Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  “The civil rights movement,” the President often said thereafter, “should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.” But news photographers deserve a share of this credit. Frontpage pictures of Connor’s police dogs savagely attacking Negroes, of fire hoses pounding them against the street, of burly policemen sitting on a female demonstrator, aroused the nation and the world. Previously timid Negroes were spurred into action in their own cities. Previously indifferent whites were shocked into sympathy. And President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, recognizing that the American conscience was at last beginning to stir, began laying his own plans for awakening that conscience to the need for further action.

  Because he said little publicly, because he still sought the least divisive answers, because he still relied on reason and persuasion, most of the Negro leaders complained about the administration’s attitude toward Birmingham. They were angry at the Kennedys for requesting a moratorium on demonstrations while an agreement was worked out and the city government settled. They resented the Kennedys’ questioning their use of small children in demonstrations which subjected them to possible injury as well as jail. They were suspicious of Burke Marshall and other Justice aides who had been striving for more than a year to negotiate privately some peaceful progress in that troubled community.

  Above all, civil rights leaders impatiently demanded that the President “do something” as he had in Mississippi. But troops had been sent to Mississippi because Federal court orders were defied by both officials and mobs. No Federal court orders had been broken by Bull Connor, nor were any crowds massed in Birmingham other than Negroes. Segregated lunch counters and an all-white police force were not contrary to Federal law. Even passage of the civil rights bill then pending would have been of little value; and the White House and Department of Justice began at this time their deliberations on further legislation. There were recurring suggestions that the President should personally appear in Birmingham and take a Negro child by the hand into a school or lunch counter. But that suggestion badly confused the physical presence of the President with the official presence of his powers. It would have demeaned the dignity of the office by relying on the same kind of dramatic stunt and physical contest that was staged by those Southern governors who “stood in the doorway.”

  The best that could be done in Birmingham was to initiate an investigation of voting rights, file a brief in a pending case against segregation, stay on the alert for official violations of the old civil rights statutes and work, as the President said, “on getting both sides together—to settle in a peaceful fashion the very real abuses too long inflicted on the Negro citizens of that community.” That was not enough to satisfy either the President or his critics. But it was all he had the power to do under the laws then prevailing in our Federal-state system.

  In private conversations with the President and Attorney General, Negro leaders understood this. They understood also the need to confine their own charges to the provable and their objectives to the obtainable. But their public stance was invariably different. The NAACP had lost members when the Rev. King seized the initiative in the South. King had lost prestige when he stayed only two days in jail in Albany, Georgia. All the Negro spokesmen and action groups were competing for leadership, for followers and necessarily for headlines—and none of them intended to be outdone by any of the others in Birmingham, Alabama. They also believed that the greater the crisis, the greater was their bargaining power with Southern officials and their “creative pressures” on President Kennedy.

  Finally, early in May, Burke Marshall convinced Birmingham’s more responsible business leaders that racial harmony was better for them than chaos. Changes in employment opportunities and public faculties were offered. The new Mayor promised a more moderate approach; Negro leaders suspended demonstrations; and the President expressed hope at his news conference for continued cooperation and progress. Asked if that settlement might be a model, he replied, “We will have to see what happens in Birmingham over the next few days.”

  Three days later he had his answer. With my sons and a group of neighbors, I was playing softball on the ellipse south of the White House on Sunday afternoon, May 12. The police asked us to clear the area for a landing by the President’s helicopter. Surprised that he would be returning early from his weekend retreat in the country, I learned the reason as soon as I was home. He had been trying to reach me by phone. Late the previous night a Birmingham Negro home and hotel had been devastated by bombs. Fear, anger, rioting and counterrioting had taken over. By the time I reached the White House the President and Attorney General had decided on a new course of action. Some three thousand troops were being dispatched to bases near Birmingham. At 9 P.M. the President broadcast over all networks a brief but strong statement of warning. Then, as the Attorney General talked with Rev. King by telephone, the President waited in his office for telephoned reports on the prospects for renewed violence. (Idly switching the channels on his TV set in search of news about the crisis, he came across a new political satire show which ribbed current political figures and failings, including a few of his own. Between telephone calls, he relaxed and chuckled appreciatively at each skit until the show ended.)

  Tensions also eased in Birmingham. Alabama’s Governor George Wallace challenged the legal basis of the troop directive on the grounds that his state police were capable of maintaining order. But the President had already suffered once the consequences of being too quick to accept such assurances and too slow to move in troops; and he responded firmly that his authority to suppress domestic violence gave him full discretion as to how and when that authority should be exercised.

