Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

That same day, Halloween, Bobby called political allies in Georgia to say he had not meant to interfere in the legal affairs of the state, that he had only tried to gather information about King’s case. Not quite a disavowal, it could serve as a veiled apology if one was needed to soothe bruised white feelings. Yet Bobby did not want to undercut his brother the way Nixon had undermined Lodge’s cabinet pledge. Bobby said later in the week that he and JFK got involved because “we were all anxious to make sure that justice prevailed, whether we lose the state of Georgia or win the state of Georgia.” He added, “Sen. Kennedy felt very strong in connection with this matter.” When pressed on the Today show, he said, “I think Sen. Kennedy did—and the rest of us did—what we thought was right under the circumstances. And we would do it again.”

  * * *

  With King’s doctor ordering bed rest due to the virus he began feeling at Reidsville, the SCLC canceled a press conference. He still planned to travel to Nigeria, however. While King recovered, his father delivered a sermon; the one he gave at the 10:45 a.m. service on Sunday morning, October 30, was titled “Self Denial.”

  King still faced hearings in January regarding his appeal, which, if he lost, could result in a four-month sentence. Despite Mitchell’s reversal, the judge was not someone King could ever trust, especially because Mitchell’s calculus might change after the election. But King would have to face that possibility another day.

  For all his idealism, King was always clear-eyed about politics, but he refused to be cynical enough to imagine that it was all about expediency. He said later of John F. Kennedy, “There are those moments in history—that doesn’t always happen, doesn’t happen often—that what is morally right is politically expedient, politically sound. And I would like to feel—I really feel this—that he made the call because he was concerned. He had come to know me as a person then. He had come to know more about this problem. Harris and others had really been talking with him about it.”

  In the end, King respected Kennedy’s actions because the candidate “didn’t know it was politically sound. It was a risk because he was already grappling with the problem of losing the South on the religious issue.” In shifting and at times bitter racial winds, there was no way for Kennedy to accurately judge the utility, or the foolhardiness, of his call to Coretta. For Kennedy, a man of infinite political calculation, it was a roll of the dice.

  Above all, King felt genuinely hurt by Nixon, who had let him down in such a dangerous way; Nixon had behaved, when it mattered most, as if “he had never heard of me.” King said he saw now with greater clarity the gulf between the two ambitious candidates. True, he had been drifting toward Kennedy—based on his decision to hire people like Wofford—but he saw now why these staffers had become so invested in their candidate.

  The reputation Nixon had earned as an opportunist, which King had been willing to ignore, seemed to have been sadly confirmed. Of his misgivings regarding Nixon, King later said, “So this is why I really considered him a moral coward and one who was unwilling to take a courageous step and take a risk. And I am convinced that he lost the election because of that. Many Negroes were still on the fence, still undecided, and they were leaning toward Nixon.” Daddy King, swayed by Nixon’s betrayal, encouraged his son to go ahead and endorse Kennedy, as Morris Abram was also prodding him to do.

  Once King was healthy enough, he traveled to Harry Belafonte’s Fifty-Seventh Street office in New York, along with the advisers Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones. Belafonte had told King on the phone before the meeting, “You have to stay above this fray.” While Belafonte had himself endorsed Kennedy, even appearing in an ad at Louis Martin’s urging, the singer saw King’s unique moral platform as something to protect. Levison suggested that King walk a delicate line between thankfulness and a fateful move into partisanship. Belafonte later heard that the Kennedys were not happy with King’s lack of an endorsement but that they had not been terribly surprised by the decision, either. Bobby even later expressed rueful admiration for King’s political savvy in not giving them all they wanted.

  In a news conference on Tuesday, November 1, King confirmed that he would not endorse either candidate: “The role that is mine in the emerging social order of the South and America demands that I remain non-partisan. Thus, devoid of partisan political attachments, I am free to be critical of both parties when necessary.” But, he added, “Sen. Kennedy exhibited moral courage of a high order.”

