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  • An Open Letter from James DiEugenio

    An Open Letter from James DiEugenio

    TO:

    Joe Scarborough, MSNBC Cable TV host

    Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard historian

    Fredrik Logevall, Harvard historian

    Van Jones, CNN contributor and sometime host

    Kevin Young, U of Mass/Amherst historian

    Steven Gillon, U of Oklahoma historian, Scholar in Residence, The History Channel

     

    RE: John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights

     

    A reader of our web site, KennedysAndKing.com, recently sent me a clip of Mr. Scarborough’s 12/11/2020 program which featured Professor Gordon-Reed. The concept of the show was to enumerate certain past presidents and what our elected president, Joe Biden, could learn from them.

    When Mr. Scarborough got to President Kennedy, he said that Biden could learn from JFK how to “brush back” on the civil rights issue, which President Johnson then had to take up the mantle on. Professor Gordon-Reed replied to this that Kennedy talked to people and eventually came around on civil rights, since he did not want events to overtake him.

    On November 22, 2020, on the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, a similar declaration took place. Professor Logevall made an appearance on the radio program Speakola. During that appearance, he said that, until the last year of his life, Kennedy was not really moved by the plight of those who were denied their civil rights; he added that this only came late to Kennedy.

    Prior to this, in 2018, on the CNN documentary series, The Kennedys: An American Dynasty, Mr. Jones said that JFK was not really interested in civil rights when he entered the White House and he had to be lectured about the issue.

    Going back to May of 2010, Professor Gillon made a speech at the Miller Center in Virginia, where he briefly touched on the civil rights matter. Included in his remarks, he said that LBJ did not think Kennedy was pushing the issue enough and that Kennedy did not submit a bill on civil rights until after he gave his speech the evening of his confrontation with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama in June of 1963. He concluded by saying that it was only through Johnson’s dogged determination and parliamentary wizardry that the bill passed.

    Professor Young might be the most extreme. In a much more recent article, November 21, of this year, at the web site Truthout, he wrote that Kennedy had done virtually nothing for civil rights for almost two and a half years. Only after the Birmingham violence did he finally send a civil rights bill to Congress, which passed the following year. Further, he said JFK only did this because of the threat of economic demobilization generated by a mass movement in the south. (I admit I really do not understand what Young means by that last statement.)

    Let me begin by saying that none of this comes close to aligning with the actual record of events. And the fact that four of you are history professors makes this rather embarrassing for your profession.

    The idea of making Lyndon Johnson some kind of hero on civil rights is, to be kind, misleading. From 1937–56, Congressman—then Senator Johnson—voted against every civil rights bill that was submitted to Capitol Hill. And this was not done passively. Johnson voiced the southern shibboleth of States Rights, which meant, of course, that there was never going to be any progress on the issue at all.

    It was only in 1957 that LBJ began to change his tune on the subject. Why? For two reasons. First, he was contemplating a run for the highest office and he had seen what Richard Russell’s anti-civil rights views had done to his mentor’s aspirations. So he knew he had to begin to alter his previous voting record. The second reason was even more a matter of political expediency. The White House had sent a bill to Congress on the issue. President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon did not care about civil rights themselves. In fact, Eisenhower had advised Earl Warren to vote against the Brown vs. Board case. But Nixon and Eisenhower understood that they could split the Democratic Party geographically on the issue: northern liberals against southern conservatives. Johnson tried to soften the blow to his party. So, he produced a pretty much papier mâché bill. One which Senator Kennedy did not like. In fact, Johnson had to send an assistant to make sure JFK would vote for it. Later, Kennedy wrote a constituent that he hoped the Senate would pass another bill; this time with some real teeth to it.

    That Robert Caro makes so much out of this, and the 1960 bill, is a classic example of the old adage: if you have lemons, make lemonade. As Harris Wofford wrote, the newly minted civil rights advisory commission, the new department of civil rights in the Justice Department, and the collection of voting data were all pretty much useless. For the simple reason that Eisenhower and Nixon had designed it that way; and LBJ went along with it. It was all a fig leaf to disguise the damaging facts that the White House did not support Brown vs. Board and Eisenhower had allowed Governor Orval Faubus to create a weeks long insurrection at Central High in Little Rock. Wofford should know, since he was the attorney for the Civil Rights Commission.

    As Judge Frank Johnson of Alabama later said, this all changed under Kennedy. He said that when Kennedy and his brother entered office, it was like an electric current going off in the south. As noted above, virtually all of you have said that President Kennedy waited until his third year to do something, since he needed wise counsel on the issue. This is simply false. I don’t see how you can act faster than on the first day of your presidency, which is what Kennedy did. After watching his inauguration ceremony, Kennedy made a call to Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon that evening. He asked him why there were no black faces in the Coast Guard parade. Dillon said he did not know why. Kennedy told him: Find out.

    Following from that, at his first Cabinet meeting Kennedy asked the members to bring in statistics on how many minority employees were in each department. Kennedy was quite disappointed when he heard the numbers. This caused him to write America’s first affirmative action executive order on March 6, 1961. In other words, far from waiting for two and a half years, Kennedy was acting right out of the gate. In a bit over six weeks, he had done what none of his predecessors had. Kennedy later extended this order to include all federal contracting and all federal programs concerning loans and grants. In other words, if you ran a textile mill in North Carolina which made uniforms for the Army, you now had to hire African Americans to work in your mill or you risked closing your doors.

    I will not go through each of Kennedy’s actions as I did the above, since this letter would get too long. Let me just list some of them:

    • The administration filed charges against the Secretary of Education in Louisiana for scheming to dodge court orders under Brown vs. Board. This was in February of 1961.
    • When the state of Virginia refused to fund local education in Prince Edward County, the Kennedys assigned William Vanden Heuvel to attain private funds in order to create from the bottom up an entirely new school district.
    • Attorney General Robert Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia Law Day. For the first time in anyone’s memory, he spoke about civil rights in the South. He concluded by saying he would enforce the Brown decision. This was on May 6, 1961.
    • RFK did this in part to aid the Fifth Circuit Court in the South. That federal court was made up of moderate to liberal judges on the issue. He would use that court in his future civil rights cases after losing in lower court.
    • By September of 1961, the administration successfully petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to integrate travel between states.
    • In his first year, Bobby Kennedy filed twice as many civil rights cases as the Eisenhower administration did in eight years. By 1963, the Department of Justice had quadrupled the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights Division.
    • The Kennedy administration was the first to raise private funds to finance large voting registration drives in the south. In today’s currency, the sum would be well over seven million dollars.
    • Kennedy was the first to get the FBI to detect voting rights violations and to use that information to grant African American voters suffrage in Alabama and Louisiana. This was before the Voting Rights Act.
    • Kennedy tried to get a voting rights bill through congress in 1962. That effort failed due to filibuster. It evolved into the 24th amendment eliminating the poll tax.
    • Kennedy established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which evolved into the EEOC to protect civil rights in hiring, employment and firing.
    • Kennedy was the first to use federal contracts and grants to force private universities in the south to integrate, e.g., Tulane and Duke.
    • The administration worked through the Fifth Circuit to sue the public universities of Mississippi and Alabama to force integration.

    I could go on. Yet, just that list is more than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower did put together. (See part 3 below) But let me add: Kennedy did not submit a wide-ranging civil rights bill to Congress after the confrontation with Wallace or after the violent confrontations in Birmingham. He submitted his bill in February of 1963. And as Clay Risen notes in his book length study of the bill’s passage, it did not owe its success to Johnson. The four major players who got it through were JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Senator Thomas Kuchel. In the summer of 1963, President Kennedy began what was probably one of the largest lobbying programs in contemporary history. He brought in over 1500 people from professional groups all over the country: lawyers, mayors, and clergy to convince them to back the bill. It was the last group that Richard Russell later said ultimately forced the collapse of the filibuster.

    Further, as most of us know, it was not Johnson who got the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. He told Martin Luther King he probably could not do so by himself. So King began the Selma demonstration, in order to give Johnson the torque to do so. And it was not Johnson who got the expansion of Kennedy’s housing act through either. He actually could not. It was the occasion of King’s assassination that allowed it to pass.

    No post Civil War president ever did as much for civil rights as President Kennedy did. That is not conjecture, it is the undisputed record. And I demonstrated it in Part 3 of my series, which I attach below. The only reason he did not pass an omnibus civil rights bill sooner is that it would have been filibustered as his narrower bill was in 1962. And it was LBJ who advised him not to even try.

    For historians and TV hosts to parrot a compilation of rightwing and leftwing myths in the place of this historical record is simply irresponsible. It is, in fact, pernicious to the public. Lyndon Johnson commandeered a ruinous presidency. Contrary to what Mr. Gillon said in his talk, LBJ could not have won the nomination in 1968. After New Hampshire, his campaign started to collapse on every leg in Wisconsin. He was given the word he was going to lose in a landslide. Contrary to what President Johnson had said, he did not “continue” what President Kennedy had begun, not in foreign policy and not in domestic policy. (See my Part Four below) He did not just wreck his own presidency. He ripped asunder the Democratic party. Staffer Carl Marcy wrote to Senator William Fulbright after the senator had discovered Johnson had lied to him about American invasions of both Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:

    … turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration. … We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintained is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness.

    It was this false righteousness that polarized the Democratic Party and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.

    I would like to conclude by drawing your attention to a recent article in the Washington Post. It is entitled “Hijacking the Electoral College: the Plot to Deny JFK the Presidency 60 years ago.” Donald Trump was not the first to scheme to sabotage the electoral college. The electors from Alabama and Mississippi decided not to vote for Kennedy in 1960, even though he defeated Nixon in those states. They agreed to halt their scheme to negate the election results, if Kennedy would switch positions on the ticket with Johnson. In other words: Johnson would be President and Kennedy Vice-President. Kennedy had endorsed Brown vs. Board twice as a Senator, once in New York and once in, of all places, Jackson, Mississippi. These deep southern segregationists understood who JFK was in 1960. They had seen him up close. So should you.

     

    (I did not annotate the above letter since my material is properly referenced in the series attached below)

     

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 1

     

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 2

     

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 3

     

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History – Part 4

    Listen to Jim being interviewed on this subject on AM 1480 WLEA News.

  • garrison: The Journal of History & Deep Politics, Issue 005

     

  • Was the TFX Case a Scandal?

    Was the TFX Case a Scandal?

    The first time I ever heard of the TFX affair—as we shall see, it should not be called a scandal—was in doing work on my first book about the JFK assassination. That was the first edition of Destiny Betrayed back in 1991-92. I was assisted in writing the footnotes for that book by Bob Spiegelman. Bob had worked as a researcher on the film JFK. He had access to an unpublished manuscript by Peter Scott called The Dallas Conspiracy, issued in 1971. Therefore, in the notes section to the first edition of Destiny Betrayed, one will see a mention of “the TFX scandal” in relation to Navy Secretary Fred Korth and also to Lyndon Johnson. That passage states that President Kennedy forced Korth to resign in October of 1963 over the TFX affair. Bob also added that the episode had the potential to destroy Lyndon Johnson. (See footnote 2 on page 340)

    I don’t stand by that information today. I have found no credible evidence that Korth was asked by Kennedy to resign and neither is there credible evidence showing his resignation was related to the dispute over the tactical experimental fighter/bomber plane (TFX), eventually called the F-111. (Boston Globe, October 15, 1963, article by Robert Thompson) But the fact that these accusations were made shows just how wild the misinformation got about this defense project procurement episode. There are, of course, several other mentions of the TFX affair in other Kennedy assassination volumes, e.g. Seth Kantor’s The Ruby Cover-Up (p. 51). But, to my knowledge, in those volumes there has been little detailed discussion of the TFX dispute in historical and factual terms. As President Kennedy complained, there had been nothing more than innuendo. (See aforementioned Thompson article)

    But yet, despite this rather barren database of information, partly made up of newspaper stories by people like Drew Pearson, the F-111 affair lives on. In fact, a bit over a year ago, a protégé of Scott’s, Jonathan Marshall, made an entire speech about the episode. Many years ago, Marshall contributed to a journal Scott put out called Parapolitics and he has co-authored two books with Scott. I expected to hear something new and scholarly on the subject at such a late date. I was disappointed when I didn’t. What Marshall spoke about was pretty much what he had written about back in 1996 and what Scott had written about back in 1971. (Click here for a sample)

    This was jarring, because the affair was as old as Kennedy’s assassination, of which there has been much new information released. And several speakers addressed that information at the informal, Gary Aguilar sponsored seminar Marshall spoke at. Because of this critical lapse, much of what follows will be new to the reader.

    I

    The TFX plane, that would eventually become the F-111, was not a product of the Kennedy administration. It was presented for production during the Eisenhower administration. In the period of 1959-60, General Frank Everest was commander over the Tactical Air Command and also a commander of U. S. Air Forces in Europe. (Robert T. Art, The TFX Decision, p. 15) Everest had decided that the current fighter/bomber in use for Europe, the F-105, was outdated. He envisioned a new plane to replace it. To say that his vision was ambitious is too modest a characterization. Everest wanted the new fighter/bomber to be able to:

    1. Participate in air to air combat over the battlefield
    2. Be able to impose effective interdiction of supply routes behind enemy lines
    3. Supply air to ground cover for combat troops
    4. Be able to take off from and land on short sod runways

    This last requirement was formed to counter what the Air Force saw as a problem in their role as part of the nuclear triad (i.e. missiles, submarines, and bombers). Namely, that when the F-105 was stationed in Europe on a long 11,000-foot runway, it would be easily detectable and, therefore, easy to knock out. Therefore, it would not be a factor in an atomic exchange. (Robert Coulam, Illusions of Choice, p. 93) So this design requirement was made to neutralize that criticism and maintain an Air Force role in the atomic triad. But Everest went further in this aspect. He also wanted the plane to be able to cross the Atlantic nonstop, without refueling in the air. The point was to further safeguard the TFX from being knocked out on the ground. (Coulam, p. 37)

    What made the upcoming decision on Everest’s plane more complicated was the fact that the Navy also wanted a new fighter. This was called the F-6D Missileer. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates stopped development of both planes before leaving office. But further, the Eisenhower administration cancelled the F-6D.

    So, from the beginning, the reader can see two important problems with Everest’s vision. First, the aim was to preserve a role for his branch of the service in an evolving Cold War scenario that would be dominated by missiles and submarines. Second, Everest’s ambition for the F-111 was unprecedented. As authors Robert Coulam and Robert T. Art have stated, Everest wanted a plane that was not just a combination fighter/bomber. He wanted a plane that would operate and perform missions at both high and low altitude. And when the design stage was over, the requirement was it had to do these things at supersonic speed. (Art pgs. 17-19; Coulam, pp. 94-95)

    It is necessary to explain what made Everest’s design so difficult to achieve. The prime mission of the plane for the Air Force was that it be able to fly at extremely low altitude at a considerable distance in order to evade radar and drop its atomic payload without being shot down. (Coulam, p. 94). The performance requirements that it had to be able to take off on short runways, yet achieve high speeds for tactical combat above the battlefield, complicated the wing structure of the plane. On short takeoffs, the plane would need long, unswept wings; for high speed air combat at Mach 2.5, it would need short, sharply swept wings. (Coulam, p. 380) The many missions that Everest imagined for the plane created complex technical problems. To name just one: the differing wing necessities eventually caused the creation of the variable wing configuration. In other words, the plane’s wings could be altered. This had never been done successfully on a military plane before. But with the help of NASA engineer John Stack, it worked for the F-111. This was a significant design and development achievement. (Art, pp. 21-22) As Peter Davies notes in his detailed examination of the plane’s features and performance, that variable wing design was imitated later in at least seven different Air Force planes. (Davies, General Dynamic’s F-111 Aardvark, see Introduction)

    Davies’ analysis goes on to mention the fact that, to fulfill its many functions, the F-111 was the first fighter plane to have afterburning turbofan engines along with supersonic performance. As opposed to turbojets, this allowed the plane to increase its flying time by using less fuel. (Davies, Introduction) Finally, and again in following with the plane’s multi-missions, Davies also shows how the F-111’s excellent avionics allowed the aircraft to fly at night, in bad weather, and over all types of terrains. (ibid)

    But even that does not do justice to what the F-111 was supposed to ultimately do. To explain why the plane’s mission got even more complicated, we must turn to the career and character of the incoming Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.

    II

    To begin with a truism: McNamara was a brilliant student in mathematics and economics. He had an impressive ability to quantify both problems and solutions. After graduating from Berkley, he attended Harvard Business School. With a Harvard MBA in 1939, he took an accounting job at Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. But, in a year, he was invited back to Harvard to become their youngest professor. When the war broke out, Harvard helped the Defense Department form a production team to turn out aircraft. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 8) McNamara was on that management team. By all accounts, McNamara was a good professor—but he was an even better manager. His talent for mathematical quantification, statistics, and computations, plus his ability to articulate his ideas, all became the stuff of legend. He attained the Legion of Merit by the time he left the service in 1946.

    After the war, through his friend and military colleague Tex Thornton, McNamara attained a management position at Ford Motor Company. At Ford, McNamara furthered his already formidable reputation for managerial analysis and problem solving. When McNamara and his colleagues came into Dearborn Michigan, the company was ailing. Henry Ford II knew he needed a young, energetic team to turn Ford around. Before Ford even met McNamara and his service cohorts, he had decided to hire them. (McNamara, p. 11) For what McNamara and his team achieved at Ford, they earned the nickname the Whiz Kids. McNamara began in planning and financial analysis; he soon rose to senior executive levels. He became known for his “scientific management” techniques (e.g. his uses of computers and spreadsheets, which were pioneering). He eventually became president of Ford, as he had brought them from a sickly state into striking distance of General Motors. His presidency lasted ever so briefly, since he soon got a phone call from Bobby Kennedy. His president elect brother wanted McNamara to be his Secretary of Defense.

    This is the point where John Kennedy’s ideas about reforming defense programs set up by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles meets up with Robert McNamara’s managerial skills. From his senate seat, Kennedy had criticized President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles quite often and on a wide variety of issues. Among them were their defense strategies of brinksmanship, the New Look, massive retaliation, and—closest to our subject—the duplication of weapons systems. Kennedy was referring to things like Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM’s), cruise missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles. (Coulam, p. 46) Kennedy planned on overhauling all of these ideas, because he felt that they forced America into dangerous, atomic-threatening scenarios much too quickly, thus depriving the president of different registers of response to perceived security threats. This is where JFK’s concepts like flexible response and counterinsurgency came into play. Kennedy also felt that there was too much service rivalry to build exclusive weapons systems that, in reality, could be interchanged with other branches, in order to save money through economies of scale. The intelligent, experienced, imaginative Robert McNamara was going to be Kennedy’s agent of change in these matters.

    But there was one factor involved in all this which made the concept of what became the F-111 even more difficult to achieve—even for someone as highly skilled in these affairs as McNamara. As previously mentioned, Eisenhower had cancelled the F6-D. When McNamara entered office, he now cancelled the F-105, but approved continued production of the F-4, which was originally designed as a Navy fighter without a nuclear mission. (Coulam, p. 49) The importance of these decisions was that the Air Force now needed the F-111 for atomic bombing missions to replace the F-105. McNamara liked the versatility of the F-111 and he decided to do something rather daring. He wanted it to be an inter-service project from its inception. In other words, both the Air Force and the Navy would cooperate in the planning and development of the plane from the start. The Navy was meant to use the plane for fleet protection and infantry (Marine) support. But since the plane’s primary mission was going to be the atomic delivery angle, the Air Force would have the lead in the design stage.

    The Navy did not like the subordinate idea and they were not shy about voicing their disagreement. (Coulam, pp. 52-53) But McNamara was intent upon beginning a successful inter-service program, that he thought would reform weapons procurement. In fact, at the start, McNamara actually wanted the F-111 to be used by every branch of the military. (Art, p. 29) But he scaled that back to both the Navy and Air Force before the bidding process began.

    Before we get to that stage of the story, it should be stressed that—because of the plane’s many missions—the project was going to be a very difficult one from the start. To use just one example: no plane had ever been required to do a low-level mission combined with a transoceanic ferry mission before. (Art, p. 20) To only make Air Force General Everest’s dream a reality was going to be an uphill task. Versatility is a laudable aim, but one can have so much of it that, in achieving the different aims, they begin to erode the others. To use one example: the Air Force wanted the atomic delivery mission performed at supersonic speed. This required more fuel, which made the plane heavier. The Navy argued that the heavier weight would decrease the time the plane could stay in the air above ships for fleet protection. (Coulam, pp. 241-44) To have just succeeded as an Air Force plane, the multi-missioned F-111 would have required all of McNamara’s managerial skills and experience. His attempt to turn it into an inter-service plane went beyond even his abilities.

    III

    F-111 Aardvark

    In almost any discussion of the F-111 controversy, the process of the source allocation and bidding by manufacturers is made into a matter of intrigue and mystery. The reason being that, when the four bidding rounds were completed, the Pentagon unanimously endorsed the offer by the Boeing company. Because of the plane’s grand ambition and technical problems, this process went on for 14 months, until November of 1962. (Art, p. 55) The competition began with six competitors. There were three bids by single companies and three dual bids. In the last two rounds, the two competitors were Boeing and a dual bid by General Dynamics/Grumman. The Pentagon had worked out a complex multi-stage evaluation process that was point scored over four major areas.

    Almost every commentator notes that McNamara ended up overriding the Pentagon’s decision and awarding the contract to General Dynamics/Grumman. What no one notes is, that based on the Pentagon’s own points evaluation system, General Dynamics/Grumman won the competition! (Art, pp. 112-115) In other words, the Pentagon overruled its own evaluation. McNamara was restoring the original scored decision. It’s true that the scores were quite close. But in some areas, like the Technical and Management categories, General Dynamics/Grumman won by large margins. The Pentagon preferred the Boeing bid, because the company promised higher performance in certain areas. But as Robert Art points out, the Boeing bid was based upon an engine that was only in the planning stages. It had yet to be built or tested. And it would probably not be perfected and ready for the assembly line until 1967. (Art, p. 64) Whereas the General Dynamics/Grumman plane was scheduled to fly in 1965.

    The other factor that is usually used in adding intrigue to the episode is the fact that the Boeing bid was lower in price. As any experienced author in the field of weapons procurement understands, this issue is a tempest in a teapot, for the simple reason that it is a rarity when a weapons system comes in on time and on budget. For this reason, very few participants believe the original estimates anyway. By 1968, the average weapons procurement contract was 220% over budget and 36% over schedule. (Art, p. 86) Most everyone understood that many of these estimates were unrealistic for a purpose: they wanted the Pentagon to buy into the project on the promise of higher performance. By nature and experience manufacturers knew the Pentagon liked things like higher speed and more explosive power. Therefore, contractors would deliberately lower the price of their projects to make it easier for the generals to sell the contract to the Defense Secretary. A good example of this corrupt process occurred with the F-111. During congressional hearings, it was discovered that one of the evaluators, Admiral Frederick Ashworth, had not even read the final evaluation report. (Art, pp. 162-63) The practice that had become routine was this: the Pentagon would decide on the weapon it wanted, the company would fudge the figures to make it attractive, and all that would be required was an oral briefing so each evaluator would get the same canned message. (ibid) This was the system that McNamara and Kennedy were trying to challenge.

    Coming from his background, McNamara’s disagreement with all this was not just that the system was rigged and bloated—which it was. But that the Pentagon was a sucker for performance that went beyond the contract requirement. McNamara was specific about this in an interview he did with the Government Accounting Office. The Pentagon’s penchant for high performance caused decisions which misallocated scarce resources. And the Pentagon did this understanding that “greater incremental costs were inevitable because of the greater development risks…”. (GAO interview with McNamara of April 16, 1963) In other words, the promised performance would only be achieved after the contract was awarded in the form of additional, unawarded but substantial cost overruns.

    Which was another area that McNamara and Kennedy were trying to reform. As one observer wrote of him, “It has been said of Robert McNamara that he was the first Secretary of Defense to read the description of his job and to take it seriously.” (Coulam, p. 45) Prior to McNamara, almost all Pentagon contracts had been figured on cost plus terms. Which loosely meant that whatever the overrun was, it would be covered by the original contract. This had led to increases in the research and development phase of contracting of 300 % from 1953-63. (Art, p. 89) McNamara wanted to change this also. He wanted to alter the system by adding a ceiling price and also incentives for coming in ahead of schedule. In the case of the TFX, McNamara wanted more realistic estimates from both companies, since he understood the Pentagon’s past habit of buying into a false contract. His goal was to achieve high quality at the most economical price.

    Which leads into an important point that Jonathan Marshall misconstrued in his presentation about the TFX. Marshall said that when going through the final estimates McNamara did not present written reports before he made his decision, which ignores the fact that everyone was working from the same estimates that the Air Force had prepared. (Art, p. 134) McNamara thought both sets of estimates were unrealistic, but he thought Boeing’s was worse in that aspect. And he was specific in his analysis about the areas where he felt they had fudged the numbers, thereby showing that the price difference was a mirage (ibid, pp. 139-142) But McNamara also felt that he had to do this, because the Pentagon had performed a lousy job in their analysis of costs. During the entire long evaluation process, only 1% of their time had been spent on this important area. (ibid, p. 137)

    Another point missed in this regard is quite relevant: the Secretary of Defense did not have a systems analysis department in 1962. If the reader can comprehend it, for 14 years, the Defense Secretary was in essence rubber stamping what the Pentagon placed on his desk. It was McNamara who began systems analysis and it was a direct result of the TFX episode. (ibid, pp. 139-140)

    But the truth is that McNamara did have written reports at his disposal. He had a secret study made by a private consulting firm. Understandably, he did not wish to reveal this at the time. (Coulam, p. 59) Based on this private analysis, McNamara concluded that the Boeing estimate and plan was too risky technically, overindulgent in cost estimates, and almost ignored the interchangeable parts formula the secretary wanted between the Navy and Air Force version of the planes. (ibid, p. 58)

    In that last, crucial regard, the numbers were overwhelmingly against Boeing. By measurement against structural weight of the Air Force and Navy versions, the General Dynamics/Grumman model had a ratio of 92% interchangeable parts; Boeing’s rate was 34%. (Art, p. 150) The Defense Secretary noted that the General Dynamics/Grumman design has “a very high degree of identical structure for the Air Force and Navy versions. In the Boeing version, less than half of the structural components were the same.” (Davies, section on Design and Development.) McNamara justifiably concluded that, in reality, Boeing was going to produce two different planes. Yet, they were going to charge the Defense Department less for this? As Robert Art points out, this factor would greatly increase costs in the development of the plane. Yet it is one reason the Pentagon preferred Boeing. They preferred two separate planes. (Art, pp. 151-53)

    As McNamara stated early in his tenure during an interview with NBC News:

    I think that the role of public manager is very similar to the role of a private manager; in each case he has the option of following one of two major alternative courses of action. He can either act as judge or a leader. In the former case, he sits and waits until subordinates bring to him problems for solution or alternatives for choice. In the latter case, he immerses himself in the operations of the business or governmental activity, examines the problems, the objectives, the alternative courses of action, chooses among them, and leads the organization to their accomplishment. In the one case, it’s a passive role, in the other case an active role. I have always believed in and endeavored to follow the active leadership role, as opposed to the passive judicial role.

