by Ted Sorensen
The summer was, in fact, cooler than the President had feared. The influence of extremist groups in the Negro community dwindled; one civil rights leader was privately persuaded to reject some Communists who had infiltrated his movement; and the President in turn rejected the claims of the Wallaces and Barnetts that the whole civil rights movement was Communist-inspired. It was not surprising, he said, that the nation’s few Communists would attempt to “worm their way into those movements…. But I must say that we looked into this matter with a good deal of care. We have no evidence that any of the leaders of the civil rights movements in the United States are Communists.”
Asked at a late summer news conference about the diminution of demonstrations, he emphasized that a period of calm should be used to advance progress and not be regarded as the end of the effort. With considerable candor, he explained that demonstrations had subsided partly because of the progress under way and “partly because…the responsible Negro leadership…realizes that this is a long-drawn-out task…and a quick demonstration in the street is not the immediate answer…. In some cases…particularly in their extreme form…[or] fringe actions…they were self-defeating.”
But those opposed to demonstrations could take little comfort from his words. “Some of the people,” he said at another news conference, “who keep talking about demonstrations never talk about the problem of redressing grievances…. You can’t just tell people ‘Don’t protest,’ but still keep them out of your store.” The massive march on Washington earlier mentioned had been altered. Instead of a menacing sit-in in the legislative galleries—which he had strongly opposed—it was to be a peaceful assembly on the Washington Monument grounds, marching from there to the Lincoln Memorial. Kennedy worked through the Department of Justice, personal intermediaries and such friendly sponsors as Walter Reuther to make the planning as responsible and effective as possible. While he shared some of the trepidation of those officials who forecast disaster, he was ahead of his team in endorsing the project and recognizing the necessity for its success without turning it into a Federal undertaking. Washington and Park Police and Federally financed facilities were made available. The project was still under fire as a high-pressure, explosive demonstration. But the President termed it “a peaceful assembly calling for a redress of grievances…and that is in the great tradition.”
As August 28, the day of the march, neared, the President was concerned about how peaceful an assembly it would be. The American Nazi Party threatened a countermarch, the Black Muslims opposed the march, and at least one of the Negro student leaders prepared to denounce the “inadequacies” of the President’s bill. Thousands of extra police were to be on hand, with four thousand troops standing by across the river. Many Washingtonians, fearing trouble, said they would stay home that day. Some Congressmen wanted protection for the Capitol. The President made it clear that he would be in his office. Aware of the hard political fact that a crowd of 230,000 is capable of many reactions, he declined to appear before the march. Nor did he want to meet its leaders in advance of their reports, agreeing to see them instead at day’s end.
On August 28 all went well. Kennedy marveled, as the world marveled, at the spirit and self-discipline of the largest public demonstration ever held in Washington. Participants from every state and race, arriving by every means of transportation, maintained dignity with enthusiasm, sang, chanted and listened patiently to hours of entertainment and exhortation. The most impassioned oratory from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was delivered by Martin Luther King. “I have a dream,” he cried over and over, describing the day when harmony and equality would prevail.
“I have a dream,” said the President to King as he greeted the group’s leaders at the White House. His dream was theirs. He had been deeply touched by the proceedings and was full of admiration for march leader A. Philip Randolph. Their cause, he said, had been advanced by the moving but orderly events of the day. Then, around a table of coffee and sandwiches, he brought them back to the harsh world of legislative committees, compromises and constituent pressures. He doubted that any votes in the Congress had been changed. He doubted that any segregationists had been converted. But he felt that the march had helped to unite the adherents of civil rights more closely; and merely the absence of violence in such a huge and restless throng had awakened new interest and won new adherents in white America.
Polls showed a majority in white America in favor of the Kennedy bill, but they also showed a majority feeling that Kennedy was pushing too fast. Signs of a white “backlash” in Northern suburbs were widely discussed. A poll in California reportedly showed outspoken Liberals privately opposed to integration in their neighborhoods and schools. A Lubell survey in Birmingham of white voters for Kennedy in the 1960 election could find only one willing to support him again. Governor Terry Sanford acknowledged that even moderate North Carolina would be lost if the election were in November, 1963. “K.O. the Kennedys” became a slogan for the Mississippi gubernatorial election that fall. Right-wing Republicanism under Barry Goldwater was in the ascendancy. Vitriolic mail poured into the White House every day. Reviewing a speech for Andrew Hatcher’s delivery to key Negro audiences, the President came upon a passage describing him as “determined to pass the best bill possible, however it may affect him politically, whatever abuse he may receive from any sector or section of the country.” He paused, smiled and wrote in the words: “and he has received some.”
