Making matters worse, JFK would be facing a general election opponent with a strong civil rights reputation. This is a Nixon long lost to American memory. Though it is overshadowed by his later actions, this Nixon prided himself on his moderate racial views. Vice President Nixon held an advantage with Black voters over Kennedy, at least when it came to his image. Nixon was seen by many of those voters as a more hopeful and sympathetic figure than the man he served, President Eisenhower. Nonetheless, in his 1956 reelection campaign, Eisenhower had still won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote, the most of any Republican since 1932, before FDR’s New Deal. Roosevelt’s economic programs won the Democrats a majority of Black votes outside the South, but southern cities (at least those in which Black voters were able to go to the polls) remained a different matter. The Democrats, after all, were the party that violently resisted Reconstruction, leading to the Jim Crow era. Segregationist Democrats were overwhelmingly supported by white voters across the South and reviled by Black voters in equal measure. There was an inevitable spillover effect to other parts of the country, and the CRS was trying to reverse the trend of Black Americans elsewhere once again voting for the party of Lincoln. Their task was made even more difficult by the perception that their candidate was a rich Massachusetts senator who had not been shy about forging connections with southern segregationist colleagues.
Although few Democratic operatives understood the hazards of their campaign’s disconnect with Black voters, the Kennedys were finally waking up to a simple truth: all Nixon had to do was improve on Eisenhower’s 40 percent, or simply come close to it, and he would be well on his way to winning the White House. Black voters remained the Democrats’ to lose outside the South, but it was nonetheless important to make inroads where possible and to stanch the loss of votes in the North and West. In light of Nixon’s popularity, it seemed plausible that he might even approach the threshold of 50 percent.
* * *
Though Wofford, in the years to come, would be dismissed by politicians as irritatingly idealistic, he was no fool. He knew Bobby’s dire assessment was correct. As former counsel to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Wofford had an unusual perspective on where both parties stood on issues of race. Yet as useful as his experience working for the commission had been, it was his role as an adviser on nonviolence to Dr. King that gave Wofford the most insight into the developing civil rights movement.
He knew that Nixon had personally forged a relationship with King, despite the minister’s youth, and that King was more and more at the center of a volatile national debate about racial inequality. Wofford sensed that King’s stated neutrality concerning the presidential race might not last for long, given the pastor’s meetings with, letters from, and seeming goodwill toward Vice President Nixon. Besides, King had been raised in Atlanta’s Black community, which for generations had gravitated toward the GOP. It did not help that Kennedy had over the course of his career displayed little interest in the realities of racial discrimination.
Finding himself unexpectedly appointed by Bobby to this new position in the Civil Rights Section of the campaign, Wofford thought it might be the perfect opportunity to help the Massachusetts senator understand the importance of encouraging if not a friendship, then at least an honest and forthright connection with King.
After Kennedy nailed down the nomination, Wofford increasingly stressed King’s potential benefit to the campaign, though he sensed he might pay a high price with the Kennedys’ inner circle in the future for doing so. Serving as the link between Kennedy and King would never be an easy role, not in this campaign season nor in years to come. Yet even as his efforts were met with resistance, Wofford did not despair; he sensed that King was becoming more responsive to Kennedy’s appeals. And King, for one, believed the Democrat surrounded himself with better advisers than Nixon did, and he included Wofford among those he called the “good people, the right people.”
