An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  But on Capitol Hill, the southern bulls bellowed in predictable protest. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina railed against the bill as “unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and beyond the realm of reason,” while James Eastland of Mississippi, the all-powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called it a “complete blueprint for the totalitarian state.” Richard Russell of Georgia denounced the measure as “a threatened crime against the whole philosophy of liberty.”

  By contrast, civil rights groups offered praise for Kennedy’s effort, but denounced the president’s request for “self-restraint” on further demonstrations and his warning that “unruly tactics or pressures will not help and may hinder the effective consideration of these measures” as unreasonable. Most insisted that the bill did not “fully meet the needs of the times,” as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP put it.

  It was now Bob Kennedy’s thankless job to reconcile those irreconcilable views.

  * * *

  THE ATTORNEY GENERAL WAS well aware of the task before him. Earlier on the same day as the White House meeting with the lawyers, he had traveled to Philadelphia for a speech at Independence Hall marking the 175th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution. Quoting Woodrow Wilson’s maxim that the Constitution was no “mere lawyer’s document” but a “vehicle of life,” whose “spirit is always the spirit of the age,” Kennedy said such sentiment had special meaning “at a time when the inadequate phrase ‘Civil Rights’ has come to reflect an urgent nationwide struggle for equality by the ten and a half percent of our people whose skin is not white.”

  “The time is long past when any sensible American could tolerate the denial of free voting rights to all races, or the existence of ‘White Only’ signs on public facilities,” he added. “Even by the narrowest interpretation, these things are unconstitutional.” Then he asked, “Must we now wait, as intelligent modern Americans in a changing society, must we now wait for the Supreme Court to spell out each new particularity of civil rights for us? Whatever color we are, let us hope not.”

  But there were scores of politically powerful people in Washington and around the country—and millions of ordinary Americans—who would beg to differ on that point. Indeed, on June 12, the very day after President Kennedy’s televised speech, southern Democrats in the House of Representatives had helped to defeat what should have been a routine funding bill for the Area Redevelopment Administration, a Kennedy-sponsored program that promoted public works in underprivileged areas.

  “That was a tough one … wasn’t it?” the president asked the House majority leader, Carl Albert, in an exasperated phone call after the vote.

  “Oh, it was awful,” Albert replied. “This is going to affect mass transit, it’s going to kill the farm bill.”

  “Well,” the president replied, his voice grim, “we just have to take ’em as they come.”

  Even some of the administration’s most liberal supporters were unnerved by the sweep of his bill. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., President Kennedy’s historian in residence, would record in his diary that soundings by a liberal friend in the Chicago suburbs in the wake of Kennedy’s proposals had found “considerable anxiety” over the president’s speech, and that people “seemed alarmed over the pace of the integration movement.” Still other liberals insisted that the Kennedy administration was moving much too slowly. In a letter to Senator Hubert Humphrey just before the bill was introduced, Andrew Biemiller, the AFL-CIO’s chief lobbyist in Washington and himself a former Democratic congressman from Wisconsin, complained that the measure contained no FEPC provision, inadequate provisions on public accommodations, and not enough authority for the government to sue to enforce desegregation. “A patent compromise in a no-compromise situation,” Biemiller wrote. “All-out fights are made on all-out measures. How is the public to understand that the administration is going to make an all-out fight when it starts with a halfway measure?” He predicted that the administration’s bill would “become a ceiling on what can be done, rather than a floor.”

  On June 14, several thousand demonstrators marched through downtown Washington, winding up outside the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bob Kennedy addressed them through a bullhorn from a makeshift platform, taking umbrage at flyers being distributed that suggested there was discrimination in his own department. “There is no discrimination here at Justice,” he insisted, noting that he had increased the number of black lawyers in the department from ten to sixty (out of nine hundred). “Any individual can come here and get a job if he is qualified.” But he added with some asperity, “I’m not going out and hire a Negro just because he’s not white.”

  It was Bob Kennedy’s job to take the heat for the administration. He would recall that he had resisted becoming attorney general in part because he worried that the Justice Department would be so consumed with the controversies of civil rights that having a Kennedy as attorney general would needlessly complicate life for the Kennedy who was president. Now that fear was coming true.

  “The fact that I was Attorney General caused him many more problems than if I hadn’t been his brother,” he would remember. “Instead of talking about Robert Kennedy, they started talking about the ‘Kennedy brothers,’ which he used to point out to me frequently. It was no longer Robert, the Attorney General, but now they were talking about the Kennedy brothers.” The very name Bobby had become a curse, a blood oath, as it was for a policeman in Winona, Mississippi, who had hollered the attorney general’s name over and over as he smashed the head of a civil rights protester against the floor in early June. Indeed, Time magazine’s cover for June 21—under the tagline “Civil Rights: The Moral Crisis”—featured not only a large full-face portrait of Bob Kennedy in the foreground, but a smaller background painting of the two brothers, their heads bowed toward each other in concentration and consultation.