  King said he knew of Black leaders now switching to Kennedy. This included his friend Abernathy, who said that Kennedy’s call to Coretta “was the kind act I was waiting for. It was not just Dr. King on trial—it was America on trial.” In another essentially Democratic rally in Ebenezer—without King present—Abernathy preached, “Since Mr. Nixon has been silent through all this, I am going to return his silence when I go into the voting booth.” In Mississippi, one NAACP leader who switched from Nixon because of Kennedy’s intervention was Medgar Evers.

  Dora McDonald, King’s secretary, wrote back to one of his admirers that although King would not make an endorsement, “Dr. King intends to support Senator Kennedy—feeling that he has the best program for the hour.”

  King never got to cast that vote. A Montgomery probate judge ruled he could not get an absentee ballot because he had not paid a poll tax in the last two years. King sent a canceled check showing that he had tried to pay. With a pained grin, he noted that “the state of Alabama and I have had frequent disputes.” Nor could he vote in Georgia, having not registered there during the tumultuous move back home.

  * * *

  Shriver called Martin and Wofford on Tuesday, telling them he wanted to print 250,000 more Blue Bomb pamphlets. That figure was soon upped to half a million. With that, they could flood Chicago churches over the weekend, as well as Wisconsin—in particular, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Madison. This last-minute distribution, coming only days before the election, would be an emotional appeal with what they hoped would be maximum impact. Shriver later said that the Blue Bomb “was like a shot of lightning in the middle of the night. You can’t imagine what effect that had … like a prairie fire.”

  The Amsterdam News’s estimation was that Kennedy’s call would help him earn around 70 percent of Black New Yorkers’ votes. Local Black GOP leaders were lamenting the lack of funding they had been given for organizing, always a bad sign for a campaign’s prospects. One Black GOP leader admitted, “They have almost written us off.” Yet some Black Republicans remained loyal, still frantically calling Morrow for help. In Atlanta, a group of Republican ministers issued another endorsement of Nixon, but Daddy King was not among them.

  Most public polls still showed Kennedy narrowly ahead. Kennedy had been confident about the outcome after the debates, but now he was starting to wonder if he would lose. Yes, he had the crowds, the excitement, even some residual momentum from the debates, but Nixon had the general. Eisenhower packed Cleveland’s Public Square on Friday with thirty-five thousand people, and the old campaigner’s dander was clearly up—revealing, if not genuine enthusiasm for his VP, an active disdain for Kennedy. A week earlier, Kennedy had felt secure, but as Eisenhower headed out on the trail, he said of the president, “With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. If the election were held tomorrow, I’d win easily. But six days from now, it’s up for grabs.”

  When Lyndon Johnson heard about the call to Coretta while on his campaign plane, he said, “Goddammit, I didn’t know those Kennedys were so smart.” Johnson’s home state could decide the election, and he thought this call could sway enough Black Texans to break their Republican ties. Regardless, Johnson told Kennedy, “We’ll sweat it out—but you’ll have the privilege of knowing that you did the right thing.”

  * * *

  In the week leading up to the election, Louis Martin’s every call, every telegram, was dedicated to advancing the Blue Bomb. He sent out four hundred personali
zed telegrams to every Black newspaper editor and community leader he knew, drawing on two and a half decades of relationships, urging each of them to write as much as possible about the election-defining story of how Kennedy was “moved to show his concern on this outrage against blacks and against Martin Luther King.” Martin wrangled endorsements from some traditionally Republican papers like Norfolk, Virginia’s Journal and Guide and the Amsterdam News. King, when asked what swung Black voters to the Democrats, stated, “The Democrats did a great deal of work in Negro areas, and especially in the Negro press. They did an excellent job of public relations.”

  Once he had sent out the telegrams, Martin moved to the phones. The editor called every Black Democratic leader with an organization he knew of, urging them to get messengers out on the street: “Pass the word through the ghettos and the bars,” as well as beauty salons, barbershops, and pool halls. Raymond “Silver Fox” Jones, a Harlem operative, promised Martin, “I’ll get the boys out in the streets.” Unions helped get them out, too, from New York to Detroit. Multiplied hundreds of times, Martin’s efforts created momentum, and CRS efforts over the last few months had primed Black voters to start liking Kennedy. Now, with Kennedy’s call to Coretta, the CRS had the right closing strategy to solidify that trust.

