The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [364]
The structure of American liberty stood only half finished. If the administration moved too timidly, the president might find himself the overseer of the breakdown of American freedom, crumbling in the storms. Yet if he moved too harshly, too precipitously, Kennedy might have to line the streets of the South with federal soldiers, creating a second Reconstruction and destroying that house of liberty by the sheer weight of the roof that he sought to erect.
Most politicians rarely stray from the arithmetic of democracy. The Democrats had lost two seats in the Senate and twenty-one seats in the House in 1960, and the conservative Republicans and Dixie Democrats could probably filibuster any civil rights legislation that the president tried to push through a reluctant Congress. The president thought that he would have been doubly a fool for pressing civil rights legislation: not only would he have lost but he also would have unnecessarily confronted members of his own party whose votes he needed on other vital matters. Early in his term he was doing what even a man of Wofford’s passion thought was the only thing to do. He was limiting himself to executive actions to push civil rights along, hiring blacks in unprecedented numbers, authorizing the attorney general to push for school desegregation, championing voting rights in the Justice Department. And while the administration was trying to uphold civil rights in this fashion, young men and women in the South who were trying to integrate lunch counters or register voters were getting not meals and ballots but jail cells and clubbings. And the Freedom Riders continued their journey.
Bobby called the Greyhound superintendent to try to get Greyhound to find a driver and a bus to carry the Freedom Riders out of Birmingham. “I think you should—had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound or whoever Greyhound is and somebody better give us an answer to this question,” he said. “I am—the government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.”
To many southerners, this was evidence that the attorney general was siding with these troublemakers and orchestrating this assault on what they considered their very liberty. Bobby was trying to get the Freedom Riders out of Birmingham and on to Montgomery and to end the shameful photos disgracing America in the world’s newspapers.
As John Lewis got off the Greyhound bus at the station in Montgomery, Alabama, with his fellow Freedom Riders, the young black activist began to address the reporters standing there. He stopped suddenly and stood transfixed. Coming toward the bus was a mob of whites carrying baseball bats, lead pipes, and bottles. To this rabble, the reporters and photographers were as much the enemy as the Freedom Riders, and the white mob battered away ecumenically, striking out against anyone who came within reach of its weapons. Lewis and several others were brutally assaulted and knocked to the ground. When Bobby’s aide and emissary John Seigenthaler arrived in the midst of the melee, he attempted to use his federal authority to stop a group of white women from beating a white woman activist. As Seigenthaler insisted that they stop, a man smashed a lead pipe down on his head, rendering him unconscious. Floyd Mann, the chief of the Alabama state police and an official with no jurisdiction in the city, stopped the attacks by pulling his gun and ordering, “Stand back!”
Bobby’s close associates were even more a band of brothers than the president’s men. They were devoted to the attorney general and the causes he championed. They had not anticipated, however, that they were risking their very lives by signing on to come to Washington. As the former Tennessee journalist lay inert, half sprawled