    IV

    As the reader can see, when presented with the true elements of the TFX case, McNamara and Kennedy were trying to reform a well-entrenched system that needed reforming. For whatever reason, the journalists working the story did not want to reveal that fact. Particularly poor in this regard was the work of Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who knew no boundaries in writing up unfounded rumors and gossip about the TFX, even if it came from the likes of Bobby Baker. But even more important in manufacturing the tidal wave of misinformation about the conflict was a figure who Marshall did not mention. This was Senator Henry Jackson from Washington. Jackson is important to this saga, because his nickname was “the senator from Boeing”. To leave Jackson out of the TFX affair is like not revealing that Jim McCord had worked for the CIA prior to his role in Watergate. As Joe Baugher notes at his web site, it was Jackson who instigated the initial congressional hearings on the subject, which went on for the better part of a year. (Art, p. 4) As Peter Davies observes, the many trials it took to perfect all of the plane’s technical achievements—variable wings, turbofan engines, the avionics—these all provided fodder for its congressional critics. (Davies, Introduction)

    Jackson’s investigation, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, was created to prove that somehow McNamara’s supervision of the process was corrupted and this was why he rejected Boeing. By doing this, it managed to fudge the fact that the Pentagon did not stand by its own scoring system. For the many months that the congressional inquiry went on, nothing stuck to either McNamara, Johnson, or Kennedy. But since the inquiry was politically motivated—so that Jackson could stay on indefinitely as the senator from Boeing—the committee was forced to come up with something, anything. If they did not, then it would have exposed the fact that Jackson was running a political vendetta for his backers.

    What did they come up with? That Fred Korth, the Secretary of the Navy in 1962 and 1963, had been the president of a bank which had once loaned money to General Dynamics. The fact that this was what banks are supposed to do and that the loan occurred years prior to the TFX being bid on did not matter. The other point that the committee harped on was that Roswell Gilpatric, a deputy of McNamara’s, had done some work for General Dynamics at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. The fact that his firm had also worked for Boeing did not matter, since the work they did for General Dynamics was more expensive. The fact that Gilpatric had next to nothing to do with the decision to award the contract was also not important to Jackson. (Art, pp. 4-5) As Robert Coulam points out in his book on the matter, not only could the committee not prove any impropriety, but they could not disprove that McNamara had awarded the contract on the merits. This made their failed attempts to show untoward influence even weaker. (Coulam, p. 64) Since the Jackson effort was political, Senator McClellan ended up being an ally of the Navy and their objective had always been to kill the plane. As Coulam notes in his book, during the evaluation process, at a flight demonstration, a Navy admiral told an Air Force officer, words to the effect: You will never see this airplane fly off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

    That prediction ended up being correct. Yet, in one of the most revealing sections of his book, Robert Coulam demonstrates in detail that every objection the Navy made to the F-111 could also have been made to the F-14 Tomcat—called the VFX in its development stage. But because it was originally designed as a Navy plane and they were in the driver’s seat throughout, failures the Navy would not accept in price and performance with the TFX, they would accept with the VFX. (Coulam, pp. 247-51) And he also shows that the much-storied expense of the F-111 was easily surpassed by the F-14. Yet, that plane was only a fighter, not a fighter/bomber. Thus, he proves the ingrained bias that McNamara was trying to overcome. And this is the bias and narrowness that Jackson and McClellan took advantage of to keep a corrupt and wasteful process intact. In fact, the moment the Navy learned about McNamara’s intent to resign in 1967, they began to go around him in order to cancel their version of the plane. (Coulam, p. 76) If the reader can believe it, around this time, congressional hearings resumed, led by Armed Services chairman John Stennis. The admiral mentioned above was quite prescient about what the Navy would do to stop the plane.

    Marshall ended his presentation with the usual Jackson/Pentagon talking points: the F-111 was an utter failure once it was used by the Air Force. Therefore, backward reasoning would dictate that this was owed to the corrupt process condoned by Kennedy and McNamara and influenced by those (unproven) criminals Korth and Gilpatric.

    The problem with this is simple: it’s not true. The F-111 stayed in use in America for 30 years and in Australia ten years longer, which is about an average to slightly above average run for such a plane. As Joe Baugher explains at his web site, the F-111 “turned out to be one of the most effective all-weather interdiction aircraft in the world” with a very good safety record. The reason it stayed in use for so long is that there was no other aircraft the Air Force had which could carry out its mission “…of precise air strikes over such long ranges in all-weather conditions.” Baugher continues, the amazing thing about the F-111 was that it could be fitted with up to as many as 50 750-pound bombs and it could carry a large payload over a range of 1,725 miles. Thus, although it was not designed for that conflict, it was often used during the Vietnam War. (It would later be used in Libya in 1986 and Desert Storm in Iraq.) As William Vassallo notes at history.net, one of the best things about the F-111 was its ability to fly at almost tree-top level, thus avoiding obstacles and radar. And, therefore, making bomb runs more accurate. Vassallo quotes Colonel Ivan Dethman, who commanded a detachment of the planes in Indochina: “That…was the best plane I had ever flown.” He even quotes a Navy pilot who flew the F-111B, the prototype made for that service: “There’s no aircraft now flying that can match it in the sky.” It also fulfilled its design mission of being able to land on runways less than 3,000 feet long. As Vassallo notes, “…even today this is unparalleled in most fighter aircraft.”

    But, as Vassallo also writes, the most impressive aspect of the F-111 was its overall ordnance carrying ability: “Never before had a fighter been as capable of carrying and launching such a mix.” This included conventional bombs ranging from 500-3,000 pounds, napalm, long range rockets, nuclear weapons, cluster bomb units, and even a Gatling gun. For a large plane, it could zoom to 60,000 feet at 1,750 mph. Finally, the plane had a terrain following radar and this allowed the navigator to see not just down and ahead, but also to each side. In addition to this, the plane could fly at well above MACH 2, because of its innovative afterburning turbofan engines. (Robert Bernier, Air and Space Magazine, 9/18) Because of this unusual speed and size combination, maintenance supervisor Mike Glenn, who worked on both planes, said that the later versions of the F-111 could fly circles around the early F 14s. Finally, one of the Navy’s prime objections was that they did not think the plane could land smoothly on a carrier deck. The Navy guaranteed that this criticism would stay alive, since they never landed the plane on a carrier until after it was cancelled. But in the summer of 1968, it did attempt such a landing. It was achieved without problems on the USS Coral Sea. (See Bernier)

    Major Jim Icenhour said, it was:

    …a hell of an airplane! It had an ordnance carrying capacity and internal fuel load that far exceeded any other fighter of the time. It was superb at low level. That faster it went, the better it handled. (Davies, ibid)

    As Peter Davies writes in his book about the plane, the F-111 was so good as an interdiction aircraft that, after production was halted in 1978, the Air Force had a hard time finding a replacement that could match it. In fact, the Air Force Study Group on the subject recommended bringing it back instead of buying into its successor, the F-15E Strike Eagle. In the interim, that service went ahead and rebuilt 13 F-111’s, because there was a shortage of them in use. The Air Force then planned on updating the plane and keeping it in use until 2015, which would have meant the plane would have been flying for a remarkable half century. But the budget cuts introduced under President Clinton ended up ruling this out. (Davies, see Conclusion) Davies closed his detailed study of the plane with the following:

    The F-111 overcame unrealistic design goals, muddled management, inter-service conflict, and ill-informed press criticism to become one of the most successful combat aircraft of the 20th century and the progenitor of an international generation of “swing-wing” designs.

    He also paid it the highest compliment, writing that the plane “…was in a class of its own…Its demise has left a gap in tactical strike capability that has not yet been filled”. The idea that the F-111 was a failure is a necessary part of a misleading myth.

    V

    In theory, I have no objections to the Deep Politics/Parapolitics approach to complex and officially unsolved political crimes. At times, in those instances, one has to resort to such oblique techniques, because of the deliberate cover ups employed. But, in practice, it should not be used in the place of real scholarship and genuine, relevant data collection. In his book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott wrote that what he described there is a system of accommodations featuring alliances and symbiosis between lawless forces which the system is supposed to eradicate. (p. 312) But with the TFX, that kind of analysis resulted in errors and omissions that somehow missed the main culprit—the Pentagon’s corrupt practices—and mischaracterized the man who was trying to eradicate the practices, Robert McNamara. At the end of Marshall’s speech, he gave the impression that he had read at least some of the books written on the subject. To be kind, I hope he was bluffing. Because if he did read those books and he recycled the Pearson/Jackson talking points instead, it does not speak well for him.

    As a result of these lacunae, in all the instances where the subject was discussed in relation to the JFK case, it has been largely mischaracterized, and in just about every way. I have little problem in saying that what entered into the assassination literature was a diversion from what really happened. As I have stated elsewhere, one can make the argument that Henry Jackson was one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement. Like Ronald Reagan, he was ready to give the Treasury over to the Pentagon in his pursuit of a hawkish foreign policy. I never considered Drew Pearson a genuine journalist. But yet, using those kinds of sources, one can conceal what the true conflict really was in the TFX affair. It was not about the Chicago Outfit, financier Henry Crown, Fred Korth, or Roswell Gilpatric. It was about McNamara’s and Kennedy’s desire to reform the military and specifically the process of weapons procurement. As Robert Art has written, McNamara had done something no prior Secretary of Defense had done: “He developed the ability to make informed decisions on which of the choices before him would contribute the most to integrating and balancing military instruments of force.” (Art, p. 158) The military did not like McNamara’s integrating and balancing act. But McNamara understood how the procurement process in place would resist that kind of reform. As a result, in addition to setting up a systems analysis unit, he reversed the source allocation process from one of recommendation to one of advisement. (ibid, p. 164) By ignoring all of this (quite) relevant data, the Deep Politics/Parapolitics approach to the TFX episode has proven to be superficial at best and misleading at worst. And it does not appear to have been done as a last resort but as a first resort—and a repeating resort lasting about 50 years. It is not easy to read congressional hearings and Pentagon reports or to interview important people—some who wish to remain anonymous—but yet this is what primary sourcing is all about. And this is what good historical analysis is made from.

    Because of the flaws inherent in that approach and methodology, many people will only now have a (long-delayed) knowledge of what the whole TFX mélange really concerned, what the real battle was about—and how Jackson guaranteed McNamara would end up losing. Contrary to what many have wrongly conveyed, the F-111 was an exceptional plane. But the Navy was never going to admit that. As McNamara said, they sabotaged the aircraft rather than let it fly off their carrier decks.

  • Thomas D. Herman Smooches Halberstam and Sheehan

    Thomas D. Herman Smooches Halberstam and Sheehan

    Thomas D. Herman was a former producer for CNN. The editorial he published in the Boston Globe on September 19, 2019 shows it. If the reader can believe it, Herman writes there that the reporting of Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam from Saigon in the period of 1962-63 upset President John Kennedy, because they were exposing America’s growing involvement in the Indochina conflict. To say such a thing in 2019 is simply stunning. With all the documents that have been declassified on this subject, with all the contemporary research that has been written by authors like Gordon Goldstein, James Blight, David Kaiser, Howard Jones, Jim Douglass, and John Newman, this concept is so obsolete that its almost ludicrous. It is so opposed to the current factual record that one almost suspects that Sheehan and the heirs of Halberstam were behind it.

    As the six authors noted above have proven with declassified documents, by 1963, Kennedy had decided that there would be no escalation of the war. In that year, he had issued a directive, NSAM 263, to begin removing all American advisors from the conflict. In fact, one could persuasively argue that Kennedy had made the decision to withdraw in the spring of 1962. This is when he had his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, hand over a memo to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recommending drawing down American forces there. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 236-37). One month later, McNamara forwarded that directive to General Harkins, the commander of forces in Vietnam. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 120-21). This was the actual beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

    The basis of Herman’s nonsensical column is a documentary film called Dateline Saigon. This is a film that Herman produced and wrote in 2016, which has yet to find a distributor. But in his article, Herman tries to say that somehow Kennedy was angry with Halberstam for writing about the air operation Farmgate. These were combat operations which McNamara had approved as long as they were dual missions, that is, they consisted of both American pilots and Vietnamese trainees. The military had done what they could to cover up their individual missions prior to McNamara taking supervisorial command in December of 1961. (Newman, pp. 160-61). After this, they had to be dual missions. As John Newman makes clear, the Pentagon was not happy with this directive, most notably Curtis LeMay. He thought these dual missions were nothing but “diplomatic fiddling around.” (Newman, p. 162). LeMay said that the threat in Vietnam was being played down and it was a good place for a showdown with the communists. He pressed for the use of American might all the way up to atomic weapons. LeMay also advocated for an insertion of an Army brigade task force, a Marine division accompanied by an air wing, and three tactical Air Force units. These were needed to stop the loss of South Vietnam and ultimately all of Southeast Asia. One month later, in January of 1962, the Joint Chiefs passed on a recommendation to insert combat troops. (Newman, p. 163). If one adds in all the previous recommendations from the previous year, as enumerated by Gordon Goldstein in his book Lessons in Disaster, this would make 11 requests for combat troops that were all turned aside by Kennedy.

    There is a secret that Herman keeps out of his column, namely, that Halberstam and Sheehan agreed with this escalation. How anyone can write a column about those two men and leave out the name of John Paul Vann is startling. For as anyone who understands the Vietnam story knows, Sheehan and Halberstam were acolytes of Vann. And Colonel Vann wanted more American involvement in the war, not less. Vann understood that the ARVN could not win the war on their own, but he did not want America to leave. He wanted direct US involvement to save the day. And he made no secret of this fact. (Newman, pp. 316-19). Much of the information that Sheehan and Halberstam wrote came from Vann and almost all their stories criticized the conduct of the war and said the USA and Saigon were losing. (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 194) As John Newman notes in JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy was trying to conceal his withdrawal program under the mask of false intelligence reports saying Saigon was winning. Vann knew this was false. And he was using Sheehan and Halberstam to expose it. (Kaiser, p. 225) In fact, one could argue that Halberstam and Sheehan became conduits for Americans in Saigon who were opposed to Kennedy’s policies. In addition to Vann, that would have included Henry Cabot lodge. (Kaiser, p. 233, p. 255) The disapproval of what Vann, Halberstam, and Sheehan were doing went all the way up to the top levels of the administration, i.e. Kennedy, McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. (Kaiser, p. 261)

    If the evidence advanced above is not enough for Mr. Herman, I would then offer up Halberstam’s first book on Vietnam, which he would have much preferred that everyone forget. It was called The Making of a Quagmire and was published in 1965. As I have stated previously, that book is probably the single harshest blast issued against American policy in Vietnam written up to that time. It was quite comprehensive, attacking just about every single element of the American mission. It attacked American backing of the Diem regime, the ineptness of the ARVN, and especially Colonel Hunyh Van Cao, since Vann really disliked Cao. Halberstam praised Vann and recommended him since he knew how to win the war. (See Chapter 11). If one needed to make it clearer, Halberstam does. Towards the end, he writes that “Bombers and helicopters and napalm are a help but they are not enough.” (p. 321) In other words, combat troops were needed. A page later, he concluded with the following: “The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder, and for the other side to practice self-deception.” In other words, Kennedy had blown it by not escalating the war. When, in fact, the real problem was that Eisenhower, Nixon, and the Dulles brothers—Secretary of State John Foster and CIA Director Allen—should have never broken the Geneva Accords back in 1956.

    The problem for these three hawks was this: they got their wish. Johnson expanded the war in the air and inserted tens of thousands of combat troops in the very year Halberstam published his book. It ended up being a horrifying debacle. All in pursuit of a goal that could not be achieved. Kennedy was correct on this. Vann, Sheehan, and Halberstam were wrong. But the two enthralled reporters could never admit that. It took them years to even understand that military escalation was not going to work. In fact, it was not until 1971, when Sheehan was confronted with the Pentagon Papers, that he began to understand what he had done. Just the year before, he had been sent out by his New York Times editors to attack Mark Lane for exposing Vietnam atrocities in his book Conversations with Americans. He dutifully did so and called the My Lai Massacre only a rumor. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, pp. 220-21)

    In 1972, Halberstam published his fallacious and pernicious book, The Best and the Brightest. I have examined that book at length and in depth. That volume broke a basic rule of scholarship, in that not one statement was footnoted. Beyond that, the author did not even list his interview subjects. This allowed him to make some of the most fraudulent statements ever in a book about the Vietnam conflict. For instance, on page 214, he writes that McNamara “became the principal desk officer on Vietnam in 1962 because he felt that the President needed his help.”

    Everyone makes mistakes in a journalistic career. They are acceptable in dealing with complex subjects. As long as not too many are made. But this reviewer has a problem when someone gets an important episode precisely wrong. When someone does that, it indicates 1.) The writer was gulled by an unreliable source, or 2.) The writer had an agenda. Today, I think both factors applied for Halberstam’s inflated phantasm of a book. In the second paragraph of this article, it is revealed that McNamara did not go to Kennedy. Kennedy went to McNamara and it was not about conducting the war. It was about implementing a withdrawal plan. It is hard to believe that Halberstam could have missed this key point in all those interviews he did. But it was this piece of hokum that began the myth that Vietnam was McNamara’s War. (For my original review of this pathetic book, click here)

    Can Mr. Herman have really not been aware of any of this material? The idea that Halberstam and Sheehan were journalistic heroes on Vietnam is a sick joke. And the idea that Kennedy planned on escalating the war is also ersatz.

    The conclusion of the piece is also seriously compromised. The Pentagon later learned a lesson from the coverage of Vietnam. But the lesson was not learned under Kennedy. When Johnson escalated the war to almost unimaginable heights and reporters were allowed to roam free and expose the utter futility of General William Westmoreland’s plan to win the conflict, that is when the true horror of the conflict reached into the homes of the American public. Which is why it ended up being called The Living Room War. This was especially accentuated during the Tet offensive, with films of Viet Cong guerillas running through the American State Department compound with rifles, while American diplomats fired at them with pistols. Those kinds of reports went on for four years, night after night, week after week, month after month. This is how Vietnam really became a quagmire—after Vann, Halberstam, and Sheehan got what they hoped for. There was nothing like it under Kennedy. And it was those later images which ruined LBJ’s presidency and poisoned the support for the war effort domestically. It also caused the incoming president after him, Richard Nixon, to understand that the war was a losing effort and it could not be escalated on the ground any further.

    The Pentagon learned its lesson from this ordeal. Therefore, beginning with Ronald Reagan, the idea of guided press caravans began. The alternative was to only allow certain press representatives to report back to a larger group of reporters as to what was happening. Sometimes, as in Fallujah, Iraq, there was virtually no American press allowed at all. And that was the real significance of the press coverage in Vietnam. The only way Halberstam and Sheehan caused this was in encouraging escalation in service of John Paul Vann.

    Tom Herman is making sure that no one learns the real lessons of Vietnam.

  • The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 4

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 4

    Part 4: Assaulting the Ghetto: LBJ vs. the Kennedys

    As I have tried to show in this series, the gestalt message contained in the books under discussion—that President Kennedy had no vision of what he wanted to do in regards to civil rights—is not supported by the record. (For an expression of that idea, see Bryant, pp. 471-73) John F. Kennedy did have a vision. It was articulated as far back as 1956, when he stated in a New York City speech that Harry Truman must be given credit for trying to pass a civil rights bill and added that Democrats must not waver on the issue. (NY Times, 2/8/56) It was reiterated when he voted for Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He advocated for that part of the bill because it would have given the attorney general expansive powers to file lawsuits on both voting rights and school integration issues. (Golden, pp. 94-95) In 1960, he told his civil rights advisory team that they could use information garnered by the Civil Rights Commission to break the back of voter discrimination in the South. (Golden, p. 139)

    That goal was also contained in Harris Wofford’s memo, which was delivered to JFK in late December of 1960. (Nick Bryant writes that this was a thousand word memo; Wofford says it was 30 pages long, a rather significant difference. Since Wofford wrote it, I think we can trust him. See Bryant, p. 225; Wofford, p. 130) That memo advised he do as much as possible with executive orders and the judiciary, with the idea that this pressure would eventually cause something to break in the legislature. As we have seen, that is what President Kennedy did. When he placed an omnibus civil rights bill before Congress in February of 1963, he stated he felt he had gone as far as he could with executive orders; it was now time for the legislature to do its part. (Risen, p. 36) Contrary to what Bryant implies, the president then conducted one of the longest and most comprehensive lobbying actions ever in order to get the bill passed. (Bryant, p. 410; Risen, pp. 62-63) Based upon the actions of Bull Connor in Birmingham, and the president’s conversation with Dick Gregory, the February 1963 bill was revised and fortified. Again, contrary to what Bryant writes, the president did not lose interest in the bill that fall. (Bryant, pp. 450-52) He directly intervened in the legislative process in October. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, p. 249) He also told Philip Randolph, “I know this whole thing could cost me the election but I have no intention of turning back, now or ever.” (Golden, p. 98)

    Michael Harrington
    Michael Harrington

    The Other America

    At this point in the discussion, we should pay particular attention to the last part of that statement, as it is one more indication that Kennedy did have a vision. And he and his brother were ahead of almost everyone—as we shall see, most certainly James Baldwin and Jerome Smith. For as his bill was moving through Congress, he was already thinking beyond its parameters. In June of 1963, Kennedy told a group of labor leaders that something would have to be done for the Negro. He continued by saying that we all owed them a debt of gratitude for being “in the streets” and calling our attention to the American Dream. (Golden, p. 131) What did JFK mean by this?

    Walter Heller and JFK
    Walter Heller & JFK

    As several authors have written, earlier in the year, the president had read Dwight MacDonald’s 13,000-word review of Michael Harrington’s book about the poor, The Other America. It left an indelible impression on him. In October of 1963, Homer Bigart had written a long article in The New York Times about pockets of poverty in Kentucky. The impact of those two articles caused a series of discussions between the president and his chief economic advisor, Walter Heller. (Clarke, pp. 242-43) Heller had written him a memo well before the Bigart article appeared. In it he stated that although the economy was expanding overall, there were pockets of poverty that were resistant to growth. Over months of discussion, the staunch Keynesian economist had to admit that in those pockets, people were “caught in a web of illiteracy, lack of skills, poor health and squalor.” After giving the president some statistics on the matter, Heller suggested what he called an “attack on poverty”. Kennedy told Heller that he was going to make this an election issue and he would visit some blighted areas in order to enter it onto the national stage.

    In other words, the “War on Poverty”, or as some call it, the “Second Reconstruction”, was not President Johnson’s idea. But beyond that, there is something else lurking here as a back-story. Something that Thurston Clarke did not touch upon. And, in fact, few authors have ever discussed it. This back-story concerns the figure of David Hackett.

    II

    David Hackett and RFK
    David Hackett & RFK

    Like William Vanden Heuvel with the Prince Edward Schools crisis, Hackett was a friend of the Kennedy family. Specifically, he attended prep school with Robert Kennedy. He was such a good athlete that novelist John Knowles modeled the charismatic figure of Phineas in A Separate Peace on him. (See this bio)

    Influenced by the work of his sister Eunice Shriver, one of the first things Robert Kennedy did as attorney general was to take a dual interest in the rights of the poor to have attorneys and also the problems and causes of juvenile delinquency. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) The siblings convinced President Kennedy to issue an executive order creating the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. The committee had a three-year life span and JFK made Hackett the executive director. Hackett had a wide mandate. The attorney general wanted his friend to explore the issue in all of its dimensions and manifestations. Which he did. Sometimes he and RFK would just take a stroll through Harlem or the slum areas of Washington DC. Hackett would then introduce Kennedy to someone he knew, preferably a gang member, and the three would talk. Other times, Hackett would show RFK the shabby conditions of schools or recreation areas. The attorney general was moved by these and so he invited celebrities—Cary Grant, Chuck Connors, Edward R. Murrow—to come into those blighted neighborhoods to give talks to the kids who lived there. (Schmitt, pp. 69-70) The attorney general would also attain appropriations to repair some of these facilities.

