The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [461]
Kennedy was uncomfortable with a passionate moral issue that could lead men to violence or the rhetoric of despair. He was living in a segregated southern city, the evil of which had largely been ignored by both political parties. For the most part, he knew blacks as deferential people who served drinks, made beds, and drove chauffeured cars. He was head of a political party that risked being torn in two between the conservative southerners and the more liberal northerners.
Kennedy had in fact gone far in trying to open important government positions to blacks and using the federal law to push ahead the integration of public facilities in the South. But to blacks, it was only a first step. The president was an astute politician who looked out across the expanses of America and saw that there was not a strong majority ready to push civil rights, not in the South and probably not in the North either. If he moved too slowly, however, he took the risk that frustrated black Americans would start setting fires in the night. If he moved too fast, he might have to put out brushfires of violence across America.
In June, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a pint-sized demagogue, said that he would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent blacks from attending the University of Alabama. Wallace had vowed when he lost his first race that he would “never be out-niggered again,” and all those who heard him in those torpid days in Tuscaloosa would say that he had kept his pledge. Wallace, however, no more wanted federal troops and bloodshed than did the Kennedys. After his endless posturing in front of the cameras, he followed the order to step aside once federal officials and the federalized Alabama National Guardsmen arrived. Despite the ugliness of the scene, the covenant of government had not been broken, and Wallace bowed to the law of the land, even if he did so standing on a chalk line positioned for filming him from the best camera angle.
That evening the president decided that he had to give a television address to the nation boldly announcing his plans to put forth his civil rights bill. The political operatives in the White House opposed the legislation, but just as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two Kennedy brothers stood together. O’Brien and O’Donnell may not have been numb to the pain of black Americans, but they knew that the figures did not add up, not in Congress, not in the Democratic Party, and not in the life of an American president who would soon be seeking reelection. Great leadership is often not good politics, however, and Kennedy decided to go ahead.
Kennedy began to prepare for this historic address only an hour before the 8:00 P.M.. televised speech. Sorensen hurried into the Cabinet Room where the president sat with Bobby and Burke Marshall. The president quickly sketched his ideas, and Sorensen left to try to piece together a worthy speech in a few minutes. As Sorensen worked elsewhere, Kennedy worried that he would have to give the address extemporaneously. While he was jotting down a bunch of notes on what Bobby remembered as “the back of an envelope or something,” Sorensen returned with the draft of a speech. Once again Sorensen had managed to channel himself into the president’s psyche, and the speech had all the resonance and depth that would have taken anyone else hours to try to match. As good as it was, Bobby felt that Kennedy should end with a few unscripted remarks—and so he did.
Kennedy was not comfortable with the moralizing of priests and preachers, but there was a difference between moralizing and morality, and he grasped that this was his nation’s great moral issue. A leader did not temporize and cut his words and meaning when he had prepared an important address in just one hour. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he told Americans. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He saw the urgency