Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Kennedy: Do you think it is so horrifying to have a Negro attend the University of Alabama?

  Wallace: I think it is horrifying for the federal courts and the central government to rewrite all the law and force upon people that which they don’t want.

  Kennedy: But Governor, it is not the central government. We are not rewriting the laws. It is the federal courts that have made a decision, and a determination—

  Wallace: The federal courts rewrote the law in the matter of integration and segregation. For a hundred years they said we could have segregated schools, and then all of a sudden, for political reasons, they pull the rug out from under us….I will never myself submit voluntarily to any integration in a school system in Alabama.

  Bobby’s trip to the Heart of Dixie convinced him to plan for the worst at the university even as he calculated ways to exploit Wallace’s various soft spots. He prepared to federalize the Alabama National Guard and had real federal troops standing by at nearby Fort Benning. State business leaders, meanwhile, had been shocked out of their instinctive support for the ways of the Old South by the white mob’s savage reaction to the Freedom Riders in Montgomery and by withering pressure from the White House; they let Wallace know that the only acceptable outcome was a peaceful one. The University of Alabama president also quietly conspired with federal officials, determined to keep his campus from becoming a riot-torn replica of Ole Miss. In charge on the scene was the Justice Department’s Katzenbach, who this time had orders to avoid any face-off that would make Wallace into a hero and, if possible, “to make him look foolish.” The table and floor in Bobby’s office in Washington were covered with maps of Tuscaloosa, letting him not just monitor the action but pilot it.

  D-Day in Tuscaloosa fell on June 11, but instead of an invasion, Bobby ran an end run. He had been tipped off about something few in Alabama were aware of then: that four years before, then Circuit Court judge George Wallace had worked out a “secret deal” in the “darkest hours of the night” with federal judge Frank Johnson to turn over voter registration records even as he publicly proclaimed he wouldn’t. Knowing about that and other historic backtracking, Bobby gambled that Wallace would give a repeat performance now. The attorney general let the governor make his theatrical stand in the schoolhouse door. White crayons marked where Wallace should stand, TV and radio crews had been prepositioned, and the diminutive governor raised his hand in the universal symbol of the traffic cop as he denounced the federal interference. The only people he was blocking, however, were Katzenbach and two law enforcement colleagues, with Malone and Hood a safe distance away. The National Guard was mobilized but saw no combat. The two students checked in to their dormitories and quietly registered that afternoon. Wallace’s performance as defender of the South was beamed across the land and stoked his national ambitions, but those on the scene knew his script had been carefully crafted to suggest defiance but deliver acquiescence.

  “The show is over. Obviously the Kennedys have won,” said Seymore Trammel, Wallace’s former finance director and friend. The governor “wanted the fires of integration fanned in order to build the issue to a fever pitch among the emotional voters. We figured there were 30 emotional voters, especially in the South[,] to every 1 objective voter,” Trammel recounted in an unpublished memoir. Bobby, too, used the events in Tuscaloosa to present the exact mix of conciliation and persuasion that he needed after his disasters with the Freedom Rides and Ole Miss. “All eyes of integration were on Bobby,” said Trammel, who eventually had a bitter break with Wallace. “And all eyes of segregation were focused on Wallace.”

  That week in June 1963 turned out to be one of the most pivotal in the narrative of the civil rights movement. The same day Malone and Hood made history in Alabama, JFK went on national TV to define racial justice as “a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” Rarely had any president captured so concisely and precisely what was at stake. John Kennedy—who wanted his presidency to redefine America’s place in the world, not just to remake America’s ghettos—had never come close before. He also promised, the next week, to push Congress to pass broad civil rights legislation. As sure as he sounded that night, all of the president’s political advisers “except me” opposed his giving the speech or filing his bill, Bobby said, and JFK worried that civil rights could be “his political swan song.” The attorney general shared that concern, but at long last he was convinced that “the mightiest internal struggle of our time” justified the risk. Baldwin and the others who’d met with Bobby three weeks earlier at his father’s New York apartment now celebrated, having advocated just this sort of national call to arms. Their jubilation, however, was brief. Hours after Americans shut off their television sets, Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field director in Mississippi, was hit in the back by a sniper’s bullet that ripped through his heart. His assassination—in his driveway, his arms loaded with T-shirts reading JIM CROW MUST GO—made clear how deep racial hatreds ran and how difficult it would be to enforce a new civil rights law in the unlikely event that Congress approved it. Nobody understood that better than Bobby, who attended Evers’s funeral, offered support to his widow, and became the closest of friends with his brother.

