American Experiment (352 page)

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes … ?”

Eight days later the President asked Congress for measures to ban the segregation of public facilities, give the Attorney General authority to initiate proceedings against the segregation of schools, expand educational and training programs, grant a permanent statutory basis for his Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. While Kennedy renewed
the voting rights recommendations he had urged in February, the heart of the June 1963 proposals lay in their antisegregation provisions. Still divided themselves over whether desegregation or voting rights was the better strategy, black leaders were disappointed that the President did not ask for more—but grimly determined that he would at least get what he asked.

As the engines of delay and deadlock were wheeled into action on the Hill, the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership, a coalition of the “Big Six”—the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young of the Urban League, Martin Luther King, James Farmer of CORE, SNCC executive secretary James Forman (rotating with SNCC’s chair, John Lewis), and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women—debated how to put pressure on Congress. At an earlier leadership meeting, it was recalled, the revered labor leader A. Philip Randolph had proposed that the Big Six organize a massive march on Washington; after all, Randolph’s mere threat to invade the capital back in 1941 had pushed FDR into banning discrimination in war industries. The leaders seized on a “march for jobs and freedom” that would unify all factions of the movement.

They conferred with the President, who was cool to the idea, fearing that it would give members of Congress an easy way out by charging intimidation. It was, he suggested, ill-timed.

“It may seem ill-timed,” King said. “Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed.” The leaders resolved to go ahead.

August 28, 1963, the Mall, Washington, D.C.
A quarter of a million people, black and white together, gathered in the summer heat at the Washington Monument and then surged forth to the Lincoln Memorial. They had come on buses and trains, many from the Deep South. Large contingents represented white religious faiths and, despite lack of backing by the AFL-CIO, many labor unions. Haunting freedom songs—“We Shall Overcome” sung by Joan Baez, “Oh, Freedom!” by Odetta—blended with speeches by the civil rights leadership. SNCC’s John Lewis pierced the uplifting mood by denouncing the inadequacy of conventional liberalism and Kennedy’s legislative program to complete “the unfinished revolution of 1776.”

Around midafternoon Martin Luther King stood beneath the brooding face of Abraham Lincoln. Inspired by the sea of upturned black and white faces, he left his carefully crafted text and in rippling cadences and rich colors, he painted his vibrant dream of racial justice. Repeatedly invoking his phrase, “I have a
dream,
”
\
responding to the people in rhythm with him,
he implored that freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire, the mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, and even more, from Georgia’s Stone Mountain. “Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountain top, let freedom ring.

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and from every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

A euphoric group of blacks, save for Coretta King, who to her distress was left to repair to her hotel room, met with the President following the rally. Having first opposed the march and then cooperated with it—to the point, some militants charged, of cooptation—Kennedy now shared in the moment of relief and triumph. He was “bubbling over with the success of the event,” Wilkins recalled. But out on the Mall some blacks remained skeptical and even cynical. Listening to King, young activist Anne Moody had told herself that back in Mississippi they had never had time to sleep, much less dream. An angry black man had shouted: “Fuck that dream, Martin. Now, goddamit, NOW!”

It was a luminous moment in a season of death and despair. The very evening of Kennedy’s June television address, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been shot down as he returned to his home in Mississippi; later the President consoled the Evers family in the White House. By the end of the summer nearly 14,000 persons had been arrested in seventy-five cities in the South alone. Two weeks after the March, on a Sunday morning, a dynamite bomb exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a center of the spring crusade, killing four black girls as they were donning their choir robes.

During some of the tense days of school and university integration a few Americans North and South had dreamt their own special dream—that the President of the United States would walk hand in hand with two small black children toward a schoolhouse door, or that John F. Kennedy rather than a subordinate federal official would stand up to a southern governor at a university registration place. Even if the Secret Service had approved this risky act, JFK would never have favored such a melodramatic gesture. But in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of fall 1963 he was willing to venture into politically hostile land. This was Texas, some of whose cities harbored not only extreme racists but fanatical rightists, anti-Castro Cubans, Puerto Rican nationalists, black militants, violent leftists. Dallas, a
center of Texas politics and finance, was also a center of hatred. There Lyndon B. Johnson himself had been beset by a hostile crowd during the 1960 campaign; there Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon earlier this very fall. Stevenson had been shown handbills screaming
WANTED FOR TREASON
under a photograph of Kennedy.

The President would journey to Texas not to confront Southerners over civil rights but to seek common ground. So in San Antonio he would visit the new Aero-Space Medical Health Center and greet crowds of Mexican-Americans. In Houston he would talk to Latin American citizens about the Alliance for Progress. In Fort Worth he would discuss his defense program, which not coincidentally had brought huge contracts to General Dynamics and other corporations located in Texas. In Dallas at the Trade Mart he intended to describe the Administration’s pro-business policies to Texas business leaders. In all these places he would seek to recognize his congressional and other supporters, placate rival factions in the Texas Democracy, raise money for his own reelection campaign. Told by a southern friend that he was about to enter a hornet’s nest, Kennedy said drily, “Well, that’ll add interest.”

