Parting the Waters (116 page)

King hushed them when he returned, holding an ice-filled handkerchief to his face. Rosa Parks, mother of the bus boycott, stopped him briefly to administer her favorite remedy for headache: two aspirin and a Coca-Cola. King then announced that he and the assailant had been able to talk calmly in the office, and that the man had presented himself as a soldier on a mission for the American Nazi Party. His refusal to press charges infuriated the Birmingham police officers who arrived at the auditorium, as it put their boss, Bull Connor, into a perverse predicament. Having breached his fundamental political rule—which he had enforced against First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt herself, among many others—to allow an integrated SCLC convention in Birmingham at all, Connor did not hesitate to point out that a white man could not have attacked King at a lawfully segregated meeting of Negroes. Under duress, Connor had permitted the integration, just as he had permitted the signs to come down in the stores, in the hope of holding business support against the new city constitution. For all his strained tolerance, he reaped only a crazed “Nazi” and the prospect of unwelcome publicity. With King refusing to press charges, Connor had no choice but to have the department bring them itself. The Birmingham police persuaded Roy James to plead guilty and hustled him off to serve thirty days.

Wyatt Walker, trying to get the news out, was stymied temporarily because the few major reporters who had come to Birmingham long since had departed to cover Ole Miss. Finally he tracked down a young
New York Times
reporter who was sympathetic and trusting enough to write a story datelined Birmingham, as though he had been there. The reporter, being at risk himself for the deception, could do no more than identify the attacker as a “self-styled Nazi.” No firmer description reached the news world, but FBI agents advised headquarters within hours that James was a member of the American Nazi Party, and that his home address was a Nazi “dormitory” outside Washington, D.C. His FBI rap sheet showed previous arrests for violence in New Orleans and his native New York. Almost immediately, police intercepted a letter from Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who wrote “Lieutenant” James that “your heroic deed has put new heart into hundreds of people who…have protested the outrage of sending a white American to jail for punching a communist-nigger agitator.” Adding, “I know how much you hate jails, Roy,” Rockwell promised to secure James's prompt release and closed with “Heil Hitler!” His letter, along with other reports of organized violence against King, lay buried in the files.

When the SCLC convention left town, a Birmingham judge ordered a November referendum on the new city constitution. Bull Connor, having tarnished his segregationist credentials for no political reward, lost patience with the blandishments of reform politics. He promptly sent his men to notify the downtown store owners that they were in violation of city ordinances, and the “Whites Only” signs reappeared one by one.

 

From his home in Atlanta, with a swollen jaw and a bruised back, King watched the conclusion of the Ole Miss saga on television. On September 29, the day after the James attack in Birmingham, the screen showed the arrival in Oxford of former Major General Edwin Walker, who, disciplined for insubordination, had resigned from the U.S. Army in flaming public protest against what he called the Kennedy Administration's “collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy.” Walker already had gone on the radio to rally volunteers, confessing that he had been “on the wrong side” when he carried out Eisenhower's orders to integrate Little Rock's Central High School five years earlier. “Barnett yes, Castro no!” he declared. “Bring your flags, your tents and your skillets! It is time! Now or never!” Other cameras showed trucks and cars already cruising the streets of Oxford. Intelligence reports picked up Klan Klaverns mobilizing from as far away as Florida. Barnett's desk was stacked with telegrams offering services to the defense of Mississippi.

