Parting the Waters (71 page)

From the point of view of the White House advisers, the second battle of Fort Sumter was a farcical tempest over the hotel accommodations for a single Negro woman, proving that the President would probably look foolish and impotent if he tried to act nobly in racial politics. Mercifully for Kennedy, the political damage from the affair was limited by the low level of public interest in the Civil War itself. Centennial history began a four-year trek through the back pages. Charleston officials reported that the city's tourist traffic was down by half on the day of the ceremony. News from Fort Sumter was overshadowed by the opening of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and even more so by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight, which shocked Americans as a kind of reprise on Sputnik. Five days later, these sensational stories were swept away by the real-life military disaster at the Bay of Pigs.

 

Beyond geopolitics and ideology, President Kennedy felt a keen antipathy for Fidel Castro as a man who personified many qualities he himself cherished—youth, vigor, daring against impossible odds. Castro lived gaily on the edge of survival, ruthlessly suppressing his internal enemies and then stopping by to gossip with common folk on the street. Called simply “Fidel” by worshippers and revilers alike, Castro had the sort of Hemingway “ballsiness” that the Kennedys so admired, along with the awareness to present himself to the Western world in the proper mixture of idealism and existentialism.

When this same Castro not only crushed the surprise invasion at the Bay of Pigs but also exposed as a clumsy lie the entire CIA cover story of American noninvolvement, the sting of President Kennedy's humiliation spread instantly to millions of citizens. U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers remained in the Soviet Union on charges of capital espionage even as Castro's triumphant army imprisoned more than a thousand surviving soldiers of the Bay of Pigs brigade. For the second time in a year, an American President went before the nation for the politically torturous act of public apology. Although the President gracefully assumed responsibility, and his allies diverted blame elsewhere, no Kennedy defender developed a cogent rationale for his decisions—most especially for his persistent reductions of the invasion's military power in the hope of secrecy.
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Still, the President did not recoil from the international struggle against Communist rivals, nor change his definition of its terms. On the contrary, he became ever more immersed in foreign affairs, more determined to energize the entire Western defense network with the new doctrines of flexible response, counterinsurgency warfare, and economic assistance. Having initiated a $17 billion nuclear missile program a month before the Bay of Pigs, he returned a month afterward to deliver a special State of the Union address in which he called for twelve thousand new Marines, the training of new anti-guerrilla units that came to be known as Special Forces or Green Berets, and a tripling of funds for fallout shelters and other civil defense programs. Moreover, he made the electrifying announcement that the United States was undertaking to place a man on the moon “before this decade is out.”

In the struggle against communism, Kennedy officials displayed ambivalence or avoidance only about the issue of subversion at home. There the swirling contradictions between democratic freedoms and the suppression of subversives had been demonstrated painfully in the career of Senator Joe McCarthy, and both John and Robert Kennedy, still vulnerable to charges of abetting or tolerating McCarthy's witch-hunts, knew better than to repeat his rampage against vaguely defined security risks. Nevertheless, it was difficult to rally the entire nation for a showdown with communism without taking measure of the alien threat at home. This was a delicate matter for Robert Kennedy, who was J. Edgar Hoover's nominal boss even though Hoover had been FBI Director longer than Kennedy had been alive. He tried to soothe Hoover with flattery and other personal attentions while establishing his prerogatives as Attorney General, to acknowledge Hoover's immense power as the nation's expert on internal security while also advancing the New Frontier's post-McCarthy attitudes.

The personal relationship between Hoover and Robert Kennedy was an Oriental pageant of formal respect, beneath which played out a comedy of private insults and mismatched quirks. From the beginning, Kennedy's people spoke of the Director's “good days” of crisp, brilliant efficiency and his “bad days” of cartoonlike lunacy. During John Seigenthaler's first private visit, Hoover punctuated a tirade against newspapers with a listing of known Communists on the copy desk of the New York
Herald-Tribune
, then lurched into a long description of Adlai Stevenson as a “notorious homosexual.” Seigenthaler blinked in amazement, not least because other FBI officials were using the same details of the same episodes to ridicule former diplomat Sumner Welles. When Seigenthaler returned to the Justice Department, Attorney General Kennedy took one look at him and said, “He was out of it today, wasn't he?” Hoover's quicksilver moods became a running joke, which was made all the more surreal by the assumption that Hoover himself was homosexual in style if not in performance. On learning that the Director's associate and bachelor housemate, Clyde Tolson, had been hospitalized for an operation, the Attorney General quipped to his aides, “What was it, a hysterectomy?” Against all that, however—and against the wildly conspiratorial tips from disgruntled FBI agents that Hoover had his office bugged—Kennedy insisted that all his subordinates spare no effort to cooperate with the Bureau. It was more than a matter of political necessity for him. His father had once offered Hoover $100,000 a year to become chief of security for the Kennedy interests, he said. To Robert Kennedy, his father's assessment of Hoover's worth meant something, and it was a measure of Hoover's devotion to the Bureau that he had turned the offer down.