  Martin was proud of how well and how painstakingly they had baked the cake, but his actions showed how important he thought this final effort was, and he was now working fourteen hours a day to push the Blue Bomb “to be the dramatic thing” in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. He and Wofford were prepared to meet the demand, with hundreds of thousands of copies heading out on buses, trains, and planes. A CRS associate, Franklin Williams, described the Blue Bomb as “electricity.”

  * * *

  Jackie Robinson was a hero because he was stubborn. His prodigious talent on the baseball field had left fans, coaches, and fellow players in perpetual awe, but what differentiated him from other supremely talented players was his inability to give up, to quit when it was the sensible thing to do. He endured verbal abuse and raw racism because he refused to surrender to anyone. Those same character traits also led him to refuse to abandon Nixon. Reversing course was not in his makeup. His friend Dr. Kenneth Clark, famous for his white and black doll study that was used as evidence in the Brown v. Board hearings, said that the moment had come to make the switch, given how the Democrat had aided King. Yet in these final, frantic days, Robinson fiercely held on to his sense of being truly independent, not a partisan—someone who was actively choosing Nixon. When pressed, he remembered his instinctive dislike of Kennedy, but above all, no matter how distraught he felt about Nixon’s inaction, he believed that a man’s promises mattered.

  Despite the attractiveness of what Robinson called a “shrewd political move” by Kennedy, he decided to do all he could to propel Nixon to victory in the final inning. Nixon sent him a letter the Friday before the election, as though aware of Robinson’s disappointment in him. He wrote of the King case that it would have been easy for those not in the administration to make “a ‘grandstand play.’” Robinson forged on.

  In the final issue of Jet before the election, the reporter Simeon Booker characterized Black Republicans as feeling “woefully weak in organization, resources and manpower at a time the Party stood a chance of making the best inroads into the Negro vote.” Jet reported that the GOP felt Nixon was popular enough not to need a concentrated effort in the Black community, even though the reporter did not see as many Black people at Republican events as he did at Kennedy’s rallies. To the National Urban League’s Lester Granger in the Amsterdam News, what the Democrats seemed to have this year that the GOP lacked was “a most able corps of Negro troubleshooters, hatchet men, advisers and interpreters.”

  Still, the Jet article ended with a Black Republican expressing hope they could “make enough gains in our communities to push Nixon through … The improvement will be noticed in the final days of the campaign.”

  While Robinson was still stubbornly on the road, the other major Black Republican surrogate, Morrow, was at the White House, sidelined when he was needed most.

  * * *

  On Sunday in Atlanta, King sat for a long radio interview targeted at Black listeners, and the election hovered over the discussion. Nimbly evading the usual endorsement pressures, King hoped that Kennedy would adopt a “forthright position” on segregation, whereas he feared that a potential Republican administration would engage in “too much disagreement and double talk.” Explaining that he had spoken with Kennedy twice, the minister admitted, “I was very impressed with his intelligence and his understanding of the problem and honesty in discussing it.” This seemed to be another endorsement in all but name. King said, “I think more and more [Kennedy] has demonstrated a great deal of courage, and this has been impressive.”

  The Constitution’s moderate editor, Ralph McGill, wrote of King’s jailers, “They alone provided him with the opportunity to exert and reveal his undenied courage. As the late Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated, neither jail nor physical assaults are an answer when the moral force is on the other side.” A misdemeanor leading to a late-night transfer to the state prison “was so obviously a discrimination that the conscience of the nation was outraged against the South.” He advised those who were upset about Bobby’s call to “cast the first stone at those who made Georgia vulnerable to a charge of injustice. Without them, there would have been no call.”

