Part 12 (1/2)

But Kennedy's concern was not with the usual press aggressiveness in covering a president's family and recreational activities. Rather, he was increasingly worried about disclosures detailing his much-rumored womanizing. Almost everyone in the press corps knew about or at least suspected his philandering, columnist Bob Novak later said. From the start of his presidency, some ultra-right-wing papers and what one historian called the ”underground market” were swamped with exposes about JFK's hidden, illicit romances. But the mainstream press resisted such scandal mongering. Lyndon Johnson's hideaway office on Capitol Hill, for example, where he indulged in recreational s.e.x, was an open secret during his vice presidency; reporters privately joked about LBJ's ”nooky room.” Yet n.o.body in the mainstream press thought it was worth writing about.

The fact that such gossip was confined to a fringe media, which earned a living from unsubstantiated rumors, made Kennedy himself largely indifferent to these articles at the start of his presidency. The fact that the gossip, much of which was true, might trouble Jackie was not enough to rein him in. Indeed, such talk, which added to a romantic, macho image that contrasted sharply with that of his stodgy predecessor, may even have appealed to JFK. Nevertheless, despite the press restraint, people around the president worried about his vulnerability to enemies who might try to break tradition and embarra.s.s him with published accounts of his affairs. Ten days after Kennedy became president, J. Edgar Hoover pa.s.sed along a report from a field agent about a woman who claimed to be JFK's lover. ”Once every two or three months, similar missives would arrive in Bobby's office from the director, not-so-subtle signals that Hoover was keeping, and regularly updating, a file on the president. Blackmail,” Bobby Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas concluded, ”was an efficient means towards Hoover's true end, the preservation of his own power.” It was also Hoover's way of ingratiating himself with Bobby, his immediate boss, and the president. His reports were meant to say, I am your protector, keeping you up-to-date on allegations and dangers you might want to preempt.

THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that rumors about Kennedy's s.e.x life or, for that matter, the escapades themselves distracted him from important business in the first months of his term. Between November and February he had exchanged conciliatory messages with Khrushchev, and on February 22, he expressed the hope that they might be able to meet soon ”for an informal exchange of views,” which could contribute to ”a more harmonious relations.h.i.+p between our two countries.” But the Bay of Pigs invasion undermined whatever goodwill the initial Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges had generated. Seeing Kennedy as thrown on the defensive by his embarra.s.sing failure, Khrushchev went on the attack. ”It is a secret to no one,” he wrote Kennedy, ”that the armed bands invading” Cuba ”were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.” He promised to give Cuba ”all necessary help to repel armed attack” and warned that ”conflagration in one region could endanger settlements elsewhere.” that rumors about Kennedy's s.e.x life or, for that matter, the escapades themselves distracted him from important business in the first months of his term. Between November and February he had exchanged conciliatory messages with Khrushchev, and on February 22, he expressed the hope that they might be able to meet soon ”for an informal exchange of views,” which could contribute to ”a more harmonious relations.h.i.+p between our two countries.” But the Bay of Pigs invasion undermined whatever goodwill the initial Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges had generated. Seeing Kennedy as thrown on the defensive by his embarra.s.sing failure, Khrushchev went on the attack. ”It is a secret to no one,” he wrote Kennedy, ”that the armed bands invading” Cuba ”were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.” He promised to give Cuba ”all necessary help to repel armed attack” and warned that ”conflagration in one region could endanger settlements elsewhere.”

Kennedy manfully responded that the invasion was a demonstration of brave patriots determined to restore freedom to Cuba. He emphasized that the United States intended no military intervention on the island but was obliged ”to protect this hemisphere against external aggression.” Kennedy also warned against using Cuba as a pretext for inflaming other areas of the world, which would endanger the general peace. He asked Khrushchev to ”recognize that free people in all parts of the world do not accept the claim of historical inevitability for Communist revolution. What your government believes is its own business; what it does in the world is the world's business. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present, and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.”

