Even before he left Chicago after the 1956 Democratic convention Kennedy had recognized the potential for an unusual alliance. Nine of the southern delegations had given him support during the decisive second ballot for vice president. He was under no illusion that this represented a firm commitment in the future; he knew their votes were driven by their hatred of Kefauver and that their attraction to him was more personal than substantive. Still, he marveled that those states where fundamentalist Protestant faiths were dominant and ministers inveighed against the dangers of Catholicism loyal to Rome had been willing to side with him. Talking with a family friend, the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, at the Drake Hotel hours after he failed to get the vice presidential nomination, Kennedy made a wry remark: “I’ll be singing Dixie the rest of my life.”
When he began his undeclared presidential campaign in 1957, there was reason to hope that the South might form a significant part of his base in reaching for the nomination. There was precedent for southern support of an eastern Catholic in a national election. In 1928 Al Smith carried six of the eleven states of the old Confederacy. While being swept away by Herbert Hoover in more heavily populated and cosmopolitan states, the New York governor nonetheless won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
Like the embrace of Kennedy at the convention, the southern showing for Smith did not reflect a bond between the New Yorker and Dixie but rather a deep southern antipathy for his opponent’s party. The region had been hostile to the Republican Party for decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln—and the home of ardent abolitionists who had been punitive in victory—was held responsible for the humiliation of the South. Politically the former Confederate states morphed into the “Solid South,” a powerful bloc that voted almost monolithically for Democrats. In some states the Republican Party did not exist beyond a few newly enfranchised blacks and a handful of wayward whites. As a result the Catholic Smith won 91 percent of the vote in South Carolina and 81 percent in Mississippi, an amazing outcome in two of the most rigidly right-wing states in the Union.
Into the 1950s Democrats ruled the region as governors and mayors. Congressional delegations from the South were exclusively Democratic. Because the same men were repeatedly sent to Washington they accumulated power through seniority. And with a notable exception or two, they not only practiced segregation at home but defended it ruthlessly as committee chairmen on Capitol Hill.
Young Senator Kennedy found it necessary to pay fealty to the old southern bulls who controlled the place, following the recommendation of an old aphorism, “Go along to get along.” He understood the importance of obeying the dictates of the Texan Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader. He knew to join James Eastland of Mississippi, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, for evening cocktails in his office; to show deference to Richard Russell of Georgia, who controlled the Armed Services Committee; to cultivate his contemporary, Russell Long of Louisiana, an emerging force on the Finance Committee; and to appreciate the value of a genuine friendship with George Smathers of Florida.
Kennedy believed he had a viable relationship with southern leaders that he could build upon. But it would require an extraordinary exercise, a tightrope walk between the southern forces and a civil rights movement beginning to gather momentum.
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In 1957 the nation was awakening to the demand by blacks—buttressed by a chorus of sympathetic whites—to strike down segregation. Kennedy was not part of this awakening. He was a reliable northern Democratic politician on civil rights issues, but by background, temperament, and political calculation he was not a strong voice on the subject. Not until later did he come to appreciate the brutal oppression of the Jim Crow system and the moral force of the movement for equality. In addition to his privileged upbringing, he was shielded from direct experience with the privations of African American reality as well as from the deeply segregated South, and his primary interest when he entered politics was foreign affairs.
At the same time he touched all the issues of the day—opposing the poll tax, supporting efforts to confront open discrimination in hiring practices, and advocating a quicker end to colonialism—from his very first campaign for Congress through his election to the Senate in 1952. Missing were his voice and leadership in the broader struggle for civil rights; his was a meek stance similar to his muted position on McCarthy’s witch hunts.
In its historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public schools—yet ruled that recalcitrant school districts could move with “deliberate speed” to integrate their facilities. They moved grudgingly, if at all. Kennedy’s reluctance to push harder for quicker action was apparent in his opposition to an amendment to a 1956 bill that would have blocked federal aid to segregated schools, foreshadowing more, higher-profile trimming the following year. Asked about his positions in an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Kennedy explained that if the amendment were attached to a broader federal aid bill the measure would not pass. The segregation issue, he said, was being “dealt with very satisfactorily by the Supreme Court.” Pressed about the slow enforcement of the Brown ruling, he replied, “They came to a decision in 1954. It was unanimous and it is the law. . . . As I understand, the Supreme Court used the words ‘deliberate speed,’ which may sound like a paradox but isn’t, I don’t think, and left it to the judgment of the lower federal courts as to when it should be carried out, and I think that is a satisfactory arrangement.”
Civil rights activists found the refusal of the southern schools to comply with the Brown decision unacceptable, and the question of racial equality moved rapidly from the courts and classrooms into the streets of America.