  Editorials like McGill’s were moving more than undecided Black voters; they were starting to elevate King’s status and viability as a national leader. Life magazine wrote of how being a sit-in martyr gave King new prestige. The Pittsburgh Courier reported how the thought in Atlanta was, “These white folks have now made Dr. Martin King Jr. the biggest Negro in the United States.” In wanting to crush him as a regional voice, his enemies had inadvertently helped create something Harris Wofford had only dared dream of: an American Gandhi.

  As the day of decision neared, King was now seen as not only a man influencing a crucial voting bloc but a figure who might well have the capacity to rise above politics itself. Nixon and Kennedy were scrambling to ascend to the pinnacle of political success, and King was seeing, for the first time, what it might be like to rise in moral stature above men like them. Not just as a nimble activist leader, not just as a Black leader on par with Wilkins and Randolph, but as a new national force.

  What hath Judge Mitchell wrought?

  * * *

  Kennedy was back in New York, speaking at Grand Concourse and Fordham Road to more than twenty thousand supporters. Kennedy said that Nixon “in the last seven days has called me an economic ignoramus, a Pied Piper, and all the rest. I just confine myself to calling him a Republican. But he says that is really getting low.” On the surface, Kennedy’s charm and wit seemed fully intact, the soul of confidence and bonhomie. By late in the day, however, Kennedy was so consumed by anguished second-guessing that he experienced, to the astonishment of campaign aides, a raging meltdown. His gut told him that they should be campaigning in California (he would be proved correct) instead of tracing well-worn and secure East Coast cities. Sensing they were making a devastating error, soaked from the rain, and two hours behind schedule as they worked their way across Long Island, he uncharacteristically said he would not go on to the Upper East and West Side crowds awaiting him. Instead, he told the driver to take him back to his hotel.

  Nixon had reached a breaking point from the pressure weeks before. While sitting in the back seat of a car in Iowa following a poorly designed schedule with too few destinations, he savagely kicked the front seat, breaking the frame and knocking a long-suffering aide in the kidneys. Before Election Day, Nixon would punch a consultant in the ribs for not running an errand. Nagging physical ailments were dragging him down, but what was hurting more was an unwillingness to break his convention promise to visit all fifty states, given the time he lost in the hospital owing to his knee inju
ry. His stubbornness compounded his exhaustion as he demonstrated a lack of strategic vision in the last, draining hours of the campaign.

  * * *

  As the Blue Bomb continued to roll out, Martin and Wofford’s attention was focused on the final Sunday before the election. They had to figure out how the pamphlets would get into as many Black churches as possible. Their secret play was shaping up to possibly be one of the great covert political moves in American history. Late Saturday night, Wofford was lugging heavy boxes of Blue Bombs onto Greyhound buses bound for Virginia and the Carolinas. He could not help but feel inspired as he watched the buses pull away with the first hints of dawn.

  Twenty thousand people were out at 3:00 a.m. at an unusual campaign stop in Waterbury, Connecticut. It was a rare middle-of-the-night chance to greet Kennedy, followed by an event with more than forty-five thousand people on the New Haven Green later in the morning. Kennedy was back on track, determined to outwork Nixon. They were almost home.

  In Chicago, Shriver had been calling every Catholic activist and education contact he could think of to hand out his blue pamphlets, particularly on the South and West Sides of Chicago. In Washington, Martin was also on the line with Chicago contacts, drawing on his years reporting for the Defender and the time he had spent living in Hyde Park. More than a quarter of a million pamphlets would be distributed in Chicago that Sunday, primarily at Black churches.

  Shriver wanted to see it all happen, to personally help hand out the pamphlets. This would make a splendid morning activity for his daughter, Maria, on her fifth birthday, as well as for her six-year-old brother, Robert. The three Shrivers stood outside Chicago’s Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church and talked to every worshipper they could. What Shriver experienced that Sunday morning was extraordinary. Parishioners grabbed the pamphlets as they entered, and Shriver, to his delight, saw them clutching them as they filed out. The worshippers looked energized by the contents. The same enthusiasm was building from St. Louis to Philadelphia to New Orleans. Few, if any, on those church steps realized they had just encountered the man in charge of Kennedy’s Civil Rights Section.