Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part Two

 

When Shriver got to the hotel suite he found Kennedy surrounded by aides, all rigidly opposed to the idea. Although the senator had already expressed his concerns privately to Governor Vandiver, he worried that a public telephone call to Coretta King could be perceived as a “gimmick” to reel in black votes. His key advisor, Ken O’Donnell, saw little political upside. “I felt my job was to always focus on the political factors and implications,” O’Donnell recalled. “The moral issues would be raised by Bobby [Kennedy], Sarge [Shriver], Harris Wofford, or others.” When John Kennedy pulled O’Donnell aside to confer privately, Ken told him: “While I am sympathetic to what Mrs. King and her family must be going through, from a political point of view, all I can see is that it could backfire.” How could Kennedy, a candidate who was criticized for his lukewarm support of black issues, justify this unusual bighearted action? “There are a million ways politically it could be a mess,” he warned Kennedy.

 

Shriver hovered, waiting to make his case alone. Finally the aides began to disperse: Wordsmith Ted Sorensen left to work on a speech, and press secretary Pierre Salinger went out to speak with reporters. But O’Donnell stuck around—besides advising Kennedy, he was the man who controlled access to the candidate and later to the president, and he now stood between Jack and his brother-in-law. Ready to pull rank as brother in law, Shriver approached O’Donnell. “I never use my family connection or ask for a favor, but you are wrong, Kenny,” he said. “This is too important. I want time alone with him.”

 

In O’Donnell’s view, the issue was decided and he didn’t want it reopened. But he also knew Shriver didn’t use his family position to advantage. “Unlike others,” O’Donnell said of Shriver, “he never asked or abused that [family] relationship, and, at some level, morally I suspected he might be right, though politically I still was against it.” Out of respect, or courtesy, or simply because he was hungry, O’Donnell stepped aside, allowing Shriver a private moment with Jack.

 

In parting, O’Donnell said softly he hadn’t eaten, he was going to get a hamburger, and the two men shook hands.

 

“You know I am right,” Shriver said as O’Donnell started off.

 

“Maybe,” O’Donnell replied. Then reminding him of how things often went in the rough and tumble of politics, he observed: “If it works, you’ll get no credit for it; if it does not, you’ll get all the blame.”

 

Shriver went into Kennedy’s room and found his brother-in-law alone, folding his clothes into his suitcase. As Shriver built his case, describing King’s terrifying drive through rural Georgia and Coretta’s anguish, Kennedy didn’t seem to be listening. His mind was elsewhere. “Jack,” Shriver pressed, “you just need to convey to Mrs. King that you believe what happened to her husband was wrong and that you will do what you can to see the situation rectified and that in general you stand behind him.”

 

Kennedy was not paying attention. To engage him, Shriver appealed to his conscience. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected,” he told Jack. “But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they will know you understand and will help. You will reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman who is afraid her husband will be killed.”

 

Although cool and detached, Kennedy was in a quiet way sympathetic to the suffering of others and had a reflexive dislike of unfairness. All at once, Shriver noticed a change of heart in his brother-in-law. As he remembered it, Jack zipped up his suitcase then turned to him and said: “That’s a pretty good idea. How do I get to her?”

 

When Shriver handed over Coretta’s telephone number to him, Kennedy said: “Dial it for me, will you? I’ve got to pack up my papers.” As Jack filled his briefcase, Shriver sat down on the edge of the bed and put his finger into the rotary dial.

 

When the phone rang that morning, Coretta listened as Sargent Shriver introduced himself and told her he was with Jack Kennedy in Chicago. Senator Kennedy “wanted to speak with her for a moment,” Shriver informed her. “Would that be okay?”

 

After several seconds, she heard a voice familiar to her; she had just recently watched Kennedy give a smooth performance in the televised debates. “Good morning, Mrs. King,” the voice said. “This is Senator Kennedy.” After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Kennedy offered his sympathy: “I want to express to you my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard for you.” He mentioned that he was aware she was expecting a baby. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King,” he said cordially. “If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

 

Coretta thanked him, saying: “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

 

And that was it: The call lasted no more than ninety seconds.