Kennedy's greatest fear was that Moscow might use Cuba as an excuse to close off West Berlin, to which many educated East Germans and other East Europeans were fleeing from communism. When Nixon had urged JFK to find an excuse for invading Cuba, Kennedy had replied that an invasion would risk a war with Russia over Berlin and his priority had to be world peace. If there was to be a next world war, Berlin, Kennedy believed, would be where it began.

Khrushchev answered Kennedy with a fifteen-page letter reiterating his accusations about U.S. interference in Cuba and restating his warnings that this was no way to ease Soviet-American tensions. Kennedy wisely left Khrushchev's letter unanswered. Still, because Khrushchev was as intent as Kennedy on avoiding a nuclear conflict, the Soviet leader seized upon the president's February proposal for a meeting in Vienna on June 3 to 4. Although Khrushchev did not say so, it was clear to Kennedy that Berlin, which Khrushchev described as ”a dangerous source of tension in the very heart of Europe,” was also his greatest concern.

KENNEDY'S FIRST THREE MONTHS in office had confirmed his belief that overseas perils should take priority over economic and social reforms, but because he believed that an effective foreign policy partly depended on a strong economy and social cohesion at home, he felt compelled to strike a balance between external and internal initiatives. His dilemma, as he saw it, was that domestic proposals could do more to divide than unite the country. in office had confirmed his belief that overseas perils should take priority over economic and social reforms, but because he believed that an effective foreign policy partly depended on a strong economy and social cohesion at home, he felt compelled to strike a balance between external and internal initiatives. His dilemma, as he saw it, was that domestic proposals could do more to divide than unite the country.

On April 18, in the midst of the Bay of Pigs crisis, he asked Congress to create a new cabinet department of urban affairs and housing as a way to halt ”the appalling deterioration of many of our country's urban areas,” rehabilitate the nation's cities, where 70 percent of Americans lived, and ensure ”adequate housing for all segments of our population.” It seemed like an apple pie and motherhood proposal, but it quickly ran into opposition from southern senators and congressmen representing rural areas and small cities. A greater emphasis in a revised bill on small communities promised to neutralize the latter, but southern opposition to an act that could primarily serve inner-city blacks and make Housing and Home Finance Agency administrator Robert Weaver the first African American cabinet secretary was unyielding. The bill was also held hostage to budget constraints imposed by the improving but still sluggish economy and increasing defense expenditures. Kennedy's reluctance to fight for something he saw as a secondary priority was as much a drag on aggressive action as the economy and southern opposition.

Consequently, in May, Kennedy proposed legislation that would stimulate the economy with limited tax reductions tied to revenue gains. He described his proposal as ”a first though urgent step along the road to constructive reform.” He said he planned to send a more comprehensive tax reform program to the Congress in 1962 that would stimulate ”a higher rate of economic growth, [and create] a more equitable tax structure, and a simpler tax law.” In the meantime, he proposed a tax incentive to businesses in the form of a credit for modernization and expansion of plant and equipment. To make up for lost income here, he proposed the end of tax exemptions for Americans earning incomes abroad in economically advanced countries and for estate taxes on overseas properties, withholding taxes on interest and dividend payments, the continuation of corporate and excise taxes scheduled to be reduced or ended in July, and a tax on civil aviation providers to help pay for the operation and improvement of the federal airways system.

Business leaders, who preferred liberalized depreciation allowances to tax credits for new plant and equipment costs, successfully blocked Kennedy's bill, demonstrating both their power as a lobby and White House inattentiveness or carelessness. Fearful of sharing the spotlight and thus diminis.h.i.+ng JFK's standing as a domestic leader, the White House had barred Lyndon Johnson, the most skilled legislator in the administration, from a meaningful role in dealing with Congress. Instead, Kennedy, who had never shown an affinity for the sort of cooperative endeavor needed to enact major bills, relied on inexperienced aides to advance his legislative agenda. Complaining that his contacts on the Hill were not being used, Johnson said, ”You know, they never once asked me about that!” The result, predictably, was a stumbling Kennedy legislative effort.

