A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  By this he did not mean anything so simple as the proposition that, whatever the condition of détente, the ideological debate between communism and democracy must continue. He meant, indeed, the exact opposite. He meant that the ideological debate must not take place at all—at least not within the Soviet Union. “Soviet society,” he warned his intellectuals in March, “has reached the stage now when complete monolithic unity . . . has been achieved.” The Central Committee of the Party “will demand from everybody—from the most honored and renowned worker of literature and art as well as from the young, budding artist—unswerving abidance by the Party line.” Anyone “who advocates the idea of peaceful coexistence in ideology is objectively sliding down to the position of anti-communism.” And so Russia defended its prohibition of non-communist books, magazines and newspapers from the west as well as its censorship not only of books and magazines but of personal mail at home. With all the Soviet talk about peaceful competition, the Communists evidently flinched from such competition where it mattered most: in the realm of ideas.

  The President was nonetheless determined to persevere in the search. “Let us exhaust every avenue for peace,” he said at the University of Maine exactly a year after the missile crisis. “Let us always make clear our willingness to talk, if talk will help, and our readiness to fight, if fight we must. Let us resolve to be the masters, not the victims, of our history.” Yet he warned his listeners to distinguish between hopes and illusions. “Mr. Khrushchev himself has said there can be no coexistence in the field of ideology. . . . The United States and the Soviet Union still have wholly different conceptions of the world, its freedom, its future. . . . So long as these basic differences continue, they . . . set limits to the possibilities of agreement.”

  All this defined the boundaries of détente. Obviously the technical measures were of the greatest value. Obviously a world with increased security against self-destruction, a world slowing down the arms race and moving toward general and complete disarmament, a world enlarging its cooperation in economic and scientific matters, a world collaborating on an expedition to the moon and on the conquest of space—such a world would be far better than the world we had. But it would not be a genuine international community, nor would so tense and dour a form of coexistence constitute, except in the minimal sense, peace.

  It was because the President understood this so well that he reacted so sharply in November 1963 when Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale, a scholar pursuing his studies in the Soviet Union, was arrested on accusations of espionage. The “reasonable” atmosphere between the two countries, the President said, “has been badly damaged by the Barghoorn arrest. . . . Professor Barghoorn I regard as a very serious matter.” “In view,” the Soviet authorities explained, “of the personal concern expressed by President Kennedy,” Barghoorn was released after a few days. But the charges were not withdrawn, and the incident was a useful reminder not only of the fragility of the détente but of the profound differences which separated communism from democracy, the monolithic world from the world of diversity.

  “We must never forget,” Kennedy had said a few days earlier in making his own comment on society and the arts in a speech at Amherst, “that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. . . . In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”

  So long as one power insisted that it had exclusive possession of the truth, that it would permit no competing truths within its domain and that it could not wait until its absolute truth obliterated competing truths in the rest of the planet, so long as it declined to accept the permanence of a diverse world, so long the cold war would continue. In the end, peaceful coexistence had to mean the free circulation of ideas among all countries or it would mean very little.

  XXXV

  The Travail of Equal Rights

  HISTORIANS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth—and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.

  The answer to this mystery lay in the belief, welling up from the depths of the white unconscious, in the inherent and necessary inferiority of those of a darker color. This belief was fortified by the failure of institutions—the church, the university, the government, the business firm—to live up to their own ideals and by the narrow views of the federal system which could lead a President like William Howard Taft to say with unction in his inaugural address, “It is not the disposition or within the province of the Federal Government to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs.” By such means white America virtuously succeeded in cutting the Negro out of conscience and even, except for servants, entertainers and athletes, out of sight.

  “I am an invisible man,” cried the hero of Ralph Ellison’s novel in 1953. “. . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse, and you swear to make them recognize you. . . . I can hear you say, ‘What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!’ And you’re right. . . . But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?”

  1. INTO THE LIGHT

  In the first decade of the twentieth century outbursts of race rioting in Illinois reminded some white Americans of the existence of outcasts in their midst. In 1909 Arthur B. Spingarn joined with Jane Addams, William Dean Howells, John Dewey and others to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the next years the national ethos began slowly to change. Woodrow Wilson was the last progressive President for whom Negroes were outside the scope of human concern, Herbert Hoover the last conservative President for whom having the wife of a Negro Congressman for tea at the White House constituted a crisis. In the thirties Franklin Roosevelt gave the Negroes a sense of national recognition. He did so more in terms of their interests in economic and social justice than of their title to equal rights. Yet he threw open the gate of hope; and the Negroes themselves, who had been stirring restlessly for a generation, now began to shake off the psychological manacles with which white society had so long made them accomplices in their own subjection—the convictions of inferiority and dependence, the manner of shuffling docility and what Ellison once called “the long habit of deception and evasion.” The future at last was spreading out before them, and they moved to take history into their own hands.

