WASHINGTON
JUST AS MALCOLM BROWNE’S PHOTO of the flaming Quang Duc brought attention to President Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam, another powerful news photo underscored his feeble support of the civil rights movement. The editors of the New York Times published it on the front page, spread across three columns above the fold. It showed one of Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s police dogs sinking its fangs into the stomach of a Birmingham high school senior. Associated Press photographer Bill Hudson caught the ferocity of Alabama’s opposition to equality for African-Americans. The picture of the German shepherd’s attack on seventeen-year-old Walter Gadsen symbolized the hatred of segregation that was dividing the nation just as slavery and the Civil War did a century earlier. The AP photo permitted a detailed look at what first was viewed in American living rooms as video broadcast by the three major networks. Such footage tarnished the image of America around the world. Schoolchildren as young as eight were sent tumbling by high-pressure fire hoses, were arrested, and were jailed eighty-eight to a cell designed for three prisoners. Placed in the same Birmingham jail was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., leader of 2,500 elementary and high school students who were charging the racial barriers in one of the most segregated cities of the South. In giving the picture such dramatic display, the Grey Lady of newspapers overcame its distaste for tabloid-style shockers. The front page of the Times on May 4, 1963, called on the establishment to rise up against segregation. It also spotlighted Kennedy’s failure of moral leadership in the battle against racism in the United States.
As president, Kennedy was a reluctant emancipator. Despite his campaign promises, Kennedy shelved demands by King and other civil rights leaders while yielding to conservative Southern senators who controlled Congress and promoted segregation. The New Frontier, said the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell Jr., looked “suspiciously like a dude ranch with [Mississippi] Senator James O. Eastland as the general manager.” On the day the Times showed the chaos in Birmingham, the Americans for Democratic Action—representing the most liberal wing of the Democrats—showed up in the Oval Office for a testy session with the defensive president.
“I think it’s a terrible picture in the paper,” Kennedy said. “There’s nothing we can do. I mean, what law can you pass to do anything about police power in the community of Birmingham? And as I say, Birmingham is the worst city in the South. They have done nothing for the Negroes in that community, so it is an intolerable situation.”
He would again portray himself as helpless at a nationally televised news conference. Asked by a reporter if he was using all the powers of the presidency to quell the turmoil in Birmingham, Kennedy said federal law did not apply to civil rights marches. “There isn’t any federal statute that was involved in the last few days in Birmingham,” Kennedy replied. It was a feeble performance by Kennedy, who was still straddling the political divide of civil rights. The South’s seventy-three electoral votes had made Kennedy president in 1960 just as African-American voters in Illinois made the difference in a razor-thin win in that crucial state. Birmingham made clear to everyone except Kennedy that he could no longer win both of these constituencies. The country was in flames and Kennedy was still fiddling with the electorate. Birmingham also marked the end of what Kennedy’s closest aides called a “terrible ambivalence” on civil rights and a “painful journey” to the front of the moral crusade.
In Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland, peaceful Negro protestors were met with spit, beatings, murder, and bombings. Yet King and other leaders refused to step back. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,” sang Fannie Lou Hamer in the South and Pete Seeger in the North. From jail, King wrote an epistle to the world on the plight of 20 million black brothers and sisters turned away from restaurants, motels, voting booths, and jobs in a flourishing economy. King described the humiliation of explaining to black children why “your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ however old you are.” To King, the events in Birmingham marked the end of black acceptance of segregation. “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair,” King wrote. “I am not criticizing the president, but we are going to have to help him,” King later told a church congregation. “The hour has come for the federal government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States.” It was a taunt delivered by the nation’s media to the White House.
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In public, Kennedy’s brother Bobby seemed more sympathetic. The attorney general was using members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division to be present at racial hot spots in the South and to protect buses full of black and white Freedom Riders through Mississippi and Louisiana. In private, however, Bobby complained to his brother that a number of protests was getting out of hand. “You could make a pretty strong argument that we should end those and get them off the front page,” Bobby said at a White House strategy meeting with the president. “It’s bad for the country and bad for the world.” The chaos was also bad for his brother’s reelection campaign, which Bobby planned to direct in 1964.
Kennedy’s argument that he was helpless in the face of growing civil rights violence was soon challenged by religious leaders and other members of the moral and legal establishment. The deans of the law schools at Yale and Harvard delivered a devastating rejoinder. “It seems clear to me that he hasn’t even started to use the powers that are available,” said Erwin Griswold of Harvard Law. His remarks were quickly endorsed by Eugene Rostow of Yale Law. King brushed aside the need for some relevant statute in the federal code to deal with the denial of voting rights, equal housing, education, jobs, and justice for Negroes. “I feel there have been blatant violations of basic constitutional principles,” King told reporters. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, of which Griswold was a member, voted to cut off all federal funds for Mississippi because of its segregationist policies.