  The eventful week ended on an upbeat note. Three thousand Negroes and whites marched through Washington peacefully and circled the Justice Department building with placards asking WHY AN ALMOST LILY WHITE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT? IT’S NOT EASTER. Administrators closed the doors but Bobby reopened them, jumped onto a makeshift platform, and spoke to the crowd through a megaphone. His tone was partly defensive—talking about the tenfold increase in black lawyers and saying “I’m not going out and hire a Negro just because he’s not white”—but he took the wind out of the protesters’ fury just by showing up, and he drew cheers for what he’d done in Tuscaloosa and beyond.

  Days later Bobby came out swinging over the slow pace of black hiring. The setting was the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the first federal agency to take “affirmative action” to ensure that Negroes got a fair shot at federal jobs. JFK set up the committee, LBJ chaired it, and RFK was its perpetual gadfly, grousing that the snail’s pace of government progress in cities like Birmingham undercut White House calls for private employers to integrate their workplaces. At its June meeting, Bobby stormed in midway and took over. “He wanted to know what agencies had how many Negroes, how many vacancies there were, who had done what to get more jobs. He wanted to know what defense industries were located in Birmingham, what their employment patterns were, and what the compliance reports were showing….[He] was beginning to be shrill,” recalled Judge Marjorie McKenzie Lawson, a committee member. Then, in the middle of a staffer’s reply, “Bob got up without saying a word to excuse himself, and Burke Marshall got up behind him, [and] they stomped out of the room.” No one there that day doubted Bobby’s true target: the vice president he’d never wanted to see get the job, whose face had turned dark red and voice was nearly inaudible. LBJ wouldn’t forget.

  If the first two years of his civil rights work felt as if he was taking two steps back for every one forward, as Harry Belafonte complained, now it was two steps ahead for every one of slippage. August’s March on Washington,*14 the biggest demonstration ever held in the capital, drew an estimated quarter million people to press not just for liberty but for employment, which even more than the vote was now seen as the gateway to racial justice. A. Philip Randolph, grandfather of the civil rights movement, had been imagining a show of strength like this since the New Deal. Now the country was finally ready. But Bobby, while committed to jobs and justice, feared it could prove catastrophic to bring hundreds of thousands of Negroes to Washington just as the administration was building a case for its civil rights bill. What if the Communists, who had been trying for years to attach themselves to the civil rights movement, co-opted the march? What if the peaceful protest that Randolph dreamed of turned violent? What if, as President Kennedy worried,
members of Congress said, “Yes, I’m for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun”?

