A decade later, Wofford began to reevaluate his initial impression of Jack Kennedy. After reading the senator’s impressive speeches on new approaches to Poland and Algeria, Wofford wrote him a letter from his corporate law firm praising the senator’s worldview. Wofford’s overture was successful, and he ended up editing Kennedy’s speeches on international affairs for a book, The Strategy of Peace. Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen tried to get Wofford to join the campaign in the summer of 1959, seeing Wofford as someone who understood international affairs and might be able to help Kennedy with the liberals who were wary of his nomination. But Wofford had promised the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father Ted Hesburgh (whom he had worked under at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights), that he would teach there for a year. At Notre Dame, Wofford got an unexpected call from the university’s former president—and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s confessor—Father John Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh relayed Joe Kennedy’s message to him: “I understand my boy wants to get somebody that you’ve got in your law school teaching, Wofford, or Wufford or something. Would you tell Father Hesburgh that moral teachings be damned—that my boy needs him, so put him on the next plane back to Washington.”
Wofford declined again, saying, “I’m here, and I’m doing this book for Kennedy, and I will go at the end of the year.” In April 1960, JFK came to South Bend for a campaign speech, and he spotted Wofford at the reception. He stated, “We need you now. When is your last class?” Wofford said he still had another few weeks; Kennedy responded, “Could you miss it? Could you get on the plane and come?”
Wofford replied, “My wife is nine months pregnant, and I couldn’t go until the baby’s born.”
“Let me talk to her.”
JFK took Clare aside, and when they returned, they were laughing. Clare said, “Look, if he wants you this badly, go ahead now. We’ll be fine.” That night at home the conversation continued, and around midnight Clare realized she was going into labor. Wofford would say of Kennedy, “If he can turn the womb of my wife, he can win the women’s vote.”
Kennedy eventually decided to put him to work on Black outreach, for as he told Wofford in his Senate office early in the spring, “You know I’m way behind on this, because I’ve hardly known any Blacks in my life. It isn’t an issue that I’ve thought about a lot.”
This push to help Kennedy close the gap with Black voters had so consumed Wofford over the past months that it had distracted him from his involvement with King’s movement. Wofford remembered meeting an attorney in Atlanta during his Civil Rights Commission days who seemed well connected. Why not give that man—Morris Abram—a call, he thought. Scooping up his children, Wofford went back inside, found Abram’s number, and dialed it.
Abram was also spending the morning at home and was about to take his nine-year-old daughter out to play. Wofford said, “Morris, Martin Luther King, Jr., is in jail in Atlanta.”
He replied, “Harris, surely you don’t have to call long distance to tell me. Everybody knows that.”
“I’m supposed to be a civil-rights man for John Kennedy—and King’s old friend—and I haven’t been able to do a thing.” Wofford asked, “Can’t you do anything? Can’t the mayor really do something to get him out?” He added, “Atlanta’s supposed to be the enlightened leader of a New South; Hartsfield’s the best mayor in the country; and you’re a lawyer who can do anything. So why is Martin still in jail?” He concluded, “This is a scandal.”
Abram retorted, “How in the hell do you think I’m going to spring him?”
“Go see Mayor Hartsfield, since he was arrested by Atlanta police.”
Abram protested that he was just about to spend time with his daughter, but Wofford insisted, saying, “Take her with you.”
Amazingly, Abram agreed to do just that. But when Abram said he would let the mayor know of Senator Kennedy’s interest in King’s case, Wofford immediately put the lid on that idea. He stressed to Abram that Kennedy knew nothing of his call; while the candidate would surely want to see King released from prison, their communication was not authorized by the senator.
When Abram called Hartsfield, with local and national coverage swirling around the events at city hall, the mayor said, “Yeah, come down at once. We’re negotiating right now with every important Negro in town. They’re all sixty of them in the council chamber.”