King’s reservations about Kennedy himself were understandable; Wofford, too, felt some unease about the candidate he now worked for. While the young lawyer admired Kennedy for his wit, his quick intelligence, and his apparent capacity for growth, he had signed on to the campaign in order to move and to motivate Kennedy as much as to elect him. This dynamic was quite different from his devotion to King. Their connection had developed soon after Wofford read about the Alabama minister’s use of Gandhian tactics during the Montgomery bus boycott. When he heard how this young pastor was utilizing nonviolent techniques, putting into action ideas the young lawyer Wofford was speaking and publishing about, he resolved they should meet. He began sending King letters with his writings on nonviolence and solidified a working relationship when they met at a conference in 1956. Though never formally a member of King’s staff, Wofford offered blunt advice and editorial support for King’s 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
Wofford was encouraged when the popular singer Harry Belafonte also advised Kennedy to seek out King. The candidate was recruiting Belafonte as a prominent Black supporter, but at their meeting the entertainer bluntly told Kennedy, “You’re making a big mistake if you think I can deliver the Negro vote for you. If you want the Negro vote, pay attention to what Martin Luther King is saying and doing. You get him, you don’t need me—or Jackie Robinson.” He added, “The time you’ve spent with me would be better spent talking to him, and listening to what he has to say, because he is the future of our people.” Suddenly Wofford’s advice was starting to look more and more prescient.
* * *
Wofford eventually succeeded in arranging two private meetings between King and Kennedy, one before and one after the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. King would later say of his first meeting with JFK, which took place in the lavish New York apartment belonging to Kennedy’s father, that he could tell the senator was bright but that he sensed little emotional commitment to addressing the depth of the injustices Black Americans faced. King noted that Kennedy “had never really had the personal experience of knowing the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the Negroes for freedom.” Kennedy had grown up without knowing many Black people and had not sought out knowing many more since then. Bobby would say later of racial inequality, “I don’t think that it was a matter that we were extra-concerned about as we were growing up.” But Wofford believed that Kennedy might well possess the capacity, perhaps because of his own family’s experience of discrimination toward the Irish, to develop an impulse to take action. King and Kennedy, so different in personality and attitude—one moral and somber, the other coolly ambitious and ironic—were at last beginning to forge some kind of connection, however awkward and halting.
During their second meeting at the senator’s Georgetown town house, King told Kennedy, “Something dramatic must be done to convince the Negroes that you are committed on civil rights.” Given the candidate’s spotty civil rights record and long-standing inclination to accommodate the segregationist sensibilities of southern Democrats, King was only expressing what many Black leaders felt. Kennedy did not disagree, nor did he bristle at King’s helpful candor. They agreed they should meet again as soon as the fall campaign began, perhaps in a public forum. Wofford got to work on making that happen.
Little did King know that his earnest admonition to Kennedy—that the candidate would have to do “something dramatic”—would play out with his own life in jeopardy.
Kennedy finally agreed to appear with King in the third week of October, less than three weeks before Election Day. King was not inclined to allow Kennedy to play a double game, talking about civil rights only in northern media markets, so he insisted that the joint appearance take place in the South. Wofford and King first discussed King’s home city of Atlanta, but the Democrats running Kennedy’s Georgia campaign warned he would lose their state if he appeared there alongside King. Kennedy was not willing to take that risk. So Wofford persuaded a reluctant King to agree to meet in Miami—where Kennedy was scheduled to speak before
the American Legion—even if Miami was Deep South more by geography than culture. Wofford hoped this event might be what would allow them to clinch the Black vote.
* * *
A bleak, open-plan office in the Investment Building in Washington was home to Shriver’s Civil Rights Section. Situated three blocks east of campaign headquarters, the team was grateful to do their work mostly unsupervised by the main campaign staff. Over the summer, the small group started working on a plan that was, by the standards of the time, entirely novel: a substantive, civil-rights-focused program aimed at Black voters that would go far beyond the modest publicity-focused outreach of the past. As summer turned into autumn, however, the CRS learned just how daunting a task this would be. At the July convention, Shriver saw that Kennedy was the least popular of the Democratic presidential candidates with Black delegates, who looked as “cold as fish” toward Kennedy. Making matters worse, the Kennedy brothers belatedly decided that the two Black Washington lawyers they had brought on to head the CRS—Marjorie Lawson and Frank Reeves—lacked the national stature needed to actually rally Black votes. Furthermore, Lawson and Reeves seemed to be intent on spending their time disparaging each other. As a result, Shriver and Wofford found themselves functionally in charge of outreach to the Black community—an untenable situation.
