The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [462]
The Freedom Riders had irked him with their moral absolutism and their refusal to compromise, and the civil rights activists worried him still. He feared where their uncompromising passions were leading America. He believed that “a great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change peaceful and constructive for all…. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”
This president was above all a realist. Morality and the political imperative were one and the same, and he now proposed to the nation a civil rights bill that would help ensure that all Americans could go to hotels and restaurants and theaters and sit where they pleased, and that children could attend the schools that best served them, not facilities relegated to their race. He concluded in his own ad-libbed words, linked seamlessly to Sorensen’s eloquent phrases, “We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color-blind.”
The president had listened to Bobby and learned from him, assuming if not his brother’s passion then at least his brother’s insight into the black struggle. He had put his toe gingerly into this moral caldron, and he wondered aloud afterward whether he should have pulled it out immediately. “Do you think we did the right thing by sending the legislation up?” he asked Bobby, knowing what his answer would be. “Look at the trouble it’s got us in.” Bobby recalled that Kennedy feared that “this was going to be his political swan song.”
When Kennedy learned that in August King was planning to bring hundreds of thousands of blacks to Washington for the largest civil rights event in the country’s history, he was appalled. He could envision the event turning into a riot in the streets of the capital, or an unseemly gathering of the unkempt and unwashed. “They’re going to come on down here and shit all over the monument,” Alan Raywid, a Justice Department official, recalls the president saying.
Both Kennedys were worried not only about the dangers of a mass march on Washington but about the influence of Communists on King, particularly Stanley Levison, the minister’s closest white associate and friend. Levison was a left-wing New York attorney, part of the diminishing circle of the American Left in the fifties. He unquestionably brushed shoulders with party members at rallies and meetings and raised money for left-wing causes. As a fellow traveler of the party, he had become, in the words of King’s biographer Taylor Branch, “a financial pillar of the Communist Party during the height of its persecution.”
There were a disproportionate number of Communists in the civil rights movement, as there were in almost all struggles for social justice. They may have attempted to push the agenda toward the current Communist line, but they were often brave men and women who spilled their blood and gave endless energy to the cause. Hoover had convinced the Kennedys that Levison was a Communist agent who was trying to turn King into a Soviet puppet and the civil rights movement into what would truly be the largest subversive movement in American history.
Levison may have been dangerously myopic when he looked at the realities of the Soviet Union. Hoover, however, made a case that Levison was a master spy when all the FBI director had against him was mindless innuendo. The FBI director had no evidence that the attorney was involved with espionage or that he had ever been a Communist Party member. Hoover and his colleagues probably sincerely believed that Levison was a Communist spy and thought they were acting out of only the most patriotic of motives when they warned the president. In the eyes of the Kennedys, Levison was a red Svengali leading the dangerously