In a background session with reporters, Kennedy called the commission vote a mistake. “I wouldn’t have issued that report,” Kennedy said. “It doesn’t do any good. It just makes people mad.” The chairman of the commission, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, saw Kennedy’s bobbing and weaving as craven politics. “Kennedy is afraid if he does more than he has about Negroes, he can forget about being president for eight years,” said Father Hesburgh, who was president of Notre Dame University.
Under mounting establishment pressure, Kennedy buckled. “I think Birmingham did it,” King said later. “Birmingham created such a crisis in race relations that it could no longer be ignored. No matter what the polls revealed, he had to take a strong stand on the issue.” A month after the violence erupted in Birmingham, he decided to lead the nation toward the abolition of segregation with a package of new civil rights laws. A nationwide television address followed the federal showdown with Alabama governor George C. Wallace over the admission of black students to the University of Alabama. Wallace had vowed to stand in the doorway of the Tuscaloosa University to block their entrance, despite an order for integration issued by the federal courts. Kennedy was still in his pajamas in bed, going over the June 11 morning papers, when he called his brother, the attorney general. Bobby was explaining the federal choreography with Wallace in the doorway when the president interrupted.
“Jesus Christ!” Kennedy exclaimed. The president had just seen Malcolm Browne’s photo of the immolation of Quang Duc. It was just as shocking as Bull Connor’s police dog attacking the Birmingham high schooler. These two iconic photographs were to become an indictment of his policies and an undertow for his administration. They, in effect, acted to force his hand to act against the oppression of a black minority at home and to end support for suppression of Buddhist rights abroad. For Kennedy, violence in the avenues of America had intersected with turmoil in the streets of Saigon. For the next five months Kennedy would tack back and forth between his most burning domestic issue and his most crucial foreign policy initiative. Both crises defied solution, and both sapped his political standing and his morale.
Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s personal secretary, said that during this period Kennedy became discouraged. “He felt like packing his bags and leaving,” Lincoln said. At times like these, a morose Kennedy would talk of a situation in which it seemed everything was turning against him. McGeorge Bundy, his adviser on national security affairs, noticed Kennedy’s frequent lament during his final months of office. “I was actually rather surprised to find that just at the end of his life he was quite familiar with and constantly had in his thoughts that famous speech in Henry V in which the king describes how everything came back to him,” Bundy recalled. Bundy was talking about a scene in Shakespeare’s play where Henry in disguise visits his troops the day before the Battle of Agincourt. In Act IV, Scene 1, the soldiers bitterly complain how the king’s warring could lead to their death and leave their wives and children with debts and poverty. Stung by their candor, Henry returns to his tent and broods.
Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children, and our sins, lay on the King!
We must bear all. O hard condition.
Vietnam and civil rights underscored the weakness of his administration. Although there were Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, Kennedy was unable to forge support for civil rights, just as he failed to win approval of health care for the elderly, federal aid to education, or income tax reform. An inept congressional liaison staff, headed by Larry O’Brien, combined with Kennedy’s lack of interest in domestic issues, meant few victories on Capitol Hill. Southern Democrats, angered by Kennedy’s ambivalence on civil rights, took it out on other administration programs. Representative Carl Albert of Oklahoma, the House majority leader, explained the chemistry to Kennedy in a phone call. “Civil rights,” Albert said. “It’s overwhelming the whole program. This is going to affect mass transit, there’s no question about that. It’s gonna kill these farm bills.”
When Kennedy finally decided to embrace the civil rights movement, he was following in the footsteps of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Two weeks after King’s arrest in Birmingham, Johnson became the first in the administration to acknowledge the legitimacy of King’s crusade. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said at a Gettysburg ceremony marking the hundredth anniversary of that bloody Civil War battle. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
In large White House strategy sessions on civil rights, Johnson contributed little. As did Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Johnson preferred imparting his advice to others in private. There is no record of what Johnson told Kennedy when others were not around. But Johnson did outline the script Kennedy used in a landmark television address to claim moral leadership of the civil rights movement. Johnson spelled out his ideas on what the president should do in a telephone conversation with Kennedy’s speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen. Kennedy could no longer delay becoming the leader on what was a moral issue, Johnson told Sorensen. It was time to forget about Southern political votes in 1964. “I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South,” Johnson said. “But those sort of states may be lost anyway.” Kennedy must appeal for fairness. “We got a little popgun and I want to pull out the cannon,” Johnson said. “The president is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience.” Kennedy’s backdrop should be a military honor guard of black and white soldiers holding American flags, Johnson said. “Then let him reach over and point and say, ‘I have to order these boys into battle in foxholes carrying the flag. And I don’t ask them what their name is, whether it’s Gomez or Smith, or what color they got, what religion. If I can order them into battle, I’ve got to make it possible for them to eat and sleep in this country.’”