 

When Shriver informed Kenny O’Donnell, the campaign’s political master groused: “You just lost us the election.”

 

Inevitably, word of Kennedy’s gesture trickled out to the press, and pressure now mounted from several directions for King’s release.

 

Just as he protected his Vandiver conversation, Jack Kennedy was in no hurry to reveal that he had chatted with Coretta. He didn’t tell his press secretary Pierre Salinger until his campaign plane lifted off that afternoon from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on its way to Detroit. In the air, he nonchalantly mentioned it to Salinger who, recognizing a potential media firestorm, immediately relayed the news via the onboard radiophone to campaign manager Bobby Kennedy in Washington. Bobby was apoplectic when he learned that Shriver, Wofford, and Louis Martin had conspired and put Jack up to the call. Now the campaign had to prepare to control the damage.

 

For Sargent Shriver, it was impossible to forget Bobby’s irate phone call. “Bobby landed on me like a ton of bricks….He scorched my ass,” Shriver recalled. “Jack Kennedy was going to get defeated because of the stupid call,” Bobby fumed. He then turned his wrath on Wofford and Louis Martin, summoning the men to the campaign headquarters and berating them “with fists tight, his blue eyes cold,” as Wofford remembered it. Bobby had made the political calculations and didn’t like what it all added up to. “Do you know,” he fumed, “that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”

 

The next morning, Thursday, October 27, Judge Oscar Mitchell announced the release of the prisoner on a $2,000 bond, saying his action was mandatory under Georgia law. That afternoon, after about thirty hours of confinement at Reidsville, Martin Luther King Jr. walked out of his cell for his flight home to Atlanta. About two hours later he stepped off a chartered plane at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport into the arms of his relieved wife and other supporters.

 

Speaking to reporters at the airport, King said he was indebted to Kennedy for his role. “I understand from very reliable sources that Senator Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible,” he said. “For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.” Kennedy’s participation, he said, was “morally wise.” Leaving no doubt about his appreciation, King nonetheless stopped short of endorsing the candidate. “I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem,” he said. “I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of his party’s platform.”

 

King also took the opportunity to say that he had not heard from Vice President Richard Nixon and knew of no Republican efforts on his behalf (Levingston 11-18).

 

King did not endorse Kennedy, but news of the phone call spread quickly and undoubtedly energized black voters in a close election. Among those whose minds were changed was a black Southerner who (unlike most) could vote. He was Martin Luther King Sr. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “Now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.”

 

Kennedy was amused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he said. Then: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we” (Goodman 2)?

 

According to his aide William Safire, Nixon said he had not spoken out because doing so would have been “grandstanding.”  Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy” (Frank 3).

 

“Back in 1960, there was a real battle for the black vote,” wrote author Larry Sabato.   “The GOP was still seen as the party of Lincoln in many parts of the country, while JFK’s Democrats had loads of segregationists in powerful posts.”

 

The campaign feared that these actions would hurt Kennedy with white southern voters, so they produced a pamphlet on blue paper, which became known as “the blue bomb.” Neither the candidate’s name nor the Democratic Party appeared on the pamphlet, but it still gave Kennedy credit for his sympathetic call by contrasting his actions with Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s silence on the issue.

 

Staffers distributed approximately two million copies in African American churches across the country just weeks before the election.  … So while the pamphlet became well known in many African-American communities, it could be overlooked in other areas.  … “At the same time, Kennedy’s campaign had plausible deniability for Southern whites,” Sabato said. “JFK needed plenty of electoral votes from Southern segregationist states” (Hiegel 2).

