The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [401]
Kennedy spoke to Barnett much the way he had been talking to southern governors for years, as if they and he were secret comrades, faced with pesky problems that only they could solve. “Well, now, here’s my problem,” Kennedy said, as if he were confiding to a colleague.
“Listen, I didn’t put him in the university,” the president went on, not even mentioning Meredith’s name. “But on the other hand, under the Constitution … I have to carry … that order out, and I don’t want to do it any way that causes difficulty to you or to anyone else.”
What Kennedy was trying to signal to the Mississippi governor was that he could bluster and rant against Washington all he wanted as long as he upheld law and order. He could make whatever symbolic protests he needed to make as long as he saw to it that Meredith was registered and peacefully entered the university.
Barnett had his problems too, and he wanted his fellow politician to understand just what they were. “You know what I am up against, Mr. President. I took an oath, you know, to abide by the laws of this state … and our constitution here and the Constitution of the United States. I’m on the spot here, you know.”
The governor gave the president ominous warnings of calls he had received of citizens groups wanting to descend on Oxford. Barnett, however, was a glad-handing, favor-exchanging, soft-soaping southern politician, and he segued into a matter about which he felt far more comfortable. “I appreciate your interest in our poultry program and all those things.”
Early that evening, federal officials escorted Meredith to an empty dormitory on campus to prepare to begin classes the next morning. For the men around Bobby, this represented something of a triumph, a sign that the worst was over. O’Donnell enthused that Bobby “should be Mandrake the Magician,” though this was a sleight of hand that fooled almost no one. By then most of the makeshift team of U.S. marshals, border patrol officers, prison guards, and other federal officials had taken up their posts at the Greek Revival-style Lyceum, the very heart and soul of the university, part of the building dating back to 1848. That gesture was as much a sacrilege as camping out in one of the local churches, a mark not so much of willful insensitivity as of old-fashioned ignorance and bad planning.
If the milling students and their outside collaborators had needed a symbol to stiffen their resistance, they had one now. Within a few minutes, shouted epithets had given way to pebbles, and pebbles to stones, and stones to rocks whirling past the heads of the white-helmeted marshals. Under the cover of the gathering darkness, most of the Mississippi highway patrol officers disappeared into the night, leaving the protection of Meredith to men viewed by the crowd as foreigners. Molotov cocktails, Coke bottles full of flaming gasoline, sailed through the night skies, splattering at the feet of the marshals. A lead pipe struck an officer, dropping him to the ground. The marshals fired their first canisters of tear gas into the surging crowds, and among the first victims were those marshals who did not have gas masks. Then they fired more shells, and one of the casings hit one of the few remaining Mississippi patrol officers in the back. The officer had been caught between the students and the marshals, and he almost died there outside the Lyceum.
As the president, the attorney general, and their aides sat in the White House, they were reluctant to face the reality that this crisis risked becoming an insurrection. Bobby was wistful in his hopes that Barnett