  Then the Second World War offered Negro militants the great opportunity to force the moral issue on the white conscience. For that war called on the American Negro to fight the idea of a master race in defense of rights denied them by their own master race; and the paradox proved too manifest even for the white man to ignore. In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal documented the contradiction between creed and performance in his great study An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and American Democracy. Myrdal insisted on the ultimate power of the creed to alter folkways and institutions; and in a way he was right. After the war, President Truman, abandoning the prejudices of his upbringing, set forth the first comprehensive legislative program for civil rights. In these years segregation disappeared in the armed forces. In 1954 a unanimous Supreme Court, including three southerners, outlawed segregation in public schools.

  It should have surprised no one that, as the Negroes began to gain some of their rights, their determination to claim all their rights hardened. Revolutions accelerate not from despair
but from hope. When barriers began to fall, the Negro leadership, ever more able and aggressive, pressed more and more urgently for full membership in American society. The national creed gave them their moral leverage, and politics increasingly responded to their pressure. By the 1950s the northern Democracy had been firmly committed by Truman and Adlai Stevenson to civil rights. “The Democratic party must not weasel on this issue,” John F. Kennedy said early in 1956 . . . We might alienate southern support, but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.” Yet this remained more a matter of intellectual and political commitment than of emotional identification. The northern Democratic leaders recognized that historic injustices had to end, but they thought that steady and rational progress step by step over a period of years would suffice to satisfy the victims of injustice and contain their incipient revolution.

  The school desegregation decision, now to be carried out, in the delphic words of the Court, with “all deliberate speed,” was one such step. The next was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first congressional enactment on civil rights for eighty-seven years. The most significant provision of the bill, Title III, giving the Attorney General injunctive powers to enforce school desegregation and other civil rights, had failed in the Senate. Nevertheless the act strengthened the authority of the Attorney General to intervene when Negroes were denied the right to vote; and, in two symbolic gestures, it raised the civil rights section of the Department of Justice to a division and established an independent Commission on Civil Rights. A second act, passed in 1960, gave the Department of Justice additional, though still limited, powers in voting cases. The Supreme Court decision and the Civil Rights Acts were essentially the result of the strategy of the NAACP and its executive director, Roy Wilkins, a man of exceptional sagacity and purpose. Regarding law as the most effective and lasting way of securing Negroes their rights, Wilkins concentrated on persuading the courts to take a fresh look at old law (as through Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal bureau) and on persuading Congress to enact new law (as through Clarence Mitchell and the NAACP Washington office). Yet progress in the courts and Congress, though of a sort unimaginable a generation earlier, was beginning to be slow and abstract for the awakening Negro militancy. The “deliberate speed” of the desegregation decision seemed to mean no movement at all; by 1960 only one-sixth of 1 percent of the Negro students in the ex-Confederate states were in desegregated schools (and this was mostly in Texas and Florida). Nor in the first years did the Civil Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Commission produce notable federal action.

  In the meantime, the experience of a Negro bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in the winter of 1955–56 had suggested another strategy. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister precipitated into the leadership of the boycott, preserved Negro purpose and discipline during the long weeks by preaching the gospel of non-violent resistance, derived from his reading of Thoreau and Gandhi. A superb orator, deeply sensitive to the woe and weariness of his race, King drew from the religious traditions of southern Negroes a strength which now enabled them to defy white society without giving it the pretext to respond in customary manner with whip and rope. The spirituals which had once sustained Negroes in servitude now nerved them for battle. Though in fact King’s approach supplemented and supported that of the NAACP (indeed, it took an NAACP suit to secure the goal of the bus boycott), his appeal released new energies in the struggle. Where the NAACP used legal means to attack the power points in southern society, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference went into the communities, called for mass action and brought the Negroes into the streets.

