Kennedy: The Classic Biography (89 page)

The President and Attorney General accepted this responsibility and moved steadily but cautiously to meet it. They hoped to avoid either force or violence in the most thoroughly segregated, bitterly prejudiced state in the Federal Union. They hoped to avoid making a martyr out of Governor Barnett, who was rumored to be planning a Senate race against the more thoughtful and soft-spoken John Stennis. They hoped to persuade Mississippi officials—and ultimately did persuade the university officials—to comply peacefully and responsibly with the law. They hoped, finally, to prove that many steps lay between inaction and the use of Federal troops—including a few, many or a full squadron of U.S. marshals (including deputies, border patrolmen and Federal prison guards) especially trained for such situations.

In late September of 1962 matters came rapidly to a head. Nearly every day of the last ten days of the month a new effort was made—in court, at the university, at the State College Board, at the Governor’s office or with the Governor privately by telephone. Each day the number of marshals accompanying Meredith grew larger. Each conversation with Barnett grew sharper. Bob Kennedy and his brilliant Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall led the fight, thus re-emphasizing that it was not John F. Kennedy whom Barnett defied but the majesty of the United States Government.

Finally, on Sunday, September 30, Barnett recognized the inevitable. The President had issued a proclamation and Executive Order preliminary to federalizing the Mississippi National Guard and deploying other troops. He had announced a nationwide TV address for Sunday night. In a series of secret telephone conversations with the Attorney General and the President, Barnett suggested that he be permitted to stand courageously in the door of the school and yield only when a marshal’s gun was pointed at him. But that little drama would have risked violence from menacing groups of students, sheriffs, state police and hangers-on who gathered for each such confrontation. Still trying to save face, the Governor then proposed that Meredith be spirited quickly and quietly onto the campus that very day, Sunday, before the President’s speech. Inasmuch as it had been assumed that the speech would announce Federal action for Monday, the Oxford campus would be deserted for the weekend, the Governor could pretend ignorance and he then would protest vehemently from his office at Jackson. A large force of state police would assure the safety of Meredith, Barnett promised, with no need for National Guardsmen or other forces. The Kennedys agreed to the plan as a means of avoiding Barnett’s arrest and a troop deployment but, unwilling to rely wholly on Barnett’s word, they kept troops on a stand-by basis in Memphis and equipped Meredith’s guard of deputy marshals with steel helmets and tear gas.

It was my misfortune to have been hospitalized that week with an ulcer. I had expressed my suggestions on the crisis in a memorandum to the President on Friday, received his instructions on a possible speech for national television Saturday, and left the hospital a day early on Sunday in response to his call that I “had better get down here.” I never returned to the hospital. In fact, none of us gathered at the White House that Sunday afternoon would reach bed until 6
A.M.
Monday morning.

I arrived to find the President—accompanied by the Attorney General, Marshall, O’Donnell and O’Brien—pacing the floor of the Cabinet Room, where a direct phone link to Oxford was being maintained. His speech had been set for 7:30
P.M.
Sunday night, and by the time that hour arrived Meredith, escorted by state police and university officials, had been driven safely to a men’s dormitory on the campus. But the President was still skeptical of Barnett’s pledge. “We can’t take a chance with Meredith’s life,” he said to his brother, “or let that—— make the Federal Government look foolish.” He postponed his talk until 10
P.M.
The possibility of domestic violence made him more anxious than usual. He carefully rewrote his speech to make it clear that the government was merely carrying out the orders of the court in a case it had not brought and was not forcing anything down the throats of Mississippians on its own initiative.

Meanwhile a squad of U.S. deputy marshals—which in the end reached 550—took up guard positions near the university administration building, deliberately staying away from Meredith’s unpublicized quarters. It was not an army. All were civilians, most were from the South, and many worked in Immigration or other Justice Department offices unaccustomed to armed combat. But they were well disciplined under the leadership of Chief Marshal James McShane and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Throughout the night these men and other Justice officials on the scene maintained direct telephone contact with the “Command Headquarters” set up in the Cabinet Room, because of the camera crews working in the President’s office.

By 10
P.M.
, when the President went on the air, Barnett had already issued his statement, claiming that Meredith had been sneaked in “by helicopter” without his knowledge. His aides informed the White House that no further forces would be required. But the two hundred state police he provided had suddenly vanished without notice at the first sign of tension, returning only after a bitter protest to the Governor’s office from the Attorney General. Now an ugly mob was gathering around the band of marshals as the President began to speak.

The speech, its first rough draft prepared the night before in the hospital but its final text completed by the President only shortly before air time, began with a quiet statement of fact and hope:

The orders of the court in the case of
Meredith versus Fair
are beginning to be carried out…. This has been accomplished thus far without the use of National Guard or other troops.

The President then gave a brief but eloquent summation on “the integrity of American law”:

Our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty…. Even among law-abiding men, few laws are universally loved, but they are uniformly respected and not resisted. Americans are free to disagree with the law, but not to disobey it…. My obligation…is to implement the orders of the court with whatever means are necessary, and with as little force and civil disorder as the circumstances permit.

Reviewing the circumstances of the case, he emphasized the Southern backgrounds of the Federal judges, commended other Southern universities that had admitted Negroes and pointed out that only Mississippi’s failure to do likewise had brought the Federal Government into the picture. Reminding his Mississippi listeners of that state’s history of patriotic courage, he concluded with an appeal to the students of the university, the people who were most concerned.

You have a great tradition to uphold, a tradition of honor and courage…. Let us preserve both the law and the peace, and then, healing those wounds that are within, we can turn to the greater crises that are without, and stand united as one people in our pledge to man’s freedom.

