Letters to Jackie (13 page)

P
OLITICS
, S
OCIETY, AND
P
RESIDENT
, 1963

Helen Stone to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, December 3, 1963, Adult Letters, box 14, folder 107, Condolence Mail, John F. Kennedy Library. Reprinted with permission of Joyce C. Orman.

P
resident Kennedy’s assassination led to much soul searching in the nation. For weeks, months—even decades—exhaustive analysis and debate about JFK’s death and its meaning filled the print media and airways. A variety of politicians, commentators, insiders, and intellectuals sought to uncover the reasons for the assassination, to measure its impact on the country and to assess Kennedy’s legacy. The latter endeavor proved especially problematic given the brevity of his administration, its sudden violent conclusion, and the persistent grief that soon created a mythic figure of a martyred President. “It will not be easy for historians to compare John Kennedy with his predecessors and successors,” his brilliant Special Counsel and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen predicted two years after the assassination. But, he ventured, “people will remember not only what he did but what he stood for.” That fact, he hoped, would “help the historians assess his Presidency.”

Ironically, however, some of the most compelling commentary about the assassination’s impact on Americans never reached the public. In the privacy of their homes, dorm rooms, barracks, and offices, citizens themselves—“average” Americans all—gathered pen and paper to record in letters to Jacqueline Kennedy their own views about the President. In so doing, they revealed much about how they saw the nation. Working men and women, those who lived in poverty, immigrants, those suffering from physical illness and disability, minorities who especially believed they had a champion in Kennedy, and Catholics who took singular pride in the election of the first
President of their faith described very openly why they grieved his death. Their letters vividly portray thoughtful citizens seeking solace, wisdom, and understanding.

Some blamed the assassination on what they saw as the country’s political, social, and moral failings. A few were convinced that through John F. Kennedy’s brutal death a vengeful God had punished a sinful nation. Others pointed to their own perceived personal failings as disinterested citizens. Many more described a political climate that they believed permitted political excess, extremism, and hatred to flourish. References to Kennedy’s Catholicism—and the open opposition it inspired during the 1960 election—abound in the condolence letters, especially among those who believed that bigotry had contributed to a toxic climate that might have encouraged an assassin. “It still riles me to think”, a citizen confessed, “that the only Catholic President we ever had should be taken from us in this terrible manner.” She recalled her mother’s family’s attempt to build a Catholic church in New Jersey: “When the church was being built the Ku Klux Klan would tear down whatever was put up that day and the Catholics would have to start all over again but they stuck to it…If we had a man like Mr. Kennedy in office then perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.” Others located the fault for the President’s assassination squarely in rigid racial prejudices harbored by the American public. “We may not realize that fault now,” wrote one Pennsylvanian, “but in time, history will write its own story on blood filled pages.”

Those who took the measure of American society in 1963 commented most frequently on racial unrest. In so doing, the letters offer striking evidence of how deeply embedded segregation remained in the nation at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. They also reveal the tensions that challenges to segregation had heightened—especially among those who had watched the civil rights movement only with discomfort. “We did not agree with your husband,” wrote not a few Americans, from every part of the country, who took the time to pen a condolence letter to Mrs. Kennedy. Such letters came from every part of the country, but often the source of the distress was a civil rights policy some Americans viewed as
far too aggressive. A Louisianan who admitted that she “raged against the President when he was in office” was joined in that sentiment by a native of Mississippi who implored Jacqueline Kennedy to do whatever she could now to prevent passage of her husband’s civil rights legislation. A rare letter from a white supremacist depicted President Kennedy as a “wayward son” who supported “black-white mixture” because he had been hoodwinked by liberals, Communists, and Zionists. Many white Southerners wrote to say they knew Kennedy was right in emphasizing racial equality, though they “lacked the courage” to say so in a climate they believed imperiled the life and limb of anyone sympathetic to desegregation. Despite the lack of any evidence tying Lee Harvey Oswald to white supremacist organizations or anti–civil rights sentiment, some letter writers—black and white—expressed the firm conviction that Kennedy’s death marked another regressive milestone in the long struggle to achieve racial equality.

Such fears were the flip side of another view of the nation expressed very often in the condolence letters—the powerful mood of optimism and idealism, cutting across generations, that many Americans believed President Kennedy had created. Young and old, World War II veterans and their children, rich and poor, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and political atheists alike describe being inspired by the rhetoric and aspirations of John F. Kennedy. On the night of the assassination, one New Yorker recounted her love of country and her conviction that Kennedy exemplified its strengths. “The day he was born, he never belong to his mamma or daddy because God put a Star on him. he belonged to his country,” she wrote. “He was born holding a flag.” Many saw in Kennedy their own dreams for the nation. They lauded JFK as a leader who sought to overcome the country’s divisions and realize its promise. For some, the assassination leveled a harshly felt blow against these soaring ambitions. Virtually all letter writers who mentioned Lyndon Johnson offered their support, high regard, best wishes, and praise for the new President even as they mourned his predecessor. But one can also feel an effort to divine a way forward for the country in the face of a devastating disappointment.

