Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  Over and over since his inauguration he had sounded the theme of harmony and cooperation: “Far from being natural enemies, government and business are necessary allies.”

  In addition to addressing the major business organizations and holding a special press conference with business writers, the President was effective in meetings, luncheons and receptions at the White House with smaller groups of business leaders, showing a genuine interest in their problems and giving them a better grasp of his. A public exchange of letters with banker David Rockefeller on balance of payments problems and his December, 1962, address to the Economic Club on his new tax and budget program were also well regarded in the business community. But in all these appeals and appearances the President was explaining rather than altering his policies.

  Particularly in the summer of 1962, many of his efforts were poorly received. He did not refrain, at a peacemaking White House Economic Conference in May, from chastising American bankers who had endangered our gold supply by telling their European counterparts that Kennedy’s deficits were sure to bring inflation. Some businessmen thought the repeated mention of profits in his Chamber of Commerce address (some twenty times in a five-page speech) was designed to make them look greedy. Still others resented his Yale Commencement address labeling as myths most of their cherished concepts. His request that the administration-business dialogue move on “to a…difficult…confrontation with reality” fell largely on deaf ears in the business community. General Eisenhower, among others, said that the President was saying, “Business, get friendly—or else!” Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  But it was true that John Kennedy, merely to placate unreasoning opponents, had no intention of displacing their favorite targets in the administration with business appointees lacking breadth (unlike McNamara, McCone, McCloy, Hodges, Day, Dillon and other businessmen whom he appointed and admired), or relaxing his enforcement of the antitrust laws (most indictments, he pointed out, stem from complaints by other businessmen), or preventing all further budget deficits (which would have weakened the economy and depressed the stock market). Above all, he intended to find out whether it was possible to pursue a rational national economic policy in the public interest instead of one based on the myths and pressures of private interests—business, labor or otherwise.

  A British cartoon at the height of the business-administration clash showed one irate American executive saying to another: “This guy Kennedy thinks he is running the country!” That caption was correct. He did—and he was.

  1 Presumably a Biblical reference to Samson never used by the President, possibly suspecting that some opponent would note that Samson used “the jawbone of an ass.”

  2 To a stockholder urging the corporation not to give any grants to Harvard University, “where they study deficit spending,” Martin said, “I agree with you…. I don’t think we could get any Harvard men anyway—they’re all in the government.”

  3 To whom they contributed twenty-five times as much money in the 1960 campaign as they gave to John Kennedy.

  4 Coincidentally, he had also invoked his Taft-Hartley injunction powers against the West Coast maritime unions on the very day of his attack on Big Steel, and in time several other unions, as mentioned earlier, felt both his pressure and his wrath on their wage or job demands.

  5 suggested, to the President’s amusement, that the statement, with its strong arguments against an increase followed by the above, was based on a line from Don Juan:

  “A little still she strove, and much repented,

  And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL RIGHTS

  IN 1953 John Kennedy was mildly and quietly in favor of civil rights legislation as a political necessity consistent with his moral instincts.

  In 1963 he was deeply and fervently committed to the cause of human rights as a moral necessity inconsistent with his political instincts.

  Of all the national ills which he finally brought to the attention of the nation—not merely that of one branch of ggovernment or one wing of his party, but that of the entire nation—none had been more studiously avoided in the past than the evils of racial discrimination. Of all the efforts he made as President none was more important or more bitterly resisted than his effort not only to make such discrimination illegal but to make his white countrymen understand that it was wrong. He was revered in many Negro homes and reviled in many white Southern homes as the first President, in the words of Richard Rovere, “with the conviction that no form of segregation or discrimination is morally defensible or socially tolerable.”

  In 1963 the Negro revolution in America rose more rapidly than ever before. John Kennedy did not start that revolution and nothing he could have done could have stopped it. But in 1963 he befriended and articulated its high aspirations, and helped guide its torrential currents. He was not forced into this position by circumstances beyond his control, as many have written. On the contrary, the sympathy he displayed, the appointees he assembled, the courage he demonstrated in placing himself at the head of that revolution, all encouraged a climate for reform and a reason for hope within the Southern Negro leadership. Their new efforts and pressures would probably not have been risked had there been a different attitude in the White House and in the Department of Justice.

  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. John Kennedy’s convictions on equal rights—like his convictions on nearly all other subjects—were reached gradually, logically and coolly, ultimately involving a dedication of the heart even stronger than that of the mind. As a Senator he simply did not give much thought to this subject. He had no background of association or activity in race relations. He was against discrimination as he was against colonialism or loyalty oaths—it was an academic judgment rather than a deep-rooted personal compulsion. He voted for every civil rights bill coming before him as Congressman and Senator more as a matter of course than of deep concern. Although he joined in sponsoring several such measures, he regarded the school desegregation question as “a judicial problem, not a legislative one…and for the courts to interpret as they see fit.” His statement of support for Eisenhower’s intervention with troops in the Little Rock schools in 1957 was more impassive than impassioned. Even in addressing Negro audiences he was more likely to talk about the general problems of education, unemployment and slum housing than to focus directly on the race issue.