With his daughter in tow, Abram rushed to city hall. He was excited at the possibility of being helpful to the mayor in a crisis like this. Raised in Fitzgerald, Georgia, Abram had not only longed to escape his rural roots—his Jewish faith and bookishness making him feel like an outsider—but also aspired to become a popular southern politician. The anti-Semitic lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 left him with a fear of being defenseless. In his college years, Abram came to believe Black people suffered under a system of segregation that was fundamentally wrong and kindred to the discrimination Jews faced. After attending law school at the University of Chicago and serving as part of the Nuremberg prosecution team, he began a long quest to reform the Georgia electoral system. Abram then ran for Congress, but as a Jewish racial progressive running after the Brown decision, he did not win.
Abram headed downtown, where police were posted everywhere. Many stores were closed. In front of Rich’s, whose restaurants were all shut, the Klan was back, hoisting signs proclaiming, “We will not accept race mixing in Georgia.” Abram and his daughter arrived at the cream-colored city hall tower, across from the Georgia capitol, late in the morning. Inside, Abram found a chaotic scene, with Hartsfield presiding as ringleader. Hartsfield shooed the media out, saying their presence didn’t allow his Black constituents “to say what they really think and to let us get right to the heart of the problem.” The mayor had planned to hold the meeting in his office, but with so many older leaders showing up, including Daddy King, Dr. Benjamin Mays, and Dr. Rufus Clement, they had relocated to the Gothic-style aldermen’s chamber on the second floor.
Mayor Hartsfield was selling a simple proposal: “If you will give me a thirty day truce, I will promise to try to get a settlement for you. I will be your advocate to try to get these merchants to agree to a general custom in this city to admit Negroes to their lunch room, and I will also see that Dr. King is turned out of jail.” He had talked with business leaders the day before, and he said they were willing to negotiate. Watching Hartsfield interact with citizens the rest of the Georgia political establishment ignored (when not actively oppressing them), Abram was impressed. He found Mayor Hartsfield to be a “distinct and marvelous southern prototype, the rough-hewn, even comical character who knows the difference between right and wrong, and has the guts to act accordingly and the wits to survive.” When an Atlanta synagogue was bombed in 1958, it was Hartsfield who showed up to denounce the act of terror and to promise to find the perpetrators.
At seventy, Mayor Hartsfield was, at last, starting to see the finish line of his career as a politician coming into view, and he wanted to solidify Atlanta’s reputation as a major, desirable American city, which required harmony between its white and its Black residents. Martin Luther King’s arrest at a sit-in threatened to upend all of this. The peril this posed for his legacy roused the old municipal battler for one last fight before stepping down after a quarter century as mayor.
Hartsfield had amazed Daddy King when he was photographed shaking hands with Black Atlantans in the 1940s, and the pastor believed he was “an unusually effective leader during an especially difficult time. He tried to walk a line between two opposing forces.” In fact, Daddy King added, “I believe William Hartsfield may have been alone in his desire to make Atlanta into one city instead of two.” When Daddy King called Hartsfield to say that his daughter, Christine, was not being hired as a teacher because of her race, she had a job offer within minutes.
The meeting that day went on for almost three hours, with Hartsfield in the room for more than two-thirds of it, occasionally taking refuge in his office
to let the city fathers discuss how they would proceed. Back at his desk, telegrams continued to pour in demanding King’s release. Flipping through them, he saw that they came from everywhere from Maine to California. All eyes were on him, which was as he liked it.
After talking with Abram in his office, Hartsfield started making calls to the Kennedy campaign, which was sweeping through Kansas that Saturday. He later said that every time he tried to reach JFK, all he could hear was “hoopin and a hollerin.” Because he imagined that the announcement he planned to make that afternoon would be in Kennedy’s interest—it was certainly in his own—he figured that he might as well get on with it. After being told of Wofford’s call to Abram two hours prior, he thought that he might now have the cover he needed.
