Parting the Waters (67 page)

In the midst of the post-election excitement,
Time
correspondent Theodore White sat down to write
The Making of the President, 1960
. A spectacular success, the book sold more than four million copies and caused fundamental changes in campaign reporting, if not in the conception of the American presidency itself. White captured the swell of postwar confidence with his central thesis that the presidency had acquired the glow of a sacred romance. In the modern revolutionary age, he argued, the awesome responsibilities of the office overwhelmed the traditional American skepticism of power and royalty. “A hush, an entirely personal hush, surrounds this kind of power,” he wrote, “and the hush is deepest in the Oval Office of the West Wing of the White House, where the President, however many his advisers, must sit alone.” White's inventive use of capital letters for the Oval Office swept into standard usage in many languages, becoming a symbol of the modern United States.

“In the sixties, the office of the Presidency, which John F. Kennedy held, was above all an intellectual exercise,” wrote White. More scientifically than most, he verified the Negro vote and the Kennedy-King calls as the critical ingredient in the outcome of the election. Having isolated the key to a seminal event at the gate of history, he was almost obliged to soar away upon his thesis, in safe disregard for the contrary facts of his own central illustration. White's celebration of power had no room for the wrongheaded, race-wrapped disorder that stumbled through the King episode from start to finish. Discarding most of his evidence from Shriver, Wofford, and others, he described the expression of sympathy for King as the “master stroke.” Robert Kennedy's call became an execution of “the command decision” by the Kennedy organization in the pursuit of the Negro vote. Going still further, White appraised the King maneuver as “the most precise response of result to strategy” in the entire 1960 campaign. A final, rhapsodic description of the King calls slipped all bounds of fact: “Decisions now not only followed crisply and unfalteringly in sequence, but where decision pointed, the organization followed—and the various parts of the organization had all passed through their break-in period, had been road-tested, and purred in the comforting hum of human machinery intermeshing with the same complete efficiency that one remembers of the American bomber crews flying out of Tinian and Saipan.”

Many clouds distorted or obscured interpretation of the pivotal election, which emerged as a kind of mythological puberty rite for the United States as a superpower. Still, one plain fact shined through everywhere: two little phone calls about the welfare of a Negro preacher were a necessary cause of Democratic victory. This fact mattered dearly to Republican county chairmen as well as Democratic mayors, to students of politics as well as crusaders on both sides of the civil rights issue. That something so minor could whip silently through the Negro world with such devastating impact gave witness to the cohesion and volatility of the separate culture. That at the heart of this phenomenon was not just any preacher but Martin Luther King gave his name a symbolic resonance that spilled outside the small constituency of civil rights. Before, King had been a curiosity to most of the larger world—unsettling and primeval in meaning, perhaps, but as remote as the backseats of buses or the other side of town. Now, as a historical asterisk, a catalytic agent in the outcome of the presidential election, he registered as someone who might affect the common national history of whites and Negroes alike.

On the day after the election, playing touch football at Hyannis Port under the mass scrutiny of freshly encamped reporters, President-elect Kennedy received a telegram from the old lion of the British Empire. “On the occasion of your election to your office, I salute you,” wired Sir Winston Churchill. While tributes poured in from lesser figures, Kennedy presided over a family dinner giddy with triumph and exhaustion, during which the guests imagined how they might rearrange the world. One favored idea was to get rid of Allen Dulles at the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, on the grounds that these entrenched founding bureaucrats were incompatible with the Kennedy spirit of change. The President-elect enjoyed the sportive dinner talk, but the next morning he promptly announced his intention to reappoint Dulles and Hoover. Then, surrounded by Secret Service agents, he flew off to Palm Beach for a vacation.

As the Kennedy plane headed south, John Lewis and two companions sat down with their ten-cent hamburgers at a Nashville restaurant called The Krystal, a pioneering chain of the fast-food industry. A visibly distressed waitress poured cleansing powder down their backs and water over their food, while the three Negroes steadfastly ate what they could of their meal. Lewis returned to the restaurant two hours later with his friend James Bevel, the new chairman of the Nashville student movement. Their request to speak with the manager met with the reply that the place was being cleared for emergency fumigation, whereupon the manager locked the front door, turned on a fumigating machine, and exited to the rear, leaving Bevel and Lewis alone amid the rising spray. The two of them endured for some time, with Bevel preaching quietly about the deliverance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from King Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. Outside, the commotion and the escaping smoke soon attracted a roaring fire engine. A Negro preacher was pleading with the firemen to smash in the door, and a news photographer was snapping pictures of the two gasping figures inside, when the nervous manager reappeared with the door key. He tried to make light of the episode, but the fumigation dramatized his association of Negroes with insects and other vermin. For Lewis and Bevel, it was but another day of witness.