Public consciousness had been jarred by two fateful incidents in 1955. In the late summer Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago visiting relatives in rural Mississippi, had been abducted, brutalized, and murdered, accused of having the temerity to whistle at a white woman. That December the grievance of black passengers weary of being ordered to yield their seats to whites on crowded buses boiled over into a massive protest in Montgomery, Alabama. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat and was arrested, she became a symbol for a new phase of the movement that triggered a bus boycott and the establishment of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an organization echoing with demands for justice for local blacks and headed by a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr.
Two months later, upstate in Tuscaloosa, white mobs thwarted the Brown decision by creating so much campus turmoil that Autherine Lucy, the first black student to enroll, under a court order, at the University of Alabama, was forced out of school. Following a riot, the university trustees suspended Lucy on the grounds that they were protecting her safety.
Fury was building on many fronts. By 1957 the two sides were digging in for a bitter, protracted battle, and it would become increasingly difficult to compromise.
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Civil rights was terra incognito to the young senator from Massachusetts. With the pressures of the cold war intensifying, Kennedy seemed more intrigued by foreign policy questions than the racial struggle at home. Blacks composed less than 2 percent of his state’s population and commanded little political clout. When he campaigned for the Senate in 1952, he ventured into a few black wards, but their votes were not much of a consideration.
Kennedy had grown up versed in the discrimination against the Irish in America. His parents’ generation remembered the nineteenth-century “help wanted” advertisements in newspapers that included the condition “No Irish need apply,” barely camouflaged by the widely used initials NINA. The Kennedy children learned that the world was full of disadvantaged people who suffered from bigotry. But no special concern was shown for blacks.
Kennedy was educated at elite schools and served in a segregated navy. No black with any influence had been a member of his congressional staff or was among his inner circle of friends. It was not that he was a bigot, but simply that his social and political life kept blacks at a distance.
By comparison Kennedy’s supporters at the Chicago convention included an interesting assortment of segregationist leaders and virulent racists who either favored him personally or were bound to him by their delegation’s unit rule. From South Carolina, Senator Strom Thurmond, who led the breakaway Dixiecrats in 1948, was counted in Kennedy’s column. From Arkansas, he had the support of Governor Orval E. Faubus, who within a year would embroil President Eisenhower and the federal government in a major racial conflict. From Alabama, two figures on the threshold of infamy were also in Kennedy’s ranks: Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham police commissioner who would unleash attack dogs and fire hoses on youthful black demonstrators, and a local judge named George C. Wallace, who became the face of southern resistance to black aspirations. From Georgia, he enjoyed the support of a pair of newspaper publishers who were well-known segregationist voices: James Gray, who would push back the followers of Dr. King in a confrontation in Gray’s hometown of Albany, and Roy Harris, who used his Augusta Courier editorials to promote the idea that blacks were an inferior race. From Mississippi, he claimed the votes of Jim Eastland, a notorious champion of segregation, and Eastland’s key ally back home, the obdurate speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, Walter Sillers.
After Chicago, Kennedy courted some of them. In a letter to a hard-line Mississippi segregationist, Congressman John Bell Williams, with whom he had served in the House, he wrote, “I appreciated the help and support which you gave my candidacy at the convention. Certainly the unanimous action of the Mississippi delegation on the second ballot, which I am sure was done in large measure to your efforts, was most helpful in making the run as close as it was.”I
Kennedy also exchanged friendly letters with George Wallace, offering help, if needed, in his coming campaign for governor in 1958, and sending his “highest regards and best wishes for your success.” Wallace, who would complain he was “outniggered” in the Democratic primary that year, responded that he intended to be a delegate to the 1960 convention. He told Kennedy, “I have always been interested in you and want you to know that I shall continue to be so.”
Kennedy showered the 1956 convention delegates with copies of Profiles in Courage. The Pulitzer Prize–winning book included a chapter saluting Mississippi’s L. Q. C. Lamar, a secessionist and Confederate veteran who changed his stripes after the Civil War in order to gain the reputation of a statesman. One of eight men cited by Kennedy, Lamar won the author’s praise for delivering a touching eulogy for Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts who had been one of the most vocal critics of the South in the run-up to the Civil War. In his remarks on the Senate floor, Lamar appealed for national unity: “My countrymen! Know one another and you will love one another.” By including Lamar in his pantheon of American heroes, Kennedy stroked southern pride and revealed a desire for their favorable recognition.
