American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Suddenly the third horse in the American troika came galloping to the rescue when the Supreme Court—supposedly the “nonpolitical” branch— in the Brown case on May 17, 1954, held racially segregated public schools in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision burst on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers like a bombshell, but Court-watchers were not so surprised. Roosevelt appointees, including Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter, still held a majority on the High Court; gifted black and white attorneys for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations had been pressing the courts for redress; and the Supreme Court in 1950 had struck down state laws failing to satisfy blacks’ Fourteenth Amendment rights in higher or professional education. Still, the Brown decision was breathtaking—in its extension of these rights to hundreds of thousands of children in elementary schools and in its frank reversal of the pro-segregation Plessy decision of 1896 and its endorsement by all nine justices, headed by Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren.

  But even the Supreme Court, acting decisively in the policy void left by anti-civil rights congressional leadership and presidential nonleadership, could not shake the Senate bastion. How would the justices’ decision be enforced, especially since the Warren Court had left open the implementation formula? Against the gathering civil rights forces North and South the southern Democratic senators fought to defend the right to filibuster— which for them was a fight for the “southern way of life.” Johnson, eternally balancing interests, institutions, and ideologies, struggled to find some common ground. “I knew that if I failed to produce on this one,” he said later, “my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces.”

  The upshot was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which emerged from the legislative obstacle race as a weak voting rights bill, stripped of its provisions enforcing school desegregation. Liberal Democrats found some consolation in the hope that once southern blacks gained the right to vote with the help of the new measure, they could use their newfound power to gain more goals. Others, including many blacks, contended that Negroes could win freedom and equality only by pressing ahead on all fronts—desegregation, fair employment, housing, welfare, as well as voting—in a manner that allowed these changes to be mutually reinforcing. This strategic issue was never put to the test because the voting measure of 1957 produced very little voting. Two years later fewer than two hundred blacks were registered to vote in Alabama’s Dallas County, only a total of five blacks in three other Alabama counties. For countless blacks and others, “liberal democracy,” American style, did not appear to be working even for the most elementary of rights, the right to vote.

  Nor did “liberal democracy” now have the luxury of time. Even as Eisenhower signed the 1957 bill in mid-September, tension was rising over the barring of blacks from Little Rock high schools by order of the governor. In two weeks the President reluctantly sent a thousand federal paratroopers to the Arkansas capital to force integration against the will of the state government and the mob. The blacks there were making school integration, not voting rights, the issue. As the mobilized civil rights forces pursued direct action and as massive resistance and noting by whites broke out elsewhere in the lower South, it was more and more evident that Congress must once again face the issues of voting rights and schools.

  A long guerrilla battle broke out in the Capitol contrapuntally to the struggle in the South. Once again the filibuster rule stood firm in the Senate; indeed, this kind of obstruction reached a new high when a moderate civil rights bill ran into a filibuster in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was found to have no cloture rule. With Eisenhower offering little support because, he said, he had “very little faith in the ability of statutory law to change the human heart, or to eliminate prejudice,” the 1957 voting rights bill was somewhat strengthened in 1960 but enforcement of school desegregation was killed.

  Johnson was still the Negotiator-in-Chief, bargaining with the White House and helping build coalitions for or against specific sections of the civil rights bill. But now the political environment was changing as the 1960 presidential election neared. And Lyndon Johnson, determined to seek the presidency, confronted a rival who as a senator was no great shakes but was vigorously building a national constituency. This was John F. Kennedy.

  The two men had more in common than either might wish to admit. Each had had a nurturing mother and a demanding father who had fired up his ambition and helped satisfy it. Each had represented a poverty-stricken congressional district that he had won after furious battles with a bevy of fellow Democrats. Both had been bored in the House of Representatives. Each was highly ambitious, politically cautious, rhetorically bold. Both had had serious health problems. Navy veterans, they were part of the postwar generation of tough-minded, “pragmatic” politicians. But the differences between them were more profound. JFK had observed poverty; LBJ had lived in it. Kennedy could depend on his father to supply political money; Johnson had to turn to businessmen outside his family. The Massachusetts senator had an inbred cosmopolitan style that the Majority Leader disdained and envied. The biggest contrast, though, lay in their constituencies—Johnson’s in the Senate, in the congressional parties he traded with, and in the South; Kennedy’s in the larger, urban, ethnic states that held the big, balance-of-power chunks of the electoral college.

