JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (16 page)

At his
July 20, 1963, press conference
a reporter asked about rumors that the Russians were abandoning the race to the moon, and wanted to know whether, if this proved to be correct, the United States would still continue its lunar program, or perhaps consider a joint moon mission. Kennedy replied that the United States should push on with its own program in light of “any evidence that they [the Soviets] are carrying out a major campaign,” and called a moon flight important not only for its own sake, but because it would demonstrate “the capacity to dominate space.” He was skeptical about the possibility of a joint flight, saying it would require “a breaking down of a good many barriers of suspicion and hostility.”

Either he was being less than candid or he had changed his mind by the time he and Dobrynin met a month later. When he announced the lunar program in 1961, it had seemed a necessary response to a series of Soviet space triumphs, but if the test ban treaty led to more agreements and a reduction of cold war tensions, then beating the Soviets to the moon suddenly seemed less important, and a joint moon program could both symbolize and further the emerging détente between the two nations. His willingness to dismiss the program as “not that important” also suggests that he trusted Dobrynin and Khrushchev to keep his comments confidential, and that he never intended the recordings of meetings like this one to become public, at least during his lifetime.

After the meeting ended, Kennedy asked Thompson for his impressions. Thompson said that Dobrynin, and by extension Khrushchev, “
appeared to be looking for an agreement
on almost anything.” Two days later, the Moscow correspondent of the
New York Times
reported that “
Soviet propaganda has shown unusual restraint
toward the United States for the last two and a half months.” Articles about the U.S. racial situation had also suddenly disappeared from the Soviet press, and the Soviets had stopped jamming the Russian-language broadcasts of the Voice of America.

Minutes after reading Khrushchev’s letter and discussing initiatives to further his spirit of détente with the Soviet Union, Kennedy joined McNamara, Rusk, Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, Forrestal, Taylor, and others in the Cabinet Room to discuss whether a coup in Vietnam might harm or further U.S. interests.
The meeting was among the most contentious
of his presidency and involved him in a detailed discussion of the loyalties of individual South Vietnamese generals. It quickly became obvious that his advisers had only the vaguest notion of who these generals were. When McNamara asked who belonged to this “general officers group,” Hilsman replied that U.S. officials in Saigon had contacted only three, and that they had declined to name their colleagues.

Kennedy asked what forces they commanded, only to be told that they included staff officers who did not command any combat units and generals who were stationed in the countryside. The preponderance of military forces in Saigon would probably remain loyal to Diem.

Cable 243 had committed the United States to offering the generals “direct support.” McNamara wondered what this meant. Hilsman said it meant assistance that would not be channeled through Saigon. Marine Corps General Victor Krulak, the Joint Chiefs’ expert on counterinsurgency warfare, thought this might prove “extremely difficult.”

Kennedy asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Taylor to estimate the chances that the generals could mount a successful coup, taking into consideration his own experience at the Pentagon. Taylor replied tartly that in Washington they did not turn over the problem of changing a head of state to the military.

During this and four subsequent meetings held over the next three days, Kennedy persistently posed two questions: Was a coup likely to succeed? And could he call it off if he changed his mind?

When the Bay of Pigs invasion had been under consideration, the military and the CIA had argued that because the Eisenhower administration had signed off on the operation and the rebels had been trained, canceling it would be difficult and risky. Now he was being told the same thing about a possible coup in South Vietnam. His military and civilian advisers had unanimously approved the Bay of Pigs, but on August 26 they were sharply divided over the wisdom of encouraging a coup. McNamara, Taylor, and the CIA had serious reservations and believed that Lodge, Hilsman, Forrestal, and Harriman had stampeded him into approving the cable. Taylor would call it “
an egregious ‘end run
,’” writing, “The anti-Diem group centered in State had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions which would never have been approved as written under normal circumstances.”