Surveying the current political landscape, Kennedy felt encouraged not only by his madcap, enthusiastic reception in Louisiana during the Stevenson campaign but by the stature he seemed to have among the state’s party elders. One Louisiana leader, Edmund Reggie, already promoting him for president, believed Kennedy could become “the darling of the South.”
Kennedy also heard from William Winter, a young Mississippi delegate.II Although Kennedy had served as the anti-Kefauver candidate supported by southerners in Chicago, Winter wrote, “Let me assure you that my vote, and I believe that most of the delegation was an affirmative vote for you and not just a vote against somebody else.”
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Within months of the Chicago convention Kennedy would have his developing friendship with the South tested by the votes he would be forced to cast on the first major civil rights bill to be debated in Congress in the twentieth century. The measure was originally drafted to protect voting rights, but it was actually a fig leaf to cover a more ambitious assault on “the southern way of life.” The bill would easily clear the House, but once it went to the Senate in early 1957, it took on new dimensions as liberals vowed their strong commitment even as the formidable southern bloc worked to gut it.
Kennedy was not the only senator squeezed by the legislation. The bill represented a far bigger quandary for the man he expected to be one of his chief rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Lyndon Johnson, who was charged with steering the bill to passage. With his Texas background, Johnson appeared to be a natural political fit with his fellow southerners, but he knew that blind adherence to southern values would cost him elsewhere. Shepherding a civil rights bill might act as an antidote to liberal Democrats’ suspicions that he was just another wheeler-dealer from Dixie. Yet Johnson risked alienating his base of support in the South if he were held responsible for a strong civil rights bill. It presented a tantalizing conundrum. With Texas-size determination he took up the burden of moving the legislation through the contentious shoals to craft something that might ultimately appease both sides. His tactics created dilemmas for other Democrats, and the Massachusetts senator would be bruised by the process.
Kennedy’s first ticklish moment came when liberals attempted to keep the bill from being assigned to the Judiciary Committee, whose chairman was Eastland, the very man whose trust Kennedy had been pursuing. The Sphinx-like Eastland was a quiet killer of any legislation remotely tied to civil rights. His home was a Mississippi Delta plantation where his wealth had been built on the backs of poor black farm laborers. He rarely gave speeches, but in the Senate he was a ringleader of forces that defeated any bill designed to aid voting rights by eliminating poll taxes and literacy tests and any legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime. Since the end of World War II, dozens of bills had been buried in Eastland’s committee. Johnson, who would use all of his legislative legerdemain during the struggle over the civil rights bill, believed that by sending it to the Judiciary Committee it would be weakened by concessions to the South but would emerge as something that could win final passage. With Johnson manipulating the measure’s path, a motion to divert the bill away from the Judiciary Committee failed. To the consternation of civil rights lobbyists and many of his friends, Kennedy voted with the majority to keep the bill in Eastland’s hands.
A second critical roll-call vote settled the most significant fight. The bill’s Title III would have given the federal government increased power to take civil and criminal action against anyone accused of violating the civil rights—and not merely the voting rights—of others. During the debate Richard Russell of Georgia—another of the southern leaders Kennedy had targeted as a potential source of support—vehemently attacked the provision. Invoking the troubled history of Reconstruction, he warned that federal military forces could be used again against the South. Moreover, he said, “under this bill, if the attorney general should contend that separate eating places, places of amusement and the like in the South” were deemed guilty of discrimination, then “white people who operated the place of amusement could be jailed without benefit of jury trial and kept in jail until they either rotted or until they conformed to the edict to integrate their place of business.”
Title III represented the heart of the bill, and Kennedy was vigorously lobbied by such advocates as Joseph Rauh, the point man for the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, who concluded that the senator “wanted to be on both sides.” It seemed to be a period in his life, Rauh said later, “when the civil rights thing wasn’t quite clear to him.”
Under pressure from liberals in Washington as well as back home in Boston, Kennedy voted for Title III, but it was defeated on the Senate floor.
This left a third controversial amendment, another sop to the South. It would require that any criminal contempt cases involving voting rights would be tried by juries rather than heard by judges. The language sounded as if it ensured basic freedoms for the accused; in fact it assured that any defendant would be acquitted by all-white juries, which were the norm in the South.
Kennedy was ambivalent and sought help from several legal scholars, most notably Paul Freund of Harvard Law School, whose advice was mixed. Freund said he would oppose the measure himself but told Kennedy that voting for the jury trial amendment would not “constitute a betrayal of principle.” Kennedy shared Freund’s letter with Rauh, who felt Kennedy “misused the letter a little bit.”