  If they weren’t able to stop the march—and Bobby knew that if they tried, it would look as if he and Jack didn’t support its goals—the attorney general was determined to control it. He couldn’t do that publicly, in case it turned into a disaster, and he couldn’t even work backstage with the organizers, for fear Bayard Rustin and the others would think he was trying to supplant them. But for a full five weeks, five of Bobby’s trusted assistants at Justice had their hands in everything essential to the rally’s success. They started by making a list of all that could go wrong, including a planned protest by the Nazi Party getting out of hand. (The Nazi demonstration was moved to 7 A.M. at a safe location, and law enforcement authorities singled out seventy-five or so suspected subversives and assigned an undercover agent to each of them.) They persuaded concessionaires to open even in the face of a potential riot, because the marchers had to be fed. (Records were set for sales of hot dogs and Cokes.) Bobby’s aides educated the D.C. police about the public relations risk of using their twenty-seven dogs to control a crowd to whom dogs like those symbolized police oppression. (Marchers, pouring through the Baltimore tunnel that morning at the rate of one hundred buses an hour, policed themselves in a way that set a model for crowd control.) They persuaded the owners of bars and liquor stores to close, and they let marchers know they were welcome for the day but shouldn’t spend the night. (The Department of Justice said it was a matter of logistics; organizers knew better.) At the last instant, John Lewis, a student leader and the youngest speaker, agreed to remove from his speech the dig that the Kennedy legislation was “too little, too late” and his threat to lead the next march “through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did”; in return, Washington archbishop Patrick O’Boyle—with behind-the-curtain prodding by Bobby—agreed to deliver the opening invocation he had threatened to withhold. (James Baldwin, deemed too inflammatory, was simply excluded from the roster of speakers.) The Kennedys helped ensure that whites marched, too, to show that the crowd was all-American. They even had a plan for what would happen if a speaker got too incendiary: The Army Signal Corps had installed a cutoff switch that would let the Justice officials—manning a secret outpost at the Washington Monument—activate a turntable queued to play Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  The march came off with no visible hitches and no need to switch on the turntable. Mahalia Jackson instead made her presence felt in person, urging Rev. King to “tell ’em about the dream, Martin,” as he set out his vision for a day when “black men and white men…join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ” Black activists were joined on the dais by leaders of the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, along with Big Labor’s Walter Reuther. TV networks set up more cameras than at JFK’s inauguration and preempted regular programming, expecting fireworks that, thanks to the meticulous planning, never went off. Seeing so many blacks and whites assemble harmoniously on the National Mall gave hope to a civil rights movement consumed by images of carnage from Montgomery and Oxford. But back at the Justice Department, Bobby and the senior staff watching on TV with him held their breath as King uttered his iconic words. “Oh my God,” Katzenbach said, giving voice to everyone’s worries. “He’ll get that crowd revved up and then we’re gonna really have a problem.” Burke Marshall later offered this footnote to the history of the celebrated march: “Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph may have taken a good deal of credit, and they should—but the person that organized it, as a matter of fact, was the attorney general.”

  —

  OPERATING FROM THE shadows was becoming a pattern for Bobby. His brother used him to take on not just the stickiest jobs in government, but those with the highest stakes, facing off against presumptive allies along with unmistakable enemies. Martin Luther King bridged that gap. The attorney general’s relations with the Southern preacher had always been stilted. King was lyrical and loquacious, a style as foreign to Kennedy as his literalness and prickliness were to King. Bobby couldn’t forgive him for that spring’s Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, when King summoned high school and college students to the streets, where they were set upon by Bull Connor’s high-pressure hoses and snarling police dogs. (Bobby acknowledged that public disgust at such viciousness was the main reason his civil rights bill had a shot, yet he couldn’t understand why King had jeopardized those young lives; King felt Bobby should have understood that the youth faced even greater peril from the day-to-day racism they were protesting.) But what really doomed the relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were the warnings J. Edgar Hoover had been sounding about King since early 1961.

  Hoover had learned precisely which buttons to push with Bobby, and he pushed them all in the King affair. Stanley Levison, King’s aide and closest white friend, had been a senior operative in the Communist Party in the 1950s, and Hoover insisted that he was still active. The FBI director said the same about another King aide, Jack O’Dell. While Hoover’s warnings that King was being influenced by Levison and O’Dell made an impression on an old cold warrior like Bobby, the attorney general’s politics had grown more nuanced and he had more pressing worries during the first two years of the administration. By the summer of 1963, however, the Kennedys had put their careers on the line to promote a civil rights bill and they now depended on King, the most popular Negro in America, to help. They took Hoover’s alarms seriously enough that even the president tried to warn King away, during a walk in the Rose Garden. Couldn’t he see the risk posed by his leftist friends, not just to the cause, but to the White House? King said he did, but he also saw Hoover using outdated information to manipulate the Kennedys. The civil rights leader disdained his white allies’ assumption that he could be outfoxed either by them or by supposed Communists. Hoover proposed breaking the standoff by installing wiretaps that would reveal in their own voices the civil rights leaders’ true ambitions.