There were two factions at these meetings: a State Department one consisting of Harriman, Hilsman, and Ball, joined by Forrestal of the National Security Council, who viewed Vietnam as a crucial cold war conflict that the United States could win only if Diem was deposed; and a Pentagon faction of McNamara, Taylor, and Krulak, who also viewed it as a critical conflict, but one that Diem was more likely to win than were the generals plotting against him. There was also a third, less obvious faction in the Cabinet Room that week, which doubted that Vietnam really
was
a crucial cold war battleground. It consisted of one person, the president. Forrestal had an inkling of this. He later observed that “
we began to lose
our Presidential support in the summer of 1963,” and that after the Buddhist crisis, the president was “beginning to resist his staffs’ insistence, and the State Department’s insistence, and the Defense Department’s insistence on increasing the effort,” and “beginning to dig in his heels.”

WASHINGTON

H
ours before Kennedy delivered his June 11 civil rights speech, a spokesman for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced that the organization would sponsor a “
massive, militant, and monumental sit-in demonstration
” in Washington coinciding with nationwide acts of civil disobedience. Eleven days later, Kennedy implored a delegation of civil rights leaders that included King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to cancel their march, telling them, “
We want success in Congress
, not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to oppose us. I don’t want to give them the chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill—but not at the point of a gun.’”

Once he realized that he could not stop them, he tried to control them. “
They’re going to come down here
and shit all over the [Washington] Monument,” he told a Justice Department official. “I’ve got a civil rights bill to get through. We’ll run it.” Following consultations with the Justice Department, the leaders agreed to cancel acts of civil disobedience planned for the Capitol, stage a shorter march between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, hold the event on a Wednesday to discourage participants from remaining in the city over the weekend, limit speeches to seven minutes, and advance the schedule so that most participants would leave by nightfall. Kennedy gave the demonstration his blessing at a press conference, saying, “
They [the marchers] are going to express
their strong views. I think it is in the great tradition [of our democracy].” Having decided to support the march, he now feared that a low turnout would enable opponents of his civil rights bill to argue that he had exaggerated the demand for it, and so he added, “I look forward to being there.”

He later changed his mind about attending, probably because he feared his presence might inflame the South and connect him to any violence occurring during the demonstration. So instead of joining the 150 members of Congress at the Lincoln Memorial rally and witnessing the largest mass protest in American history, he asked one of the black White House employees, a doorman, Preston Bruce, to accompany him to the third-floor solarium, where they stood at an open window, too far away to see the crowd of a quarter million over the treetops, but close enough to hear the strains of the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Gripping the windowsill so hard that his knuckles turned white, Kennedy said in a choked voice, “
Oh, Bruce, I wish I were out there
with them!”

He returned downstairs in time to see Dr. King deliver the only speech that a panel of distinguished historians would rank above his inaugural address when asked to choose the finest orations of the twentieth century. He watched King on the First Family’s only television set, a thirteen-inch black-and-white portable with rabbit ears. Blair Clark, a CBS executive who had roomed with Kennedy at Harvard, thought he had
a natural “instinct” for the medium
, and “never forgot that he was an actor in a public drama.” He was so telegenic that his appearance more than his words had accounted for his victory in his debates with Nixon. After seeing a replay of them, he had remarked, “
We wouldn’t have had a prayer
without that gadget,” a comment perfectly expressing his conflicted emotions toward television: a respect for its power, and a disdain for a “gadget” that bored him so much that except for watching football games, he seldom tuned it on. One of its black marks was that Eisenhower had loved it so much that he and Mamie had installed sets throughout the White House, including two in their sitting room so they could watch different programs while eating dinner off trays.
Kennedy had ordered
the White House electrician to remove all of Ike’s sets, but after Caroline protested that she would miss
Lassie,
he left the small portable in the West Hall so that it could be moved out of sight when guests arrived.

