In Thirteen Days, his behind-the-scenes account of the Kennedy White House’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bobby would write that its lesson lay in “the importance of placing ourselves in the other country’s shoes.” He meant the necessity, in such a confrontation, to weigh carefully each step being taken, always thinking ahead, never backing the adversary into a corner that could prove ultimately dangerous to both sides.
The president had, above all, wanted “not to humiliate the Soviet Union, not to have them feel they would have to escalate their response because their security or national interest so committed them.”
The edge-of-the-seat memoir comes to an end when Ambassador Dobrynin visits Bobby’s office. It was Sunday morning. The Soviet diplomat wanted to bring the news that the missiles were to be withdrawn.
Though the State Department had already learned of the decision through official channels, this was a personal call. Once he’d conveyed the news about the missiles’ removal, Dobrynin had a further message from Moscow to pass on. Mr. Khrushchev, he said, “wanted to send his best wishes” to the president and his brother.
Three children unite against fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CIVIL RIGHTS
“What I didn’t fully appreciate, and most critics did not understand, was the relationship between the President and Bobby—that it was remarkably close even for brothers.”
—EDWIN GUTHMAN
In early 1963, to mark the Kennedy administration’s halfway point, Ben Bradlee sat down with President Kennedy for a Newsweek cover story he was writing on Bobby. “Never mind the brother bit,” he told his friend Jack. What Bradlee was looking for was a fair and frank assessment of the attorney general’s on-the-job performance.
Nevertheless, it couldn’t be helped: the president quickly revealed strong personal feelings on the subject. Praising Bobby’s “high moral standards” and “strict personal ethics,” he described him as “a puritan, absolutely incorruptible.”
Next, he spoke of the “terrific executive energy” he possessed. As Jack explained it, anybody can have ideas, the problem was actually making them happen. Bobby, he declared, was “the best organizer I’ve ever seen.” And not just when it came to running his department, but in his off-hours, too. Making reference to that trademark of Kennedy life, touch football, the president commented, “it was always Bobby’s team that won, because he had it organized the best, the best plays.”
Saluting loyalty—“It wasn’t the easiest thing for him to go to Joe McCarthy’s funeral”—as another of Bobby’s virtues, Jack also cited his conscience. He spoke of his brother’s dogged crusade to win release of the men taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. “And it’s got nothing to do with publicity or politics,” the president added. “In Palm Beach now, I bet there isn’t one of the Cuban exile leaders who hasn’t been invited to his house and to be with his family.”
The president’s estimate of his brother was not out of line with the conventional wisdom. Prominent columnists that year began offering confident predictions that, following a John Kennedy second term, Robert would look to succeed him in office. “No Kennedy likes to wait too long,” wrote one in the New York Herald Tribune.
Two men found such assumptions unsettling. The first was Jack himself—who likely considered such dynastic speculation bad politics. The other was the Texan waiting next in line. By 1963, the First Brother had grown to become an obsession with Lyndon Johnson, an inside threat to his obtaining the prize he’d signed on for. According to biographer Robert Caro, he’d accepted the 1960 vice presidential nod because it was his best chance, possibly his only one, of being the Democrats’ choice in 1968.
Now it looked as if the president’s brother was setting his sights on the same goal. Bobby, not discouraging the buzz, only offered that he had no plans “at this time.” Still, rumors kept reaching Johnson from the press corps that there was already a well-organized move to ready Robert Kennedy for the presidency by 1968, shoving aside the patient vice president.
By early 1963, there were the inevitable discussions about opponents Jack might face in the next year’s presidential election. Both brothers were rooting for the GOP to select Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who’d served on the Rackets Committee. While they liked him personally, they believed any contest between the archconservative Westerner and the man now sitting in the Oval Office would wind up focused on their greatly diverging political philosophies. For just that reason, he was their favorite for a 1964 rival, a candidate they never doubted they could beat.
At this stage—March 1963—Bobby was struck by what he saw as inefficiency in his brother’s administration. In his mind, it didn’t serve the president well to compartmentalize his cabinet the way Jack did.
In a memo he sent Jack on the subject, Bobby said that he obviously hadn’t learned an important lesson from the use of ExComm during the Missile Crisis.
“You talk to McNamara, but mostly on Defense matters,” he noted. “You talk to Dillon but primarily on financial questions, Dave Bell on AID matters, etc. These men should be sitting down and thinking of some of the problems facing us in a broader context.”
Bobby was well aware that these three Kennedy appointees, along with many of the others, were skilled and savvy Washington veterans. (McNamara was in charge at the Pentagon, Douglas Dillon at the Treasury. David Bell was now the administrator of the Agency for International Development but until recently had been director of the Office of Management and Budget.) He was urging Jack to stop and consider how to make use of these “best minds in government . . . in times other than deep crisis and emergencies.”
