by Ted Sorensen
THE KENNEDY CIVIL RIGHTS BILL
On June 19 President Kennedy sent to the Eighty-eighth Congress the most comprehensive and far-reaching civil rights bill ever proposed. It codified and expanded the pattern his executive actions had already started. It was accompanied by a message as forceful as his June 11 manifesto. It was to differ only slightly from the Civil Rights Act enacted by that Congress the following year. But it was different in several respects from the bill we had first discussed with Justice the previous month.
With the backing of the Vice President, a Community Relations Service had been added to work quietly with local communities in search of progress. (Negro Congressmen had urged that the words “mediation” and “conciliation” had an “Uncle Tom” air about them and should be stricken from the title.) The Vice President, once the decision was final to go ahead with a bill, had also strongly backed the President’s addition to the message of new and supplemental programs for job training, vocational education and literacy skills. Added at the suggestion of Congressional leaders was a broad authorization to withhold Federal funds from any program or effort that practiced racial discrimination—thus denying to obstructionist or irresponsible Congressmen their familiar practice of offering nondiscrimination amendments to programs they hoped to defeat. By leaving the cut-off discretionary, the President sought to avoid terminations which punished Negroes for white violations.
The President, aware of the emotions surrounding the initials FEPC, decided finally to omit it from the bill but to endorse a pending FEPC measure in his message. In addition, his Committee on Equal Opportunity under the Vice President was to be given statutory authority and increased jurisdiction.
The two principal features of the bill, in addition to those proposed back in February, had been included from the outset of our discussions:
1. The first was a ban on discrimination in places of public accommodation—including hotels, restaurants, places of amusement and retail stores—with a “substantial” effect on interstate commerce (thus excluding what came to be known as “Mrs. Murphy’s boardinghouse”). This kind of discrimination more than any other had been the object of Negro sit-ins, pickets and demonstrations. Like Lincoln’s Proclamation taking slaves away from owners, this proposal was condemned as a violation of property rights. But the President reminded the Congress that “property has its duties as well as its rights.” (Two years earlier in Paris, he had expressed anger and chagrin upon learning that the two dark-skinned domestics who accompanied him, after being served their meals in a private dining room of their own at the Quai d’Orsay Palace by liveried footmen in wigs and knee breeches, had then crossed the Seine to visit a French lady’s maid of their acquaintance, only to be turned away at the hotel door because of their color.)
2. The second basic provision gave authority to the Attorney General to seek desegregation of public education on his own initiative when a lack of means or fear of reprisal prevented the aggrieved students or their parents from doing so. This was the essence of the old Title III supported by Senator Kennedy in 1957 but stricken from that year’s bill before passage. A lack of adequate education is one root of other Negro problems, the President said, and the implementation of the Supreme Court’s decision cannot be left solely to those who lack the resources to bring suits or withstand intimidation. “The pace is very slow. Too many Negro children entering segregated grade schools at the time of the Supreme Court’s decision nine years ago will enter segregated high schools this fall, having suffered a loss which can never be restored.”
A host of other proposals had been suggested to the President, but he was looking for a law, not an issue. This Congress and future Congresses could amend and improve his effort. He wanted a package unencumbered by any provisions that went beyond the clearly legal, reasonable and necessary—because he wanted it to pass.
He was asking Congress to swallow a pill many times larger than those it had previously refused to swallow. This was no grandstand play for a lost cause or a political effort. He was not interested in a “moral victory” on a legislative issue—he wanted a legislative victory on a moral issue. Despite the odds and despite the opposition, he set out to get the best bill possible at the earliest time possible. The thrust of his argument was that the country could take no other course, that the Congress had no other choice and that the Republicans—upon whose votes House Rules Committee and Senate cloture approval depended—had no higher obligation.
The basic legislative tactics remained relatively unchanged from our May discussions. One omnibus bill, which included the February proposals as well as the new ones, would be sought instead of several separate measures. Bipartisan sponsorship would be sought to the extent possible—resulting in Democrat Mansfield’s introducing the whole bill and simultaneously cosponsoring with Republican Dirksen the same bill minus the public accommodations sections (to which the Republican leader was opposed). The President had considered delivering the message in person before a joint session, but the June 11 speech made that unnecessary. His objective was passage of the bill that year without any loss of priority to the tax-cut bill. Faster economic growth would provide far more jobs for Negroes than FEPC, and a new recession would hit Negroes hardest of all. There was little point, said the President, in gaining entrance to a lunch counter “if you didn’t have a dime for a cup of coffee.” One out of every seven Negro teen-agers in the labor force was unemployed, a source of both frustration and friction; and his economic measures could not be set aside as irrelevant to the racial crisis.