That Saturday afternoon, Robert Kennedy concluded that the situation was grave enough for him to bring the President himself into the confidential talks with Barnett. In the Oval Office, historian Arthur Schlesinger joined Kennedy, Burke Marshall, and Kenneth O'Donnell, all seated expectantly around the President as the call to Barnett went through. “Go get him, Johnny boy,” the Attorney General told his brother with a tight smile, as though spurring on a champion boxer. The President responded with a breezier levity, rehearsing a fake greeting that went, “Governor, this is the President of the United States—not Bobby, not Teddy, not Princess Radziwill.” Then Barnett came on the line and President Kennedy, turning serious, was promptly deflected. Barnett asked whether he had talked with the Attorney General that morning about the Attorney General's latest talk with one of Barnett's aides, Tom Watkins, and the President, despite frequent asides with his brother, could not catch up with the third-hand conversation. This gave Barnett an opening to suggest that Kennedy wait for the Barnett aide—“really an A-1 lawyer,” said the governor—to bring his unspecified idea personally to Washington. Kennedy agreed to have the Attorney General receive him, but asked what Barnett intended to do about the Tuesday deadline.

“I want to think it over a few days,” Barnett replied.

“Well, of course,” said Kennedy. “The problem is, Governor, that I got my responsibility just like you have yours.”

“I realize that,” said Barnett. “And I appreciate that
so much
.” He spoke the last two words with a long earnest drawl, stopping the conversation. Reemphasizing his hope that Watkins could find a way out, Barnett started to sign off. Then abruptly, and sincerely, he said, “I appreciate your interest in our poultry program and all those things.”

President Kennedy stifled a laugh until the phone connection was broken, then chuckled in wonder that Barnett could mention livestock in the midst of the constitutional crisis. “You've been fighting a sofa pillow all week,” he told the Attorney General. By this he seemed to mean that Barnett's warm, simple manner made him an easy mark, but by the objective results the governor was no pushover for anyone. The President's personal authority—carefully reserved until now—had just come to bear in the emergency with no effect except to ratify a postponement. Segregationists were streaming into Oxford more rapidly than Justice Department officials could reassemble their Freedom Ride-style civilian force of prison guards, Border Patrol agents, and deputy marshals. That force was gathering at the naval air base outside Memphis, having stripped three prisons and the Mexican border of federal manpower, but it numbered only five hundred at maximum strength.

The White House conferees decided that something stronger than words was required to force a change in Barnett. They resolved to nationalize the Mississippi National Guard, though there was some doubt as to whether its units would fight other Mississippians in behalf of James Meredith and the Kennedy White House. The Attorney General immediately set lawyers to work on the necessary presidential proclamations, and the President himself called his chief speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, in the hospital, where he was recovering from a case of White House ulcers. Kennedy asked Sorensen to rouse himself to write a speech for him to deliver on television. Sorensen agreed, saying he would craft some ideas in light of the fact that “the Republicans are taking the straight Ross Barnett line.”

“Except Eisenhower,” laughed Kennedy. He appreciated the irony of looking more favorably now upon the Little Rock precedent. “Eisenhower's taking a little away from 'em,” he said.

“No, I mean the Republicans in Alabama,” said Sorensen, making the point that Kennedy would be safe from partisan attack at least in the Deep South: both parties would attack him.

A second call to Barnett went out from the Oval Office an hour after the first. This time Robert Kennedy prepared the way by telling Barnett that they need not wait for Watkins to come all the way to Washington, as Watkins “would be wasting his time…. He doesn't have any suggestions,” said Kennedy. “He just told me, Mr. Governor.”

“I thought he did have,” said Barnett, sounding puzzled.

“Well, he didn't,” said Kennedy. “I mean he said something about sending the, Meredith, uh, sneaking him into Jackson and getting him registered while all of you were up at…”

“Yeah?” said Barnett.

“…at Oxford. But that doesn't make much sense, does it?”

“Well, I don't know,” drawled Barnett. “Why? Why doesn't it? That's where they ordered him to go at first, you know.” The idea was that Barnett would continue to lead the charge of segregationists up to the Ole Miss campus at Oxford for the scheduled confrontation; meanwhile the Kennedys would sneak Meredith into deserted Jackson and register him there in accordance with the court order from one of the earlier registration attempts. By this devious plan, Barnett could swear to the people of Mississippi that he had not given an inch on segregation, and that Meredith had been registered only by the conniving tricks of the Kennedys.

