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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Indeed, there was nothing simple or easy about Bob Kennedy or his motives, yet his seriousness—his heaviness—could be leavened with a sly, self-effacing humor. On the morning of his brother’s inauguration, when the NBC television correspondent Sander Vanocur encountered Bob in the Capitol Rotunda and asked on the air how to address him, since he had not yet been confirmed as attorney general, Kennedy just smiled his toothy grin and suggested, “How about Bob?”

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  ROBERT F. KENNEDY BECAME ATTORNEY general for one overwhelming reason: his father insisted on it, arguing that Jack needed a senior official in his government whose loyalty and discretion would be absolutely unquestioned, and who could advise the president with unshrinking candor. Bob himself was ambivalent. He would later recall that he was actually eager to get away from Jack for a while. But he knew he could not work on the White House staff or in a sub-Cabinet job; his status as the president’s brother would make it impossible for him to function as anyone’s subordinate. So, in the face of his father’s and brother’s insistence, he relented in mid-December 1960 and accepted the appointment. But he chafed when President Kennedy told the 1961 Gridiron Club dinner that he thought it only appropriate that Bobby “get a little experience first,” by working in the Justice Department before practicing law (which he had never done). When the president advised him that it was good to make fun of oneself, Bob retorted, “You weren’t making fun of yourself. You were making fun of me!”

  “Clearly, Bobby was not qualified by any traditional standards,” Nicholas Katzenbach recalled. “He was too young, too inexperienced, too political, too brash, too immature in every way. All of these shortcomings were obvious to everyone, including Bobby. What was not obvious was Bobby’s determination to do the job well, and his capacity to lead, which had been overshadowed by his devotion to his brother.”

  With the guidance of his first deputy attorney general, Byron “Whizzer” White, Kennedy recruited a standout team of aides and assistants. His new press secretary, Edwin Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former reporter for the Seattle Times, would later call them—borrowing from Shakespeare’s Henry V—a “band of brothers.” Besides White, an All-American football halfback and Rhodes scholar from the University of Colorado, who as a young naval intelligence officer in the South Pacific had debriefed Lieutenant John F. Kennedy after the sinking of PT 109, they included Katzenbach, another Rhodes scholar by way of Princeton and Yale Law School who had spent more than two years in prisoner of war camps during World War II after the bomber he was navigating was shot down over the Mediterranean. Katzenbach was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School when he was recruited to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; he would later succeed White as deputy attorney general.

  As his administrative assistant, Kennedy tapped John Seigenthaler, a courtly, lanky reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, whose investigations of the local branch of the Teamsters union he had admired. And for the all-important role of assistant attorney general for civil rights he chose Burke Marshall, a lawyer from Yale who had worked in Army intelligence as a Japanese translator and code breaker. When asked at his Senate confirmation hearing what experience he had in the field of civil rights, Marshall answered, “Virtually none,” adding that he had “no specific plans” for his division, which had about forty lawyers, compared to about three hundred in the antitrust division. Marshall’s own deputy was another unlikely choice: John Doar, a six-foot-two-inch former Princeton basketball player who had trained as an Army Air Forces bomber pilot. Doar, a Republican, had joined the Eisenhower Justice Department from his family’s law firm in northwest Wisconsin and was now recruited, he would recall, for a job that “no one else wanted.”

  Bob Kennedy’s new team may have lacked expertise in civil rights, but it had priceless experience of another kind: it had been “tempered by war,” as John Kennedy had summed up the passage of power to a new generation in his inaugural address. “Our training as soldiers or sailors made a difference when we confronted civil rights crises,” Guthman would later recall. “We could react under pressure to what the situation required.”

  The editorials on Bob Kennedy’s appointment as attorney general may have been scathing, but at his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he received surprisingly broad support. The New York Times’s James Reston wrote that Kennedy had come “expecting to do battle with Jack Dempsey and instead found himself confronted, most agreeably, by Shirley Temple.” Senator Sam Ervin, a country lawyer and former judge from North Carolina by way of the Harvard Law School, praised Kennedy as a man of “profound personal and political courage.” Indeed, Kennedy would later recall with some wonder, “The strongest support ever I received as Attorney General came from Southerners,” including the powerful Judiciary Committee chairman, James O. Eastland of Mississippi.

  Nick Katzenbach would remember Kennedy’s “ability to engage the loyalty of each of us, both to him and to each other,” and added, “We all participated in the making of policy, and he treated each of us as a valued colleague, not as the head of a division or someone with turf to protect.” Lawyers from the antitrust division were asked to weigh in on tax policy, and those from the civil division were asked their opinions on civil rights. “One of the hallmarks of the Kennedys was that they expected you to do everything,” recalled William Orrick, who headed the civil division. Remembering his own brief time as a junior lawyer in the department, when higher-ups had ignored him, the new attorney general resolved to get to know as many of the career lawyers as he could, and he walked the hallways, connecting names and faces.