    The question that Hackett eventually began to hone in on was this: What caused the problem of delinquency? In doing so, he first reviewed the literature. He then interviewed some of the authorities in the field: for instance, sociologist Lloyd Ohlin and psychiatrist Lawrence Kumrie. He then traveled outside the east coast to the Watts ghetto and East LA barrio. (Schmitt, pp. 71-72)

    Lloyd Ohlin
    Lloyd Ohlin

    After doing this research and field investigation, Hackett formulated two broad conclusions. First, he agreed with Ohlin and his approach to the subject. Ohlin co-wrote a book called Delinquency and Opportunity. That volume challenged the accepted paradigm that the problem was one of individual adjustment. It made the case that the real underlying problem was the poverty of the slum area and how that constricted opportunities for youth. To remedy the situation, one therefore had to supply more and better opportunities for youth in blighted areas. The second conclusion that Hackett came to was that this was not a simple phenomenon. What made it worse was the paucity of past efforts in the field, rendering it difficult to ensure that new programs would work. After all, Ohlin’s book had just been published in 1960. It was thus unlikely a solution could be found by the traditional remedy of starting up a series of FDR/New Deal-type programs. (Schmitt, p. 72)

    Leonard Cottrell
    Leonard Cottrell

    In the latter part of 1961, President Kennedy proposed a bill that would create 16 demonstration projects funded at 30 million dollars and provide Hackett a staff of 12 full-time employees. (Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America, pp. 111-112) A year later, when Harrington’s book came out, Eunice Shriver recommended forming a domestic version of the Peace Corps. (When Johnson enacted his War on Poverty this ended up being called VISTA.) But there was one point that Hackett disagreed with Ohlin about. The sociologist suggested a top-down schedule of opportunities that those in the community could choose to participate in, e.g., jobs for teenagers, legal services, day care centers, or local centers offering government services. Hackett brought in a new expert, Leonard Cottrell of the Sage Foundation. They decided that the choice of options should not originate from the top down, but from the bottom up. In other words, the poor should choose what they wanted to pick from. Hackett called this “the competent community”. (Matusow, p. 117)

    With respect to this proposal, there are two points the reader should keep in mind. First, after doing his study, Hackett understood that there was no established meme via which to frame the problem—let alone cure it. Until the day he died, he always insisted that there needed to be continual assessment as to what was working and what was not. (Schmitt, p. 92) Related to this, Hackett wanted to expand the number of demonstration projects. He reasoned that it was necessary to test what would work with differing ethnic groups; that is, what worked in East LA might not work in South Central. After he expanded his focus from delinquency to the circumstances of poverty, he knew there was more work to be done. (Matusow, p. 121) Second, he also insisted that a pure influx of funds would not solve the problem. There needed to be research and planning behind it. He convinced Bobby Kennedy on that point. (Schmitt, p. 84)

    Both men understood the urgency of the problem. From what they had read and seen, America was sitting on a ticking time-bomb. This is not after-the-fact revisionism. While everyone was concentrating on the South, Hackett and Bobby Kennedy were examining sociological predicaments elsewhere that could not be solved by an accommodations bill or a voting rights act. In these places, the problems were not simple and the remedy was not as direct. In fact, RFK predicted that riots would erupt soon if nothing was done. (Schmitt, p. 86) He told a Senate committee in February of 1963 that America was “racing the clock against disaster … We must give the members of this new lost generation some real hope in order to prevent a shattering explosion of social problems in the years to come.”

    Two and a half years later, when Martin Luther King visited Watts after the riots, that was the message he had for President Johnson. (See the film King in the Wilderness) As we saw in Part 2, this was the subject—northern race relations—that Bobby Kennedy wanted to discuss with James Baldwin and his friends at their meeting in New York in May of 1963. Through the work of Hackett, the attorney general understood that the problems of discrimination in the northern ghetto were not the same as segregation laws in the South. After the riot at Ole Miss, in the fall of 1962, he told Arthur Schlesinger words to the effect: if you think this is bad, wait till you see what we are headed for up north. (Ellen B. Meacham, Delta Epiphany, chapter 3) Because the circumstances were so different, he and Hackett knew that creative ideas were needed. That is what he wanted from people like Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry and Lena Horne. He and Burke Marshall were lawyers; they did not need any advice on whether or not they could arrest the likes of Bull Connor. But they were now about to set sail on uncharted waters and they wanted some input. The fact that authors like Larry Tye and Michael Eric Dyson completely miss the hidden epic tragedy of that wasted opportunity demonstrates the kind of writers they really are. The real truth of Dyson’s pitiful book could be illustrated with an aerial picture of the Watts riots on the front cover with RFK’s words of warning on the back. That, Mr. Dyson, is what truth really sounds like.

    III

    Needless to say, no other administration had ever gone this far in this specific field. As author David Farber has noted, Harrington’s book—which eventually sold over a million copies—surprised America. This is one of Harrington’s most quoted passages:

    The other America … is populated by failures, by those driven from the land and bewildered by the city, by old people suddenly confronted with the torments of loneliness and poverty, and by minorities facing a wall of prejudice. (The Age of Great Dreams, p. 18)

    As Farber observed, the reason the book had such an impact was that during the forties, fifties and early sixties, the topic of poverty was pretty much non-existent. But in 1943, the mechanical cotton-picker displaced tens of thousands of workers, mostly African Americans, in the south. The problem was that since these laid-off workers had little skill and less education, there was no real future for them in the north. This may have been what Richard Russell had in mind when he told his colleague Senator Harry Byrd that what he feared if John Kennedy got elected was that he would go beyond even the Democratic platform. (Brauer, p. 53) The insight may have originated from Russell’s personal exposure to Kennedy while they were in the Senate. And indeed, as we have seen, that is what the president was doing at the time of his death, before his civil rights bill passed.

    To crystallize how the Kennedys conceived the dilemma they would eventually face, let me quote Robert Kennedy:

    You could pass a law to permit a Negro to eat at Howard Johnson’s restaurant or stay at the Hilton Hotel. But you can’t pass a law that gives him enough money to permit him to eat at that restaurant or stay at that hotel. I think that’s basically the problem of the Negro in the North. (Guthman & Shulman, p. 158)

    That was not the entire problem of course. But the basic idea was that the matter was more complex and insidious once you got out of the South. As the president told Heller at their last meeting on the topic, “Yes, Walter, I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty … I don’t know what yet.” (Schmitt, p. 93) To show how interested he was, at his final meeting with his cabinet, President Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. After his death, Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general had them framed and put up on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96)

    As with many of President Kennedy’s policies, once it was assumed by Lyndon Johnson, it was changed. One of the underlying traps was what Hackett warned the Kennedys about. This problem could not be solved by constructing a New Deal program and blindly throwing money at it. As intimated above, the reason for this was that an unambiguous or certain remedy for it had not been identified. Hackett was still managing and evaluating his experimental projects, and JFK was not ready to commit to a specific program either. He wanted to do something, but he was not sure what it was.

    FDR and LBJ
    FDR & LBJ

    A significant difference in the backgrounds of Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy is that Kennedy did not arrive in Congress until after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, while Johnson was there in the thirties. He prided himself on being a New Dealer. He ran the National Youth Administration in Texas, which meant he supervised 20,000 youths. One of his proudest moments occurred during FDR’s visit to Galveston, when Johnson had all of his boys lined up for the president’s visit. (Nancy Colbert, Great Society, pp. 36-38) Unlike what Ohlin and Harrington were writing about—and what Heller was describing to the president—Roosevelt was not facing peculiar pockets of poverty amid a generally thriving economy. FDR was confronted with a massive, nationwide economic blowout that covered almost the whole country. He was facing a macroeconomic problem: how can I revive the entire economy by using Keynesian solutions? In the meantime, he had to provide aid to literally millions of people who were unemployed. And those people crisscrossed all kinds of economic, ethnic and racial boundaries. FDR’s New Deal was like a combination giant fire engine, ambulance corps, and cafeteria truck dropping supplies and services throughout the country in an attempt to stimulate the economy, give people jobs, and provide relief programs so they would not starve.

    As Hackett told RFK, this was not the situation America faced in 1962. It was much more localized and much more complicated. As we have seen, Kennedy was going to run on it in 1964 in order to transform it into a national issue. He did not plan on starting his program until after the 1964 election. (Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, p. 71) What happened after his death shows how important one man can be in determining the currents of history.

    Walter Heller met with Johnson the day after Kennedy’s murder. The economist told the new president about the ideas he and JFK had reviewed for relieving poverty. Johnson told him that it sounded like his kind of program and he wanted to go full tilt on it. He then added that John Kennedy was a bit too conservative for his taste. (Schmitt, p. 96) When Heller got back to him with the demonstration projects that were running under Hackett, Johnson almost eliminated the entire program. In his eyes, such a project had to be big and bold in order to win congressional approval and make a rhetorical impact with the public. (Schulman, p. 71; Matusow, p. 123)

    But there was another aspect to why LBJ trotted the program out before it was ready. The new president understood that the civil rights act making its slow way through Congress was really Kennedy’s. As I have noted, Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century, proves that point. But Kennedy’s poverty program had not been formally announced or written up. Therefore, Johnson could present it as his own. (Evans and Novak, pp. 431-33) Also, like a star athlete in sports, LBJ wanted to set records in getting bills passed. (Farber, p. 106) He ended up doing both.

    Just six weeks after he met with Heller, Johnson now appeared before the nation in an evening version of the State of the Union address. He announced to that nationwide audience that:

    This administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America … It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.

    This kind of rhetoric about a program whose specific points had not even been worked out yet! A bit over four months later, Johnson would announce the Great Society. Most analysts have differentiated the Great Society from the War on Poverty. The main agency for the latter was called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). In five years, from 1965-70, OEO was granted 1.5% of the budget for all of its programs. Had that money been instead sent to each person living in poverty in America, the total would have come to about seventy dollars a year. (Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided, p. 192) How can you lift someone out of poverty spending that small sum? As many have said, the latter got lost and distracted by the former.

    The greater expenditure on the Great Society was of particular consequence in this regard, because programs like Medicare, highway beautification, the National Endowment for the Arts, the creation of the Department of Transportation, and public broadcasting generally favored the middle class. Programs like air and water purification, and consumer protection, these favored almost all citizens. The problem with this panoply of programs was that when Johnson announced the Great Society at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, he did it with the same, if not more, extravagant language that he did his War on Poverty. In retrospect, what makes that even more shocking is this: Johnson had not run for president yet! For that matter, he had not even been formally nominated as the candidate of his party in the 1964 election. That would not occur for three more months, in August at Atlantic City.

    In Johnson’s almost manic attempt to differentiate himself from his predecessor, what Hackett warned against was now going to happen. Johnson was going to play the New Dealer. He was going to create and pass an anti-poverty program well before the 1964 election. Yet before that was even passed, he was going to announce something even bigger: the Great Society. Needless to say, all this hubbub necessitated that the cautious Hackett be retired to the sidelines. Which he was. While Johnson was putting together his package, David Hackett—the man who ran the program for three years, who knew more about it than anyone—was now working on Bobby Kennedy’s senatorial campaign in New York. RFK tried to intervene. In January of 1964, he wrote the president a memo: “In my opinion, the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems” unless Hackett’s basic approach was used. (Matusow, p. 123) At the time he was shunted aside, Hackett was working on something he called “competence and knowledge”. Using Ohlin’s opportunity approach, he wanted the people in these affected areas to have a complete knowledge of the opportunities at their disposal. And he wanted them to be able to designate their own leaders who could then competently use those opportunities in order to improve the lives of those they represented. It is safe to say that this was a continuation of Hackett’s dispute with Ohlin and his siding with Cottrell. Hackett wanted what he called his “community action experiments” to resemble something like a socialist democratic laboratory.

    It didn’t end up that way.

    IV

    Sargent Shriver and LBJ
    Sargent Shriver & LBJ

    With unwise alacrity, Johnson sent his program to Congress in March of 1964. (Matusow, p. 125) As Harris Wofford notes in his book, the choice Johnson made to replace Hackett with as supervisor of his War on Poverty surprised many people. On February 1, 1964, he appointed Sargent Shriver to lead it. (Wofford, p. 286) As Wofford further writes, what was so surprising about this was that Shriver already had a position in the administration. He was running what many saw as a great success: JFK’s Peace Corps. Why have him running two programs? Why not make directing the War on Poverty a full-time job? With someone like, say, Bill Moyers running it?

    Later in the year, Heller would also leave the White House. What made that decision worse was that Heller wanted to preserve much of what Hackett had done, whereas Shriver did not believe in the community action program, which was Hackett’s central idea. Shriver memorably said, “It will never fly.” (Wofford, p. 292) But he couldn’t kill it, since Robert Kennedy was still attorney general. Instead, he added other elements to it: a job training program, a summer jobs program, a work-study program, assistance to small farms and small business, and the aforementioned VISTA program. This brought in other parts of the administration, like the Department of Agriculture and the U. S. Office of Education. Bobby Kennedy had targeted help for pre-school children that would bypass the regular school system. This is how Head Start and Upward Bound entered into the overall program. (Schmitt, p. 114) These were probably the two best parts of the entire OEO schedule.

    But what quickly became one of the problems with the overall program was a lack of administrative oversight. When Johnson turned it over to Shriver, he said, “You just make this thing work. I don’t give a damn about the details.” (Isserman & Kazin, p. 109) As Bruce J. Schulman noted in his book about Johnson, the president did not speak very much or spend any amount on the oversight or administration of the Great Society or the War on Poverty. (Schulman, p. 95) He argues that Johnson understood that the sooner underlying problems were exposed, the sooner Congress would cut back on them. So, in essence, he tried to ignore them. The other problem was the visible and vocal disagreement about Hackett’s ideas for community action.

    As almost every commentator on the subject has observed, what came to be called the Community Action Program (CAP) fell prey to forces on the right and left. Hackett always said that he was not done fully defining what the program should be at the time he left. But he and Bobby Kennedy did agree on a stricture called “maximum feasible participation.” (MFP) This was their way of keeping the CAP democratic and also out of the hands of the local and state bureaucracies that had already failed their citizens in these areas. Another reason Kennedy tried to push MFP was that he knew that veteran local politicians would see the OEO money as simply a bounty they could get to and then spend on their own favorite programs, which did not benefit the people he and Hackett wanted to help.

    Richard Daley
    Richard Daley

    He was correct. Mayor Richard Daley said, “We think the local officials should have control of this program.” (Matusow, p. 125) Another city official said, “You can’t go to a street corner with a pad and pencil and tell the poor to write you a program. They don’t know how.” (Farber, p. 107) That last comment was nonsense. Hackett did not envision the citizenry writing the programs. He wanted the local poor to be able to vote on what kind of opportunities they should have through their community action grant. But it showed why Hackett and Kennedy feared that CAP would be taken over by already standing local agencies.

    When RFK arrived in the Senate, he had the opportunity to debate one of Daley’s cronies on this issue. Like Daley, the Chicago schools superintendent argued that the education programs of OEO should be taken over by his school district. Senator Kennedy then asked, if that occurred, what would safeguard the targeted children’s rights to get the benefits of the grants? The superintendent’s answer was that it would be the school community in the form of local groups of parents. From his experience in walking the streets of Harlem with Dave Hackett, the senator replied thusly:

    Many of them do not have parents. They do not have two parents anyway. They might have one parent, and maybe they have a group in the community that is going to come down and make their protest known; but a lot of times that is very difficult. They are working for seven or eight dollars a day and making forty or fifty dollars a week. It is difficult to take off and go down and protest … I think we have a special responsibility to those people who are less fortunate then we are, to make sure that the money that is being expended is going to be used so that the next generation will not have to have these kinds of hearings. (Schmitt, pp. 115-16)

    Later, RFK continued in this vein by saying:

    The institutions which affect the poor—education, welfare, recreation, business, labor—are huge, complex structures, operating outside their control. They plan programs for the poor, not with them. Part of the sense of helplessness and futility comes from the feeling of powerlessness to affect the operation of these organizations. (Matusow, p. 126)

    What Kennedy and Hackett were saying was rather simple: How can we trust the same people who allowed these inequities in the first place with the millions meant to cure them? (Schulman, p. 94) Author Schulman then listed a few examples that proved the Hackett/Kennedy warning. To cite one: a Camden New Jersey physical education program was subsidized with OEO money, yet it was a class for middle class students. I can also state from my own experience that such was the state of affairs. At the high schools I worked at which were entitled to what is called Title 1 funds, the administration tries to get the faculty behind a program that will benefit the majority of the students. As I recall, there was never any consideration given to targeting the students that Hackett and Kennedy wanted to single out and help. Many commentators concluded that this problem stemmed from the lack of oversight Johnson built into the program. (Schulman, p. 95)

    Kenneth Clark
    Kenneth Clark

    The other problem was something that was not foreseen by Hackett and Kennedy. In some cities, the CAP was taken over by, let us say, some persons on the left who also did not understand its original aims. In Harlem, respected sociologist Kenneth Clark was forced out and Livingston Wingate spent a lot of money producing the street plays of Leroi Jones. When the board argued about these productions, Wingate brought in some thugs to intimidate them. (Matusow, pp. 257-59) Wingate paid himself 25 grand a year, close to two hundred thousand today. When Kenneth Marshall, a civil rights worker who worked with Clark, examined the program records, he said he simply did not think that many of the offerings were useful. And most of the 20 million disappeared without a trace left behind. (Matusow, p. 260)

    V

    This is not to say that the whole thing was a boondoggle, as, for reasons of agitprop, some on the right have claimed. As noted, there were some good programs designed for the poor and underprivileged: Head Start, Upward Bound, and Legal Services, for example. And in some places, the CAP concept did succeed as it was designed. For instance, in Ellen Meacham’s book Delta Epiphany, she describes a community action center she was familiar with. It was in Mississippi and it was called Coahoma Opportunities. It offered what Hackett had envisioned. It maintained an array of services that would aid those who needed them: tutors who could help young children learn to read, Legal Services as a way to claim Social Security benefits, help with emergency food aid, placing a child in Head Start, a guide to gaining a summer job, job training that paid while you were learning, and help in finding a credit union. The reason it worked was because it had fine leadership. Aaron Henry was the head of the state branch of the NAACP, and his partner was a local white businessman who saw the program benefiting the business community and contributing to racial harmony. (Meacham, chapter 8) That is what Hackett wanted the CAP to be. The problem, as I have tried to state, was not so much the concept as its execution.

    Eventually the administration gave in to the local and business leaders on CAP. By 1967, Johnson had folded his cards on community action. He allowed them to be taken over by the local entities Hackett feared. Shriver left to become ambassador to France. In the end, LBJ had lost all faith in it and said it was being run by “kooks and sociologists”. (Matusow, p. 270)

    The beginning of Johnson losing faith started in Watts in the late summer of 1965. To his credit, I have never read anything that states that Bobby Kennedy had his “I told you so” moment at this time, even though, as we have seen, he did predict it. On August 11, 1965, a slightly drunken motorist, Marquette Frye, who was on parole for robbery, was stopped and pulled over by a highway patrolman, Lee Minikus. Frye resisted arrest. As he did, a crowd began to gather at the intersection of Avalon and 116th Street. It quickly swelled to a thousand. The police had to call in reinforcements. The crowd began hurling rocks and bottles. They then began to shout the chant that became the chorus to the hundreds of riots that would soon follow: “Burn, baby, burn.” (Matusow, p. 360)

    Watts Riots
    Watts 1965

    During the next six days, a 46-square-mile section of Los Angeles turned into a battle zone. The conflagration raged for the better part of this period. At one time or other, nearly 30,000 residents participated in the looting, sniping and torching. A crowd estimated at 60,000 cheered them on. The local authorities called in 2,300 National Guardsmen. They were sent in on the fourth day and this started to bring things under control. (Matusow, p. 361) They joined a force of about 1,700 local and state police. When it was all over, there were 34 dead, 1,072 injured, 977 buildings damaged, and nearly 4,000 arrests.

    Johnson was stunned by Watts. It exploded just one week after he had signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was King’s Selma demonstration that had made that act possible. But both men had cooperated in the process. According to his chief domestic aide, Joe Califano, after Watts, LBJ refused to take King’s calls for a period of 24 hours: “He just wouldn’t accept it. He refused to look at the cables from Los Angeles describing the situation.” (Schulman, p. 112) When he came out of it, Johnson asked, “How is it possible, after all we’ve accomplished? How could it be?” (Schmitt, p. 120) Politically, the riots handcuffed the president. He had to issue a statement condemning the looting and lawlessness, but he also understood that if he went too far, a backlash would now ensue against the War on Poverty.

    Why did Watts explode? To its residents, the arrest of Frye seemed to symbolize what the white community of Los Angeles thought of the neighborhood. Nearly 2/3 of Watts high school students had flunked at least one grade; almost that many had dropped out. Forty per cent of its residents had no cars, which in a commuter city made it tough to find a job. African American unemployment was three times that of whites. (Farber, p. 113) Bobby Kennedy commented on this police symbolism when he said the law did not protect those in the ghetto from paying too much for inferior goods; from having their furniture repossessed, or “from having to keep lights turned on the feet of children at night to keep them from being gnawed on by rats.” (Schmitt, p. 120)

    Detroit Riots
    Detroit 1967

    The volcanic eruption in Watts initiated an annual series of rolling explosions of summer riots, most of them in the north. In 1966, 43 urban ghettoes went up in flames, in 1967 there were 167 incinerations, in 1968, there were over 125. (Farber, p. 115; “The Legacy of the 1968 Riots,” The Guardian, April 4, 2008) In 1967, eight American cities were occupied by the National Guard. (Matusow, p. 362)

    Neward Riots
    Newark 1967

    The 1967 Newark and Detroit riots actually surpassed Watts in their ferocity. In Newark, the violence resulted in a maelstrom: the Guardsmen were firing on police and the police returned fire. The Guardsmen then fired into a housing project, killing three women. The governor called in SDS leader Tom Hayden, who had done a study of inner-city Newark. Hayden told him to withdraw the Guard. A few hours later, things calmed down. (Matusow, pp. 362-63) One week later, on July 23, 1967, the worst riot in a century broke out in Detroit. Governor George Romney had to request the White House send in the army to quell the insurrection. It ended with 43 dead, 7000 arrested, 1,300 buildings burned down and 2,700 businesses looted. (Matusow, p. 363)

    Tom Hayden
    Tom Hayden

    By 1966, both King and longtime civil rights lawyer Joe Rauh had split with Johnson. (Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, p. 699) One reason for this was that Johnson—with America going up in flames—continued to escalate in Vietnam, thereby contributing to student unrest and devoting a huge amount of money to a senseless war that neither Rauh nor King could understand. A war that, at that time, was killing or wounding an inordinate number of men of color. King later decided to memorialize the War on Poverty:

    A few years [ago] there was a shining moment, as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war … So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. (Isserman & Kazin, p. 192)

    But Johnson insisted that he could still do all three; that is, wipe out poverty, build his Great Society and fight a large land war in Indochina—and win all of them. He said as much in his January 12, 1966 State of the Union address. This contributed to his growing credibility gap—for the simple reason that very few people saw it that way, especially with more and more cities being incinerated while more and more troops were coming home in body bags. All of this caused another sociological and historical milestone to manifest itself.

    Carmichael and Brown
    Stokely Carmichael & H. Rap Brown

    As the country seemed to be spinning out of control, not only did this contribute to the rise of rightwing backlash and demagoguery (e.g., Alabama Governor George Wallace entering the national scene); it also contributed to the rise of a leftwing militancy, both in the civil rights movement and the student protest movement. We thus witnessed the appearance on the scene of people like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown in the former and Bernardine Dohrn and the Weathermen group in the latter. In 1966, Carmichael directly confronted King on a march in Mississippi with his new slogan, “Black Power”. He later said that integration was a “subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.” He then added that people of color would not be beaten up anymore: “Black people should and must fight back.” (Matusow, p. 355) Carmichael, and later Brown, meant this to be their version of the militancy and separatism of the late Malcolm X. First Carmichael and then Brown used this extremism to take over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Isserman & Kazin, pp. 174-75) Apparently, few members noticed that this approach contradicted what their acronym stood for. Carmichael—who wanted to start an “anti-imperialist guerilla war in the ghetto to free the Afro-American colony”—was directly responsible for inciting riots after speaking engagements. (Matusow, p. 365)

    Johnson responded to this by going first to the CIA and starting up Operation MH/CHAOS. When he did not like the results he got there, he went to the FBI, and reactivated COINTELPRO. These were illegal spying programs on these two groups, which also utilized subversive operations to destabilize them. (Schulman, p. 146) Coupled with this, in the fall of 1967, he also made an appearance in Kansas City for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. (Matusow, p. 215)

    Bobby Kennedy was not taking that path. In early 1967, he met with SDS founder Tom Hayden for an exchange of ideas. Hayden later said that Kennedy wanted to get the networks to run documentaries on what life was really like in the ghettoes. He also wanted them to broadcast what the real poverty statistics there were. (Schmitt, p. 175) Six months later, when Detroit erupted, Kennedy predicted this would be the death knell of the Great Society. When Senator Kennedy tried to propose a new package of bills, the White House refused to back it. (Schmitt, p. 190)

    The White House also failed to back its own proposals. In the wake of Newark and Detroit, Johnson had appointed what he called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. This was helmed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner and was therefore referred to as the Kerner Commission. It was composed of some visionary personages, for example Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Congressman Jim Corman of California. On February 29, 1968, they handed in their remarkable report. Its most quoted passage asserted that America was becoming “two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal.” (Joseph A Palermo, In His Own Right, p. 161) One of its recommendations was to adopt ideas similar to RFK’s: a triangular union of private business, government grants and community leadership to rebuild impoverished communities. Both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were disappointed that Johnson pretty much ignored the report and its guidelines. (Palermo, pp. 161-62)

    As many have commented, it was this splitting of the Democratic/liberal coalition over the issues of Vietnam and urban rioting which gave the GOP/conservative coalition their golden opportunity to break it asunder. Conservative strategists like Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan began to write up plans to do so. (Isserman & Kazin, pp. 216-17, 272-73) In 1967-68, the promise of 1963-64 became a distant memory. Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon now went to work on their “law and order” themes in the shadows and smoke of Watts, Detroit and Newark while the Living Room War raged each night on TV and the police clubbed SDS protestors in the streets. What caused it all to be even more made-to-order for the right wing is reflected in a comment by Johnson to Bill Moyers after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The president remarked, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for my lifetime and yours.” (Schulman, p. 76)

    Inspired by the example of George Wallace, Republicans like Nixon and Reagan strove to siphon off the racist vote in the South. This resulted in Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy, and Reagan’s equally infamous appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi in 1980 to kick-start his campaign. The location of that fair was just seven miles from the site where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers had been found sixteen years prior (Read further about this here). This technique has been a standby for the GOP ever since, and has been amplified to new levels by Donald Trump.

    VI

    We will oppose … with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms. Let there be no misunderstanding, no weasel words, on this point: we dedicate our every capacity to preserve segregation in the schools.

     ~Virginia Governor James L. Almond Jr.

    I would like to close this series by discussing two fascinating and important projects that get little detailed attention, either by the MSM or even in academia. The first deals with a topic that we discussed in passing in Part 3: the Prince Edward County Schools crisis. The second is a subject not addressed yet: Robert Kennedy’s Bedford Stuyvesant restoration.

    As I, and many others, have shown, President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon did next to nothing to support or enforce the Brown decision. This holds true when it was first announced in 1954, and when it was restated in 1955. The decision made by the Republican administration was unfortunate, since without any enforcement, the Brown case now became a rallying cry for the rightwing establishment in the South. What is worse, as we have also shown: when Eisenhower and Nixon did mention it, it was with disdain.