  Bobby authorized the FBI to listen in on Levison’s office phone in March 1962, and eight months later he added the home phone to the warrant. But Hoover wanted more. He already had King on his roster of dangerous people to be rounded up during a national emergency. He leaked incriminating information on O’Dell to the press that fall, and King eventually severed his tie with O’Dell. In July 1963 Bobby added to the wiretap list King’s lawyer, who was an intermediary with Levison, and he requested the permission form for King, too, but hesitated about signing it. It wasn’t that he objected to wiretapping, which he saw as a necessary tool of law enforcement. And, by God, he had to know whether he could trust King. Governor Barnett already was alleging that Bobby and his brother were part of a “world Communist conspiracy to divide and conquer” America by fomenting racial strife, and he couldn’t afford the chance that a critical ally like King was conspiring with Marxists. But if saying no to Hoover was dicey, saying yes could be even more perilous. Whatever the wiretap revealed, the FBI director could use the mere fact of its existence to undermine the Kennedys’ standing with liberals, who abhorred such invasions of privacy, and with blacks, who a recent poll showed were backing JFK by an unheard-of thirty-to-one margin over any Republican opponent. This green light to snoop was just the sort of ammunition that Hoover relished, and long after Jack was gone, he would exploit it to the full against Bobby.

  In October, just two months after the March on Washington, Kennedy gave Hoover what he wanted. First, he approved the phone taps at King’s home and office in New York, then on his Atlanta office line. All were subject to reevaluation in thirty days but none was stopped. All were justified as vital to national security, which stretched credulity, not to mention the law. All were supplemented by electronic bugging of hotel rooms and other venues, which the FBI and local police undertook without Bobby’s approval. No evidence was unearthed of any ongoing
relationship between Levison and the Communists, or of any attempt to subvert King or his movement. The surveillance did unearth embarrassing information on King’s extramarital sex life that Bobby tried to retrieve but couldn’t. The FBI, it was clear in hindsight, had been asking the wrong question—what mattered most was not whether King was anticommunist, but that he was antiviolence, which it didn’t take secret recordings to reveal. Most of all, the taps reinforced a lesson Bobby already knew: that rather than enabling Hoover, he and Jack should have replaced the FBI director early in the administration, when he had less dirt on them and everyone in their orbit.*15

  Any regrets about how he’d treated King added to Bobby’s determination to press ahead on the civil rights bill. The legislation would open to blacks all lunch counters, hotels, movie theaters, and other public accommodations. It would ease the way for them to vote in national elections and for the attorney general to sue for integrated schools. Two and a half years into the administration, it would make good on most of the Kennedy rhetoric from the 1960 campaign, although not on the job protections that Bobby knew were vital. But first, the bill had to win approval from a skeptical Congress, and nobody worked harder on that than the president’s brother. Other big initiatives that he and the White House cared about were put on hold for months. Bobby bartered with Southern Democrats who wanted no part of the changes and with northern ones who wanted more than he believed southerners would accept. He made allies of top Republicans in the House and Senate and absorbed accusations from civil rights allies that he was selling them out. Frustrated by the shellacking he was taking, he told reporters, “What I want is a bill, not an issue.” He held meeting after meeting with national organizations of chain store owners, clergy, college presidents, lawyers, and others the administration thought could help. He made nine exhausting appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee alone, leading Ethel to tease one senator who was particularly tough on her husband, “What have you been doing to Bobby? He came home and went straight to bed.”