An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (37 page)

BUT WINNING SOUTHERN SUPPORT
for the 1960 nomination was much more complicated than writing a letter. Since 1955 the Democrats had been in control of the Senate, where Lyndon Johnson had become majority leader and Mississippi’s James Eastland chaired the Judiciary Committee, which had blocked civil rights legislation from reaching the floor. In 1957, it was clear to congressional leaders, including Johnson and other southerners, that pressure from southern blacks led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), coupled with Supreme Court decisions mandating desegregation of public schools and integration of the Columbia, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama, municipal bus systems, made changes in race relations across the South inevitable, including possible passage of a civil rights law. The only question was how fast and far-reaching these changes would be. Johnson, who was also planning on running for president, understood that he could never win the White House unless he established himself as a national leader supportive of reforms giving African Americans full constitutional rights. James Rowe, LBJ’s old New Deal friend, urged him to lead a civil rights bill through Congress that would give him “all the credit for . . . a compromise . . . with the emphasis in the South on compromise, and emphasis in the North on getting a bill.”

Both Johnson and Kennedy saw such a political strategy as the best way to advance their presidential ambitions. For his part, Jack’s interest in civil rights was more political than moral. The only blacks he knew were chauffeurs, valets, or domestics, with whom he had minimal contact. He was not insensitive to the human and legal abuses of segregation, but as Sorensen wrote later, in the fifties he was “shaped primarily by political expedience instead of basic human principles.” He could not empathize, and only faintly sympathize, with the pains felt by African Americans. He did not even consider an aggressive challenge to deeply ingrained southern racial attitudes, and he was far from alone. No one could imagine southerners again rising up in armed rebellion, but threats to the traditional mores seemed certain to provoke enough rage to discourage most white Americans from wanting to combat southern racism. Unlike Hubert Humphrey, another rival for the White House, who had a long-standing, visceral commitment to ending segregation, or even LBJ, whose political actions masked a sincere opposition to segregation, Jack Kennedy’s response to the great civil rights debates of 1957-60 was largely motivated by self-serving political considerations.

In 1956-57, Jack mapped out a strategy for accommodating all factions of the Democratic party on civil rights, including black voters, who were seen in the late fifties as holding “the balance of power in the big states where elections are won or lost.” Yet his concern with political expediency sometimes resulted in contradictions and tangles. During an October 1956
Meet the Press
interview, when the host asked Jack why African American voters should want to see Democratic congressional majorities, which would lead in turn to southern committee chairmen blocking civil rights legislation, Jack replied that Congress could bypass an obstructionist committee and that his party’s record of favoring economic and social reforms beneficial to low-income Americans gave it a claim on black voters. But in 1957, when a civil rights bill came to the Senate from the House, Jack opposed bypassing the Judiciary Committee, where Eastland was certain to table it. Jack said his opposition to invoking Rule XIV, a little-used device for bringing a bill directly to the Senate floor, rested on the belief that this was a “highly questionable legislative course” that would give up “one of our maximum protections” against arbitrary action. It was a “dangerous precedent,” he told NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins, “which can be used against our causes and other liberal issues in the future.” Instead, he favored the conventional but more difficult use of a discharge petition to bring the bill to the Senate floor. Knowing that civil rights advocates would win the discharge petition fight, which they did by a 45-39 vote, Jack felt free to side with the southerners. And because four liberal western Democrats joined the minority (trading their votes for southern support of the Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake River in Idaho, a controversial public power project), it gave Jack some cover with liberals.

Not surprisingly, civil rights proponents began attacking Kennedy for having sided with the South. In response, he leapt into a Senate debate about Titles III and IV of the House bill, which gave the attorney general broad powers. Southerners complained that the Title III provision would allow “the reimposition of post-Civil War Reconstruction,” specifically military intervention to enforce school desegregation. They also objected to Title IV, which sanctioned trials by federal judges without juries to punish defiance of the law. Aware that Title III was too radical to win a Senate majority, Jack felt free to favor it publicly. Thus, when a southern-moderate coalition eliminated the provision by a vote of 52-38, Jack reestablished his credibility with liberals while losing little ground with southern conservatives, who read his vote as a bow to northern interests essential to his political future—again, hardly a profile in political courage.

Elimination of Title III turned the bill into a voting rights act, and the issue that now divided supporters and opponents was whether violators of someone’s right to vote should be entitled to a jury trial. Advocates of the bill had no confidence that southern white juries would convict registrars barring blacks from the polls. In order to assuage liberals, Johnson agreed to omit jury trials in civil contempt cases while insisting that it apply to criminal proceedings. He also agreed to an amendment guaranteeing “the right of
all
Americans to serve on [federal] juries, regardless of race, creed, or color.”

The battle over the jury trial amendment drew considerable attention and put Jack in a difficult position. Only after consulting several legal experts and the addition of the amendment promising interracial juries did Jack declare his support of jury trials, which he saw as the only way to enact the civil rights bill: A vote against jury trials, he said, would have provoked a filibuster that would have been “impossible” to defeat with cloture (the two-thirds vote needed for ending a filibuster). A majority of his Senate colleagues, who approved the jury trial amendment by a vote of 51-42, agreed.

Not surprisingly, enactment of the law brought an outpouring of criticism from civil rights advocates. The bill was a “mere fakery,” a policeman’s gun without bullets, and “like soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.” They were right: two years later, not a single southern black had been added to the voting rolls and nothing had been accomplished for other civil rights. Yet some civil rights proponents saw reason for optimism. The law marked the first time since Reconstruction that Congress had acted to protect civil rights. Bayard Rustin saw the measure as establishing “a very important precedent.” And George Reedy, LBJ’s Senate aide, said the act was “a watershed. . . . A major branch of the American government that had been closed to minority members of the population seeking redress for wrongs was suddenly open. The civil rights battle could now be fought out legislatively in an arena that previously had provided nothing but a sounding board for speeches.”

