WASHINGTON
U-2 PLANES SPYING FROM THE edge of space, undercover agents, and countless analysts served as the eyes on the world for the president’s daily intelligence briefing. President Kennedy greeted the briefing skeptically. The CIA was constantly predicting East Germany was on the verge of preempting West Germany as the dominant European economy. Then on August 17, 1961, the Soviet Union built the first of ninety-seven miles of wall around East Berlin. This act halted what had been the defection of 3.5 million disenchanted East Germans from what was supposed to be the vibrant heart of communist industry. In reality, East German industry produced inferior automobiles and inexportable consumer goods from a society robbed of its culture and corrupted by insidious informers. The Wall, designed to halt the German exodus to the West, was really a symbol of the failure of communism. It didn’t play that way in the news reports of the day. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s erection of the Berlin Wall was another knee in Kennedy’s groin. It followed Khrushchev’s demand at their Vienna summit that Kennedy withdraw U.S. troops from Berlin or face nuclear warfare. The Wall seemed an extension of the threat to prevent American, French, and British forces access to East Berlin. Kennedy was stunned by the threat to snatch what had been the allied prize in the war with Nazi Germany.
Kennedy’s self-termed inept performance at Vienna in June followed the retreat from Laos in May and the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April. Newspaper columnists both hostile and friendly joined Republicans in Congress to lash the young chief executive for his incompetence. The CIA was surprised when the Wall was erected in secret at night and then announced to the world at sunrise. Blindsided, Kennedy had no response to the Soviet surprise. Another round of criticism washed over Kennedy at home and abroad. “Berlin expects more than words,” said West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt. “It expects action.” Kennedy, who hoped to increase his political capital through his expertise in foreign affairs, had a miserable first year. Reeling from these foreign policy losses, Kennedy grew to resent the CIA’s miscalculation in Cuba and its continual surprise at Kremlin machinations. “Splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” he told one aide after the Bay of Pigs.
For Kennedy, newspapers and reporters were a far more reliable, accurate, and balanced source of world intelligence. “He always thought they knew what was really going on,” said Jean Kennedy Smith, the president’s sister. “Whenever we’d go to a strange city, he would say, ‘Let’s check in with the locals,’ meaning the press.” Kennedy’s daily bible was the New York Times, but he perused other newspapers and magazines as well. The Times was often on the breakfast table or even spread on his bed, where he read in pajamas. Articles were clipped, peppered with question marks, and passed along to his staff. Or he would even make a quick, bureaucracy-rattling phone call. No one could elude the White House telephone operators. Sometimes Kennedy pulled the clipping from his pocket and read it aloud to an aide scrambling for a reply. Defense Secretary McNamara was confronted by Kennedy with a Times story saying there was rift in the U.S. embassy over the Strategic Hamlet Program. “How accurate is this story?” Kennedy demanded. “Is there a split?” Senior cabinet members as well some backwater diplomats were often forced to respond to something Kennedy clipped from his bible.
In the midst of the political setbacks from foreign misadventures, Kennedy got the first inkling of his most serious domestic political problem from a Times May 15, 1961, headline: “Biracial Buses Attacked, Riders Beaten in Alabama.” Two Greyhound buses with both blacks and whites aboard were challenging Southern racial barriers. They became known as the Freedom Riders. Angry crowds ambushed and beat them in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. One bus was burned in Anniston and the mob outside tried to block the exits for the screaming Freedom Riders. These rides, nonviolent protests, were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality and its leader, James Farmer Jr. The goal was to eliminate barriers to washrooms, waiting rooms, and bus stop restaurants, restricted to whites only in the South’s Bible Belt. Farmer, with his eye patch and operatic basso, relished goading Kennedy into the civil rights battlefield. “We put on pressure and create a crisis and then they react,” Farmer said. As attorney general, Kennedy’s brother Bobby was forced to send U.S. marshals to protect the Freedom Riders on their daring mission to New Orleans. But neither the president nor Bobby was sympathetic to the cause. “Stop them,” the president told Harris Wofford, his special assistant on civil rights. “Get your goddamn friends off the buses.” This was said, Wofford noted, without Kennedy’s usual humor. To Wofford, Kennedy complained that Farmer and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were out to embarrass the president—or to put Kennedy in a politically painful spot. The civil rights campaigns were inflaming passions against federal intervention by the Kennedy White House and the Justice Department. The movement was riling Kennedy’s Southern political base. The South had produced seventy-three electoral votes in 1960 for Kennedy. Without them, Richard M. Nixon would have become president.
