“Stand by, Mr. President,” a technician intoned.
“Good evening, my fellow Americans,” the president began.
* * *
KENNEDY’S DECISION TO MAKE the speech may have been sudden, but the consideration behind it was anything but. By May and June 1963, the crisis in Birmingham—the dogs and hoses and bombings, the children in jail, the horrifying news footage—had combined with the experiences and instincts of a lifetime to leave the president no choice.
On May 14, Robert Kennedy had addressed a meeting of Alabama newspaper editors, warning them that if Martin Luther King’s campaign of nonviolence failed, less responsible leaders would follow. By May 17, on a flight to Asheville, North Carolina, for a speech, Bob Kennedy and Burke Marshall agreed that the time had at last come for a comprehensive civil rights bill, and they directed Harold Greene, a Justice Department lawyer, to begin the work of preliminary drafting—though the bill itself was still as unfinished as the speech the president was about to deliver. Even those of Kennedy’s aides most sympathetic to the civil rights cause tended to approach the problem more as a political headache than as a moral crusade. “My friends all say the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic,” Bob Kennedy reported to the president on the morning of May 20, as they met with Marshall, Sorensen, the White House civil rights adviser Lee White, and the president’s political aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Lawrence O’Brien to discuss whether and how to offer a bill. A few minutes later, when Marshall tried to explain the importance of a strong public accommodations provision—that separate restrooms and lunch counters was the “one thing that makes all Negroes, regardless of age, maddest”—the attorney general dismissed him. “They can stand at the lunch counters,” he scoffed. “They don’t have to eat there. They can pee before they come to the store or the supermarket.”
Yet even Bob Kennedy had to acknowledge that, for blacks, the situation was grim. A review of federal employment in Birmingham by the administration’s own Civil Service Commission had found, for example, that outside the Veterans Administration and the post office, just fifteen blacks were on the federal payroll in the entire city, out of a pool of two thousand jobs. Still, Larry O’Brien, the president’s chief liaison to Congress, warned that the president—already struggling to pass a major tax bill, among other legislation—was “going to run smack into a straight-out draw” on Capitol Hill if he sent up a civil rights bill now.
Later in the same meeting, when Bob Kennedy suggested that the president convene meetings at the White House with both blacks and whites—including Martin Luther King and other protest leaders—to talk about the problem and build support for a bill in the coming days, the president revealed his personal ambivalence about King. “The trouble with King is everybody thinks he’s our boy anyway,” he said. “King is so hot these days, it’s like Marx is coming to the White House. I’d like to have some southern governors or mayors or businessmen in first. And my program should have gone up to the hill first.”
But events kept pressing. Just eight days later, on May 28, demonstrations again exploded, this time in Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital, where a thirty-seven-year-old former Army sergeant named Medgar Evers, now the local field secretary for the NAACP, had called for a “massive offensive.” City police stood idly by for hours as a parade of whites rushed the local Woolworth’s lunch counter, where some black and white students and a white sociology professor from a nearby college were seeking service, and poured ketchup, mustard, sugar, and salt over the demonstrators. When a former policeman kicked the professor to the floor, then kicked one of the students repeatedly in the face, the white counterdemonstrators poured salt into the raw wounds.
The president’s top advisers met again four days later, on June 1, and Burke Marshall told Kennedy that they had passed the point of no return. “I think it’s absolutely essential that you have legislation,” Marshall said. (A statement drafted that same day by Ted Sorensen—apparently never issued—declared that comprehensive legislation that year, “however long it takes or however troublesome it may be is an unavoidable necessity.”)
Then Kennedy made a point of soliciting the views of the person who was surely the best legislative tactician in the room: Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who tended to keep his own counsel at such meetings. “I haven’t read the bill … I haven’t seen it,” Johnson demurred, later adding, in a voice so soft that the Oval Office taping system barely picked it up, “I’m not very competent to counsel you.” Johnson then gave a hint of his deeper feelings, exclaiming, “We’ve got to go through with passing … We’ve got to bear down, very important that we get an agreement, else yours will be just another gesture.”
In fact, Johnson had much more specific advice in mind, and he asked Ken O’Donnell for a meeting with the president, to discuss civil rights. Not for the first time, O’Donnell said no, so the vice president turned instead to Norbert Schlei, a senior lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who promptly alerted the White House. On June 3, Ted Sorensen telephoned Johnson, who unburdened himself of some pointed advice: Kennedy needed to take far more extensive soundings of Congress, and get the rest of his legislative agenda in better shape, before submitting a civil rights bill. And he should take the fight directly to the people, by making a major speech, ideally somewhere in the South—perhaps San Antonio. “I believe he’d run some of the demagogues right in the hole,” Johnson said. “This aura, this thing, this halo around the president: everybody wants to believe in the president, the commander in chief. I think he’d make the Barnetts and the Wallaces look silly. The good people, the church people, I think have to come around to him—not the majority of them, maybe, but a good many of them over the country—and it would really unify the North. He’d be looking them straight in the face.”
