Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Meanwhile, in Boston, hundreds of thousands: Homer Bigart, “Kennedy Closes Drive in Boston,” NYT, Nov. 8, 1960.

  “It can go either way”: Charles Grutzner, “3 of 4 Election Polls Give Kennedy the Edge in Close Vote,” NYT, Nov. 8, 1960.

  to drive west, home to Chicago: Louis E. Martin, interview by Ronald Grele, #3, May 11, 1966, JFKL; Louis Martin, interview by McComb, LBJ Presidential Library. The day before the election, the Defender spoke directly to Black voters (in an editorial that might have been written by the former editor Martin): “We have a date with history. In looking at Nixon and the last eight years, we want a change, a new landscape, a new vista of hope and opportunity.” Calling Nixon a man backed by the Grand Dragon of the KKK, they wanted Kennedy, “the man who saved Rev. Martin Luther King from the jaws of the monster of race prejudice in Georgia, the man who will transform America into a real democracy. To vote for him to-morrow is to meet our date with history. We must not fail” (“To-Morrow—Day of Decision,” Chicago Daily Defender, Nov. 7, 1960). On the other hand, back in Georgia, the Rome News-Tribune was making their endorsement of Nixon a reminder of a white reaction that could cost the Democrats the election. They chided Kennedy’s “cynical and determined bid for a majority vote by the intrusion of himself and associates in Georgia’s affairs—the Martin Luther King case” (“We Support Vice President Nixon,” Rome News-Tribune, Nov. 6, 1960). The Los Angeles Times warned with Georgia, “There has been resentment among white voters of Kennedy’s sympathy phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr.” (“AP Poll Puts Kennedy in Electoral Vote Lead,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 7, 1960). In Atlanta, the Inquirer had cited The Wall Street Journal on the late movement toward Democrats among northern Black voters, supposing Kennedy would do more for their pocketbooks (“Possible North-South Split in Negro Vote,” AI, Oct. 31, 1960). Closer to home, however, they predicted that Nixon would win Atlanta Black voters two to one (“Negros Favor Kennedy in 7, Lean to Nixon in 2,” AI, Nov. 7, 1960). That day, the man who so unexpectedly had influenced this race was not at a campaign rally or standing by a candidate. Instead, Martin Luther King was spending that Monday speaking to more than a thousand beauticians at a hairstylist conference in Atlanta at the Auburn Avenue Casino (“Keynote Speaker at Opening Session of Bronner’s Beauty Clinic, Monday, 9 A.M.,” ADW, Nov. 5, 1960). King’s instinct was to be with working people, not politicians.

  When Martin got to Chicago: Martin notebook, LMP; Martin, interview by McComb, #1, LBJ Presidential Library; Martin, interview by Grele, #2, JFKL. Somehow Shriver tracked Martin down by telephone to the South Side ward he was helping with, asking if he could meet him at the Merchandise Mart as soon as possible. Shriver had one last assignment, and it was not about the Black vote. He explained Republicans were making a play for Jewish voters by spreading rumors of Joe Kennedy being an anti-Semite. Shriver wanted to counter this with a broadcast that night, but the problem was he had no airtime, script, or broadcaster. Other than that, the plan sounded good; Martin was happy to help. In a few hours, Martin performed his usual political magic to get on air with a persuasive message and a respected host, Philip Klutznick.

  “IT WAS A SYMPHONY”

  From the moment the sun rose: Marion E. Jackson, “Atlanta Turnout for Vote Is Big,” ADW, Nov. 9, 1960.

  Kennedy voted at a quiet library: White, Making of the President, 1960, 3–7.

  Nixon took off down the California coast: Frank, Ike and Dick, 216–17; Nixon, Six Crises, 377–78.

  “Well, just take it easy”: Wofford, interview by Hackman, #2, JFKL.

  “moved in action and responded”: Ibid.

  “They were not systematic calculators”: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 193.

  Viva Zapata, with Marlon Brando: Wofford, interview.

  Martin’s nine-year-old daughter: Dr. Toni Martin interview by the authors, May 16, 2017. The Martins lived at the time at 5301 S. Greenwood Avenue at East Fifty-Third Street.

  Bobby, a continent away: White, Making of the President, 1960, 15–25; O’Donnell, Playing with Fire, 139.

  “We’re being clobbered”: White, Making of the President, 1960, 16.

  Then the poll closings: Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 144–47.

  he could be a worrier: Trudy Martin Hatter, interview by the authors, May 16, 2017.

  Nearing midnight in the West: Nixon, Six Crises, 385–86.

