King vs. the Kennedys
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
King vs. the Kennedys Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 By Taylor Branch Simon and Schuster. 922 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...Sixty per cent of black voters had supported Eisenhower in 1956...
...LBJ was languishing in Coventry when the Civil Rights Movement heated up, owing to Kennedy disdain...
...Although just about every Une of this extremely long book is worthwhile, the most absorbing pages concern the interplay between King and the brothers Kennedy...
...Branch chronicles their actions in great detail, hour by hour at times...
...Parting the Waters ends with the murder of President Kennedy...
...LBJ accomplished this by threatening to cancel millions of dollars in contracts for a Nasa tracking station that was to be built in Houston...
...King's biggest triumphs still lay ahead of him, and his severest trials as well...
...Floating in and out of the narrative are such remarkable men as saintly Robert Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee...
...Kennedy aides forced King to fire an important Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff member who was, or had been, a Communist, and they tried to separate King from Stanley Levison, his closest white ally and friend...
...The Kennedys urged blacks to give voter registration their highest priority, but when intimidation and murder followed explained that they were helpless to protect registrants...
...Group biography, together with what seem to be previously unused documents, enables Branch to present a familiar story as if it were freshly minted...
...When James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi the Kennedys did everything possible to avoid imposing martial law, waiting so long that two men were killed and 160 marshals wounded before Federal troops restored order...
...fierce Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who resented King's sudden rise to fame but sought also to exploit it...
...John F. Kennedy won the black vote in 1960 with two telephone calls, placed when King was imprisoned for neglecting to secure a Georgia driver's license...
...The Kennedys could not contain it because the FBI chief had damaging evidence against two of John Kennedy's mistresses, one an East German refugee of uncertain loyalty, the other a gangster's consort...
...Yet King was a giant all the same, and a giant who was being persecuted with theconsent of the Kennedys...
...But I think his memory and the fact that he stood up for the Civil Rights Bill will cause many people to see the necessity for working passionately...
...He endorsed the Civil Rights Bill that Johnson would later pass...
...There would be, too, the rise of black power and terrible ghetto riots, which would ravage his cause and drive King to the brink of despair...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...John Doar, the only Republican holdover in Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, and for a time the only Justice official who cared about civil rights...
...Though they owed their victory to the black vote, the Kennedys' dependence on it presented them with a quandary...
...To do so he employs many interviews, some his own, others drawn from various oral history collections, a historical resource that has seldom been mined more profitably...
...Hoover was a racist and so disliked King on principle, but after King criticized the FBI's indifference to crimes against rights workers Hoover overflowed with malice...
...After he became President civil rights had a relentless champion...
...Those two calls, heavily publicized through religious outlets, turned black America around...
...After much indecision, John made a sympathy telephone call to King's wife Coretta, while Robert Kennedy impulsively called a local judge and secured King's release...
...A biography of Martin Luther King Jr., this riveting book is also a history of the Civil Rights Movement as it was experienced by certain key figures...
...Because the law was changing in their favor, thanks to Warren's Court, that was enough to attract black voters to the GOP, but since it did very little to hold them they were easily reconverted...
...In a prophetic interview King said to a graduate student "I'm convinced that had [Kennedy] lived, there wouldhavebeen continual delays and attempts to evade [civil rights] at every point and water it down at every point...
...Of all the shameful things the Kennedys did or didn't do, few equal their capitulation to J. Edgar Hoover's obsessive hatred of King...
...History will not forgive them for this, or excuse Lyndon Johnson for allowing the evil to continue...
...70 per cent voted for JFK four years later...
...If the public found out about either it would have ruined the President—as recently a lesser offense terminated Gary Hart...
...Taylor Branch's new study, of which Parting the Waters is volume one, returns us to that more hopeful time...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower disliked the Civil Rights Movement, regretted appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and confined himself to enforcing the law...
...Under him the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which did nothing to safeguard blacks in Kennedy's day, would turn into an avenging angel, putting an end to racial brutality in the South and destroying the Ku Klux Klan...
...In this it resembles the movement he is chronicling so superbly...
...Until then even Martin's father, the Reverend "Daddy" King, supported Richard M. Nixon, who had the great merit in Baptist eyes of not being Roman Catholic...
...To that end President Kennedy appointed segregationists to important Federal judgeships in the South, and made every effort to appease bigots in all those places where the Civil Rights Movement was confronting white resistance...
...Kennedy fearfulness on the race issue contrasted markedly with Lyndon B. Johnson's lack of it...
...Wherever Southern blacks were marching and dying, Kennedy's government could be counted on to urge caution, insist that its hands were tied, and seek to make compromising deals with the local power structure...
...They provided his margin of victory, giving him many more than the 114,000 votes that were his edge over Nixon, and deciding the outcome in such crucial states as Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois...
...Hit them where it hurts" was Johnson's motto, and he would live up to it...
...These events and much more await Branch's second volume, but we can already see that he is embarked upon a great voyage of rediscovery, a journey filled with pity, rage and terror, yet also heights of exaltation...
...On one occasion the city of Houston denied electricity to Navy ships at dockside, in reprisal against new policies concerning off-base segregation...
...Before his own death by violence at the age of 38 there would be Birmingham and Selma, making possible momentous Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-'60s...
...John Kennedy had won the black vote without earning it, but he could not entirely avoid paying his dues...
...Yet where he had authority, as over the space program, he used it...
...Using various despicable methods, the FBI sought to destroy a man who was not just any citizen, which would have been bad enough, but the greatest American of his time...
...But are we to say to the world—and much more importantly, to each other—that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes...
...Had Nixon acted first these votes would have been his, but Nixon wanted to crack the still mostly solid white South and missed his historic chance...
...Kingwas flawed to be sure...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" The history of race relations, not only in this country but virtually everywhere, has been dismal...
...Faced with blackmail, the Kennedys gave Hoover a free hand to spy on and bug King's associates, and ultimately King himself...
...He did call out the troops when there was no alternative, and under pressure took additional faltering steps in the interests of decency...
...Johnson called up the president of Houston Light and Power and forced him to turn the Navy's lights back on...
...They had to retain black loyalties without, as they saw it, alienating white Southerners whose votes would be needed in future...
...Brutal candor notwithstanding, this was a fair assessment...
...His sexual affairs were unpardonable, and endangered him in the same way as the President was imperiled by his...
...We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it...
...He had promised to desegregate Federally subsidized housing with "a stroke of the pen," then waited for years to sign a limited open housing order...
...When President Kennedy was assassinated King felt that his death would serve the cause better than if he had continued to live...
...A few months before his death Kennedy even went so far as to speak to the basic issue...
...Yet once, for a glorious moment, it seemed as if racism would be at last transcended...
...the flamboyant, Gandhian Bayard Rustin, gay, itinerant and a brilliant organizer...
...And we cherish our freedom here at home...
...These were brave words that would have been braver still had he accompanied them with action...
Vol. 71 • December 1988 • No. 22