Kennedy’s nationwide address on June 11 had no multiracial honor guard. A draped Old Glory was the only backdrop. He asked the nation to examine its conscience. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” The president reminded viewers that the nation was engaged in a global struggle on behalf of freedom around the world. “When Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only,” Kennedy said. “It ought to be possible therefore for American students of any color to attend a public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.”
It was another magnificent Kennedy speech that left the nation with a lump in its throat. But it did little to stem a rising tide of violence, particularly in the South. A few hours after the speech, a sniper murdered Medgar Evers, who was leading the fight against school segregation in Mississippi. In Dixie, the president’s approval rating in one poll had plummeted to 33 percent. “I can kiss the South good-bye,” Kennedy told Pittsburgh mayor David Lawrence during a campaign swing later that year. Lawrence also recounted the president telling a racist joke that reflected concerns about blacks moving into all-white neighborhoods. “Knock, knock,” the president said.
“Who’s there?”
“Izya,” Kennedy said.
“Izya who?”
“Izya new neighbor.”
Unlike Johnson and Humphrey, Kennedy was unaware of the poverty that gripped the throat of black Americans. To King, Kennedy lacked an emotional commitment to civil rights because of his ignorance of the plight of African-Americans. “He didn’t know too many Negroes personally,” King said. “He never really had the personal experience of knowing the deep groans and the passionate yearnings of the Negroes for freedom because he didn’t know Negroes generally.” Growing up rich, Kennedy saw blacks only in menial positions. While Kennedy was in the service in the U.S. Navy, African-Americans were restricted to servant duties as shipboard stewards. Kennedy shared a streak of racism with his predecessors. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected an appeal from civil rights leaders to open all naval duties to 139,000 black stewards. Instead, Roosevelt suggested elevating Negros to shipboard bands.
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a colored band on some of these ships because they’re darn good at it,” FDR told the leaders in a session recorded in the Oval Office on September 27, 1940. “That’s something we should look into. You know, if it’ll increase the opportunity—that’s what we’re after. They may develop a leader of the band.”
FDR’s view of African-Americans through his pince-nez was not as blunt as that of Missouri farmer Harry S. Truman. During his presidency and afterward, Truman privately spoke of blacks as “niggers.” He had a solid white supremacist view of mankind that meant he used ethnic slurs for Negroes, Jews, Chinese, and our wartime enemies, the Japanese and the Germans. Even so, Truman delivered the first telling blow to segregation when he ordered the integration of all U.S. military forces. His July 26, 1948, executive order did not really take effect until the 1950 Korean conflict. The killed and wounded white soldiers in Korea were replaced by African-Americans. For the next twenty years, the draft put millions of white and black soldiers in the same barracks, an eye-opening experience for both races.
Kennedy’s legislative proposals put forth in the summer of 1963 would have eliminated discrimination at the voting booth and in hotels and other public facilities, the workplace, and public schools. They would have required a cutoff of federal funding for segregationist programs. It would fall to Lyndon Johnson when he became president in 1964 to break the congressional logjam and win passage for the landmark laws. In 1963, however, Kennedy was hitting a congressional stone wall. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy dealt with civil rights and Vietnam at the same time, with every twist and turn of both issues weighing heavily on his reelection chances in 1964. There were striking similarities between the two. Both dealt with civil rights. Kennedy had no control over the two key players in both situations—King in the South and Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. Both defied Kennedy’s efforts to curtail their single-minded dedication to their life’s work.
As Birmingham erupted, Kennedy was estranged from King instead of treating him as one of his most influential supporters. As King took the leadership of what Time magazine termed in its headline “The Negro Revolt,” Kennedy became increasingly cool to the thirty-four-year-old Baptist minister. He rejected at least four requests by King for a meeting. The attorney general, his brother Bobby, planned a meeting of civil rights leaders in the White House after the chaos in Birmingham. The president specifically told Bobby not to invite King, although he later relented.
