The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [402]
What Barnett did not say was that he was unwilling to step in front of these mobs to try to drive them back by word or authority. He wiggled, finagled, backtracked, sidetracked, and finessed his way back from agreeing to admit Meredith to the university. “I say I’m going to cooperate,” he told the president in another call. “I might not know when you’re going to register him, you know…. I might not know what your plans were, you see.” That was a slick bit of business, and when Barnett tried to back away from his words, Bobby gave him the melancholy news that he had a tape of his conversations, and if he backed down, the president would be ready to tell the American people of his duplicity.
While tear gas filled the air, the president was preparing to give a speech to the nation on television about the situation. Information is the most immediate power, and without it, the president risked looking like an ill-fated observer of a world he did not understand. Bobby knew just enough to have called for a postponement of the speech, or a quick-witted revision of the remarks, but he said nothing. He wore a blinder of optimism. So the president went on television at 10:00 P.M.. to talk confidently about how “the orders of the court … are beginning to be carried out,” while tear gas drifted across the bucolic campus. As the crowd of two thousand surrounded the besieged marshals, Kennedy’s words sounded pandering and silly. “You have a great tradition to uphold, a tradition of honor and courage,” he said as the rioters, perverted exemplars of this tradition, moved on the Lyceum.
After the speech the president joined the attorney general and his advisers in the Cabinet Room, where they attempted to monitor events in Oxford. This was the attorney general’s arena, and for the most part Kennedy allowed his brother to manage the crisis. Bobby seemed unable to grasp the sheer magnitude of what he faced. He and his aides came up with the less-than-inspired idea of having Johnny Vaught, the revered Ole Miss football coach, address the students. Gunshots had begun to sound in the night, and even the most inspiring words would have gone unheard. A shotgun blast tore into a marshal’s neck. A shot from a high-powered rifle felled a patrol officer. These were not just students any longer, but a mob that held agitators willing to kill. In downtown Oxford, retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a right-wing fanatic, incited his supporters to become the new minutemen, standing up to the tyranny of the federal state.
Kennedy realized what they faced well before his brother did. He knew that these endless mishaps and seeming mismanagement were signs not so much of Bobby’s ineptness as of the nature of this crisis. “That’s what happens with … all of these wonderful operations,” he said. “War.”
“I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” the president mused ironically a few minutes later.
“Since the day, what?” Bobby asked.
“Bay of Pigs.”
“The attorney general announced today, he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton Univers—,” Bobby said, making a mock announcement of his departure from Washington in the wake of this new disaster.
In alluding to the Bay of Pigs, the president had come up with an appropriate metaphor. As in that misadventure, the administration had grievously misjudged the strength of its opponent. Representatives of the federal government had gone in with a weak force, and like the brigade on the Cuban beach, the marshals were running out of their most crucial ammunition, tear gas. In the end, innocent men died who should have lived. “I knew that he [the president]