by I. F. Stone
The failure of the attempted invasion of Cuba, like so many of our failures in the postwar period, had its roots in an inability to understand popular feeling. But in the briefings held at the State Department during the first two days of this week for visiting editors—a kind of mass brainwashing operation in which no time was allowed for any but the official point of view and little time for questions or discussion—there was no evidence of a willingness to face up to this fact. From the conceited Berle through the discombobulated Stevenson to the smug Allen Dulles not a single official was willing to admit that our intelligence was wrong in assessing the mood of the Cuban people. Official Washington has learned nothing, on the contrary it has drawn all the wrong conclusions, from the failure in Cuba. The Kennedy Administration’s swift slide back to the conventional viewpoint of the stuffed shirts who direct our intelligence, military and diplomatic bureaucracies is evident from the men chosen by Kennedy to investigate the failure. Only a few weeks ago, the President was enforcing a blue pencil on the inflammatory remarks of Admiral Arleigh Burke, one of the biggest windbags in the military establishment; now the Admiral is to assist General Maxwell Taylor in the investigation. Admiral Burke is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; one of the points which ought to be investigated is the poor advice given the President by them; how to get a real investigation with the Admiral at General Taylor’s elbow? Just to make sure that the inquiry will be equally impartial in assessing the role of the CIA, Allen Dulles will also serve on this panel; he too will be in the happy position of investigating himself. In addition, Attorney General Robert Kennedy has been added to the panel. Like his brother, he had been acting admirably until the Cuban crisis came along. Now, in advance of the investigation, he has issued a disingenuous opinion which would so reduce the ambit of the Neutrality Act as to absolve the CIA and big business paymasters of the Cuban counter revolution from complicity. General Taylor himself is superior in intellectual capacity to most of the Pentagon crowd, but as a professional soldier he is concerned with military means for dealing with social change; events have over and over again demonstrated their futility. There is not a single man on this panel capable of approaching the Cuban question and the broader problems it illustrates with the independent mind and perceptive spirit they require.
The clearest sign of deterioration in national leadership lay in the tone, the implications and the deceptions of Mr. Kennedy’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The tone in its arrogant and willful self-righteousness sounded like an echo of Bismarck and Teddy Roosevelt; this was the Monroe Doctrine nakedly restated as American domination of the hemisphere; here was exactly that doctrine of unilateral intervention Latin America so hates and fears. The implications were of a return to the worst days of the cold war, with a readiness to extend the use of cloak-and-dagger methods on a wider scale than ever before. The worst deception did not come out until several days later. Mr. Kennedy spoke that Thursday, April 20, of the Cuban affair as “a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator.” But on Sunday, April 23, in both Washington and Miami many newspapermen heard but few dared to print the story of how the Cuban Revolutionary Council was taken into custody in New York on the eve of the Cuban invasion, kept in ignorance of it, shut off from all contact with their own forces, and held incommunicado at a supposedly abandoned air base in Florida while statements were drafted in its name by the CIA and issued through the Lem Jones advertising agency in New York. Despite White House orders to the contrary, Batista men were not weeded out of the invasion forces and the CIA’s notorious Mr. Bender who is cordially hated by all but the extreme right-wingers still ran the show. Yet Mr. Dulles at the big private press briefing Tuesday (not having been invited we are not bound by secrecy) was brazen enough to claim that his intelligence estimates were correct and that failure was due solely to the poor Cuban exiles themselves!
Fidel Castro won in Cuba by provoking Batista into destroying himself; the dictator in his fear and frenzy set out on so brutal a course as to undermine all support for himself except among his partners in plunder. I have all along feared that if we allowed ourselves to be drawn into war with Castro, he would provoke us similarly to self-destruction. The chain reaction is already in motion, and all Americans of sense and devotion must speak up quickly while it can still be stopped. The bright promise of the new Administration is being quenched by its own panicky folly; the military and the right wingers have been strengthened within our own government. A moral obduracy like that of South Africa’s is apparent in the unthinking clamor for get-tough policies. The danger of direct invasion seems to have passed for the moment, but the new emphasis on “para-military” methods has an ominous ring; para-military formations poisoned the life of the German Republic under Weimar, assassinated some of its best leaders, and paved the way for Nazism. We cannot set up government agencies empowered to act lawlessly without infecting the life of our own Republic. To fall back on the conspiracy theory of history is to assume that human convulsion and aspiration are but puppet movements on string from Moscow, to place our hopes in counter-conspiracy, is to misread man and history to our own ultimate undoing.
Part Four
THE WALL BETWEEN
BLACK AND WHITE
The Voice of America Falters
I. F. Stone began writing about America’s failure to respect the rights of the “Negro” (then the accepted term) long before the advent of the modern civil rights movement. Here, he puts our failure to honor the constitutional protections of due process and color-blind justice in the context of our global rivalry with the Soviet Union.
