A First-Rate Madness (24 page)

 

 

BY 1962, Kennedy had bounced back internationally, but not yet domestically. Congress continually stalled most of his legislation into 1963. JFK then made a bold move. He added to his list of killed bills one more that his politically savvy vice president, Lyndon Johnson, thought had no chance: civil rights. Kennedy came to this conclusion not on political grounds, weighing the possibility of legislative or electoral success, but rather through moral and pragmatic considerations.

Robert Kennedy later described the pragmatic aspect, responding to civil rights marches in the South. We have two options, he said; either we send the military to protect the protesters, or we solve the cause of the protests: segregation laws. As with Cuba, Kennedy preferred political to military solutions.

The moral aspect is little appreciated and more complex. It is often said that JFK had little moral passion about civil rights, that he reacted to events rather than participating in them, that his hand was forced by King and others. There is a modicum of truth here. But it depends on which JFK we mean: the erratic JFK of 1961, or the resilient JFK of 1963?

In May 1961—just after the Bay of Pigs and just before the Vienna summit with Khrushchev—when the new president was at his most vertiginous, Martin Luther King was invited to the White House for a secret visit. King entered the White House through a side door; the men got to know each other personally, but nothing of consequence was decided. Robert Kennedy later reported that the Kennedys urged King to focus on voting rights rather than desegregation. Voting rights would be easier to pass in Congress, and eventually it would end desegregation. King demurred; he wanted desegregation as well as voting rights.

After the meeting, King came to this verdict: “In the election, when I gave my testimony for Kennedy, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership we've been waiting for and do what no President has ever done. 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 knew Kennedy was not ideologically opposed to civil rights, but as Kennedy put it, the president might agree with him but the government might not; and the government, specifically the southern-run Congress, was reluctant. King decided to compel Kennedy to lead.

King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staged protests in Albany, Georgia, for desegregation and voting rights; the Freedom Rides moved throughout the South, challenging segregation directly in restaurants and public spaces; and activists began to integrate the universities. Southern governors sent their troopers to harass and fight the protesters. Kennedy, through his brother Robert, watched carefully, and when needed sent federal government forces, usually National Guard units, to protect the protesters. A dangerous dance of quasi-military conflict was playing out between John Kennedy's federal government and southern states. This dance would soon come to a bloody end.

 

 

ON JANUARY 21, 1961, James Meredith, a young black man inspired by Kennedy's inaugural address the previous day, registered to attend the segregated University of Mississippi. After delaying tactics by the university, Meredith prepared to attend his first class on the Oxford, Mississippi, campus in September 1962. He announced that he had just bought a new gold Thunderbird and planned to drive it onto campus. The Mississippi governor sent state troopers to stop him. The president intervened, repeatedly calling the governor. Though Kennedy said he was executing the laws, not making them, everyone knew that presidents for generations, including great ones like Franklin Roosevelt, had not bothered to execute these laws. Indeed, being president involves, among other things, deciding which laws to enforce and which ones to ignore.

Kennedy wondered why the protests were mounting. He turned to his closest black adviser, Louis Martin, a newspaper publisher. “Negroes are getting ideas they didn't have before,” Kennedy said. “Where are you getting them?” “From you!” Martin replied.

The Mississippi governor promised that state troopers would be unarmed; Kennedy used a table that belonged to General Ulysses Grant to sign orders for federal troops to be available. (“Don't tell them about General Grant's table,” he warned an aide.) A Kennedy aide was on the scene in Oxford, Mississippi, reporting by telephone amid an angry crowd. The president asked what the crowd was chanting.

“Well, sir,” his aide stammered, “they're chanting: Go to hell, JFK!”

Kennedy, turning to his brother, winced.

Just when Kennedy was about to give a televised address calling for calm, some in the crowd began firing weapons. Meredith was shot in the leg, two bystanders were killed (one a French reporter), and the Mississippi state troopers, unarmed as promised, stood by and watched. Federal troops were nowhere to be seen. The president was furious. He stayed up all night trying frantically to get National Guard troops to the scene. “I haven't had such a good time since the Bay of Pigs,” he noted sarcastically. He called the nearest military base in Memphis, Tennessee. “People are dying in Oxford,” he told the general. “This is the worst thing I've seen in forty-five years.”

The president placed a phone call to Dr. Max Jacobsen, the “horsepiss” provider whom he had been secretly seeing since 1960. Come down here, Kennedy told him, this one is a ball-breaker. Jacobsen got on a private jet provided by the president and arrived at the White House that day.

 

 

THE MEREDITH SHOOTING was followed by the Birmingham protests and police chief Bull Connor's loosing of the dogs and fire hoses. All the world was watching. By June 1963, with another university showdown in process, this time in Alabama with Governor George Wallace literally standing in the schoolhouse door, Kennedy decided on something dramatic. Robert Kennedy later recounted that the president had planned a speech on civil rights, though he had not decided exactly when or how to deliver it. As with his second try in Cuba, JFK was better prepared in Alabama than he had been in Mississippi; this time federal troops were all over the campus. Five hundred state national guardsmen, mobilized by Wallace, drilled in front of the governor, shouting, “Yankee go home!” Legally, the president could take control of the National Guard from a governor, and JFK didn't hesitate to do so. He signed orders placing the National Guard under federal command; they now had to protect the students. If they did not, Kennedy had four hundred federal soldiers with helicopters waiting to be airlifted immediately to the scene. Wallace stood in the doorway; Robert Kennedy's deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, walked up and asked him to stand aside. Wallace gave a speech—and then stood aside.