  On civil rights Kennedy had hardly shown a profile in courage. He had favored sending the 1957 measure to that graveyard of civil rights legislation, the Judiciary Committee, to the outrage of black leaders and northern liberals, and to the delight of southern senators including Eastland, who promptly stated his support for Kennedy for President. Later he lined up with the liberals in voting for the desegregation part of a 1960 bill, although—or perhaps because—it had little chance of passing. His civil rights stand, as his loyal aide Theodore Sorensen later lamented, was still “shaped primarily by political expediency instead of basic human principles.”

  The shape of “political expediency” had changed by 1960. While Johnson as an established national leader thought he could campaign for the presidency from the Senate, Kennedy knew that he must convert his magazine-cover fame into grass-roots voting support in the key presidential primaries, every one of which posed critical challenges for him. He had to placate ADA liberals turned off by his compromises on McCarthy and civil rights, veteran party leaders like Harry Truman who flatly opposed him, southern conservatives against him for both religious and ideological reasons, Stevenson loyalists who wanted their man to have the opportunity to run against someone besides Ike.

  The Kennedy people believed they could deal with such traditional political pressures, but three other “issues” bristled: the candidate’s religion, his youth, and his father. The Kennedy office made intensive studies of the “Catholic element” in voting, put out analyses suggesting the advantages of a Catholic running for office, and were immensely relieved when Protestant West Virginia, stimulated by heavy campaign spending, gave Kennedy a clear win over Humphrey in its primary. Kennedy rebutted the youth issue with talk about a “new generation of leadership.” His father and his father’s money he handled with humor. To a 1958 Gridiron Club dinner, he read a telegram from his “generous daddy”: “Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” The remorseless correspondents replied with a song at the next year’s Gridiron to the tune of “All of Me”:

  All of us

  Why not take all of us

  Fabulous

  You can’t live without us

  My son Jack

  Heads the procession

  Groomed for succession.…

  Brilliantly supported by a small campaign group headed by the versatile Sorensen, amply financed by his father, intensively covered by television that projected his image to millions of new tube watchers, and assisted by Kennedy enthusiasts who traveled hundreds of miles to “help Jack,” Kennedy picked his way adroitly through the political minefields
and lined up enough Democratic convention delegates weeks in advance to bring him victory on the first ballot in Los Angeles.

  Trounced on the convention floor, Johnson now had to contemplate the humiliation of being passed over for running mate. He wanted to be Vice President, both to position himself as JFK’s successor someday and because he believed that he could convert any job—even Throttlebottom’s— into a power base. Kennedy’s first-ballot victory was followed by a wild day in which the candidate and his brother Robert lost control of the process of picking a running mate—a process that LBJ would have handled with brutal skill. The struggle over the vice-presidential choice was so complex and murky that historians were still differing in their accounts decades later, but this much seemed clear: in the maneuvering before the convention, Kennedy had long and seriously considered LBJ, but the names of Humphrey, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, Governors G. Mennen Williams of Michigan and Orville Freeman of Minnesota, and others had also been put forward; in a typical politicians’ confrontation, the nominee halfheartedly offered his beaten rival the nomination and LBJ halfheartedly declined, in part because “Mr. Sam” Rayburn opposed acceptance; labor and liberal leaders implored the Kennedy people to reject Johnson; hours of confusion passed as pro- and anti-Johnson people pressured Kennedy, and LBJ’s friends pressured him to run and not to run; Bobby offered to try to persuade LBJ not to accept and Jack wished him good luck; Bobby’s missions ran into an increasingly indignant Johnson and retinue; and JFK suddenly put an end to the whole business by telling Johnson he not only wanted him but would fight for him. That was what Johnson, burning with indignation at “that little shit-ass” Bobby, wanted to hear.

  One vice-presidential nomination was far from enough, however, to assuage the various wounds left by the Los Angeles convention. Even before it ended, the party seemed to crack: Russell had quit the convention early because he feared the “evil threat” to “our Southland” of the pro-civil rights party platform, while Eleanor Roosevelt quietly departed out of disappointment that her close friend and ally Adlai Stevenson had neither made much effort for the nomination nor been accorded the support she felt was due him. Harry Truman hadn’t put in an appearance; nine days before the convention opened, he had blasted Kennedy at a televised press conference and condemned the convention as a “prearranged affair.” Protestant spokesmen were hostile; some leading Catholics feared that a Kennedy campaign would simply exacerbate ancient hostilities.

