Parting the Waters (66 page)

Kennedy was making his way eastward from California, where he unveiled his plan to establish a Peace Corps of unarmed American volunteers in the poor nations of the world, warning that “the enemy advances now by non-military means.” On reaching Connecticut, he said, “I run as a candidate for the Presidency with a view that this is a great country but it must be greater.” He repeated a quotation from Lincoln about the coming storm—“I know there is a God, and I know he hates injustice”—then flew on to Boston and finally, exhausted, arrived at the family compound at Hyannis Port.

Far removed from these twin storms of political attention, beneath the notice of campaign professionals, the Kennedy campaign's “blue bomb” was spreading through the Negro culture by means of the most effective private communications medium since the Underground Railroad—the church. Nearly two million copies were being shipped by bus, train, and airplane—duplicated and bundled, picked up and unbundled, praised from ten thousand pulpits and handed out. The confines of race made it easy for the civil rights office to keep the operation secret within their own organization, but even the secret-keepers did not know all the secrets that made their logistical miracle possible. Neither Wofford nor Shriver knew—and Louis Martin was only dimly aware at first—that their main distribution network was drawn almost entirely from the Gardner Taylor faction of the National Baptist Convention, which was still in a death struggle with J. H. Jackson for control of the national church. The Kennedy “dummy committee” was located in Philadelphia, site of the riotous church schism in September. Its co-chairman was one of the preachers J. H. Jackson had expelled from the Convention and sent off to jail three years earlier,
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and the cover endorsement on the “blue bomb” was a quotation from Gardner Taylor himself. Taylor's nationwide telephone apparatus was reactivated for the Kennedy-King emergency.

Not all the Taylor preachers had been Kennedy supporters, nor had all the Jackson preachers been inclined to Nixon. But all had taken special notice when J. H. Jackson publicly denounced the sit-ins shortly after King's arrest at Rich's, saying that some Negroes “talk too much about racial integration and not enough about racial elevation.”
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Then, in quick succession, came news of a manacled King being hauled off to Reidsville and of Kennedy's expression of sympathy. The force of the sudden blows sheared off not just Daddy King's Republicanism but a host of cross-cutting affiliations within the Negro Baptist clergy. A fissure within the Negro Baptist church shifted into line with the racial fault underlying American politics, producing a seismic rumble.

Sargent Shriver and Louis Martin felt it on Sunday, November 6, the mass-distribution day for the “blue bomb.” Both were home in Chicago, working frantically for the last two days of the campaign, and by now Martin had told Shriver something of the Negro church battles affecting their work. They ventured that morning to Olivet Baptist Church—J. H. Jackson's pulpit, the largest congregation in the city—curious to see what the worshippers were doing. Shriver stood with his children across the street from the entrance, transfixed by the sight of all the churchgoers carrying the blue pamphlets. They were not bringing them out of the church, as expected; somehow they had gotten hold of them in advance and were taking them
into
church, along with their Bibles. They were taking pamphlets praising J. H. Jackson's mortal enemies into his own church. Given the current level of ecclesiastical hostility, this was something like taking the Bill of Rights into the Kremlin or Lutheran tracts into the College of Cardinals.

Nearly all those who passed by seemed to be talking about what King had suffered and what Kennedy had done. Shriver realized in a rush that the pamphlet touched something transcendent, beyond campaign machinations and the most bitter preacher politics. It put him in awe to witness such a silent tremor among the common people of a culture different from his own, and to feel it shaking something as close to him as the Kennedy campaign.

 

King took no active part in the campaign. On Monday, snugly within his own world, he addressed fifteen hundred beauticians at the Bronner Brothers Fall Beauty Clinic on Auburn Avenue. On Election Day, the Atlanta
Daily World
urged Negroes one last time to vote Republican. Vernon Johns's old friend John Wesley Dobbs declared on the front page that Kennedy's Boston had fewer Negro policemen than segregated Atlanta—a deficiency he blamed on the Catholic Church. Dobbs said he could not understand how any self-respecting Negro could vote Democratic in view of the state party's refusal to allow a single Negro to become a member, “not even Mr. Walden or M. L. King.”

King himself was not permitted to vote that day. Georgia officials ruled that he had not established residency long enough to vote in Atlanta, and Alabama officials said that it was too late for him to pay the $1.50 poll tax required to vote by absentee ballot in Montgomery. Like the two candidates and millions of groggy TV viewers, he went to bed not knowing who would be the next President. Toward dawn the next morning, electoral votes were still shifting from one column to the other. In fully one-third of the states, the Kennedy and Nixon totals were hovering between 48 and 52 percent. When Senator Kennedy emerged from his bedroom at nine o'clock, his aide Ted Sorensen greeted him with the news that he had won California and therefore the presidency. As it turned out, Sorensen was wrong about California but right about the election. Nationally, Kennedy had received 34,221,463 votes to Nixon's 34,108,582, for a popular margin of two-tenths of one percent. The tiniest of changes—5,000 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas—would have opened the White House to Nixon instead of Kennedy.

A dejected President Eisenhower, stunned by what he regarded as a “repudiation” of his eight years, first blamed Henry Cabot Lodge for promising a Negro cabinet member. By “sticking his nose into the makeup of the cabinet,” Eisenhower fumed privately, Lodge “cost us thousands of votes in the South, maybe South Carolina and Texas.” Soon, however, the President reversed himself to say that the Nixon campaign had been too little concerned with Negro votes, not too much. He then blamed the loss on “a couple of phone calls” by John and Robert Kennedy in the King case.