Despite his defeats on creating a housing department and tax reform, Kennedy could point to some gains in domestic affairs. The Congress agreed to an Area Redevelopment Act that fulfilled his campaign promise to help ease chronic unemployment in West Virginia and nine other states. In addition, the Congress gave Kennedy significant additions to several existing programs: expanded unemployment benefits, a higher minimum wage that included 3.6 million uncovered workers, increases in Social Security, aid to cities to improve housing and transportation, a water pollution control act to protect the country's rivers and streams, funds to continue the building of a national highway system begun under Eisenhower, and an agriculture act to raise farmers' incomes and perpetuate ”a most outstanding accomplishment of our civilization ... to produce more food with less people than any country on earth.”

Despite these advances, the administration could not take much satisfaction from its initial domestic record. Aside from area redevelopment, the White House had no major legislative achievements. Kennedy's ”highest-priority items,” tax reform, federal aid to elementary and secondary education, college scholars.h.i.+ps, and health insurance for the aged, never got out of congressional committees. Historian Irving Bernstein, who closely studied the struggles over the education and health bills, described them as political snake pits. Federal involvement in education was anathema to conservatives, who wished to preserve local control. Emotional arguments about public funding for parochial schools opened an unbridgeable gap between Catholics and Protestants. Determined to keep his campaign pledges on separation of church and state, Kennedy provoked unyielding opposition from Catholics for refusing to support direct aid to parochial schools. While some critics of his stand on education protested his adherence to traditional thinking, his advocacy of health insurance for the elderly under Social Security provoked the opposite response-warnings against administration plans to imitate communist countries by socializing medicine. Nor could a health insurance bill win approval from the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, would endorse only bills with clear majorities.

Supporters of the education and health bills blamed Kennedy for not providing stronger leaders.h.i.+p. He had in fact spoken forcefully for both measures during the presidential campaign, describing them as legislative priorities. But Richard Neustadt's recent book Presidential Power Presidential Power had deepened Kennedy's understanding of a president's limited personal influence and the folly of fighting for lost causes in a Congress dominated by conservative southern Democrats allied with Republicans. The almost certain defeat of these bills in the first session of the 87th Congress made him reluctant to spend much political capital on them. had deepened Kennedy's understanding of a president's limited personal influence and the folly of fighting for lost causes in a Congress dominated by conservative southern Democrats allied with Republicans. The almost certain defeat of these bills in the first session of the 87th Congress made him reluctant to spend much political capital on them.

Because Kennedy had been so cautious in backing the school and health bills, pollster Lou Harris urged him to understand the need for a more substantial domestic record. ”Phase Two” of Kennedy's administration ”is now beginning and it is time for a new up-beat,” Harris wrote him in June. ”The President needs some major and specific score-throughs. While the foreign policy crisis has dominated ... [your] time and energies, the quickest, most easily understood, and most dramatic gains are likely to be on domestic issues.” Harris counseled him to make a September back-to-school fight for an education bill. It should become ”a new number one domestic priority.” After an education bill pa.s.sed, Harris urged him to announce ”Medical Care for the Aged by '62.” He suggested a three-p.r.o.nged attack: ”A frontal a.s.sault on the AMA as an obstructive lobby holding back progress,” a ”gra.s.s roots” movement by ”older people ... who could make the Kennedy bill their rallying point,” and a direct appeal to a national audience ”through three separate television shows.” Given the makeup of Congress in 1961, Harris's advice was less a demonstration of smart politics than an expression of frustration, shared by Kennedy, at the president's inability to make headway on two of the country's most compelling social needs and on issues that could give the Democrats a significant advantage in the 1962 congressional campaigns. Although unwilling to bring either bill up again in the fall, Kennedy vowed another effort the next year.

