Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [147]
48. GEORGE WALLACE (1919–1998) served the first of his four terms as governor of Alabama from 1963 until 1967. In June 1963, a month after angry dogs were set upon black teenagers demonstrating for civil rights in Birmingham, the governor announced his intention to block a judicial order to enroll two African-American students at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. In a ritual choreographed by the Kennedy brothers, who wished to avoid violence, Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, denouncing "this illegal, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion by the federal government." Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, backed by a federalized Alabama National Guard, asked the governor to step aside, which he did. That evening, on television, JFK announced that he was sending a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress, citing "a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution."
49. She refers to the storm surrounding President Eisenhower's use of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to compel the integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957.
50. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (1929–1968) was the best-known leader of the American civil rights movement when he delivered his "I Have a Dream" address at the March on Washington (which Jacqueline calls the "freedom march") of August 1963. When the event was over, JFK welcomed King and other leaders to the White House and said, "I have a dream." The FBI tape to which Mrs. Kennedy refers was of King and his colleagues relaxing at the Willard Hotel after the march. Hectored by J. Edgar Hoover with charges that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists in his entourage, Robert Kennedy grudgingly authorized Hoover to tap King's telephone calls and bug his rooms, which in time produced transcripts of derogatory private comments made by King while watching President Kennedy's Capitol Rotunda and funeral ceremonies. Hoover was only too eager to share them with the attorney general, and the shocked brother of the late President conveyed their essence to Jacqueline. Thus she was bristling at King (although in 1968, despite the disturbing emotions in her that it was bound to evoke, she accompanied RFK to King's funeral in Atlanta and consoled King's widow).
51. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH (1889–1979) was chief of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the organizers of the March on Washington.
52. In May 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of Gettysburg, LBJ had delivered a civil rights speech at the battlefield that went beyond anything the President had theretofore said about the issue in public. (This was before Kennedy's television speech the following month declaring civil rights "a moral issue.") Johnson declared, "The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, Patience.'" In private, the vice president stridently complained to Sorensen that the President wasn't doing enough about civil rights, either in Congress or in his efforts to change public opinion.
53. On Tuesday morning, October 16, 1962, Bundy told the President in his White House bedroom that U-2 photography by the CIA had revealed the Soviets installing offensive missiles in Cuba—an eventuality that JFK had assured the public the previous month that he would never accept. Midterm congressional elections were three weeks ahead. Anxious to keep the missile problem secret from Americans until he and his advisers agreed on a strategy, Kennedy tried to maintain his normal schedule, flying to Chicago for a campaign address, before returning to Washington on the pretext that he was suffering from a cold. On Monday evening, October