Today was the first time he had heard King deliver an entire speech. After listening to his “I Have a Dream”
litany, Kennedy turned to his aide Lee White and said, “
Jesus Christ, that’s a terrific speech
. He’s damn good, isn’t he?” An hour later he welcomed the organizers of the march to the White House, telling King as he shook his hand, “
I have a dream
.” King had dreamed of Mississippi “transformed into the oasis of freedom and justice,” and America becoming a “beautiful symphony of brotherhood” where children were judged “by the content of their character.” Kennedy was dreaming of sixty-seven U.S. senators prepared to override a filibuster of his civil rights bill, and would support whatever furthered that dream, and oppose whatever threatened it.

By the time the leaders arrived at the White House, it was evident that their march had been an epic success. They had promised to bring 100,000 demonstrators to Washington, and more than twice that number had come. Although Kennedy had ordered the largest peacetime mobilization of armed forces in U.S. history, there had been no violence, the troops had stayed in their barracks, and Americans had witnessed an inspiring television spectacle that had advanced his bill more than weeks of backroom arm-twisting.

Roy Wilkins saw “
relief written all over his face
” as he praised the leaders for doing “
a superb job of making your case
,” overlooking that his civil rights bill had made it his case as well.

Wilkins and King had the best understanding of the journey that Kennedy had traveled since his inauguration, and why a man whose cautious approach to equal rights had once left them so frustrated had at last become, in their opinion, a greater champion of black Americans than any president in U.S. history, Lincoln included. Wilkins called his transformation “
the education of JFK on the race question
,” and credited his willingness to learn and be moved by events for finally awakening him “to the poison and venom that had been the daily lot of the Negro.”
King had a similar take on his evolution
. When they first met in 1960 he had sensed that Kennedy had an intellectual commitment to civil rights but not an emotional one, and blamed the fact that like most white men of his age and class, he had simply not known many black people. There had been no black students at Choate and only a few at Harvard in the 1930s, and the Navy remained segregated throughout the war. During his six years in the House there had been just two black representatives, and during his eight in the Senate, not a single black senator. In the 1940s and 1950s, Washington had been a segregated city, the first Jim Crow metropolis south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Black passengers moved into the Colored Only coaches at Union Station before continuing south, classified advertisements specified race, and black employees at the Capitol were prohibited from swimming in its pool or eating in its restaurants, so it is hardly surprising that Kennedy had never attended a black wedding, funeral, or church service, and had no way of understanding what Wilkins called
the “joys and hardships” of being black
in America.

During his first congressional race he had courted his district’s small black vote by praising the wartime heroism of black servicemen and recruiting black college students to work as volunteers in his campaign headquarters.
His black valet George Taylor protested
after noticing that only the white volunteers were being invited upstairs to share lunch with his sisters. “Jack, I think that’s bullshit,” he said. “They’re all giving their time. They’re all human beings. Why segregate in this way?” Kennedy called him “thin-skinned,” and justified excluding the black students as “one of the things of the time.” But at his inauguration fifteen years later he had immediately noticed that there were no black cadets in the Coast Guard Academy unit marching in his parade and told his aide Richard Goodwin, “
That’s not acceptable
. Something ought to be done about it.” Goodwin called Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, who oversaw the Coast Guard, and within the year the Coast Guard academy was integrated.

During his first year in office Kennedy appointed more blacks to high-level positions in the federal government than any of his predecessors, yet he remained emotionally detached from the civil rights struggle. He persisted in viewing racial discrimination through the lens of the anti-Irish prejudice that had humiliated his parents, and so when a party leader urged him to seek the vice presidency instead of the presidency in 1960, he had said caustically, “
Oh, I see, the back of the bus for Catholics
.”

The 1960 Democratic platform had a strong civil rights plank, and his speeches and gestures raised the hopes of African Americans that he would submit civil rights legislation to Congress and enforce the desegregation of Southern schools. A turning point came near the end of his campaign when King was imprisoned in a county jail in rural Georgia, and Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver suggested that he telephone Mrs. King to offer his sympathy and support. “
What the hell. That’s a decent thing to do
,” he told Shriver. “Why not? Get her on the phone.” Shriver had expected the call to pay political dividends, but Kennedy’s decision to make it had been spontaneous, motivated more by his good manners and humanity than political calculation. “The decent thing to do” won him 70 percent of the black vote, a crucial difference in some closely contested states.