NOWHERE, HOWEVER, was Kennedy's frustration more evident than on civil rights. Throughout the 1960 campaign and most of his presidency he felt underappreciated by civil rights activists. After watching Kennedy's performance in the opening months of his term, Martin Luther King predicted that the new administration would do no more than reach ”aggressively” for ”the limited goal of token integration.” He told Harris Wofford, ”In the election, when I gave my testimony for Kennedy, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leaders.h.i.+p we've been waiting for and do what no President has ever done. Now,” after watching him in office, ”I'm convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I'm afraid that the moral pa.s.sion is missing.” James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was less convinced of the president's good intentions, describing Kennedy on civil rights as nothing more than ”quick-talking [and] double-dealing.” Bayard Rustin, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), believed Kennedy was ”the smartest politician we have had in a long time.” At one minute, according to Rustin, he called black leaders together and promised to help them get money for voter registration. The next he cozied up to ”the Dixiecrats and gives them Southern racist judges who make certain that the money the Negro gets will not achieve its purpose.” Rustin added: ”This is the way all presidents behave. They give you as little as they can. And one of the reasons for that is they're president of all the people and they have to accommodate all segments... . So they are constantly weighing where is the weight of the problem for me if I don't act?” Rustin believed that ”anything we got out of Kennedy came out of the objective situation and the political necessity, and not out of the spirit of John Kennedy. He was a reactor.” was Kennedy's frustration more evident than on civil rights. Throughout the 1960 campaign and most of his presidency he felt underappreciated by civil rights activists. After watching Kennedy's performance in the opening months of his term, Martin Luther King predicted that the new administration would do no more than reach ”aggressively” for ”the limited goal of token integration.” He told Harris Wofford, ”In the election, when I gave my testimony for Kennedy, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leaders.h.i.+p we've been waiting for and do what no President has ever done. Now,” after watching him in office, ”I'm convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I'm afraid that the moral pa.s.sion is missing.” James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was less convinced of the president's good intentions, describing Kennedy on civil rights as nothing more than ”quick-talking [and] double-dealing.” Bayard Rustin, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), believed Kennedy was ”the smartest politician we have had in a long time.” At one minute, according to Rustin, he called black leaders together and promised to help them get money for voter registration. The next he cozied up to ”the Dixiecrats and gives them Southern racist judges who make certain that the money the Negro gets will not achieve its purpose.” Rustin added: ”This is the way all presidents behave. They give you as little as they can. And one of the reasons for that is they're president of all the people and they have to accommodate all segments... . So they are constantly weighing where is the weight of the problem for me if I don't act?” Rustin believed that ”anything we got out of Kennedy came out of the objective situation and the political necessity, and not out of the spirit of John Kennedy. He was a reactor.”

Much of the resentment during the first six months of Kennedy's term concerned the fact that he would neither sign a promised Executive Order desegregating federally financed housing nor ask Congress for a civil rights law. He saw either action as certain to anger southerners and lose any chance of support for other reforms. Having criticized Eisenhower's refusal to act on housing by emphasizing that it required only a stroke of the pen, Kennedy began receiving pens in the mail as a reminder of his words during the campaign. In response, Kennedy ”kept muttering and kidding about how in the world he had ever come to promise that one stroke of the pen.”

In May, the African American deputy DNC director, Louis Martin, wrote Ted Sorensen to say that the president's silence on the issue showed the administration as ”timid and reluctant to put its full weight behind Civil Rights legislation... . His enemies are now being given an opportunity to charge him with inaction in a very vital area.” The criticism angered the president and Bobby. They believed that they were doing as much as possible for civil rights under current constraints. True, when a Gallup poll in January asked people in the South whether the day would ever come when blacks and whites would share the same public accommodations, 76 percent said yes. But all the other polling data suggested that neither the North nor the South had a majority ready to see this happen soon. If there were federal aid to education, should money go to all public schools, including those practicing racial segregation? Gallup asked. Almost seven years after the Supreme Court declared ”separate but equal” schools unconst.i.tutional and two thirds of the country said it supported desegregation in public schools and all forms of public transportation, 68 percent of Americans answered yes. In May and June, when asked if integration should be brought about by every means in the near future, only 23 percent agreed; 61 percent preferred gradual change. The Kennedys shared majority sentiment that peaceful demonstrations challenging southern segregation laws would do more to hurt than help bring about integration.