  Even as Birmingham returned fitfully to the terms of the agreement that Marshall had negotiated, Kennedy and Wallace were moving steadily toward another confrontation which threatened to resemble that in Mississippi. On that long night in the previous September, after the Federal troops had finally arrived in Oxford and guaranteed Meredith’s safety, the President had wearily asked his brother whether there would be “any more like this one coming up soon.” Bob Kennedy had replied that he could look forward to losing at least one more state’s electoral votes—Alabama. A University of Alabama lawsuit similar to the Meredith case, he said, would reach the same critical stage in the spring of 1963. “Let’s be ready,” said the President grimly.

  That same September night Alabama’s Wallace was also planning to be ready. Early the next morning he had warned that Alabama would never yield on segregation in education. He was publicly pledged to “stand in the doorway” of any schoolhouse under court order and defy the Federal Government to remove him. The Justice Department, in preparation for the eventual clash, began an intensive campaign of contacts with Alabama educators, editors, clergymen, business and other community leaders, hoping to build a climate that had not been possible in Mississippi.

  In May of 1963 the President added his weight to this effort. Less than a week after the Birmingham bombings, he made a one-day trip to Tennessee and Alabama, saluting the ninetieth anniversary of Vanderbilt University and the thirtieth anniversary of the TVA, but in addition reminding his listeners of their roles and responsibilities as citizens. At Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the presence of Governor Wallace, he cited the TVA and other popular Federal efforts to show that the Federal Government was not “an outsider, an intruder, an adversary…[but] the people of fifty states joining in a national effort to see progress in every state.” In building the TVA, he said, Nebraska’s Norris and New York’s Roosevelt “were not afraid to direct the power and purpose of the nation toward a solution of the nation’s problems.” Even Governor Wallace could not have missed the meaning.

  At Vanderbilt the President’s remarks were again directed to the point:

  … liberty without learning is always in peril; and learning without liberty is always in vain….

  Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other hum
an beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning and betrays his obligations.

  Bull Connor may have felt these words did not apply to him. But George Wallace made clear at a press conference that he had heard the message—had heard it again on the President’s plane—and had rejected it.

  Alabama was now the only state in the Union without a desegregated state university. The court decisions on two Negro students were final—the university was willing to admit them—prominent Alabamans urged Wallace not to resist—but the Governor was apparently determined on a theatrical show for home consumption. This time each White House move was based on the Mississippi experience. This time the President and Attorney General made certain that troops in nearby Fort Benning were already sitting in helicopters. This time the campus was completely cleared of outsiders, and community leaders spoke out for acceptance. And this time the defiant Governor knew, from Mississippi’s experience, that no amount or kind of defiance could succeed.

  In two press conference statements, the President expressed the hope that troops would be unnecessary—that all Alabamans would recognize that law “is not a matter of choice”—and that the way to avoid troops was to abide by the law. He also expressed to the Attorney General in our meetings his hope that Wallace would not have to be physically pushed or arrested, thus gaining the martyrdom he sought. As the day of decision neared, the President advised the Governor to stay away from the campus at Tuscaloosa. Wallace rejected the advice.

  On June n, 1963, in a knowingly empty and foolish gesture, Governor Wallace appeared in the doorway of the university registration building, replied to Katzenbach’s reading of the President’s proclamation by reading one of his own, and made no objection as the two Negro students were taken to their dormitories. The President had been watching their “confrontation” on TV. As previously planned, he promptly federalized the Alabama National Guard. Less than three hours later, Wallace stepped back from a second confrontation with Katzenbach and the Guard commander, and the two students were registered without incident.3

  THE KENNEDY MANIFESTO

  That day, June n, 1963, marked the end of the state governments’ overt resistance to college desegregation. It also marked the beginning of the Federal Government’s full-scale commitment to the fight against all discrimination. Kennedy had contemplated a nationally televised address in the event of trouble at Tuscaloosa. When that trouble vanished, he decided at the last moment to address the nation anyway while attention was focused on the subject.

  Trouble had not been confined to Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. A white Baltimore postman on a “freedom walk” to Mississippi had been found slain on an Alabama road. A Negro sit-in demonstrator in Jackson had been slugged to the floor, kicked in the face, stomped on again and again—and arrested for disturbing the peace. Rioting by both Negroes and whites in Lexington, North Carolina, had killed one and injured others. The nonviolent passive resistance strategy emphasized by Martin Luther King was not deeply rooted in Negro traditions, and there were signs that it might soon give way to a more violent strategy uncontrolled by responsible leaders. The essence of Kennedy’s civil rights strategy since inauguration had been to keep at all times at least one step ahead of the evolving pressures, never to be caught dead in the water, always to have something new. Now, in Jackson, Danville, New York and scores of other cities and states, “the events in Birmingham and elsewhere,” as he said, had “so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them…. Where legal remedies are not at hand…redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.”