“King is so hot these days that it’s like having [Karl] Marx coming to the White House,” the president told Bobby. Kennedy may have been alluding to King’s ties to Stanley Levison, a one-time contributor to the Communist Party USA. Levison had become one of the earliest and most important advisers to the civil rights leader. Bobby gave FBI director J. Edgar Hoover the attorney general’s approval to intercept Levison’s telephone calls on March 6, 1962. Some of Levison’s phone conversations with King ended up as transcripts for the brothers Kennedy. Levison was a wealthy New York Jew who contributed to liberal causes. He was active in supporting opponents of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for his unfounded allegations about communists in the federal government. The brothers Kennedy were devoted to the red-baiting McCarthy. Bobby had worked for McCarthy’s Republican staff. Senator Kennedy sat on McCarthy’s panel during his infamous hearings. Kennedy refused to vote for McCarthy’s censure, a decision that won the undying disgust of Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberal Democrats.
Hoover’s records, since made public by Freedom of Information requests, show Communist Party members informing the FBI of Levison’s involvement in financial affairs from 1952 until reports fell off sharply in 1955. As a result, the FBI stopped tracking Levison for a number of years until 1962, when agents learned of his close association with King. Despite years of digging, the FBI never turned up solid evidence that Levison was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Although the FBI knew from party informants that Levison had severed ties seven years earlier, Hoover told the attorney general and the president that Levison was “a secret member of the Communist Party.” Hoover probably sparked a Senate investigation of Levison a month after Bobby Kennedy approved the FBI wiretap. Mississippi senator Eastland, chairman of the internal security subcommittee, subpoenaed Levison April 25, 1963. At a secret hearing, Levison, after being sworn, led off with a statement: “I am a loyal American and I am not now and never have been a member of the Communist Party.” After that, he refused to answer any questions on constitutional grounds against self-incrimination.
Hoover also told the Kennedy brothers that at Levison’s recommendation, King had hired Hunter “Jack” O’Dell to administer the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—the civil rights leader’s political organization. Levison warned King of O’Dell’s past connections with American communists, but King brushed them off. “No matter what a man was,” King told Levison, “if he could stand up now and say he is not connected, then as far as I am concerned, he is eligible to work for me.” When the attorney general’s office was alerted to the fact that King’s senior adviser had a communist connection, Bobby ordered Justice officials to give King a series of warnings. In most cases, King thanked them for their concern but said little. But when Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s adviser on civil rights, alerted King, the civil rights leader expressed doubt about the FBI’s facts.
The threat of exposure of a political opponent is a staple dirty trick in American politics. The brothers Kennedy were masters of hardball tactics. If the warnings were also designed to rattle King, even slow the pace of demonstrations, this didn’t work, even after the president himself applied the pressure. At the June 22 White House meeting with civil rights leaders, Kennedy took King into the Rose Garden for a private chat. “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” Kennedy said, putting his hand on King’s shoulder. Then he told King that Levison and O’Dell were communists and were under the control of the Soviet Union. “You’ve got to get rid of them,” Kennedy said. The president argued that Levison and O’Dell were still active in Communist Party affairs. Disclosure of their communist ties could weaken chances for civil rights legislation, Kennedy said. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too,” the president said. Bobby Kennedy later recalled it was a harsh exchange.
“The president was very firm and strong with him,” Bobby said. King was dismissive. “He sort of laughs about a lot of these things. Makes fun of it,” Bobby said. King challenged the president’s facts about O’Dell’s communist activities. “I don’t know he’s got to do all that—he’s got two jobs with me,” King shot back. Besides, King said there was no proof that Levison was a communist agent. King’s defiance clearly upset Kennedy. At one point, the president’s face turned red and he shook with anger, according to King.
After the exchange in the Rose Garden, the two rejoined the other leaders to discuss plans for an August 28 March on Washington. More than 250,000 Americans showed up to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, now considered one of the finest speeches of the twentieth century. Portions are broadcast every year to mark Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday. But on June 22, 1963, Kennedy was opposed to the mass demonstration planned for August 28 in the nation’s capital just as Congress was starting hearings on civil rights legislation.
“It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a march on Washington before the bill was even in committee,” Kennedy told the leaders. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol.” Opponents would call the march a gun to the head of Congress. Many other administration programs would be lost. “I may lose the next election because of this,” Kennedy said to stress his commitment. “I don’t care.”