The floor fight was critical because if a simple amendment was defeated the result would be a southern filibuster to block the entire legislative package. At nearly the last minute a rescuer entered the picture in the person of a freshman senator from the West at the dawn of a distinguished career, Frank Church of Idaho, for whom Kennedy had campaigned in 1956. Church’s proposal forbade discrimination in the selection of juries in federal trials; it would have required diligent enforcement, but it was more than a token. It was enough to attract several northern and western Democrats, including Kennedy; it also got the vital backing of Johnson, eager to protect his standing with northern Democrats after the defeat of Title III.
On his way out of the Senate chamber after the successful vote, Kennedy literally bumped into Church’s wife, Bethine, and told her, “Frank did a great thing today; he enabled me, he made it possible for me to vote for the jury trial.”
Kennedy voted for the amendment, siding again with the southern bloc.
During the battle Kennedy encountered for the first time a black leader named Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They met in the Senate dining room, where Kennedy spoke at length during a late lunch about his decision to support the amendment. “It appeared to me that the senator might have been inclined to vote otherwise had someone talked to him beforehand and with some of the background material I was able to give him,” Wilkins said later. He decided that Kennedy knew little about civil rights, and his unfavorable impression would lead to explosive criticism of him the following year.
But Kennedy escaped the debate with some standing among his southern colleagues, just as he had intended. And Johnson, the engineer of the bill, was able to claim credit for the passage of the first civil rights legislation since 1875 while at the same time watering it down to the satisfaction of the South.
The political games-playing was obvious to anyone following the struggle on Capitol Hill. Tom Wicker, a young reporter covering the story for a North Carolina newspaper, remembered, “The feeling in Washington at the time was that Kennedy had somewhat straddled the issue.” Wicker, who became a distinguished columnist for the New York Times, figured Kennedy “was hoping to have quite a bit of Southern support in the convention in 1960.”
In all the legislative maneuvering and positioning the question for Jack and Robert Kennedy was how to effectively achieve civil rights progress while showing a willingness to compromise. The jury trial amendment was an obstacle, to be sure, but there was a constitutional case to be made for it; furthermore its defeat could torpedo the bill itself. That made it acceptable, especially after Church helped change it.
To Robert these episodes illustrated his problem with liberals, who, he once said in exasperation, “are in love with death.” He often used extreme imagery, including this passage: “You showed you were for civil rights by sending up legislation whether the legislation passed or not and made a speech. It didn’t matter what you did for the Negro as long as you had these outward manifestations of being interested. Well, my brother and I thought that really didn’t make any sense and what mattered was doing something.”
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Before President Eisenhower could sign the Civil Rights Act of 1957 in early September, a new drama began unfolding with the start of school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine black students had been selected to integrate Central High School, a popular, previously all-white facility just blocks from the state capitol. But the night before they arrived for the first day of classes, Governor Orval E. Faubus delivered a televised address to announce that he was sending units of the Arkansas National Guard to do the work that segregationist groups were promising to do: block the students from attending. Faubus couched his action as a move to ensure peace and preserve the status quo. Instead he created havoc and made an early entry for himself in the ledger of southern governors determined to use all their power to prevent the desegregation of their schools.
Faubus was an unlikely obstructionist. The son of a fiery socialist, he had been given his middle name, Eugene, in honor of Eugene Debs, the national leader of the Socialist Party. He had even attended Commonwealth College, a left-leaning institution that was shut down in 1940 because of charges that it sponsored subversive activities. As a product of the northwestern part of the state, which had relatively few blacks and escaped racial conflict, Faubus had been elected as a moderate who used Arkansas Power & Light Company as his whipping boy instead of the U.S. Supreme Court.
It seemed logical for Kennedy to consider him a prospective supporter. However, Faubus became another example of a southern politician infected by the toxin of race. It was assumed that he deployed the National Guard out of fear that he would be defeated for reelection in 1958 if he acquiesced in school integration. Arkansas governors had two-year terms at the time, and Faubus had been challenged in 1956 by a demagogic segregationist named Jim Johnson riding the rabid support of the Citizens Councils, a network of local organizations set up across the South to fight the Brown decision. A Council publication called “Arkansas Faith” branded Faubus as a politician “who would trade your daughter for a mess of nigger votes.” With another election coming in less than a year, Faubus withered in the face of the racist onslaught. Little Rock was bristling with threats of a human blockade of Central High School by fanatics who would be coming out of the woods with guns drawn. By stopping the black students with the National Guard, Faubus co-opted his critics.
