“Can you believe that such people”: Matthews, Jack Kennedy, p. 230.
Kennedy once countermanded: Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last 100 Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), p. 134.
Another friend, the artist William Walton: Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 72.
Kennedy’s reply was dismissive: Bryant, Bystander, p. 17.
As a freshman in the House: Ibid., pp. 27–28.
Yet Kennedy also kept his distance: Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 471.
Kennedy took the issue seriously enough: Bryant, Bystander, p. 36.
More immediately: Ibid., p. 38.
The Senate of that day: William S. White, The Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), p. 72.
That July … on Meet the Press: Bryant, Bystander, p. 55.
“I’ll be singing Dixie”: Ibid., p. 60.
In his 1956 book: John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), p. 153.
Once more, he paid a price: Bryant, Bystander, p. 78.
“This is one of the saddest days”: Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 988.
Wilkins’s answer was direct: Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 217.
After a speech in Jackson: Bryant, Bystander, pp. 86–88.
he became the first member of Congress: Ibid., p. 94.
King didn’t even bother to reply: Ibid., pp. 105, 111.
“Now, in five minutes, tick off ten things”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 58.
“It is in the American tradition to stand up”: Ibid., p. 62.
“This is a moral question”: Ibid., p. 63.
“Do you know that this election may be razor close”: Ibid., p. 19.
Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, had considered: Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 351. William Safire, then a Nixon aide, would report that Robinson left a meeting with the candidate with “tears of frustration in his eyes.”
a pamphlet for distribution in black neighborhoods: Bryant, Bystander, p. 186.
“Did you see what Martin’s father said?”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 28.
That summer, the Coast Guard Academy: Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), p. 4.
Those few words had the effect: Author interview with Wofford, 2010.
But Kennedy did not adopt: Robert F. Kennedy preadministration political files, General Subject, Box 52, JFKL.
“and I’m hopeful that we will shortly conclude”: PPP, John F. Kennedy, 1961, p. 33.
“there was going to be plenty of time to fight”: White OH, JFKL.
It was also news to Wofford: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 132.
“Jesus Christ!” Kennedy exclaimed: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 517.
“We’re still talking about that”: Ibid., p. 518.
But if Kennedy’s words were ringing: President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Box 45, JFKL.
“ran out of runway”: Author telephone conversation with White, Oct. 17, 2012.
Barely a minute after Kennedy went off the air: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/fXbXxZHwaUmJqbxW_5IrQg.aspx, JFKL.
Four hours later, in Jackson: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 523.
3: The Heart of the Problem
“I’m not going to admit I’m straddling the fence”: Scrapbook, 1963–1964, Box 129, CAHP.
“The legal remedies I have proposed”: Charles and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1985), p. 1.
But on Capitol Hill, the southern bulls bellowed: Bryant, Bystander, p. 28.
Most insisted that the bill did not: New York Times, June 20, 1963.
“The time is long past”: Justice Department Online Archives, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/fXbXxZHwaUmJqbxW_5IrQg.aspx.
“Oh, it was awful”: June 12 conversation, Dictation Belt 22A.2, JFKL.
“seemed alarmed over the pace”: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Journals, 1952–2000 (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), p. 199.
“A patent compromise”: LCCR Files, Box 117; Folder Civil Rights Act 1963, LOC.
“Any individual can come here and get a job”: New York Times, June 15, 1963.
“The fact that I was Attorney General”: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 75.
The very name Bobby: Evan Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 249.
“His obvious characteristics are energy”: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 620.
“What you had to do when the meeting was over”: Strober and Strober, Let Us Begin Anew, p. 281.
“He would ask me every four days”: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 179.
“For the last two and a half years”: Meeting, June 17, 1963, Lee White office files, Box 23, JFKL.
“didn’t lie awake nights worrying”: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, pp. 66, 72.
“I didn’t give a shit about civil rights”: C. David Heymann, RFK: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Dutton, 1998), p. 278.
“Who really knew Bob Kennedy?”: Warren Rogers, When I Think of Bobby (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 187.
he briefly had a paper route: Heymann, RFK, p. 23.
caught up in a cheating scandal: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 36.
After the war, he earned C’s and D’s: Ibid., p. 55.
“Mr. Kennedy, the Dinosaur Is Dead”: Ibid.
the only one of the Kennedy boys: Ibid., p. 45.
“What we did grow up with”: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, pp. 66–67.
Bunche became the first speaker: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 56; Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 68.
“Every adjective ever applied to his father”: David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), p. 664.