The one tactical paragraph of his message which received as much careful attention as the portions dealing with legislation concerned the problem of continued Negro demonstrations. Southerners and Republicans warned that further pressures would surely defeat the bill. Negroes warned that they would not give up their chief weapon. They talked of a “massive march” on the Senate and House galleries. The President—as stern in the message as he had been in his private talks with Negro leaders—was careful not to decry the value of peaceful demonstrations:
But as feelings have risen in recent days, these demonstrations have increasingly endangered lives and property, inflamed emotions and unnecessarily divided communities. They are not the way in which this country should rid itself of racial discrimination. Violence is never justified; and, while peaceful communication, deliberation and petitions of protest continue, I want to caution against demonstrations which can lead to violence.
This problem is now before the Congress….The Congress should have an opportunity to freely work its will. [The italicized portions were personally added by the President to the final draft.]
I…ask every member of Congress to set aside sectional and political ties, and to look at this issue from the viewpoint of the nation. I ask you to look into your hearts—not in search of charity, for the Negro neither wants nor needs condescension—but for the one plain, proud and priceless quality that unites us all as Americans: a sense of justice.
The President did not rely on eloquence alone. “It is clear,” he had written to Eisenhower June 10, “that such a measure cannot pass either house without substantial bipartisan support.” He kept Eisenhower—who was sympathetic but not enthusiastic about the legislative approach—fully informed. Along with the Vice President, he consulted frequently with the leaders of both parties, once with Republican leaders Dirksen and McCulloch alone to brief them on the need for the bill and its details. Bob Kennedy and Burke Marshall held a series of Capitol Hill briefings to which all Democratic Senators, and all but the Deep South Congressmen, were invited. The decision to send a bill, the President stressed to each group, was final, but their comments and suggestions for its contents were welcome. While he would not drop the public accommodations section as Dirksen preferred, or extend it still further under the Fourteenth Amendment as other Republicans preferred, he included the Fourteenth Amendment as additional constitutional grounds and accepted other GOP suggestions for improvement.
Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei and I reviewed the bill with Dirksen and other Republicans before it was printed in final form. The Illinois Senator, accepting “an idea whose time has come,” proved to be constructive and cooperative.
Special attention in the House focused on William McCulloch of Ohio, the key Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a respected conservative. McCulloch’s constituency might normally have been considered too rural and Republican to have made him a champion of Negro rights, but his conscience responded to the reason of the administration and to the realities of the situation.
The President wanted not only a bill which dealt effectively with the problems of discrimination in voting, public accommodations, educational and other public institutions, Federal programs and employment, but also a bill which reflected a bipartisan approach and a national consensus which the nation would accept and obey. The test of whether this was possible came in the House Judiciary Committee. A subcommittee considering the bill under the chairmanship of Congressman Celler, split along bipartisan lines, reported out an expanded bill which appeared to be stronger and had the unyielding support of the civil rights groups, but which in fact included provisions that were of doubtful constitutionality and contained the seeds of more turmoil than solutions. Southern Democrats gleefully joined Northern liberal Democrats in giving the bill more weight than the House Rules Committee and full House membership were capable of carrying. The President had the choice of either making this new version the official Democratic bill, which would have increased enormously his prestige and influence with liberal and civil rights groups, or risking an all-out effort to re-create the badly damaged bipartisan consensus. He chose the latter course.
Recognizing that the liberal Democrats on the committee were under great pressure from the civil rights organizations, including church groups and organized labor, to support the new version, he agreed that the administration would take on as much as possible the burden of going back to a bipartisan bill. For this purpose the Attorney General came before the full committee. He testified in direct fashion that many of the changes were unenforceable, unconstitutional or undesirable; that only a bipartisan bill could pass; and that a compromise, which he outlined, should be adopted by the committee. But this was not enough. To enlist behind the compromise the full committee’s liberal Democrats, who were suspicious that the Republicans would seek to outmaneuver them and who were under public pressure to stay with the subcommittee bill, the President had to intervene personally. In a series of White House meetings and phone calls, he discovered that, to do this, he would have to get a commitment of House Republican support for the compromise, lasting through the Rules Committee and on the floor. For this he needed a commitment from Minority Leader Halleck and the rest of the Republican leadership in the House, as well as Congressman McCulloch. To enable him to make his own commitment on a bipartisan approach to the Republican leadership, he first had to persuade enough liberal Democrats on the committee to follow his lead, and that required another late-night meeting at the White House. It was a difficult juggling act, but in the end Halleck, aided by McCulloch, told the President that the votes would be there. Right-wing Republicans accused Halleck of appeasing the enemy and placed a furled umbrella on his desk, but the committee reported out the new compromise version, after a dramatic meeting, on October 29, 1963. (The commitment to Kennedy from both Republicans and Democrats which that vote entailed would make possible House passage of the compromise bill in December of that year.)
The President, discouraged by the months of hearings and maneuverings, then pressed the committee to get its report to the House Rules Committee. It arrived there on November 21 as he left for a speech-making tour in Texas.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, where the Attorney General patiently spent one day after another answering Senator Ervin’s questions on the Constitution, a real test awaited floor debate. The President hoped—but never with much confidence—that a “Vandenberg” would emerge among the Southern Senators, a statesman willing to break with the past and place national interests first. Despite idle speculation that Arkansas’ Fulbright might play such a role, no Southern solon came forward to place the judgment of history ahead of his continued career.