King experienced both the energized glamour of the Kennedy victory and the morally transcendent humiliation of Bevel and Lewis. He tasted of both worlds, and knew both sets of people. During the transition between administrations, he called both John and Robert Kennedy on behalf of Morris Abram, urging that he be made Solicitor General. Similarly, he asked the Kennedys to appoint Benjamin Mays to the Civil Rights Commission or to an ambassadorship, and he wrote private letters of protest on hearing that Georgia's senators had blocked such an appointment. King did not succeed in these patronage requests, but the consultation itself was a lofty new role that he never had approached with Eisenhower.

After the election, he crossed the Atlantic again—this time as a guest of the Nigerian government on the occasion of its independence from Great Britain. He returned to New York to defend sit-in demonstrations in a nationally televised debate against Richmond
News Leader
editor James J. Kilpatrick. “Truly America faces today a rendezvous with destiny,” King said nervously, “and I think these students, through their non-violent, direct, courageous action, have met the challenge of this destiny-paced moment in a very majestic way.” Kilpatrick, who had risen to prominence since the
Brown
decision by espousing Virginia's right to “interpose” its sovereignty against federal integration orders,
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asserted that the hidden goal of the sit-ins was sexual—universal miscegenation. “We believe it is an affirmatively good thing to preserve the predominantly racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two thousand years,” Kilpatrick told the NBC audience, “and we do not believe that the way to preserve them lies in fostering any intimate race mixing by which these principles and characteristics inevitably must be destroyed.” In addition to sex and civilization, Kilpatrick cited a host of legal precedents against the sit-ins and then denounced them as a “boorish exhibition” of “plain bad manners.” One of his subtler ploys was to speak of King in the third person, as though he were not there. King left the studio believing he had failed to parry the full range of Kilpatrick's explicit and implicit attacks.

He returned home to find his father marching in picket lines outside Atlanta's downtown department stores. Time having expired on the truce that Mayor Hartsfield had negotiated before the election, Daddy King and the other Negro elders felt obliged to admit to the students that progress seemed to stall without the pressure of demonstrations. Daddy King, wearing a
JIM CROW MUST GO
! placard, took up marching alongside rock ‘n' roll singer Clyde McPhatter. They made an unlikely pair. For a brief period, nearly all the elements of Negro society in Atlanta—hotheaded youth, academics, even the Republican stalwarts such as John Wesley Dobbs—were united in protest.

 

During the changeover of administration, King and the Kennedy people had virtually no face-to-face contact, even privately. King was not invited to the Inauguration, nor was he, like Roy Wilkins, granted a private audience with the President-elect to present his civil rights agenda. King's name was too sensitive at the time, too associated with ongoing demonstrations that were vexing politicians in the South. As it happened, the two sides drifted into collusion more or less independently around two gritty requirements of politics: votes and money.

Wyatt Walker noticed that a number of the country's more aggressive, liberal philanthropists were expanding their commitments in the civil rights field, which was becoming recognized as a kind of institutionalized crisis. Responding eagerly to the prospect of large stipends, Walker and King quickly learned a whole new vocabulary: grant proposals, funding conduits, advance budgeting, program reviews. With the active encouragement of Stanley Levison, they met in New York with the heads of the Taconic and Field foundations, among others, and talked with numerous college deans about scholarship replacement funds for expelled sit-in students. From Highlander, Myles Horton suggested that the SCLC take over the endowment of Septima Clark's thriving citizenship school. Horton wanted to protect Clark against the likelihood of Highlander's demise.

King and Walker were drawn to the vision of a multifaceted attack on segregation in a targeted town—with Clark training the registration workers and teachers, SNCC students sitting in, King preaching, and Walker coordinating the attack. More immediately, they liked the fact that some influential foundation officials already were devoted to Clark. If they sponsored her through the SCLC, they might also come to subsidize other SCLC projects, such as the money-starved voter registration drives. By January, Walker was at the center of several scholarship funds through which the SCLC was supporting the education of scores of arrested students.
*
Complex arrangements were begun to transfer Septima Clark's citizenship school to the SCLC, and two major proposals were filed for voter registration money.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy people were approaching a voter registration strategy from the top down, by way of Robert Kennedy's post-election reviews. The civil rights constituency was volatile, politically cheap, and potentially decisive. Such was the lesson of the King phone calls in the campaign, and the advisers were shrewd enough to recognize another sign hidden among the election results. In Fayette County, Tennessee—one of the two counties in Tennessee where John Doar of the Eisenhower Justice Department had sued to protect Negroes—twelve hundred new Negro votes helped turn the county Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. This landslide, going against the general Kennedy landslide, was interpreted to mean that Negroes in the South would reward those who helped them gain the right to vote.