The great majority of students, however, did not hear or heed the President’s appeal. Nor did the great majority of the more than 2,500 roughnecks who began attacking newsmen and marshals—even as the President was speaking—have any connection with the university. Roughnecks and racists from all over Mississippi and the South had been gathering in Oxford, carrying clubs, rocks, pipes, bricks, bottles, bats, firebombs—and guns. The marshals responded with tear gas but kept their pistols in their holsters. The Attorney General’s continuing efforts to enlist the effective help of university officials—including the popular and successful football coach—were in vain. The arrival of the local Mississippi National Guard unit only enraged the Guard’s fellow Mississippians further. As rioting raged through the night, a newsman and a townsman were shot dead, two hundred marshals and Guardsmen were injured, vehicles and buildings were burned, campus benches were smashed to provide jagged concrete projectiles, a stolen fire engine and bulldozer tried to batter their way into the administration building and frenzied attackers roamed the campus. But the Governor had failed to reassign the state police in force; and the President, who had previously thought it best to deal with Barnett chiefly through the Attorney General, angrily took the phone and demanded of the Governor that he send his police back. He interrupted each of Barnett’s drawled excuses and explanations. “Listen, Governor, somebody’s been shot down there already and it’s going to get worse. Most of it’s happened since those police left and I want them back. Good-bye.” He slammed down the phone.

Barnett had whined, grumbled and equivocated, afraid that his compatriots knew he had “sold out,” begging that Meredith be withdrawn, but finally agreeing to send the two hundred state troopers back. More crucial time passed, however, before fifty showed up to stay. In a new statement, which reversed his earlier statement of merely indignant submission, the Governor proclaimed that Mississippi would “never surrender.” Perhaps he reasoned that mob action could achieve his aims without placing him directly in contempt of court.

The marshals—bloodied, unfed and exhausted—obeyed orders to use only the minimum tear gas necessary to protect lives and to refrain from returning fire. But their telephoned reports to the President and Attorney General expressed concern about snipers in the dark and uncertainty as to how much longer they could hold out even with National Guard help. The President, terribly disheartened by news of increasing violence, especially against the Federal marshals, and concerned lest the mob run rampant, find James Meredith and lynch him, ordered into action the troops standing by in Memphis. Their response was agonizingly slow. Each time he called the Pentagon the troops were “on their way.” Each new call from Oxford asked desperately where they were. His temper rising, the President insisted on talking directly to the Army commander on the scene. An elaborate Army communication system failed to function, and the President received his reports from Katzenbach dropping dimes into a pay phone in a campus booth.

We were all tired and hungry now, with an almost helpless feeling about getting the troops there in time to relieve the hard-pressed defenders. The President looked drawn and bleak. He refused to accept our suggestion that he had done everything he could. Through the long night of waiting and telephoning, he cursed himself for ever believing Barnett and for not ordering the troops in sooner. At least one of the two deaths, he believed at the time, might have been prevented had the Army arrived when he had thought it would. Finally, after 5
A.M.
, he called his wife in Newport, awakening her with a dismal account of the night’s happenings, and then obtained a few hours of sleep. In the morning he ordered a full report on the timing of each call placed from the White House to the Pentagon, the time such orders were implemented and an accounting for each minute in between.

Once the flow of troops began, it gushed forth in what were soon needless numbers of up to twenty thousand. The mob was dispersed; the town was quieted; some two hundred troublemakers were arrested (only twenty-four of them students at the university); and Barnett issued still another statement, this one opposing violence. Early the next morning Meredith, accompanied by a group of marshals (at least one of whom would be guarding him constantly thereafter) but not, at the President’s insistence, by Army troops, officially registered and began, to the jeers and catcalls of his fellow students, his own ordeal of perseverance.

Governor Barnett, embarrassed by the revelation that he had double-crossed his own segregationist supporters by conniving in Meredith’s admission on Sunday, sought to blame “trigger-happy” marshals for starting the trouble, a charge echoed not only by some Senators but by some university officials who knew better. The Governor ignored the injuries suffered by eight marshals before the tear gas was fired in self-protection, the thirty-five marshals shot and the more than 150 others requiring medical treatment. He claimed that the state police gas masks were not suitable for tear gas. And he complained, just as the rest of the world marveled, that the Federal Government had arrayed thousands of troops and spent several hundred thousands of dollars to obtain the admission of one otherwise obscure citizen to the university.

But “this country cannot survive…and this government would unravel very fast,” said the President, “if…the Executive Branch does not carry out the decisions of the court…[or] had failed…to protect Mr. Meredith…. That would have been far more expensive.” The cost of the Meredith incident, he reasoned, could be spread over all the other incidents avoided in the peaceful admissions that would follow. “I recognize that it has caused a lot of bitterness against me,” he added. “[But] I don’t really know what other role they would expect the President of the United States to play. They expect me to carry out my oath under the Constitution, and that is what we are going to do.”

He sought to heal “those wounds that are within.” He resisted a Civil Rights Commission recommendation that he shut off all Federal funds to Mississippi, regardless of whether they aided whites or Negroes, integrated or segregated activities, believing that no President should possess the power to punish an entire state. (This is not the only situation in which the free-wheeling Civil Rights Commission proved to be a somewhat uncomfortable ally in this struggle.) He urged through Burke Marshall that an indignant Court of Appeals punish Barnett’s contempt by fine instead of by the martyrdom of arrest and imprisonment. He urged other states to realize that all court orders would be carried out and that resistance served no purpose other than their own economic harm. He was pleased that quiet preparations with South Carolina leaders, as well as the force of example in Mississippi, helped facilitate the peaceful admission to Clemson University of its first Negro student. But he knew that the Mississippi battle was not an end but a beginning—that his relations with the South would never be the same—and that still harsher crises and choices lay ahead in 1963.