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he would say to his subordinates. “Tell me what I can do.” After one early tour of the office with Seigenthaler, Kennedy demanded, “Did you see any Negroes? Get me a study of how many Negroes are working here.” Seigenthaler would soon report that of the department’s 955 lawyers in Washington, only ten were black. At his first staff meeting in February, Kennedy emphasized the need to integrate the department’s offices—north and south—and he wrote to the deans of leading law schools, asking for recommendations about the brightest black students.

  To his formal, walnut-paneled office—a converted conference room that he chose because it was bigger than J. Edgar Hoover’s office—Kennedy brought a bubbling sense of life, with a varnished mounted sailfish over the mantel, a model of a Chinese junk on a table, a stuffed tiger, and an ever-changing gallery of his children’s drawings and artwork hung on the walls with Scotch tape. In violation of government regulations, and to Hoover’s extreme annoyance, he often brought Brumus, his large, black, obstreperous Newfoundland retriever, to work, and one or more of his children could be found running in and out of his office even in the midst of the hottest crises. Fifty years later, Kennedy’s successor Eric Holder could point to pockmarks in the paneling from the children’s stray BB gunfire.

  From the start of Kennedy’s tenure, the administration’s working assumption was that there would be no immediate legislation on civil rights. Instead, the White House and Justice pursued administrative actions. That did not mean Kennedy could ignore the problem. At a meeting in the attorney general’s office with top aides on March 6, 1961, Ed Guthman’s handwritten notes show that Kennedy and his advisers covered some seventeen points on the matter of civil rights, from “Have U.S. Attorneys study integration laws” to “Leadership by president. Climate of opinion filters down to judges and juries.” They considered the idea of a “roving D.A. in the South,” and on the question of Alabama, Guthman wrote presciently, “Don’t rock the boat on school seg until a Negro student gets into U of A.” Guthman also noted that the “Government can’t overestimate effect of cleaning up its own operations in South” by hiring more blacks for federal jobs, and added: “Top priority to voting.”

  That same month, Bob Kennedy told Look magazine that civil rights was the “most difficult problem” he faced, “because of the emotio
nal factors involved.” Asked about the sit-in movement that had been building in the South since the previous year, he said, “My sympathy is with them morally,” but he acknowledged, “Rightly or wrongly, other people have grown up with totally different backgrounds and mores, which we can’t change overnight.” Asked whether he could envision sending troops to enforce a court order as Eisenhower had been required to do in Little Rock in 1957, he was firm: “I don’t think we would ever come to the point of sending troops to any part of the country on a matter like that.”

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  BY 1963, BITTER EXPERIENCE—with the Freedom Rides, Ole Miss, the Birmingham Spring, and the desegregation of the University of Alabama itself—had shown Bob Kennedy just how naïve he had been about the federal government’s required role in civil rights enforcement. He thought he understood the problem of civil rights—and black discontent with the status quo—as well as anyone in Washington. But nothing had prepared him for a devastating encounter that spring, an encounter that would show him how little he really understood—and how much he had yet to learn.

  It started with some advice from Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, to whom Kennedy sometimes turned to take the pulse of black opinion. Gregory was part of a new generation of black comics who were breaking old minstrel stereotypes with more topical humor (“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?”) and he now suggested that the attorney general could profit from a meeting with James Baldwin, the black writer and intellectual. Kennedy had met Baldwin the previous year at a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners, and Baldwin had just published his searing indictment of race in America, “The Fire Next Time,” in the New Yorker.

  Following Gregory’s recommendation, Baldwin was invited to the attorney general’s home at Hickory Hill for a meeting on Thursday, May 23. Intrigued by their discussion about the problems of urban blacks, Kennedy proposed that Baldwin convene a group of other prominent black figures for a private discussion the very next night, when Kennedy was scheduled to be in New York to meet with chain store owners about desegregating their lunch counters. Baldwin quickly summoned an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances for a meeting that Friday evening in a Kennedy family apartment on Central Park South. The invitees included the playwright Lorraine Hansberry; the singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte; the white actor Rip Torn; Clarence Jones, a lawyer and speechwriter for Martin Luther King; Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist whose studies of black children and their differing reactions to black and white dolls had been used by the NAACP in its arguments to the Supreme Court in the Brown case; and Jerome Smith, a young civil rights worker who had joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 and had been repeatedly beaten and jailed and was now in New York for medical treatment.

  As if reflecting the emotional divide, blacks and whites sat on opposite sides of the room, and the atmosphere was tense. Torn, who had been born in a small Texas town, tried to break the ice by talking about the evolution of his own attitudes on race, but no one seemed much interested. Clark and others had come ready with statistics and policy ideas, while Kennedy had a list of the administration’s accomplishments and a warning about the dangers of extremism preached by Malcolm X and the Black Muslims.

  But it was Smith, stammering in frustration and agitation, who set the tone by suggesting that simply having to be in the same room to make his case to the attorney general made him want to throw up. Kennedy, offended, turned away. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General,” Hansberry bore in, pointing toward Smith. “But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.”