    In Virginia, the state legislature mounted a policy of “massive resistance”. In 1958, following the Orval Faubus example in Arkansas, schools were closed rather than allow African American students to register. When this policy was overturned by the courts, Prince Edward County officials defied the decision. The County Board of Supervisors decided to cut off funding to the Prince Edward Schools altogether. Private academies for white students now opened which excluded pupils of color. This policy was upheld by Richmond newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick and his good friend William F. Buckley.

    As a result, Prince Edward’s African American students had no schools to attend. In other words, rather than integrate and obey the law, the power brokers in Virginia, egged on by Kilpatrick, resurrected the claims of John C Calhoun: interposition can override the central government. What made this all the worse was that, as Nancy Mclean notes in her book Democracy in Chains, it was a 1951 walk-out protesting segregated schools that caused Prince Edward to be included in the Brown v Board filing. (Mclean, p. 6)

    Harry F. Byrd
    Harry F. Byrd

    Consequently, students of color decided to cross over into North Carolina, or find relatives elsewhere who would let them move in, to continue their education. (Lee, p. 2) At this time, Senator Harry Byrd was one of the dominant forces in Virginia and he vigorously opposed the Brown decision. Along with Governor Almond, this made Virginia—even though it was in the upper South—quite reactionary. As analyst V. O. Key wrote at the time, “Compared to Virginia, Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy”. (Lee, p. 14) Local liberal leaders appealed to the White House to enter the fray in some way. Eisenhower actually encouraged the creation of the white private schools. (Lee, pp. 49-50)

    The Byrd/Almond nexus was quite powerful. Religious ministers did not speak out for fear of being transferred. When an education administrator complained, he was forced to resign. When Almond tried to sell the former schools, which were now empty, half the school board resigned. (Lee, pp. 68-74) Professors who wrote against these decisions were spied upon, harassed and sometimes fired. (Lee, p. 78) But that still was not enough. With the likes of Kilpatrick leading the way, laws were now passed to outlaw the NAACP in the state. And the agency was now forced to turn over its membership rolls. (Lee, p. 79) In 1960, when a 13-year-old who had been out of school for a year wrote the White House, the reply was he should express his feelings to the local officials. (Lee, p. 90)

    Two months after President Kennedy’s inauguration, Robert Kennedy called the Virginia attorney general to Washington for a meeting. When that did not get very far, a month later RFK and Burke Marshall filed a suit to join the legal action. As one commentator has written, the filing of the Kennedy/Marshall lawsuit all but stopped the Byrd/Almond movement to close down all public schools. (Lee, p. 156) The problem was that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was not as law-abiding as the Fifth Circuit in the Deep South, so the progress in gaining favorable decisions was much slower, at least until President Kennedy was allowed to appoint two of his choices to that court. (Lee, p. 100)

    RFK at Prince Edward

    While all this stalling was going on, the Kennedys decided to make a bold, unprecedented move. JFK had told Burke Marshall he wanted to make Prince Edward a high priority. (Lee, p. 258) In February of 1963, after President Kennedy mentioned the Prince Edward case in his civil rights speech, the Kennedys decided to erect a new school system in Prince Edward, from grade school through high school. (Lee, pp. 33-34) As he did with Dave Hackett, Bobby Kennedy recruited a friend, William Vanden Heuvel, and gave him the assignment of creating the Free Schools system out of nothing in Prince Edward. (Lee, p. 292) By this time, four years had gone by. Some students did not even know how to hold a pencil. (Lee, pp. 314-15)

    William Vanden Heuvel
    William Vanden Heuvel

    Vanden Heuvel, with Bobby Kennedy and the president backing him all the way, did the seemingly impossible. He secured 1.2 million in grants and hired an integrated school faculty and staff with Dr. Neil Sullivan as his superintendent. Sullivan got threatening phone calls, and his car was shot at. Some children were afraid to come to school since they had no shoes or proper attire. Vanden Heuvel got them the clothes. There was a remarkable class ratio of 12-1 in the high school. The system opened on September 16, 1963 with nearly 1,600 students, including four whites. The Free Schools were an oasis in the desert. It showed what could be done in the face of complete adversity.

    RFK in Watts
    RFK in Watts

    RFK visited Watts in November of 1965. When he returned, he told a couple of his staffers, Ed Edelman and Adam Walinsky, to continue with Hackett’s research, but to take it a step further. He wanted ideas on how to address the entire phenomenon of the urban ghetto and how to structurally transform it. They did so, and in January of 1966, the senator gave three speeches on the subject of race and poverty. (John Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 255-61) Those speeches marked the birth of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration project. It was RFK’s answer to Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal.

    Bedford Stuyvesant was a ghetto in the Brooklyn area of New York. It had a population of 400,000. This made it the second largest ghetto in America outside the south side of Chicago. It covered 9 square miles. There was no hospital, college or local newspaper. After he gave his speeches, the senator asked Walinsky and Edelman to start fashioning a project for Bedford Stuyvesant that would put those ideas into action. Bobby Kennedy’s idea was to form a tripartite partnership between the federal government, businesses and foundations, and the residents, to transform the area and revive it.

    RFK in Bed-Stuy
    RFK in Bedford Stuyvesant

    He first got the business community to chip in by going to people like financier Andre Meyer and IBM chairman Tom Watson. He also secured foundation grants. (Schmitt, p. 151) He used that money to hire the local unemployed to do restoration for the fronts of local homes, a program that ended up being exceedingly popular. (Schmitt, p. 162) The plan’s next step was to push for tax incentives in order to get businesses to move there. He also attained a mortgage pool of money that allowed residents to secure low down payment FHA loans to finance real estate deals. He brought in a Dodge car lot. He got Watson to locate a factory there. He even convinced the City University of New York to open a branch, which was later named Medgar Evers College. (Schmitt, p. 165) John Doar became the chief executive officer of the restoration.

    Restoration Plaza
    Restoration Plaza
    The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
    was established in 1967 as one of the first community
    development corporations in the United States.

    He announced the formation of what he called the community development corporation on December 10, 1966 at Public School 305 in Bedford Stuyvesant. He said that he was now going beyond community action in order to gain the power to act with “the power to command resources of money, mind and skill.” (Schmitt, p. 155)

    The Bed-Stuy project was a qualified success, not a total success as the Prince Edward School District was. The reason it did not attain that instant stature was that Bobby Kennedy got involved in the 1968 race for the presidency. Yet, apart from whatever may currently be occurring there, no less than Michael Harrington once stated concerning this project, “It is extremely satisfying to witness a social idea that works.” (Schmitt, p. 166) The CDC idea was in fact widely imitated. Today there are over 4000 of them, and companies that specialize in that field. Bobby Kennedy and Dave Hackett made a formidable reply to Johnson’s New Deal. One that has echoed down through the decades.

    VII

    Whatever the ambitions of these four authors were, as the reader can see, their efforts to belittle what the Kennedys did for civil rights do not stand up to scrutiny. Instead, upon actual inspection, they simply reveal their own poverty. (Again, I would make a mild exception in this regard for David Margolick.)

    As Harrington said of RFK, “As I look back on the sixties, he was the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.” (Wofford, p. 420)

    Journalist Pete Hammill wrote RFK before the presidential race of 1968:

    I wanted to remind you that in Watts, I didn’t see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls. I saw pictures of JFK. That is your capital in the most cynical sense. It is your obligation in another, the obligation of staying true to whatever it was that put those pictures on those walls. (Schmitt, p. 221)

    As Brenda Luckett, one of the young African Americans Bobby Kennedy saw in the impoverished Mississippi delta in 1967, said after his death, “We felt like Kennedy was purged. He should have gotten out. It’s like we knew they were going to kill him for helping black people.” (Meacham, chapter 12)

    Charles Evers, brother of the murdered Medgar, said of him, “Mr. Kennedy did more to help us get our rights as first class citizens than all of the other US attorney generals put together.” (Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 976)

    But this sentiment had been previewed several years earlier. During the Freedom Riders’ episode, when King arrived in Montgomery, the citizens rallied to him and realized that something new was afoot. One youth said, “President Kennedy is on our side.” A woman said, “Bless God! We now have a president who’s going to make sure we can go anywhere we want like the white folks in this country.” (Brauer, p. 103)

    Unfortunately, it did not last very long. One is left to imagine what America would be like today if President Kennedy had lived, and Bobby Kennedy and Dave Hackett had run the War on Poverty. Without Vietnam, and those men in charge, it is even possible that America would not have burned.

    rfk mississippi 1967

    A Summary of Major Points Made by this Essay

    1. Reconstruction ended up as a failure for the liberated slaves of the South. And due to several odd and adverse Supreme Court decisions afterwards, the Reconstruction laws and amendments were neutralized. (Part 1, section 1)
    2. From 1876 to 1932, no president did anything to alleviate what had occurred in the South thanks to the rise of the Redeemer movement. In fact, some of them clearly sided with that movement. (Part 1, section 2)
    3. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, respectively, passed the FEPC law and integrated the military under pressure from the prominent civil rights leader Philip Randolph. But they were constricted from doing much else by the southern bloc in Congress and the threat of a filibuster. (Part 1, section 3)
    4. Charles Hamilton Houston began the modern civil rights movement by initiating a systematic challenge to the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson. This ended in the epochal Brown v Board decision. (Part 1, section 3)
    5. Because of the Brown decision, Dwight Eisenhower had an opportunity to move in a major way on the issue, since he won two resounding victories in 1952 and 1956. For political purposes, he and Richard Nixon largely avoided the issue. (Part 1, section 3)
    6. Senator John Kennedy was not enthralled by southern interests on the race issue. This is shown by his 1956 public statement of support for Truman’s civil rights bill; his speech declaring his support for the Brown decision in 1957; his vote for Title III of the civil rights bill, also in 1957, and his reference to the issue in several speeches in the 1960 campaign. (Part 2, section 1)
    7. Senator Kennedy addressed the issue during the 1960 campaign several times, accentuating its moral dimension. He spent several moments criticizing the Eisenhower administration on their performance during his second debate with Richard Nixon. (Go to the 13:45 mark here)
    8. President Kennedy did not delay in addressing the problem once he got into office. In fact, he got to work on it his first day, originating an affirmative action program that would eventually spread across the entire expanse of the federal government. (Part 2, section 3)
    9. It was not possible to pass an omnibus civil rights bill in 1961. The evidence in support of that conclusion is overwhelming. (Part 2, section 1)
    10. It was also not possible to alter the filibuster rules in 1961. The Democrats had tried to do this prior to Kennedy, and they tried to do it several times after Kennedy’s death. It was not achieved until 1975. (See pages 6 and 7 of this paper)
    11. Attorney General Robert Kennedy took on school desegregation within weeks of entering office and did things in that regard in New Orleans and Prince Edward County, Virginia that Eisenhower had never done. (Part 3, section 1)
    12. The Kennedys worked closely with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in order to ensure voting rights, integrate colleges and enforce the Brown decision. Again, this had not been done prior to 1961. (Part 3, sections 2 & 5)
    13. JFK extended fair hiring practices to contracting companies who did work for the federal government and private colleges which got research grants from Washington. This helped integrate business and higher education in the South. (Part 3, section 3)
    14. The Kennedy administration did more to advance civil rights in three years than the prior 18 did in nearly a century. This is simply a matter of record. (See the chart at the end of Part 3.)
    15. Kennedy tried to get a civil rights bill on voting rights in 1962 but he could not defeat the filibuster. (Part 3, section 3)
    16. In February of 1963, Kennedy announced he had gone as far as he could through executive orders and the judiciary, and that he was submitting an omnibus civil rights bill to Congress. (Part 3, section 6)
    17. The implications of the encounter between RFK and James Baldwin in May of 1963 have been wildly distorted and pulled out of context. The discussion Kennedy wanted to have with those attending that meeting concerned what he had been working on with David Hackett: ways to approach racism and discrimination in the north. Baldwin and Jerome Smith hijacked the agenda and thereby wasted a golden opportunity. The danger of an eruption of inner-city violence, which Kennedy predicted and wished to talk about, was confirmed 27 months later with the Watts riots. (Part 2, section 3; Part 3, section 4; Part 4, section 2)
    18. Due to Fred Shuttlesworth’s highly publicized demonstrations in Birmingham, JFK’s confrontation with George Wallace in Tuscaloosa, and his televised speech on the subject, the February 1963 bill was redrawn and strengthened. It eventually passed in 1964 due to the efforts of RFK, Hubert Humphrey and Thomas Kuchel, not LBJ. This eliminated Jim Crow. (Part 3, sections 5 & 6)
    19. John Kennedy was working on an attack on poverty before his civil rights bill was sent to Congress. This effort had begun in 1961 with the research of David Hackett on the issues of poverty and delinquency. (Part 4, sections 1 & 2)
    20. LBJ appropriated that program as his own, and retired Hackett. He started it up before the research was completed. It ended up being taken over by interests who did not center it on the people it was designed for. The mishandling of this program, it could be argued, exacerbated the issue, and, as Bobby Kennedy predicted, America descended into a nightmare of riots and killings for four straight summers, 1965-68. (Part 4, section 5)
    21. Republican strategists Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan advised candidates on how to use this violence to manipulate white backlash and break up the Democratic Party coalition. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did so, and this strategy, which has been used ever since, has risen to new heights under Donald Trump. (Part 4, section 5)

     

    A Selected Bibliography

    1. Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
    2. Patrick Henry Bass, Like a Mighty Stream. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2002.
    3. Michael Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1970.
    4. Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
    5. John Bohrer, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy: From Power to Protest after JFK.  New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017.
    6. Herb Boyd, Baldwin’s Harlem. New York: Atria Books, 2008.
    7. Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
    8. Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days. New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
    9. Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June. Toronto: Signal, 2014.
    10. Nancy A. Colbert, Great Society. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 2002.
    11. Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.
    12. Rowland Evans & Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. New York: New American Library, 1966.
    13. David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994.
    14. Eric Foner, with Joshua Brown, Forever Free. New York: Knopf, 2005.
    15. Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1964.
    16. Lawrence Goldstone, Inherently Unequal. New York: Walker and Company, 2011.
    17. Edwin Guthman & Jeffrey Shulman, Robert Kennedy in His Own Words. Toronto: Bantam, 1988.
    18. Maurice Isserman & Michael Kazin, America Divided.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
    19. William P. Jones, The March on Washington. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
    20. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage. New York: Avon, 1956.
    21. Brian E. Lee, A Matter of National Concern.  Unpublished Ph. D. thesis.  Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2015.
    22. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1994.
    23. Nicolas Lemann, Redemption. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.
    24. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains. New York: Viking, 2017.
    25. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
    26. Ellen B. Meacham, Delta Epiphany. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
    27. Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
    28. Joseph Palermo, In His Own Right. New York: Columbia University, 2001.
    29. Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.
    30. Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978.
    31. Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
    32. Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.
    33. Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995.
    34. Frank Sikora, The Judge. Montgomery, AL: River City Publishing, 1992.
    35. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
    36. Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
    37. Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of America Ambition. New York: Free Press, 2006.

    Go to Part 1

    Go to Part 2

    Go to Part 3

  • The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 3

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 3

    Part 3: The Kennedys Tear Down Jim Crow

    John F. Kennedy “literally shook his head with incredulity” when he learned that Prince Edward County abandoned public education.

    ~ Brian E. Lee, A Matter of National Concern

    In speaking of the years 1961-64, there can be little doubt that the major impetus for the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964—which eliminated Jim Crow laws in the South—was President Kennedy at the White House, and Robert Kennedy and his assistant Burke Marshall at Justice. In close support was a group of individuals who—like Philip Randolph and Charles Houston—almost never get the recognition they deserve. These were the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court encompassed six former states of the Confederacy: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. They worked in concert with RFK and Marshall to overturn lower court rulings that went against the attorney general, and to cite individuals—including governors—for contempt when they disobeyed court orders. The men on that circuit are so important that at least four books have been written about them. It is a measure of the historical value of the four volumes under review that I could find no reference to that court in any of them. Yet it was their cooperation with and support of the attorney general that kept the pressure on until 1963 when the tactics of Sheriff Bull Connor ignited the issue into national consciousness in Birmingham. By that time, May of 1963, JFK already had a civil rights bill in process.

    I

    Eisenhower and Earl Warren
    Eisenhower tried to persuade Earl Warren
    not to decide in favor of Brown

    Harris Wofford was an assistant to the Civil Rights Commission set up by the Johnson/Eisenhower bill of 1957. As he writes in his book, Of Kennedys and Kings, President Eisenhower resisted enacting every recommendation that the commission suggested. (p. 21) As we have also seen, both Eisenhower and Nixon failed to back the Brown v Board decision of 1954. In fact, Eisenhower actually tried to discourage Chief Justice Earl Warren from deciding in favor of the plaintiffs in the Brown case. As we have seen, the only time that Eisenhower acted to apply the decision was in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. In that case, Eisenhower had to be asked to join the case. And he waited three weeks to send in troops to protect the students after being badgered by the mayor to do so. (Brauer, p. 4) In the Autherine Lucy case at the University of Alabama in 1956, Eisenhower failed to back the NAACP court order that allowed Lucy to continue her education in graduate school. The college and the student body literally ran her off the campus. Eisenhower did not send in marshals to escort her to class, nor did he federalize the National Guard to maintain order on campus. (Bernstein, p. 97; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 64)

    This nod and wink by Eisenhower to the South encouraged their power brokers to find ways to dodge the court order or scheme around its objective. And this was something they were primed and ready to do. For example, in 1955, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi stated that the Brown decision wrecked the Constitution because it disregarded the law in deciding integration was right. He then closed with, “You are not required to obey any court which passes out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it.” (Bass, p. 17) That kind of plea was made viable because Eisenhower had never stood up for the issue. For a Republican, Eisenhower had done well in the South in the 1952 election, and even better in 1956. As Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall were closing in on Plessy v Ferguson, the Southern solution had been to build newer, nicer, separate schools for African American students. But when the Supreme Court restated the 1954 decision in 1955, it stressed that public schools should be integrated and there was no point in building new schools and arguing that these schools were equal.

    As we have seen, President Kennedy was already on record as supporting the Brown decision. After he was inaugurated, there were two specific cases that Eisenhower had dawdled on which fell to him. One was in New Orleans, the other in Prince Edward County, Virginia. As we shall see, the contrast with Eisenhower—who called these issues a local problem—could not have been more dramatic. Even in 1956—after the Brown restatement—when the governor of Texas called out Texas Rangers to stop African American children from registering at court-ordered integrated Mansfield High School, Eisenhower failed to act. (Bass, p. 122)

    Led by Senator Harry Byrd and columnist James Kilpatrick, Virginia was urged to abandon public education altogether. The state now passed laws decreeing any district that obeyed Brown would have funding ceased. (Nancy McLean, Democracy in Chains, p. 25) In January of 1959, higher courts overturned this action. (p. 65) The state schemed again, this time by using state vouchers for a segregated private system. This ultimately failed due to another court challenge. But in the meantime, 1,800 African American children in Prince Edward County had no schools to attend. What made this most notable was that Prince Edward was one of the five counties that Charles Houston had targeted to overturn Plessy v Ferguson. As Brian Lee wrote in his Ph. D. thesis, A Matter of National Concern, Eisenhower actually encouraged this scheme by saying that states were not required to maintain a system of public education, and therefore the president was “powerless to take any action.” (Lee, p. 50)

    The Kennedys disagreed. The attorney general called Prince Edward “a blight on Virginia” and “a disgrace to our educational system and to our country”. (Lee, p. 22) President Kennedy now began to remake the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, governing Virginia and nearby states, altering Eisenhower’s composition in order to strike down these schemes. (Lee, p. 6) In the meantime the White House did something that is probably unprecedented. While the president altered the court, the attorney general asked William Vanden Heuvel to raise money to build a free school system to educate the Prince Edward African American students left behind. Further, Burke Marshall attempted to join the NAACP legal action in Virginia, not as a friend of the court, but as a plaintiff. This had never been done by Eisenhower in six years. (Lee, pp. 145-150)

    Ruby Bridges
    New Orleans: Ruby Bridges was the only
    student left at the school

    This unprecedented action in Virginia was paralleled by what the administration immediately did in New Orleans. That school district, after a successful lawsuit to integrate schools, at first stalled and then schemed. Finally, federal Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered integration to proceed in September of 1960. The state legislature now passed laws circumventing Wright’s order. The Eisenhower administration asked Wright to delay issuing his new order declaring the state laws unconstitutional until after the November elections. They did not want to deal with another Little Rock. (Bass, p. 132)

    New Orleans segregationists
    Across from the school:
    this is what she was being protected from

    The pathology sanctioned by the White House continued. The state legislature passed laws to oust school board members and to even fire teachers who agreed to work with black students. (New Orleans Magazine, “The Struggle for Education”, January 2016) Wright again struck them down. The judge then asked for federal marshals to escort the students of color to their new schools. Louisiana now took up a scheme inspired by Orval Faubus in Arkansas. The schools ended up being largely empty, since the white students boycotted them and their parents picketed them. (Bass, p. 129)

    As in Virginia, the legislature threatened to close down schools by withholding funds. Wright now called RFK’s assistant Burke Marshall. Marshall advised Bobby Kennedy of the situation. The attorney general replied, “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” (Bass, p. 131)

    Burke Marshall and RFK
    Burke Marshall & RFK

    The Kennedy administration again did something unprecedented. In February of 1961, Burke Marshall filed charges against the state secretary of education, Shelby Jackson. Marshall’s aim was to block the attempt by the governor to cut off funding for integrated schools. (Bass, p. 135) Wright set a trial date to begin proceedings against the secretary for contempt of court. Jackson backed off and said he would not interfere. He avoided a prison sentence by pleading he had a weak heart.

    Steven Levingston does not mention Shelby Jackson. Nor does he note the New Orleans schools case or Judge Wright. You will also not see the Prince Edward Free Schools listed in his index. But I should also note, these two cases were done without any consultation with King, though he would have endorsed them both, as other civil rights leaders did. Thus Levingston’s twin themes—that somehow King was the only focus of the race issue, and the Kennedys were denying his requests and did not understand his message—are simply not substantiated by the record. And this is in early 1961!

    The administration also began to finish up Charles Houston’s work that, again, Eisenhower had abandoned. Bobby Kennedy made it a point to speak at the University of Georgia Law Day on May 6, 1961. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, this was the first time in memory that an attorney general had directly addressed the civil rights issue in the South. (Brauer, p. 95) He did this partly in order to congratulate the university for its efforts in integrating the college with relatively little violence in January of that year; partly to aid the efforts of the Fifth Circuit, for they had completed the process of integration at that university. (Bass, p. 136) In that address, the attorney general said that he planned on abiding by and enforcing the Brown decision. He spent half the speech talking about civil rights. The Kennedys would also make good on the Charles Houston goal of completing integration of higher education—a goal Eisenhower abandoned with the Lucy case—and this address was part of achieving that goal.

    jfk and nixon
    Senator Kennedy compared his
    civil rights record to Nixon’s

    In a larger sense, these were the first steps toward fulfilling a campaign promise that Senator Kennedy made on November 1, 1960 in Los Angeles. Neither Levingston nor Margolick deal with this speech, so we are left with the impression that civil rights were not an issue in that race. That is not accurate. In that speech, Senator Kennedy compared his congressional record with Richard Nixon’s on civil rights. He also compared his stand on the minimum wage, which when boosted would help many African Americans. He concluded by saying that although not everyone can have equal abilities, “everyone should have the same chance to develop their talent.” Which was something he was trying to do with education.

    II

    In Part 2, we discussed the Freedom Rides of May, 1961. The end result of all this was that two lawyers from the attorney general’s office filed a petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In the latter part of May, a request went up to issue regulations eliminating segregation at bus terminals. Under pressure from Burke Marshall, the ICC issued these in September. Marshall convinced Senator John Stennis to get the last three towns in Mississippi to remove their discriminatory signs. (Brauer, p. 109) By the end of 1962, Jim Crow was eliminated in interstate transportation. (Bernstein, p. 68)

    In Wofford’s memo of December 1960, he wrote, “Ending discrimination in voting is the point of which there would be the greatest areas of agreement and the greatest progress could be made.” (Bernstein, p. 68) This was a primary goal of candidate Kennedy as opposed to Richard Nixon. In October of 1960, JFK proposed to his civil rights advisory group that they use access to voting records that the Civil Rights Commission had gained to file lawsuits in court based on voting discrimination. On the day Bobby Kennedy was confirmed as attorney general, the judiciary chairman, James Eastland of Mississippi, commented that his predecessor had never filed a civil rights case in Mississippi. This was true. It was also an understatement. During Eisenhower’s two terms, his administration had filed a total of ten civil rights lawsuits. Two of those were posted on his last day. (Golden, pp. 100, 104) The day after RFK’s confirmation, his brother sent him a note saying, “Get the road maps—and go!” Which meant: start sending your men into the backwoods of the South to secure those records and file cases.

