The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [403]
As the night went on the news worsened. There were more tales of shootings and confrontations. At their maddening distance from it all, it was as if they were trying to make out images through the tear gas.
“They’re storming where Meredith is,” Bobby said as he put down the phone.
“Oh,” Kennedy said softly. “The students are or the …?”
“They’re storming where Meredith is,” the attorney general repeated.
“You don’t want to have a lynching,” O’Donnell said a moment later.
They were on the verge of a disaster. Meredith dead. Students dead. U.S. marshals dead. Reelection dead. Bobby had been hoping that the federal officers would not have to fire their guns. “They better fire, I suppose,” Bobby said on the phone. “They gotta protect Meredith.”
Meredith remained safe for the moment, but outside anarchy reigned. Three more deputies fell from gunfire, and then came the news that the body of a reporter from France had been found behind a women’s dormitory with a bullet in his back.
Bobby no longer looked as youthful as he had when his brother entered office. The intensity of these moments and the endless pressures had etched themselves into the attorney general’s face. Despite what others thought, the Kennedys held no console of power in the White House from which they could merely press a button here, pull a lever there, and events moved and history was made.
On this evening, Barnett, whom Bobby considered a weak man and “an agreeable rogue,” proved stronger than all the power of the presidency. The governor’s objective, as the attorney general saw it, “was the avoidance of integration … and if he couldn’t do that, then to be forced to do it by our heavy hand—and his preference was with troops.” Bobby’s objective was to get Meredith safely into the university without calling in federal troops. All these hours, and at a heavy cost, Bobby had sought to avoid calling in the army, to not invoke that terrible image of American soldiers marching against some of their own people. By midnight, though, he felt forced to call in federal troops.
Bobby was a man of righteous anger, but he could not express one note of the rage he felt toward Barnett when he talked to him this endless night. Nor could he vent his full anger at General Creighton Abrams and the army for their slow-footed journey toward Oxford. Even before the main force of the soldiers had moved onto the campus, Bobby was musing about how this would all play out. It was not a picture to be placed happily in the administration’s scrapbook. Two men had died, the French reporter and another unfortunate bystander. And 160 of the marshals had been wounded, 28 of them by gunfire, a casualty rate like that of an invasion force. If Bobby had not refused to give the marshals the order to fire back except in defending Meredith, the casualty totals would have been far higher. That had been the most daring of gambles, for if any of the wounded marshals died, the finger of recrimination would have pointed squarely at him. “We’re gonna have a helluva problem about why we didn’t handle the situation better,” he thought aloud. “Well, I think we’re gonna have to figure out what we’re gonna say.”
At dawn, the main force of the troops arrived in Oxford. Well-armed, perfectly disciplined soldiers marched down a street where minutes before rioters had danced. One of the protesters threw a Molotov cocktail in front of the troops, a barricade of flames lapping across the street. The soldiers marched on in perfect order through the flames, and the crowd backed off for good. In the end, an overwhelming force of twenty-three thousand troops entered the college town so that for the first time in history a black man could attend the university.
27
“A Hell of a Burden to Garry”
In mid-August 1962, General Douglas MacArthur sat in the Oval Office