Now that Alabama had desegregated its university without violence, the president decided to take advantage of the moment and give his long-awaited civil rights speech. The problem was, with all that had been happening, his staff hadn't prepared a speech. Wallace had stepped aside about noon. Kennedy would be on television at 8 p.m. In the intervening hours, the president, Robert, speechwriter Ted Sorensen, and Burke Marshall, a civil rights aide, frantically worked on the speech that, as Sorenson said later, they knew would be their most important since the inauguration.

They didn't finish in time. By 8 p.m., the speech was mostly done, but some of it was still on the back of envelopes; Kennedy went ahead with a plan to ad-lib as needed.

He began by recounting the events of the day in Alabama, and then continued, “I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this. . . . When Americans are sent to Viet Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. . . . This is not a sectional issue. . . . Nor is this a partisan issue. . . . This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. . . . We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”

He made a clear appeal based on political empathy, the core of King's philosophy: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him . . . then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay? We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people.” He then dropped a bombshell, calling for new civil rights laws that would end segregation and extend voting rights to blacks. He had not prepared any such legislation; he announced it before he wrote it. This was an act of passion—moral passion. King's original hopes for JFK had been fulfilled at last.

That night, four hours after Kennedy's speech, Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, was murdered.

Kennedy knew there was no way he could pass desegregation and voting rights in the Congress. He knew he would lose the southern states in 1964. This was no political calculation. Kennedy knew what he was giving up. This bold move was simply bad politics. Said Burke Marshall, “Every single person who spoke about it in the White House—every one of them—was against President Kennedy sending up that bill; against his speech in June; against making it a moral issue; against the March on Washington.” The exception, Marshall said, was Robert Kennedy: “He urged it, he felt it, he understood it. And he prevailed. I don't think there was anybody in the Cabinet—except the President himself—who felt that way on these issues, and the President got it from his brother.”

Within a few weeks, after Evers's funeral, the president invited his widow and his young children to stay at the White House. Another emotional move from the hyperthymic president: If you kill a black man out of hatred for his race, Kennedy was saying, I'll invite his family to the White House.

 

 

IN THE SUMMER of 1963, after finally sending federal troops to support civil rights marches in Alabama and Mississippi, Kennedy initially tried to dissuade civil rights leaders from conducting a planned March on Washington to pressure the Congress to pass Kennedy's new civil rights bill. Too much could go wrong: Kennedy remembered Oxford, Mississippi. But when he couldn't stop them, Kennedy decided to join them. The White House practically took over the whole affair. Kennedy and his staff identified the site for the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial, not just for its symbolism but because, surrounded by water on three sides, it was an ideal venue for crowd control. Kennedy's men installed and controlled the sound system so that they could cut it off at a moment's notice. The White House established the route of the march, keeping it very short, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, and completely limited to the National Mall area, with police on all sides. Kennedy insisted the event occur on a Wednesday, so as to avoid spilling into the weekend, and that it be relatively short, from noon to 4 p.m., with each speech limited to seven minutes.

The organizers even invited the president to speak, but wanting deniability in case the march went awry, he declined. Still, Kennedy himself reviewed and even edited the addresses of the speakers. He changed a line in student leader John Lewis's speech from “We cannot support the Administration's civil rights bill” to “It is true we support the Administration's Civil Rights bill in Congress. We support it with great reservations, however.” He also asked Lewis to remove an analogy between the civil rights marchers and General Sherman marching through the South.

Each speaker stuck to the seven-minute limit—except the last. Martin Luther King went on for nineteen rapturous minutes, and when he had finished detailing his mesmerizing dream, the president, watching on television, commented, “He's damned good . . . Damned good!”

Thirty minutes later, King and the other leaders were in the White House. Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, gave credit to Kennedy: “You made the difference. You gave us your blessings. It was one of the prime factors in turning it into an orderly protest to help our government rather than a protest against our government.” Three months later, after the president was dead, King revised his earlier judgment about Kennedy's lack of moral passion. JFK “frankly acknowledged that he was responding to mass demands,” said King, but that was not all. Kennedy could have ignored or impeded the protesters; instead he helped them “because he thought it was right to do so,” King concluded. “This is the secret of the deep affection he evoked. He was responsive, sensitive, humble before the people, and bold on their behalf.”

No one could know that this moment of triumph was to be a bittersweet coda. Kennedy thanked the march leaders—and Bull Connor—for making it all possible. Then the president turned to King, extended his hand, and whispered, “I have a dream.”

It was a dream conjured up by a depressed leader, and realized by a manic one.

 

 

IN HER 1966 ORAL HISTORY, Dr. Janet Travell took offense when Ted Sorensen used the word “drugs” for Kennedy's medications; they were physiological replacements of his normal bodily chemicals, she said. We should set the historical record right, Travell insisted, falsely: John Kennedy never took “drugs.” Not only did John Kennedy take drugs, he took plenty of them, many with psychotropic properties; and he eventually benefited from them. Doctors know that drugs are not inherently good or bad; it is
how
they are used—for what purposes and in what doses—that makes them beneficial or harmful. For Kennedy in his last years, under the watchful eye of Dr. Burkley, the benefits outweighed the harms.

Perhaps the most honest judgment was made in a brief, peculiar comment in the last note written, on November 29, 1963, after the president's death, by his urologist, William Herbst. After Travell requested that he send the president's medical records, Herbst expressed some resistance, and then penned one brief final note on the records, presumably for posterity: “It is my considered opinion,” he wrote, “that John F. Kennedy experienced a profound psychochemical influence for the better in a spectacular way. This is not an uncommon clinical phenomenon.”