Then in the next breath, Johnson warned of the dangers for the rest of Kennedy’s legislative agenda if the civil rights bill wasn’t handled just right. “I think that he’ll be cut to pieces with this and I think he’ll be a sacrificial lamb,” he said. “I think his program will be hurt if it’s not killed.” But, in the end, Johnson made it clear he was fully in the fight. “We got a little pop gun, and I want to pull out the cannon,” he said. “The president is the cannon.”
Johnson could not have known it, but the cannon was ready to fire.
* * *
JOHN KENNEDY WON THE presidency in 1960 with more than 70 percent of the black vote. But virtually nothing in his background or breeding had prepared him for truly understanding—much less grappling with how to redress—the painful realities faced by black Americans. There is no record of his ever even having visited the Deep South states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or Arkansas until 1956, when he was nearly forty years old. Meeting a black dentist in San Francisco during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy was asked how many black people he was friends with, and was forced to reply, “Doctor, I don’t know five people of your caliber well enough to call them by their first names, but I promise to do better.” As late as the 1950s, he told a British friend that he had learned—as if he had just heard it for the first time—“this marvelous expression,” from the black Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell: “Uncle Tom.” James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality would judge that Kennedy was “ignorant on civil rights in particular and blacks in general at the time he became president.” In fact, Kennedy had once told Jackie Robinson, “I don’t know any Negroes. Would you introduce me to some?”
Growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Bronxville, New York, Kennedy was, as he would later put it, a child of “one of the great fortunes of the world.” He had lived through the Great Depression but had no real understanding of it until he read about it at Harvard. “We had bigger houses, more servants, we traveled more,” he explained. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, a self-made multimillionaire, had felt the sting of anti-Irish prejudice in his native Boston but was nevertheless himself a vicious anti-Semite. Any blacks
the younger Kennedy might have encountered held strictly servile roles. As president, he would tell Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he could never get over Harry Truman’s “talking all the time about ‘the niggers.’” But as a libidinous teenager he was not above bearding his boarding school friend Lem Billings about the risk of syphilis in a “nigger” brothel. At Harvard, he inherited his older brother Joe Jr.’s black “gentleman’s gentleman,” a valet named George Taylor, who picked up the clothes Kennedy carelessly tossed in a heap. They might banter about Kennedy’s fondness for women and Taylor’s for whiskey, but it was not a relationship of equals.
When Kennedy joined the Navy in October 1941, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, the service had about four thousand black sailors, but they worked strictly as mess men, peeling potatoes, making beds, and cleaning rooms. Only the previous year, fifteen black mess men aboard the USS Philadelphia had written to the Pittsburgh Courier complaining about conditions and discouraging other blacks from enlisting and winding up in the same straits. The signers were thrown in the brig, indicted for conduct prejudicial to good order, and dishonorably discharged.
After the war, when Kennedy first went to Washington as a freshman congressman from Massachusetts, he inherited yet another black valet, this one named George Thomas, as a gift from the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a family friend. Thomas would serve Kennedy all through his political career, until the last morning of his life, laying out his clothes, shining his shoes, and arranging his laundry and dry cleaning. That didn’t spare Thomas from bearing the brunt of Kennedy’s occasional irritation, as he did when the valet told the writer Jim Bishop, preparing an article about a day in the president’s life for Good Housekeeping, that Kennedy owned twenty-five pairs of shoes and changed his shirt about six times a day. Later, Kennedy regaled his friend Ben Bradlee with the tale of how he upbraided Thomas for this lapse, “imitating George, hemming as he puts his eyes to the ceiling,” Bradlee would recall.
“How many pairs of shoes do you own, George?” the president had asked his valet.
“One,” George had replied.
“Well,” Kennedy had countered, “don’t you see how most of the people who own only one pair of shoes might resent my having twenty-five—even if it were true?”
Asked by Bradlee how many pairs he did have, Kennedy claimed to have no idea, but admitted that he had changed his shirt four times on the day of their conversation.
And yet. And yet Jack Kennedy, who had endured not only anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bias but a lifetime of severe gastrointestinal ailments and debilitating back pain, had just enough of a chip on his shoulder to make him sympathetic to the underdog, and just enough experience of suffering to soften his heart. “I think he felt that, as an Irishman, somewhere along the line, he’d been discriminated against,” recalled George Smathers, his best friend in the Senate. Even as president, Kennedy knew that his ancestry would leave him blackballed by Boston’s blue-blood Somerset Club, where he had once witnessed a speaker say that the Democrats were the party of “the help.”
“Can you believe that such people can still be around?” Kennedy had fumed to a friend.
Kennedy once countermanded the skipper of the presidential yacht Honey Fitz, who had started to steam toward the dock of the Edgartown Yacht Club, a WASP bastion on Martha’s Vineyard, without advance permission. “My God!” Kennedy exclaimed, “they’d have my hide if I just barged in there.”
