Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  William Safire, who witnessed Jackie Robinson’s tears of frustration, told Finch, “Their Martin Luther King gambit paid off handsomely.” Nixon agreed, later admitting, “I just didn’t realize such a call could swing an election. The Democrats whipped up a fury in the Negro areas. I was painted a villain, and my entire record was erased within a few weeks.”

  His actions, or inaction, during those nine days left a wound that would never heal. Nixon was publicly restrained, but some indication of the emotion he felt after losing the Black vote can be found in a note dated a week after the election. Finch passed on to Nixon a proposal that he send a response to all those who had contacted him about King, given that “the guy is out now, but there might be a chance to do a little spade work.” He added, “We show sincerity and so leave it up to JFK to show where he stands as soon as he gets into office.” The campaign even drafted a letter Nixon could use, which included the lines “It was good of you to communicate with me in regard to the recent arrest of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., an incident about which I was deeply concerned. I know that my satisfaction in Dr. King’s subsequent release was shared by millions.”

  In response to Finch’s suggestion that he send out these conciliatory notes, Nixon scrawled his reply in large letters: “NO.”

  There is one letter to King written after 1960 in Nixon’s files. During his 1962 gubernatorial campaign, Nixon declined an invitation from the Southern California–Nevada Council of Churches to speak alongside King. He sent King a note lacking the familiarity of their 1950s letters, but saying, “I look forward to future meetings and discussions when all of us can join together in a realistic appraisal of race relations problems.” There is no record of any such meeting ever happening, or of further contact between them. It was as if, for Nixon, the Reidsville incident were cause not for apology but rather for a sundering, the rejection of a relationship that had begun with such promise.

  In an April 1962 Ebony profile, Nixon would still appear to be haunted by the King crisis, alternating between contrition and self-justification. Nixon maintained, “I could have become President. I needed only five per cent more votes in the Negro areas. I could have gotten them if I had campaigned harder.” He thought his record and relationships were strong enough, but “then the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. case came up.” Louis Martin’s impact was known even if his name was not: “The Democrats used this incident as a symbol of my unconcern in an all-out drive in the big city Negro areas.” Nixon claimed he worked to help free King, but thought he should not publicize “something which is a matter of confidential government business.” As for what Bobby had done, Nixon wanted the attorney general to stop getting credit because “this was unethical. I agreed it was a bum rap (for King) but as a lawyer, I know if you call a judge in a case, you’re guilty of contempt and this is a violation of canons of legal ethics. Bob Kennedy called the judge but this did not get him out of the jail—not so—it was public opinion.”

  Calling it a “fast moving campaign,” Nixon presented himself as an idealistic political naïf: “There was some doubt … in the effectiveness of the Democratic use of the King case. At first our party people were not aware of the tremendous impact … We had no idea the Democrats were concentrating so much in the Negro areas on this ‘No Comment’ business.” He warned of the direction in which Republicans were moving, in light of the right-winger Barry Goldwater’s rise to power: “Our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party. And that isn’t good.”

  Even in 1960, Republicans were quicker than Democrats to understand that the King crisis had effectively transformed the election. At a White House meeting with Nixon present, President Eisenhower, interpreting his vice president’s loss as a repudiation of his administration, muttered to his staff that Lodge’s cabinet pledge had “just killed us in the South.” What also peeved the president was his belief that they had fruitlessly made a good faith effort on civil rights, yet fewer Black people voted for Republicans than in 1956. He declared that Black voters “just do not give a damn.”

  Nixon, for his part, grumbled to Eisenhower that the Black vote was “a bought vote, and it is not bought by civil rights,” a sign of bitterness that would only grow in years to come. This was a view he had never, to anyone’s knowledge, expressed before.

  In December, a still sore president said to a group of business leaders visiting the White House that a “couple of phone calls” kept Republicans from winning. No reporter followed up to ask which calls he was referring to; it was clear just how important the Kennedy calls had become to Republicans smarting from this defeat. Yet despite the quick assessment that these phone calls had made all the difference, no one apparently reached out to Morrow to see what he thought of the decline in the GOP’s share of the Black vote.

  Morrow, for one, knew all too well what had happened to his dream:

  This act won the election. Kennedy’s action electrified the entire Negro community and resulted in tens of thousands of Negro voters going over to the Democrats’ banner. Many factors contributed to Mr. Kennedy’s election—which was close—but one incontrovertible fact is evident. He carried the crucial, essential Negro vote. He had keen, intelligent Negro advisers, and he obviously listened to them.

  This was a subtle tip of the hat to Louis Martin, as well as a pained observation that at least one candidate had listened.

  Morrow hoped Republicans would learn two lessons. First, “the strategy of wooing the solid South and ignoring the available Negro vote was a costly blunder.” Morrow thought he had seen in Nixon an ability to listen, an affinity with the disenfranchised. But having assumed such feelings were enough, Nixon lost this community’s trust, and now he seemed well on his way to assisting the GOP in losing its way with African Americans entirely.