  He was angered in one conference committee when a Southern Senator made a slurring reference in the presence of Negro Congressman Dawson, but he found the approach of many single-minded civil rights advocates uncomfortable and unreasonable also. As the first member of either house of Congress from any New England state to appoint a Negro to his staff (Mrs. Virginia Battle, a secretary in his Boston office)—as a leading speaker for the United Negro College Fund—as an advocate of curbs on filibusters—he was not being hypocritical, but neither was he being nonpolitical.

  In fact, when he talked privately about Negroes at all in those days, it was usually about winning Negro votes. He talked privately that way about every group—Poles, farmers, Jews, veterans, the aged, suburbanites or any other. To him Negroes were no different from anyone else. He did not treat them differently, look at them differently or speak of them differently. They were not set aside as a Special Problem or singled out as a special group—he simply sought their votes along with those of everyone else.

  Politics, in fact, helped to deepen his concern. He was a good politician—and in the 1960 convention and election Negroes more than most groups were his political friends and their enemies were often his enemies. As he became a national figure, his compassion for the problems of his “constituents” took in a far larger proportion of Negroes than it had in Massachusetts. Harris Wofford, who had previously worked for the Civil Rights Commission, sup
plied him with some statistics for the campaign which shocked and offended him. He used them in his opening debate with Nixon (just as, nearly three years later, he would use them in his February, 1963, Civil Rights Message and in his June, 1963, address to the nation):

  The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

  His assumption of the powers of the Presidency accelerated the change in his outlook. As a strong President, he had no intention of permitting Southern governors and others to defy the courts and his office. He was freedom’s spokesman—and he recognized the stain on American freedom which race repression represented. He was concerned about the unemployed and the underpaid, the school dropouts and the slum dwellers—and he realized that Negroes were forced into those categories in greater proportions than all others. Racial discrimination was divisive and wasteful—and John Kennedy believed in national unity and strength. It was irrational and he was logical. It was undemocratic and he was a democrat, even before he was a Democrat. It was an historic challenge, a dangerous and unpopular controversy, the nation’s most critical domestic problem—and he was a President determined to meet every challenge and to leave his mark.

  Above all, he was motivated by a deep sense of justice and fair play. “I do not say that all men are equal in their ability, their character or their motivation,” he declared more than once, “but I say they should be equal in their chance to develop their character, their motivation and their ability. They should be given a fair chance to develop all the talents that they have.” His instinctive inability to be bound by artificial and arbitrary distinctions had in 1953 caused him to pay little attention to the Negro as a Negro. In 1963 it caused him to pay little attention to those unwilling to accept his basic commitment to fair play. Simple justice requires this program, he would tell the Congress in concluding his Civil Rights Message of June 19, 1963, “not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquillity—but, above all, because it is right.”

  EXECUTIVE ACTION, 1961-1962

  A long and difficult Presidential journey had preceded that June, 1963, message, and it began on January 20, 1961, as John Kennedy sat in the cold and frosty stands in front of the White House reviewing the Inaugural Parade. There were, he noted, among all the floats and bands that marched before him, no dark faces in the honor guard of the Coast Guard. That night he placed a call to Treasury Secretary Dillon, whose department had jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. Special recruiting efforts would be required, but the Coast Guard Academy in 1962 would have the first Negro student in its eighty-six-year history.

  At his first Cabinet meeting the following week, the President mentioned the incident; and he asked each Cabinet member to examine the situation in his own department. He stressed that he was not interested merely in numbers but in opportunity at all levels—in the Foreign Service, for example, and in the top policy, professional and supervisory positions. Among his own earliest appointees were Associate Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher and Housing and Home Finance Administrator Robert Weaver, both “firsts” for their race.

  During the next one hundred and the next one thousand days, the President’s admonition was heeded. For the first time Negroes were named as ambassadors to European as well as to African nations, as United States Attorneys and as a Commissioner of the District of Columbia. (The U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia was the first Negro in that position since Frederick Douglass nearly a century earlier.) More Negroes were appointed to top Federal jobs than at any time in history—including a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, an Assistant Secretary of Labor and members of several boards and commissions. The number of Negroes serving in top professional or supervisory positions multiplied in most departments. In the Department of Justice, for example, the number of Negro attorneys rose from ten to more than seventy. Some of these new appointees were promoted from within. Others were invited through special recruitment programs and regional conferences undertaken by the Civil Service Commission, Foreign Service and other agencies.