And so San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, in lovely weather before exuberant crowds. Then Dallas, the cavalcade, the open presidential limousine, the sharp turn left where the Texas School Book Depository overlooked Dealey Plaza, the unerring bullets …

The searing, the exalting events of the twentieth century had left millions of Americans with memories of just where they had been, what they had been doing, when they heard the news—of Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, of Roosevelt’s bank holiday, of Pearl Harbor, of Hiroshima or the war’s end. But nothing so riveted the memory as the horrifying news from Dallas. (This author was teaching a class in American government in a basement room of the First Congregational Church of Williamstown, Massachusetts, when a student came to the door with an early report of Kennedy’s wounding; the class continued in a half-daze, then broke up in shocked incredulity when someone burst in with the wrenching second report.) The earlier unforgettable events had been understandable, they had made some sense. Kennedy’s death seemed inexplicable, senseless. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to an interviewer: “You know the French author Camus—he said the world was absurd. A Christian couldn’t think that, but the utter senselessness, the meaninglessness … We all of us know down here that politics is a tough game. And I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.… Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young
again.’ ” Searching for meaning, people looked for a conspiracy, villains, motives.

Investigations, official findings on the assassination, did not satisfy most Americans, nor did the passage of time put the event into a comfortable perspective. But John Kennedy, a fatalist who had lost a brother and a sister in aircraft tragedies, might have seen Dallas only as the ultimate proof of his favorite adage: “Life is unfair.” So was death.

John Kennedy had planned on almost three thousand days in office; he was given a third of that. Lincoln and McKinley had enjoyed at least full first terms and the satisfaction of reelections. It was the brutal cutting off of a young leader of a young administration that appalled people. After earlier mishaps, he had been coming into the fullness not only of his presidential power but of personal fulfillment. He had told a friend some months before his presidential campaign that while some people had their liberalism “made” by their late twenties, “I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.”

Still caught in these crosscurrents, the President for a year or two seemed to be four persons: a rhetorical radical delivering the ringing speeches Theodore Sorensen and others prepared for him; the policy liberal carefully husbanding his power and weighing the balance of interests and attitudes; the fiscal conservative, always intent, like FDR, on balancing the budget and, like FDR, always failing; and the institutional conservative who accepted the constraints around him and planned on vitalizing the torpid governmental system by jolts of New Frontier electricity. These four Kennedys could not coexist for long and they did not; toward the end the eloquent leader was moving the policy liberal toward stronger positions and toward Keynesian economics, although not toward any assault on the institutional chains and checks.

Watching Kennedy during his early presidential months, pundits and politicians noted his calculating approach to politics and policy, his personal self-control and self-containment. Civil rights posed the great test of these qualities. For two years he and his brother Robert had analyzed the mounting struggle in the South by the same standards as they had conventional and quantifiable problems like taxation or Social Security. Just as the policies and priorities could be weighed and balanced off against one another, so the prescriptions could be measured out in droplets—for southern blacks, voter education and registration programs, case-by-case litigation, step-by-step policy making.

The passion in the black movement, in contrast, was beyond calculation.
By Kennedy’s third year in office that passion could not be contained. When Birmingham and other flash points threatened to burst into flames, King warned the Administration that it was at a “historic crossroad” and now it must face “its moral commitment and with it, its political fortunes.” Kennedy the rhetorical radical must come across. Within a few weeks Kennedy recognized the “moral crisis” that could not be met by repression or tokenism. Still, the leadership had come from the bottom, from Rosa Parks and all her counterparts across the South who had acted while others preached. They created the events that in turn moved the Administration. The White House had mainly reacted.

These leaders had given Kennedy, indeed the whole nation, a lesson in freedom. For Kennedy freedom had meant Bill of Rights liberties, constitutional procedures, liberal tolerance. For blacks freedom meant also self-expression, self-respect, dignity, status, power. They had their own language of freedom—they talked about freedom rides, freedom songs, freedom schools, the freedom movement. They were following Ella Baker’s cardinal principle: “
You must let the oppressed themselves define their own freedom.
” In the end it was not his Irish-American heritage but civil rights principles backed up by black pressure that moved John Kennedy toward an expanded concept of freedom.

An eager lover of life and fun and paradox, a man of rationality and restraint and realism, he had only an amused contempt for the theatrical gesture, the sentimental idealist, the quixotic hero. This made the cause of his death—the smashing, blinding bullets arching out of nowhere—all the more incomprehensible, all the more unbearable to those who had known and loved him.

Lyndon B. Johnson lost no time in taking the oath of office, grasping firmly the reins of power, and making passage of the civil rights bill his top legislative priority. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he told Congress in a brief address five days after the assassination. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” This was the kind of talk black leaders wanted to hear—and had not expected to hear from the Johnson they had known.

But it was Congress that passed the laws, and Congress on civil rights continued to provide a masterly example of American government in inaction. The civil rights bill was still in the hands of the House Rules Committee, chaired by Judge Howard W. Smith, the venerable Virginian
who had led the counterattack against FDR’s New Deal in the late 1930s. At a critical moment during the combat over the 1957 civil rights bill he had delayed consideration by discovering that he must return home to inspect a barn that had burned, upon which Speaker Rayburn quipped that although he knew Howard Smith would do anything to block a civil rights bill, “I never knew he would resort to arson.” Finally opening proceedings before the Rules Committee in January 1964, he proved that he had not exhausted his parliamentary bag of tricks when he scheduled day after day of hearings on what he called this “nefarious bill.” At last voted out of the Rules Committee, the measure had then to run the House gantlet of days of debate on complex provisions and amendments. Smith threw male members of the House into confusion by moving to add the word “sex” to the list of forbidden discriminations—race, creed, color, and national origin. Designed more to kill the bill than to promote equal rights for women, his amendment prevailed after vigorous lobbying by the National Women’s Party.