. . .
February 8, 1951
PARIS—Scene: the office of Voice of America; an imaginary interview.
Q. Are you in charge of European broadcasts?
A. I am.
Q. I was wondering how you were going to handle two criminal cases involving American policy which attracted a great deal of attention in Europe during the past few days.
A. What cases do you mean?
Q. One was the reprieve of twenty-one Nazis sentenced to death for war crimes, and the release of Krupp and other prisoners condemned to long terms in jail. The other was the execution of seven Martinsville, Virginia, Negroes.
A. I don’t see any connection between them.
Q. Clemency was granted in one case and not the other.
A. Yes, but what’s the execution of some Negroes for rape in Virginia got to do with the reprieve of some Nazis at Landsberg?
Q. It will be said that American policy is more tender with Nazi war criminals than with American Negroes.
A. That’s just Communist propaganda.
Q. But I thought it was the job of the Voice of America to counter Communist propaganda? How are you going to do it in this instance?
A. We’re going to let people know the truth. Those boys in Martinsville had their day in court. They were found guilty. They had their full right of appeal. The case showed that today even in the South and even for the crime of rape Negroes can get a fair trial. We’ll present the facts as they are—a triumph of American justice.
Q. The Nuremberg trials were also a triumph of American justice. The Nazis also had their day in court. They were found guilty, and the review board in recommending the reprieves reasserted the justice of the convictions but advised clemency.
A. I still don’t get what you’re driving at.
Q. Well, how are you going to answer when people ask why Nazis guilty of heinous crimes against humanity were considered worthy of clemency while Negroes found guilty of rape are considered unworthy, although no white man has ever been given the death penalty for rape in Virginia, and there are doubts both about the fairness of the trial and the actual role of the poor half-witted woman in the case.
A. Look, I’m on to newspapermen like you. We’re engaged in the opening maneuvers of a vast war against the totalitarian evil you pinks help to cover up. I don’t like those Nazis any more than you do a
nd I wish to God they had freed those Negro boys. It makes my job a lot harder. But we’ve got to have the Germans on our side in the scrap that’s coming, and we can’t infuriate the South by reprieving some Negro boys who have had a fair trial instead of just being strung up as they might so easily have been. We can’t change the South overnight and we need national unity more than ever.
Q. Then you think war against Communism so necessary and inevitable as to excuse clemency for Nazis and denial of clemency for American Negroes?
A. I certainly do.
Q. Why?
A. Because we’re up against an immoral force which believes the end justifies the means, and will distort and pervert any and every human ideal to get its way.
Q. But didn’t you just finish telling me that you were ready to excuse the Nazi pardons and the Negro executions, much as you regretted both, because you felt the end—war against Communism—justified the means? Aren’t you condoning mass extermination of peoples and the ugliest side of “white supremacy” in the South because you think these immoral means justify the end—war against Communism? Where, then, does your kind of thinking differ from that you impute to the Communists? Where does it differ from those who supported Hitlerism on the same grounds, that objectionable as its methods might be, they were necessary for war against Communism?
A. Get the hell out of my office, you dirty R – d.
May 17, 1954
Here is Stone’s on-the-spot reaction to one of the epochal events of twentieth-century history—the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the case commonly known as Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down school segregation. As Stone immediately recognized, “The ultimate impact [of this decision] must revolutionize race relations.”
. . .
May 24, 1954
FOR WEEKS ON MONDAYS, when opinions are handed down, the Supreme Court press room had drawn a full house, including an unusually large number of Negro reporters. Last Monday, after we had all begun to give up hope of a school segregation decision that day, an unusual event occurred. Ordinarily opinions are given out in the press room after word comes down the pneumatic chute that they have been read in the courtroom above. This time the light flashed and there was a different kind of message. The press aide put on his coat and we were all shepherded into the court chamber to hear the opinion read and receive our copies there.
In that tense and crowded marble hall, the Chief Justice was already reading the opinion in Brown et al. v. United States. He read in a firm, clear voice and with expression. As the Chief Justice launched into the opinion’s lengthy discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment, the reporters, white and Negro, edged forward in the press boxes, alert for indications of which way the decision was going. “We come then,” the Chief Justice read, “to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” In the moment of suspense which followed we could hear the Chief Justice replying firmly, “We believe that it does.” It was all one could do to keep from cheering, and a few of us were moved to tears.