From the FBI, the Kennedy Justice Department received a similar mixture of outward respect and private derision. Even lowly field agents often referred to Robert Kennedy's office as the “playpen” or “rumpus room,” making sport of the Attorney General's stocking-footed work style, his touch-football parties, and the splashes of children's art on his office walls. Such informalities offended the punctilious Hoover, who resented all the more Kennedy's efforts to function as his boss in substance as well as title. When Kennedy broke the cherished FBI tie to the White House by getting his brother's aides to refuse Hoover's calls, Hoover retaliated by becoming unavailable to receive the Attorney General's calls. Kennedy countered by installing a direct telephone line into Hoover's office. Down the line at the Bureau, agents resented the effrontery to Hoover but also laughed at the war of manners. The Old Man still could make Kennedy jump through hoops, they said, as in the matter of the Negro agents. When Kennedy gently urged the Director to integrate his elite work force, Hoover first claimed it was an internal FBI matter, then that the Bureau already was integrated. Over nearly two years, Hoover strung out the Attorney General's suspicious and increasingly annoyed campaign to learn the specifics of the integrated Bureau. Hoover's masterly bureaucratic retreat was a source of proud merriment within the FBI, where it was widely known that the “Negro agents” consisted of Hoover's Washington driver, his white-coated doorman, his all-purpose messenger, plus chauffeurs attached to the Miami and La Jolla FBI offices to be available for the Director's vacations. All five Negro retainers had been made Special Agents to exempt them from civil service protections as well as military service, making them personally dependent on Hoover.

 

J. Edgar Hoover's top officials at the FBI first took personal notice of King only two weeks after the Kennedy inauguration, when
The Nation
magazine published an article by King titled “Equality Now.” Deep within a long list of recommendations for the incoming Administration was a parenthetical reference to the FBI: “If, for instance, the law-enforcement personnel in the FBI were integrated, many persons who now defy federal law might come under restraints from which they are presently free.” This one sentence rocketed up through that portion of the FBI bureaucracy keeping watch for the appearance of criticism in the public domain. Internal defenders branded King “in error,” apparently on the theory that even one “Negro agent” technically invalidated charges of segregation. A memo to Assistant Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Hoover's political guardian, recommended that the Bureau not “call his hand on this matter as he [King] obviously would only welcome any controversy or resulting publicity that might ensue.”

By any reasonable measure, the substance of King's article was a much greater threat to the incoming Kennedy Administration than to Hoover. Its publication served notice that King was not disposed to trim his expectations in the face of harsh political realities, nor even to hold his peace during the “honeymoon” normally allotted a new President. Beginning simply with the assertion that “the principle is no longer in doubt,” King brushed aside all qualifiers to the moral imperative of racial integration, along with the claims of segregation laws in more than a dozen states. For all that, King substituted a single question—how can the new President most rapidly and effectively bring about integration? “We must face the tragic fact that the federal government is the nation's highest investor in segregation,” wrote King. His tone was unfailingly positive, as usual, and he presented his agenda as an “opportunity” for the Administration. Still, for fresh Kennedy officials, the article could be perceived only as a warning shot across the Administration's bow, or, more accurately, across its stern.

King was not invited to the first large meeting of civil rights leaders in the Attorney General's office on March 6, at which the petitioners suggested the appointment of a roving federal prosecutor for the South, and Kennedy in turn stressed the importance of voting. King, threatened with exclusion, responded by seeking access at a higher level. Ten days later, after the “clarification mass meeting” in Atlanta, he wrote the White House to seek a private appointment with President Kennedy himself. Appointments secretary Kenneth O'Donnell turned him down on March 25, citing the squeeze of the “present international situation” on the President's time. Communist guerrillas were overrunning Laos; Portuguese troops were suppressing a revolt in Angola; the Congo remained in turmoil following the assassination of the new country's deposed premier, Patrice Lumumba; new Soviet demands imperiled the nuclear test ban talks in Geneva.

The King problem became a running subtopic of conversation among the half-dozen top Kennedy officials most concerned with civil rights. At Harris Wofford's weekly interagency meeting at the Civil Rights Division, hesitations and calculations were swapped at some length, with the more conservative men worrying generally about the dangers of establishing a political relationship with someone like King. Louis Martin, installed after the inauguration as assistant chairman of the Democratic National Committee, finally suggested a way out of the impasse: they should invite King to Washington for a secret, “off the record” meeting. If King agreed to come under such conditions, and fulfilled his pledge to keep the event out of the newspapers, that in itself would be a reassuring sign of how he operated. If the scheme worked, Martin argued, the Kennedy people would get a chance to take their measure of King in a political setting, and to make the case to him for their civil rights plans, without publicity. If it did not work, they needed to find out sooner rather than later, and it would be easier to limit the political damage from a secret meeting than from a public one.

Not until after the Bay of Pigs invasion were the arrangements completed, with secrecy permeating every detail. King was permitted to bring only one aide. The setting was a private dining room of the Mayflower Hotel rather than a government office building, and the luncheon was laid out on a buffet table rather than served by waiters, who had been known to pass on tidbits of conversation to reporters. One by one the parties arrived—Wofford and Kenneth O'Donnell from the White House, Louis Martin from the DNC, Attorney General Kennedy, John Seigenthaler, Burke Marshall and two or three others from Justice, plus King and his aide—no more than a dozen people in all. There were no formal introductions. When the Attorney General arrived, the men served themselves and sat down for a Kennedy-style meeting over lunch.

By prior designation, Burke Marshall did most of the talking for the Kennedy side. He explained to King his view of the severe constraints on the federal government imposed by constitutional federalism, as applied more rigidly in federal laws governing civil rights than in other fields. The Justice Department had little power to intervene in school desegregation cases or even police brutality cases except in very narrowly defined circumstances, Marshall explained, and its widest latitude by far lay in the protection of voting rights. There the Justice Department was, in the watchword of the Administration, “moving” by both conventional and unconventional methods. Attorneys from the Civil Rights Division were filing suits to enjoin Southern counties from harassing or discouraging Negro registrants. John Doar, for example, had just come back from an undercover assignment in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on such a case, and he was working to develop another in Selma, Alabama. By Marshall's presentation, all roads in civil rights led to voter registration, where the federal government's most explicit legal authority could protect the most significant political opportunity for Southern Negroes. Attorney General Kennedy and others chimed in on this central theme.