  Then Smith went on, recounting his brutal experiences in the South, and saying he did not know how much longer he could remain committed to nonviolence. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” he said. “When I pull the trigger, kiss it goodbye.” Baldwin, trying to calm the waters, asked Smith if he would fight for his country. “Never!” he shouted. “Never! Never!”

  “How can you say that?” Kennedy demanded, growing redder by the minute, deeply shocked by an attitude so at odds with his own brothers’ sacrifices in World War II. But Smith had touched something deep and implacable, and the rest of the room was suddenly with him. “This boy,” Horne would recall, “just put it like it was. He communicated the plain, basic suffering of being a Negro. The primeval memory of everyone in that room went to work after that … He took us back to the common dirt of our experiences and rubbed our noses in it … You could not encompass his anger, his fury, in a set of statistics, nor could Mr. Belafonte and Dr. Clark and Miss Horne, the fortunate Negroes, keep up the pretense of being the mature, responsible spokesmen for the race.”

  Hansberry turned again to Kennedy. “Look,” she said, “if you can’t understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a white America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there’s no alternative except our going in the streets … and chaos.”

  On and on it went for two hours, perhaps three, “the most intense, traumatic meeting in which I’ve ever taken part, the most unrestrained interchange among adults, head-to-head, no holds barred … the most dramatic experience I have ever had,” Clark would recall. All of Kennedy’s recitation of the administration’s record meant nothing—his pleas for understanding, his appeals to reason, carried no weight at all. He was furious, and his anger only increased as the meeting broke up when Clarence Jones approached and thanked him for his help—the secret bail money, Burke Marshall’s behind-the-scenes peacemaking—in handling the Birmingham crisis. “You watched these people attack me over Birmingham for forty minutes, and you didn’t say a word,” Kennedy replied icily. “There is no point in your saying this to me now.” To Belafonte, Kennedy simply said, “You know us better than that. Why don’t you tell these people who we are?”

  “Why do you assume I don’t?” Belafonte replied. “Maybe if we were not there telling them who you are, things would not be as calm as they are.”

  The next morning’s New York Times carried a front-page account of the session. Baldwin was quoted in it, and Belafonte and others assumed he’d been the source. Kennedy called the Democratic Party’s civil rights expert Louis Martin to complain. “I gave him hell,” Martin would recall. “I said, ‘You go out and make your own appointments without telling me. I could have told you what would happen.’”

  “I think that Bobby also sensed that most of the blacks were on the make themselves,” Martin added. “They were looking for a place in the sun. He was thinking of them like the Boston Irish in the old days—like Honey Fitz—they were always scrambling.”

  To Arthur Schlesinger the attorney general complained, “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are—they don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do.” But just days later, Kennedy told Ed Guthman that if he had grown up black, he would feel as strongly about the matter. “He resented the experience, but it pierced him all the same,” Schlesinger would recall. “His tormentors made no sense, but in a way, they made all sense. It was another stage in education.”

  For Bob Kennedy, the crux of the issue was always what could be done. He and his brother both prided themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their contempt for the bleeding hearts, who struck a pose instead of making progress and were “in love with death,” as he once put it. “What my father said about businessmen applies to liberals,” Bob would say—meaning that they were sons of bitches. Now he was more convinced than ever that action was not only possible, but urgently necessary to address the causes of black unrest.

  “I think that what we wanted to do was deal with the problem,” he would recall. There had always been only two ways of doing so: either to protect civil rights demonstrators, or to face up to the injustices that were causing the demonstra
tions. “We didn’t feel that the protection of the people was feasible or acceptable under our constitutional system,” Kennedy said. “So therefore, what was acceptable was to try to get to the heart of the problem. For the first time, people were concerned enough about it—and there was enough demand about it—that we could get to the heart of the problem and have some chance of success.”

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  THE ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS TO get to the heart of the problem were embodied in H.R. 7152, but its chances for success were by no means clear when a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held the first hearing on the president’s civil rights bill on the morning of Wednesday, June 26. Bob Kennedy’s appearance did not much help the cause. He was the leadoff witness in the packed hearing room, Room 346 in the northeast corner of the Old House Office Building. (The president himself was half a world away in Germany, defending freedom in his own way by proclaiming, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”)

  Presiding from the curving horseshoe mahogany hearing table was the Judiciary Committee’s long-serving chairman, Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. His official portrait, unveiled earlier that year, stared out over the vaulted chamber, lit by frosted crystal chandeliers.

  The attorney general began his opening statement by repeating the president’s assertion that a law alone would not solve the problems of injustice and prejudice for black Americans. But, he insisted, “We must launch as broad an attack as possible.” He added, “If we fail to act promptly and wisely at this crucial point in our history, grave doubts will be thrown on the very premise of American democracy.” (In a bit of editing that his brother would doubtless have approved, he omitted from the middle of that sentence a ringing phrase from his prepared draft, in which he warned that if Congress failed to act, “the ugly forces of disorder and violence will surely rise and multiply throughout the land.”)