  The two men, eight years apart in age, could hardly have been more different. If Jack Kennedy was detached, free-spirited, instinctively ironic, Bob Kennedy was reliable, judgmental, easily angered—“ruthless,” in the prevailing thumbnail assessment. “Black Robert,” his big brother called him, while Jack’s friend Ben Bradlee summed up Bob’s self-righteous streak with a play on his middle name: “Saint Francis.”

  Gore Vidal, writing in Esquire that spring, sketched a withering view of the attorney general. “His obvious characteristics are energy, vindictiveness and a simple-mindedness about human motives which may yet bring him down,” Vidal wrote. “He has none of his brother’s human ease, or charity.” Vidal, who shared a stepfather with Jacqueline Kennedy, held a grudge against Bob Kennedy, who had tangled with him at a White House party after Vidal put his arm around the First Lady’s bare shoulders, and his assessment was harsh to the point of unfairness. But it nevertheless captured something of the younger Kennedy’s edgy essence.

  The two brothers had only grown close in adulthood a decade earlier—after Bob managed Jack’s successful 1952 Senate campaign and then went on to run his 1960 presidential campaign. But by this point in Kennedy’s presidency, they had long since become able to finish each other’s sentences, and in almost every crisis—from missiles in Cuba to bombs in Birmingham—theirs were the views that mattered most. “I scheduled a lot of meetings with black leaders and sat in on some of them, but it didn’t matter what went on in the meeting,” Louis Martin would recall. “What you had to do when the meeting was over was go into the Oval Office, where J.F.K. and Bobby were, to find out what was really important.”

  And on this summer solstice, what was really important, to both Kennedys, was whether the civil rights bill was worth all the political trouble it was already causing. “He would ask me every four days, ‘Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up? Look at the trouble it’s got us in,’” Bob Kennedy would recall of his conversations with his brother. “But always in a semi-jocular way.”

  The attorney general knew better than most the difficulty of finding a
proposal that could pass Congress, while also addressing a problem that he acknowledged was “different from one community to another.”

  “For the last two and a half years, we have attempted always to work at the local level to see if we could get local individuals, local leaders, political leaders and business leaders, financial leaders, to take action themselves,” he had told a meeting of religious leaders at the White House on June 17, as he displayed a map of five hundred communities in the Old Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia, showing the steps the administration had taken to encourage voluntary desegregation in each. When one of the attorney general’s listeners asked whether the administration would now discourage further demonstrations, Kennedy said he would rather have matters settled by negotiation or voluntary action.

  “But,” he added, “I can understand if I have been abused or misused and treated as a second-class citizen for a long time, where I can’t eat in downtown restaurants, where I can’t use a restroom or hotel, and I can’t get anybody to talk to me as a civilized human being and I can’t get any place, there is only one thing for me to do and that is the old American practice of going around with a sign and start picketing.”

  * * *

  ROBERT KENNEDY’S JOURNEY TO the front lines of civil rights—and to the bill he now set out to sell—had been long and slow. He once told the journalist Anthony Lewis that he “didn’t lie awake nights worrying” about the issue while he was growing up, and when Lewis asked if he had ever realized “the rather special horror of life for the Negro in the South,” he was forced to reply with a flat “No.” To his aide LaVerne Duffy, he was blunter: “Honestly, before I became attorney general, I didn’t give a shit about civil rights. It never touched my life.” In fact, Kennedy spent much of his early life veering between pretending not to give a shit about anything, and struggling—as the third son in his glamorous family and the decided runt among his siblings—simply to keep up and be noticed, especially by his father, who gave him perpetual short shrift in favor of his older brothers, Joe Jr. and Jack—and, later, his younger brother, Ted. Throughout his life, he would be the brooding Kennedy, darker, deeper, more complicated than the other men of the family, except perhaps the patriarch himself. “Who really knew Bob Kennedy?” his friend and aide John Douglas once asked.

  As a boy, he briefly had a paper route, but he soon tired of it and began making his appointed rounds in his family’s chauffeured Rolls-Royce. As a student at Portsmouth Priory, a solemn Benedictine boarding school in Rhode Island, he was so determined to make the grade that he was caught up in a cheating scandal involving a stolen examination and asked to leave. He transferred to Milton Academy in Massachusetts and in his senior year, in 1943, enlisted in the Navy’s V-12 officer training program, which sent him to Harvard while his older brothers were both in combat overseas, taunting him with teasing letters about his stateside status. He flunked the aptitude test for flight training, resigned from Officer Candidate School, and wound up missing the war altogether, serving out his Navy hitch in 1946 as a common seaman aboard the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the destroyer named for his eldest brother, whose explosives-laden plane had blown up over England on a secret mission in 1944.

  After the war, he earned C’s and D’s at Harvard, not good enough to get him into Harvard Law School, so he enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he became known for his rudeness, scarring the floor of his apartment with football cleats, and allowing an unleashed, ill-tempered German police dog to menace his neighbors. He was hot-tempered and pugnacious. When his father came to make an isolationist speech in Charlottesville and the student paper editorialized, “Mr. Kennedy, the Dinosaur Is Dead,” Bob showed up in its offices, ready to punch someone in the nose.

