Kennedy (85 page)

In fact, when he talked privately about Negroes at all in those days, it was usually about winning Negro votes. He talked privately that way about every group—Poles, farmers, Jews, veterans, the aged, suburbanites or any other. To him Negroes were no different from anyone else. He did not treat them differently, look at them differently or speak of them differently. They were not set aside as a Special Problem or singled out as a special group—he simply sought their votes along with those of everyone else.

Politics, in fact, helped to deepen his concern. He was a good politician—and in the 1960 convention and election Negroes more than most groups were his political friends and their enemies were often his enemies. As he became a national figure, his compassion for the problems of his “constituents” took in a far larger proportion of Negroes
than it had in Massachusetts. Harris Wofford, who had previously worked for the Civil Rights Commission, supplied him with some statistics for the campaign which shocked and offended him. He used them in his opening debate with Nixon (just as, nearly three years later, he would use them in his February, 1963, Civil Rights Message and in his June, 1963, address to the nation):

His assumption of the powers of the Presidency accelerated the change in his outlook. As a strong President, he had no intention of permitting Southern governors and others to defy the courts and his office. He was freedom’s spokesman—and he recognized the stain on American freedom which race repression represented. He was concerned about the unemployed and the underpaid, the school dropouts and the slum dwellers—and he realized that Negroes were forced into those categories in greater proportions than all others. Racial discrimination was divisive and wasteful—and John Kennedy believed in national unity and strength. It was irrational and he was logical. It was undemocratic and he was a democrat, even before he was a Democrat. It was an historic challenge, a dangerous and unpopular controversy, the nation’s most critical domestic problem—and he was a President determined to meet every challenge and to leave his mark.

Above all, he was motivated by a deep sense of justice and fair play. “I do not say that all men are equal in their ability, their character or their motivation,” he declared more than once, “but I say they should be equal in their chance to develop their character, their motivation and their ability. They should be given a fair chance to develop all the talents that they have.” His instinctive inability to be bound by artificial and arbitrary distinctions had in 1953 caused him to pay little attention to the Negro as a Negro. In 1963 it caused him to pay little attention to those unwilling to accept his basic commitment to fair play. Simple justice requires this program, he would tell the Congress in concluding his Civil Rights Message of June 19, 1963, “not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquillity—but, above all, because it is right.”

A long and difficult Presidential journey had preceded that June, 1963, message, and it began on January 20, 1961, as John Kennedy sat in the cold and frosty stands in front of the White House reviewing the Inaugural Parade. There were, he noted, among all the floats and bands that marched before him, no dark faces in the honor guard of the Coast Guard. That night he placed a call to Treasury Secretary Dillon, whose department had jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. Special recruiting efforts would be required, but the Coast Guard Academy in 1962 would have the first Negro student in its eighty-six-year history.

At his first Cabinet meeting the following week, the President mentioned the incident; and he asked each Cabinet member to examine the situation in his own department. He stressed that he was not interested merely in numbers but in opportunity at all levels—in the Foreign Service, for example, and in the top policy, professional and supervisory positions. Among his own earliest appointees were Associate Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher and Housing and Home Finance Administrator Robert Weaver, both “firsts” for their race.

During the next one hundred and the next one thousand days, the President’s admonition was heeded. For the first time Negroes were named as ambassadors to European as well as to African nations, as United States Attorneys and as a Commissioner of the District of Columbia. (The U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia was the first Negro in that position since Frederick Douglass nearly a century earlier.) More Negroes were appointed to top Federal jobs than at any time in history—including a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, an Assistant Secretary of Labor and members of several boards and commissions. The number of Negroes serving in top professional or supervisory positions multiplied in most departments. In the Department of Justice, for example, the number of Negro attorneys rose from ten to more than seventy. Some of these new appointees were promoted from within. Others were invited through special recruitment programs and regional conferences undertaken by the Civil Service Commission, Foreign Service and other agencies.

Kennedy also appointed five lifetime Federal judges from Negro ranks, more than any other President in history, including the first two to be named district judges in the continental United States. He named the nation’s (and NAACP’s) leading Negro lawyer, the brilliant Thurgood Marshall, to the Court of Appeals. He named three others, including the first Negro woman jurist (Mrs. Marjorie Lawson, his early campaign aide), to the District of Columbia bench—altogether nearly half the Negro judges ever nominated by the White House. (The appointment of
judges in the South whose records were not always pleasing to the President was not, it should be emphasized, the result of a
quid pro quo
with Southern Senators, although the operation of “Senatorial courtesy” limited his choice in one state rather severely. No names were forwarded by the Department of Justice to the President until investigation indicated that the prospective judges would abide by the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. At least two mistakes of judgment were made in this process. But those judges on the whole, said the President, “sharing, perhaps, as they do, the general outlook of the South, have done a remarkable job in fulfilling their oath of office.”)

Early in the transition Kennedy had asked Vice President Johnson to head his committees on nondiscrimination in government contracts and employment and to review how their powers could be strengthened. A new Executive Order in March combined the old Committees on Government Contracts and Employment into a single President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. Its extended jurisdiction and sanctions covered some twenty million employees, a sizable proportion of the labor force. It had more power, personnel and funds than its predecessors. With simplified complaint procedures and regular reports, it adjudicated several hundred more cases in its first eighteen months than its predecessors had handled in six years. Through voluntary “Plans for Progress” it covered plants and unions not included in the Executive Order. (Because these plans were conceived and advanced by a persuasive Southerner, Robert Troutman, the President had to ward off the suspicions of civil rights advocates convinced they were meaningless and eventually had to accept Troutman’s resignation. But the success of the idea vindicated his confidence in Troutman.)

