[Marxism] JFK and the civil rights movement

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Washington Post, Sunday, July 2, 2006; BW02
A new book argues that JFK sat on the sidelines in the fight for civil rights.

By Jonathan Yardley

THE BYSTANDER
John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality
By Nick Bryant
Basic. 545 pp. $29.95

The legend of John Fitzgerald Kennedy has risen and fallen over the years,
in part due to constant reinterpretation of the known facts about his
thousand-day presidency by historians and others, and in part due to the
political mood of any given moment. One aspect of that legend, though, has
remained remarkably consistent over the years: that at the hour of his
assassination in November 1963 he was widely admired and loved, especially
by Democratic liberals.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Cuban missile crisis was by
then a year in the past, and the glow it had imparted to Kennedy's
reputation had faded. Though the international situation was generally calm
and stable -- the long-term consequences of the American "advisers" Kennedy
had sent to Vietnam were then largely invisible -- the domestic scene was
troubled, especially with regard to civil rights. Black Americans were
growing ever more restive. White Americans were still sympathetic to their
cause, at least outside the South, but hints of the backlash to come were
evident, especially in the rise of Barry Goldwater and the Republican right.

In this atmosphere of deepening crisis, Kennedy had done . . . not much. In
June 1963, angered by "threats and defiant statements" by Gov. George
Wallace over desegregation of the University of Alabama, Kennedy gave a
powerful television address in which he called civil rights "a moral issue
. . . as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American
Constitution" and then proposed significant federal civil rights
legislation affecting public accommodations and related matters. But
Congress had shown little interest in acting on the bill, and Kennedy had
shown little interest in pressing it to do so. His focus was on the 1964
election. He wanted (and expected) a clear victory, and he did not want to
give undue offense to those Southern voters who had, arguably, given him
his narrow victory in 1960, a cliffhanger that still haunted him three
years later.

So in the fall of 1963, a great many people who had strongly supported
Kennedy in 1960 were angry with him. They felt that he had given little
more than lip service to the great political, social and moral issue of the
day, that he was at best ineffective in his dealings with a balky Congress
still under the thumb of a bigoted Southern minority, and that there was
too little substance behind that handsome, photogenic exterior. At the
instant of his assassination, all that changed and was quickly forgotten,
but it is a historical truth that needs to be brought back to light.

This is one of the many things that Nick Bryant, a BBC correspondent, does
in The Bystander , an exhaustive (and, yes, exhausting) examination of
Kennedy's record on civil rights from his first race for Congress in 1948
to his death 15 years later. It is a complicated story with as many ups and
downs as Kennedy's reputation, but overall it does him little credit. The
subject of African American rights produced "a bewildering range of
possibilities" in him: "At times, he was capable of genuine acts of
compassion and thoughtfulness. On other occasions, he was cold,
disparaging, and notoriously unresponsive -- and never more so than when
blacks criticized the inadequacy of his policies. Even at moments of great
crisis, he could display a numbing indifference to violence and bloodshed."
He "tended to be cold and calculating when organized civil rights
protesters tried to pressure him into taking a political stand. He was much
more sympathetic to individuals who had suffered directly from the violent
outrages of segregation."

Now, more than four decades later, it is easy to forget just how violent
those outrages could be. It was during Kennedy's presidency that James
Meredith's attempt to enroll in the University of Mississippi met with mob
violence abetted by state and local law-enforcement officers; that Bull
Connor's cops turned high-powered fire hoses on black protesters (many of
them children) in Birmingham; that four schoolgirls were killed when the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in that same city was bombed. Yet it was
all too characteristic that after this last outrage, Kennedy said nothing
-- nothing -- in public. This was three months after Kennedy had called
civil rights "a moral issue," yet about the deaths of those four girls in
what was transparently an attack motivated solely by bigotry, he had
nothing to say.

This, Bryant argues, is further evidence that Kennedy "still did not fully
comprehend what blacks were up against in pockets of fierce segregationist
resistance, like Birmingham." Doubtless this is true, and doubtless it
reflects certain obvious realities: the isolating effect of the wealth and
privilege Kennedy had enjoyed all his life and the additional isolating
effect of the Oval Office. The only black American with whom Kennedy spent
much time was George Thomas; they had a mutually friendly relationship, but
Thomas's "job each morning was to lay out the president's clothes." Beyond
that, he simply wasn't very interested in domestic issues except as they
affected his political standing; he believed that the first job of the
president was foreign affairs, and during his term many things happened --
the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, Vietnam -- that obviously confirmed
him in that belief.

It is also true, as Bryant emphasizes, that "temperamentally and
ideologically, Kennedy was a gradualist." He did not have an ounce of the
zealot in him. Even with regard to the Cold War, about which he had strong
feelings, he was clinical and detached. Indeed, the effect of American
racism on the Cold War mattered more to him than its effect on America and
its black citizens; he knew that instances of bigotry and segregation gave
the Soviet Union a powerful propaganda weapon against the United States,
and he wanted to neutralize it as much as possible.

He was essentially passive on the moral issues raised by segregation and
manipulative on the political ones, yet his record as president was far
from bleak. He and members of his administration did many things that had
powerful symbolic effect, from appointing a number of blacks to visible
positions to boycotting the Metropolitan Club, "where the only blacks
allowed into the dining room were stewards with napkins folded over their
arms," to staging festivities at the White House where blacks were
prominent as guests and performers. This may seem tame today, but in the
early 1960s it bordered on the revolutionary, and "the very gestures that
black leaders and liberals derided as token were, in fact, highly effective
in terms of sustaining widespread black support."

Yet it was also Kennedy who appointed several outright segregationists to
the federal bench -- most notoriously William Harold Cox, a buddy of
Mississippi's racist senator James O. Eastland -- and who repeatedly
equivocated as the sit-ins spread and as black demands became more
insistent. As a young congressman, he had "battled hard for new civil
rights legislation and fought tenaciously on behalf of black residents in
the District of Columbia," but once he entered the White House in 1961, he
made a "decision to back away from civil rights." He stuck with that
decision until May 1963, when events in the South convinced him "that
further equivocation could engender further violence." Yet only four months
later, he kept his silence on Birmingham.

Bryant understands that Kennedy's instincts were decent but that he was
ruled by innate caution and a keen sense of political realities, at least
as he understood them. Bryant also believes that the nation was far more
ready for vigorous action on civil rights and that by failing to seize the
moment, Kennedy may have contributed, however unwittingly, to white
resentment and resistance. Bryant, who studied American history and
politics at Cambridge and Oxford, is that genuine rarity: a Brit who
actually understands the United States. The Bystander does retrace too much
familiar ground in too great detail, but it is solid, knowledgeable and
perceptive. ?

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


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