There was one quite simple but terribly evocative sentence in the opinion. For Negroes and other sympathetic persons this packed the quintessence of the quieter misery imposed on members of a submerged race. “To separate them,” the Chief Justice said of Negro children, “from others of a similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” So the fifty-eight-year-old ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson was reversed and the court ruled “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal . . . segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”
The unanimous ruling seemed too explicit to be whittled away in the enforcing decree. The rehearing next fall on the form of that decree, the invitation to the Southern states to be heard, offer a period in which tempers may cool and bigots be allowed second thoughts. At the best, Jim Crow will not be ended overnight. The clue to what is likely to happen in most cities, North and South, may be found in a clause of the questions on which the Court will hear argument in the fall.
The Court is to consider whether “within the limits set by normal geographic school districting” Negro children shall “forthwith be admitted to schools of their choice” or a gradual changeover be arranged. Since most Negroes in most cities already lived in more or less segregated Negro sections, these will still have largely Negro schools. It is on the borderlines that mixing will begin; ultimately the pattern of segregated schools will break down with the pattern of segregated Negro housing areas. The ultimate impact must revolutionize race relations and end the system of inferior status and inferior education which has kept the ex-slave a menial.
Among the audience streaming out of the chamber when the Chief Justice had ended, the lawyers for the NAACP suddenly began to embrace each other outside the doors. They had achieved a giant stride toward the full emancipation of their people. The growing political power of the Negro had prevailed over the growing wealth of the Republican party’s newest recruits, the Texas oil millionaires. In a showdown, American democracy had proven itself real.
The Murder of Emmett Till
Stone reports on the stunning acquittal of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in the murder of Emmitt Till, a young black Mississippian accused of whistling at a white woman. Milam and Bryant were widely known to have committed the crime, and they admitted as much a year later in a Look magazine article. As usual, Stone puts the story and its revelation of American racism in the broadest possible context: “Basically all of us whites, North and South, acquiesce in white supremacy, and benefit from the pool of cheap labor created by it.” And he closes with a prescient call for a black Gandhi to lead the nation out of its racial madness—two months before the start of the Montgomery bus boycott would bring the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence.
. . .
October 3, 1955
NEXT TO THE PRESIDENT’S COLLAPSE, the worst news of the week was from Mississippi. The jury at Sumner brought in two verdicts, not one. The immediate and visible decision was that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were not guilty of killing a fourteen-year-old colored boy. The other, unspoken, unintended, unconscious but indelible was a verdict of guilty against all the rest of us and our country.
There are scenes at the murder trial which imprint themselves unforgettably: the Negro reporters, as they walked into court one day after lunch, being hailed by the Sheriff with “Hello, niggers.” Mrs. Bradley, the mother of the victim, testifying that she told her son before he left for the South “to be very careful how he spoke and to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am’ and not to hesitate to humble yourself if you had to get down on your knees.” Moses Wright—we salute his courage—testifying that when J. W. Milam came to get his fourteen-year-old nephew Emmett Till, he asked, “You from Chicago?” and when the boy answered “yes” Milam said, “Don’t you say yes to me or I’ll knock hell out of you.” Mrs. Bryant’s sexy whopper (which Judge Swango to his credit kept from the jury) that this fourteen-year-old boy with a speech defect had grabbed her round the waist, solicited her with an unprintable expression and boasted, “I’ve been with white women before.” J. A. Shaw, Jr., the foreman of the jury, asked by the press what the jury thought of Mrs. Bradley’s testimony, replying, “if she tried a little harder, she might have got out a tear.”
Emmett Till’s broken body, with the bullet hole in the right temple and the gaping hole in the back of the head, as if broken in by a rock, testified to a maniacal murder. Those who killed him were sick men, sick with race hatred. The murder and the trial could only have happened in a sick countryside. Where else would a mother be treated with such elementary lack of respect or compassion? Where else would the defense dare put forward the
idea that the murder was somehow “framed” by the NAACP? Where else would newspapers somehow make it appear that those at fault were not the men who killed the boy but those who tried to bring the killers to justice? There is a sickness in the South. Unless cured, there may some day spring from it crimes as evil and immense as the crematoria of Hitlerism.
If Milam and Bryant did not kill Till, then who did? Nobody in the South asks the question, at least publicly. Who was the third man with them? Where are the two missing witnesses? Nobody cares. Mississippi went through the motions, and the motions were enough to muffle the weak conscience of the northern white press. The judge was honorable; the special prosecutor tried hard; who can quarrel with a jury verdict? But the jury was all white, in an area two-thirds Negro. And of what use was an upright judge and a special prosecutor when the case was rushed to trial without adequate preparation or investigation? This was only the final scene of a lynching, hastily covered with a thin veil of respectability by a shrewd governor. The same governor, Hugh White, as chairman of the Legal Education Advisory Committee, has just put forward a six-point program to fight desegregation which calls for abolition of compulsory public schooling and legislation to “prohibit interference with state law under cover of federal authority.” Hugh White is himself the leader of Mississippi’s racists and nullificationists.