Eisenhower could be pushed, as he was during the debate over the civil rights bill, and he was sometimes slow to react. After nearly three weeks of negotiation with Faubus failed to resolve the situation, a federal judge enjoined the governor from employing the National Guard to keep out the black students. But when the “Little Rock Nine” reappeared at the school, they were met by hundreds of whites shouting insults. After the students were slipped through a side door and were safely inside the building, the crowd transferred their anger to journalists covering the story. White toughs pounced on four representatives of the black press, while others encouraged the violence with shrieks of “Anyone got a rope? We’ll hang ’em.” Police failed to intervene on the black reporters’ behalf, but eventually moved in, clubbing members of the crowd. With the capital of Arkansas gripped by pandemonium, the terrorized students were dismissed—for their own safety—from Central High before noon.
Eisenhower had seen enough. He ordered a thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army into Little Rock and, for good measure, federalized the National Guard to take them out of Faubus’s hands. The president’s use of force ensured that the nine students could attend the school and served as emphatic proof that the Brown decision could be implemented in the South.
But it revived a political nightmare that had colored debate in the Senate a few weeks earlier: the specter of federal troops sent to beat down the South. Faubus called the arrival of the 101st Airborne an “occupation.” To other southerners it seemed like the coming of a second Reconstruction.
In this unsettled environment Kennedy had the audacity to make a political appearance the next month in the stronghold of segregation, Mississippi. As many as two thousand Mississippians attended the $5-a-plate dinner at the Heidelberg Hotel on Capitol Street to listen to the visitor from Massachusetts. Shortly before the event began, Kennedy learned of a taunting quote from Wirt Yerger, the state chairman of a Republican Party that was in its infancy. In an article in that day’s Jackson newspaper, Yerger challenged Kennedy to state his views on integration. “Is it not a fact,” Yerger asked, “that he voted for the infamous Section Three of the so-called Civil Rights Bill?”
Kennedy had planned to again laud the career of L. Q. C. Lamar and to talk of the benefits of party loyalty. But instead of delivering the toothless words that had been prepared for him, he took a pen to his speech and made several revisions. At the outset he observed that it should be possible for Democrats to disagree on some subjects without causing a major schism in the party. The all-white audience, composed almost exclusively of segregationists, gave him a pattering of applause but appeared suspicious. Kennedy then veered from his prepared remarks to say that he had read Yerger’s comment and announced, “I accept the challenge.”
“You who have been gracious enough to invite me here realize that we do not see eye to eye on all national issues,” he continued. “I have no hesitancy in telling the Republican chairman the same thing I said in my own city of Boston: that I accept the Supreme Court decision as the supreme law of the land. I know that we do not all agree on that issue, but I think most of us do agree on the necessity to uphold law and order in every part of the land.”
Then, his voice rising, Kennedy had a retort for a party led by a president who had just sent troops to Arkansas: “I challenge the Republican chairman to tell us where he stands on President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon.” The crowd rose to its feet, clapping and cheering. One spectator spoke afterward of his wonder at seeing someone speak approvingly of integration and getting a standing ovation in Mississippi.
Following the dinner Kennedy was an overnight guest at the governor’s mansion, where he talked until 2 a.m. with Governor J. P. Coleman, considered a racial moderate; the state’s two senators, Jim Eastland and John Stennis, who were among segregation’s strongest advocates in Washington; and members of the House delegation. Kennedy’s early interest in pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination was implicit, but there was a more explicit subject on the minds of his hosts: Little Rock. The group sought to explain the peculiar problems of Mississippi, ensnared in its racial issues, to the visitor from New England. They spoke approvingly of the Supreme Court’s mention of “deliberate speed.” Pointing out that the history of segregation was older than the 140-year-old state, they warned that it could not be reversed overnight. They hoped Mississippians would be allowed to determine their own schedule for desegregation. It was also clear that they wanted no federal troops in the state. Coleman came away from the conversation with the belief that Kennedy, if elected president, would try every way possible to avoid dispatching troops to enforce a desegregation order. After Kennedy left Mississippi, Coleman was effusive in his praise. “I think he is our best presidential prospect for 1960, and I am all for him.”
Jackson was just one of several stops in the region as Kennedy stepped through treacherous political territory, careful not to offend southerners yet, at the same time, holding on to his credentials as a national candidate. It required a delicate balance. One southern commentator, John Temple Graves, wrote approvingly of Kennedy’s courtship of Dixie: “He is too intelligent to be making the advances without some sort of marriage in mind.” Graves even predicted that Kennedy could become the “living antithesis of Earl Warren,” the chief justice of the Supreme Court that had handed down the Brown decision.
I Williams was stripped of his Democratic seniority after supporting Barry Goldwater in 1964. He went home to be elected governor in 1967 and led segregationist forces in their long battle against school desegregation in the state.
II Winter would rise from the state’s racial quagmire to become a progressive governor a quarter-century later.