  But the pugnacity masked—and may well even have grown out of—a more admirable quality that Bob had also developed along the way: a strong, unyielding moral sense, perhaps influenced by his exceedingly devout Catholic mother, Rose, whose undisputed pet he had always been. “I enjoyed what you said about the officers not understanding the point of view of the men unless they had done the work themselves,” she wrote him while he was scraping paint on his ship at sea. “After your rubbing and scrubbing these months, you will never again be in that position.” He was the only one of the Kennedy boys to win his father’s promised thousand-dollar bounty for refraining from smoking or drinking until he was twenty-one, and he was physically unable to sit through the compulsory Navy training film showing the graphic consequences of venereal disease. In contrast to his older brother’s self-confessed ignorance of the Depression, he once explained, “What we did grow up with was the idea that there were a lot of people who were less fortunate and a lot of people who were hungry—this was during the 1930s—people who had a difficult time.”

  In 1951, Kennedy invited Ralph Bunche, the distinguished black United Nations negotiator who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, to speak at the University of Virginia. It was Bunche’s firm policy never to address segregated audiences, but segregation was the rule in Charlottesville. When other student leaders balked at Bunche’s demand, Kennedy became so incensed he was almost incoherent, and he sought the approval of the university’s president, Colgate Darden. Suffice it to say that Bunche became the first speaker ever to appear before an integrated audience at the University of Virginia.

  By all accounts, Bob first made a strong impression within his family when his Harvard friend Kenneth O’Donnell drafted him into service to manage Jack’s flailing 1952 Senate campaign. He had not wanted the job. He was working as a staff lawyer at the Justice Department in Washington, married to his sister Jean’s old college roommate, Ethel Skakel, with a child at home and another on the way. But he was prevailed upon to take the assignment, and, as Joseph P. Kennedy’s biographer David Nasaw writes, “Every adjective ever applied to his father was now visited upon the son: abrasive, driven, aggressive and a screamer. But, like his father, he got things done—brilliantly.”

  Bob built a statewide political organization that owed its allegiance to Jack Kennedy, not to the Democratic Party or the old-line Massachusetts ward heelers whose support their father had been clumsily courting. He brought order, discipline, a strong organization, and fierce loyalty to the effort, and by Election Day old Joe Kennedy was talking up Bob’s own political prospects in letters to friends, suggesting he might move to Connecticut to run for elective office. “In that event, we will want to have him make a good legal connection and, if possible, buy some business that would keep him interested—a paper or television station or something like that,” Ambassador Kennedy wrote.

  In the short term, though, it seemed that there was not enough adjacent airspace for two Kennedys in New England politics. So Bob wound up following Jack to Washington, as a staff lawyer for the new Republican majority on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—headed by his father’s friend, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Kennedy left the committee after just five months—at loggerheads with its snarling chief counsel, Roy Cohn—but he later joined the staff of the Democratic minority and eventually became its chief counsel when the Democrats regained power in 1954. For the rest of his life, Kennedy’s work for the McCarthy committee would dog him among liberals who could not understand his sympathy for a Red-baiting demagogue who, fueled by equal parts alcohol and vitriol, ruined lives and careers with reckless charges of subversion, before making the fatal mistake of taking on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s beloved Army and finally being censured by his Senate colleagues.

  For Bob Kennedy, McCarthy’s appeal was twofold: Kennedy, too, was a strident anticommunist, and he believed McCarthy was doing the Lord’s work; and he believed that much of the criticism of McCarthy amounted to thinly veiled anti-Catholicism. The same sense of outrage would fuel Kennedy’s subsequent and even more celebrated investigation of labor racketeering as counsel of a new Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, chaired by Joh
n McClellan of Arkansas and including his brother Jack among its members. In that job, Bob pursued Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with the same zeal that McCarthy had reserved for suspected Communists.

  But if Kennedy was a typical Cold Warrior in many respects, like his brother, he was also attuned to the emerging issues of human rights around the world. In 1955, he undertook a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union with another old friend of his father, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and was so dour and suspicious that he would barely try the local food and resisted being treated by a Russian doctor even when he fell seriously ill. Yet upon his return, he wrote articles for U.S. News and World Report and the New York Times Magazine in which he argued, “If we are going to win the present conflict with the Soviet Union, we can no longer support the exploitation of native people by Western nations. We supported the French in Indochina for too long.”

  And like his brother, Bob was becoming more and more aware of the enduring racial injustices suffered by American blacks. He may have chewed out Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford for engineering John Kennedy’s sympathetic phone call to Coretta King in the 1960 presidential campaign, but it was he himself—as campaign manager—who called the Georgia state judge to argue for King’s release, in part because of his moral outrage at the severity of the sentence. “The more I thought about the injustice of it, the more I thought what a son of a bitch the judge was,” he would later recall, telling Wofford, “It made me so damn angry to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen to hard labor for a minor traffic offense.” After the election, when the calls to Mrs. King and the judge had come to be seen as contributing to John Kennedy’s close victory, the liberal newspaper columnist Murray Kempton asked Bobby if he was glad they’d been made. “Sure I’m glad,” he replied, “but I would hope I’m not glad for the reason you think I’m glad.”