1963 had already been a very tumultuous year before the President took his fateful trip to Dallas. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall, the civil rights movement was widening its challenge to segregation, pressing not only the case of racial equality but the Kennedy administration’s failure to act with clear affirmation, commitment, and speed. During the 1960 election, Kennedy had won over African Americans with his promise to redress discrimination, including a vow to end housing discrimination with “the stroke of a pen.” He earned admiration, too, for his actions when Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed during a sit-in and sentenced to four months of hard labor in a Georgia penitentiary. Political calculation figured in the equation, but JFK’s sympathetic phone call to Coretta Scott King and Robert Kennedy’s pressure on the judge to reduce the sentence convinced some African Americans that Kennedy held the best promise for their race. In the cliff-hanger 1960 election, over 70 percent of African Americans voted for Kennedy.

But after his election, Kennedy’s inattention and caution bitterly disappointed many civil rights activists. The federal government’s failure to protect those engaged in freedom rides and voter registration drives in 1961 and 1962 had cost lives. Insisting that the federal government had no jurisdiction to intervene, the Kennedy administration left state and local officials in charge even when the latter refused to prevent (at best) violent attacks on civil rights workers. The resulting bloodshed and ongoing threat of violence badly damaged the civil rights movement’s faith in Kennedy. Three years into the administration, many still awaited civil rights legislation.

In April and May, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference embarked upon a bold campaign to speed up desegregation and move the Kennedy administration. They brought the movement into one of the most segregated cities in the country—Birmingham, Alabama. Despite their blatant unconstitutionality, local ordinances continued to specify rigid segregation of the races, with separate drinking fountains, restaurants, schools, and facilities of many kinds the norm.
New York Times
correspondent Harrison Salisbury described the city as a place where “whites and blacks still walk the same streets. But the streets, the water supply and the sewer system are about the only public facilities they share.” Here Jim Crow was enforced by
“the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus,” he asserted. To confront the degrading conditions in Birmingham would be to dramatize the political, financial, moral, and human costs of the Kennedy administration’s reliance on legal enforcement of desegregation orders by local officials.

As expected, it did not take long for events to escalate. In April, sit-ins at Birmingham lunch counters, boycotts, and marches led to the arrests of civil rights demonstrators, including Martin Luther King Jr. From his jail cell, King wrote his eloquent “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” explaining the urgency, moral purpose, and philosophical underpinnings of the action and of civil disobedience. May brought the “children’s crusade”—a series of marches that attracted national attention and outrage when city officials turned snarling police dogs and fire hoses capable of ripping the bark off of trees, onto demonstrators, including six-year-old schoolchildren. The scene, Kennedy said, made him “sick.” By May 10, the SCLC campaign produced an agreement, brokered with the assistance of the Justice Department, that would mandate the dismantling of some of the most egregious Jim Crow practices in the city.

With summer came further highly publicized confrontations, this time with more aggressive intervention by President Kennedy. Governor George Wallace’s attempt to prevent the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama produced an open test of wills with the Kennedy administration. In the end, Wallace relented but not without offering a ringing defense of states rights even as he faced a general from the Alabama National Guard, now federalized, and Justice Department officials. The very evening of the showdown with Wallace, Kennedy delivered a forceful civil rights speech on national television announcing his intention to introduce new civil rights legislation. Although other American presidents had previously taken occasional affirmative steps to address institutionalized racism—Harry Truman’s efforts to desegregate the armed forces being, perhaps, the most notable example—Kennedy’s pledge in June of 1963 to pursue sweeping federal civil rights legislation made a powerful impression.

“We are confronted primarily,” Kennedy said on the evening of June 11, speaking in part extemporaneously, “with a moral issue. It is as old as
the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Noting that “one hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons are not fully free,” Kennedy insisted, “this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” “Now the time has come,” Kennedy continued, “for this Nation to fulfill its promise.” Events in Birmingham and elsewhere had proved that the “moral crisis” facing the society could not “be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact
that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”

President Kennedy met with leaders of the March on Washington at the close of the march on August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. is in the front row, on the left. John Lewis is standing behind King and to his right. A. Philip Randolph is standing to the left of the President, with Whitney Young and Floyd McKissick on the far right.
President Kennedy with leaders of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, photograph by Cecil Stoughton, John F. Kennedy Library.