Parting the Waters (118 page)

 

It was 7:58 in Oxford. A minute later, Burke Marshall left the Cabinet Room for the Oval Office with news that Ole Miss had deteriorated into a full-scale riot, but the President was frozen in the commanding glare of the television lights. “Good evening, my fellow citizens,” he began, facing the cameras from behind his desk. “The orders of the court in the case of
Meredith
v.
Fair
are beginning to be carried out.” Meredith was safely on campus, he said. National Guard units had not been used. The rule of law was prevailing, and students and professors alike could return to their normal activities. “This is as it should be,” said the President. Twice he emphasized to the nation that the federal government had not been party to the Meredith case. He announced the name and home state of each Fifth Circuit judge who had voted to send Meredith to Ole Miss, adding that his responsibility to carry out their order was “inescapable.” “I accept it,” he said.

The speech was written on a tight line, crafted to reach undecided white Southerners. Not mentioning Governor Barnett, he neither criticized segregationists nor embraced Meredith's cause. He praised Mississippi specifically as the home of Lucius Lamar, of “four Medal of Honor winners in the Korean War alone,” and of Sergeant Jake Lindsay, who in 1945 “was honored by an unusual joint session of the Congress.” Then he spoke directly to Ole Miss: “You have a great tradition to uphold, a tradition of honor and courage, won on the field of battle, and on the gridiron, as well as the university campus…The eyes of the nation and all the world are upon you and upon all of us…I am certain the great majority of the students will uphold that honor. There is, in short, no reason why the books on this case cannot now be quickly closed in the manner directed by the court.”

President Kennedy's speech disposed of the Meredith case so convincingly that some troop commanders in Memphis released their men from DEFCON 2 alert (prepare to move immediately). Desire and pronouncement were being overrun by fact, however, as the President quickly discovered. Back in the Cabinet Room, he joined the Attorney General, Sorensen, O'Donnell, Marshall, and congressional adviser Larry O'Brien for a grim siege watch that was destined to last all night. Two or three of them talked on telephones at once, pausing to relay reports to the others. “They're throwing iron spikes,” Robert Kennedy told the President. “And they're throwing Coke bottles, and they're throwing rocks.” The huddled leaders absorbed erroneous reports that the gassed highway patrolman had died, and accurate ones that it was almost impossible to get injured marshals through the mob to a hospital. One early idea was to enlist football coach Johnny Vaught, a sainted figure at Ole Miss, to make a speech urging the students to disperse. Periodic bulletins on this effort punctuated the early reports that the great cloud of tear gas was only spurring on the rioters: “He [Vaught] said he wants to keep this, all the football squad out of it…It's a hell of a squad…His wife says he's out…Listen, why don't we get Bob to try to call him from here?…His wife may be lying to you…”

Within an hour of the President's speech, the first shotgun blasts rang out at Oxford. One marshal was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, and his colleagues, lacking either first-aid equipment or an ambulance, despaired for his life. A few minutes later the first high-powered rifle shot hit a border patrolman in the leg. As casualties mounted, the marshals placed their wounded along the wall inside the Lyceum. Outside, many of the student rioters fled the gunfire, giving way to the adult roughnecks who had converged on Ole Miss. The mob grew above two thousand around the Lyceum, with untold others roaming the campus on foot and in cars.

Gallows humor prevailed at the White House, where the President quipped that he remembered “riots like this at Harvard.” During lulls in the incoming calls, the leaders fidgeted glumly. They discussed what to do about a tip that James Reston intended to write a column in
The New York Times
suggesting that the Kennedy Administration was more anxious to meet with the Soviets than were the Soviets to meet with Kennedy. The President attacked the story, ticking off Soviet invitations from memory. “We ought to knock it down tonight,” he said. “That's just kicking Reston right in the balls, isn't it…Do you want to call him up? Or is that just gonna make him mad?”

