American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Investigations, official findings on the assassination, did not satisfy most Americans, nor did the passage of time put the event into a comfortable perspective. But John Kennedy, a fatalist who had lost a brother and a sister in aircraft tragedies, might have seen Dallas only as the ultimate proof of his favorite adage: “Life is unfair.” So was death.

  John Kennedy had planned on almost three thousand days in office; he was given a third of that. Lincoln and McKinley had enjoyed at least full first terms and the satisfaction of reelections. It was the brutal cutting off of a young leader of a young administration that appalled people. After earlier mishaps, he had been coming into the fullness not only of his presidential power but of personal fulfillment. He had told a friend some months before his presidential campaign that while some people had their liberalism “made” by their late twenties, “I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.”

  Still caught in these crosscurrents, the President for a year or two seemed to be four persons: a rhetorical radical delivering the ringing speeches Theodore Sorensen and others prepared for him; the policy liberal carefully husbanding his power and weighing the balance of interests and attitudes; the fiscal conservative, always intent, like FDR, on balancing the budget and, like FDR, always failing; and the institutional conservative who accepted the constraints around him and planned on vitalizing the torpid governmental system by jolts of New Frontier electricity. These four Kennedys could not coexist for long and they did not; toward the end the eloquent leader was moving the policy liberal toward stronger positions and toward Keynesian economics, although not toward any assault on the institutional chains and checks.

  Watching Kennedy during his early presidential months, pundits and politicians noted his calculating approach to politics and policy, his personal self-control and self-containment. Civil rights posed the great test of these qualities. For two years he and his brother Robert had analyzed the mounting struggle in the South by the same standards as they had conventional and quantifiable problems like taxation or Social Security. Just as the policies and priorities could be weighed and balanced off against one another, so the prescriptions could be measured out in droplets—for southern blacks, voter education and registration programs, case-by-case litigation, step-by-step policy making.

  The passion in the black movement, in contrast, was beyond calculation. By Kennedy’s third year in office that passion could not be contained. When Birmingham and other flash points threatened to burst into flames, King warned the Administration that it was at a “historic crossroad” and now it must face “its moral commitment and with it, its political fortunes.” Kennedy the rhetorical radical must come across. Within a few weeks Kennedy recognized the “moral crisis” that could not be met by repression or tokenism. Still, the leadership had come from the bottom, from Rosa Parks and all her counterparts across the South who had acted while others preached. They created the events that in turn moved the Administration. The White House had mainly reacted.

  These leaders had given Kennedy, indeed the whole nation, a lesson in freedom. For Kennedy freedom had meant Bill of Rights liberties, constitutional procedures, liberal tolerance. For blacks freedom meant also self-expression, self-respect, dignity, status, power. They had their own language of freedom—they talked about freedom rides, freedom songs, freedom schools, the freedom movement. They were following Ella Baker’s cardinal principle: “You must let the oppressed themselves define their own freedom.” In the end it was not his Irish-American heritage but civil rights principles backed up by black pressure that moved John Kennedy toward an expanded concept of freedom.

  An eager lover of life and fun and paradox, a man of rationality and restraint and realism, he had only an amused contempt for the theatrical gesture, the sentimental idealist, the quixotic hero. This made the cause of his death—the smashing, blinding bullets arching out of nowhere—all the more incomprehensible, all the more unbearable to those who had known and loved him.

  We Shall Overcome

  Lyndon B. Johnson lost no time in taking the oath of office, grasping firmly the reins of power, and making passage of the civil rights bill his top legislative priority. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he told Congress in a brief address five days after the assassination. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” This was the kind of talk black leaders wanted to hear—and had not expected to hear from the Johnson they had known.

  But it was Congress that passed the laws, and Congress on civil rights continued to provide a masterly example of American government in inaction. The civil rights bill was still in the hands of the House Rules Committee, chaired by Judge Howard W. Smith, the venerable Virginian who had led the counterattack against FDR’s New Deal in the late 1930s. At a critical moment during the combat over the 1957 civil rights bill he had delayed consideration by discovering that he must return home to inspect a barn that had burned, upon which Speaker Rayburn quipped that although he knew Howard Smith would do anything to block a civil rights bill, “I never knew he would resort to arson.” Finally opening proceedings before the Rules Committee in January 1964, he proved that he had not exhausted his parliamentary bag of tricks when he scheduled day after day of hearings on what he called this “nefarious bill.” At last voted out of the Rules Committee, the measure had then to run the House gantlet of days of debate on complex provisions and amendments. Smith threw male members of the House into confusion by moving to add the word “sex” to the list of forbidden discriminations—race, creed, color, and national origin. Designed more to kill the bill than to promote equal rights for women, his amendment prevailed after vigorous lobbying by the National Women’s Party.