    In one year RFK doubled the amount of lawyers in the civil rights section. During that same year he doubled the amount of cases that Eisenhower had filed in two full terms. By 1963, the number of attorneys in that section had quintupled. (Golden, p. 105) RFK then hired 18 legal interns to search microfilm records in suspect districts. That opened 61 new investigations—in just a year. Prior to the Kennedy administration, it is clear that neither the Brown decision nor the strictures of the Civil Rights Commission were being obeyed. To increase the tempo, Bobby Kennedy went from suing districts to filing against a whole state, e.g., Mississippi. Although the president got regular reports on this tactic, he memorably scrawled across the bottom of the Justice Department report for 1962, “Keep pushing the cases.” (Golden, p. 111)

    John Doar
    John Doar

    The weight of the residue of the previous administrations was staggering. When attorney John Doar attempted to interview people in Tennessee, he found that in 13 counties, none had registered. (Bernstein, p. 68) To show just how intent southerners were to stop this effort, some of the people who talked to the Justice Department were then evicted from their lands as tenant farmers. The White House then organized an effort to send aid to those who were evicted. (Brauer, p. 72)

    Useful in the voter registration regard was another mission that the Eisenhower administration never attempted. This was the voter registration drive. This presented a huge challenge. For example, in 1960, in the parish of East Carroll in northeast Louisiana, there were more African Americans of voting age than whites. But there were 2,845 whites registered to vote, and no African Americans. In the northwest parish of Bienville, almost every white voter was registered. Of the over 4,000 African Americans, only 25 were registered. (Golden, 136) The emerging problem was that these kinds of field projects are expensive, since one must send workers out with canvassing lists to knock on doors and get both information and documentation. The government itself could not supply the funds. So Marshall and Wofford went to various foundations in the north to get the money. (Bernstein, p. 72) They then parceled it out to the various civil rights groups like the NAACP, SCLC and CORE. The overall title given to the drive was the Voter Education Project (VEP). It cost $870,000, or about 7 million today. The VEP lasted until 1964. As one commentator noted, it gained an increase in its short duration that would have taken ten years to achieve under normal conditions. But more important, “It moved Negro registration off dead center, where it had been for most of the previous decade, and reestablished momentum.” (Bernstein, p. 73)

    Judge Frank Johnson
    Judge Frank Johnson

    In this regard, Kennedy and Marshall did something that most people would have found next to impossible. They actually got the FBI to help investigate cases of voting rights violations. This appears to be some kind of milestone for J. Edgar Hoover. (Brauer, p. 117) Extensive research in voting rights abuses were then presented to the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court. In Louisiana, with the help of Judge Minor Wisdom, the attorney general got the voting test requiring an interpretation of the Constitution thrown out in 21 parishes. That figure made up a third of the state. (Golden, p. 137) It was the Fifth Circuit’s Frank Johnson—who had worked with Robert Kennedy during the Freedom Riders crisis—who gave the attorney general his first win in a voting rights case. With Johnson’s help, the number of registered African American voters went from 13% to 42% in Macon County, Alabama. (Brauer, p. 118, 120) As Judge Johnson later said to his biographer:

    The Macon County case would be the one that began to erode Southern voting discrimination … The Middle District of Alabama federal court took the lead in voting rights and the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court consistently upheld those rulings. When the Selma demonstrations started in 1965, the black citizens in my section of the state of Alabama had already won the right to vote. (Frank Sikora, The Judge, e-book, chapter 12)

    Utilizing the Fifth Circuit, with judges like Johnson and Wisdom, plus the evolving Fourth Circuit in the upper South, and the Supreme Court sustaining their decisions, Bobby Kennedy thought he would be done securing voting rights in the South by 1968. (Golden, p. 131) The Selma demonstration, which caused the Voting Rights Act, hurried that up by three years. But as Johnson points out above, it was already happening. Clearly, this was a deliberate strategy by the attorney general. In his book on the Fifth Circuit, Jack Bass wrote that Bobby Kennedy urged civil rights groups to use the judicial process as a way to get them to their ultimate goal. (Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 25)

    That Levingston never mentions this crucial Fifth Circuit aspect shows the worthlessness of his book. As Judge Johnson later said, no one in Washington was doing anything substantial on civil rights in the fifties, including Eisenhower. He added that when Kennedy came in, “there was almost an immediate and dramatic change. He was like electricity compared to Eisenhower … [He] put the nation on notice that there were changes that were long overdue.” (Sikora, chapter 6)

    III

    Related to this, the administration tried to get a voting rights bill through Congress in 1962. Eisenhower called a press conference and labeled this modest proposal for voting rights “unconstitutional”. (Brauer, p. 135) As with Johnson in 1960, there were problems with the Southern bloc in the Senate. Due to their filibuster, the effort failed. (Edwin Guthman & Jeff Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 149) But this did help inspire the 1962 congressional proposal to do away with the poll tax by amendment. The 24th amendment outlawing the poll tax was ratified in January of 1964. (Brauer, p. 132)

    In one of his lesser-known achievements, it was President Kennedy who began the idea of affirmative action. And it started on inauguration day. Kennedy noticed that, during the parade, there were no black faces in the Coast Guard detachment. That night he called Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and asked that something be done about it. (Bernstein, p. 52) Two days after Kennedy’s phone call, the academy began an all-out effort to recruit African Americans. One year later, the streak was broken and an African American student entered the academy. (Bernstein, p. 52) In 1963, the Coast Guard made it a point to visit 199 high schools, addressing 11,000 students and then interviewing 561 African American candidates. (Golden, p. 114)

    That was just the beginning. At his first cabinet meeting, Kennedy brought up the incident and told each member that he wanted the figures on the racial balance in his respective department. He did not like the results. For instance: at the Department of Justice, only 19 of nearly 1700 lawyers were African American. Kennedy also discovered that most of the people of color were at the lower rungs of the hierarchy. The president now told everyone that he wanted the situation remedied and he also wanted regular reports on their progress. (Bernstein, p. 53) Kennedy got so involved in the process that his administration became the first to appoint an African American ambassador, Clifton Wharton, to a European country. As Roy Wilkins later said, “Kennedy was so hot on the Department heads … that everyone was scrambling around trying to find himself a Negro in order to keep the president off his neck.” (Bernstein, p. 53) In fact, Kennedy assigned a civil rights officer to manage hiring and complaints for each department. He then advised the Civil Service Commission to begin a recruiting program to target historically black colleges and universities. (Brauer, p. 72, 84)

    The president then set up two interagency groups in order to monitor and push the issue forward. One was headed by Harris Wofford and it oversaw the entire federal government; Fred Dutton’s concentrated on the cabinet positions. On March 6, 1961—45 days after his inauguration—Kennedy issued an executive order outlawing discrimination in the workplace and making sure that affirmative action employment practices were followed.

    Galbraith and JFK
    Galbraith & JFK

    This concept of seeking out qualified people of color to serve in the government was complemented by another action. Together with his longtime friend, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy decided to protest the color barrier at two posh clubs in the Washington, DC area, namely the Metropolitan and Cosmos clubs. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 387) At the Metropolitan, Galbraith sponsored Kennedy as a member. But Kennedy refused to join when they declined service to a visiting African diplomat. At the Cosmos Club, Kennedy withdrew his application when the club refused to admit federal employee Carl Rowan. Kennedy got other government members and friends to follow suit and resign membership. Due to the bad publicity, both clubs later reversed policy. The notable thing about these episodes is that both were private clubs. (Washington Daily News, January 15, 1962, p, 21; Wofford, pp. 149-50) Kennedy then announced that neither he nor any member of his administration would attend functions at segregated facilities. (Bernstein, p. 53) To top it off, some of the members who resigned in protest then banded together to form a non-discriminatory club called the Federal City Club. (Brauer, p. 70)

    But Kennedy wanted to go beyond just the direct reach of government employment and the upper classes of Washington, DC. As noted previously, President Truman could not sustain the Fair Employment Practices Committee that Philip Randolph had pressed on Franklin Roosevelt. So first Truman, and then Eisenhower, set up advisory committees on the issue. The aim was to make the companies that won federal contracts adhere to non-discriminatory employment practices. In reality, if, say, the army contracted out to a textile company to manufacture rolls of cloth to make uniforms, that company would have to show that it hired some people of color. Kennedy established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) as part of his March 6, 1961 Executive Order on affirmative action. (Golden, p. 59)

    Under Eisenhower, Nixon had run their employment program, so President Kennedy put Lyndon Johnson in charge of the CEEO. Again, the contrast in activity is startling. In seven years, Nixon filed six suits. In a bit over two years, the CEEO heard almost four times as many complaints—1700—as Eisenhower and Nixon did in seven years, and acted favorably on over 70% of them. For example, there was a desegregation lawsuit filed against Socony in Texas. (Golden, p. 60; Bernstein, p. 59) Kennedy’s plans for retaliatory action went beyond Eisenhower and Truman. The CEEO allowed for the publication of the names of those who were violators, lawsuits by the attorney general, cancellation of the contract, and the foreclosure of future contracts. (Bernstein, p. 56) As a result, by 1963, you had people of color working alongside whites in the carding rooms of textile mills in the South. As a mill supervisor explained, “We work together for the simple reason we must if we want the government contracts. Without those contracts, we close down.” (Golden, p. 61) Its greatest achievement under Johnson was a settlement with Lockheed to integrate all of its facilities and begin a program of affirmative action in hiring. This was important since Lockheed was a large employer in Georgia. (Bernstein, p. 58)

    Kennedy’s stricter program also extended to funds given to institutions of higher learning. As Melissa Kean noted in her 2008 book:

    With the election of John F. Kennedy, the reach of federal nondiscrimination requirements in contracting finally extended into the admissions policies of private southern universities. Failure to comply meant ineligibility for the federal grants and contracts that were the life-blood of the advanced programs at these schools. (Kean, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South, p. 237)

    As a result of Kennedy’s more rigorous policies, large private universities like Duke and Tulane chose to quietly and peacefully admit African Americans.

    The CEEO also developed a parallel program for non-discrimination in labor unions. This was called the Programs for Fair Practices. The AFL-CIO, covering about 11 million members, chartered it. (Bernstein, p. 60)

    Since Johnson ran the program, the sternest critic of the CEEO was Robert Kennedy. He thought Johnson was not aggressive enough. For instance, RFK filed a lawsuit in December of 1961 against hospitals who received federal funds but discriminated against doctors or patients. (Golden, p. 113) President Kennedy felt so strongly about this issue that in June of 1963 he issued another executive order that both strengthened and extended the mandate of the CEEO. This agency later became a permanent part of the government and was renamed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Kennedy had achieved what Truman could not and what Eisenhower and Nixon simply were not interested in.

    IV

    At this point we should address an issue that some professional writers on the Left, like Paul Street, have brought up: the idea of federal protection for those struggling for rights. This was obviously an issue in the 1963 RFK/Marshall meeting with James Baldwin and Jerome Smith. In addition to the violence during the Freedom Riders demonstrations, there was also the riot at Ole Miss in 1962, which we shall discuss, and the nationally televised tactics used by Sheriff Bull Connor in 1963 at Birmingham which Baldwin mentioned in one of his telegrams to Robert Kennedy before the meeting. (Dyson, p. 25) As Robert Kennedy later said, in addition to Jerome Smith throwing the meeting off subject, the other problem was how little Baldwin and the others knew what the law was. (Guthman and Schulman, pp. 224-25)

    Burke Marshall had studied this entire field and examined the legislation that was on the books and how it fit into the system of federalism. In 1964, he wrote a brief book on the subject called Federalism and Civil Rights. To indicate his quality of scholarship, Michael Eric Dyson never mentions it anywhere in his book. Neither does Levingston. Professional historians Arthur Schlesinger and Carl Brauer do more than mention it: they spend several pages explaining Marshall’s book.

    No one can deny that the Birmingham images of youngsters being attacked by rabid dogs and bounced around by fire hoses were shocking to behold. Yet no one can deny that RFK and Marshall were on the protesters’ side. So the question then became: Why didn’t they do anything to preempt it?

    The answer that Marshall got sick and tired of giving was simple: America does not have a national police force. The police function is a local function. With very rare exceptions, the FBI is an investigative force, one that is supposed to help and support local and state police. Marshall then added, “There is no substitute under the federal system for the failure of the local law enforcement responsibility.” (Letter from Marshall to R. H .Barrett, 1/3/64) None other than Thurgood Marshall backed him in that judgment. The man who argued Brown v Board said that the police authority does not lie with the federal government, but within the states. That was a point that he, as a civil rights lawyer, could understand, “but the average layman cannot understand it.” (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 318)

    What both men were saying amounts to this: Robert Kennedy could not go in and arrest Bull Connor and the entire Birmingham police force. There simply was no federal mechanism that allowed him to do so. But beyond that problem, there was also the matter that, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, Connor was abiding by the state and local laws. In that regard, we must recall Part 1 of this series, where the author explained how the Supreme Court had neutered the Reconstruction laws and amendments. In addition to that, each locality has municipal laws guiding the administration of demonstrations. Fred Shuttlesworth, father of the Birmingham demonstrations, knew he was violating them. That was his point: to use civil disobedience and moral suasion to defeat misguided power.

    There was an exception in the law. And this allowed the White House ultimately to send in federal marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi and also to Alabama during the Freedom Rides. Sections 332-334 of Title 10 of the US Code allows the president to send in troops in instances of a large scale failure of law and order. Burke Marshall was hesitant to use Title 10. As the famous legal scholar Alexander Bickel once wrote, “As a regular and more or less permanent device, it is something from which we recoil, deeming it destructive of a free society.” John Doar also found that route to be a dangerous one: the federal government should not be a police state. (Schlesinger, p. 318-319)

    A good point of comparison would be the famous incident when Robert Kennedy heard that local police had arrested a Chicano demonstrator in Delano, California before he broke any laws. This was during the time that Cesar Chavez was trying to organize fruit pickers in the central valley area. Kennedy had flown there for a hearing on their organizational rights. When he heard that, RFK advised the police officer to read the Constitution during the lunch break. (Schlesinger, p. 826) As Attorney General Kennedy had said to Anthony Lewis, the investment of dictatorial powers in the executive branch might seem convenient or expedient during times of stress. But it should be resisted, since it would boomerang later. (Schlesinger, pp. 319-20)

    Today, living in the shadow of Dick Cheney, water boarding, drones, Edward Snowden and Guantanamo, I think we all understand what the attorney general meant. But the meeting with Baldwin and Smith was not the most appropriate time for Burke Marshall to take out a chalkboard and play law professor.

    V

    In addition to attempting to pass a voting rights act in 1962, the Kennedy administration was also working with the NAACP and the Fifth Circuit to complete the integration of colleges and universities in the South. As noted above, President Kennedy used restrictions on grants to private universities to shoehorn integration. With public universities, Burke Marshall decided to work with the NAACP to attain court orders from the Fifth Circuit. In 1963, Clemson and South Carolina integrated peacefully. Such was not the case with Ole Miss and Alabama.

    The day after JFK was inaugurated, James Meredith decided to become the first African American student at Oxford. Both the NAACP and Burke Marshall decided to take part in his attempt. (Brauer, pp. 180-81) Governor Ross Barnett now invoked a policy that southern universities had used many times before. He offered to pay for Meredith to go elsewhere. When that did not work, he started shouting “states rights” and John Calhoun’s specious claims about interposition.

    Robert Kennedy formally entered the Justice Department into the legal proceedings. President Kennedy began to lobby business leaders in the state. (Brauer, pp. 182-83) When the university tried to deny Meredith’s application, the Fifth Circuit, in an opinion written by Minor Wisdom, overruled the denial. (Bernstein, p. 77)

    But now, the trustees of the college transferred power over to Barnett. The Fifth Circuit first charged the trustees, then Barnett, with contempt. (Brauer, p. 184) At Millington air base in Memphis, the president now began to build up a force of federal marshals and draw up a military contingency plan which would eventually include 20,000 troops. (Bernstein, p. 81)

    James Mergedith and John Doar
    James Meredith & John Doar

    Ross Barnett ended up double-crossing the White House. And his stalling tactics had allowed General Edwin Walker to build up an angry crowd estimated at anywhere from two to three thousand rabid segregationists, including Klansmen. On the Sunday evening of September 30th, Deputy Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach headed the escort to prepare for Meredith’s next day registration. Just before that was to occur, Barnett pulled the state troopers who were supposed to maintain order until Meredith was processed. (Bernstein, p. 83) A riot ensued and Walker’s crowd outnumbered the federal marshals. What made it worse was that Katzenbach’s communications network went down, and the troops that were supposed to arrive in a contingency failed to arrive when they were scheduled. Two bystanders were killed, scores of marshals were injured and 13 men were indicted. President Kennedy had marshals escort Meredith constantly until he graduated. (Brauer, pp. 195-97)

    The next year, at the University of Alabama, things went smoother. This was part of perhaps the most groundbreaking three days any president has had since FDR. On June 9th, President Kennedy had made a strong speech for civil rights at a mayor’s conference in Hawaii. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, pp. 18-19) Coming back from Hawaii, on June 10th, the president announced his plans for détente with the Russians in his speech at American University.

    The next day, President Kennedy had his showdown with Governor George Wallace in Tuscaloosa. Robert Kennedy had tried to talk to Wallace in order to prevent anything like Ole Miss from happening. (Cohen, p. 235) Again, an associate of Frank Johnson, Judge Seybourn Lynne, had written the order for two African American students to enter the university. (Cohen, p. 236) Wallace had arranged for a combined force of 895 state troopers and police to back him. The White House brought in 3000 troops; this time they were only minutes away. (Cohen, pp. 243-47)

    Katzenbach and Wallace
    Wallace confronted by Katzenbach

    Contrary to what MSM hacks like Evan Thomas claim, no one knew what Wallace was going to do that day. The proof of this is that in the documentary film made of this event, Robert Drew’s Crisis, Bobby Kennedy is suggesting that they may have to shove the students through the furthest door at the main entry. That discussion went on as Katzenbach was preparing to confront Wallace. Andrew Cohen, who has written one of the longest and most detailed studies of the event, agrees with that view. According to Cohen, the plan was only finalized that morning. (Cohen, pp. 247-49) When Wallace refused to leave, President Kennedy nationalized the state guard. General Henry Graham threatened to arrest Wallace, so he stepped aside. The other point that had an impact on Wallace’s decision was that Lynne had promised to cite Wallace for contempt if he obstructed the students’ entry. (Bernstein, p. 97)

    That evening, President Kennedy gave what many believe was the finest speech given on the race issue since Abraham Lincoln. As Cohen writes, what makes that speech even more impressive is that it was written in two hours. (Cohen, p. 321) After King heard it, he told the person he was watching it with, Walter Fauntroy, “Walter, you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence.” (Cohen, p. 339)

    But Wallace was not finished. On July 22, 1963, Judge Johnson signed an order for 13 African American students to attend Tuskegee High School in Macon County, Alabama. In addition, the same would happen in Mobile and Birmingham. (Sikora, chapter 22) On the day those 13 students were supposed to be in attendance, there was a large force of state troopers awaiting them. Wallace also sent an order to the superintendent that the school would not open.

    Bobby Kennedy now convened a five-man panel of the Fifth Circuit to issue a restraining order enjoining Wallace from interfering with the integration of the three schools. Wallace tried to get around that by now sending the National Guard in to stop the students from entering. That afternoon President Kennedy ordered the guard to be nationalized, that is, placed under his control. (Sikora, chapter 23)

    VI

    At the end of 1962, President Kennedy issued his executive order to integrate housing. It inserted nondiscrimination clauses for all new public housing developments and urban renewal projects, and took action against housing contractors who practiced discrimination. Because it was an executive order, its scope was limited. (Brauer, p. 210) This relates to a criticism made by several writers, such as King biographer Taylor Branch, and which Levingston continues. (pp. 205-06, 213, 226) King wanted Kennedy to issue an executive order in 1963 as a new Emancipation Proclamation to strike down segregation in the South. Kennedy did not and writers like Branch and Levingston imply that this was some kind of missed opportunity that King offered the president.

    This author decided to get into contact with the Dean of the law school at Cal Berkeley, Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. I queried him, since he is one of America’s most illustrious constitutional scholars and has a liberal reputation. He replied that if Kennedy had done that, it would have only applied to the executive branch of government, not to private businesses and not even to state and local governments. (email communication, October 15, 2018) Since, as we have seen, Kennedy was already integrating the executive branch by other means, the Levingston/Branch implication is baseless.

    As noted previously, President Kennedy submitted a civil rights bill to Congress on February 28, 1963. (Risen, p. 36) He accompanied this with an address. That address, like other statements he had made on the subject—going all the way back to when he was a senator, and during the 1960 campaign—had a moral dimension to it. Which counters the idea of playwright Levingston: that JFK only understood the moral dimension in his June 1963 televised address. (Levingston, p. 405) The February bill was significantly revised as the year went on due to media pressures which finally made civil rights a continuing front page/TV news lead story.

    Birmingham
    Birmingham, May 1963

    As the conflict in Birmingham took hold and the media began to report on it, the opportunity presented itself to make the bill even stronger. The masterstroke at Birmingham was using schoolchildren in illegal demonstrations, knowing that Bull Connor would overreact. Which he did, using powerful fire hoses and attack dogs. It was those newspaper and TV images that altered the consciousness of this issue in the north. It also made John Kennedy understand the sick pathology of many of the power brokers in the South, and that he had been wrong in his characterization of Thaddeus Stevens in Profiles in Courage. (Brauer, p. 240)

    Bevel's kids
    It was James Bevel who organized
    Birmingham school children

    That maneuver was not proposed or executed by King. In fact, at this point, on his own, King could not get enough demonstrators in the streets. It was James Bevel who went on local radio and gathered scores of school kids in a church on April 24th, a move that King actually opposed at the time. (McWhorter, p. 361) Then, with King out of town, Bevel began to work with and organize the students. He told them to listen to a secret code word he would use on the radio. And on May 2nd, with King still mulling the idea over, Bevel launched his first student wave. Six hundred kids went to jail. But Bevel continued it a second day, with even more students involved. (McWhorter, pp. 368-71) The ugly media exposure was a body blow to the power structure in Birmingham. Vincent Townsend, CEO of the local newspaper, got someone in the sheriff’s office to call Burke Marshall. He flew down and that was the beginning of the city-wide settlement. (McWhorter, pp. 380-81)

    Both the president and Bobby Kennedy now realized that this was the time to stamp out Jim Crow in the South. In 2003, in an interview with Dick Gregory on the Joe Madison show, he said that President Kennedy had called him after he had visited Birmingham. After Gregory described just how bad it was, Kennedy replied: “We got those bastards now!” Consequently, the February bill was overhauled by the Justice Department to focus on public accommodations. (Risen, pp. 45-49) Once that was decided, the president now began an unprecedented, massive lobbying effort. He brought to Washington dozens of groups of people: lawyers, mayors, governors, business leaders and, most important of all, the clergy. This effort lasted from May 29 through June 22nd: in other words, right up until when the bill was presented to Congress. (Risen, p. 63) From those meetings, which were attended by 1,558 persons, spin-off groups back home were created. And those groups now traveled to Washington to lobby Congress during the long debate on the bill. Senator Richard Russell later noted it was this impact that won in the end. What JFK had done was something King could not do. He got a wide array of church leaders to back his bill. (Risen, pp. 96-97, 148-49) As Russell put it, “We had been able to hold the line until all the churches joined the civil rights lobby in 1964.” (Risen, p. 5) As Risen notes, King had little or nothing to do with the passage of the bill. (pp. 83-84)

    The even bigger myth is that it was LBJ who got the bill passed. This was a deception first advanced by Kay Graham and the Washington Post in order to aggrandize her friend and mentor President Johnson. It was then furthered by Robert Caro in The Passage of Power. Caro pretty much followed what his subject Johnson had written. (The New Republic, “The Shrinking of Lyndon Johnson”, February 9, 2014) The people who really got the bill passed were Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department team, and Senator Thomas Kuchel. This is why RFK did not resign as attorney general until the bill was passed.

    Rustin and Randolph
    Bayard Rustin & Philip Randolph

    King made a charge at this time that was simply wrong. He said that President Kennedy wanted to call off the proposed March on Washington. (Risen, p. 83) Levingston’s lousy book takes a little lighter approach and tries to insinuate that JFK had nothing to do with the march. (Levingston, p. 423) First, as several books have pointed out, the March on Washington was not King’s idea or a product of the SCLC. It was the proposal of Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. (Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around, pp. 17-18; Patrick Henry Bass, Like a Might Stream, p. 107; Bernstein, pp. 112-13) It was meant as a fulfillment of what Randolph had negotiated away to FDR and Truman. Kennedy was not opposed to the idea. He was opposed to the first draft design. Rustin’s concept was to have a two-day mass demonstration aimed at Capitol Hill. Arthur Schlesinger was at the early meetings where it was presented to President Kennedy. (Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 969-972) Kennedy’s objection was that this was the wrong approach, it was too confrontational. Both Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins agreed with JFK. (Euchner, p. 77) So after the president got some of his own people on the organizing committee, like Walter Reuther, it was scaled back to a one-day event, and centered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Rustin insisted he could live with these revisions since the important factors were the size of the live audience and the scope of the televised audience. (Euchner, pp. 77-78) Once that was done, President Kennedy became the first white politician in Washington to endorse the march. He then had his brother Robert assign men from the Justice Department to assist with the logistics and to arrange security. It is doubtful that the event could have come off as well as it did without that help. (Bernstein, pp. 114-16)

    March on Washington
    The March on Washington

    One last point on this event. Some have questioned why President Kennedy did not speak that day. The answer is simple: the principal organizer, Bayard Rustin, did not want him there. Not because he did not like Kennedy—he did. But because he thought it would detract from it being their moment, that is, the civil rights leaders’ time in the sun. So he and Wilkins made up an excuse that his life would be endangered, and they would see him afterwards instead. (Euchner, pp. 79-80)

    Kennedy realized his presidency was on the line with the civil rights bill. He had now become hated in the South. The joke after his showdown with Wallace was: Why does Alabama have so many Negroes and Massachusetts so many Kennedys? Because Alabama had first choice. (McWhorter, p. 380) By June of 1963, his approval rating there had plummeted from 60 to 33%. He was losing votes on his other programs because of his stand for civil rights. But as Kennedy told Luther Hodges, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.” (Brauer, pp. 247, 263-64)

    When the bill first went up, Humphrey had 42 votes, well short of the 67 he needed to force a cloture on the filibuster. (Brauer, p. 269) It was the full court press done by the president and then by the Department of Justice that finally turned it around through pressure on conservative Midwest Republicans. (Risen, p. 97) It is hard to exaggerate the impact of this bill. “It reached deep into the social fabric of the nation to refashion structures of racial order and domination that had held for almost a century—and it worked.” (Risen, p. 12)

    As the reader can see, no president before Kennedy ever confronted the civil rights issue as he did. No one was even close.  It was the preceding century of near inertia that created the immense problem that President Kennedy faced in 1961. But to his credit, Kennedy pressed the issue from the outset. Finally, the pressure from his administration, and the inspiration and support he gave the civil rights movement, provided the opportunity to pass what Clay Risen has called the “bill of the century”. What JFK achieved in three years is remarkable, especially when compared to his predecessors. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, what President Kennedy did was to pick up the narrow trail that Truman attempted and widen it into broad avenues. (Brauer, p. 315) And those avenues are still being traversed today. Yesterday (November 2, 2018), Kristen Clarke, the president of the Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, announced a victory for the Democrats in Georgia. Agreeing with Clarke, the court made a ruling weakening the state’s attempt to limit voting among the poor and minority groups. Clarke’s activist committee was founded in 1963 by President Kennedy for the express purpose of counteracting attempts at discrimination in the Deep South. (On the list of achievements following this essay, the reader can see it at number 20.)