The besieged Katzenbach called in again. Those in the Cabinet Room could hear only Robert Kennedy's end of the conversation: “Do you want these troops in there?…He got hit by what?…Is he gonna live?…The state police have left?” Marshall broke in to announce that he had just had a talk with Barnett, who said the troopers “
can't
have pulled out.” They
had
pulled out, Kennedy replied. Then Marshall repeated Barnett's assurance that he had just talked with the highway patrol and that everything was under control. Frustrated, the leaders in the Cabinet Room began denouncing the insurrectionist harangues of General Walker, which led them into a discussion of the novel
Seven Days in May
, about a military coup in the United States. President Kennedy remarked that the book's president seemed “awfully vague” to him, but that the coup-plotting general was “a pretty good character.” On the phone, Marshall almost plaintively asked someone whether Coach Vaught was “doing any good.” On another phone, the Attorney General quietly consoled John Doar, saying he knew Ole Miss was “a long way from Wisconsin.”

“I haven't had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” sighed President Kennedy. His brother, assigning himself comparable responsibility for this new disaster, wryly composed a press release for his own sacking: “The Attorney General announced today, he's joining Allen Dulles at Princeton Univ—” Nervous laughter cut him off.

When they ran out of tear gas at the Lyceum, and the volunteer who tried to drive through the mob to fetch new supplies was delayed—feared lost—the leaders in the Cabinet Room decided to move the regular Army units down from Memphis by air, and to move a Mississippi National Guard unit to the campus from the local armory in Oxford. Waiting anxiously for confirmation of troop movements by military officers of unproven loyalty, the President thought of the Shah of Iran. “This is what they must do every night in Teheran,” he remarked dryly. Then came a maddening disparity of communications: the cries of desperation arrived instantly from Katzenbach's pay phone inside the Lyceum, but responding orders for help seemed to vanish into a maze of radio hookups. “Well, they have to call the Attorney General's office to get the Attorney General's office to call the Secretary of the Army,” Marshall explained in exasperation, “and the Secretary of the Army to call to Memphis, and then…” When he reported that one unit was known to be forming to receive orders, Sorensen objected that the unit had formed ten or twelve hours earlier. “I saw them form on television,” he said. Marshall said they must be forming again.

Robert Kennedy's voice chilled the room shortly before midnight. “They're storming where Meredith is,” he said. “They're storming where Meredith is.” Bands of rioters had discovered Meredith at Baxter Hall, and the battered marshals at the Lyceum were in no position to move across the campus to help protect him. The men in Washington clung to their telephones, scrambling for ideas. O'Donnell said he feared the riot might turn into a lynching. The President placed an urgent call to Barnett in Jackson. Robert Kennedy tried to reach Katzenbach on the pay phone, but Katzenbach was out rallying his men in the face of new shootings. The Attorney General wound up speaking with his old Harvard football friend, Dean Markham, who told him the marshals could not defend themselves with tear gas alone. O'Donnell, listening in, broke the news to the Cabinet Room that “the marshals are now going to start firing.” They had sidearms, he said.

President Kennedy returned to report that Barnett had parried his demand for highway patrolmen, saying the best way to rescue Meredith was to remove him from Ole Miss.

“I
can't
get him out,” Robert Kennedy said miserably, hearing the President. “How am I gonna get him out?”

“That's what I said to him,” the President replied. “Now the problem is, if he can get law and order restored…” He paused, then said, “Okay, we'll move him out of there if he can get order restored.”

The decision to withdraw Meredith was impossible to carry out, which rendered it easier for Kennedy to make. And now fresh waves of chaos superseded the Barnett negotiations. Three more marshals had just been shot, Larry O'Brien announced. Listening in on the line, Ken O'Donnell remarked that Ed Guthman was “so scared he can't talk.” Robert Kennedy tried to talk Katzenbach out of authorizing the marshals to return gunfire. “Can you hold out if you have gas?” he asked. “…Is there any way you could figure a way to
scare
'em off?” Katzenbach's anguished reply made the Attorney General back off this last suggestion. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, but the marshals held their fire.