“In that event, we will want to have him”: Ibid., pp. 671–72.
In 1955, he undertook a fact-finding tour: Ibid., p. 689.
“The more I thought about the injustice of it”: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, pp. 102–3; Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, pp. 70–71.
“Sure I’m glad”: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 104.
“You weren’t making fun of yourself”: Ibid., p. 111; Brayman, President Speaks Off the Record, p. 632.
“Clearly, Bobby was not qualified”: Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 22.
he chose Burke Marshall: Bryant, Bystander, p. 247.
“Our training as soldiers or sailors”: New York Times, obituary of Guthman, Sept. 2, 2008.
at his confirmation hearings: Bryant, Bystander, p. 245.
Nick Katzenbach would remember: Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun, p. 31.
“One of the hallmarks of the Kennedys”: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 249–51.
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do”: Ibid., p. 254.
At his first staff meeting: Ibid., p. 302.
To his formal, walnut-paneled office: Author conversation with Eric Holder, 2013.
From the start of Kennedy’s tenure: Guthman Papers, Box 1, JFKL.
Bob Kennedy told Look magazine: Bryant, Bystander, pp. 245–46.
As if reflecting the emotional divide: Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 229.
On and on it went: Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson, My Song (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), pp. 266–69; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, vol. 1, pp. 344–48; Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, pp. 244�
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“I think that Bobby also sensed”: Strober and Strober, Let Us Begin Anew, p. 191.
To Arthur Schlesinger the attorney general complained: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, vol. 1, p. 348.
But just days later: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 245.
“He resented the experience, but it pierced him”: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, vol. 1, p. 348.
“What my father said about businessmen”: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 204.
“For the first time, people were concerned enough”: Ibid., p. 173.
The attorney general began his opening statement: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, pp. 5–6; Department of Justice Online Archives, prepared testimony for June 26, 1963, http://www.justice.gov/ag/rfkspeeches/1963/06-26-1963.pdf.
“Today, business enterprises are regulated”: DOJ online archives testimony, June 26.
“I want this legislation to pass”: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, p. 7.
“Frankly, it would be extremely difficult”: Ibid., p. 9.
On the Senate side of Capitol Hill: Mann, Walls of Jericho, p. 368.
The first time Kennedy appeared before the committee: CR, Judiciary Committee Hearings, Civil Rights: The President’s Program, July 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 31, August 1, 8, 23, and September 11. All the material in this section comes from the transcripts of those hearings.
“Isn’t it true, if we pass this bill”: CR, Judiciary Committee Hearings, July 17.
The grilling was so exhausting: Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 260.
4: Tell ’Em About the Dream!
They had been met at the North Portico: Preston Bruce, From the Door of the White House (New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1984), p. 95.
“the best meeting I attended”: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 968.
When someone asked why no Negroes: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 529.
“We want success in Congress”: Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 969.
“a good many programs I care about”: Ibid., p. 971.
“I assume you know”: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 530.
“If they shoot you down”: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 273.
the FBI had known since the early 1950s: David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic Monthly, July 2002.
What Hoover never told the president: Ibid.
Because of the existing tap: Robert Kennedy’s suspicions of King would influence his whole family. In 1964, in interviews not made public for half a century, Jacqueline Kennedy told Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. that King was “really a tricky person” and said she could not see a picture of him “without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible.” See Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy (New York: Hyperion, 2011), p. 260.
(The FBI could never confirm): Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 386.
known to his friends as Tweedie: Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 55–56.
“Cogitating with the cosmic universe”: Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King Jr.: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 13.
“I was determined to hate every white person”: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 35.
King’s spiritual awakening: Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 60.
He also fell deeply and painfully in love: Ibid., pp. 90–91; Frady, Martin Luther King Jr., pp. 20–22.
The very night of Rosa Parks’s arrest: Frady, Martin Luther King Jr., p. 26.
“You know, my friends, there comes a time”: Ibid., p. 34.
“Lord, I’m down here trying”: Ibid., p. 46.
“It ends with me getting killed”: Ibid., p. 51.
“I think I should choose the time and place”: Ibid., p. 73.
The president responded with politesse: Bryant, Bystander, p. 294.
“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here”: King, Why We Can’t Wait, p. 86.
“the moral passion is missing”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, pp. 128–29.
“That little baby does not belong to me”: Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 841.
“Well,” King had replied: Ibid., p. 849.
Wilkins still favored “quiet, patient lobbying tactics”: Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 291.
Only when Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed: Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 252.
(“an old black fairy”): Thomas, Robert F. Kennedy, p. 263.