Since taking office, Kennedy seemed to forget his African-American supporters. He waited until after the 1962 congressional election to deliver on his 1960 campaign promise of an executive order denying federal guarantees of mortgages for whites-only housing. On the 1960 campaign trail, he accused Eisenhower of failing to end federal support of housing segregation with the mere “stroke of a pen.” What about Kennedy’s stroke of the pen? Farmer of CORE would ask in every television interview. The White House mailroom filled with hundreds of ballpoints labeled “Stroke of the Pen” from supporters of Farmer’s demand for Kennedy’s signature. It took Kennedy seventeen months to implement the attack on the nationwide practice of segregated housing and neighborhoods. He buried the announcement of the action in a news conference that dealt mainly with the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Three months earlier, to the dismay of party liberals, Kennedy had proposed his first civil rights bill. Instead of banning literacy tests—a major roadblock to Negro voters in the South—he offered a compromise: Voters would have to demonstrate a sixth-grade education. Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey urged for a more comprehensive attack on segregation. Unless the president acted, Humphrey warned that Republicans in New York would push civil rights to win over black voters. “When I feel that there’s necessity for congressional action with a chance of getting that congressional action, then I will recommend it to Congress,” Kennedy told Humphrey. It was a pragmatic approach that ducked Kennedy’s responsibility to act as the nation’s moral leader.
Kennedy also ignored civil rights leaders on judicial appointment in the South, where justice was brutal for blacks. Instead, the president and the attorney general deferred to Southern Democrats in the Senate who favored segregation. Kennedy installed four federal judges with records of racial prejudice on Southern benches; the most notorious was William Howard Cox, who was selected to preside in the Southern district of Mississippi in Jackson. He drew a bitter objection from Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“For 986,000 Mississippi Negroes, Judge Cox will be another strand in their barbed-wire fence, another cross to bear,” Wilkins said. He was right. In the first voting rights case before him, Cox characterized the plaintiffs as subhuman. “A bunch of niggers,” Cox said, “acting like a bunch of chimpanzees.”
While Kennedy risked loss of the white voters opposed to the civil rights movement, he was almost assured of the Negro vote in his reelection race in 1964—no matter the protests by King, Farmer, Roy Wilkins, and others. It was the old political axiom of the Democratic ward boss: Where else could they go? Republicans in Congress joined with conservative Southern Democrats to block civil rights legislation. In the 1960 presidential race, Nixon had gone on the stump and appeared in television commercials in an appeal to African-American voters. “This administration has made more progress on civil rights in the past eight years than in the preceding eighty years,” Nixon said. “I want to continue and speed up that progress.” The Republican position on civil rights stretched back to Abraham Lincoln. Even a small percentage of black votes in key states could swing things to Nixon. By contrast, Kennedy was muted on civil rights and depended on vice presidential candidate Johnson to curry the Southern vote.
Three weeks before the 1960 vote, Wofford advised Kennedy to intercede for King, who was arrested in Atlanta for protesting against segregation in department store restaurants. Using Georgia’s Jim Crow laws, the court sentenced King to four months of hard labor on a chain gang. Fearing her husband would be killed on some hidden byway, King’s wife, Coretta, called Wofford. Kennedy overruled Wofford, who pleaded for a campaign statement condemning the King sentence. But prodding by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver produced a concession: Kennedy agreed to telephone Coretta.