  Of all the specific fence-mending he had to do, the most crucial to Kennedy was a reconciliation with Eleanor Roosevelt, the conscience of the party and the channel to alienated Stevensonians and ADA liberals who could have critical influence in California and New York. So skillfully did Kennedy handle a showdown meeting with the former First Lady in Hyde Park—like Napoleon and Alexander’s meeting on their “raft at Tilsit,” he called it—that she warmed to him and soon became one of his most enthusiastic campaigners.

  Some of his fences mended, Kennedy plunged into his campaign. Awaiting him was Richard M. Nixon, who had won Ike’s glum support, easily fought off an inept challenge by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and been nominated by acclamation.

  The battle that followed left glowing images on the nation’s memory: Nixon’s lightning trips to all fifty states, including Hawaii and Alaska, as he had rashly promised—Kennedy’s audacious mission to Texas, where he assured a gathering of the Houston Ministerial Association, chaired by Norman Vincent Peale, that he believed in “an America where the separation of church and stale is absolute”—the first of four televised debates, with Nixon holding his own on substance but losing on the television screen—Kennedy’s compassionate and astute telephone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., after her husband was jailed in Georgia—and the huge crowds, swollen by the debates, and fronted by long lines of “jumpers” bobbing up and down in waves as the candidates passed. Then the long tense election evening, as Kennedy took an early lead, only to watch it slowly erode and leave him with the narrowest of victories.

  The Invisible Latins

  “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” John F. Kennedy looked out at the sea of faces in the Capitol Plaza reflecting the cold January sun. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The new President’s voice was strong and confident.

  “To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge— to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

  So finely honed were the bracing inaugural words, so masterfully delivered, so euphorically received, that many missed the deep ambivalences and dichotomies interwoven throughout:

  Man “holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” Americans still had their old “revolutionary beliefs.” But: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that 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—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights … to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

  Let every nation know that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

  Kennedy decried the cost of arms, the “steady spread of the deadly atom” and urged that “both sides begin anew the quest for peace.” But: “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

  “Let us never fear to negotiate.” But: “Let us never negotiate out of fear.”

  “Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” But: “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”

  The whole inaugural address, like many before and since, was a “celebration of freedom,” in Kennedy’s words—of liberty, the ranks of the free, of revolutionary rights, of a free society, of free men and free governments, of the freedom of humankind. But far more than the other addresses, Kennedy’s reflected the nation’s uncertainty and confusion over the meaning of freedom.

  Did Kennedy’s ambivalences reflect, in his own character and ideology, polarities that had originated in his earlier divided self? Or were they merely the familiar hedging of the American politician? Probably both, but the sheer breadth of his inaugural dichotomies suggested more that they were deep-seated. In the end, however, the new President’s words would be tested in action. Within two months of his inaugural Kennedy spoke to the Latin American diplomatic corps in the East Room of the White House in the language of hope:

  “I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—Alianza para Progreso—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y terra, salud y escuela.” He laid out a program for economic development through
national planning, regional marketing, commodity stabilization, hemispheric cooperation in education and research. “Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts—a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women—an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand.”

  Enchanted by this eloquent, dynamic young President, inspired by both his rhetoric and his recommendations, the diplomats in the East Room that day burst into applause. “We have not heard such words since Franklin Roosevelt,” the Venezuelan ambassador remarked to Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger. But mixed with the new hope of the Latin Americans was their collective memory of their earlier relationship with the “colossus of the North.”

  It was only a half century since imperial American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, hardly more than thirty years since Calvin Coolidge had sent troops into Nicaragua to help check the insurrectionist leader Augusto Sandino. To be sure, President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson had talked a less interventionist line in the early 1930s, and FDR and Hull’s Good Neighbor policy, with its emphasis on the lowering of trade barriers and nonintervention, had come as a powerful breath of fresh air to Latin Americans. Even under FDR, however, Washington remained deeply involved in the internal affairs of nations such as Cuba, and the Good Neighbor idea itself had been more a fine helping of rhetoric about freedom and the equal rights of all the American nations than a vehicle of economic or social reform. The main continuities of Washington’s interventionist policy toward Latin America over the decades had been unpredictability and volatility. For most Americans, Latin America was the great “invisible” land that burst onto the national consciousness only when some crisis—a revolution, a natural catastrophe, a phenomenon like Juan and Evita Perón of Argentina—for a brief time seized the headlines.