    When the news of President Kennedy’s assassination reached Atlanta, King grew very quiet, thinking that a similar fate awaited him. During the funeral his six-year-old son asked him, “Daddy, President Kennedy was your best friend wasn’t he?” Coretta King replied, “In a way, he was.” (Wofford, p. 175)

    Four Presidents: A Comparison of Civil Rights Actions and Achievements

     

    FDR

    (13 years in office)

    TRUMAN

    (7 years in office)

    EISENHOWER

    (8 years in office)

    KENNEDY

    (3 years in office)

    1

    Fair Employment Practices in Defense Plants (FEPC)

    Integrated the Military

    Sent troops to Little Rock in 1957

    Orally committed to backing the Brown decision

    2

    Appointed African Americans as policy advisors

    Tried to pass a civil rights bill

    Established Civil Rights Commission

    Indicted school officials who defied court orders on Brown

    3

    Made speeches on civil rights in 1952

    Created a Free Schools district when Virginia decided to drop public education

    4

    First administration to join civil rights cases as a plaintiff, not a friend of the court

    5

    Petitioned the ICC to integrate interstate busing and terminals

    6

    Systematically began to file cases to break down denial of voting rights in the South

    7

    Financed voter registration drives in the South

    8

    Began the drive to ban poll taxes with the 24th amendment

    9

    Started a massive and rigorous affirmative action program in all branches of federal government

    10

    Announced that no member of his administration would join a segregated establishment or speak at a segregated event

    11

    Revived FDR’s FEPC with the CEEO

    12

    Established rigorous contract and grant requirements to integrate private colleges in the South

    13

    Established a program to make federal contractors follow non-discriminatory hiring practices

    14

    Carried out court orders to integrate the last public universities in the South

    15

    Exploiting an exception to the law, sent in federal marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi and to Alabama during the Freedom Rides

    16

    Signed the Housing Act of 1962

    17

    Negotiated a settlement to the Birmingham demonstration in 1963

    18

    Endorsed the March on Washington in 1963

    19

    In a nationally televised address of 6/11/63, made the most forceful presidential address on civil rights since Lincoln

    20

    Established the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in 1963 to represent victims of civil rights abuses in the South

    21

    Submitted the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began a massive lobbying program to pass it

     

    So much for the received wisdom that the Kennedy administration “moved cautiously on civil rights” until they were pushed into it.

    Go to Part 1

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  • John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

    John Kenneth Galbraith: A Hero in our Time

    As many who are interested in the JFK case know, John Kenneth Galbraith was truly A Man for All Seasons. There are few men in public life who pulled off the triple crown like he did: serving with distinction as a public figure, an academician, and as a man of letters. Specifically, Galbraith was an advisor to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; he served as an instructor at Harvard for over 25 years; was a writer and editor at Fortune and, all told, wrote over forty books. Two of them are considered classics: The Great Crash and The Affluent Society. To have performed just one of those endeavors would make an individual a significant figure in American life. To have done all of them is a remarkable achievement. To have done them with the wit and style that Galbraith possessed makes what he did just about unique in modern American history.

    Galbraith was born in Ontario, Canada in 1908. He was granted an undergraduate degree at a branch of the University of Toronto in 1931. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley to attain his Masters and Ph. D. in agricultural economics. After graduation he taught at both Harvard and Princeton from 1934-40. He worked in the Office of Price Administration for Roosevelt, and then as one of the directors of the Strategic Bombing Survey under Truman. In the last position, he disagreed with his boss, the eternal hawk Paul Nitze, on the effectiveness of the bombing over Germany in reducing war production. After this he went to work at Henry Luce’s Fortune and then in 1949 he was appointed a full professor in economics at Harvard.

    Galbraith had a role in writing the summary reports for both the bombing survey of Germany and Japan. He concluded that war production had expanded during the bombing of Germany. Some strategic targets were impacted; others were not. But bombing had not decided the war in Europe. The air war cost America more than it did the Germans; it was just that the USA could afford it at the time. The real value of the bombing was in support of ground troops. They had won the war. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 183)

    Galbraith’s input into the summary survey of the bombing of Japan was probably even more important at dispelling myths. He described the terrible fire bombings of Japanese cities that sometimes consumed as many as 16 square miles, causing massive numbers of civilian deaths, but barely touching industrial production. He then wrote that in all probability, Japan likely would have surrendered in December of 1945, or maybe even in November, without the two atomic bombs being dropped. (Summary Report, Pacific War, July of 1946, p. 26)

    These insights by a skilled economist like Galbraith seem to be quite valuable, especially in light of the later emphasis placed on bombing in both the Korean War and especially the war in Indochina. The tons of bombs dropped over Indochina exceeded the tonnage dropped over both Germany and Japan during World War II. In fact, it was not even close. Yet none of the countries in Indochina—Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam—had a real industrial base as did Japan and Germany. Most of the population made its living from agriculture. So Galbraith had a real perspective on this issue during his advisory years with President Kennedy.

    It was during his first stretch of employment at Harvard that he met young John Kennedy. From 1936-39, Galbraith tutored JFK at Winthrop House. (Parker, p. 324)

    It is difficult to overestimate how much Galbraith liked writing and being on the faculty at Harvard. For instance, in 1946, he turned down an offer from Nelson and David Rockefeller to become chief economist for the Rockefeller family. (Parker, p. 222) I should not have to inform our readers the kind of money and status that position would have offered him.

    In 1956, Senator Kennedy sought his advice on an agricultural issue. After that, Kennedy developed a rather close relationship with Galbraith as an unpaid advisor. The relationship deepened after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The two would often meet in Cambridge when Kennedy was in Boston. Kennedy came to rely on Galbraith briefing him before his major appearances. (Parker, p. 325)

    In 1960, Galbraith was one of candidate Kennedy’s floor managers at the Los Angeles Democratic convention. He then wrote several speeches for the nominee during the campaign and prepped him for the third debate with Richard Nixon. He was at Kennedy’s campaign headquarters the night of the election. (Parker, p. 336)

    As most people who have studied Kennedy’s political career know, he had a genuine interest in the huge country of India. He felt that being the largest democracy in the world, and sitting in south Asia, it was of large strategic importance. In the late fifties, he wrote an article for The Progressive on the subject. With Senator John Sherman Cooper, he drew up an aid bill for the country. (Cooper had been President Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to India.)

    But another reason Kennedy viewed India to be of central importance is because of its proximity to Red China, and also to the former countries of French Indochina. If there were tensions in that area—as there were bound to be—then India could be both a counterweight, and also a nearby emissary. If such were the case, Kennedy would need a man whom he trusted implicitly to be the ambassador there. Which is why he chose Galbraith for the position.

    But with the kind of relationship the two men had, Galbraith was still advising Kennedy on a wide variety of subjects. On economics, Galbraith was a disciple of the great Englishman John Maynard Keynes. So he urged Kennedy to adapt an expansive economic policy in order to encourage growth. As almost any observer of the Kennedy presidency knows, the years 1961-66 were probably unmatched in post-war American economic history. Gross National Product averaged 5% growth each year, employment grew 2.5% each year, unemployment receded to 3.9%, poverty declined by a third and inflation was at a quite manageable 2 per cent. All of this was done with no significant budget deficits and a positive balance of payments.

    To show how in sync Galbraith was with Kennedy, during his confirmation hearings, the economist suggested that the USA recognize Red China. This created quite a stir on the committee. (Parker, p. 351) But as our readers know through the recently posted interviews with State Department official Roger Hilsman, this is what Kennedy had discussed with Hilsman as early as 1961.

    Galbraith tried to warn Kennedy about committing to the Bay of Pigs operation. He also warned about using American ground troops in Laos. (Parker, pp. 354-56) Kennedy agreed with this and told Richard Nixon, “I just don’t think we ought to get involved in Laos, particularly where we might find ourselves fighting millions of Chinese troops in the jungle.” (Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, pp. 45-48)

    And, of course, there was Vietnam. Kennedy had been advised by the likes of Edmund Gullion, Nehru of India, and General Douglas MacArthur on the subject. They all advised him not to send in combat troops. Galbraith agreed with them. Inside the Kennedy White House, he sided with Chester Bowles and George Ball for non-intervention. In prior treatments of precisely what Galbraith’s role was in these debates, the picture painted of it was, to say the least, a bit murky.

    For instance, in David Halberstam’s long book The Best and the Brightest, Galbraith is portrayed as being some kind of outsider, on the periphery of Kennedy’s circle. (Halberstam, p. 152) To state it kindly, Halberstam’s book has not aged well. To be unkind, today it seems quite misleading; so much so that this author would call it pernicious. In addition to getting the role of Robert McNamara wrong, the highly praised Halberstam also mischaracterized Galbraith’s part.

    John Newman came closer to what the true facts and characterizations were in his milestone book JFK and Vietnam, first published in 1992. There, Newman wrote that Galbraith had written Kennedy in March of 1962 after visiting Vietnam. He was quite derisive about America being involved there at all. He suggested a neutralist political solution, similar to what the administration was negotiating for in Laos. (Newman, p. 236) This is more accurate but is still unsatisfactory since it is incomplete.

    Galbraith’s role in all this began even before the famous two week long November, 1961 debate over committing combat troops to Saigon. In July of 1961, Galbraith wrote the president, warning him about the information he was getting about Indochina. He said that President Ngo Dinh Diem was not the right man to lead South Vietnam. He had alienated the public to a much further degree than the newspaper reporters have let on. (Galbraith, Letters to Kennedy, pp. 76-77) But it turns out that Galbraith was directly involved in the November debates.

    The ambassador was in Washington to accompany Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on a state visit. Galbraith had already heard about the mission President Kennedy had sent General Max Taylor and Deputy National Security Advisor Walt Rostow on in October. The ambassador feared America’s entry into a war in Vietnam would be a disaster. It could endanger Kennedy’s domestic programs, tear the Democratic Party apart, and perhaps provide the opening for a new conservative era in American politics. (The Nation, February 24, 2005, “Galbraith and Vietnam”)

    Galbraith had arranged the luncheon to be at the Newport Rhode Island home of Jackie Kennedy’s mother, so no other State Department representative would be there. Kennedy and Galbraith asked the Indian leader to participate in a neutralist solution for Vietnam. They even asked him to talk to Ho Chi Minh about forming a UN observer team as a first step in that direction. Nehru was non-committal except for saying that America should not get into a shooting war in Indochina. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 470-77)

    The next day in Washington, Galbraith made a beeline for Rostow’s office. He questioned Rostow about the actual contents of the report. Rostow said it was highly classified. Then the phone rang. With Rostow distracted, Galbraith stole a copy of the report from his desk and left. (The Nation, 2/24/2005)

    Reading it back at his hotel, the ambassador was stunned. He realized that this report and its recommendations would create the first commitment of combat troops to Saigon and that would then be the pretext for an open-ended conflict. The first group of 8,000 men were to go in under the guise of “flood relief workers”. The report recommended deepened cooperation between the CIA and Saigon’s intelligence, more covert operations and massive training of Vietnamese soldiers. Plus the use of a sprayed herbicide which Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Kennedy was really a weed killer. (At first this was called Agent Purple, it later turned into Agent Orange.)

    Kennedy had seen Galbraith the day before the Newport meeting. Realizing there was going to be a long debate over the Taylor-Rostow report, he had asked him to prepare a paper to contest direct American involvement. This now became the basis for his memo to the president. JFK read both documents and then postponed the meeting on Vietnam. Meanwhile, Galbraith did something that the president had already done. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 107) The ambassador started leaking stories to the press that Kennedy was opposed to the escalation his advisors were pressing on him. Before Galbraith left to return to India, he told Kennedy it would be a good idea if he stopped off in Saigon. JFK agreed and then instructed the ambassador to report back to him alone. (The Nation, 2/24/2005; Parker, p. 370-72)

    At the crucial meeting, which occurred on November 11, Galbraith’s biographer Richard Parker notes something that Newman did not mention, namely that Bobby Kennedy was in the room. Later, authors like David Kaiser and Gordon Goldstein did write about this information, based upon recovered notes. In what appears to be a mapped out plan, the Attorney General would repeatedly deny any suggestion of ground troops by saying flatly, “We are not sending combat troops. Not committing ourselves to combat troops.” (David Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 113) Then the president would add that if there was ever going to be a troop detachment sent in it would be a multilateral mission, under the aegis of the UN or SEATO. (Parker, p. 371)

    As most of us know, this two week long debate ended with Kennedy issuing NSAM 111. That order significantly increased the number of American advisors to over 15,000 and it sent in more equipment, like helicopters. But this is as far as Kennedy was going to go. He was going to aid Saigon, but he was not going to fight their war for them. He never allowed combat troops into theater. In fact, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day Kennedy was killed than on the day he was inaugurated. The president even wanted to replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador to Saigon with George McGhee, who he knew was opposed to intervention. But Dean Rusk, who had been one of the leaders for troop insertion during the debate, nixed this idea by saying Nolting should stay since he had Diem’s confidence. (Parker, p. 376)

    It seems to this author that with the information about Bobby Kennedy’s role in the November, 1961 debates, the attempt by Kennedy to replace Nolting, and the now fully revealed role of Galbraith, this episode is even more clearly a demarcation line than before. Kennedy simply was opposed to transforming Vietnam into America’s war, and he knew that was what it would become if ground troops were placed in theater. As the president had told Arthur Schlesinger:

    They want a force of American troops. They say it’s necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale … The troops will march in; the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off and you have to have another … The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 63)

    Upon Galbraith’s return to Asia, he did file a report from Saigon. In fact, he eventually filed three of them. These all ended up being back channel cables, meaning they bypassed the usual State Department protocols. They were laced with Galbraith’s blend of impatience and sarcasm: “Who is the man in your administration who decides what countries are strategic? I would like to … ask him what is so important about this real estate in the Space Age.” (The Nation, 2/24/2005) And again, Halberstam was wrong about what happened as a result of these, just as he was wrong about how Kennedy regarded his advice in November of 1961. For Galbraith was not on the periphery, he was at the center of the story—in two ways.

    First, Kennedy attempted to follow up on the ambassador’s proposal to open negotiations for a neutralist Vietnam settlement through India. Unfortunately, he tasked the wrong person with the mission. Averill Harriman was Kennedy’s point man on the attempts to defuse the Laotian situation with a coalition government. Apparently he did not feel the same way about Vietnam. In December of 1961, Harriman had been appointed to Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Kennedy asked Harriman to send instructions to Galbraith about pursuing a peace plan by having Indian and Russian diplomats approach Hanoi. Harriman suggested a delay, which the president agreed to. But Kennedy concluded “that instructions should nevertheless be sent to Galbraith, and that he would like to see such instructions.” Harriman said he would send them. (Douglass, p. 119) Harriman did send instructions, but “he struck the language on de-escalation from the message with a heavy pencil line.” The diplomat dictated a memo to his colleague Edward Rice which changed the de-escalation approach to a threat of escalation of the war unless Hanoi accepted American terms. When Rice tried to rewrite the memo with the original instructions, Harriman again struck Kennedy’s language. He then simply killed the telegram altogether. (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance, pp. 158-59)

    Galbraith’s other attempt at de-escalation was more successful. In early April of 1962, the ambassador was visiting the Kennedy family for a weekend at Glen Ora, their rented estate in the Virginia countryside. Jackie Kennedy had just made an official visit to India and they were watching a TV special about it. He then told the First Lady about his talk with the president about the situation in Saigon, his later visit to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the memo he left behind. (Parker, p. 389)

    It turned out that Kennedy had been giving the Galbraith memos about Vietnam a lot of attention. He wanted the ambassador to put his thoughts in writing and give a copy to McNamara. In that memo, Galbraith stated American policy should keep the door open for a political solution. We should also measurably reduce our commitment to the present leadership of South Vietnam. He then added that the advisors who were already there should not be involved in combat and kept out of any combat commitment. Their roles should become as invisible as the situation allowed. (Newman, p. 236)

    As described in JFK and Vietnam, this memo was mightily resisted by the Pentagon, because, just five months after sending in advisors and equipment, Kennedy now had an alternative. Newman also notes that Kennedy had said at that time “he wished us to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.” (Newman, p. 236) In other words, Galbraith had just given Kennedy support for what he really wanted to do in Indochina. As both Douglass and Newman have written, Galbraith’s visit to Washington and the handing off of his memo to McNamara were the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (Newman, p. 237; Douglass, p. 119)

    The very next month, in May of 1962, Robert McNamara now delivered a surprising message to his subordinates in Vietnam. Arriving in Saigon for one of his so-called SecDef meetings, McNamara asked some of the higher-ups to stick around after the formal meeting ended. The defense secretary now echoed what the president had told Arthur Schlesinger: “It was not the job of the U.S. to assume responsibility for the war but to develop the South Vietnamese capability to do so.” (Douglass, p. 120) He then asked when they thought Saigon would be able to assume sole responsibility for all actions. The secretary got no satisfactory reply, since everyone was shocked by the question. So he proceeded to tell the commander in charge of the American advisory command, General Paul Harkins, “to devise a plan for turning full responsibility over to South Vietnam and reducing the size of our military command, and to submit this plan at the next conference.” As Jim Douglass notes, Kennedy and McNamara only wanted a plan for withdrawal at this time. For as he had told Galbraith in November of 1961, “You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year.” (Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, p. 469) The president was referring to the Bay of Pigs and Laos, the latter of which he knew the Pentagon would consider a defeat.

    It took quite a long time for the commanders of all departments in Vietnam to prepare their withdrawal schedules for McNamara. More than a year to be exact. But finally, in May of 1963, at a SecDef meeting in Hawaii, they were presented to McNamara. McNamara said they were not fast enough and requested they be accelerated “to speed up replacements of U.S. units by GVN units as fast as possible.” (Douglass, p. 126) This plan was then coordinated with Kennedy’s NSAM 263 order and its accompanying report, which dictated that a thousand men would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all American advisors would be removed by 1965. So much for Galbraith being at Halberstam’s “periphery”. In a very real sense, the ambassador had provided the rationale for Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

    Galbraith always said that he would only serve under Kennedy for a bit more than two years since he had to get back to Harvard in order not to lose tenure. How badly did Kennedy want him to stay? He offered him the ambassadorship to the USSR. (Parker, p. 406) If Kennedy had lived, and Galbraith had taken that position, one can only imagine how relations between the two superpowers would have turned out. But the fact that JFK offered him the position shows what the president had in mind for the future. He saw how visionary Galbraith was on Vietnam, and he wanted to try more of that with Russia.

    Galbraith continued to be an advisor to the White House after Kennedy’s assassination. But he and President Johnson simply did not agree on Indochina policy, and Galbraith really did not like how the escalation of the Vietnam War began to downsize the War on Poverty. In January of 1966, he wrote a memo to Johnson saying that America had no national interest at stake in Vietnam. A few months later he tried again. He offered to write a speech that would set the stage for American withdrawal. Johnson did not appreciate the advice. And that was about it for their relationship. (Parker, p. 431)

    But about four months before that happened, and probably provoking the exchange, Galbraith had shared a dinner with Richard Goodwin, Carl Kaysen, Arthur Schlesinger, and Defense Secretary McNamara. By this time, January of 1966, each of these men, except for McNamara, had left the White House. Galbraith described the meeting as jarring. McNamara was extremely emotional as he described what was happening in Indochina and at the White House. The Defense Secretary said the war was spinning out of control. Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign Johnson had banked on, was not effective. Johnson was getting depressed over the results. But he still seemed insistent on victory, even if it meant more escalation. If America did not find a way out soon, we would lose the war. (Kai Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 345; Galbraith, A Life in our Times, pp. 482-83) This is why he wrote to LBJ. Instead, Johnson escalated the war further. He then pushed McNamara out of office. But it was very likely that dinner which caused McNamara to begin the task of writing the Pentagon Papers.

    Galbraith now wrote a book entitled How to Get out of Vietnam. It sold 250,000 copies. Along with Schlesinger and Goodwin, he organized a protest group called Negotiations Now. He had concluded that if LBJ would not end the war, someone who would must run against him in 1968. Things go so bitter between the two men that Johnson told White House advisor John Roche to start attacking Galbraith in the press. (Parker, p. 432)

    Galbraith finally did find someone to run against Johnson. It was Senator Eugene McCarthy. When Bobby Kennedy later announced he was also in the race, Galbraith was in a sticky position. But he felt he should be loyal to his first choice, so he stuck with McCarthy, even though after Johnson made his shocking announcement not to run, it was apparent RFK was the stronger candidate with a better chance to defeat Richard Nixon in the fall.

    After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, McCarthy, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of the race. After Kennedy’s funeral, Galbraith visited him in Washington. He later wrote the following about that meeting:

    Gene was deeply depressed; the death of Robert Kennedy showed the hopelessness of the game. What had been real would now be pretense; what had been pleasure was now pain … I pleaded that he carry on. The banality of my argument still rings flatly in my ears. Gene remained sad and unmoved, but proposed another talk in Cambridge a few days later. This we had with Coretta King and a number of McCarthy’s local supporters present. His mood was better … but I don’t believe that Eugene McCarthy’s heart was ever again wholly in the battle. (Galbraith, A Life in our Times, p. 499)

    The Kennedy administration was responsible for being the first to bring some remarkable men into the White House, or promoting them to their highest positions. These individuals were not just outstanding civil servants; they were extraordinary men in their own right. People like Robert Kennedy, George Ball, Richard Goodwin, Harris Wofford, Ted Sorenson, Sargent Shriver, Arthur Schlesinger, Edmund Gullion, Adam Yarmolinsky and G. Mennen Williams were all distinguished individuals and personalities who have yet to be surpassed in talent and achievement by those who followed. As a group no other administration comes close.

    John Kenneth Galbraith is one of the most distinguished of them all.

  • The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 2

    The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History, Part 2

    Part 2: The Media Spin-Dries JFK on Civil Rights

    I. The MSM Vitiates the Record on JFK

    As I said in my introduction to Part 1, from the work of Larry Sabato in 2013, I suspected the MSM would attempt a preemptive strike against President Kennedy’s civil rights achievements at the 50th anniversary of the MLK/RFK assassinations, for the obvious reason that both of those men were strongly involved in that struggle. Steven Levingston, of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, led it off. I would like to give Levingston some career advice. He missed his calling. He should have been a playwright. His 2017 book Kennedy and King is such a carefully crafted confection it would have done Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee proud. As history, it is worthless; but that is not what Levingston is interested in. At the outset, he sets up an external dramatic agon between Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, declaring that “King had to overcome White House mistrust, disregard, and stonewalling before his message sank in.” (Levingston, p. xi)

    Steve Levingston:
    Missed his calling

    This is utterly false. As opposed to Eisenhower, the Kennedys began working on the racial issue quite quickly—without King. And they did not stop until they did something that neither Eisenhower nor Truman came close to doing—they got an omnibus civil rights bill into Congress and worked hard to see it through. (As we shall see, the idea that Lyndon Johnson got the milestone Civil Rights Bill of 1964 passed is a myth.)

    In Part 1, I described the terrible conditions that existed in the South due to the failure of Reconstruction. This created a huge obstacle in trying to correct the immense problem, since the power structure of the South was built upon it. How does Levingston assess this horrendous record that confronted the Kennedy administration? About all the horrible things done in the South from Reconstruction onward, Levingston is rather dismissive. He writes, “So far from being modernized, in many ways the Southern Mind has actually always marched away from the present toward the past.” (p. 16) Well, that is one way of dealing with the torture murder of Sam Hose, the massacre at Rosewood, and the destruction of a whole section of Tulsa. But as far as establishing a historical backdrop, it means zilch. On top of that, there is next to nothing about the paltry record of FDR, Truman and Eisenhower.

    Another part of the plan is to make Kennedy out to be rather timid on a number of issues, not just race. Like every other cheapjack writer on the scene, Levingston does what he can to make the worst of the Joe McCarthy episode for Senator Kennedy. He tries to say that somehow Kennedy’s failure to show up and vote during the censure roll call against Joe McCarthy in December of 1954 exhibits this character flaw. But he also acknowledges that Kennedy was in the hospital at the time, seriously ill, lapsing in and out of consciousness. (Levingston, pp. 22-23) As Harris Wofford relates in his book, Of Kennedys and Kings, Senator Kennedy had been through a near-death experience—he was given last rites—due to a back operation at this time. (Wofford, p. 35) Should he have been wheeled onto the Senate floor, with his doctor next to him? The vote was overwhelming for censure anyway; the final tally was 67-22. This makes the idea that somehow Kennedy should have called in and “paired” his vote with someone who was against censure silly. Why? In order to add one more vote to the landslide? But further, in his weakened state, his assistant Ted Sorenson had written a speech for him to give in favor of the censure vote. So there is no doubt where he stood on the issue.

    A key point Levingston completely leaves out is that it was the senator’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who had started the movement to censure McCarthy in the first place. Bobby Kennedy had been on McCarthy’s committee. He resigned since he did not like the direction in which Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, was taking that body. The Democratic minority later asked him back to be their chief counsel. In the summer of 1954, after both McCarthy and Cohn imploded during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Bobby Kennedy essentially took over that committee. He retired the cases against Irving Peress and Annie Lee Moss, dismissed the accusations of mass infiltration of defense plants, and then authored a report that was so critical of McCarthy and Cohn that some Democrats would not sign on to it. It recommended the Senate take action for their abuses. It was this report that led to the censure vote against McCarthy in December of 1954. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 118-19)

    profiles in courage

    But that’s not enough for Levingston. He now does something worse. He says that Senator Kennedy wrote his book Profiles in Courage to somehow apologize for not showing up on a gurney to mark the 68th vote to censure McCarthy. (Levingston, p. 25) Even for a reporter who worked for the Wall Street Journal, this is really out there. Profiles in Courage is about men in politics who did things that had no political advantage for them; they did them anyway since they thought they were right. Now, since 1951, John Kennedy had been out there by himself—in both the House of Representatives and the Senate—harping away against the Truman/Eisenhower approaches to communism in the Third World. In other words, he was, in part, criticizing his own party. It may have been crowd-pleasing and popular to suggest that the communist threat was the monolithic monster that the domino theory suggested, but Kennedy said that was not true. The force of nationalism, the desire to be free from European colonialism, was really responsible for much tumult in the Third World. (See my Destiny Betrayed, pp. 17-25) Senator Kennedy made speeches on this subject, gave radio interviews, and wrote letters to his electorate about it. But he had no Capitol Hill or White House followers in this crusade at the time. Would it not therefore be logical to assume that this is what motivated him to write the book? I mean, was he not doing something that garnered him little if any political favor simply because he felt it was the right thing to do?