Hartsfield rose and signaled for Abram to follow, and he walked confidently back into the chamber to tell the Black leaders, “I will turn Martin Luther King loose, and I want you to know that Senator Kennedy has evidenced his interest in this thing. He has phoned me to help get a peaceful settlement, and he has also asked me to turn Martin Luther King loose.” Though it would soon become clear that the mayor alone did not possess the power to free King, Hartsfield wanted this problem solved, and he felt he could gamble on Kennedy carrying his state even after being thrust into the middle of King’s predicament. The mayor had a lifetime’s worth of experience in determining how far he could push racial progress without risking too much electoral backlash.
The reaction to Hartsfield’s announcement was explosive, and reporters who had filtered back into the meeting ran to break the story. It was immediate national news.
* * *
John Calhoun heard the mayor’s announcement and hastily begged to be excused. He was desperate to get someone from the Nixon campaign on the phone. But even before the mayor’s announcement, Calhoun had been trying to reach the vice president’s campaign to urge him to act. As a Black Republican leader in such a crucial city, Calhoun hoped he might have the influence to reach Nixon himself. It looked as if he did not.
Calhoun, then in his early sixties, was a powerful man in Atlanta—not someone a campaign should ignore. Vernon Jordan never forgot as a child seeing the Republican Calhoun lead a voter registration drive, an especially brave thing to do. Lonnie, for one, while he had doubts about the previous generation of leaders, found he couldn’t help but admire the affable Calhoun’s organizing skills. Lonnie regularly had breakfast with the Republican elder, to learn more about the NAACP tactics that Calhoun had perfected.
Hartsfield generously offered a phone to Calhoun, in deference to an honorable opponent. Calhoun foresaw that there would be a price to pay with Black voters if the Kennedy campaign got credit for springing King from jail. Little did he know that Kennedy was completely unaware of this development and would not be happy at all to learn of Hartsfield’s announcement.
Calhoun dove into more calls. Though they belonged to different political parties, his friend Morris Abram watched him sympathetically, overhearing Calhoun say to someone at the Republican National Committee (RNC), “A report! We don’t have time to write a report; you’ve got to get through to the vice-president at once.” Calhoun looked indignant as he hung up the phone.
Abram asked, “What did they tell you?”
“They told me to send in a report air mail, special delivery.” He shook his head at the foolishness of it all. Calhoun later told Hartsfield that he had been informed over the phone that “the race was very close and Mr. Nixon didn’t want to upset the apple cart.” Hartsfield, for one, took secret pleasure in the thought that the Republicans were asking Calhoun to send them a registered letter while the Democrats were hot on the phone with each other.
Calhoun had tried to reach Val Washington, the Republican National Committee’s director of minorities, and Washington returned his call while the mayor was talking to the press. Washington was a determined party operative who rose to the rank of assistant to the chairman of the Republican Party on the proposition that minority voters mattered. He thought it was important to reclaim Black Roosevelt Republicans—voters who appreciated New Deal economic programs but knew that southern Democrats were still resisting Brown and civil rights legislation. Washington’s vision that these Black voters could become faithful Republicans once again had paid off during President Eisenhower’s reelection campaign. Yet Washington lamented having a budget of only thirty thousand dollars and a team of five staffers to aid him in his quest of reaching eighteen million Black people.
Calhoun filled Washington in over the phone: “Val, this is going to have some terrific repercussions, and you oughta get ahold of Nixon to get him to say something.” As he spoke, Calhoun realized this was a stretch, not because Val Washington happened to be Black, but because Nixon ignored everyone at the national committee. Calhoun had previously offered Washington the use of his Georgia Republican campaign literature targeted at Black voters so the RNC could deploy it around the country. Washington told him that he knew he would never get approval from Nixon, given his micromanaging tendencies. Nixon was committing a fundamental sin of politics—trying to be both candidate and campaign manager.
