The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [363]
During this period Bobby met with King for a luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel. The young administration was worried that the minister might attempt to lead millions of his people to the barricades, destroying Kennedy’s plans for steady incremental advances and producing a white backlash that would cost the president his congressional majority.
King could be as uncompromising as any man when great moral principles were at stake, but this luncheon was not one of those times. He understood Kennedy’s political realities and knew that half a loaf of bread was as ample a meal as he was likely to receive at this table. King nonetheless wanted Kennedy’s support, and he was assured that he would have a private meeting with the president. “The meeting kept being delayed,” Wofford recalled, “And King’s patience began to run out.”
The president felt that he could afford to have his brother dine with King in a private dining room. But civil rights was the most volatile domestic issue, and the politician in the White House was worried that if he had a public identification with King, fears would arise that Kennedy was conspiring with the civil rights activists who so threatened the Old South.
King had his private meeting with Kennedy a few weeks later, and was led into the White House family quarters by Wofford. Kennedy was not comfortable around priests and preachers who spoke in high biblical parlance, and he would never have a deep rapport with King. He listened to King’s high discourse and then took the conversation down to a nuanced, realistic portrayal of the American social and political realities. “It lasted at least an hour and was the most effective I ever saw Kennedy on civil rights,” Wofford recalled. The president explained to King in immense detail the problems the administration faced and why, though he agreed with King on this great issue, he could not move forward now with bold strides. He would put forth a civil rights bill and issue an Executive Order on housing, but not yet.
If King and the other civil rights leaders had had Kennedy’s profoundly realistic vision, then there would have been no great movement, no Freedom Riders, no sit-ins, and no massive confrontations. If Kennedy had had King’s moral passions and commitments on this issue, he would most likely not have been elected president. As they sat talking in the study by the Lincoln bedroom, each man had something to learn from the other. King was traversing a maelstrom of politics that no one had attempted before; he would have to be not only brave and true but also as calculating as Kennedy. As for the president, if he was to be the great leader that he aspired to be, he would have to show something of the moral passion of the man who sat across from him. King understood that as well as anyone. “In the election, my impression then was that he had the intelligence and the skill and the moral fervor to give the leadership we’ve been waiting for and do what no other president has ever done,” he told Wofford afterward. “Now I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.”
Kennedy was a general being forced to fight a battle on ground he did not want. He thought that his combat lay elsewhere, in confrontations with the Soviets, not in the streets of the South. But American history had a different timetable. In 1954, in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated education was inherently unequal. American schools would have to be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” A few school districts in places such as Texas proceeded with admirable dispatch to follow the nation’s laws, but as Kennedy took office, only about 214,000 out of more than 3 million black schoolchildren in the South and border states attended integrated schools. Southern blacks drank water from fountains