Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [156]
Barnett:
There were men in there with trucks and shotguns and all such as that. Certain people were just enraged. Would you be willing to wait awhile and let the people cool off on the whole thing? It might be . . . two or three weeks, it might cool off a . . .
Kennedy:
Would you undertake to register him in two weeks?
Barnett:
You know I can’t undertake to register him myself.
Governor Barnett continued to be intransigent. His stance put him in a long succession of Southern governors such as Orville Faubus, who’d summoned the Arkansas National Guard to “protect” Central High. “I won’t agree to let that boy get to Ole Miss,” Barnett told Attorney General Kennedy. Jack and Bobby both were hoping they’d get James Meredith into Ole Miss without using federal troops, but Jack was also determined not to be caught unprepared. Aware of the shellacking he’d taken over the Bay of Pigs, what he intended to avoid was trusting anyone to share his agenda when their own was what mattered to them.
Jack was now involved in checking out every detail, scanning the aerial photographs of the university’s campus and ascertaining such details as where military helicopters might land. When two thousand demonstrators, students and nonstudents alike, showed up on September 30 to protest Meredith’s registration, Kennedy, on the phone with Barnett, pressed him either to take charge or defer to the president. The university president was evasive and came across as increasingly unstable.
The problem was whom they could trust to protect Meredith. As the day wore on, the U.S. marshals guarding him were being attacked by the crowd. Governor Barnett, claiming he couldn’t control the Mississippi state troopers—in fact, he’d secretly taken them off duty—refused to guarantee Meredith’s further safety. Kennedy had federalized the Mississippi National Guard but was reluctant to rely on them; he’d also positioned U.S. Army backup in Memphis.
By late that night, the hostilities had increased to a level of violence that saw two men—one a journalist from Agence France-Presse—killed. Military intervention was urgently needed. There was now little option but to summon the waiting troops and pray they arrived in time. Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general representing the Justice Department at the campus, confessed to his boss Bobby Kennedy his doubt that the marshals could hold off the rioting protesters until the U.S. soldiers appeared.
If they didn’t manage to arrive in time, Katzenbach worried “neither Meredith nor any of those men have a chance.” Moreover, the reliability of the Mississippi National Guard remained a real question. In Ken O’Donnell’s words, “we knew that most of the National Guard members were students, former students, or else ninety percent in sympathy with the mob.” When the president issued the order to the marshals to protect Meredith at all costs, it was with the knowledge that it might be their last. In Washington, all they could do now was sit and wait. Kennedy and his advisors were on tenterhooks. Some of them feared the next news they’d hear was that Meredith was dead and Katzenbach a prisoner being held by out-of-control students and townie hooligans.
Kennedy was responsible for all the lives that hung in the balance. It was critical that the army not fail him. Yet, here again, as in the Bay of Pigs operation, Kennedy discovered the difference between command and control. Those troops stationed in Memphis, it turned out, had yet to be mustered. When the soldiers finally landed at the Rebels’ football field, it was quickly evident they weren’t mobilizing fast enough. Communicating with them by phone, staying on top of their positions minute by minute, Jack began issuing orders as their commander in chief. As they at last made their way onto the central campus, their presence had an immediate effect. By dawn on October 1, the situation was stabilized. That day, James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi.
It had been