  “Kennedy Elected”: This headline can be found in Kallina, Kennedy v. Nixon, 179.

  At 4:00 a.m., Kennedy walked the short: White, Making of the President, 1960, 24–25, 345. Ironically, Kennedy was told he won California the next morning, but a week later, with heavily Republican absentee ballots coming in, in fact Nixon won it.

  “I think the Negro vote”: Philip Potter, “Robert Kennedy Says Debates Won Election,” Baltimore Sun, Nov. 10, 1960.

  Nixon should have focused: Thomas B. Ross, “Kennedy Urges ‘Supreme Effort,’” Chicago Sun Times, Nov. 10, 1960.

  “A good argument can be made”: Harold Davis, “Did Judge in King Case Supply Kennedy His Edge?,” AJ, Nov. 10, 1960.

  The headline in the Inquirer: “Negroes Clinched Kennedy Win,” AI, Nov. 14, 1960.

  Mayor Hartsfield moaned to friends: Raleigh Bryans, “Mayor Pained by Negro Vote,” AJ, Nov. 9, 1960; Ed Hughes, “Fulton Negro Vote for GOP Is Surprise,” AJ, Nov. 10, 1960. Another subsequent estimate put it at 58 percent (Farrington, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, 113).

  “If Kennedy hadn’t made”: “DeKalb Goes GOP,” AJ, Nov. 9, 1960.

  the Constitution proclaimed that he had garnered: “Nixon’s 38 Pct. a Record in Georgia,” AC, Nov. 11, 1960.

  a massive political realignment: Johnson won a stunning 94 percent of the Black vote nationally. Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 311.

  “THEY JUST ALL TURNED”

  “Mr. Vice President, I can’t tell you”: Nixon, Six Crises, 403.

  “Their Martin Luther King gambit”: Farrell, Richard Nixon, 289.

  “I just didn’t realize”: Ibid., 288.

  “the guy is out now”: “GG” to Finch, Nov. 15, 1960, King files, PPS, RNL.

  “I look forward to future meetings”: Nixon to King, June 16, 1962, King files, PPS, RNL.

  “I could have become President”: Booker, “Richard Nixon Tells.”

  “just killed us in the South”: Frank, Ike and Dick, 220.

  “a bought vote”: Thurber, Republicans and Race, 133. The Kentucky senator and RNC chair, Thruston Morton, was quite open about why he thought his candidate lost. “We lost the Negro vote by a larger percentage than we have been,” he stated, mentioning Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Davis, “Did Judge in King Case Supply Kennedy His Edge?”

  “couple of phone calls”: Lewis, “Protest over Dr. King’s Arrest Was Drafted for President’s Use.”

  “This act won the election”: Morrow, Black Man in the White House, 296–97.

  “the strategy of wooing”: Ibid.

  “curb the power of the southern”: Los Angeles Sentinel, Nov. 24, 1960.

  “Senator Kennedy took a risk”: Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, Nov. 14, 1960.

  “I thought it was a disservice”: Marjorie Lawson, interview by Grele, #2, JFKL. This belief was echoed in Black Republican papers such as The Philadelphia Tribune, which wrote, “Negroes are satisfied with the froth, rather than the substance of politics … It is this kind of nonsense which blocks the progress of Negroes in politics; which prevents them from having any real power in government” (Nov. 8, 1960). A letter said, “Is THAT ‘angelic’ act supposed to suffice for 20 million Negroes?” (Nov. 22, 1960).

  “an existential affirmation”: Sam Proctor, interview by Anthony K. Shriver, Kennedy’s Call to King.

  “a major factor in influencing”: Williams, interview by Anthony K. Shriver, JFKL.

  “No presidential candidate had ever”: Young, interview by the authors.

  seven percentage points
: Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 39, 311; Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, 58–59. See also Bryant, Bystander, 187–88.

  to a commanding 68 percent: Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 311. Charts of the Black vote through election cycles put the number at 68 percent (though Gallup listed it at 70 percent). IBM and Gallup numbers from White, Making of the President, 1960. Without the Black vote increases, it is estimated that Nixon would have narrowly won the popular vote and would have had a landslide win in electoral votes.

  “The 1960 election proved”: Farrington, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, 7.

  Kennedy’s pollster Louis Harris: Surveys of the Presidential Election in Various States, Robert F. Kennedy Pre-administration Political Files, 1960 Campaign and Transition, General Subject File, 1959–1960, boxes 43–45, JFKL; Sullivan, Symbol of Virtue or a Strategy for Votes?, 54–56.