    But Levingston can’t go there. He can’t even mention it. First, it would illustrate the political and moral courage that Levingston wants to strip away from Kennedy. Second, it would also show that, from early in his political career, Kennedy had some understanding of the conditions of colonialism and imperialism that were imposed on people of color in places like Africa.

    In keeping with his preplanned construct, Levingston does not begin to address Kennedy’s actual involvement with the whole race issue until 1959 and his preparations to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. This eliminates a rather important fact: namely, that, unlike Eisenhower or Nixon, neither of whom endorsed the epochal Brown decision, Senator Kennedy did so in 1956:

    The Democratic Party must not weasel on the issue … President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South … We might alienate Southern support but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land. (NY Times, 2/8/56, p. 1)

    That speech was made in New York, a liberal city and state. But in 1957, Kennedy went south to Jackson, Mississippi. He said the same thing: the Brown decision must be upheld. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) The fact he did this in the Deep South would seem to denote the courage Levingston said Kennedy lacked. For, as author Harry Golden notes, it was at this point that Kennedy began to lose support in the South and even get angry letters about his advocacy of the Brown decision. But by not mentioning these incidents, Levingston can say that Kennedy exhibited little courage or morality on the issue. What makes it worse is that when one turns to his bibliography, Levingston lists Harry Golden’s book, which noted the incident way back in 1964. This is what I mean about being a playwright.

    In passing, the author mentions Senator Kennedy’s vote on the bill constructing the 1957 civil rights commission. Levingston writes that Kennedy sided with the segregationists on a complicated procedural matter that watered down that bill. (p. 58) Even for Levingston, this is sorry. What watered down the bill was the removal of something that Kennedy voted for. This was called Title III. It allowed the attorney general to sue cities in civil court over voting rights and school integration. Kennedy backed that part of the bill. So how does being for that aspect jibe with siding with the segregationists? That part of the bill was voted down. (Golden, p. 94) And as anyone who has read anything about that vote understands, the man who engineered its defeat was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.

    The bill originally sent up by Eisenhower’s attorney general was completely commandeered by Johnson, to the point that, when it was completed, it was really Johnson’s bill. He planned it that way because he observed the fate of his mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Due to his segregationist stance, Russell could not advance his presidential ambitions on the national scene. Noting this, Johnson was intent on broadening his profile beyond the South; he did not want to be pigeonholed as a regional candidate. (Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power, pp 122-25) So he took over this bill, made it his own, and made sure it would pass the Senate. How did this occur?

    Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell

    Johnson made a deal with Russell and Senator Strom Thurmond: if he defanged the bill, they would not filibuster it. One way he did so was eliminating Title III. The other way was by adding a jury trial amendment. This meant that if there was an obstruction of voting rights, the accused would be tried by a jury. Which at that time in the South meant the defendant would very likely be acquitted. Johnson had specifically targeted Kennedy as a northern vote and he sent two people to convince him to vote for it. When Kennedy resisted, LBJ himself went to his office to lobby him. The issue was presented as follows: the amendment must be added or the bill would fail. Kennedy then consulted with some Ivy League lawyers and they told him that having some kind of a Civil Rights Commission—which was largely what was left of the bill—was at least a step in the right direction. (Evans and Novak, pp. 136-37)

    In contradistinction to what Levingston claims, what happened was not Kennedy siding with segregationists; it was a first term senator siding with the majority leader in order to get half a loaf instead of none. It should be added: even with Johnson’s severe alterations, Senator Strom Thurmond broke his agreement with him. He enacted a one-man record-setting filibuster. This was meant as a warning to LBJ: this was a one-time exception; don’t try it again.

    Abraham Ribicoff, JFK’s
    first choice for attorney general

    One of the silliest contentions in Levingston’s volume is that as president JFK appointed his brother Robert as attorney general because of his habit of turning to his older brother Joe in childhood tussles. In other words, he depended on his brothers to fight his battles for him. (p. 7, p. 168) Again, this fruitiness can only survive by not consulting the record. Bobby Kennedy was not JFK’s first choice for attorney general. Kennedy’s first choice was Senator Abraham Ribicoff. (Schlesinger, p. 237) So what would have become of Levingston’s argument if Ribicoff had accepted the position? And to show what a careful playwright the author is, Ribicoff is not mentioned in his book.

    Burke Marshall

    But even more damaging to Levingston’s attempt at pop-psychology is the following. President Kennedy’s first civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford, had written a long memo to him before the inauguration. That memo stated that since the upcoming civil rights battles would largely take place in court, the Department of Justice should be the focal point of the conflict. He therefore pointed out that the key spots in the administration on civil rights would be the attorney general, and his civil rights deputy. This prediction by Wofford ended up being correct. From this standpoint, Kennedy may be said to have been following Wofford’s memo, which turned out to be farsighted, especially when RFK made the fine choice of Burke Marshall as his deputy on civil rights. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 40-41)

    The main body of Levingston’s confection relies on a thesis he borrows from one of the most bizarre, eccentric books on the Kennedy administration ever published. This is BBC reporter Nick Bryant’s 2006 volume entitled The Bystander. Both Levingston and Bryant argue that Kennedy should have moved for a civil rights bill faster then he did. Which would mean in 1961 or 1962. (Levingston, pp. 120-21)

    The problem with this idea is that there is simply no empirical evidence to sustain it. From the 1870’s to the late 1950’s, no civil rights bill had ever gotten through the southern bloc in Congress. (Evans and Novak, p. 121) And just from 1917 forward, there had been nine different attempts to do so. They all failed. (Bernstein, p. 39) As noted in Part 1, the Truman administration had tried in 1949. They were routed. As also noted, the only reason the 1957 bill got through was because Johnson had pretty much denuded it and told the southern Senate leadership—made up of Russell, Thurmond, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina—that he would do so in advance. But in 1960, when the administration tried to add to that bill to strengthen voting rights, Johnson could not defeat the filibuster. He did not even come close. (Evans and Novak, p. 221) If Johnson, the man who was the maestro, the Toscanini of the Senate, could not come close to breaking the filibuster in 1960, how could Kennedy in 1961?

    On top of that, Kennedy was assured this was indeed the unfortunate state of affairs by his advisors. In his long memo planning a civil rights strategy submitted in late December of 1960, Harris Wofford did not even mention passing a bill as a possibility. (Bernstein, p. 48) Joe Clark of Pennsylvania, one of the most liberal senators in the body and a strong advocate for the issue, also told Kennedy it was not possible. (Bernstein, p. 50) The president’s chief vote-counter in Congress, Larry O’Brien, also said the votes were not there, even in 1962. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, p. 82) The new Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, did not think a civil rights bill would pass, and this was in 1963. At that time, Vice President Johnson felt the same way; further, he thought the very attempt would kill off other parts of President Kennedy’s program. (Carl Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, p. 245) Yet we are supposed to think that a British BBC reporter today, like Bryant, knows better than the experts on the scene did at the time.

    But the ultimate proof that both Bryant and Levingston are wrong on this point emerges from the list of events that had to occur for the bill finally to pass in the summer of 1964.

    1. The Democrats gained four more seats in the Senate in 1963, all outside the South.
    2. The May 1963 televised violent demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.
    3. The Kennedys’ televised showdown with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama the following month.
    4. JFK’s televised watershed speech on civil rights in June of 1963.
    5. The murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers on that same day.
    6. The televised Randolph/Rustin March on Washington in August of 1963.
    7. JFK’s massive, unprecedented White House lobbying effort for the bill.
    8. The president’s assassination in a southern city in November of 1963.
    Signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act

    Even with all of those momentous events, it took one year to pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill. It was the lengthiest debate in congressional history, featuring the longest filibuster in Senate history. This is how determined the South was to block it, since they knew it would mark the beginning of the end of the system this author outlined in Part 1. How do Levingston and Bryant surmount this overwhelming evidence that they are wrong? They don’t deal with it. Talk about profiles in courage. Levingston mentions the passage of the bill in one sentence (Levingston, p. 432), while Bryant does not even refer to it. In fact, in his usual manic, over-the-top manner, Bryant says that Kennedy was not really concerned with the bill’s passage at the time of his death. (Bryant, p. 452) This is completely contradicted by the record produced in Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century, describing the passage of that act. (See pages 97-134) Need I add that playwright Levingston listed the Risen book in his bibliography?

    To characterize the value of the efforts of Levingston and Bryant: If the main thesis of your book—that Kennedy could have gotten a civil rights bill through earlier—is so weak and unfounded that you cannot even present the evidence that counters and neutralizes it, then, 1) How honest are you being with the reader? And 2) What is your book worth? I would add a third question: Why would you write such a book? Because to anyone familiar with the issue, the person who dawdled on civil rights was not Kennedy, it was Eisenhower.

    II. Taking Aim at RFK

    David Margolick

    David Margolick’s The Promise and the Dream and Michael Eric Dyson’s What Truth Sounds Like, deal much more with Bobby Kennedy than with President Kennedy’s role in civil rights. One of the strangest parts of Margolick’s book is where he actually seems to endorse Levingston’s flatulent volume as being accurate about JFK’s role in that cause. He calls President Kennedy’s position passive for the first two years. (Margolick, p. 112) As we shall see, this is not supported by the record.

    But in keeping with these questionable characterizations, Margolick, as with Levingston on JFK, wishes to shrink Bobby Kennedy in relation to King. So Bobby is represented as a committed Cold Warrior (similarly to the appraisal of his brother which has mistakenly prevailed), and that somehow, “like him and so many others, [RFK] had seen Vietnam as a place to take a stand against communism.” (Margolick, p. 235) His main source for this is a nearly fifty-year old book by David Halberstam. It is notable that he ignores the more recent research by Richard Parker which reveals that Bobby Kennedy was in the room during the November 1961 debates about committing combat troops to Vietnam. In newly discovered notes, Bobby kept insisting, “We are not sending combat troops.” This was clearly meant to back up his brother, who then said that if troops were ever sent it would only be as part of a multilateral force under the aegis of the United Nations. (The Nation, 2/24/2005, “Galbraith and Vietnam”)

    Bobby Kennedy’s role in 1961 is bookended by the fact that, in 1963, he served as the liaison between his brother and the writing team of General Victor Krulak and Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who actually composed the McNamara/Taylor trip report in Washington. When it was finished, it was then bound and sent to Hawaii so Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor could read it on their return trip from Saigon, on the plane flight to Washington. RFK knew that this dictated report would serve as the backing for NSAM 263, Kennedy’s order for a military withdrawal from Vietnam. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 401) Why Margolick would use the 1969 work of a man like Halberstam, whose writing on Vietnam is pretty much obsolete, and ignore Parker, is kind of odd.

    But there is some creditable work in Margolick’s book. He produces clear evidence that when Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in June of 1968, both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King journeyed to California to be on the plane that carried his body back to New York with Ethel Kennedy. It is as if they knew that with the murder of RFK, what their two husbands had done so much to build was now going to be dissipated. What makes this even more tragic is that Jackie Kennedy did not want RFK to run for president in 1968, because she felt he would also be killed. (Margolick, p. 312) On the plane back, Jackie said to RFK’s aide Frank Mankiewicz, “Well, now we know death, don’t we, you and I. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.” (Margolick, p. 380)

    The fact that Coretta King was there may partly be due to what her husband had said a few months before, namely that Bobby Kennedy would make a great president. (Margolick, p. 295) It may also owe to what RFK did in her time of need. After her husband had been killed two months previous in Memphis, Bobby called her and asked if she needed anything. She asked if he could arrange to have King’s body transported back to Atlanta. He said he would do so but he wanted no publicity about it. He then paid for more phone lines to be tied into her home, arranged for a jet to fly her to Memphis, and booked dozens of hotel rooms for celebrities and dignitaries flying in to attend the funeral. (Margolick, p. 347) When that was done, as he previously promised, he went and met with the youths who had organized his aborted rally in Indianapolis that evening. They called themselves the Radical Action Program. (Margolick, p. 348)

    I should add one more detail about RFK and the death of King. When Bobby first heard that King had been shot, he was in Muncie, Indiana. He heard about it as he was boarding a plane to fly to Indianapolis. He was not sure King was dead. But on the plane he already looked bereaved and ashen. He rejected the drafts for speeches offered by Mankiewicz and Adam Walinsky. Those were his own words he delivered. As many have said, it was probably the most memorable speech he ever gave. (Margolick, pp. 337-39) That night, as he spoke, he was wearing his brother’s overcoat.

    Kennedy & King Park, Indianapolis IN
    Plaques commemorating RFK’s speech
    delivered on this spot on April 4, 1968


    Kennedy & King Park, Indianapolis IN

    Landmark for Peace Memorial
    artist Daniel Edwards, design by Greg R. Perry

    Commenting on what RFK did that evening, the great decathlon athlete Rafer Johnson said, “Bob Kennedy knew better than anyone else, better than Martin Luther King, that if something wasn’t done … to somehow solve the racial strife, then we’re in deep trouble.” He continued by saying that no African American could have brought black militants and moderates together as Robert Kennedy could have, and no American could have spoken to both races as he did. He then concluded:

    Senator Kennedy proved that color doesn’t make any difference. He was—in terms of the Negro—as much a Negro as Adam Clayton Powell … As Ralph Bunche or Senator Brooke. He was as much a Negro as Jesse Owens or Joe Louis because he did right by people. (Margolick, p. 349)

    I should add that Margolick’s book is profusely illustrated with some powerful and rarely seen pictures. If one can discount the several specious passages, such as those quoted above, then the book is readable. If for some reason I had to recommend one of these four volumes, Margolick’s would be the one. But only with severe reservations—most importantly, concerning his statements that James Earl Ray killed King and Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy. But he worked for the NY Times for a number of years, so he has to say these things.

    III. Michael Eric Dyson Commits an Atrocity

    Michael Eric Dyson

    Michael Eric Dyson’s book might be the worst of the bunch, which is saying something. First of all, it is not even a book. Dyson slapped a series of disconnected essays together, put them into a small format book with large spacing between lines, and the publisher somehow had the temerity to call this a book.

    Dyson begins his confection with a description of Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta. Right there, on pages 2 and 3, I sensed something was upside down. Why? Because he mentions some of the luminaries who were there, like Thurgood Marshall and Richard Nixon. But he does not mention Bobby Kennedy being in attendance. And he does not note RFK’s role in arranging the ceremony, as Margolick outlined above. Dyson then adds that President Johnson was not there since he did not “want to drape the service in the controversy of the Vietnam War …”

    These are hints of what Dyson is up to. Two of the goals driving his manufactured history are to do everything possible to smear RFK, and to be as soft as possible on Lyndon Johnson. For Dyson to write that Johnson was not in Atlanta because of some personal abnegation is simply not being honest about the relationship between King, Johnson and RFK, not only by 1968, but even before that. By this time, Johnson was involved in a bitter feud with both RFK and MLK. It was not just over what he had done with the Vietnam War. As we shall see, it was also over what Johnson had done with JFK’s plan to attack the problems of African Americans through a “war on poverty”, something which Bobby Kennedy had been at work on since 1961. In fact, according to Harris Wofford, the reason LBJ did not attend is because he thought he would be overshadowed by Robert Kennedy. Which is precisely what happened. According to Wofford, at the funeral, everyone understood that with King dead, RFK was their last best hope, since LBJ had blown it. (Wofford, pp. 221, 227)

    Peter Kunhardt’s film, King in the Wilderness, opens with King calling Johnson from the scene of the Watts riots in 1965. It is a tense, desperate call, with King telling the president that he has to do something about the economic aspects of the race problem in order to give youths in the ghetto some hope. As we shall see, by 1968, LBJ had all but abandoned the concept begun by JFK in 1963.

    But further, it is instructive to compare what King said about that riot with what Bobby Kennedy said. King saw it as a stirring of those in society who had been bypassed by the prosperity of the decade; he wished to minimize the racial aspect, since it was more the rumblings of the “have nots” inside of the affluent society. (LA Times, 8/12/15, “Viewing the Watts riots through different eyes”) Rhetorically, Bobby Kennedy went beyond King. When Eisenhower and Johnson used the word “lawbreakers” in regard to the riots, RFK replied with this: “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes the law is the enemy. In Harlem, in Bedford Stuyvesant, it has almost always been used against them.” (Schlesinger, p. 815) Kennedy also said that too many civil rights leaders had ignored the problems in the north, so the larger population of the deprived in the north had no real leadership. He also stated that the tactics used in the south—marches and sit-ins—would not work in the northern cities. (LA Times, 8/12/15)

    Images of the Watts Riots

    The last observation by RFK is directly relevant to Dyson’s principal subject. So it makes perfect sense that he would ignore it. For besides RFK and Lyndon Johnson, the third main character Dyson deals with is author James Baldwin. And as we shall also see, because Dyson is intent on smearing RFK, he correspondingly inflates and elevates Baldwin.

    James Baldwin

    Dyson’s series of essays is superficially based on a meeting that was held in May of 1963 between Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and a group of African American intellectuals, writers and artists. It is a meeting that became famous when Baldwin revealed it afterwards to a reporter from the New York Times. (Dyson, p. 11) And it has been used by hack writers like Levingston and Larry Tye to disparage RFK. After reading further on the meeting and on Baldwin, I have come to a different point of view on this matter than the MSM, and certainly Mr. Dyson.

    Fred Shuttlesworth

    In setting the stage, Dyson shows what a poor historian he is. He says the Birmingham demonstrations were led by King. (Dyson, p. 12) Not so. Local leader Fred Shuttlesworth began the Birmingham demonstrations months before King’s group, the SCLC, ever got there. They were carried out by a group of students from nearby Miles College who were inspired by Shuttlesworth. (Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, pp. 265-72) It was Shuttlesworth who, in the summer of 1962, first suggested that the SCLC go to Birmingham to extend the protests. He suggested this because he thought (correctly) that Sheriff Bull Connor would play into their hands. Then, in June of 1963, Shuttlesworth pushed it on the SCLC again, but King was still noncommittal. Finally, the Birmingham leader made an impassioned plea: “We’ve been hammering away for 7 years with no impact. If segregation is going to fall, we’ve got to at least crack the wall in Birmingham!” That is what finally made the SCLC move. (McWhorter, p. 307)

    Dyson follows this up with another faux pas. He writes that it was Birmingham that forced JFK to submit a civil rights bill to Congress. On February 28, 1963, well in advance of the SCLC beginning its Birmingham action, President Kennedy made a speech on civil rights. He concluded by saying that action must be taken for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. He also said that he had gone about as far as he could with executive orders. It was time for Congress to step in and fulfill its obligations. (Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century, p. 36) He then outlined a bill he was going to send to Congress. It was the draft of this bill, praised by leaders like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, which formed the basis of the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1964. Again, Risen’s book was published four years before Dyson’s. If Dyson were serious about his subject, he would have consulted that book.

    But he didn’t. Dyson is only interested in polemical smears. From here, he writes one of the most preposterous passages I can recall in the literature. He says that:

    … the brothers claimed interest in race but let the moment pass, and they spoke out of both sides of their political mouths, to black leaders and conservatives alike, doing little to move the racial needle. (Dyson, p. 15)

    What a pile of bird dung. By the fall of 1962, with the calling in of 20,000 federal troops to quell the insurrection, partly organized by General Edwin Walker, at Ole Miss over the admittance of James Meredith, the Kennedys were now seen as the hated enemies of the South. During that battle, the rallying cry of the Klansmen was “2-4-1-3 we hate Kennedy”. Another one was “Go to Cuba, nigger lovers”. (Brauer, p. 192) The right-wingers in Alabama, knowing another showdown would occur there the next year, tried to vote out moderate Democrats who would side with the Kennedys; they had to “show the Kennedys we will not be kicked around any longer.” (Brauer, p. 201) This is why John Bohrer notes in the introduction to his book The Revolution of Robert Kennedy that the attorney general was writing a letter of resignation to his brother in November of 1963. He thought that by being too far out there on civil rights, he had lost the entire South for the 1964 election. How is this playing both sides?

    What on earth is Dyson saying when he asserts that JFK had “let the moment pass” on civil rights? President Kennedy was right about the filibuster issue, as proven with abundant evidence above. The spring of 1963 was the correct moment to submit a bill, since the issue was dominating the air-waves. As per the concluding remark, how any writer can say that the Kennedys “did little to move the racial needle” is absurd. What the Kennedys did with Brown v Board in 1961, at Ole Miss in 1962, at Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1963, and with the Civil Rights Act of 1964—just those four achievements were enough to surpass any previous administration. But there is much more, and I will enumerate it in Part 3. What can be stated here is that with this kind of junk, Dyson already acquires little credibility for the informed reader, even before he gets to the main topic of his concoction.

    Baldwin had been sending telegrams and letters to RFK. (Dyson, p. 25) In May of 1963, Robert Kennedy met with Baldwin briefly at Kennedy’s home in Hickory Hill. Kennedy then asked him to bring some people he knew to his apartment in New York the next day. He would be there since he was lobbying some department store executives to give more positions in their southern stores to black applicants. (Schlesinger, p. 345) What RFK told Baldwin he wanted to discuss were ideas about attacking the racial problem in the north. (Robert Kennedy in his Own Words, Ed Guthman & Jeff Shulman, eds., p. 223)

    There is some confusion about who was at the meeting. But to be fair to Dyson, this is his roster of African Americans:

    • Clarence Jones—King’s attorney
    • Edwin Berry—member of the Chicago Urban League
    • Kenneth Clark—an illustrious social scientist studying urban poverty
    • Harry Belafonte—celebrity singer and actor
    • Lena Horne—celebrity dancer, actress and singer
    • Lorraine Hansberry—reporter and playwright, author of A Raisin in the Sun
    • Jerome Smith—activist for the civil rights group CORE, rode on the Freedom Rides

    There were four white persons there. Baldwin had invited the actor Rip Torn, and Kennedy was accompanied by two assistants, Burke Marshall and Ed Guthman.

    Since it was an informal meeting, there was no stenographic record. We are thus reliant upon people who were there to convey what happened. By most accounts, Kennedy started the meeting trying to state what the administration had done in the South up to that time. This was clearly meant as a segue to what he wanted to talk about now: addressing the urban cities in the north. Which, considering the series of devastating and deadly riots that occurred from about 1965-1967, seems rather prescient.

    By almost every account, the discussion never got that far. Smith shattered any kind of profitable discussion by saying that being in the room with Robert Kennedy made him want to vomit. (Risen, p. 51; Dyson, p. 43) Before we get to why Smith said something like that and why he was wrong in saying it, I wish to ask a pertinent question no one has ever posed before, namely: What was Smith doing there? If the discussion was to be about countering racism in the north, what did Smith know about that? Smith was born in the South and joined the CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] faction in New Orleans. The bill the Kennedys were revising for congressional passage was aimed at the eradication of Jim Crow in the South. As noted above, Bobby Kennedy stated, in his response to Eisenhower and Johnson about the Watts riots, that he knew it would take different leadership and tactics to address problems in the north. So what were Smith’s qualifications in this regard?

    Needless to say, Smith completely sidetracked the conversation. He seemed to be striking out at RFK personally because he had been attacked during the Freedom Rides in 1961. And this managed to turn the conversation into a kind of competition. Reportedly, Clark and Berry had come to discuss what Bobby Kennedy wanted to talk about. (Schlesinger, p. 345) But that all went out the window with Smith’s sideswipe and Baldwin’s encouragement of it. In fact, Hansberry actually said that the man RFK should be listening to was Smith, in spite of the fact that JFK’s bill was designed to eliminate discrimination in the South. (Schlesinger, p. 345)

    Dyson is such a cheerleader for Baldwin that he never even ponders the fact that Smith may have been wrong in his vindictiveness. For instance, one of the things that Smith reportedly said was that Bobby Kennedy’s men stood around taking notes while he was getting beaten up. This is not accurate. It was the FBI that stood around. And what makes it worse is that the informant the Bureau had inside the Klan cadre that performed the assault had actually told them a week in advance that the Freedom Riders attack was coming. That information never got to the attorney general. (Schlesinger, p. 307; Wofford, p. 152) When Bobby did learn about the attacks, he sent two of his men to the scene: John Siegenthaler and John Doar. Siegenthaler tried to help a fleeing victim who warned him he was going to get hurt. He was then clubbed unconscious and sent to the hospital. Doar was on the phone from Montgomery telling RFK what was happening. When Kennedy learned that the local authorities were not doing anything to keep order, the attorney general sent in five hundred marshals under the command of his assistant Byron White. (Schlesinger, p. 309)

    As Bobby Kennedy said more than once, he did not know the Freedom Riders were going to test the interstate buses when they did. (Schlesinger, p. 307) During an oral history interview for the JFK library, he once said that he first learned about it in the papers. And in fact, while the Riders had been in the upper South, there were no notable disturbances. But once they entered the Deep South, things got brutally violent. As the attorney general said, a mobile demonstration like this was pretty much unprecedented. He and Burke Marshall were working the phones willy-nilly trying to find ways to save the situation.

    But the attacks could have all been prevented. And it was not just J. Edgar Hoover’s fault. The organization Smith worked with, CORE, had chosen to make it a dramatic confrontation. As Harris Wofford wrote in his book, Bobby Kennedy had met with some civil rights leaders at his office in April. They had asked him about this very issue: when interstate transportation would be straightened out and the segregation signs pulled down at the terminals. A Supreme Court case had been decided in that regard two months prior. The attorney general said he was working on it at the time but the body involved with the details, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was slow in issuing its orders. CORE was one of the groups in attendance at that meeting. They did not tell Kennedy about their planned Freedom Rides scheduled for the next month. Why? As their leader James Farmer later explained, “Our philosophy was simple. We put on pressure and create a crisis and then they react.” (Wofford, p. 151) The first edition of Wofford’s book was released in 1980. Are we to believe that Dyson never read it? This is why his book is so mistitled. Smith’s outburst was not based on truth. Not even close. So the book’s proper title is: What Ignorance Sounds Like.