This same memo also offered a teasing punch line. After the phrase “best minds,” he’d added an asterisk. Below, its footnote read simply: “ME.”
• • •
That April, Martin Luther King made the momentous decision to challenge the segregation laws of Birmingham, Alabama, a city where every restaurant, restroom, and good job was protected by unyielding rules of racial discrimination. King was now determined to expose—to his fellow Americans and the world beyond—the actual state of conditions in a country whose famed founding documents had committed it to the principle of human equality.
The demonstration he organized began with a march of defiance led by King himself on Good Friday, April 12. Denied the required license, they paraded anyway, and were arrested. Bobby Kennedy, who as we’ve seen didn’t support such civil disobedience, became further angered when Dr. King refused to allow bail to be posted. Honoring the principles of civil disobedience, King and his fellow protesters were ready to accept legal consequences of their public actions. King now spent eight days behind bars during which time, denied paper, he wrote the essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on the margins of a newspaper his lawyer had brought him.
Now came one of those moments in history where a single event changed everything. In a new demonstration on May 2, hundreds, then thousands, of local schoolchildren, trained in the same civil disobedience, poured from the 16th Street Baptist Church, parading through the city again without a permit. They marched ahead steadily, straight into the ranks of the hostile local police led by Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor. The police met the oncoming crowd, some not yet teenagers, with high-pressure fire hoses. Though terrified, the young marchers kept singing as armed men with billy clubs bore down on them.
That night Americans, viewing these events in Birmingham from their living rooms, were shaken by what they were witnessing. In one scene caught by a news camera, a snarling police dog was sinking its teeth into the chest of a high school student.
Watching such scenes of mayhem, the United States attorney general, aware of his role as head of the Department of Justice, understood the dilemma he was facing. Dealing with it would require a careful balancing act between respecting local jurisdiction and the demands of conscience. Looking at the choices before him,
he began, as he’d done on other occasions, to work through back channels.
Bobby’s first goal was to strike at the same targets as King: the segregationist laws and culture of Birmingham. He dispatched Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to the city, where, quietly, he began to mediate between the city’s business leaders and the civil rights activists.
The pressure for an agreement soon reached fever pitch. Twelve hundred children of various ages were now packed into jails meant to accommodate nine hundred. Cells meant for eight had seventy-five youths jammed into them. To add to the tension, King and top lieutenant Ralph Abernathy, both out on bail, were rearrested. Their condition this time for accepting bail was the release of the children.
Thanks to Burke Marshall’s negotiating efforts, an agreement was reached to bring down the WHITE ONLY and BLACK ONLY signs from the city’s restrooms and drinking fountains. Lunch counters were to be desegregated, and an ongoing program to upgrade African American employment opportunities was established. The historic end to these pillars of Jim Crow was to take effect within ninety days. King praised the invaluable job Burke had done “opening channels of communication between our leadership and the top people in the economic power structure” of Birmingham.
Still, fearing that this truce would falter without King’s presence, Bobby now personally reached a local black leader in Birmingham who agreed to pay the civil rights leader’s bail. And King accepted.
Next was the challenge of getting the two thousand children released. King and Bobby estimated it would cost $160,000 to meet bail for all of them, many of whom had been held for more than a week. Kennedy decided that a possible source for the necessary funds might be labor unions. He secretly asked Harry Belafonte, a friend of both his and King’s, to serve as a secret intermediary with the protesters now being held in the Birmingham jails.
“I’m in an extremely vulnerable position,” he told the singer, asking him to receive the hand-delivered checks.
Contacted and chipping in were Michael Quill of the Transport Workers, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, and David McDonald of the United Steelworkers. Bobby remained in constant contact with Belafonte until the checks began arriving.
There were political considerations for Bobby to keep in mind, too. This extraordinary drama was not playing out in a vacuum: every citizen taking in what was happening was a potential voter. The challenge was to help King and the children while not getting too out front in the racial struggle. His brother, he knew only too well, was looking ahead to a tough reelection situation in the South the next year.
Bobby hoped that his efforts—that call to the Georgia judge to secure King’s release in 1960; the desegregation of Ole Miss; and now bringing change to Birmingham—would send a clear signal to the civil rights movement that he was on their side. He’d come a long way from the days when he confessed to not staying awake nights worrying about civil rights.
The leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement felt a different imperative. For them, this was no time to be patient and await government action. The images from Birmingham had burned their way into the national mind’s eye. Now that all eyes were on Birmingham, there could be no turning back.
Bobby, understanding how high emotions on both sides of the issue were running, realized his position and that of the civil rights leaders were at odds when it came to both timing and public acts of defiance. He understood, too, that his calls for caution—fearing further havoc and harm—and public duty to uphold the law weren’t enough to convince angry activists to cool their demands.