  The President did not regard this as a Federal problem only. With the Vice President and Attorney General he had met with union leaders and businessmen—theater owners, restaurant operators, department store executives and others—asking them to drop racial bars in employment and service. On June 9 he had asked the nation’s mayors, gathered in conference in Honolulu, to improve their practices and ordinances.

  But his first Civil Rights Message in February, 1963, had already signaled a shift in his thinking about civil rights legislation. That message called for an expansion of the role of the Civil Rights Commission, enabling it to serve as a clearinghouse for information and assistance to local communities. It called for technical and economic assistance to school districts in the process of desegregation. It called for a variety of improvements in the voting rights laws: abolishing literacy tests for those with a sixth-grade education, prohibiting the application of different standards to different races and speeding up the registration of voters in contested areas. It spoke up strongly for equal rights in all areas and reviewed the steps taken under executive authority. The message was not in response to any crisis or particular pressure but a product of the President’s own initiative and a part of his regular legislative program. It was well received by Negroes, who were listening. It was virtually ignored by the Congress and the rest of the country, who were not listening.

  But by June 11 the country was listening—and the bills previously proposed were insufficient. Unlike the situation prevailing in 1961 and 1962, public interest in civil rights legislation made Congressional passage appear at least possible. For several weeks the White House and Justice Department had been preparing a new package. The” President’s decision to go ahead definitely on a sweeping bill had been made on May 31, over the opposition of some of his political advisers who saw both Congressional and electoral defeat. Democratic leaders were being consulted. Republican support was being rounded up. The details of the program had not yet been concluded. No address to the nation had been written. But the President at the last minute decided that June 11 was the time and 7 P.M. the hour.

  Having assumed that the tranquil resolution at Tuscaloosa that afternoon would make a speech unnecessary, I did not start a first draft until late in the afternoon or complete it until minutes before he went on the air. There was no time for a redraft. “For the first time,” said the President to me in my office afterward, “I thought I was going to have to go off the cuff.” He did, in fact, wholly extemporize a heartfelt conclusion.

  But in a larger sense the June 11 speech had been in preparation by the President himself for some time. It drew on at least three years of evolution in his thinking, on at least three months of revolution in the equal rights movement, on at least three weeks of meetings in the White House, on drafts of a new message to Congress, and on his remarks to the mayors June 9 as well as on the February Civil Rights Message. An opening reference to the University of Alabama provided the springboard. The announcement of new legislation provided the substance. But the moving force of that address was the unequivocal commitment of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his office and his country “to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

  Warning of the “rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety,” he stressed that the nation’s obligation was to make this “great change…peaceful and constructive for all.” He outlined the legislation he would send to the Congress, but stressed that “legislation cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American.” He paid tribute to those cooperating citizens, North and South, who acted “not out of a sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency.”

  This was not, he said, a sectional issue, nor a partisan issue, nor even “a legal or legislative issue alone.”

  It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level. But law alone cannot make men see right.

  We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution….

  Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise…. We face a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to incre
ased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act…. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

  No President had ever before so forcefully recognized the moral injustice of all racial discrimination, and no President could ever thereafter ignore his moral obligation to remove it.

  The Kennedy commitment was designed to preserve the fabric of our social order—to prevent the unsatisfied grievances of an entire race from rending that fabric in two. But it also stirred deep antagonisms. In Jackson, Mississippi, a few hours after Negro leaders had hailed Kennedy’s talk as a second Emancipation Proclamation, one of their number, Medgar Evers, was assassinated. On Capitol Hill the following day a special caucus of Southern Senators vowed to block any civil rights legislation. A routine expansion of Area Redevelopment, expected to pass comfortably, was defeated in the House by a five-vote margin with fifty-four Southern Democrats voting against it. Republicans talked openly of a Northern white “backlash” that would down both Kennedy and his civil rights bill.

  But the President had not pledged his prestige and power either lightly or suddenly. His concern had deepened as the crisis heightened. His strategy had altered as the selective approach—emphasizing executive power and voting rights—proved insufficient. His obligation was not to the Negroes but to the nation. Just as he had believed in earlier months that the best interests of the nation required him to avoid a losing, bruising legislative battle, so now he believed that the national interest required him to try. Not content with a bill and a speech, he immediately resumed the hard, practical job of creating the political, legislative and educational climate that would transform the bill into law and the speech into a new era of racial justice.