    Based on this false information, most everyone in the room either joined Smith’s side or stayed quiet, even when Bobby Kennedy said things that were clearly correct. For instance, that his department had helped King in Birmingham—which they had done by raising bail money and monitoring King’s treatment while he was arrested and imprisoned. They also sent Burke Marshall to arrange a settlement between the city and the civil rights demonstrators to begin integration. When RFK brought this up, they laughed and jeered. (Schlesinger, pp. 342-43, 47) After the meeting was over, Clarence Jones tried to make amends to RFK since he knew that this was the case. Belafonte also tried to explain his silence. His excuse was that if he sided with RFK he would forfeit his position with the others, whom he still had a chance to influence. (Schlesinger, p. 347)

    Some have tried to say, as Dyson does, that this meeting somehow helped the attorney general by sensitizing him. I disagree. By this point, Bobby Kennedy had been at this for going on three years. He understood the situation, and as Belafonte had told him, he had done more for civil rights than any prior attorney general. What this meeting did was convince RFK that he had to consult with men like King and Wilkins, and later Cesar Chavez, on minority rights, because those men had a degree of understanding, knowledge and vision about them. Baldwin was so misinformed on the racial issue that he once verbally attacked the perennial champion of that cause, Washington lawyer Joe Rauh, in his own house. (Michael Parrish, Citizen Rauh, p. 155) Even someone as moderate as Henry Louis Gates, who liked Baldwin and is featured in the writer’s last play, has said that as a civil rights leader Baldwin had neither a grasp on his role nor an unambiguous message. And when this was discovered later, “he was relieved of his duties and shunted aside as an elder and retired statesman.” (Herb Boyd, Baldwin’s Harlem, p. 156)

    After reading three books on Baldwin, I would have to agree. Baldwin simply did not possess the emotional or mental stability to be any kind of a political leader. Even his sympathetic biographer, David Leeming, understood this. He begins his volume by describing Baldwin as somewhat paranoid and not always psychologically or emotionally stable. (James Baldwin: A Biography, p. xii) He further notes that, by 1967-68, Baldwin thought that people like Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton and H. Rap Brown were the new hope of the black movement. If the reader can comprehend it, Baldwin predicted that this new emerging black consciousness meant the beginning of the end of America. (Leeming, pp. 292, 311) This is why the celebrated African American journalist Ralph Matthews once called Baldwin the Genghis Khan of the civil rights movement. (Schmitt, p. 57) I could go on about Baldwin, but I really don’t think pointing out all of his personal and public failings is worth it, except to show that Dyson is intent on concealing them.

    Let me gladly conclude my discussion of Dyson’s sorry pastiche by addressing his points about Lyndon Johnson and civil rights. He gives Johnson credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (Dyson, p. 56) This makes Dyson one of the worst historians ever. As mentioned previously, Clay Risen’s book proves that Johnson did little to pass the 1964 act. The men who were most responsible for breaking the filibuster were Robert Kennedy, his Department of Justice team, Senator Thomas Kuchel, and Senator Hubert Humphrey. (Risen, pp. 222-23)

    As per the Voting Rights act of 1965, Johnson told King that he did not have enough capital left after the 1964 act to get that bill passed—unless King did something. So King did something in Selma. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker, July 8, 2013) For this writer, that was King’s most significant achievement. For Dyson to give the credit to Johnson shows just how agenda-driven he is.

    As per the 1968 Fair Housing Act, this was an expansion and extension of what President Kennedy had signed into law in late 1962. Johnson sent this bill up in 1966. But it only passed in 1968, as a result of King’s assassination.

    Lorraine Hansberry
    reporter, playwright, author

    The rest of Dyson’s screed is just as useless as the first part. Since he has to fill out a couple of hundred pages, he now attempts to relate the African Americans at the meeting to modern day equivalents. Anybody who would parallel the work of someone like Hansberry with the films Black Panther and Get Out! is an even worse cultural critic than historian. He gets even sillier when he tries to say that Muhammad Ali—who was not there—was some kind of civil rights leader of the sixties. The man who really fits that bill is the great NFL running back Jim Brown. But Dyson does not want to go in that direction, since Brown has little but disdain for most of the black athletes of today.

    The worst thing about Dyson’s mess is that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now chose to feature it on the anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination this year. In other words, the individual who did so much to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, who came out strongly against Johnson’s mad pursuit of the Vietnam War, who faced off against Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama, who encouraged the peasants of Brazil to overthrow their government in 1965, who ran the incandescent progressive campaign of 1968—this figure was entirely ignored. On the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Amy Goodman wanted her listeners to remember RFK through Dyson’s completely lopsided view of his dispute with James Baldwin and Jerome Smith. And to also ignore the good that could have come out of that meeting if Smith and Baldwin had not been there.

    What a disgrace.

    Go to Part 1

    Go to Part 3

    Go to Part 4

  • Clete Roberts interviews Roger Hilsman on Vietnam (1983)

    Clete Roberts interviews Roger Hilsman on Vietnam (1983)

    The following is a transcript of an interview at the 1983 USC conference entitled “Vietnam Reconsidered”. Clete Roberts was a local newscaster in Los Angeles. This interview occurred a year before his death. The cameraman for the interview was the Oscar-winning activist cinematographer Haskell Wexler. This interview is important because it took place almost ten years before the publication of John Newman’s book, JFK and Vietnam. But it shows Kennedy’s attitude toward that conflict was just as Newman depicted it.

    Clete Roberts, correspondent
    Ian Masters, Producer, Director
    Michael Rose, Producer
    Haskell Wexler, Camera (along with others)
    Susan Cope, Sound
    Eric Vollmer, Coordinator
    Anne Vermillion, Coordinator

    Vietnam Reconsidered Conference, USC, 1983

     

    Clete Roberts:

    Let’s see. When you were Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs what was going on in Vietnam at that particular time?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, I started off with the Kennedy administration as being Assistant Secretary for Research and Intelligence, and then when Averell Harriman was promoted to be Under Secretary, I became Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs. So the last 14, 15 months of the Kennedy administration, I was head of the Far East. What was going on was that Kennedy had followed the Eisenhower policy of giving aid and advisors to the South Vietnamese, but Kennedy was absolutely opposed to bombing North Vietnam or sending American troops. Kennedy was killed, I stayed on and I pursued Kennedy’s policy and Mr. Johnson, President Johnson disagreed. He and I quarreled about this, he wanted to bomb the North and send American troops in, I was opposed to it. As it happened, I resigned, but I beat him to the punch by about two hours. I think he would have fired me if I hadn’t resigned. So that gives you the basic picture.

    Roberts:

    Well, I suppose this question ought to be asked. Who got us into the Vietnam War?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, you can … If you start at the very beginning, in the middle of World War Two, OSS, which I was a member of, had liaison officers with Ho Chi Minh and we were helping Ho Chi Minh. Then as the Cold War heated up, or the Cold War got involved, increasingly Vietnam got involved with the Cold War. And during the Truman administration, we began to help the French and so on. In the Kennedy administration, Kennedy started off something of a hawk, but as things progressed, he became convinced of two things. One is that it was not a world communist thrust, that it was a nationalist Vietnamese anti-colonialst thing, and that therefore we should help the South Vietnamese with aid and maybe advisors, but that we should never get American troops involved.

    When Kennedy was killed the balance of power shifted to a group of people, Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Bob McNamara, who saw it not as an anti-colonialist nationalist movement, but as a world communist movement, you see. And they, for ideological reasons or, I would argue, for a misunderstanding of the nature of the struggle, made it an American war. So is that a capsule version?

    Roberts:

    You spoke a moment ago of being at odds, at loggerheads, with President Johnson, but what does a State department official, an official in the position you were in, what do you do when you get to loggerheads with the administration or with a policy you can’t live with? Do you just quit or do you take it to the press, to the public? Now you could have done it, but you’re arguing with the President of the United States, I understand that.

    Roger Hilsman:

    That’s right. Well, I want to be responsive to your question and how to do so. Averell Harriman was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and I was Assistant Secretary for Research and Intelligence, and Kennedy promoted him to be Under Secretary of State and promoted me to Averell’s job. And I remember a press man said to me that I think this is a wonderful appointment. And I said, “Well, why? Do you admire us that much?” And he said, “No. Both you and Averell are free men. Averell is a free man because he’s got $500 million. You’re a free man because you’ve got a PhD in International Politics and you can always go back to teaching at a university.” So he said, “I am confident that you guys will quit if push comes to shove, and you’ll do so publicly.” And I think this is true.

    For example, one of the best Foreign Service officers, I’ve never said this publicly, but I’m willing to do so now, one of the best Foreign Service officers in my day was Marshall Green in the Far East. He was Consul General at Hong Kong and I think that I can prove that I thought he was good because I brought him back to be my deputy. But some years later, in the Nixon administration he was made Assistant Secretary. I thought that was a terrible mistake.

    Roberts:

    Because he was a career man?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Because he was a career man, you see. Now when Nixon worked the rapprochement with China, the Assistant Secretary of State, Marshall Green, read about it in the newspapers. He had no alternative career. You see, if I had been Assistant Secretary at the time, or Averell Harriman, Nixon wouldn’t have dared to have done this without consulting the State department because he would know that either Averell or I would have marched out of our office, we’d have gone down to the first floor, we’d have called a press conference in front of TV, and we’d have resigned publicly with a blast. It would have cost him. Marshall Green can’t do that, a career Foreign Service can’t do that.

    So I think what I’m saying is that an Assistant Secretary who is a political appointee, who is the President’s man, yes, but because he’s the President’s man, he can say to the President, “You can’t do this without consulting the experts. You can’t go off on your own, you’ve got to consult the experts. If you don’t consult the experts, I’ll blast you and I’ll blast you publicly.” And I think it’s important that people at that second level, or third level, you see the Assistant Secretary of State level, be free men, be people who are able to blast and the President has to know. You see, he stands between the experts and the President so that the President has to consult the experts or otherwise he’ll pay the price.

    Roberts:

    And that is done only by going to the press?

    Roger Hilsman:

    I think it’s true.

    Roberts:

    No other way?

    Roger Hilsman:

    There’s no other way. This is … The press are perhaps being used in this sense, but not unfairly.

    Roberts:

    Talking earlier with George Reedy who was Press Secretary, as you know, for President Johnson, he told us that after Johnson came into office, into Washington D.C., that he felt that he was at a loss of what to do about Vietnam. And there was a meeting …

    Roger Hilsman:

    That Vietnam was … That Johnson was at a loss?

    Roberts:

    At a loss initially in what to do about it.

    Roger Hilsman:

    I don’t think that’s true.

    Roberts:

    That he felt it … At a meeting that he attended, that he was looking, he, Johnson, was looking for signals from the Kennedy people about which way to go. And he felt that perhaps Johnson had misinterpreted what the Kennedy people were saying to him.

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, George Reedy is a very old friend, I’ve known him for 25 years, I respect him a great deal, but I would have to say that George was, he was the public relations guy, so he was not involved in the substantive discussions and therefore I beg to disagree. When Johnson was Vice President, he attended a number of meetings, National Security Council meetings at which I was the Assistant Secretary. You see, I was responsible for all of Asian policy. The President made the decisions, the Secretary of State made the decisions, but I was the person who made the recommendations and who carried out their decisions. So I was in a key position.

    And I would say that those meetings, George was not at those meetings, and long before the President was killed, when LBJ was Vice President, it became very clear to us that LBJ had a viewpoint, a position, that he was a hawk if you will. That he thought that, whereas Kennedy felt we should support the South Vietnamese with aid and with advisors, but that it was basically not a world communist struggle, it was not the communist bloc against America. It was a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, we should help them certainly, but we should not get any Americans killed, we should not make a war out of it. Johnson had a world ideological view of it that this was a struggle between the communist world and the West, and I think he’s been proved wrong because they won, and the world hasn’t changed that much, we’re still here, thank God. But I think that Johnson, long before Kennedy was killed, a year before, in those meetings, made it very clear that he saw it as a cataclysmic struggle between good and evil, that he saw it in ideological terms.

    Johnson saw Vietnam as a struggle between the communist world and the non-communist world; whereas Kennedy saw it, I think correctly, as history will show us, as a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, which really had no effect on the survival of the United States. Johnson saw it as Armageddon, you see, and I think Johnson clearly was shown to be wrong.

    Roberts:

    After you left your position in the administration and you watched Vietnam, what did you think of the quality of the reporting that was coming out of there?

    Roger Hilsman:

    I’m moved to not answer your question just yet, but another question first. One of the things that has troubled me all my life is that, you see, Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, George Ball, me, Mike Forrestal, saw this as a nationalist anti-colonialist movement, whereas a lot of others saw it as this world shaking event where the communist world was going to dominate and dominoes and all the rest. And one of the things that has bothered me ever since, and that was the question I thought you were asking, was have you examined your soul? Was there anything that you could have done? ‘Cause you see, with hindsight it turns out we were right. Is there anything I could have done to have stopped this that I didn’t do? If I had been successful, there would be 55,000 Americans alive that are not alive, and about a million Vietnamese. And that one I have struggled over. I can’t think of what I could have done. It was … I tried, I tried endlessly to try to convince Johnson that this was not Armageddon, this was not something that we should spend all these American lives on, and I failed. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.

    Roger Hilsman:

    But now to go to your question, could the press have done anything differently?

    Roberts:

    My question, yes. And what they did do, what do you think of it?

    Roger Hilsman:

    Well, to tell you the honest to God truth, I don’t think any of us did a good job. I mean, I think there were a few of us in government who saw it as history shows it was. It was not ordered by Moscow or Peking. It was not Armageddon. There were some of us who saw it that way. We failed in convincing Lyndon. Now Jack Kennedy saw it that way, we didn’t need to convince him, he convinced us. He deserves the most credit. So I think that some of us saw it that way, there were a few in the press, but basically I think that it can be said equally of the press, the policy makers, the foreign service, the CIA, anybody you name, that they failed to understand what was going on.

    The press, in my judgment, never addressed themselves to the question of what is the nature of this struggle? You see, they assumed that it was a world communist movement. It wasn’t, it was a nationalist anti-colonialist movement. The press got themselves involved in the day by day business. What happened yesterday? How many Americans were killed? It was the Ernie Pyle sort of thing, you see. They accepted the overall rationale of the war, the press did, without question, and they concentrated on the Ernie Pyle level of the grunt, of the soldier. And I think they failed the American people, I think they failed the American policy makers, they didn’t ask the right questions. They didn’t ask the fundamental questions. I think that’s true of the press, I think that’s true of the policy makers. I’m not focusing on the press, I don’t think the press caused the war or the press is responsible. I just think the press, like the CIA and the foreign service and the policy makers, failed to ask the right questions. I can understand why the press did because they’ve got to make the next deadline, they’ve got to make the next thing. But there’s a tendency in the press to hype things, to push it up.

    And by the way, the most severe critics of the press are the press. For example, go to the Iran hostage situation. We now know that the militants who seized the embassy didn’t intend to hold it for more than 24 hours. They held it for 444 days. The reason they held it was because the press hyped it, and they got world publicity that they never dreamed of. And Scotty Reston is the man who is the most critical of this. As he says, it was the sonorous toning of the days on the evening news, “This is the 344th day of the captivity of the hostages.” As my … As Scotty Reston, I’m quoting Scotty Reston. And who was saying this? It was the Ayatollah Cronkite, you see. And there’s a real reason to believe that those hostages stayed 442 days more than they should have because guys like Cronkite hyped it. I think this is a fair criticism.

    So what I’m saying is that I think we’re all culpable. We all failed to analyze Vietnam correctly. I think the press has a peculiar guilt in that they hyped it, they blew it up.

    Addendum

    This interview from 1969 contains, among other things, two very important pieces of information. On page 7, Hilsman says Bobby Kennedy wanted to negotiate out of Vietnam in 1963. On page 21, he states JFK was thinking of recognizing Red China in 1961.

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  • King in the Wilderness

    King in the Wilderness

    There were three documentaries prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination: Hope and Fury was a production of NBC; I am MLK Jr. was prepared by the Viacom network;  but perhaps the most interesting of the productions was HBO’s King in the Wilderness.

    Peter Kunhardt is an experienced filmmaker who has previously produced and directed documentaries on a wide variety of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon.  Kunhardt chose to direct this production and he collaborated with a writer he knew, Chris Chuang, who had worked with on a documentary from the previous year about Warren Buffett.

    King in the Wilderness has two defining qualities that differentiate it from the other two films and from previous King documentaries I have seen.  First, it does not deal with King’s entire career—not even close. It limits itself to the last years of his life. The focus is on the time interval from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until his death in Memphis and the following funeral in Atlanta in 1968.  Second, it does not feature the usual professional pundits as talking heads.  So, thankfully, we are spared pretentious gasbags like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw.

    The film begins with shots of the King home in Atlanta.  We then learn that several of King’s friends and working colleagues gathered there for the anniversary of his death.  They will be the interview subjects for the film. When they appear, we see them in close-up looking directly at the camera. Thus we listen to King’s attorney Clarence Jones, his close colleague in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Andrew Young, his friend the actor and singer Harry Belafonte, Dianne Nash of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), singer and activist Joan Baez, and SCLC Chicago representative Jesse Jackson, among others.

    I should note one other distinguishing feature.  In criticizing the documentaries of actor Tom Hanks, I have written that, aesthetically, they are purely assembly line productions.  As far as the way they are made, there is nothing at all distinguishing about them. With Hanks and his company Playtone, it is almost as if stylistically acute documentaries like The Power of Nightmares and The Kid Stays in the Picture had never been made.  Kunhardt’s film is not a cornucopia of new ideas in that respect, but it does have some visual panache and interest to it.

    In fact, it begins with the viewer going behind the scenes of a news interview with King.  Sander Vanocur, NBC’s national correspondent at the time, is seen rehearsing an interview with the civil rights leader—clapboard included.  King recalls his famous “I Have a Dream” speech made during the March on Washington in August of 1963.  That speech was made in aid of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  He comments that in light of what has happened to America in the meantime, the dream he spoke about has now become something of a nightmare.  The reference points he is speaking about are, of course, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the recurrent rioting, and accompanying fatalities, that had become so frequent by 1967.

    The film tries to elucidate some of his chagrin by depicting both sides of a taped discussion of the 1965 Watts riot between King and President Johnson. He tells the president that unless he does something to give people in the black slum areas some hope, he fears that those areas will become tinderboxes of violence. Which, as we know, they did.  Johnson did not do very much to offer any change or hope for those living in places like Watts because of his escalation of the Vietnam War—a theme to be developed later.

    The film then sketches in another dispute that King was having in this time period.  Because of these recurrent riots, and because so many of them began with an instance of police brutality, and because of the continuing violent acts by white terrorists—for instance the shooting of James Meredith during his March Against Fear in Mississippi—King began to catch some heat from what many saw as an unlikely source.

    For instance, after Meredith was wounded and hospitalized by a white man, King’s group, the SCLC, stepped in to complete the march.  But so did other groups, like the SNCC.  By 1966, Stokely Carmichael had become the leading public figure in the SNCC.  During the completion of this march, Carmichael started to use a previously unmentioned term: “Black Power”.  This signaled the beginning of a different type of approach from King’s Gandhi-inspired civil disobedience through non-violent techniques (for example, lunch counter sit-ins).  Carmichael’s message, which he deliberately made in King’s presence, was closer to what Malcolm X had been preaching in New York, and would lead to the creation of the Black Panthers in the San Francisco/Oakland area.  King was placed on the spot by Carmichael’s provocation.  He replied that, while he supported Carmichael, he did not endorse the connotations of the message. The film depicts this colloquy with the two figures standing next to each other.  Carmichael then responds by saying that he is not as committed to non-violence as Dr. King is.

    After this point is addressed, the film takes up another pressure point on the civil rights leader.  In a taped phone call between Mayor Richard Daley and President Johnson, Daley tells the president that he knows that King is not with him on the war in Vietnam.  Daley knows this since King has now turned his civil rights demonstrations north into Daley’s city of Chicago.  This was in fact in response to an issue that Bobby Kennedy had been trying to raise awareness of for years prior to this move. As Kennedy had said at the time: What good does it do for an African-American to be able to sit at a lunch counter if he doesn’t have the money to pay for the lunch?  So King and SCLC coordinator James Bevel decided to target the city of Chicago to address a more insidious pattern of racism in the north.

    To say that King was not welcome in the north understates the antipathy that awaited him in the Windy City. During his marches he was greeted with rock throwing, loud racial slurs like “Niggers go home!”, and ugly signs. For instance, one placard said, “We Want Wallace”, meaning Alabama governor George Wallace. Another, in direct opposition to Carmichael, said “White Power”.  It got so bad that King needed police protection.  Further, Daley proved a formidable counter-puncher. Understanding his past successes, he was determined not to put King in jail. And when he heard the police had placed some of his demonstrators behind bars, he immediately ordered their release.

    As Young comments, he was not so sure that King should have taken this project on at the time.  Chicago was a huge city with a very entrenched power structure.  He did not think the SCLC had the money or manpower to manage such a crusade.  King did get an agreement after several months, concerning fair housing and integration of the city work force.  Whether or not the city abided by it afterwards has been a point of controversy among scholars and writers ever since.

    Around this time, in late 1966, King decided to meet with Carmichael to discuss precisely what he meant by the phrase “Black Power”.  Carmichael and another SNCC representative, Cleveland Sellers, countered King by asking him when he was going to come out against the war in Vietnam.  Carmichael memorably said, “No Vietnamese ever called me a Nigger.”  This was a risky step. As Johnson domestic aide Joe Califano observes, LBJ thought he had some compromising information on King, which the FBI had given him.  This referenced certain sexual activities by the civil rights leader and also presumed communist influences in his camp.  But by this time, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was in full bloom.  Consequently, J. Edgar Hoover was now using spies in King’s camp and also arranging counter-intelligence programs against these kinds of groups.

    But as the film shows, it was actually Coretta King who began to push her husband into opposing the war.  She was actually speaking out against it and demonstrating before he was.  King therefore decided to make his famous attack on Johnson’s war policy at Riverside Church in April of 1967.

    Johnson, Hoover and the MSM did not appreciate King’s stand. Newspapers openly criticized him by saying that he had now “Crossed over the Line” or he had “Bordered on Treason”, claiming this now compromised his position as a civil rights leader.  Hoover used this to play on Johnson’s feelings about King.  But in addition to these, there were people inside the civil rights movement—like Roy Wilkins—who also questioned the open attack on the White House. The break with Johnson also hurt the finances of the SCLC.  The man who had been praised for his stand on civil rights was now being attacked and vilified for his opposition to the war.

    As King had warned Johnson, the slum areas in northern cities were piles of tinder waiting to explode.  They did so in the summer of 1967. At that time, over twenty cities erupted in riots.  Some of them, for instance Newark and Detroit, were among the most deadly in American history.  The final toll was over 100 people dead.  Oddly, the film does not discuss the appointment of the Kerner Commission by Johnson. Otto Kerner was the governor of Illinois. The White House requested he form a committee to study the causes of the riots and propose solutions.  Kerner appointed a distinguished panel consisting of people like Wilkins, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, and Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Their report is one of the most honest and searing documents ever written on racial tensions in America at the time.  It sold over two million copies.  Its most famous line was, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”  Kerner focused on poor housing and education in the slum areas, but he also pointed criticism at the media for not devoting time or empathy to these problems.

    The important thing about this presidential report was this: Johnson ignored it.  He did not even do the customary photo opportunity with the committee once the report was done. Johnson’s reaction was defined by two parameters.  First, Hoover’s talking in his ear and supplying him dirt had estranged him from King.  And now this report concurred with what King had told him after Watts.  Secondly, what Kerner was proposing was going to be expensive.  Johnson’s escalation of the war had already caused budget deficits, which he was trying to disguise with accounting tricks and borrowing from the Social Security fund.   As many have commented, the goals of Johnson’s Great Society were run aground by the war in Vietnam.

    After Johnson’s failure to act, King decided to take Bobby Kennedy’s advice about a national demonstration against poverty. RFK had told NAACP attorney Marian Edelman that a good idea would be to have a mass demonstration in Washington as had been done with the March on Washington in 1963.  Not everyone liked the idea, but King did.  King appeared on the Tonight  Show in February of 1968.  The guest host was his friend Harry Belafonte.  He talked about this problem of poverty and how it had actually gotten worse in the last four years.  He also addressed fears of his mortality by saying it was not how long a person lived but what he did with that time—a message he would more or less repeat the night before his assassination in Memphis.

    The SCLC began to design the Poor People’s March as a coalition.  It would not include just African Americans, but also Mexican Americans, Native Americans and poor whites.  King now began to talk about a coalition of the poor and to bring back ideas from FDR’s New Deal program and the proposals of Senator Huey Long—specifically, a declaration of economic rights and a guaranteed annual income.  As King said at the time, when wealthy people or corporations get these things, it’s called a subsidy; when poor people get them, it’s called a dole.

    The film now transitions to 1968 and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.  King was reluctant to go to Memphis, but he did.  As the film notes, King’s first appearance there ended in a riot and looting and some bad publicity from city leaders.  Because of this black eye to the SCLC, King decided he had to return. As Andrew Young comments, the Riverside Church in New York, a huge and wealthy operation, now offered him a temporary pastorship, which King turned down.  The program then shows King’s famous speech on April 3rd, the night before his assassination.

    We then cut to news stories about the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel and the national wave of assassination riots that broke out afterward. Regarding the Martin Luther King assassination, Carmichael urged it on by saying: “White America killed Dr. King. We declare war on America!”  The film underplays Bobby Kennedy’s role in the Atlanta funeral that followed.  Kennedy called Coretta King after the murder, arranged to have King’s body transferred to Atlanta, and then booked dozens of rooms for incoming dignitaries to attend. We watch a film of Jackie Kennedy walking up to the church, and there is a touching black and white picture of both widows facing each other in black dresses. Wisely, Kunhardt holds on to that phofor a few seconds to expand their loss into our loss.

    The film ends with a quite pithy remark by Young.  He says, “We were not able to stay together without him.  And the movement began to fragment.”  That comment, following the picture of Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King, sums up the loss of what should have been a great decade.

    This was the best of the three documentaries and it will be available on DVD soon.