Kennedy was not unaware of the strain his stand had placed on his party and on his own political prospects. “Obviously it is going to be an important matter” in 1964, he said. “It has caused a good deal of feeling against the administration…. I am not sure that I am the most popular political figure…today in the South, but that is all right.” He had no doubt that polls showing white discontent were accurate. But “you must make a judgment about the movement of a great historical event…after a period of time…. Change always disturbs…. I was surprised that there wasn’t greater opposition. I think we are going at about the right tempo.”
At times he found it hard to believe that otherwise rational men could be so irrational on this subject. (He was even surprised to find deep feelings against Negroes’ sitting beside whites at a lunch counter. To him that seemed the least controversial part of his bill.) Those who thought he was pushing too fast seemed to think he was taking something away from whites and giving it to Negroes, he said; and he explained over and over that he sought for the Negroes not preference but equality, not special privilege but opportunity; he sought not to drag down white standards but to raise Negro standards.
Privately he confided to a Negro leader that “this issue could cost me the election, but we’re not turning back.” Publicly he remained cautiously optimistic. The people in time-will face up to the truth, he said, and the Republicans will live up to their legacy as the party of Lincoln. He realized that he could never pick up enough Negro and liberal votes (in addition to those he already had) to offset the votes this issue would cost him in the North as well as the South. But he still thought that he would win re-election—that local candidates would be hurt more than the national ticket—that passage of the bill would cool tempers off and let other issues rise—and that the explosive costs of inaction would have been even greater than those of any action he had taken.
This particular crisis…has come and we are going to deal with it…. We just have to wait and see what political effect they have. But I think the position of the administration is well known—and I expect it will continue to follow the same course it has followed in the past.
While he himself did not indulge in comparisons, he was not averse to those who called his speech and bill “the Second Emancipation Proclamation.” Like the first, it had confronted the issue of the black man’s freedom in a white man’s society out of necessity as well as belief. Like the first, its reliance on reason and reconciliation had won it enmities on both sides. And like the first it, it was far-reaching in e
ffect and fanatically opposed, but only the beginning of an era. “That Proclamation,” wrote John Kennedy on its centennial in 1963, “was only a first step—a step which its author unhappily did not live to follow up.”
1 An attempt by the President in 1961 merely to strengthen the Civil Rights Commission by giving it a long-term extension failed to win a third of the Republican votes needed on the House Judiciary Committee.
2 In time, the Executive Orders and actions taken on housing, employment, education, Federal administration and other public activities were the equivalent of such a Proclamation and may have accomplished more. Space does not permit an adequate listing of the many efforts initiated by the Department of Justice in particular; and because of the President-Attorney General relationship, more of these efforts proceeded outside the purview of my office than was true of most domestic matters.
3 Two days later, another Negro registered at the university’s Huntsville branch without the Governor’s even bothering to show up; and a few days earlier another Negro had enrolled without incident at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Even more marked was the contrast with the situation prevailing some seven years earlier at the same University of Alabama, where a mob of students had driven a Negro coed off the campus in three days, while the Federal Government thought it best to “avoid interference.”
PART FIVE
President Kennedy and the World
CHAPTER XIX
THE OLIVE BRANCH
JOHN KENNEDY’S APPROACH to foreign affairs was very different from his approach to domestic problems. “The big difference,” he remarked early in his term, “is between a bill being defeated and the country being wiped out.” Foreign affairs had always interested him far more than domestic. They occupied far more of his time and energy as President. They received from him far more attention to detail, to the shaping of alternatives, to the course of a proposal from origin to execution. They tested far more severely his talents of judgment and execution, with far less emphasis on budget and legislative planning and far more occasions for reacting to unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. They were the object of a far greater change in his own attitudes, as he learned by experience, grew in wisdom and mastered those complexities he had previously oversimplified. As I have earlier made clear, I was not involved in the multitudinous problems of day-to-day foreign policy to the extent I was in domestic, and the accounts which follow are influenced in part by the accident of what I was near or what the President discussed with me. They are distorted also in the sense that more space is afforded the dramatic and the public when much of Kennedy’s best work in foreign policy was undramatic or secret.
The final difference in the Kennedy treatment of foreign and domestic affairs was the relative influence of Congressional and public opinion. His foreign policy actions were still constrained within bounds set by those forces, but they operated more indirectly than directly and his own powers of initiative and decision were much wider. He was, to be sure, concerned in his first year about public complacency over the nation’s perils. “It was much easier,” he remarked, “when people could see the enemy from the walls.” And he reasoned that he could no more meet foreign problems at the expense of his domestic political support than he could woo that support at the expense of our interests abroad—for a show of weakness in either arena would be reflected in the other. Nevertheless he refused to subordinate international considerations—on aid and trade, for example—to every provincial pressure arising in the Congress or electorate.
