The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  That was a matter for hearty laughter, but Bobby was hardly extreme in his fears. He had no entourage of Secret Service agents, no state-of-the-art security around Hickory Hill, and with every controversial step he took and every threatening letter he received, the drama of his life increased. His mother had her own secret anxieties. “The attorney general was fighting against Hoffa,” Rose recalled. “Dealing with criminals was tough. They said they would throw acid in the eyes of his children. Bobby kept all those dogs there and they were very apprehensive at times.”

  Bobby was a brave man, but it diminishes the nature of courage itself to imagine that he was without self-doubt, fear, or anxiety. “My father, all of us really, were always around brave men, great athletes, people who had done great things,” reflected Bobby’s son Christopher. “We had constantly to risk ourselves to feel that we could be with them. Risk was a way to feel God.”

  When it came time to appoint the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harris Wofford was the obvious candidate, but Bobby did not trust him to subordinate his passionate convictions about civil rights to the president’s or the attorney general’s agenda. Wofford was an odd mixture—an attorney who graduated from both Yale University and Howard University Law Schools, spent several years at the prestigious Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, and taught at Notre Dame Law School. But his other side had drawn him to study Gandhi in India, to work closely with Martin Luther King Jr., and to advocate civil disobedience in the civil rights movement.

  When Bobby first met Wofford, he was puzzled that the attorney had attended Howard as the first white male student. “I can understand going and teaching there, but why would you go to Howard Law School to learn law?” Bobby asked. “It’s not a great law school. Why would you go to a Negro law school as a student?”

  Wofford had been one of those responsible for helping to deliver about 70 percent of the black vote to Kennedy, a voting bloc that was as important as any one factor in his narrow victory. He deserved an important position in the administration, but Bobby considered Wofford “in some areas a slight madman.” Men who care injudiciously about human liberty are often thought crazy, and Wofford was slightly mad about injustice. It was acceptable to have an undersecretary of Commerce concerned solely with business interests, or an undersecretary of Agriculture pushing only farmers’ causes, but Bobby considered it imprudent to have an assistant attorney general for civil rights whose advice would be “in the interest of a Negro or a group of Negroes or a group of those who were interested in civil rights.” This domestic issue was the most volatile and dangerous to his brother’s presidency, and Bobby did not want an uncompromising activist as his chief civil rights advisor. Instead, Wofford went to the White House as the president’s special assistant for civil rights. At the Justice Department the new attorney general hired Burke Marshall, a reserved respected corporate lawyer who would see civil rights as a question of law, not of emotions.

  Bobby agreed to make his first major speech as attorney general on May 6, 1961, at the law day exercises at the University of Georgia School of Law. Even if he had not been confrontational by nature, this would have been the time and the place for him to talk about civil rights. He knew that words themselves were action, and he and his aides spent five weeks working on the address, weighing words and phrases, making sure he would say precisely what he wanted to say.

  There had been racial rioting at the university in January to protest the admittance of two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, and they had been reinstated only through a federal court order. As Bobby prepared to fly down to Atlanta, the FBI learned that the Ku Klux Klan was vowing to picket him and to drive through Athens with a loudspeaker shouting, “Yankee go home!”

  Bobby’s law school audience that day was full of young people who would soon help define how the South reacted to the federal government’s push for the integration of the region’s public institutions, whether there would be blood and burning crosses or accommodation and goodwill. A measure of the challenge was that in the audience of sixteen hundred people there was only one black, Charlayne Hunter, who was there because she had press credentials.

  Today as Bobby began his speech, he had a feeling about the injustice shown to black Americans that was more than an attempt to commandeer their votes and their allegiance. The previous fall, during the campaign, Bobby had flown into Savannah, Georgia, to give a dinner speech. On the drive into the gracious city he had asked how many blacks would be in attendance. When he was told none would be there at the segregated hotel, he said, “Well, we’re not going to have the dinner unless you get some blacks there, okay?” He was being what some considered his hectoring, impossible self, but he got his way that evening, and for the first time blacks sat in that hotel like other citizens.

  Bobby did not inherit a deep concern for racial justice from his father. Nor did it come from his brother, the president. He had not learned it from his professors at Harvard or at the University of Virginia Law School. He seems to have somehow extrapolated this deep feeling out of his own experience. Bobby’s life could scarcely compare with the lives of most blacks in America. Yet he had struggled against those who thought him second-rate, and he could empathize with blacks as most other wealthy white scions of his generation could not. Injustice rankled him, especially when it was directed against American citizens of a different color.

  Bobby was a man who not only wore his emotions on his sleeve but also forced them on those he confronted. Political figures are usually brokers, trading among various interests and constituencies. There was little of this in Bobby. Nor did he love humankind only in the abstract, stepping back from the podium where he had expressed universal love to avoid the touch of a single person. He loved people, though he embraced certain groups more than others and sometimes endowed them with qualities they did not always possess, but the man was no hypocrite. He respected ability, and by bringing aides into the Justice Department who were singular in their abilities, he infused much of the organization with a splendid new esprit.