Kennedy himself received a lot of criticism. (“Why not show a little less profile and a little more courage?” one Senate colleague asked.) Although his vote allowed him, in the view of one journalist, to maintain a “stout” bridge to the South and border states, it opened him to additional attacks from liberals. Roy Wilkins publicly berated Jack for “rubbing political elbows” with southern segregationists, and in private exchanges initiated by Jack, he continued to criticize him for his jury trial vote. Jack told Wilkins that he could not understand why he was being singled out from the nearly three dozen non-southerner senators who voted for jury trials. The answer was simple and could hardly have escaped Jack’s notice: None of the others was running for president, and given Kennedy’s southern ties, no black leader had much confidence that a Kennedy presidency would produce significant advances against segregation.

To Jack’s satisfaction, events in September muted the criticism. When Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent integration of Little Rock’s Central High School and Eisenhower had to federalize the Arkansas Guard to keep the peace and enforce Court injunctions, it made Johnson and Kennedy seem like sensible moderates trying to advance equal treatment of blacks and national harmony through the rule of law. Jack reinforced his image as a centrist during a speaking engagement in Mississippi in October. At the end of a speech urging moderation and national unity, he responded to a query published in the press from the state Republican chairman about Kennedy’s vote for Title III. Jack said, “I think most of us agree on the necessity to uphold law and order in every part of the land. Now I invite the Republican chairman to tell us his views and those of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon.” The audience cheered him.

IN DECEMBER 1956
, Bobby Kennedy, who was serving as counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, agreed to look into labor racketeering, particularly among the Teamsters. During the family’s Christmas get-together in Hyannis Port, Joe attacked Bobby for jeopardizing Jack’s labor support in 1960. The “father and son had an unprecedentedly furious argument.” But Bobby would not budge. And after Joe’s urging, William O. Douglas failed to dissuade Bobby as well, telling his wife that Bobby “feels it is too great an opportunity.”

For Bobby, an intensely moralistic man with an “exacting sense of individual responsibility,” the investigation was a chance to eliminate some of the rampant corruption that had taken hold in unions. No small part of his commitment was to the rank and file being cheated and abused by crooked and violent labor bosses. But these noble ends might produce restrictive legislation that could turn unions against his brother. “If the investigation flops,” Bobby told Kenny O’Donnell, “it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too. . . . A lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”

Yet Jack’s vulnerability came more from his own doing than from anything Bobby did. Lyndon Johnson, Bobby recalled, had warned Jack against taking on labor if he was serious about running in 1960. But Jack decided to accept assignment as a member of the joint investigations and labor subcommittee probing the unions. Jack claimed he did so at his brother’s urging, to preserve its balance between conservatives and moderates—hardly a compelling reason to risk his chances in 1960.

Yet Jack and Bobby believed that their involvement in the investigation promised greater political gains than losses. They were right. For one, it would keep Jack’s name before the public and, regardless of the outcome, identify him with a good cause. The Kennedys also remembered that Senate committee investigations of war profiteering and organized crime had made Harry Truman and Estes Kefauver, respectively, nationally known political figures. Moreover, in the 1950s, labor unions, which were identified with unsavory characters such as Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, were an inviting target for an aspiring politician. Indeed, the contrast between Jack and Bobby on one side and Beck and Hoffa on the other was a political bonanza. When Beck was convicted of stealing almost $500,000 from union coffers, including money taken “from a trust fund set up for a friend’s widow,” the Kennedys were in turn identified with union honesty. Hoffa, who escaped going to jail in the fifties, was a more elusive target. But his public image as a ruthless bully more interested in maintaining control than in representing rank-and-file opinion made him a perfect foil for Jack and Bobby. (In the summer of 1959, a seven-part series in the
Saturday Evening Post,
“The Struggle to Get Hoffa,” burnished Jack’s and Bobby’s image as union reformers.) Even if the unions saw themselves as injured by an investigation Jack supported, he was able to win wider public approval as a senator who, like the heroes of his book, put the country above personal political gain. The brothers had correctly perceived that LBJ’s advice was largely self-serving. As a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Johnson was less concerned with protecting Jack from losing labor support than with deterring him from being identified as a successful union critic.

The prospect of enacting a Kennedy labor reform bill also drew Jack and Bobby to the controversy. After five years in the Senate, Jack had not attached his name to any major piece of legislation. But partisan politics blunted Jack and Bobby’s efforts to advance labor reform. In March 1958, after months of hearings by the McClellan Committee and extensive consultations with leading university experts on labor relations, Jack introduced a bill to prevent the expenditure of union dues for improper purposes or private gain; to forbid loans from union funds for illicit transactions; and to compel audits of unions, which would ensure against false financial reports. Initially, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, objected to the bill as singling out unions for regulations that could also be applied to government officials and corporate chiefs. (When Jack gave Meany the names of the experts who had helped him draft the legislation, Meany replied, “God save us from our friends.”) Amendments to the legislation and public assurances from Jack that he wished to strengthen unions largely eliminated differences with Meany, but the bill failed anyway. Opposed by the National Association of Manufacturers and Eisenhower’s labor secretary, James P. Mitchell, as too pro-labor, and the Teamsters and United Mine Workers as too draconian, Kennedy-Ives (Jack’s New York Republican cosponsor) passed the Senate but was shelved in the House. “Jimmy Hoffa can rejoice at his continued good luck,” Kennedy announced. “Honest union members and the general public can only regard it as a tragedy that politics has prevented the recommendations of the McClellan committee from being carried out this year.”