Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [97]
The Algeria speech offered political benefit with little if any cost. It appealed to the Northern liberals, but not at the expense of the Democratic South. Algerian independence had no chance of angering those Southerners who had rallied to him in Chicago the previous summer.
Kennedy was still trying to have it both ways: he wanted to be the liberals’ candidate while not giving up those he’d won over in ’56. Even as he seduced the Democratic Left with urbane commentary on colonialism, he wanted to protect the popularity with Southerners that he’d demonstrated during his vice-presidential tug-of-war with Estes Kefauver. Whatever maneuvers he was slyly executing in order to win over the liberals, he wanted, at the same time, to keep himself positioned as the best hope of moderate and conservative Democrats. And this group included those Southerners still holding fast to segregation.
Such folks liked the fact he was a “moderate,” and he wanted to keep it that way. In the same year he gave the Algeria speech, Kennedy voted for the amendment to the 1957 Civil Rights Act that allowed jury trials for local officials charged in civil rights cases. While passage of this amendment was viewed as critical to avoiding a filibuster, it was also seen as a way for all-white Southern juries to continue, routinely, to acquit defendants in such cases. Kennedy’s position on the jury-trial question earned him a rebuke from the NAACP, but maintained the warm regard of his colleagues below the Mason-Dixon line.
The man himself was more complicated. Kennedy had an instinctive contempt toward discrimination. Speaking at the Somerset Club, a private men’s club in Boston, he suffered an introduction by a member who jokingly insinuated that the Democrats were the party of “the help.” After hearing this, Jack remarked to his friend Alistair Forbes: “Well, I wondered why more people weren’t blushing with shame. But can you believe that such people can still be around?”
Forbes recalled, “He was a man wholly devoid of rancor, and his personality was completely well integrated so that he had no worries of any kind at all. He could see everything with a sort of detached view.
“And yet he was aware of the interplay of snobbish forces in his life. In England he could see which English people basically didn’t like Americans, and he knew people who didn’t like Irish people. He was always amused and interested by this sort of sin, but absolutely unaffected by it because he was his own man and happy with his money in the bank—and damn good-looking.”
George Smathers agreed. He said his friend was “always greatly interested in civil rights.” Then he amended that: “Put it this way—not civil rights legislation so much, but civil rights because he was against discrimination. I think he felt that, as an Irishman, somewhere along the line he had been discriminated against. I don’t know, but I did get the feeling that he felt that other Irishmen had felt the sting of prejudice.”
At the same time, Kennedy operated at a distinct remove from certain realities, even as he crisscrossed the country broadening his reach. Forbes, for one, was struck by his lack of awareness about black America. “I remember very late, sometime in the fifties, he’d only just heard the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ and was like a man who’d just made this extraordinary discovery. ‘Do you know that Clayton Powell’s got this marvelous expression?’ he asked me.” Powell, it seems, had been talking to Jack about a black colleague in Chicago, saying, “The trouble with him is he’s an Uncle Tom.” Learning this new expression from Harlem’s congressman delighted him.
Politically, he knew that if he wanted to make his way into liberal hearts and minds, he had to forge ties with those who cared about such issues as civil rights. He wanted very much to have the support of men such as Arthur Schlesinger, one of the co-founders of Americans for Democratic Action and a longtime