Some said that Kennedy’s bipartisan emphasis in foreign policy was the result of his narrow election margin. But even had he been elected overwhelmingly, his foreign policy objectives, as distinguished from his methods, would not, I believe, have differed radically from those of his Republican predecessor. He still would have assigned many of the most controversial slots in national security to Republicans to diminish partisan division. His narrow margin of effective Congressional support, a by-product of that close election, did hamper his efforts on foreign aid and lesser problems. But a rash of hot-tempered and uninformed speeches on the Hill when an American plane was hijacked to Cuba caused him to remark privately on the Constitution’s wisdom in not entrusting foreign policy wholly to the Legislative Branch.
In one respect his approaches to domestic and foreign affairs were the same—an emphasis on the factual, the rational and the realistic. As a Senator in 1954, he had assailed in a magazine article the “myths” which “surrounded…American foreign policy,” including
the untouchability of national sovereignty; the existence of inherently good, bad or backward nations…the impairment of an aggressor’s military power by refusing him our diplomatic recognition…myths…that the democratic way of life…will inevitably be the victor in any struggle with an alien power…[and] that other Allies owe homage and gratitude to the United States and all of its views at all times.
As President-elect in 1960-1961, he surprised Dean Rusk, said the Secretary, “by the extent to which he wanted to look at everything from the beginning, the ground up…the origins.”
As President he sought to keep himself and his country attuned to all the new developments: space exploration, the Common Market, the emerging nations, the scientific revolution and the strains within the Communist bloc. He insisted on making careful distinctions—between different kinds of Communist countries, for example, or between differing stages of development in various Latin-American countries—instead of lumping superficial similarities under one label. In Laos and Vietnam, as later illustrated, he believed there were no “right” answers, only problems to be managed instead of solved. In a notable address at the University of Washington in the fall of 1961, he struck a much less zealous note than the candidate of twelve months earlier:
We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient…that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.
Above all, he believed in retaining a choice—not a choice between “Red and dead” or “holocaust and humiliation,” but a variety of military options in the event of aggression, an opportunity for time and maneuver in the instruments of diplomacy, and a balanced approach to every crisis which combined both defense and diplomacy. This approach was reflected in the contrapuntal phrases for which he had a penchant:
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
—Inaugural Address, 1961
On the Presidential coat of arms, the American eagle holds in his right talon the olive branch, while in his left he holds a bundle of arrows. We intend to give equal attention to both.
—First State of the Union Message, 1961
Our policy must blend whatever degree of firmness and flexibility is necessary to protect our vital interests, by peaceful means if possible, by resolute action if necessary…. While we do not intend to see the free world give up, we shall make every effort to prevent the world from being blown up.
—University of North Carolina, 1961
We must face up to the chance of war, if we are to maintain the peace…. Diplomacy and defense are not substitutes for one another…. A willingness to resist force, unaccompanied by a willingness to talk, could provoke belligerence—while a willingness to talk, unaccompanied by a willingness to resist force, could invite disaster…. While we shall negotiate freely, we shall not negotiate freedom…. In short, we are neither “warmongers” nor “appeasers,” neither “hard” nor “soft.” We are Americans.
—University of Washington, 1961
Those accustomed to thinking only in black and white terms were displeased or confused by this approach. One chronicler accused him of fanning the flames of the cold war, another of being blind to the threat of Communism. One critic called his Inaugural and first State of the Union addresses alarmist, another naive. Tw
o reporters who interviewed him for an hour on foreign policy, comparing separate memos later, discovered that one had thought him rather tough and uncompromising and the other rather hopeful for agreement. Still others attributed his many-sided approach to a desire to please everyone, to a tendency to compromise or to too many advisers. “You cannot be both Chamberlain and Churchill,” advised a columnist;1 and a religious spokesman—pleased with Kennedy’s efforts on disarmament, but displeased with his emphasis on defense—advised him: “Don’t try to do two opposite things at once.” To which the President replied, with an analogy to the rhythmic expansion and contraction of the heart: “All of life is like that—systole and diastole.”
HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD WAR AND “WINNING”
John Kennedy had seen the ugly side of conventional war—in England with his father, in the South Pacific with his crew, at memorial services for his brother and brother-in-law, and on Congressional trips to Asia and the Middle East. But nuclear war could not be weighed by the same units of measure. “Because of the ingenuity of science and man’s own inability to control his relationships with one another,” he said, “we happen to live in the most dangerous time in the history of the human race…. The world has long since passed the time when armed conflict can be the solution to international problems.”
He was acutely aware of the responsibility of governing in a world where both the United States and its chief adversary could destroy each other’s society in a matter of minutes. “That changes the problem,” he said.
It changes all the answers and all the questions. I don’t think many people really understand the change…. When that day comes, and there is a massive exchange, then that is the end, because you are talking about…150 million fatalities in the first eighteen hours.