  Second, Morrow assessed, “white people must stop believing they ‘know the Negro.’ For a long while to come in this country, it would be well to ask knowledgeable Negroes for an objective assessment of the Negro attitude and mood on a given subject.” This ability to listen would prove difficult for both parties to master (if indeed either ever has). But insensitivity would be weighed by Black voters alongside outright hostility to their citizenship.

  Morrow would never leave the party, but he never again held any position of political responsibility, at any level—national, state, or local.

  Jackie Robinson lost his newspaper column in the New York Post as a result of his support for Nixon. He retained a column in the Black Los Angeles Sentinel, and there he wrote that he could only hope Kennedy would “curb the power of the southern segregationists in his camp,” those who still “have their feet on the Negro’s neck!” As angry as he was at Nixon, he continued to treat the vice president’s racial insensitivities as a mistake and Kennedy’s as a deep character flaw—particularly the new president’s dealings with segregationist governors. He predicted that unless the new president worked to make equality real in America, he would not be able to advance democracy abroad.

  * * *

  The fact that King had been an inadvertent kingmaker dawned on Democrats slowly, perhaps because winners luxuriate in victory rather than confront the critical realities responsible for a win. Recognizing that Black voters had mattered would have created not only a sense of obligation but also a sense of embarrassment in a party so riven by the civil rights movement. Still, some saw something noble and important in what had just happened. “Senator Kennedy took a risk in his campaign,” Eleanor Roosevelt said, “when he telephoned and promised to help the Rev. Martin Luther King.” She believed, “It may well be that similar risks will have to be taken to save humanity from itself.”

  It was also true that some in the CRS insisted that one moment should not obscure the reality of what months of organizing had also achieved. Even Louis Martin was hesitant to say that one call had turned Black America. He was proud of the hard work the CRS had done—the cake they had made—and now everyone, it seemed, was interested
only in the icing on the top.

  Marjorie Lawson later said of the phone call to Coretta, “I thought it was a disservice to Negro voters to say that they were so childlike that one telephone call made to one woman would turn a whole voter group to, or against, a candidate.” She thought that what really mattered was that “for the first time, a candidate had made a staff and funds available in recognition of Negro voters and had helped them organize and get out the vote.” Believing that the entire story could be reduced to a single call was to ignore “organizational work that had been done.”

  What the call meant to the North Carolina A&T State University president and CRS ally Sam Proctor was “an existential affirmation before black people that this candidate cared about our well-being, showed respect for us.” He said Black communities had been choosing presidents based on who would hurt them least, and Kennedy looked “light years ahead of anybody else, because other people hadn’t made any such gestures.” Franklin Williams, who ran a voter registration drive for the CRS at churches nationally, was convinced the call tipped the election to Kennedy, calling it “a major factor in influencing unconvinced millions of blacks to support this young man from Massachusetts … You couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity.” Understanding its power meant understanding its context: “These were desperate times and there were very few lights of hope for us.” As Andrew Young put it nearly sixty years later, “No presidential candidate had ever expressed any concern for anybody Black in any situation.”

  What is indisputable is that the Democratic share of the Black vote rebounded from the previous presidential election by seven percentage points, to a commanding 68 percent. For an election decided by less than a percentage point overall, this shift was more than enough to put Kennedy in the White House. The Kennedy campaign reversed the rising tide of Black support for Republicans, which had increased from 21 percent in 1952 to 39 percent in 1956. Even Louis Martin thought Nixon would build upon this trend. But it was not to be.

  Black American votes for the GOP had decreased by seven percentage points, to 32 percent. And despite Nixon’s poor performance, never again would a Republican do as well as Nixon did with Black voters. The CRS’s efforts changed the direction of a trend line, and the Republican Party never approached Nixon’s 1960 margins again. As Joshua Farrington writes in Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, “The 1960 election proved to be a decisive turning point in the GOP’s relationship with black voters.”

  Though it can never be precisely known just how many voters were swayed by the Blue Bomb, or the Kennedy calls, or any specific actions taken by the CRS during the campaign (polling still being a primitive instrument), we can study some small pieces of data to try to gain a sense of what really happened in 1960. Kennedy’s pollster Louis Harris happened to survey Black voters both before and after the call to Coretta in six states and found that Kennedy’s existing lead increased in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. In North Carolina, his support increased from 47 percent to 88 percent, while the margin of how far ahead Kennedy was in Texas and New York declined, but not dramatically.

  Martin would say you had to get the horses on the track; Election Day is a race. Key urban wards across the country increased their support for Democrats by ten percentage points or more compared with 1956, in many cases voting at a rate of around 75 percent for Kennedy. The Democrats’ 7 percent increase in Black support also does not fully explain just how pivotal the CRS’s efforts proved to be. Martin’s greatest concern was not the percentage, per se, but the total Black turnout, which could make or break winning margins in close states where Nixon was poised to do well with white voters.

  Nationally, data showed that Black turnout was indeed higher than in previous presidential election cycles. There was also plenty of anecdotal evidence that in crucial areas the turnout was beyond even the CRS’s dreams. All this, when energy for Kennedy before the convention had been lukewarm at best. Seen in this light, the turnout Martin was aiming for was a remarkable achievement. Without this increase in the number of Black voters, Nixon would have narrowly won the popular vote and could well have won in the Electoral College by a landslide. The political science professor David Niven found in his book The Politics of Injustice that Black voters made the difference for Kennedy in nine states, accounting for 142 electoral votes.