  Then in February 1960 four Negro students at the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, were denied service at a lunch counter. Their decision to stay in their seats until the place closed launched the new technique of ‘sit-ins’ across the South and brought another organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), into prominence. A year later James Farmer, who had been program director for the NAACP, became CORE’S national director. The sit-ins led to kneel-ins, pray-ins and other forms of non-violent protest and soon to the formation of still another group, intense in its emotions and radical, if often obscure, in its doctrines, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

  By 1960 the Negro was no longer the invisible man. The Negro leadership—Wilkins, King, Farmer, Whitney Young of the Urban League and the veteran head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, whose threat to march on Washington in 1941 had led Franklin Roosevelt to set up the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission—were as gifted and impressive a group as one could find in the country. The movement for equal rights was beginning to pierce apathy and overcome fear among Negroes, and it was winning increasing support in the white community. The revolution was rushing along. But no one—certainly not the white politicians, not even the established Negro leadership—could foretell at what pace or with what intensity.

  2. KENNEDY AND CIVIL RIGHTS

  Kennedy had collaborated with the movement for civil rights in the fifties. In the 1957 fight, he had supported Title III of the civil rights bill, though he had earlier disappointed the Negro groups by declining to take part in the effort to bypass Senator James Eastland of Mississippi and his Senate Judiciary Committee and send the bill directly to the floor. In the late fifties civil rights advocates regarded him as sympathetic—Roy Wilkins sent him a favorable letter which he used during his campaign for re-election to the Senate in 1958—but detached. King, who breakfasted with him in New York a month before the 1960 convention, later said that he displayed at this time “a definite concern but . . . not what I would call a ‘depthed’ understanding.” Most civil rights leaders preferred Humphrey or Stevenson for the Democratic nomination.

  Kennedy’s sense of his weakness with the Negroes led him in the spring of 1960 to ask Harris Wofford of the Notre Dame Law School, who had joined his campaign staff as an expert on Asian matters, to shift over to civil rights. Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame and a leading member of the Civil Rights Commission, had brought Wofford to Washington in 1958 as his counsel and chief of the Commission’s inquiry into discrim¡nation in housing. This experience had given Wofford the belief that the untapped resources of executive action offered the best immediate hope for new civil rights progress. Kennedy liked this approach both because it fitted his conception of an activist Presidency and because the 1957 and 1960 civil rights debates had left him pessimistic about further progress in Congress.

  Wofford now arranged a series of meetings between Kennedy and Negro leaders. Each session advanced the candidate a little in his own commitment. At the convention he insisted on a strong civil rights plank; and after the August special session he joined twenty-three other Democratic Senators in a statement condemning the Republican civil rights record. The Eisenhower administration, the Senators declared, had carefully avoided opportunities for executive action; it had not, for example, issued an order to end discrimination in federal housing programs which “the President could do by a stroke of his pen.” The statement concluded: “we pledge action to obtain consideration of a civil rights bill by the Senate early next session that will implement the pledges of the Democratic platform.”

  In the campaign Kennedy incorporated the plight of the Negro into his general critique of American society. “The Negro baby,” he said in Wisconsin in October, “has one-half, regardless of his talents, statistically has one-half as much chance of finishing high school as the white baby, one-third as much chance of finishing college, one-fourth as much chance of being a professional man or woman, four times as much chance of being out of work.” “Only a President willing to use all the resources of his office,” he said in California, “can provide the leadership, the determination and the direction . . . to eliminate racial and religious discrimination from American society.” He emphasized that “the greater opportunity” lay “in the executive branch
without congressional action.” Here he mentioned the housing order and, repeatedly, the stroke of the presidential pen. He also advocated more vigorous measures to win the Negro the right to vote, the right to employment in companies doing business with the federal government and the right to federal appointments, especially in the Foreign Service, where, he said, there were presently only twenty-six Negro officers.

  These proposals probably counted less in the election than his phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I am deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy,” King soon said, ‘‘who served as a great force in making my release possible. It took a lot of courage for Senator Kennedy to do this, especially in Georgia. . . . He did it because of his great concern and humanitarian bent.” On election day Kennedy received an overwhelming share of the Negro vote.* And, if King thought himself indebted to Kennedy before the election, Kennedy, reflecting on his margin, must have known after the election how indebted he was to King and the Negroes. Had only whites gone to the polls in 1960, Nixon would have taken 52 per cent of the vote. In the electoral college Kennedy could not have carried Illinois and Michigan, not to mention Texas, South Carolina and possibly Louisiana. He needed to lose only the first two of those states to have lost the election.