Kennedy Justice by Victor S. Navasky

Author:Victor S. Navasky [Navasky, Victor S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Politics, Judicial Branch, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, American Government, Political, History
ISBN: 9781480436220
Google: WV29AAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18491908
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1971-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The trial was deferred and eventually, after a side issue went up to the Supreme Court, the whole issue was dropped in 1965 when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said, in effect, that it didn’t matter any more.

It did matter. On October 24, 1962, one month after Barnett’s defiance, Burke Marshall—at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ request—was about to file an affidavit (excerpted on pp. 262–266) setting out his version of the Attorney General’s conversations with Barnett. But the Attorney General was the President’s brother, and the Kennedys had another crisis to contend with—the Cuban missile crisis. It wouldn’t do to have the sovereign of a sovereign state thrown in jail (and suppose he wouldn’t go?) at a time when JFK needed national unity. So Marshall didn’t file the affidavit and instead, says Marshall, “I was asked by the Attorney General and I guess by the President—he called me during the crisis weekend and asked me to see to it that the courts didn’t do something that would require troops and I did. I called the court-Judge Tuttle.”

Others in the Department—especially in the Solicitor General’s office—were distressed that the Kennedy code and the corporation lawyers’ propensity for off-stage settlements took precedence over the legal code. Louis Claiborne argues to this day that “The fact that Governor Barnett defied the court and the Attorney General and the President and got away with it made inevitable Governor Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door. No [Southern] Governor worth his salt could do less.”

Clearly, the Attorney General was not interested in pressing the case—yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to quash it or moot it. In November of 1962 when he received a memo stating the Department’s position that Barnett and Johnson were not entitled to a jury trial (because it was a contempt case) he scratched in the margin, “Can’t we remain silent on this unless asked by the court?”

The following month at one of the Attorney General’s beer-and-pretzels meetings for young lawyers where he would go around the room asking each man what he was working on, Kennedy stopped when he came to Claiborne, the attorney working on Barnett, and said, “That’s a very difficult case.” The young attorney expressed surprise, since he said Barnett had clearly violated the court order, and asked the Attorney General if he was referring to Barnett’s contention that he was entitled to a jury trial. “Not only that,” said Kennedy, “but the whole issue of prosecuting a Governor.”

Shortly thereafter Solicitor General Cox approached Claiborne and said the Attorney General had told him he was offering a prize to anyone who could find a way of mooting the Barnett case. Cox said, “I thought I should mention this to you, but I’m not interested in that prize.” “Neither am I,” said the young lawyer.

Cox argued the jury-trial issue eloquently, and the government prevailed in the Supreme Court. But as the months dragged on, it became apparent that time had dimmed the issues; the Civil Rights

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