(no subject)

[ayrdaomei]

“I won’t say I stayed awake nights worrying about civil rights before I became Attorney General,” Robert Kennedy remarked [in later years]. He had always acted with impetuous decency when racial discrimination forced itself on his attention. But this was response to individual wrong, not to national shame. “My fundamental belief,” he said soon after taking office, is “that all people are created equal. Logically, it follows that integration should take place today everywhere.” But, he added, “other people have grown up with totally different backgrounds and mores, which we can’t change overnight.” In the longer run, it would all work out; when his grandfather arrived in Boston, “the Irish were not wanted there. Now an Irish Catholic is President of the United States. There is no question about it. In the next forty years, a Negro can achieve the same position.” He saw civil rights in 1961 as an issue in the middle distance, morally invincible but filled for the moment with operational difficulty. He did not see racial injustice as the urgent American problem, as the contradiction, now at last intolerable, between the theory and the practice of the republic.

.... The Kennedys were abstractly in favor of equal opportunity. But it took presidential politics to involve them with the movement; and then the prospect of responsibility to make them think intensively about the problem. On an August morning in 1960 John Kennedy picked up Harris Wofford, his campaign man on civil rights, in his red convertible, and said, as they drove downtown, "Now, in five minutes, tick off the ten things that a president ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess." Kennedy needed the black vote. He was also, in Wofford's view, appalled by the goddamn mess. "He considered it irrational. He was not knowledgable about it. It was alien to most of his experience. He was ready to learn."

.... With executive action the designated route, the Attorney General became the key actor. "I...kept [the President] advised," Robert Kennedy said later, " but I think it was just understood by us, which has always been understood, that I have my area of responsibility; and I'd do it.... If I had a problem about alternative steps, I'd call him.... But I wouldn't call him just to be gabby about what was going on in the south."

- Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at p.307-09.

[Voter registration and civil rights enforcement] wore out Robert Kennedy's southern welcome. "The Freedom Riders do not seem to have hurt President Kennedy much," wrote Samuel Lubell, the expert political observer. "...It is 'brother Bobby' in the Attorney General's office, rather than President Jack, who has been blamed." Lubell asked a Mississippi housewife to name the biggest problem in the country. She replied: "Kennedy has too many brothers."

- at p. 325.

"The point about protection," [Burke] Marshall wrote to a civil rights advocate,

is the most difficult and frustrating we have to live with under the federal system. I say over and over again - hundreds of times a year - that we do not have a national police force, and cannot provide protection in the physical sense for everyone who is disliked because of his exercise of his constitutional rights....There is no substitute under the federal system for the failure of local law enforcement responsibility. There is simply a vacuum, which can be filled only rarely, with extraordinary difficulty, at monumental expense, and in a totally unsatisfactory fashion.

Asked in 1964 whether he thought the decision against a vast federal police presence in the absence of specific court orders was wise, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, replied, "I certainly do.... The law is quite clear that the federal government is not the policing authority. Policing authority rests with the several states. That," he added, "...some of us can understand, but the average layman cannot understand it." Certainly civil rights activists risking their lives in the war for the Constitution did not. "Careful explanations of the historic limitations on the federal government's police powers," as Robert Kennedy said that same year, "are not satisfactory to the parents of students who have vanished in Mississippi or to the widow of a Negro educator shot down without any reason by the night riders in Georgia."

In 1964 Anthony Lewis asked Robert Kennedy whether he would alter the system that gave primary responsibility for law enforcement to the states and communities. Kennedy said:

No...I still think it's wise. I think that for periods of time that it's very, very difficult....I just wouldn't want that much more authority in the hands of either the FBI or the Department of Justice or the President of the United States.... You would have accomplished much more if you had had a dictatorship during the time that President Kennedy was president... But I think that comes back to haunt you at a later time. I think that these matters should be decided over a long range of history, not on a temporary basis or under the stress of a particular crisis...I think it's [best] for the health of the country.

A generation rendered sensitive by Watergate to the case for constitutional process finds this view more persuasive than did the men and women who went south in defense of elemental rights in the early 1960s. For a time Robert Kennedy was almost as unpopular among civil rights workers as he was among segregationists.

- at p.328

Comments

[aurealis.livejournal.com]

( [A]n Irish Catholic is President of the United States. There is no question about it. In the next forty years, a Negro can achieve the same position.

My hair stands on its end thinking of how prescient this was.

I saw a headline once (unfortunately, didn't read it) about the many similarities between JFK'a and Obama's runs for the White House. How did the Kennedys react to this? Were they supportive of Obama, or of Hilary?

[ayrdaomei.livejournal.com]

I had the same feeling when reading that language! His foresight - and faith in America - was really amazing, given the state of civil rights and race relations in the early 1960s.

There were a lot of columns and articles that expounded about the perceived similarities between Obama and Kennedy. The Kennedys endorsed Obama, after the first few primaries in January, and it was HUGE news when it happened. Caroline also wrote an op-ed for the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27kennedy.html) called "A President Like My Father."

[aurealis.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for linkin me to that piece. I thought she was excellent in outlining why people believed in Kennedy and now Obama. They are symbols of possibility and of hope, and they have the power to make you believe that you can help change the world. I could hear the voices of the millions who voted for Obama chanting "Yes, we can" as I was readng that editorial.

I wish I had followed the presidential campaign, to have been part of the excitement and the optimism that it generated ...