THE CLIMATE FOR CHANGE
Passage of his bill, the President knew, required appeals to more than the Congress; and a peaceful revolution required more than passage of his bill. Its enactment, his message made plain,
will not solve all our problems of race relations. This bill must be supplemented by action in every branch of government at the Federal, state and local level. It must be supplemented as well by enlightened private citizens, private businesses and private labor and civic organizations.
To enlighten and encourage those citizens, the President, accompanied by the Vice President and Attorney General, embarked on an unprecedented series of private meetings in the White House—seeking to enlist the cooperation and understanding of more than sixteen hundred national leaders: educators, lawyers, Negro leaders, Southern leaders, women’s organizations, business groups, governors, mayors, editors and others, Republicans as well as Democrats, segregationists as well as integrationists. He briefed them not only on the bill but on their responsibilities beyond the bill. He had neither funds nor sanctions to induce their assistance, but he offered Presidential leadership.
He pressed for action from the leaders of the American labor movement some of whom had long given lip service to civil rights but had excluded Negroes from many craft unions, or forced them into segregated locals or seniority systems, or denied them the required apprenticeship training. He pressed for action from clergymen of all faiths, certain they would “recognize the conflict between racial bigotry and the Holy Word.” What about racial intermarriage? asked one minister. “I am not talking about private lives,” replied the President, dismissing this familiar bugaboo, “but public accommodations, public education and public elections.” He pressed for action from the blue-ribbon Business Council (noting later in a caustic aside that it was the only audience not to rise to its feet upon the entrance of the President of the United States).
The over-all response made Kennedy proud of his country. The citizen “lobby” on behalf of the bill—led particularly by religious groups and supported by editorial writers usually poles apart—was massive and effective. Even more striking was the voluntary removal of segregation signs and practices in chain stores, theaters and restaurants. Southern mayors and chambers of commerce began talking with Negro leaders. Employers and unions, North and South, began lowering racial bars. The nation’s clergy were goaded into effective action on a major moral issue which had long preceded Kennedy’s leadership. Progress was slow and insufficient, but, compared to the previous hundred years, rapid and gratifying.
Federally sponsored apprenticeship programs opened the building trades to more Negroes. James Meredith received his degree. The Prince Edward County, Virginia, schools were reopening on a voluntary basis. “We, as a country, are doing well…passing through a very grueling test,” said the President. But not everyone passed the test. Alabama’s Governor Wallace, hoping to re-enact another summit in the doorway, turned Negro children away from newly integrated schools in Birmingham and two other cities, first with state troopers, then with his National Guard. When Kennedy federalized the Guardsmen once again and simply returned them to their quarters, Wallace backed down as before.
But the Governor’s example of defying the law and oppressing Negro children was not lost on his fellow Alabamans. Many white students boycotted the schools. A white man threw a rock at two Negro girls on their way to school. Four days after Wallace’s performance, a bomb planted in a Birmingham Negro church killed four little girls in Sunday school, another Negro youth was shot dead by a Birmingham policeman and still another by two white boys. Almost all the warnings about violence in 1963 had been directed at Negroes, yet almost all the victims had been Negroes. “I deplore violence,” said
George Wallace.
The President sent FBI bomb specialists to the city and left no doubt whom he held at least indirectly responsible. “Public disparagement of law and order has encouraged violence which has fallen on the innocent.” He conferred with Negro and white leaders from Birmingham, dispatched General Kenneth Royall and Colonel Earl Blaik as a special negotiating team, and obtained pledges of cooperation from all sides.
In the space of a few months President Kennedy had made the Negroes’ troubles his troubles and their problems his priority. Their assailants were attacking him. Their overwhelming endorsement, combined with continued white resentment, the President was told, created the danger of political division along racial lines. “I would doubt that,” he said. “I think the American people have been through too much to make that fatal mistake…. Over the long run we are going to have a mix. That will be true racially, socially, ethnically, geographically, and that is really, finally, the best way.” (A recording of the last two sentences, taken out of context, appeared in the radio commercials of Southern segregationist candidates warning of intermarriage.)
At times there was still grumbling from Negroes, and it was not confined to extremist leaders such as Malcolm X or intellectuals such as James Baldwin. Many of the more genuine and practical leaders failed to understand that Kennedy had to work simultaneously on his tax bill, on the Test Ban Treaty, on the threat of a railroad strike and on Vietnam—in their interest as well as the interest of all Americans. When he did not cancel his European trip in June, some complained that he was interrupting his attention to their problems. But the President valued the trip partly because it did interrupt the nation’s attention to this problem. Too much attention, he believed, could accelerate demands and expectations more rapidly than they could be fulfilled, and thereby increase tensions during a long, hot summer.