One day in late August, Shriver—a lean, compact man whose blinding smile concealed an obsession with fourteen-hour workdays—wondered out loud if they should bring on someone new, a member of the Black community respected across the country. He had heard good things from organized labor contacts about a Chicago newspaper editor who might be the perfect fit, though the two fellow Chicagoans had never met. The idea sounded good to Wofford, so Shriver started wooing Louis (pronounced “Louie”) E. Martin with the aim of persuading him to join their team.
Shriver began by inviting Martin to a Black advisory group that gathered at the start of August at Washington’s LaSalle Hotel. As Martin listened to the morning’s presentations, he was dismayed by the lack of practicality. What the journalist heard were banal generalities from people who had never worked in politics. Martin finally spoke up during the afternoon session, saying the Democratic National Committee (DNC) needed to pay its outstanding debts for advertising space it had bought during the previous election in papers like The Chicago Defender, the publication he worked for: “These bills had to be paid by the DNC before we could get the full cooperation of the Negro newspapers.” Martin added, “We should work for the total involvement of all elements in Black life in this campaign, irrespective of past association, party affiliation.” At the end of the day, Shriver and Wofford took Martin aside and asked what the budget for Black outreach should be. Martin answered, “A million dollars.” Wofford and Shriver exchanged startled looks; they had expected to be told to spend one or two hundred thousand. Martin scoffed, having spent more than that during his brief adventure doing Black media publicity for FDR’s 1944 campaign.
It was then that Shriver asked, because Martin had the experience they needed, would he stay on and serve as their guide?
Martin at first declined, though both Shriver and Wofford had impressed him. Back in Chicago the next day, Shriver telephoned him, insistent that Martin come “get into the act.” Martin again demurred, but eventually Shriver got him to agree to work three days a week in D.C. with them. That arrangement lasted all of two weeks; there was no such thing as part-time work, or half-hearted commitments, in the Kennedy world. One meeting would end up leading to eight years of work on behalf of both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations for Martin.
* * *
Still, Martin’s first meeting with Robert Kennedy was less than propitious. The first time he walked into Bobby’s office, flanked by Wofford and Shriver, he watched as Kennedy tore into his two associates, saying it was “mighty late in the day to find out that the Civil Rights Section had not gotten off the ground.” The two silently absorbed the tirade, though they felt they were doing valuable work: Shriver was focusing on civil rights issues instead of merely handing out money (though the campaign would resort to this tactic, too). Nonetheless, Bobby did not think they were securing the connections they would need to turn out the Black vote.
Martin had seen enough and decided to risk his continued involvement in the Kennedy campaign by communicating some salient realities to Bobby. He spoke up: “You don’t know anything!” People looked at Martin in shock. “You’re talking about what we haven’t done. You haven’t done what you were supposed to do. You haven’t linked up the guys who have been in this party for twenty years. You don’t know the officers. You don’t know anybody. You’re supposed to open these doors, you know.”
He added that it was ridiculous that Bobby had not even met with South Side Chicago’s representative William Dawson, the honorary chair of the CRS. The traditional, older Dawson had counseled Shriver when they first met, “Don’t have any relations with these wild young men like Martin Luther King. That will just get Kennedy into trouble.” Dawson even objected to their using “civil rights” in their unit name, because it would “offend our good Southern friends.” Still, Martin believed it was scandalous that Bobby had not bothered to sit down with the nation’s longest-serving Black congressman. In truth, Shriver and Wofford were just as dismissive as Bobby toward the elderly Dawson. When the congressman was first shown the CRS’s open-plan layout, he had demanded a private office for himself, which the team soon referred to as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Martin, though, had more respect for Dawson. The congressman’s views might seem out of touch to the upstart Kennedys, but to fail to respect Dawson was to fail to respect his Chicago voters, and Martin thought that mattered.