  By early 1964, however, parliamentary maneuvers alone could not stop a measure whose time had come. When the bill passed the House 290-130, the four-party split was once again evident as 86 Democrats from the states of the old Confederacy voted against the bill and 138 Republicans supported it, while “aye” votes by 11 representatives from the “outer rim” states of the South indicated some erosion in southern congressional opposition to civil rights. Republican support for the measure reflected both the historic allegiance of presidential Republicans to the party of Lincoln and their hopes and fears about the forthcoming presidential election; it was also a response after his death to John Kennedy’s assiduous courting of Republican votes for his civil rights bill.

  And then the Senate. The four-party split on civil rights broadly prevailed in the upper chamber too, but backers of the measure faced there the single most venerable and formidable weapon of delay in the congressional arsenal—the filibuster. Southern senators, proclaiming that they were prepared for “a battle to the last ditch—to the death,” made clear that they would filibuster the bill at every possible point in the tortuous Senate process. Civil rights Democrats under the leadership of majority whip Hubert H. Humphrey and civil rights Republicans led by Thomas H. Kuchel of California teamed up to try to muster the two-thirds vote necessary to invoke cloture and end debate. Civil rights advocates were apprehensive. Their adversaries included such skilled obstructionists as Richard Russell, John Stennis, and Strom Thurmond; Thurmond had established the filibuster record in the Senate with an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour speech against the 1957 civil rights bill.

  Feeling in the nation mounted as the Southerners conducted their talkathons. A Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, Inc., headed by the arch-reactionary publisher of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, William Loeb, Jr., but largely financed by Mississippians, charged that the bill was a “billion dollar blackjack.” A formidable leadership network united the civil rights coalition—the President of the United States, congressional leaders, labor spokesmen, a “leadership conference” busily lobbying on behalf of the fourscore organizations it embraced. Crucial
to the effort were the organizing and lobbying efforts of religious bodies. “We have seen cardinals, bishops, elders, stated clerks, common preachers, priests, and rabbis come to Washington to press for passage of the bill,” Senator Russell complained. “They have sought to make its passage a great moral issue.”

  Week after week the Senate debate droned on—through eighty-two working days, 6,300 pages of the Congressional Record, ten million words. Throughout Johnson stood steadfast for the bill, rejecting major changes, prodding and advising Humphrey, twisting people’s arms, wheeling and dealing. Pivotal in the Senate was one man, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, long a leader of the congressional Republicans on the Hill. The President drew Humphrey aside at a White House breakfast for legislative leaders.

  “The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” LBJ said. “You and I are going to get Ev. It’s going to take time. We’re going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Don’t let these bomb throwers, now, talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”

  Humphrey did—and so did Johnson. Having measured the man during their years together in the Senate, the President, said a White House aide, “never let him alone for thirty minutes.” Dirksen was heavily cross-pressured by attitudes among his Illinois constituents, including a mounting number of blacks, by his friendships with both Kennedy and Johnson, by public-opinion polls favorable to civil rights, by his conservative Republican cronies and his Democratic allies in the South who warned him that backing the measure would “kill off” Republican hopes for victory in November, and above all, perhaps, by his own moral concern over the struggle. In the end he not only switched; he became a Senate crusader for civil rights.

  Finally, with the civil rights lobbyists working day and night while the filibusterers did likewise, a cloture petition was filed. Dirksen’s led the names on the petition. Soon the Senate voted cloture 71-29—the first time it ever did so on a civil rights bill. Passage of the bill followed. Only one Democrat outside the South—Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia—and only four non-southern Republicans voted against. One of them was Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

  President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 in the East Room of the White House, where John F. Kennedy had lain in state seven months earlier. The new law, LBJ told the nation, was designed neither to punish nor to divide, but “to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom.” Later he handed out seventy-two pens to the backers of the act clustered around him. The leaders were happy and self-satisfied. The battle had been a long and hard one. One hundred years before, Yankee troops were smashing through the South with victories that marked the turning point of the Civil War. A century was a long time, but the system finally had produced.

  Yet the power of the President, of the Justice Department, of congressional majorities, of the Supreme Court, had not been enough. It was the civil rights street people who had pushed and prodded that system into action. Whether or not they received pens that night, they had been the real leaders.

  The civil rights measure that Lyndon Johnson signed in July 1964 outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, authorized the Attorney General to initiate suits to desegregate public facilities including schools, barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It gave a little more protection to voting rights— mainly by banning denial of registration because of trivial errors in filling out forms—but it largely bypassed the issue of the denial to blacks of the right to register and vote. Many still believed that blacks must secure their rights by gaining voting power in the political system—power that they could use to fight all the ills that beset them, power they could exercise through city councils and state governments as well as in Washington, power that could be brought to bear on the sheriffs, school boards, state troopers, mayors, city police, who were so often the bane of their lives. And what could be more appropriate in a democracy—more citizenlike, more unthreatening—than to seek the right to vote?