  Bobby was not some northern preacher come south to condemn only southern racists. Earlier than almost anyone in American public life, he understood the sheer hypocrisy of such racial moralizing. He saw that North and South, liberal and conservative, redneck and ascot-garbed, the whole nation bore the burden of racism. “The problem between the white and colored people is a problem for all sections of the United States,” he told his Georgia audience. “I believe there has been a great deal of hypocrisy in dealing with it. In fact, I found when I came to the Department of Justice that I need look no further to find evidence of this.”

  Bobby was not a natural orator, and he seemed uncomfortable before the University of Georgia audience. His hands shook, and he spoke in a high-pitched voice. He told his audience that at the Justice Department only 10 of the 950 lawyers were blacks. What he did not say, and he knew as well, was that at the FBI there were only three black agents, and they were the director’s chauffeurs. “Financial leaders from the East who deplore discrimination in the South belong to institutions where no blacks or Jews are allowed and their children attend private schools where no Negro students are enrolled,” he continued. “Union officials criticize southern leaders and yet practice discrimination with their unions. Government officials belong to private clubs in Washington where blacks, including ambassadors, are not welcomed even at meal times.”

  Bobby was a truth-sayer, and his words resonated deeply within his audience, which responded in the end with sustained applause. He was so consumed with the cold war, however, that he attempted to relate everything to the struggle against the Soviets, as he did when talking about the first two blacks graduating from the university. “In the worldwide struggle the graduation at this university of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes will without question aid and assist the fight against Communist political infiltration and guerrilla warfare,” he told the audience.

  As Bobby
spoke, a group of black and white civil rights activists were traveling south in a Greyhound bus, not thinking that they were assisting in “the fight against Communist political infiltration and guerrilla warfare.” The Freedom Riders were confronting the South’s segregated system by sitting together, black and white, traveling deeper and deeper into danger. As they set out, they were not accompanied by reporters ready to celebrate their acts and, by their presence, help to protect them. Nor did helicopters fly overhead or federal marshals lead them down isolated macadam strips.

  For a man who appreciated courage above all virtues and sought to exemplify both political and physical bravery, Bobby should have seen these activists as heroic figures. Instead, he saw them as endangering what he hoped would be the acceptance of federal laws by the South. As Bobby saw it, politicians like Alabama governor John Patterson might shout, “Never!” but if the federal law steadily nudged the South forward, the people would grudgingly, reluctantly assent.

  To the Kennedy brothers, what was so maddening about the Freedom Riders was that instead of simply making their point and moving on, these young men and women pushed and pushed and pushed, sending new groups of nonviolent activists to pick up the bloody banner from those who could carry it no further. The first group of Freedom Riders got as far south as Anniston, Alabama, before their bus was overturned and burned. Those who were not hospitalized got onto a new bus and headed south again. When these Riders were brutally assailed in Birmingham, they flew to New Orleans while a new group arrived to get on a bus and travel farther south.

  “Stop them!” Kennedy ordered Wofford, his special assistant for civil rights. “Get your friends off those buses!” The president’s command showed a woeful lack of understanding of the civil rights movement. Neither Wofford, King, nor anyone else had control over the Freedom Riders or could contain the moral imperatives of this movement. Kennedy believed in the advancement of civil rights in orderly ways but this was not a transcendent matter on which he wanted to rest his presidency.

  During this period Bobby met with King for a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel. The young administration was worried that the minister might attempt to lead millions of his people to the barricades, destroying Kennedy’s plans for steady incremental advances and producing a white backlash that would cost the president his congressional majority.

  King could be as uncompromising as any man when great moral principles were at stake, but this luncheon was not one of those times. He understood Kennedy’s political realities and knew that half a loaf of bread was as ample a meal as he was likely to receive at this table. King nonetheless wanted Kennedy’s support, and he was assured that he would have a private meeting with the president. “The meeting kept being delayed,” Wofford recalled, “And King’s patience began to run out.”

  The president felt that he could afford to have his brother dine with King in a private dining room. But civil rights was the most volatile domestic issue, and the politician in the White House was worried that if he had a public identification with King, fears would arise that Kennedy was conspiring with the civil rights activists who so threatened the Old South.

  King had his private meeting with Kennedy a few weeks later, and was led into the White House family quarters by Wofford. Kennedy was not comfortable around priests and preachers who spoke in high biblical parlance, and he would never have a deep rapport with King. He listened to King’s high discourse and then took the conversation down to a nuanced, realistic portrayal of the American social and political realities. “It lasted at least an hour and was the most effective I ever saw Kennedy on civil rights,” Wofford recalled. The president explained to King in immense detail the problems the administration faced and why, though he agreed with King on this great issue, he could not move forward now with bold strides. He would put forth a civil rights bill and issue an Executive Order on housing, but not yet.