No contracts were canceled. From time to time the President and Attorney General were dissatisfied with the committee’s pace and skeptical of its glowing statistics. But major breakthroughs were made—in textile mills where Negroes had only been sweepers, in aircraft plants where they had been told not to apply, in thousands of new jobs and supervisory positions.

In all this whirlwind of activity—in the areas of Negro voting rights and education as well as employment—one ingredient was missing: legislation. It was missing throughout 1961, except for a largely routine extension of the Civil Rights Commission. It was confined in 1962 to two efforts in the voting rights area—the prevention of discriminatory literacy tests and the abolition by constitutional amendment of poll taxes. Hope for the first measure was lost in the Senate when failure to obtain even a majority vote for cloture (which requires a two-thirds vote) made two facts abundantly clear: (1) that it could not pass without virtually unanimous Republican support, which was not forthcoming; and (2)
that a filibuster would kill most of the President’s other legislative proposals, including those which could provide better housing and more jobs for both Negro and white. The ban on poll taxes in Federal elections, which had been sought for twenty years and for which the President had cast one of his first votes as a freshman Congressman in 1947, finally passed both houses, was pushed by the President and Democratic National Committee in the state legislatures, and became the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The number of Negroes and less affluent whites enabled to vote by that measure alone, the President believed, could make a difference in his 1964 re-election race in Texas and Virginia.

But for two years no other civil rights measures were sought or enacted. Bills originating in the Congress were endorsed by administration witnesses, thus technically fulfilling the pledges of the 1960 platform, but none of these was adopted or pressed by the President as his own. The reason was arithmetic. The August, 1960, defeat of civil rights measures in the more liberal Eighty-sixth Congress—as well as the voting patterns in January of 1961 in the Rules Committee fight in the House and the cloture rule fight in the Senate—all made it obvious that no amount of Presidential pressure could put through the Eighty-seventh Congress a meaningful legislative package on civil rights. The votes were lacking in the House to get it through or around the Rules Committee. They were lacking in the Senate to outlast or shut off a filibuster. In view of solid Southern Democratic intransigence, greater Republican and Western Democratic support was required, and with no broad public interest in such legislation outside of the various civil rights organizations, that support was not obtainable.
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The choice confronting the President was clear. He could put forward and fight for bold proposals anyway, without any prospects for their passage, and with some risk of jeopardizing other legislation, or he could accept criticism for failing to carry out the platform by confining himself to an expansion of executive actions, as his campaign speeches had in fact emphasized.

It was not an easy choice. The President knew that legislative proposals had been promised and expected. He knew that the token gradualism of the preceding years was insufficient. “But a lot of talk and no results will only make them madder,” he said to me after one civil rights delegation had left his office. “If we drive Sparkman, Hill and other moderate Southerners to the wall with a lot of civil rights demands that can’t pass anyway, then what happens to the Negro on minimum wages,
housing and the rest?” To solidify the conservative coalition—by presenting an issue on which Southerners had traditionally sought Republican support in exchange for Southern opposition to other measures—could doom his whole program. To provoke a bitter national controversy without achieving any gain would divide the American people at a time when the international scene required maximum unity.

There was no “deal” with Southern Congressmen. There was no disagreement with Negro leaders over the need for legislation. There was no indifference to campaign pledges. But success required selectivity. Kennedy had won the Presidency by attacking Nixon, not Eisenhower, and by taking on Humphrey in Wisconsin, not South Dakota. He would take on civil rights at the right time on the right issue. “When I believe we can usefully move ahead in the field of legislation,” said the President at his news conference, “when I feel that there is a necessity for Congressional action,
with a chance of getting that Congressional action
, then I will recommend it.”

Negro leaders also talked of by-passing the Congress, which had historically been more of a burial ground than a battleground for civil rights legislation. They also talked of promoting equal voting, education, employment and other opportunities through increased executive effort. NAACP Chairman Roy Wilkins presented to me in February, 1961, at the President’s request, a sixty-one-page memorandum which offered new areas for executive action. Martin Luther King presented a still longer document. Both talked in terms of an across-the-board Executive Order or “Second Emancipation Proclamation” on or before the hundredth anniversary of the first.
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These leaders could not, however, publicly accept the President’s decision not to wage a losing fight for legislation. None of them thought a bill could pass, but they had to respond to their constituencies, and they seemed to weigh the disadvantages of defeat less heavily than did the President. King wanted more “fireside chats.” Wilkins complained of “supercaution.” Like the abolitionists a hundred years earlier, they accused their President of vacillation, equivocation and retreat.

But relations remained cordial and close. The President, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, Assistant White House Counsel Lee White and Democratic National Committee Deputy Chairman Louis Martin were constantly in touch with Negro leaders. The latter knew they had a President willing to listen and learn. When
Wilkins and a delegation pressed him for legislation, they were impressed by both the charm and the tenacity with which he refused to change his course, and by the candor with which he welcomed their pressure “to offset pressures from the other side.” On Lincoln’s Birthday (traditionally celebrated only by Republicans) the President in 1963 held a large White House reception for more than a thousand Negro leaders and civil rights champions. Their displeasure with his strategy was in some measure alleviated because he treated them with dignity—not with condescension, and not as people deserving any preferential status, but with the same respect and recognition that he offered to every American citizen. Most Negro leaders were shrewd judges of which politicians cared deeply about their values and which cared chiefly about their votes—and while Kennedy may have initially been more influenced by the second concern, by the 1960’s the first had become more and more important to him.