Rustin was an organizational genius: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 277–78.
“we cawn’t have any disorganized pissing”: John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 215.
“The attitudes began to change”: Author interview with James Hamilton, 2013; James F. Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1950–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 50–55.
“Well, I’ll run it then”: John Douglas OH #3, JFKL.
“that’s in the great tradition”: PPP, John F. Kennedy, 1963, pp. 572–73.
“Only those citizens who are committed to non-violence”: Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General Correspondence, Box 11, JFKL.
Burke Marshall would later recall: Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 161.
“I do not intend to be disturbed”: Civil Rights 1963–65, Folder 3, EMDP.
Charles Halleck … noted that there were strict rules and regulations: Civil rights statement, July 1963, EMDP.
“They’re not going to bluff me”: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, p. 24.
no detail was too small: John Reilly papers, Department of Justice Files, Series #195, Box 1, JFKL.
no dogs: Douglas OH #3, JFKL.
“All this arranging and orchestrating”: Lewis, Walking with the Wind, p. 213.
an old enemy of Stan Levison’s: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 285.
Reilly even suggested: John Reilly papers, JFKL.
the press and public knew next to nothing: John Douglas OH #3, JFKL.
“I thought you would be interested”: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 280; Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 861.
the streets of the city were eerily empty: John Douglas OH #3, JFKL.
with thousands more troops on standby alert: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, p. 24.
“When I saw the number of people”: Author conversation with Eleanor Holmes Norton, The Daily Rundown, MSNBC, August 23, 2013.
Bayard Rustin’s elaborate sound system: John Reilly papers, JFKL.
a documentary about the day: Author interview with George Stevens Jr., Jan. 25, 2012.
News organizations feared the worst: Author email with Philip Kopper, Jan. 17, 2013.
The New York Times went even further: Author email with Russell Baker, Dec. 16, 2011.
Shortly before 11:00 a.m.: Author interview with Gregory B. Craig, Jan. 2012.
“he doesn’t get what we’re yelling”: Ibid.
he had debated up to the last minute: Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass: A Memoir (New York: Twelve, 2009), p. 201.
He went to the mansion’s third-floor solarium: Bruce, From the Door of the White House, p. 97; Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, p. 108.
The night before, an advance copy: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 282.
Lewis and his fellow activists: http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhome.htm.
“John, we’ve come this far together”: Lewis, Walking with the Wind, p. 223.
“Wake up, America”: Clarence B. Jones, Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 65.<
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with the help of Clarence Jones: Ibid., pp. 76–77.
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!”: Ibid., p. 112.
“Today you were smokin’!”: Ibid., p. 125.
“He’s damned good”: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 585; Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 883.
“We cannot defend freedom in Berlin”: Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 883.
as usual, the president was pessimistic: Meetings: Tape 108/A43, Civil Rights, Aug. 28, 1963, JFKL.
“Grab the nigger vote”: Lee C. White papers, Box 23, JFKL.
“we must mark him now”: Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 235.
“of all the places to be”: Craig interview.
John Lewis found himself disappointed: Lewis, Walking with the Wind, p. 226.
“that means there’s going to be a civil rights bill”: Author interview with Kenneth Teasdale, May 2013.
A Gallup poll that July: Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p. 139.
“I would like to think”: Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun, p. 126.
5: A Compromise Between Polar Positions
“Bill had an engagement”: Interview of David Carver by Adam Clymer, May 13, 2008.
“Your representative owes you”: Ibid.
“There is no such thing as easy money from Washington”: Dayton Daily News, Oct. 20, 1948.
he preferred the term “equal rights”: Folder SC389, McCulloch Papers, Public Library, Piqua, Ohio, “Bill McCulloch and Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Bill Milligan address to YMCA, Apr. 8, 1987; also interview of Ann Carver by Adam Clymer, Apr. 7, 2008.
“The Constitution doesn’t say”: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, p. 105.
“Reality is what we live by”: Ibid., p. 13.
As the spring wore on: Ibid., p. 34.
William Moore McCulloch was born in 1901: James Oda submission, Piqua Historian and Librarian, Clymer papers. Author possession.
“I have never spent nearly as much”: McCulloch letter, Aug. 20, 1964, Folder C, Public Library, Piqua, Ohio.
“His constituents were very conservative”: Clymer interview of Joe Metz, May 15, 2008.
Throughout that summer and into the fall: Whalen and Whalen, Longest Debate, p. 33.
“This is a reasonable, moderate bill”: Author interview of David Filvaroff, June 19, 2013.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 40