck a chord with millions, Kennedy finally asserted himself to heal the wound of America’s racial divisions. He began to understand the unique difficulties of the black experience in America in a way he had never done before. Those who doubted his sincerity about civil rights realized that Kennedy’s background probably made it easier for him to relate to the black experience.“He had an Irish sense about the comedy of life and a tragic view of the human condition, but he had a remarkable belief that reason can be brought to bear to solve these problems,” Harris Wofford recalled. Jack Kennedy could see parallels with other minorities who landed in America. “Mr. Kennedy’s whole life gave him an understanding of discrimination and bigotry, because he came from a religion and a nationality which had known persecution,” observed Harry Golden, author of Only in America, who was one of the few white commentators to make the connection between Kennedy’s long-held views on immigration and his emerging advocacy of civil rights.“When Mr. Kennedy publicly applauded the unorganized street demonstrations and approved the March on Washington, he may have related this vitality of the American Negro to the determination with which the Irish immigrant went about the task of making a better world for his children.”
Within a few weeks of the Birmingham television speech, the president announced his intent to fight racism in another part of government—the nation’s immigration system—a topic far less heralded in the press but one even closer to his own history.
IMMIGRATION NEVER left his mind. At the time he announced his new immigration plan, Jack Kennedy was preparing an update of his little-known book, A Nation of Immigrants. He now planned to use a newly revised version of his 1958 booklet to help push his legislation for immigration reform. As Bobby later pointed out, his brother intended the updated book “as a weapon of enlightenment” in the battle to get his legislation passed.