But it was not simply public opinion that restrained them. The Kennedy lawyers in the Justice Department believed that there were distinct limits to what the White House could do about racial injustices. Burke Marshall, the head of the department's Civil Rights Division, told Martin Luther King that const.i.tutional federalism placed severe restrictions on the government's power to intervene in school desegregation or police brutality cases. The only substantial lat.i.tude the Justice Department had was to protect voting rights, and even there they had to struggle against the resistance of local southern officials to enfranchising blacks.

In March and April, a controversy erupted over hotel accommodations in Charleston, South Carolina, for a black member of the National Civil War Commission planning to attend the commemoration of the battle of Fort Sumter. When Kennedy wrote a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant III, the head of the commission, urging equal treatment for all commission members, southern delegates to the ceremony decried Kennedy's unauthorized intrusion into the actions of a privately owned hotel. Grant's response that the commission had no business interfering in ”racial matters,” Kennedy's inability to persuade any Charleston hotel to satisfy his request, and a decision to move the commemoration dinner to a nearby U.S. naval base that segregated its personnel embarra.s.sed Kennedy and reinforced his determination to shun ”racial politics.”

Kennedy's relations.h.i.+p with Martin Luther King in 1961 reflected the administration's eagerness to avoid too much entanglement in civil rights struggles. King was not invited to the Inauguration nor to a meeting of civil rights leaders on March 6 in Bobby's office. As King biographer Taylor Branch said, ”King's name was too sensitive at the time, too a.s.sociated with ongoing demonstrations that were vexing politicians in the South.” In late March, after King asked for a private appointment with Kennedy, O'Donnell told King that the ”present international situation”-Laos, Africa, Cuba, and Soviet difficulties-made it impossible for the president to find time for a meeting. Only at the end of April did the White House agree to a secret, off-the-record discussion in a private dining room at Was.h.i.+ngton's Mayflower Hotel between King, Bobby, Louis Martin, and several Justice Department officials. King was so self-effacing and agreeable during the meeting that he got a few minutes with Kennedy at the White House afterward, and Bobby gave him the private phone numbers of Justice Department officials John Seigenthaler and Burke Marshall with instructions to call them any time voter registration workers in trouble could not get through to the FBI.

The gestures were of a piece with other administration actions the Kennedys believed gave them a claim on the appreciation of civil rights leaders. A White House ”Summary of Civil Rights Progress for the Nine Months-January 20 Through October 1961” stated the Kennedy case. It described the president's Executive Order establis.h.i.+ng a ”Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity with far greater power of enforcement than held by any predecessor agencies” and its record of having persuaded ”about half of the fifty largest government contractors to undertake specific 'plans for progress' involving recruitment, training, hiring and upgrading of Negro employees.” The committee hoped to enlist all fifty contractors in this program of ”affirmative action” by the end of the year. More than ”fifty outstanding Negroes” had already been appointed to high-level policy-making jobs in the administration, and government agencies were actively recruiting ”qualified Negroes for federal service in the U.S. and overseas.” The Justice Department had filed twelve voting rights suits and intended to ”support in every appropriate way efforts of Negroes to ... register and vote.” The administration had taken legal action and given moral and political backing to implement school desegregation across the South. And the president had set up a subcabinet group on civil rights to coordinate all federal civil rights actions. Finally, the administration stated its intention to end segregation and other forms of discrimination in interstate bus, train, and plane travel everywhere in the country within a year.

The claim about desegregating interstate transportation was a good example of why the Kennedys had limited credibility with civil rights leaders. The administration had been reluctantly drawn into the controversy. In early May, thirteen black and white members of CORE boarded Greyhound and Trailway buses in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to travel to New Orleans through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. The goal was to reach New Orleans by May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling. Although CORE had notified the Justice Department of its actions and a reporter had told Bobby, the White House itself had no advance warning of the trip. On May 15, newspaper stories about violence in Alabama against the Freedom Riders caught the Kennedys by surprise. Kennedy, who was scheduled to go to Canada in two days, saw the headlines as another blow to America's international prestige. ”Can't you get your G.o.dd.a.m.ned friends off those buses?” he asked Harris Wofford. ”Tell them to call it off! Stop them!” When the Freedom Riders, several of whom had been badly beaten, abandoned the bus trip to fly from Birmingham to New Orleans and found themselves trapped in the Birmingham airport by bomb threats, Bobby asked Seigenthaler to go help them. ”What sort of help do they need?” Seigenthaler asked. Bobby, who a week before at the University of Georgia had made a forceful statement of the administration's determination to enforce civil rights laws as a way to a.s.sist the fight against international communism, replied, ”I think they primarily need somebody along just to hold their hand and let them know that we care.”