Another friend, the artist William Walton, believed that Kennedy had a “marvelous capacity for projecting himself” into other people’s lives. He recalled once being together in a New York restaurant where a drunken man began loudly berating Kennedy for his political views. When Walton suggested they leave, Kennedy demurred, saying, “Would you look at that guy’s wife and what she’s going through?”
* * *
IN THE JOHN F. KENNEDY Presidential Library in Boston, the pre-presidential file on civil rights is a slender folder, sandwiched between “Birth Control” and “Conduct of Government” amid the plethora of subjects that crossed a politician’s desk in the first decade and a half after World War II. And yet, with a few notable exceptions, Kennedy had handled questions of race and civil rights deftly and effectively throughout his political career, starting with his first race for Congress, when he called for abolition of the poll tax and measures to combat employment discrimination. In part, that was because he was among the generation of returning servicemen and women whose expectations for themselves and their country had been changed dramatically by a conflict against fascism and dictatorship.
On perhaps no group did the war have a more profound effect than young black servicemen, many of whom—stationed in the cities of Europe and elsewhere—for the first time experienced everyday life without the yoke of Jim Crow. They could not return to Chicago or Boston, much less to Chattanooga or Birmingham, and feel the same way about the status quo. Kennedy realized this, and quickly set about making special outreach efforts to black voters in his first campaign for Congress in 1946. With the help of his college valet, George Taylor, he organized a meeting for five hundred people at a black social organization, the Dunbar Club—and even thought of embellishing the saga of his wartime exploits aboard PT 109 to put himself in command of a diverse crew. “My story about the collision is getting better all the time,” he told a friend. “Now I’ve got a Jew and a Nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that’s great.”
Such language is itself proof enough that Kennedy’s attitudes remained unenlightened. There is other evidence, too. Taylor recruited several black college women to join the campaign, but they were not invited to share a luncheon with the candidate’s sisters as other volunteers had been. This elicited an unusually frank complaint from the gentleman’s gentleman. “Jack, I think that’s bullshit,” Taylor said. “They’re all giving their time. They’re all human beings.”
Kennedy’s reply was dismissive: “George, you’re thin-skinned. That’s one of the things of the time.”
As a freshman in the House, Kennedy supported the Truman administration’s surprisingly robust civil rights initiatives, including a ban on segregation in the armed forces, a proposed federal antilynching law, abolition of the poll tax, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and a strengthening of the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. As a member of the House District of Columbia Affairs Committee, he also pressed for broader desegregation of a city that remained locked in the clutches of Jim Crow (except for the airport, the railroad station, and federal cafeterias), partly because the southern barons who ruled Congress believed that if segregation could be maintained in the nation’s capital, it could survive in their home states. Kennedy favored home rule for the District (a dream that would not come true for another three decades, and even then in a limited way) and went so far as to try to force a home rule bill out of committee by a parliamentary maneuver. The effort fell short by twelve votes, but Kennedy believed the spectacle of a segregated capital undermined America’s prestige in the world, especially in its global competition with an increasingly belligerent Soviet bloc.
Yet Kennedy also kept his distance from organized civil rights groups. He was not a joiner, and just as he did not take membership in Americans for Democratic Action, the anticommunist liberal group formed at the dawn of the Cold War to support liberties at home while opposing Stalinism abroad, so he resisted entreaties from the most venerable civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His aide Ted Sorensen would later say that Kennedy found “the approach of many single-minded civil rights advocates uncomfortable and unreasonable also.”
Still, civil rights would play a prominent role in Kennedy’s campaign when he sought to move up to the United States Senate in 1952. His Republican opponent that year was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a descendant of one of Boston’s leading families, who had first been elected in 1936 and whose grandfather and namesake had defeated
Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, for the Senate in 1916. Kennedy brought a strong civil rights platform to the contest, including advocacy of reforming Senate Rule XXII, which allowed a single member to prolong debate indefinitely, unless a two-thirds vote could be mustered to shut off debate. For decades, southern opponents of civil rights had used the provision to block bill after bill, and no civil rights filibuster had ever been broken.
Kennedy took the issue seriously enough that he was moved to write a speech that he drafted by hand and titled “Kennedy Fights for Civil Rights.” The first sentence read, “There is nothing worse in life than racial bigotry,” but he revised that to end with the word “prejudice,” while following up with a second sentence: “There is nothing lower than bigotry.” He couched his arguments, as he often would in years to come, in terms of American prestige and the stakes in the Cold War. “Those who view fellow Americans—regardless of race, color or national origin—as anything other than fellow Americans are fostering the very climate in which the seeds of Communism flourish,” he wrote. His words were stirring. His prescriptions were less bold. He did not call for the desegregation of public accommodations or schools, for example, and thus in no way really acknowledged the extent of the daily injustices and indignities endured by blacks throughout the South. (It is also not clear that he ever delivered the speech.)
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 5