Shriver said, “You know, this man is from Chicago,” attempting to justify Martin’s near insubordination. Martin, for his part, went on laying out exactly what needed to be done in order to win and just how much it would cost. As he walked out of the fractious meeting, Bobby’s assistant, the journalist John Seigenthaler, whispered to Martin, “Wait a minute, I wish you’d stay. Bobby wants to talk to you.”
Martin prepared himself to be fired.
It turned out that firing Martin was not what Bobby had in mind. Martin’s ability to speak Bobby’s rough, practical political language had already won him the Kennedy brother’s respect.
So Martin posed another tough question to Bobby: Did he really want to win the Black vote? Martin explained, “If you want it, you can get it, but you’re going to have to work for it, and you’re going to have to fight for it and you’re going to have to spend money.” The campaign manager’s immediate trust in Martin’s judgment over that of two well-intentioned white liberals gave him enough confidence in the CRS to allow them to continue their work—at least for now. Martin would walk out of headquarters onto Connecticut Avenue and K Street resolved to give the Kennedy campaign everything he had.
* * *
Martin’s and Wofford’s desks sat side by side in the cavernous CRS office, which was also where other constituency outreach operations were based. The two new colleagues toiled through endless days of calls, meetings, and hundreds of press releases. It would have felt overwhelming, except that they quickly became friends, discovering that they could rely on each other. Many nights, the two of them, along with Shriver, stumbled out late to go to nearby Harvey’s Restaurant, where their best ideas emerged over midnight beers and oysters.
Late nights hardly precluded early mornings, because the devout Shriver rarely missed morning Mass. Given the many directions in which the campaign pulled Shriver (who also headed up outreach to the business community and to farmers), Martin—a fellow Roman Catholic owing to his Afro-Cuban father—figured that going to Mass with Shriver followed by breakfast was a good opportunity to take care of CRS business. Though Wofford was not a Catholic, he tagged along, figuring it couldn’t hurt.
The thirty-four-year-old Wofford—whose high forehead and arched eyebrows gave him a look of affable curiosity—was a man
more comfortable with classical Greek tragedy than raw politics. He admired Martin’s ability to maneuver through a world hidden to him and Shriver: the arena of Black newspapers, magazines, and radio stations. Martin had spent the previous year building up independent media in Nigeria, and now he was on the phone each day in D.C., calling as many Black publishers, journalists, and local precinct organizers as he could, opening their minds to Kennedy. When an emissary of Representative Adam Clayton Powell laid out what Powell could do for Kennedy around the country—for a steep price—Martin immediately saw that Powell’s proposal was full of big promises he did not have the necessary organization to keep, at least not outside New York. Martin got the congressman on board to do speeches for them at a fifth of the cost. His negotiating skills amazed Shriver and Wofford.
Martin, in turn, respected Wofford’s knowledge of young players in the emerging civil rights movement. He relied on Wofford as a walking repository of everything Kennedy had previously said or done regarding civil rights (which, admittedly, was little). The journalist sensed his white partner had more latitude to express his passionate ideals than he did. Though he shared Wofford’s vision for equality, Martin figured it was hard political advice for winning this election first that he was here to give.
Martin found Wofford to be someone who listened to him. The only thing that worried him was whether other Black associates of the CRS might see Wofford’s self-assurance in discussions as arrogance. On the other hand, Wofford was hardly aloof; for a man operating in the aggressive Kennedy world, he was kind and accessible, and this in spite of a tendency to always be on the go. He was the epitome of a big-city lawyer, constantly hurrying with a bulky briefcase in hand, and yet no matter how busy he was, Wofford was always willing to slow down and tell a funny story about his Tennessee lineage. This ability to make fun of himself saved Wofford from being annoyingly self-righteous. The fact that Wofford had attended law school at Howard University, a historically Black institution (causing his grandmother to literally faint at the news), also fascinated Martin. It showed that his colleague was more than a dreamy idealist; he had spent time learning about realities of Black life before getting a second legal degree at Yale.
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