  Of course, any number of slight shifts in voting patterns could have altered a race that close: the rise in unemployment in the weeks before the election; a Roman Catholic Democrat running against a Protestant (Kennedy lost some Protestant votes in the South, where he won anyway, and gained Catholic votes in places he needed them, such as New York). Still, a New York Times article announced, “Negro Vote Held Vital to Kennedy,” singling out the call to Coretta as the turning point. The reporter Anthony Lewis estimated that the 250,000 pamphlets given out in Chicago might have made the difference in a state that Kennedy won by a little over eight thousand votes. This piece was followed by a New Republic study of the Black vote that found that Kennedy would not have been president without these voters. The article discussed how there were more Black votes for Kennedy than his slim margin of victory in states like Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and South Carolina. The Times reported similar outcomes in Texas and North Carolina as well.

  The idea that Kennedy owed his presidency to Black voters gained further traction when Theodore White published his groundbreaking book, The Making of the President, 1960. White had interviewed Wofford, and when the book became a runaway bestseller, many white Americans began to understand the importance of Kennedy’s call to Coretta for the first time. White singled out the “hard work” of the CRS, “led by the able Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford.” (Louis Martin went unmentioned, as he would in many future books.)

  White pointed to eleven states where Black voters gave Kennedy the margin of support he needed to win, and five in particular where, if the 1956 election margins by race had repeated without Democrats’ improvement, Kennedy could not have won them. He also pointed out that the Kennedy campaign proved dominant in a number of important Black-majority wards in Chicago and Detroit. Though White’s account of Kennedy’s efforts to help King was not entirely accurate, the story was now out there, irrevocably part of a growing legend. Wofford, for his part, saw his conversations with reporters like White and Anthony Lewis as part of a larger effort to not only help people understand Kennedy’s victory but also ensure that the civil rights struggle would not be conveniently forgotten by the new administration; the Black vote was now visible and invaluable.

  To Wofford, Kennedy’s call also revealed something about the man who made it—one who was imperfect, vulnerable to temptation and to stress, and not noticeably inclined to think about, or empathize with, the pain of Black Americans. While the pressures on Kennedy were nothing compared with King’s suffering in his cell, Wofford still recognized that JFK had found himself in a deeply uncomfortable situation, achingly close to the presidency and whipsawed by the (morally incomparable) demands of two very different blocs of voters. Though he told the story hundreds of times, Wofford never lost the note of wonder in his voice as he described a candidate under unrelenting pressure—a candidate who certainly did not have to call a stranger in distress, one whose husband’s notoriety among white voters could derail his hopes of becoming president. He reflected, “Most people in life and in politics, and certainly Jack Kennedy, have mixed motives. He wanted to win the election and he also liked to do the right thing. That’s why the call to King is a test of what sort of a fellow he was.”

  Wofford saw the call as an example of the Kennedys being their best selves, just as their decision to allow King to be wiretapped years later was an example of them at their worst. Though it surely helped that Kennedy had men like Wofford, Martin, and Shriver around him, he passed a test of decency in 1960 that Nixon failed.

  * * *

  Bobby’s actions during those nine days have long been mischaracterized, first by Bo
bby himself and then by historians in coming decades who took his word at face value. But in his 1964 oral history of the Kennedy presidency—which was published posthumously in 1988—he offered something closer to the truth. He refuted the story he had spun in the immediate aftermath of the election, in which he impulsively called Judge Mitchell out of moral outrage and in which the cowed judge backed down in the face of his anger. In the oral history, he hinted at the Vandiver back channel and described his easy, almost convivial, conversation with Judge Mitchell.

  As to why Bobby himself intervened after telling the CRS not to, Wofford guessed there was a simple answer: “Once having started it … you want to finish the job.” The Kennedys prioritized problem solving over virtuous gestures. This mentality was summed up by Wofford as “We’re in it, so we better win it.” After JFK made an early morning call to Vandiver, prodded by Hartsfield’s invented story of his interest in King’s fate, Bobby had to quietly lay it all to rest. No one can say that the Kennedys weren’t good at back-channeling.

  One could imagine that the CRS did little to win King’s freedom—except that the Kennedy brothers would never have involved themselves in such a risky affair, so close to the election, had Wofford not called Morris Abram that Saturday morning. And even after that call, the CRS kept pushing the campaign to do more, cultivating and directing public pressure to free King. It was the CRS, too, that orchestrated JFK’s call to Coretta through Shriver—which made it incumbent upon the campaign to match words with actions. The Kennedys might have finished the job, but the CRS started it, and without the efforts of Martin, Wofford, and Shriver the Kennedy campaign might well have remained silent.

  Martin and Wofford, not knowing better, continued to tell the story of Bobby’s berating Judge Mitchell for decades. King himself, in his Kennedy Library oral history, showed he never knew the facts of Bobby’s intervention. He simply accepted the story of the spontaneous call to the judge.