  Kennedy’s existing lead: Kennedy surged in Martin’s home state of Illinois, from 76 percent up to 82 percent, in Pennsylvania from 66 percent to 74 percent, in Maryland from 64 percent to 66 percent, and in North Carolina from being behind Nixon, 53 percent to 47 percent, to a lead of 88 percent to 12 percent. However, this increase was not found in every state: Kennedy’s already high support in Texas, 83 percent, polled at 71 percent after the call, and New York fell to 63 percent from 66 percent. Connecticut was polled only after the call and found Kennedy at 68 percent.

  Martin would say you had to: Martin, interview by Anthony K. Shriver, JFKL.

  Key urban wards across the country: Scammon, “How the Negroes Voted”; Layhmond Robinson, “Negro Vote Gave Kennedy Big Push,” NYT, Nov. 11, 1960; Lewis, “Protest over Dr. King’s Arrest Was Drafted for President’s Use”; White, Making of the President, 1960, 354; Sullivan, Symbol of Virtue or a Strategy for Votes?, 61–64. Kennedy’s reversing the Republicans’ 1956 progress could be seen in five South Side Chicago wards, where Kennedy went from Stevenson’s 63 up to 78 percent; a Philadelphia ward where Democrats went from 74 to 84 percent; Ward 5 in Pittsburgh going from 68 to 78 percent; three largely Black New York City districts going from 64 to 75 percent; two Black Baltimore wards increasing from 48 to 74 percent; an important Memphis ward going from 36 to 68 percent; three Nashville Black wards flipping to the Democrats, with similar movement in areas within South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia; predominantly Black Charles City County, Virginia, shooting from 19 to 65 percent, and the eight Black precincts of King’s Atlanta improving from 15 to 42 percent. The Chicago Daily Defender, Dec. 1, 1960, recorded Black wards in its city went from 66 percent Stevenson to 80 percent Kennedy. It also reported Virginia and South Carolina Black voters went from a majority supporting Eisenhower to 60 percent for Kennedy.

  After the election, The New Republic (Scammon, “How the Negroes Voted.”) reported Illinois was won by fewer than 10,000 votes, with more than 350,000 Black people voting for Kennedy; Michigan decided by just over 65,000 with at least 225,000 Black votes for Kennedy; New Jersey taken by fewer than 30,000 with more than 125,000 Black votes for Kennedy; and South Carolina with a difference of under 10,000 with 60,000 Black residents registered to vote. Theodore White pointed to Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and South Carolina as potentially due to Black vote margins.

  Martin’s greatest concern: Martin, interview by Anthony K. Shriver, JFKL.

  Nationally, data showed that Black turnout was indeed higher: Flanigan et al., Political Behavior of the American Electorate, 76.

  anecdotal evidence: White, Making of the President, 1960, 354.

  Black voters made the difference: Niven, Politics of Injustice, 166–68.

  “Negro Vote Held Vital to Kennedy”: Anthony Lewis, “Negro Vote Held Vital to Kennedy,” NYT, Nov. 27, 1960. Kennedy took Texas by more than forty-five thousand while winning the majority of the hundred thousand Black voters; roughly seventy thousand North Carolina Black people voted for Kennedy when he won by below fifty-eight thousand; and South Carolina had a margin of fewer than ten thousand with more than forty thousand people supporting Kennedy.

  a New Republic study of the Black vote: Scammon, “How the Negroes Voted.”

  “hard work” of the CRS: White, Making of the President, 1960, 354. A White article four years before (“The Negro Voter. Can He Elect a President?,” Collier’s, Aug. 17, 1956) on the rising Black vote in northern urban centers was a prescient indicator of what was to come.

  White pointed to eleven states: White, Making of the President, 1960, 354.

  “Most people in life and in politics”: Wofford, interview by Anthony K. Shriver, JFKL. Wofford told us, “Robert and John both, their changes came about because facts change; they were very realistic, they wanted very much to know what the real story was.”

  Once they did, “the fact that Jack had made the call about which no one had checked—Bob had every reason to be angry with Louis and me and Sarge. We were under Robert Kennedy, and it was a big thing, the call to Mrs. King, and we hadn’t mentioned it to Robert Kennedy or his team, so he first was just angry with us that we had done that on our own. [Bobby] was being his best self figuring out what to do. The call already made, he had to deal with that fact, and the best way to solve it, was, you know, to end King’s arrest.”

  the Kennedys being their best selves: Wofford, interview.

  his 1964 oral history: Guthman and Shulman, Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, 70–71.

  “Once having started it”: Wofford, interview.

