JFK's Last Hundred Days by Thurston Clarke

Author:Thurston Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-19T21:00:00+00:00

Monday, October 14–Friday, October 18

CAMP DAVID AND WASHINGTON

On Monday, Salinger announced that the president had decided to stay at Camp David with his children because it was a lovely day and he had no pressing engagements in Washington. Articles that morning in the New York Times and the Washington Post, ones he surely read, summarized the findings of a Louis Harris poll surveying the racial attitudes of white Americans. The poll confirmed what he had told Birmingham’s white leaders: that providing equal access to public accommodations and university classrooms was easy compared with integrating neighborhoods and public schools. It reported that although 71 percent of whites, including a solid majority in the South, believed that “Negroes are discriminated against,” many thought that they were partly to blame. Sixty-six percent thought they “had less ambition” than whites, and 55 percent cited their “looser morals.” The poll concluded that “substantial numbers of white people in both the North and the South still believe the composite stereotype of the Negro as lazy, unintelligent and inherently inferior to whites.”

A Gallup poll released that weekend showed Kennedy’s approval rating falling to 57 percent nationally, the lowest level of his presidency, and dropping in the South from 50 to 35 percent after he submitted his civil rights bill. There was better news in a second Harris poll appearing in the Washington Post on Monday. It reported that although he had lost the support of 6.5 million Americans who had voted for him in 1960, he had gained the backing of 11 million who had voted for Nixon, meaning that if the election were held that day, he would defeat a Republican opponent by 4.5 million votes. His prospects in the Electoral College were less encouraging, with Harris predicting the loss of half of the Southern states he had won in 1960, a dismal showing that Newsweek blamed on his being “the most widely disliked Democratic President of this century among white Southerners.”

His civil rights bill remained stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, where a subcommittee dominated by liberals had added provisions making it too extreme to appeal to Republican moderates, many of whom represented districts containing the very white-middle-class voters that the Harris poll had identified as opposing discrimination in theory yet resisting the integration of their own neighborhoods and schools. The liberals had added a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to the bill, a more expansive definition of “public accommodations,” and a clause permitting the Department of Justice to bring suit in federal court on behalf of individual Americans whose rights were being infringed. Writing about the impasse in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis cautioned that “by pressing for all they [the liberals] want, they risk alienating the votes needed to pass anything at all.” Southern Democrats on the Judiciary Committee confirmed the folly of the liberals’ position by announcing their intention to vote for the bill because they were certain that it would be easily defeated on the House floor.

Bobby Kennedy testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

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