Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [155]
“Jackie knew that he had this . . . feeling. But she sort of said, ‘Well, Jack’s got these girlfriends.’ She never griped about it, she said he could do what he wants.”
Part of it, she believed, was that Jackie had a very “old world” view of men.
“She was a Bouvier and, how can I put it, I think she was strange enough not to be small. It was her fault to marry Jack Kennedy. I mean, she was attracted by him. She was fascinated by him. Regular, decent kind of guys, they would come down the road. She didn’t care who, but she married him. She married him because he was different.”
The presidency offered Jack the chance to act on his old schoolboy’s love of heroes. In August, he invited General Douglas MacArthur to visit. Jack was entranced by the old soldier, respectful even when the eighty-two-year-old wartime general showed what the years and Korea had done to him. He told of his recommendation that his infantrymen each be issued “some kind of cartridge that would clear ten or fifteen yards in front of him.” He was talking about nuclear weapons carried in holsters! “If you could get me this type of atomic cartridge so that every soldier will have that,” he told of his frustrated efforts to win production of this new serviceman’s hardware, “one hundred men could stop a division.” Awestruck at the preposterous idea, Kennedy was true to form. He asked for details. “Let’s say that the cartridge would be fired, let’s say, at some man, or group of men, coming across a field at a hundred and twenty yards. It would hit one man and what? You just explode in a puff?”
It must have occurred to the young president how much war had changed. Here was a revered military hero, a general for the ages, who’d come back to liberate the Philippines and win the war in the Pacific. Here was the genius behind the Inchon Landing in the Korean War, totally unaware of the menace posed by a minor nuclear explosion. Kennedy, the junior officer from World War II come back to lead his country, could not afford such anachronistic thinking, even if it survived among the top military men who now commanded the services.
At the University of Mississippi as that fall semester began, a new student was under extraordinary scrutiny. The air force veteran James Meredith was seeking admission. He would be the first African-American to enroll—and in a rigidly segregated state, it wasn’t going to happen without trouble.
Washington efforts to end discrimination were another issue on the Kennedy administration’s agenda. The main task up to this point, however, had been to encourage government contractors to hire more minorities. But even more radical social change was on the minds of civil rights leaders, and across the South, the educational system at all levels was under assault. Ernest Green and eight other African-American students had made history by integrating Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. In early May 1961, the first Freedom Riders—seven black, six white—had begun courageously riding buses throughout the South, challenging the rules of segregation.
Now it was Ole Miss’s turn to join the late twentieth century, however unwillingly.
On September 10, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Meredith. Supported by the NAACP—the pioneering civil rights organization founded in 1909 by W. E. B. Du Bois, among others—Meredith petitioned the university to admit him. The school continued to refuse, making it increasingly clear that the federal government might need to use force. As the crisis escalated, President Kennedy feared he was heading for a showdown, not just with one school or even one state, but with the entire South.
Here is the recorded conversation between Kennedy and Mississippi governor Ross Barnett:
Kennedy:
Can you maintain this order?
Barnett:
Well, I don’t know. That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t know whether I can or not. I couldn’t have the other afternoon.
Kennedy:
You couldn’t have?
Barnett:
There