  Two years before LBJ signed the 1964 act, a tired but strong-willed woman with a warm smile and great shining eyes had walked into a meeting at her church in Ruleville, a Mississippi Delta town not far from where Emmett Till had been bludgeoned to death. “Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote,” Fannie Lou Hamer recalled. James Forman and other SNCC activists ran the meeting. “When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it up high as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared. The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

  Forty-four years old, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children of sharecropper parents. She had picked cotton all her life, for the past eighteen years with her husband on a nearby plantation. She had always known poverty and injustice; when her parents were getting a little ahead a white farmer had poisoned their mules. For a long time she had wanted to help her kind. “Just listenin’ at ’em, I could just see myself votin’ people outa office that I know was wrong and didn’t do nothin’ to help the poor.”

  With seventeen others Hamer rode on a bus chartered by SNCC to the county seat of Indianola, birthplace of the White Citizens’ Councils, where the registrar “brought a big old book out there, and he gave me the sixteenth section of the Constitution of Mississippi, and that was dealing with de facto laws, and I didn’t know nothin’ about no de facto laws.” She “flunked out” along with the others. Driving home, they were all arrested because the bus was “too yellow.” The plantation owner kicked Hamer off the land, and the house where she stayed in town was shot up by vigilantes. It was one hell of a winter. “Pap couldn’t get a job nowhere ’cause everybody knew he was my husband.” But they made it through. Soon Hamer joined SNCC as an organizer.

  SNCC had been struggling since 1961 to register black voters in the closed society of Mississippi. Although blacks made up almost half the population, local intimidation, along with the state literacy test and poll tax, held them down to 5 percent of the registered voters. The old debate in the southern black movement between those who advocated civil disobedience in resistance to segregation and those who argued that blacks must first pursue political power now intensified. At an August 1961 SNCC conference at Highlander, Ella Baker had mediated the issue with a proposal to have two wings in SNCC, one for direct action and one for voter registration. As it turned out, no action was riskier, more militant, even potentially more revolutionary than organizing blacks to vote in Mississippi, whose reputation for terrorism had made it the most dreaded state on SNCC’s target list and virtually off limits to SCLC.

  Mississippi more than lived up to its reputation. When Bob Moses, the driving force behind the SNCC voting campaign, had moved to the small southern Mississippi city of McComb in July 1961 to set up the first of a string of registration “schools,” he and his cohorts were routinely arrested and beaten—more than once in a place called Liberty. Herbert Lee, a local farmer and father of nine, was gunned down by a state legislator who was never prosecuted; after a protest march Moses and others were jailed for two months. Routed for the moment, they left McComb, recruited people from the grass roots, and fanned out into several other counties in the flat Delta country. Risk and repression became a way of life. Diane Nash, now married to James Bevel and pregnant, was jailed after teaching nonviolence to young people; refusing bail, she declared that “since my child will be a black child, born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not he will be born in prison.”

  Fannie Lou Hamer was in the thick of the struggle. She and others were locked up for trying to use a whites-only
café. The next moments burned into her memory: the shrieks from blows in other cells—the cop yelling at her, “You, bitch, you, we gon’ make you wish you was dead”—the two black prisoners forced to beat her with a long blackjack—screaming into the mattress so the sound would not come out—the injuries that never left her. It was while she was in jail that Medgar Evers was killed. But the black leaders persisted in Mississippi, turning increasingly to electoral tactics as 1964 approached. Black and white activists canvassed the state, persuading over 80,000 black people to cast symbolic “freedom ballots” in churches, in stores, and on the street.

  Early in 1964, SNCC began a campaign to sign up voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the lily-white Democrats for accreditation as the Mississippi delegation at the Democratic national convention to be held in Atlantic City in August. Black leaders launched a large project to import hundreds of white college students to help in a climactic registration campaign. Three activists—two white and one black—were arrested for speeding, turned over to the Klan, beaten, mutilated, and shot to death (for which crimes seven whites were later convicted in a federal court). Still the students flocked in by the hundreds, living with black families in ramshackle “freedom houses,” teaching the three R’s and black history and the meaning of democracy in “freedom schools,” escorting to the courthouse blacks who dared try to register. After modest gains the registration crusade waned as plans focused on gaining seats at the Democratic national convention. Party conclaves in each county, some threatened by hostile whites, chose delegates to the five congressional district conventions, which in turn sent delegates to the state convention in Jackson.