Not surprisingly, Barnett had stalled until he heard this idea come out of Kennedy's mouth rather than his own, but then he embraced it as a mighty fine suggestion. His enthusiasm led Kennedy to reconsider the scheme. Its obvious drawback was that while Meredith might leap the great hurdle of registration, he would wind up an hour's drive from the Oxford campus, and in the meantime the federal government would have allowed Barnett to gather Mississippi's army of resistance to prevent him from setting foot there. Perhaps registration was only fool's gold. In this light, Kennedy pushed Barnett to guarantee that state forces would maintain order in Oxford. The President came back on the line to press the same question.

“Oh, they'll do that,” Barnett assured him. He said his 220 highway patrolmen, backing up the local police, would “take positive action, Mr. President, to maintain law and order as best we can…and they'll absolutely be unarmed.”

Kennedy stumbled over this surprise twist: “I understa—”

“Not a one of 'em'll be armed,” Barnett said proudly.

But the problem was, said the President, “what can they do to maintain law and order and prevent the gathering of a mob…What can they do?” Kennedy wanted the state forces armed to the teeth when it came to quelling the mob, and nonviolent only in confronting Meredith, but Barnett refused to be so discerning. He stuck blithely to the previous negotiating scenarios in which Robert Kennedy had addressed the reality being screamed in the headlines—that the state forces were lining up
against
Meredith. The President found himself in the backwash of earlier deals, and the demands of secrecy made his predicament the more vexing. He was like a farmer trying to convince a sly mule that the way to the feed house went through the plow fields. Nevertheless, Kennedy and his advisers concluded that Barnett's ruse promised a step forward. Once Meredith was registered, the game would shift in their direction. When Barnett's next call came in, the President undertook again to move him off the nonviolence idea as applied to the mob at Oxford.

There were rumblings of movement at the White House soon thereafter. Pierre Salinger called the television networks to cancel President Kennedy's scheduled address that night. Burke Marshall called the Justice Department to tell the lawyers to stop drafting the emergency proclamations. “We've got a deal with Barnett,” he said. As happy as the draftsmen were to hear that they could go home on a Saturday evening, Marshall's glad news left them with doubts. Norbert Schlei's premonition was so strong that he kept his secretary there until nearly midnight typing up the required presidential documents, just in case. Meanwhile, Ross Barnett went to see the Ole Miss Rebels play the Kentucky Wildcats at Jackson's Memorial Stadium. The war fever of the political crisis boosted the normal emotions of the football rite to the heights of pandemonium, and by halftime the crowd was shouting “We want Ross!” in a deafening roar. Barnett made his way to the fifty-yard line, where he raised a fist of defiance and cried out over the loudspeakers: “I love Mississippi!” The roar intensified, and Barnett, nearly overcome, rose above it to let loose another shout: “I love her people!” Then at the peak: “I love our customs!” These three short sentences were enough to ignite pre-battle ecstasy. People were ready to die. This was as close to, and yet as far from, the fervor of a Negro mass meeting as segregationists came. No one could know that this football game would be the last militant race rally among respectable whites for at least a generation.

In Washington, Norbert Schlei had just gotten home when Burke Marshall called to say that the deal was off again. Barnett could not go through with it. “The President wants to sign those documents,” said Marshall. Schlei made it down to the White House and upstairs into the residential quarters by midnight Saturday. President Kennedy, looking over the proclamations necessary to call out the troops, asked, “Is this pretty much what Ike signed in 1957 with the Little Rock thing?” Told it was, Kennedy signed, handed the documents back to Schlei, and rapped the table as he stood up. The moment engaged his sense of history. “You know,” he remarked, “that's General Grant's table.” He said goodnight, but then stopped Schlei on his way down to face the White House press corps with the documents. “Don't tell them about General Grant's table,” Kennedy cautioned. He did not want to antagonize the South any further with reminders of the Civil War.