  King himself, in his Kennedy Library: King, interview by Bernhard, JFKL.

  “the Kennedy family did have some part”: Grier, “Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.” This gentle insistence from King is evident in a recently discovered tape, long forgotten in a Tennessee attic for half a century, now held by the National Civil Rights Museum. Taped for a book that was never written, King recounts what each Kennedy brother did, but references, almost in a resigned way, all those close to him in Atlanta who worked to free him as well and whose efforts had been mostly overlooked.

  One Inquirer headline read: “King: Public Freed Him,” AI, Nov. 7, 1960.

  “If there was any critical pressure”: Ibid.

  “Those of us who knew”: Vandiver, interview by Pyle, GSU. Vandiver said, “Jack Kennedy thought that made the difference, he really did, he told me that.”

  Vandiver first began to talk: Vandiver, interview by Stewart, May 22, 1967, JFKL. This put historians such as Jack Bass and Clifford Kuhn on the hunt, both of whom did critical work before Vandiver’s death, of pinning down otherwise obscured details of what happened.

  President Kennedy himself apparently told: Vandiver, interview by Pyle, GSU.

  in the wake of a Christmas party: Ibid.

  “Since King had to be released”: Pou, “King Call Arranger Was George Stewart.”

  in certain Georgia circles: Vandiver, interview by Kuhn, GSU. Stewart was quoted about the back channel in the one Atlanta Journal interview (Pou, “King Call Arranger Was George Stewart”) and then went quiet. Bob Russell died of cancer at age forty in 1965, with President Johnson attending the funeral.

  many of those involved had died: Henderson, Ernest Vandiver, 201; AJC, Jan. 18, 1998. Stewart died in 1977.

  “He sat out the jailing”: Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 6.

  Kennedy adviser Dick Goodwin: Dick Goodwin, interview by authors, Jan. 23, 2017. It remains improbable that the Kennedy brothers “acted individually.” Vandiver said they worked in chorus, Seigenthaler was not in a position to know, and the CRS was too busy, too committed to its own dangerous course, to ask. In an interview with us before his death, the assistant Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin, the last living person who rode the Kennedy campaign plane, told us in response to this notion, “Let me assure you, Bobby never did anything, never made a move, without Jack approving it.” The calls back and forth between them were constant.

&nbs
p; “The finest strategies are usually”: Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 6.

  “get back to Washington”: Louis Martin, interview by McComb, #1, LBJ Presidential Library.

  “If you thought you were going”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 68. With Martin and Wofford working as feverishly as before on the talent search, King tried to reach the president-elect to first recommend Morris Abram for solicitor general (he would end up working with Shriver and Wofford as the Peace Corps’s first counsel) and to recommend his mentor Dr. Mays be appointed to the Civil Rights Commission or as ambassador to Israel. Wofford and Martin came up short on those. The Georgia senators, Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge, blocked Mays from moving forward.

  At the same time, Wofford was dismayed to learn that Vandiver was being considered for secretary of the Army. When Wofford implored Kennedy not to appoint him—at least not until he integrated Georgia’s schools—it turned out Vandiver had already turned down the administration.

  “Who’s Who of Negro experts”: Martin, interview by Grele, #3, JFKL.

  “There was an opportunity”: Martin, interview by Edwin, #3, Columbia University Oral History Collection. Martin’s daughters, Dr. Toni Martin and Trudy Martin Hatter, told us that the suspicion in their family was that their father was kept out of the administration because of his closeness with Detroit labor unions. Dr. Martin later requested her father’s FBI file, but did not find any record of vetting that got that far. One of Martin’s first projects during the Kennedy administration was pressuring Attorney General Robert Kennedy to have J. Edgar Hoover take the NAACP off the FBI’s subversives list. He did so because false connections to communism caused Black apointees and nominees vetting and security clearance problems.

  a generation of Black presidential appointees: Eisenhower made more notable appointments than previous presidents had managed, such as Jewel Rogers as Assistant U.S. Attorney, J. Ernest Wilkins as assistant secretary of labor, and Roberta Church to a policy-making role in the same agency. See Gellman, The President and the Apprentice, 137. But Martin’s ambitions and success were on a scale more impressive than in the earlier Eisenhower years. The Kennedys had a long way to go; important administration appointments went almost exclusively to those Kennedy was at ease with: white men, mostly in their thirties and forties—smart without being dull; witty instead of self-righteous. There were Black men who served on White House staff during the Kennedy administration in fairly uninfluential positions, such as Andrew Hatcher as a Salinger press aide and the CRS’s Frank Reeves briefly, before being forced out over a personal tax issue.