The step he now took, hoping for mutual benefit, was to ask celebrated black author and social critic James Baldwin, whom he’d met the year before, for help. Baldwin’s first book, Go Tell It on the Mountain, had been published a decade earlier, and his newest one, The Fire Next Time, was a national bestseller. At Bobby’s request, Baldwin now arranged—on very short notice—an informal get-together of his own friends and acquaintances to take place at the Kennedy family apartment in New York. This was two weeks after the successful conclusion of the Birmingham protest.
The guests included Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, and psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose work on black youth had aided in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregation in U.S. public schools.
The attorney general opened the discussion by offering his own position and point of view. “We have a party in revolt,” he explained, referring especially to Southern whites. “And we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them aboard if the Democratic Party is going to prevail in the next elections.” He worried, he said, that black activism, now growing more extreme, could result in further backlash. Then he described the Justice Department’s ongoing support for civil rights as demonstrated by the cases it was arguing.
He ended by appealing to a sense of who we are as Americans, both black and white, and the necessity, as a nation, to remain united. Don’t we join together in defending this country? In that same spirit, shouldn’t both races, he asked, be working together at home for civil rights?
It was all well intentioned, but naive as far as his listeners were concerned. Their lives and his couldn’t be more different, and now they began to say so. Loudest and most belligerent in his objections to Bobby’s remarks was twenty-four-year-old Jerome Smith, a CORE activist and early Freedom Rider who’d been beaten and jailed in Mississippi.
It made him sick, he burst out angrily, to have to beg for civil rights from the man whose job charged him with the duty to enforce laws guaranteeing them. “I’ve seen you guys stand around and do nothing more than take notes while we’re being beaten,” he said, referring to Justice Department attorneys.
Denouncing meaningless “cocktail party patter,” Smith grew even more accusatory as he faced his host. Referring to the Vietnam War, he said, “What you’re asking us young black people to do is pick up guns against people in Asia while you have continued to deny us our rights.” The next time the police used fire hoses and dogs on him and his fellow protesters, he promised, he’d respond with a gun.
Now Baldwin asked Smith how he’d react if called upon to fight for his country. It was a provocative question. “Never! Never! Never!” Smith declared. Then, again alluding to Southeast Asia, said, “These are poor people who did nothing to us. They’re more my brothers than you are.”
Kennedy, unable to believe his ears, instantly challenged him. “You won’t fight for your country? How can you say that?” At this moment, Lorraine Hansberry—the first black woman to have had a play produced on Broadway—intervened.
“You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General,” she said, “but the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.” She pointed at Jerome Smith.
Though the evening ended in an unhappy standoff, its echoes would linger. Martin Luther King, hearing an account of it the next morning, hoped it would light a fire under the Kennedys. “Maybe it’s what Bobby needed to hear. He’s going to hear a lot more of it if the president keeps dawdling on that civil rights bill.” But he also worried that insistence on keeping the struggle nonviolent was fast losing its appeal to angry and impatient young men like Jerome Smith.
Bob Kennedy’s own reaction to the gathering—he’d, after all, requested it, seeing it as a reaching out—at first was exasperation. “They didn’t want to talk about anything. They don’t know the facts. They just wanted to shout.”
Yet, with the days passing, he began to brood over what he’d heard that night in New York. “I guess if I were in his shoes,” he told Ed Guthman, referring to Smith, “if I’d gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.”
• • •
“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” That was the prom
ise which rang out from George Wallace’s inaugural address when—standing on the very spot where Jefferson Davis a century earlier took charge of the Confederacy—he’d been sworn in as Alabama governor that January.
Six months later, ignoring the country’s shock at the police assault on those Birmingham children, he vowed to resist a federal court order to admit two students—Vivian Malone and James Hood—to the University of Alabama. He boasted he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent such an affront to his state.
Bobby, his department already moving to enforce the court order and gain the two students’ admission, now saw an opportunity for broader action. In a meeting in the Oval Office, he called for the president to address the nation on the civil rights question. His brother, uncertain what was going to happen at the university, was against it.
Sitting around the table were the president, Bobby, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and political aide Larry O’Brien. Their conversation was being filmed for a documentary on the current impasse between the Justice Department and Governor Wallace. Bobby continued to make the case for a speech, arguing that the time was right, with the scenes from Birmingham seared into the mind of Americans. Wallace’s resistance now revealed the urgency of the civil rights effort.
Malone and Hood were set to arrive the next day, June 11, on the Tuscaloosa campus. That morning, when they did, Governor Wallace, as he’d promised, had planted himself at the entrance to Foster Auditorium, where registration was taking place. He’d surrounded himself with state troopers. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, representing the Justice Department and accompanied by federal marshals, now arrived to clear the way for the two new students, who were waiting in a car nearby.
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