  Kennedy also appointed five lifetime Federal judges from Negro ranks, more than any other President in history, including the first two to be named district judges in the continental United States. He named the nation’s (and NAACP’s) leading Negro lawyer, the brilliant Thurgood Marshall, to the Court of Appeals. He named three others, including the first Negro woman jurist (Mrs. Marjorie Lawson, his early campaign aide), to the District of Columbia bench—altogether nearly half the Negro judges ever nominated by the White House. (The appointment of judges in the South whose records were not always pleasing to the President was not, it should be emphasized, the result of a quid pro quo with Southern Senators, although the operation of “Senatorial courtesy” limited his choice in one state rather severely. No names were forwarded by the Department of Justice to the President until investigation indicated that the prospective judges would abide by the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. At least two mistakes of judgment were made in this process. But those judges on the whole, said the President, “sharing, perhaps, as they do, the general outlook of the South, have done a remarkable job in fulfilling their oath of office.”)

  Early in the transition Kennedy had asked Vice President Johnson to head his committees on nondiscrimination in government contracts and employment and to review how their powers could be strengthened. A new Executive Order in March combined the old Committees on Government Contracts and Employment into a single President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. Its extended jurisdiction and sanctions covered some twenty million employees, a sizable proportion of the labor force. It had more power, personnel and funds than its predecessors. With simplified complaint procedures and regular reports, it adjudicated several hundred more cases in its first eighteen months than its predecessors had handled in six years. Through voluntary “Plans for Progress” it covered plants and unions not included in the Executive Order. (Because these plans were conceived and advanced by a persuasive Southerner, Robert Troutman, the President had to ward off the suspicions of civil rights advocates convinced they were meaningless and eventually had to accept Troutman’s resignation. But the success of the idea vindicated his confidence in Troutman.)

  No contracts were canceled. From time to time the President and Attorney General were dissatisfied with the committee’s pace and skeptical of its glowing statistics. But major breakthroughs were made—in textile mills where Negroes had only been sweepers, in aircraft plants where they had been told not to apply, in thousands of new jobs and supervisory positions.

  In all this whirlwind of activity—in the areas of Negro voting rights and education as well as employment—one ingredient was missing: legislation. It was missing throughout 1961, except for a largely routine extension of the Civil Rights Commission. It was confined in 1962 to two efforts in the voting rights area—the prevention of discriminatory literacy tests and the abolition by constitutional amendment of poll taxes. Hope for the first measure was lost in the Senate when failure to obtain even a majority vote for cloture (which requires a two-thirds vote) made two facts abundantly clear: (1) that it could not pass without virtually unanimous Republican support, which was not forthcoming; and (2) that a filibuster would kill most of the President’s other legislative proposals, including those which could provide better housing and more jobs for both Negro and white. The ban on poll taxes in Federal elections, which had been sought for twenty years and for which the President had cast one of his first votes as a freshman Congressman in 1947, finally passed both houses, was pushed by the President and Demo
cratic National Committee in the state legislatures, and became the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The number of Negroes and less affluent whites enabled to vote by that measure alone, the President believed, could make a difference in his 1964 re-election race in Texas and Virginia.

  But for two years no other civil rights measures were sought or enacted. Bills originating in the Congress were endorsed by administration witnesses, thus technically fulfilling the pledges of the 1960 platform, but none of these was adopted or pressed by the President as his own. The reason was arithmetic. The August, 1960, defeat of civil rights measures in the more liberal Eighty-sixth Congress—as well as the voting patterns in January of 1961 in the Rules Committee fight in the House and the cloture rule fight in the Senate—all made it obvious that no amount of Presidential pressure could put through the Eighty-seventh Congress a meaningful legislative package on civil rights. The votes were lacking in the House to get it through or around the Rules Committee. They were lacking in the Senate to outlast or shut off a filibuster. In view of solid Southern Democratic intransigence, greater Republican and Western Democratic support was required, and with no broad public interest in such legislation outside of the various civil rights organizations, that support was not obtainable.1

  The choice confronting the President was clear. He could put forward and fight for bold proposals anyway, without any prospects for their passage, and with some risk of jeopardizing other legislation, or he could accept criticism for failing to carry out the platform by confining himself to an expansion of executive actions, as his campaign speeches had in fact emphasized.

  It was not an easy choice. The President knew that legislative proposals had been promised and expected. He knew that the token gradualism of the preceding years was insufficient. “But a lot of talk and no results will only make them madder,” he said to me after one civil rights delegation had left his office. “If we drive Sparkman, Hill and other moderate Southerners to the wall with a lot of civil rights demands that can’t pass anyway, then what happens to the Negro on minimum wages, housing and the rest?” To solidify the conservative coalition—by presenting an issue on which Southerners had traditionally sought Republican support in exchange for Southern opposition to other measures—could doom his whole program. To provoke a bitter national controversy without achieving any gain would divide the American people at a time when the international scene required maximum unity.