Because he had won the presidency by such a narrow margin, and opinion polls showed equal rights being a low priority for white Americans, he took office believing that it was an inopportune time to submit sweeping civil rights legislation to Congress. Instead, he used his executive powers to enforce the court-ordered integration of Southern universities and to pursue voting rights cases. He remained reluctant to use federal powers to protect civil rights workers and enforce school desegregation, arguing that submitting a civil rights bill would be a pointless exercise because Southern Democrats would stall it in the House, filibuster it in the Senate, and retaliate by sabotaging the rest of his legislative program. “
I’m not going to just play at this business
,” he told a journalist. “We can’t get any civil rights legislation through at this point, we don’t have any political muscle over there [in Congress] and until [then] . . . I’m not going to engage in just token show business.”

Roy Wilkins called his decision to pursue executive action instead of legislation “
an offering of a cactus bouquet
to Negro parents and their children.”
King criticized him for vacillating
, and later
spoke of “two Kennedys
: a Kennedy [of] the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963 with . . . a great understanding of the moral issues.”

King believed that events had changed him. The transformation began in April 1961, when white mobs attacked interracial groups of Freedom Riders attempting to desegregate bus stations and interstate buses in Alabama and Mississippi, firebombing one bus and pummeling one of Robert Kennedy’s aides. It continued in September 1962, when the registration of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi led to riots and two deaths, forcing him to send troops. The turning point came in May 1963, when police and firemen in Birmingham attacked civil rights demonstrators. Kennedy said that photographs and news footage of firemen blasting schoolchildren with high-pressure hoses and policemen loosing German shepherds on black teenagers and pummeling demonstrators with nightsticks
had made him “sick
.” King believed that Birmingham had convinced him that segregation was morally wrong. “
Lincoln had real agonizing moments
over this question of signing the emancipation proclamation,” King said. “He vacillated a great deal. But finally the events caused him to see that he had to do this and he came to the moral conclusion that he had to do it no matter what it meant.” Birmingham had also convinced Kennedy that segregation might lead to black violence that could threaten national security, and that civil rights had become the great domestic issue of his presidency, one he needed to tackle as courageously as FDR had the Depression.

In a June 10, 1963, television interview that was reported the next day on the front page of the
New York Times
,
King compared Kennedy’s civil rights record with Eisenhower’s, criticized him for substituting “an inadequate approach for a miserable one,” and urged him to discuss integration in moral terms. The following evening, Kennedy told Americans, “
We are confronted primarily
with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures, and is as clear as the American constitution.” He warned that America faced a “moral crisis as a country and a people,” and insisted that the crisis could not be solved (as he had previously tried to do) “by token moves or talk.” After delivering the speech he told a friend, “
Sometimes you look at what
you’ve done and the only thing you ask yourself is—what took you so long to do it?”

King praised him for addressing
the “morality of integration
,” and later called his speech “the most eloquent, passionate, and unequivocal plea for civil rights, for justice toward the Negro ever made by any President.” That same evening in Jackson, Mississippi, a white supremacist shot and killed the NAACP official Medgar Evers as he was walking to his front door.
Kennedy invited his widow and children
to the White House. Evelyn Lincoln told them that if you made a wish while sitting in the president’s chair it would come true. Evers’s eldest son climbed into the chair, bowed his head, and said he wished his father had not died in vain. The meeting left Kennedy so moved that he told Schlesinger, “
I don’t understand the South
. I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens [the firebrand abolitionist who wanted to punish and humiliate the South after the Civil War] was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But, when I see this sort of thing [the Evers assassination], I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” On June 19, the same day that Evers was being buried at Arlington with military honors, Kennedy submitted his civil rights bill and asked congressmen “
to look into your hearts
 . . . for the one plain, proud, and priceless quality that unites us all as Americans: a sense of justice.”