The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [464]
Afterward Kennedy met with King and the civil rights leaders at the White House. Kennedy had feared that if there were not a riot, then only a paltry crowd would turn out at the Lincoln Memorial, helping to doom the troubled civil rights bill. Instead, there was a massive, unprecedented turnout. King had given what Kennedy, that student of language, considered a speech of immense power. The president knew that the equation of power had changed, that these men and women here before him had something they had not had previously. He honored them not with flattery and applause, but with his hard-won political wisdom, and for him that was the highest honor of all. He let them in on just how hard it was to work the civil rights bill through Congress, running down the congressional tallies senator by senator, and state by state. These people before him had a crusade, but he had a problem, and he wanted them to understand it.
Walter Reuther, the labor leader, talked about amending the civil rights bill with even more guarantees. Kennedy listened to the articulate Reuther, and then interrupted. “This doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been talking about,” he said. “But it seems to me, with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community, that we could emphasize, which I think the Jewish community has done, educating their children, or making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.”
In King’s glorious words, there had been not one sentence about what blacks should do for themselves. The overwhelming burden of black oppression lay elsewhere, but the civil rights leaders risked fostering a disquieting sense of entitlement. Kennedy understood the limits of government in changing the spirit of human beings, and he never would have suggested, as King did, that on some miraculous day the shackles of injustice would be broken and all men would walk free as brothers. Kennedy’s comment was lost in all the talk of programs and strategy, but he had struck at something deep to which he might one day have returned.
The Reverend King had become one of the most important leaders in America; the spiritual and political guide to black Americans, he was admired by millions of white Americans as well. In October, when Hoover placed a request on Bobby’s desk to wiretap the civil rights leader, the nature of the enterprise had changed entirely. Bobby had a multitude of reasons to look on the request skeptically. The FBI had already been taping Jones and Levison and had come up with nothing even hinting of subversion. It bothered the attorney general that despite everything he and his brother had told King, he still was unwilling to back away from Levison. It did not seem to have occurred to Bobby that if Levison were indeed a Communist agent, he would probably have communicated surreptitiously with King and not become known as his closest white friend.
The attorney general believed Hoover’s worst accusations against Levison. In 1964 Bobby wrongfully called him “a secret member of the Communist party” and a member of the “Executive Committee.” And so, primarily as a way of getting information on Levison, he signed the documents that allowed the FBI to wiretap King.
It was a shameful day for American civil liberties. Bobby’s apologists have blamed his actions on everything from Hoover’s manipulations to Bobby’s concern for passage of the civil rights bill. That may all have