The Kennedys believed that Bobby's Georgia speech, which had won praise from blacks and whites, and Seigenthaler's presence in Birmingham, where he helped get the Freedom Riders to New Orleans, were ample demonstrations of their commitment to civil rights and ent.i.tled them to cooperation and support from activists. A Gallup poll showing that only 24 percent of the country approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing and that 64 percent disapproved added to the Kennedys' conviction that their actions showed political courage.

Rights leaders, however, believed that the administration was doing as little as it could and much less than needed to be done. Consequently, a group of Nashville students, despite warnings that they might be killed and counterpressure from Seigenthaler, decided to go to Birmingham and then complete the bus trip to New Orleans. On their arrival, they were arrested and imprisoned by local police for violating segregation laws. The activists, held illegally in ”protective custody,” demanded immediate release to resume their trip. To keep the president clear of ”racial politics,” Bobby told the press that only he and his deputies were discussing how to proceed. But Kennedy met with this team in his bedroom, where he sat in pajamas before an uneaten breakfast. All agreed that they needed a plan for direct intervention. They ruled out federalizing the Alabama National Guard, which would add to the sense of crisis and engage the president beyond what they wanted. Instead, the president called Alabama governor John Patterson, his most reliable southern ally during the 1960 campaign. Patterson, who had no intention of falling on his sword for the Kennedys, replied through a State House operator that he was fis.h.i.+ng in the Gulf of Mexico and was unreachable. When another call to Patterson from Kennedy brought a more direct refusal to talk, Bobby told the governor's aides that the president would be compelled to send in federal forces unless Patterson agreed to protect the Freedom Riders. Grudging agreement from Patterson to act and pressure from Bobby on Greyhound to find a driver who would risk driving an integrated bus finally got the protesters on their way to Montgomery.

In order to get Greyhound on board, Bobby had been forced to threaten a company supervisor in Birmingham. ”Do you know how to drive a bus?” Bobby had asked with controlled rage. When the man said no, Bobby exploded: ”Well, surely somebody in the d.a.m.n bus company can drive a bus, can't they? ... I think you ... had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is, and somebody better give us an answer to this question. I am-the Government is-going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.” Eavesdroppers on Bobby's telephone conversation leaked it to the press, which ran front-page stories across the South charging that Bobby was backing and abetting the Freedom Riders. In addition to the bad publicity in the South, the reports gave the Kennedys little credit with civil rights backers, who saw Bobby as reacting rather than leading on an important issue. And they undermined the administration's political influence with southern congressmen and senators, who now seemed certain to make life more difficult than ever for Kennedy on the Hill. ”I never recovered from it,” Bobby later said of the newspaper allegations.

The ordeal of the activists and the administration's struggle to protect them resumed in Montgomery, where a white mob carrying ax handles, baseball bats, chains, and lead pipes a.s.saulted the Freedom Riders at the bus terminal. In the absence of city policemen, who shared local antagonism to the riders, the unrestrained mob beat the activists, reporters, photographers, and Seigenthaler, who tried to protect two women being pummeled. John Doar, a Justice Department attorney on a.s.signment in Montgomery, was watching from a federal building window. He described the melee to Burke Marshall on the telephone in Was.h.i.+ngton. ”Oh, there are fists, punching!” he shouted into the phone. ”There are no cops. It's terrible! It's terrible! There's not a cop in sight. People are yelling, 'There those n.i.g.g.e.rs are! Get 'em, get 'em!' It's awful.” Rioters with pipes clubbed Seigenthaler to the ground, where he lay unconscious for half an hour before being taken to a hospital.