King admitted that the schedule for the march might be awkward. “But frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill timed,” King said. “Some people thought Birmingham was ill timed.” Despite the president’s demands, a defiant King continued to organize the March on Washington. And he continued to consult Levison and have contacts with O’Dell. Bobby learned of the contacts through new FBI wiretaps on the telephone of King’s lawyer, Clarence Jones. For all the intercepts over a nineteen-month period, the FBI failed to produce any hint that King was part of a Moscow-controlled Communist conspiracy.
David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, combed 17,000 FBI files for evidence against Levison. “The case against Levison is in legal terms so weak as to be virtually worthless,” Garrow concluded. Many of the FBI files of that era are filled with hearsay, the sort of nudge nudge (wink wink) gossip aimed at smearing suspected targets of Hoover’s obsessions. Despite the FBI’s dry hole, Bobby authorized a third program of tapping and bugging, this time of King himself. The attorney general signed two orders: October 10 for King’s home and October 21 for the office of the SCLC. Bobby would later say these wiretaps were justified based on the fear that public exposure of the communist connections of King’s advisers might derail the civil rights bill in Congress. “This is also the reason that President Kennedy and I and the Justice Department were so reserved about him,” Bobby Kennedy said.
There was another, more sinister reason as well. The attorney general spelled it out to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis while preparing an oral history for the Kennedy Library in March of 1964. “King was in a very vulnerable position,” Bobby told Lewis. “First, because of his association with members of the Communist Party, about whom he had been warned.” Also, “to see what other activities he was involved in. I think there were rumors.” With nothing new on the communist front from the intercepts, Bobby trolled for personal information that would provide leverage on King. The “rumors” were verified two month before Bobby met with Lewis. The telephone tap on Jones revealed King planned to spend two nights at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., starting January 5, 1964. The FBI planted a listening device in the room before King arrived. The bug recorded the Baptist minister participating in what sounded like a sex orgy with two women. Other bugs in other hotel rooms would also record King’s extramarital relations.
To Lewis, Bobby expressed his disapproval of King’s hotel room behavior, but his exact criticisms were sealed from public view by the Kennedy Library. In giving approval for the invasion of King’s privacy, Bobby lifted his foot off the neck of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was a racist with a deep-seated hatred of King. Three days after these recordings were made, Hoover had launched the most elaborate smear campaign by the federal government in the history of the United States. When Hoover heard the Willard recordings on January 10, he was elated. “They will destroy the burr head,” Hoover told his deputy, William Sullivan.
Transcripts from the recordings at the Willard along with copies of the tapes were prepared for wide distribution within the government, including to the new president at the White House. Johnson found them more entertaining than shocking. As did his predecessor, Johnson had a long list of liaisons outside his marriage to Lady Bird. The FBI offered transcripts to newsmen, but many refused to take them and none published accounts of King’s sexual activities. Sexual antics by political leaders were taboo topics for the media in those days. In closed-door testimony on January 29, Hoover laid out the details of the King tapes, which spread rapidly to right-wing congressmen and segregationists. Representative Howard Smith, a Virginia Democrat, planned a floor speech on the subject. But Smith was waved off by the FBI. “Despite our desire to see the scoundrel exposed,” Deke DeLoach of the FBI told Smith, the exposure might disrupt other operations. FBI agents bugged almost every hotel room King used in 1964. Neither Bobby, still the attorney general until December 1964, nor the new president, Lyndon Johnson, did anything to disrupt the FBI’s smear campaign, even though they knew what Hoover was doing.
When Hoover learned King planned to meet with Pope Paul VI, the FBI contacted New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and urged him to warn the Vatican about King’s extramarital behavior. FBI records indicate Spellman alerted Rome, but the pope went ahead with the King meeting. When King was named winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover was outraged. Federal agencies participating in the awards ceremony as well as U.S. embassies were supplied with the FBI dirt on King. One package of the recordings was sent to King, where it was opened by his wife, Coretta. It contained a note written by a Hoover deputy to King. “King there is only one thing left for you to do,” said the unsigned note. “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
President Kennedy had been dead for two months when the Willard Hotel recordings were made. Some apologists said Bobby was a grief-stricken attorney general unable to focus on Hoover’s smearing of King. But Bobby was just as bad as Hoover when it came to demeaning King’s image with the president’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. In a June 4, 1964, interview, Mrs. Kennedy at first said it was her husband but later said it was Bobby who told her about King, “how he was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women. I mean, sort of an orgy in the hotel and everything. Bobby told me of the tapes of these orgies.
“I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible,” Jackie said.