What happened between Eisenhower's instinctive reaction and his considered one was a nationwide detective search for the secret of the 1960 election. Everyone seemed to have a private theory about what had been the decisive factor—whether stolen votes in Chicago or Nixon's makeup man for the first debate. As legions of analysts sifted the results, it did not take them long to discover that the most startling component of Kennedy's victory was his 40 percent margin among Negro voters. In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30. This 30 percent shift accounted for more votes than Kennedy's victory margins in a number of key states, including Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the Carolinas. On the day after the election, Republican National Chairman Thruston B. Morton declared that his party had taken the Negro vote too much for granted.

The crucial switch was easier to identify than to explain. Kennedy had entered the election year as the declared Democratic contender
least
popular among Negroes—certainly less popular than the Republican opponent, Nixon, whose civil rights record was generally considered creditable. In the summer, Nixon had insisted upon a strong civil rights plank in the most visible dispute at the Republican Convention, whereas Kennedy angered Negroes by choosing Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. During the campaign itself, neither candidate had said anything dramatic about civil rights. Kennedy might have pulled closer to Nixon on the strength of his looks and polished demeanor, analysts figured, but to have trounced him so soundly begged for a cause of glaring, magical strength.

The King case leaped to national attention during the postmortem as the overlooked master clue. Most people in the country first learned of the saga retrospectively, as capsule summaries of the Kennedy phone calls were told and retold to establish the difference between the two candidates on civil rights: Kennedy had acted in response to King's plight, whereas Nixon had not. Some reporters unearthed the essential facts of the Kennedy pamphlet. Others wrote stories clarifying that there had been two separate Kennedy calls—one by Senator Kennedy to Coretta King and another by Robert Kennedy to Judge Mitchell.
The New York Times
, still pursuing both sides of the story a month after the election, published a statement that had been drafted but never released by the Eisenhower White House, calling King's Reidsville sentence “fundamentally unjust.”

It turned out that many people inside the Nixon campaign—Attorney General Rogers, E. Frederic Morrow, and Republican Negroes in Georgia, among others—had implored Nixon to say something supportive of King, but Nixon had declined. When news of King's Reidsville sentence had broken, Nixon had been on his way to South Carolina in the hope of an upset there and elsewhere in the Deep South. His response had been to hide Rogers within his entourage, as a man unpopular among Southern whites because of the Justice Department's voting rights suits, and to say nothing about King. For Nixon, the unfortunate result was that he still did not carry South Carolina, Georgia, or Alabama, but he lost enough Negro votes to suffer defeats in larger Northern states. In later statements, Nixon implied that the Eisenhower White House had been at fault for failing to issue a statement drafted by the Justice Department. Such an authoritative but indirect response, said Nixon, would have neutralized Kennedy's call without risking Nixon's white vote in the South. His explanation was faulty, however, because the statement to which he referred was not even drafted until four days after King was released from Reidsville, by which time it was already useless.
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Politics and personal beliefs aside, the Nixon campaign was fatally encrusted with the incumbent Eisenhower bureaucracy in Washington. It moved by memo, letter, and clearance, whereas the Kennedy people moved by telephone.

As the political side of the King arrests gained historic notoriety, pride and other human factors spurred those close to the events to embrace interpretations favorable to themselves. Kennedy's inner circle of advisers—the realists who had resisted all suggestions of intervention in the King case, who had not known of either Kennedy call in advance, nor anything of the “blue bomb”—downplayed the importance of the entire matter. So great was their need to deny having been outsmarted by the softheaded bomb-throwers in the civil rights section that they argued, obstinately and fatuously, that Kennedy would have won a landslide victory among Negro voters even without the King affair, “as the result of economic issues.” Meanwhile, the staunchly Republican Ebenezer members who ran the Atlanta
Daily World
announced joyfully that Nixon had carried the Negro precincts of Atlanta in spite of the Kennedy-King dramatics. The editors offered these results in refutation of the theory that Kennedy fever had swept up those Negroes best informed about the King case, but the results more likely showed that King was less honored in his hometown than elsewhere, and that prestige Republicanism was strong enough in Negro Atlanta to survive one last election.

Both Morris Abram and Daddy King warmed to a technicality that mattered to few others in the country besides King Jr.: that the younger King had declined to endorse Kennedy formally whereas Daddy King had agreed. Both Abram, who had engineered the endorsement, and Daddy King, who had delivered it, came to imply by either omission or emphasis that King's suffering could not have influenced Negro votes on its own, as King had not instructed his followers how to vote. To the end of his life, Daddy King would attribute Kennedy's victory to his own “suitcase full of votes” statement.

In Washington, the hindsight attention to the King story troubled the President-elect, who worried that the new perception of him as a man beholden to Negro voters would impair his ability to govern the divided country. Within days of the election, Kennedy adjusted to this adjustment of his image by sending out word that his administration did not contemplate seeking new civil rights legislation or supporting challenges to the filibuster rule in the Senate. This reassured his Southern supporters but punctured the enthusiasm of Roy Wilkins, who promptly criticized Kennedy for surrendering the Democratic platform before taking office.

The President-elect said nothing publicly about how the King case might have affected his victory. Robert Kennedy—every bit as competitive by nature, but possessed of a confessional, self-deprecating humor that lacked his brother's hard deflective irony—said with a laugh some years later that he had called Judge Mitchell on the suggestion of Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver, King's most aggressive political enemy of the moment. This revelation appeared to clash with both the Machiavellian and the humanitarian interpretations of the Kennedy calls. It made sense only if Vandiver, shrinking from his promise to get King out of Reidsville, had talked Robert Kennedy into assuming the political risk. Kennedy's motivation remained a mystery, perhaps even to himself. After the election, his public comments on the matter reflected a keen ambivalence, as though the bizarre rebounds of the King case had put into question the entire relationship between winning and being decent. Asked by a journalist if he was glad he had called Judge Mitchell, Kennedy replied enigmatically: “Sure I'm glad, but I would hope I'm not glad for the reason you think I'm glad.”