About that time a call came in from one of Guthman's assistants. When busy men declined to accept an underling's call, Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy's secretary, agreed to take a message for the Attorney General, whereupon she heard the assistant say in a precise, disembodied monotone that “a reporter for the London
Daily Sketch
, whose name is Paul Guihard, G-U-I-H-A-R-D, was killed in Oxford just now. His body was found with a bullet in the back, next to a women's dormitory.”

At midnight in Washington, Katzenbach told Robert Kennedy that he needed regular troops—as many as possible. Like Guthman, he spoke with soldierly remorse, blaming himself for failing Kennedy in his prolonged effort to avoid using soldiers. Kennedy took the blame, sent the troops, and summoned Guthman back to the phone to discuss what they would say to the press. “We're gonna have a hell of a problem about why we didn't handle the situation better,” he said.

The riot went on all night, as the mob showed astonishing persistence. Rioters sent a bulldozer, then a car, crashing toward the Lyceum as a battering ram. They wounded 160 of the marshals—28 by gunfire—and sent a stray bullet into the head of a local juke-box repairman, killing him. In the Cabinet Room, the leaders absorbed the reports of injury one by one until dawn. They heard that flying wedges of students were attacking Baxter Hall, that flying wedges of marshals were trying to break out with wounded men. Robert Kennedy stressed “how important it is to keep Meredith alive.” The leaders adjusted stoically to the two deaths. O'Donnell suggested that the Administration “hit the London papers” with the death of Guihard, who, as a reporter, guaranteed widespread news coverage. “A good story over in Europe,” someone said.

What nearly broke them was the waiting. Robert Kennedy, who blamed himself for waiting too long to summon the military, alternately joked, whimpered, seethed, and cursed when the night dragged on past the arrival times promised by the generals. Army Secretary Cyrus Vance
*
and Division Commander Creighton Abrams
†
had assured the White House that they could airlift soldiers from Memphis to Ole Miss within an hour, but it took that long for the sixty-five-man Mississippi National Guard unit
‡
to reach the campus from the local armory in Oxford. After false sightings and interminable delays, the National Guard trotted loyally up to the Lyceum to stand alongside the battered marshals. (“One of them was just wounded,” Larry O'Brien finally announced to the Cabinet Room, “so they know they're there.”) No more reinforcements arrived for some three hours, during which time most of the night's injuries were sustained. Both Kennedys spoke sharply to the brass. “I have a hunch that Khrushchev would get those troops in fast enough,” O'Donnell sighed. “That's what worries
me
about the whole thing.”

A bone-weary Katzenbach was talking with President Kennedy when joyous shouts went up that regular troops had been sighted outside the Lyceum. “Just a minute, Mr. President,” said Katzenbach. “They may be here now. Please stay on the line while I confirm it.” Katzenbach dashed off, shouting back orders not to let anyone touch the phone because the President was waiting. Returning seconds later, Katzenbach was mortified to discover that the man holding the receiver was not his aide but a reporter. Far from seizing his scoop, however, the reporter was so awed by the thought that the President of the United States was on the other end of the line that he had been unable to move or speak, much less ask a question. Katzenbach grabbed the phone to say, “They're here, Mr. President.”

Meredith's room smelled of tear gas a few hours later when Doar came to pick him up. With Guthman and McShane, they climbed into the same Border Patrol car that had carried them to the first registration attempt eleven days earlier. Then shiny and new, its doors now were pockmarked with bullet holes, its windows shattered by bricks. McShane put army blankets on the backseat to protect them from the shards of glass as they rode to the Lyceum for registration. Soldiers stood on the Grove, holding back students who had gathered to witness the surrender. Meredith—unknown and withdrawn, temperamental, practical, of military bearing and yet erratically sentimental—said it was then that he heard Mississippi whites call him “nigger” for the first time in his life. An hour later, escorted by marshals, he attended his first class in Colonial American history.