“What the hell,” Kennedy said. “That’s the decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.” Kennedy expressed concern and support, offering to do anything he could to help. The call lasted only two minutes. But word of the October 20 phone call—and Nixon’s silence—spread widely through Negro communities. King himself did not endorse Kennedy, but his father did. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. told his congregation at the Ebenezer Baptist Church “But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right,” Daddy King said to cheers and applause. “I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.” Two weeks later, Kennedy won 70 percent of the Negro vote, a 30 percent improvement from the previous presidential election. It certainly contributed to his narrow victory in Illinois. Kennedy won twenty-seven electoral votes by a razor-thin majority of 8,858 voters out of 4.7 million cast in Illinois. Kennedy also carried Georgia’s twelve electoral votes, where the blacks and the whites combined to make 62 percent of the vote. Kennedy somehow forgot to invite King to the presidential inauguration.
As president, he became angry at efforts to desegregate public accommodations pushed by other than civil rights leaders. African diplomats driving between New York and Washington along Route 40 found themselves expelled from Maryland restaurants below the Mason-Dixon line. Complaints to the State Department found their way to the Oval Office. “Can’t you tell these African ambassadors not to drive on Route 40?” Kennedy told Wofford. “It’s a hell of a road. I used to drive it years ago, but why would anyone want to drive it today when you can fly? Tell these ambassadors I wouldn’t think of driving from New York to Washington. Tell them to fly.”
Wofford and the in-house historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., were sometimes dismayed by Kennedy’s outlook. A “terrible ambivalence about civil rights,” Schlesinger wrote in his official biography, A Thousand Days. While Kennedy eventually came around, it was “a long and difficult presidential journey,” said Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s liberal speechwriter and author of another in-house biography, Kennedy. On civil rights, Kennedy was hard-nosed in 1961. The president had no interest in theories and was hardly the sort of intellectual that McGeorge Bundy knew as a Harvard dean before coming to the White House. “If you mean that he was a man with an uncommonly well-stocked mind and a high intelligence and a habit of believing that it was useful to apply intelligence to evidence—then he was that kind of man,” said Bundy, Kennedy’s national security affairs adviser. “He thought very much more concretely, and the word pragmatic is certainly right.”
King would get a heavy dose of Kennedy’s pragmatism. Wofford arranged for a ride up in the elevator to the family quarters. Such exclusive White House sessions were reserved to make the visitor feel very important. Wofford hoped to disarm King. “There was always a strain in his dealing with King, who came on with a moral tone that was not Kennedy’s style and made him uncomfortable,” Wofford said. The seduction ended when Kennedy laid it out for King: Banning federal mortgages for segregated housing would be delayed despite campaign promises. Civil rights legislation would be delayed so other priority proposals could get past Southern Democratic senators. Then there was the need to reelect Southern moderates and avoid the turmoil of desegregation. Kennedy was not about to expend political capital on King’s priorities. “The president candidly explained how he felt limited by the federal system in what he could do to protect civil rights workers in the South.” At the end of the session, Kennedy assured King of “his intention in due course to do most, if not all, of what King sought.” Just what “due course” meant was left unsaid.
At dinner that night at the Wofford home, King made clear his disappointment. To King, candidate Kennedy had the brains, political skill, and moral fervor to change the world for American Negroes. As president, he had changed. “Now I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill, but so far I’m afraid the moral passion is missing,” King said. He was done waiting for “due course.” King could go toe-to-toe with Kennedy with words, and his sermons in churches in Atlanta, Montgomery, and other Southern towns ignited a revolution among African-Americans. “There are three ways by which an oppressed people can respond to injustice,” King preached. “One is by acquiescence, but that involves acceptance of evil. Another is by violence, but as Christians we should not obey the old law of an eye for an eye. The way we must rise up is through nonviolence.”
By 1963, King had raised up the American conscience against Kennedy’s “due course” civil rights policies and had shattered the president’s political standing in both North and South. As with the Berlin Wall, Kennedy didn’t see it coming.