For Robert Kennedy and his political aides, the circumstances dictated a conscious strategy of “appoint and appoint, elect and elect”—as expressed by Harris Wofford in a political memo. The repetition was deliberate. The idea was to keep appointing Negroes to jobs and to register enough Negroes to render Southern officeholders more sympathetic to their legislative proposals. It was a policy of accretion, with nothing so sweeping or grand as to touch off a segregationist backlash against them. In school desegregation, as in voter registration, the Kennedys planned to work “Negro by Negro,” one by one, in lawsuits and registration campaigns. “The years go by,” wrote a friendly journalist, lamenting the tactical concession to time, “yet there can be no other strategy.”

Harris Wofford remained a Kennedy insider without portfolio, slightly tainted but possessed nevertheless of a unique blend of contacts that helped King and the Kennedy Justice Department alike. During the changeover of administration, he learned from King of the SCLC's ambition to acquire foundation grants, and Wofford recommended foundation executives he thought might help. Then he advised some of his foundation friends that the best political brains in the Kennedy Administration had decided to push Negro voter registration, and he completed the circle by telling his Kennedy contacts that King was seeking foundation grants for that very purpose. As a catalyst, Wofford found that people from each of the three sides were happy to hear about the enthusiasm of the other two. King's people were pleased that the nervy Kennedy types were determined to “make things happen” in voter registration. The foundation people swelled with the prospect of helping the New Frontier and Southern Negroes at the same time, under the implicit protection of the federal government. And the Kennedy people were attracted to the idea of a quiet, well-financed coup. All three sides realized that they stood to lose heavily if the partisan Kennedy role came to public attention. Tax exemptions and political reputations were at stake, as was the new Administration's duty to act impartially in the sensitive area of voting. Consequently, the exploratory meetings took place in an atmosphere of secrecy.

 

In the glare of a crisp, snow-blanketed day, John F. Kennedy delivered an inaugural speech that from its first phrase—“We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom”—was a paean to liberty. The speech defined an American identity by looking outward, projecting a new battle cry of freedom into the Cold War struggle against communism—all set dramatically within an era of ultimate risk in which “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” As a liberal, Kennedy tempered militancy with sentiments of moral grace mixed with pragmatism—“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”—and he dreamed that even the Communists might join the free world to “explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease.” No American president had ever surveyed such a vast domain with such an urgent sense of mission. “In the long history of the world,” Kennedy declared, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”

The speech struck the country with a bolt of energy, as Kennedy projected the image of a daring sailor in a gale wind. Some of his excitement reached down among King's colleagues. In Birmingham, where criminal trials from sit-in cases had pitched Negroes into a continuous crisis, Fred Shuttlesworth walked into the weekly mass meeting at the St. James Baptist Church and paid tribute to Kennedy from the pulpit. “What a wonderful President we have now!” he exclaimed, reminding the crowd that he and the freedom movement had helped put Kennedy into office. The moment inspired Shuttlesworth to come down to sit next to two men who were highly conspicuous as the only white people in the congregation. The bantam preacher made a fuss over welcoming them, shaking their hands warmly, and then he introduced them with relish as members of the police intelligence squad sent by Bull Connor into all the mass meetings. “This is Detective Jones,” he announced. “He voted for Nixon along with the other white people.” Shuttlesworth made a speech breaking all allegiance with the Republicans. “Ike never did nothing for the Negroes in the eight years he was in there,” he said. “No Negro ever played golf with Ike.” He turned the meeting over to a minister who began preaching so fervently from Ezekiel about the dry bones of the faithless that more than a dozen people had to be carried out in fits of uncontrollable excitement, and the deacons finally covered the preacher himself with an overcoat and several scarves, to calm him. This was an old ritual of religious ecstasy that was just being introduced to white teenagers through the performances of rock stars, most notably James Brown.

For King himself, it remained to be seen how much Kennedy's ideas of freedom overlapped with his. Kennedy never mentioned segregation, civil rights, or race in his inaugural address, and to some degree the new President was using his political gifts to make his summons to freedom intoxicating to both Negroes and white Southern Democrats. Still, King had to find it encouraging that Kennedy occasionally condemned racial prejudice as “irrational,” and that he seemed so much more comfortable in the presence of Negroes than had Eisenhower. Kennedy danced with Negro women on Inauguration night and included Louis Martin and his wife among the members of his political “family,” as introduced on the platform of the inaugural gala.

These were signals. And certainly Kennedy and King connected in the visible sphere of glitter and stardom. By and large, Kennedy's celebrities supported King, and vice versa. Frank Sinatra produced and starred in the Kennedy gala, bringing to the stage an interracial cast that included Nat “King” Cole, Jimmy Durante, Mahalia Jackson, Sidney Poitier, Leonard Bernstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Lawford, and Harry Belafonte. Lawford, married to the new President's sister Patricia, was part of Sinatra's casino-hopping, moviemaking “Rat Pack,” whose extravagances were splashed regularly in the tabloids and fan magazines. The only member absent from the gala was Sammy Davis, Jr. His recent interracial marriage to a Swedish actress made him, like King, too controversial for a mainstream political gathering.