Patterson refused to discuss the latest riot with Bobby, and after a conversation with Jack, who was away for the weekend in Middleburg, Virginia, Bobby decided to send federal marshals to Montgomery to protect the ”interstate travelers.” News that King was also heading for Montgomery, to preach to the Freedom Riders at black minister Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church, upset Bobby, who unsuccessfully tried to dissuade King from putting himself in harm's way and adding to the local tensions. To guarantee King's safety, fifty U.S. marshals met him at the airport and escorted him to Abernathy's home. After Byron White, Kennedy's old friend and a deputy U.S. attorney general, met with Governor Patterson, who demanded withdrawal of the U.S. marshals, White called the president to recommend just that. But Kennedy, who had issued a statement after the riot at the Montgomery bus terminal saying that the U.S. government would meet its responsibility to maintain public calm, rejected White's suggestion.

Except for his statement issued from the White House press office, Kennedy remained out of sight, though Bobby consulted with him constantly during the weekend. On Sunday, May 21, a new violent confrontation erupted between the marshals and a white mob surrounding Abernathy's church, where fifteen hundred supporters of the Freedom Riders had gathered to hear King speak. To continue insulating the president from the crisis, Bobby took the lead in deploying the marshals and negotiating with local law enforcement to keep the peace. During repeated mob a.s.saults on the church, which the marshals repelled with tear gas, King and Bobby clashed on the telephone. While King and his audience waited for more marshals to arrive, he told Bobby, ”If they don't get here immediately, we're going to have a b.l.o.o.d.y confrontation.” After Alabama National Guardsmen replaced the marshals and intimidated people inside the church by refusing to let them leave, King upbraided Bobby for having abandoned the congregation to the control of Patterson's hostile guardsmen. ”Now, Reverend,” Bobby replied impatiently, ”you know just as well as I do that if it hadn't been for the U.S. marshals you'd be dead as Kelsey's nuts right now.” Bobby's reference did not amuse King, who had never heard the Irish expression describing impotence. ”Who's Kelsey?” he asked some aides. ”That ended the conversation,” Wofford says, ”but there were harder words to come.”

Although the people in the church were allowed to depart before dawn and the administration had a sense of triumph at having preserved law and order, the gulf between the Kennedys and civil rights advocates deepened. When Patterson had complained that the presence of U.S. marshals in Alabama was ”destroying us politically,” Bobby replied, ”John, it's more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically.” But on Monday, after the all-night crisis at the church, Bobby wanted the Freedom Riders to call off their campaign. ”They had made their point,” he told Wofford. Publicly, Bobby called for a ”cooling-off” period. James Farmer of CORE responded sharply. ”Negroes have been cooling off for a hundred years,” he said, and would be ”in a deep freeze if they cooled any further.” For his part, King told Time Time magazine, ”Wait, means 'Never.'” When a reporter asked Ralph Abernathy if he was concerned about embarra.s.sing the president, Abernathy answered, ”Man, we've been embarra.s.sed all our lives.” King told some of his a.s.sociates after rejecting Bobby's request, ”You know, they don't understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don't understand what we're doing.” magazine, ”Wait, means 'Never.'” When a reporter asked Ralph Abernathy if he was concerned about embarra.s.sing the president, Abernathy answered, ”Man, we've been embarra.s.sed all our lives.” King told some of his a.s.sociates after rejecting Bobby's request, ”You know, they don't understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don't understand what we're doing.”

After he had issued his public statement on the disorders in Alabama, Kennedy met with a group of liberals, including the actor Harry Belafonte and Eugene Rostow, the dean of the Yale School and W. W. Rostow's brother. Belafonte respectfully asked if the president ”could say something a little more about the Freedom Riders.” No less respectfully, but more forcefully, Rostow urged ”the need for moral leaders.h.i.+p on the substantive issue of equal access to public facilities.” After they left, Kennedy asked Wofford, ”What in the world does [Rostow] think I should do? Doesn't he know I've done more for civil rights than any President in American history? How could any man have done more than I've done?” There was something to be said for Kennedy's point, but not as much as he thought. He had gone beyond other presidents, but it was not enough to keep up with the determined efforts of African Americans to end two centuries of oppression.