  If King and the other civil rights leaders had had Kennedy’s profoundly realistic vision, then there would have been no great movement, no Freedom Riders, no sit-ins, and no massive confrontations. If Kennedy had had King’s moral passions and commitments on this issue, he would most likely not have been elected president. As they sat talking in the study by the Lincoln bedroom, each man had something to learn from the other. King was traversing a maelstrom of politics that no one had attempted before; he would have to be not only brave and true but also as calculating as Kennedy. As for the president, if he was to be the great leader that he aspired to be, he would have to show something of the moral passion of the man who sat across from him. King understood that as well as anyone. “In the election, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership we’ve been waiting for and do what no other president has ever done,” he told Wofford afterward. “Now I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.”

  Kennedy was a general being forced to fight a battle on ground he did not want. He thought that his combat lay elsewhere, in confrontations with the Soviets, not in the streets of the South. But American history had a different timetable. In 1954, in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated education was inherently unequal. American schools would have to be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” A few school districts in places such as Texas proceeded with admirable dispatch to follow the nation’s laws, but as Kennedy took office, only about 214,000 out of more than 3 million black schoolchildren in the South and border states attended integrated schools. Southern blacks drank water from fountains labeled “COLORED ONLY,” ate at restaurants relegated to their race, had their hair cut only by black barbers, and sat in the backs of buses. This “South” of institutionalized segregation spread far north of the Mason-Dixon Line in a belt of states that included southern Ohio and southern Illinois.

  The structure of American liberty stood only half finished. If the administration moved too timidly, the president might find himself the overseer of the breakdown of American freedom, crumbling in the storms. Yet if he moved too harshly, too precipitously, Kennedy might have to line the streets of the South with federal soldiers, creating a second Reconstruction and destroying that house of liberty by the sheer weight of the roof that he sought to erect.

  Most politicians rarely stray from the arithmetic of democracy. The Democrats had lost two seats in the Senate and twenty-one seats in the House in 1960, and the conservative Republicans and Dixie Democrats could probably filibuster any civil rights legislation that the president tried to push through a reluctant Congress. The president thought that he would have been doubly a fool for pressing civil rights legislation: not only would he have lost but he also would have unnecessarily confronted members of his own party whose votes he needed on other vital matters. Early in his term he was doing what even a man of Wofford’s passion thought was the only thing to do. He was limiting himself to executive actions to push civil rights along, hiring blacks in unprecedented numbers, authorizing the attorney general to push for school desegregation, championing voting rights in the Justice Department. And while the administration was trying to uphold civil rights in this fashion, young men and women in the South who were trying to integrate lunch counters or register voters were getting not meals and ballots but jail cells and clubbings. And the Freedom Riders continued their journey.

  Bobby called the Greyhound superintendent to try to get Greyhound to find a driver and a bus to carry the Freedom Riders out of Birmingham. “I think you should—had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is and somebody better give us an answer to this question,” he said. “I am—the government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.”

  To many southerners, this was evidence that the attorney general was siding with these troublemakers and orchestrating this assault on what they considered their very liberty. Bobby was trying to get the Freedo
m Riders out of Birmingham and on to Montgomery and to end the shameful photos disgracing America in the world’s newspapers.

  As John Lewis got off the Greyhound bus at the station in Montgomery, Alabama, with his fellow Freedom Riders, the young black activist began to address the reporters standing there. He stopped suddenly and stood transfixed. Coming toward the bus was a mob of whites carrying baseball bats, lead pipes, and bottles. To this rabble, the reporters and photographers were as much the enemy as the Freedom Riders, and the white mob battered away ecumenically, striking out against anyone who came within reach of its weapons. Lewis and several others were brutally assaulted and knocked to the ground. When Bobby’s aide and emissary John Seigenthaler arrived in the midst of the melee, he attempted to use his federal authority to stop a group of white women from beating a white woman activist. As Seigenthaler insisted that they stop, a man smashed a lead pipe down on his head, rendering him unconscious. Floyd Mann, the chief of the Alabama state police and an official with no jurisdiction in the city, stopped the attacks by pulling his gun and ordering, “Stand back!”

  Bobby’s close associates were even more a band of brothers than the president’s men. They were devoted to the attorney general and the causes he championed. They had not anticipated, however, that they were risking their very lives by signing on to come to Washington. As the former Tennessee journalist lay inert, half sprawled under a car, the stage on which this drama was taking place had grown immeasurably, for Bobby and his men as for everyone else.

  Bobby was still interested in dimming the lights and hurrying everyone offstage, but this theater had become irresistible and new players arrived who sought to speak their parts. King had chosen not to join the Freedom Riders on their journey. He knew that he had to speak his lines or in the next act of this drama he might have no lines at all. He saw this as “a turning point and a testing point…. If we can break the back of opposition here, public facilities will be desegregated tomorrow.” Much to Bobby’s discomfiture, King insisted on flying into Montgomery, where he was met at the airport by roughly fifty federal agents who escorted him to the home of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a civil rights leader. King was a believer in moral witnessing, and he needed dramatic moments on which to make his stand. That evening fifteen hundred crowded into Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, while outside a crowd of whites twice that size stood and jeered and threatened, held off by a cordon of federal marshals. As the night went by, the mob pushed nearer and nearer, heaving Molotov cocktails and trying to break down the church doors. Time and again they were pushed back by the seriously outnumbered federal marshals.