Washington also said, “John, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do that because Nixon doesn’t deal with the Republican committee. He’s got these other organizations he’s dealing with, the Democrats for Nixon … I don’t know whether I can talk to him or not.” Democrats for Nixon were white southerners primed to leave a party inching toward support for civil rights. Calhoun vowed to keep trying to get his message across to Nixon, but the candidate was listening to people with a different agenda.
* * *
Hartsfield had started with a three-month “peace and quiet” offer, but he always began negotiations with a target he could bargain down from. Black leaders agreed to Hartsfield’s deal of a truce of at least thirty days, which would hopefully allow him to persuade stores to desegregate. As part of the deal, Hartsfield would release the twenty-two students charged by the city and then work with county and state officials to get the other thirty-nine activists who would still be in jail—including King—freed, too. Peace and quiet for Hartsfield meant no protests on the street or by those wanting to stay behind bars—especially the minister eliciting calls of concern from a presidential campaign. From his desk, Hartsfield spoke to the press—twinkling blue eyes betraying no guile behind thick glasses. An uneasy Otis Moss, with a narrow mustache and tie, stood behind him. Hartsfield announced, “I will give the Negro leadership weekly reports on the progress being made if they want. I think they are justified in wanting to know that real progress is being made and that this is not just a stalling tactic.”
His message to the students was blunt: “I can’t negotiate at gunpoint—with picketers out there.”
Moss felt that this was the right deal to make: trusting Hartsfield to broker a solution within a defined window of time. The young minister added, however, “At the end of that time we will review progress made and decide our future of action.” There were still hard negotiations in store, and suddenly a raging storm in the form of Kennedy’s friend Bobby Troutman sweeping into city hall.
Like Wofford and Abram, Troutman had been spending a pleasant day with his kids, driving across Atlanta to a baseball game, when, on the radio, he heard a report about Hartsfield’s announcement. He almost swerved off the road in disbelief; it seemed impossible that Kennedy was involving himself in Georgia’s affairs, and on behalf of the controversial Martin Luther King, no less. Troutman served as Kennedy’s eyes, ears, and advocate in the South and had been a trusted law school roommate of John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joe junior (whose death in World War II cleared the way for Jack to enter politics—with some reluctance). Bobby Troutman was something of a southern aristocrat, and his wealthy family had sometimes stepped in to help out a college friend of his—none other than Morris Abram. Now this friendship was about to be tested.
Troutman pulled over and found a pay phone from which he
called Bobby Kennedy, who was as shocked as he was. Wofford later learned that Troutman told Bobby he “suspected the dark hand of Harris Wofford in this.”
When Troutman got to Hartsfield’s office, he was apoplectic. Staring at his friends, he said, “Who is this representative of Senator Kennedy who is trying to get this King fellow out of jail?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Hartsfield, feigning befuddled innocence.
“I do know. You two have just blown the election. Do you understand that?”
Abram had never in twenty years seen his friend this angry. The prize Troutman had long hoped for—seeing Kennedy elected president—had potentially been lost because of something fishy happening in his pond: “We had it sewed up, but now you’re going to lose the South. These southern politicians are going to turn against us. They’ll never accept Kennedyism with Martin Luther King tied to its tail. I have already heard from Fritz Hollings. He called me from the governor’s mansion in South Carolina. What do you think he said? He said that if Kennedy is trying to help that rabble-rouser, he’s off the team.”
Troutman reached for a phone, but then looked around. “Ah, forget it.” There were too many people in the room for the call he wanted to make.
* * *
Harris Wofford waited at home for a call to see if anything positive had come of his request. When it arrived, Abram’s voice was hesitant: “I know this might lose you your job, and I didn’t intend to do any harm to you.” This was not how a call should begin. “Sit down and hold on to your seat. I realize you didn’t mean anything like this. The Mayor wants to talk to you in just a minute. Let me tell you that he has just gone on the television and radio networks and announced, that in response to Senator Kennedy’s direct personal intervention, he has ordered the release of Martin Luther King and the other sit-in prisoners.”
Nine Days Page 11