The View from Washington
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
The View from Washington By George E. Herman Washington To understand the developments in and around Oxford, Mississippi, it is necessary for a moment to review the ultimate objectives...
...The President openly confronted Barnett with the prospect of inciting Mississippians to attack Mississippians, certainly a threat to the Governor's hopes of displacing Senator Stennis in 1964...
...Whether the Mississippi madness will in fact chill passions or fan them remains to be seen...
...It also had to resist the clearly evidenced intention of the Southern segregationists to slow progress to a complete halt...
...The Mississippi National Guard was mobilized under Federal control and immediately thrown into the crisis...
...The area of conflict, and the setting for the desired final victory, was not Oxford but the United States...
...More important, by mobilizing the State Guard the President changed the conflict, in part at least, from a Southern battle against Federal invaders to a struggle of Southerners against the South's own guardians of law and order...
...In the end, therefore, the President moved toward the final goal established by the Supreme Court along paths allowed him by the Constitution...
...President Kennedy had made a careful study of the events at Little Rock four years ago...
...Cheering sections sprang up around the secondary goals on both sides, but the respective commanders kept their eyes coldly on their central targets...
...Out of these final objectives, there quickly emerged a host of secondary goals...
...Using troops can stir up fears which are not only politically damaging but which also endanger the final objective of the entire Federal maneuver...
...A large part of the Bill of Rights is devoted to various ways of trying to prevent such forcible military intrusions...
...It had to withstand vindictiveness or impatience from Negro activists pressing for undue haste...
...He also gave several thousand Mississippians in the Guard a sobering look at the faces of their friends and neighbors as they hurled pop bottles, bricks and even Molotov cocktails at the soldiers...
...What would it have profited the country to win James Meredith and lose all hope for the soul of the South...
...Perhaps with Alabama and South Carolina in mind, he tried to act with a deliberateness which would not fan passions elsewhere...
...The White House then moved fast, along a legal path already scouted...
...He decided that Federal pressure had to be applied slowly in Mississippi, with full advance warning and wide publicity to every step...
...As James Meredith said about the need for a return to normalcy at Ole Miss, "At this point it is more important for America than for me...
...The Administration intended to carry out the legal mandate of the courts, i.e., to enroll James Meredith at the University of Mississippi...
...But beyond that, it wished to carry out the deeper 1954 mandate of the United States Supreme Court: to integrate American education with all deliberate speed, and thus to make a start at healing the bleeding ulcer draining our strength as a nation...
...There was a calculated gamble involved, and for a few hours the Administration thought the gamble had paid off...
...Governor Ross Barnett's principal intention was to forestall any Negro-white integration at the University, or elsewhere...
...President Kennedy said: "If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long deny the commands of our courts then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbor...
...George E. Herman is the White House correspondent for CBS News...
...He clearly had the backing of most Mississippians in his current battle, and this support had the secondary effect of furthering his campaign to unseat moderate Senator John Stennis from the United States Senate in 1964...
...But it does seem ingrained in those who have enjoyed its protection...
...Meanwhile, Washington hopes to keep both education and integration moving...
...And what would the use of troops have done to prospects for integration in Alabama and South Carolina, the two Southern states still completely unintegrated...
...Threatened with a fine of $10,000 a day and all the other economic pressures Washington can put on a state that receives more than twice as much Federal tax money as it contributes, Governor Barnett seemed to yield...
...The same is true of the current Administration...
...The Administration tried to maintain steady pressure for integration...
...True, many Negroes-particularly those who have long been denied the protection of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitutionmay not share this feeling...
...But would such action have helped initiate real integration in Mississippi...
...Barnett is so convinced a racist that in 1950, as the Hartford Courant reminded us, he had to be marched off by Connecticut police after making a ruckus in a local restaurant because a Negro sat down to eat nearby...
...He wanted to make it plain that he was in the process of building up overwhelming and irresistible power...
...Two other factors had to be considered by the President...
...Where President Eisenhower had mobilized the Arkansas National Guard simply to get it away from Governor Orval Faubus, the Mississippi unit actually was used...
...On the Saturday night before violence erupted, the White House thought a hard-and-fast agreement had been reached...
...Though bigotry is patently an evil, trying to end it by short-cutting the law may damage the very fabric of the law...
...He offered former Major General Walker and his wild assortment of out-of-state volunteers the prospect of having to fight the people of the State they were trying to save...
...One was vague, but nonetheless important: Americans generally do not take kindly to the idea of the Army taking over a community in order to correct its thinking...
...In fact, the Administration's hand was stayed by its own ultimate objective, which kept it from using the easier, more dramatic forms of action urged by Northern cheerleaders...
...Moving in troops to force Meredith into the University would have been the simplest thing to command...
...And he placed his Administration's prestige repeatedly and publicly on the line in making clear he would not back down...
...For these reasons, James Meredith had to go through a long series of legal tangles involving 12 separate rulings...
...Thus when the chips were down, the Kennedy family strategists decided to move cautiously at first, like a man stretching out his hand to a strange dog so it may sniff and not be frightened into biting...
...But later the same night, after Governor Barnett had met with white supremacy groups, the agreement came unstuck...
...The View from Washington By George E. Herman Washington To understand the developments in and around Oxford, Mississippi, it is necessary for a moment to review the ultimate objectives on each side, stripping away the many complications and secondary tactical objectives which obscured the main issues...
...The Governor said he could not guarantee law and order...
...The second factor which had to be borne in mind was a legal one: The Administration must operate as a government of law, not issues...
...If one President is able to invoke military forces to end segregation, another might be able to invoke them to enforce it...
...To preserve justice, a defendant has to be presumed innocent until proven guilty-and that applies equally to Governor Barnett, the University of Mississippi and James Meredith...
...This is the tiresome but irreplaceable process which guarantees (or attempts to guarantee, anyway) a government of laws, and not men or issues...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