 

King’s release had an immediate and profound impact on the black community, unleashing a wave of support for Kennedy. In a single day, the senator beat back years of skepticism about his commitment to racial justice. Debates raged over whether his call to Coretta was a calculated political act or a true expression of compassion. Whatever the truth was, the act inspired a flood of raw emotion. The front page of the Chicago Defender featured a photo of King holding his young son and rubbing cheeks with him while his wife, Coretta, kissed him on his other cheek and his daughter stood at his elbow peering up at him. Above the photo was a large headline: REV. KING FREE ON BOND—HAIL SEN. KENNEDY’S ROLE IN CLERIC’S RELEASE. The New York Post sent a reporter into Harlem to gauge the reaction. “Many Harlemites were indignant at Nixon’s refusal even to comment on the case,” the reporter wrote. The Post published the comments of John Patterson, publisher of the Harlem paper Citizen-Call. “Mr. Nixon, in his refusal to comment or take a stand on the civil rights issue that Rev. King’s arrest symbolized, merely extends the say-nothing, do-nothing rule by golf-club philosophy of President Eisenhower regarding this moral issue.” By contrast, Senator Kennedy was praised in newspapers across the country. A widely distributed Associated Press dispatch reported a version of the comforting words Kennedy said to Coretta on the phone: “This must be pretty hard on you, and I want to let you both know that I’m thinking about you, and will do all I can to help.”

 

Kennedy suffered only minor fallout among Southern white voters. On the Sunday following King’s release, Claude Sitton of the New York Times reported that Kennedy appeared “to be gaining strength in Southern states once considered safe for Vice President Nixon.” In the concluding paragraphs, Sitton acknowledged that Kennedy’s role in King’s release from prison “may hurt the Democratic cause somewhat among white Southern voters” but that the repercussions “had been milder than expected.” If there was a strong reaction, it was among Southern blacks who were now more favorably disposed toward Kennedy. Despite voting restrictions that prevented Southern blacks from casting ballots in numbers that their population justified, their impact could be substantial. As Sitton reported, blacks “cast the decisive vote in close elections in some Southern states.”

 

On Election Day, if blacks hadn’t turned out for him in large numbers, Kennedy might have had to deliver a concession speech. In Illinois, for instance, where he topped Nixon by 9,000 votes, 250,000 blacks voted for Kennedy. In Michigan, he won the votes of another 250,000 blacks and carried the state by 67,000 votes. In South Carolina, he carried the state by 10,000 votes with 40,000 blacks casting ballots for him.

 

In his book The Making of the President 1960, campaign historian Theodore White assessed the impact of the call to Coretta. “One cannot identify in the narrowness of American voting of 1960 any one particular episode or decision as being more important than any other in the final tallies,” he wrote. But, he added, the “instinctive decision must be ranked among the most crucial of the last few weeks.” White observed that blacks were convinced that they had anointed Kennedy. “Some Negro political leaders claim,” White wrote, “that in no less than eleven states (Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, Texas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada), with 169 electoral votes, it was the Negro community that provided the Kennedy margin of victory.”

 

Nationwide, Kennedy got only 118,574 more votes than Nixon did out of a total 68,370,000 ballots cast. Kennedy tallied 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent. In the crucial electoral votes, Kennedy amassed 303 to Nixon’s 219, enough to catapult him into the White House. Altogether, blacks turned out for Kennedy in staggering numbers. A Gallup poll put the figure at 70 percent, and an IBM poll came up with 68 percent. (In 1956, Adlai Stevenson got 60 percent.) From the black perspective, those numbers left no doubt of the community’s role in sending Kennedy to the White House.

 

Nixon was embittered by his narrow loss and the surprising black turnout for Kennedy. Later explaining his “no comment” at the height of the King uproar, he admitted “this was a fatal communication gap. I had meant Herb [Klein, his press secretary] to say that I had no comment at this time.” This explanation doesn’t quite conform to reality. Nixon in fact had heard a drumbeat of voices within his campaign begging him to speak out immediately, but he remained silent.

 

John Kennedy never explained his reason for placing the call to Coretta King. Was the candidate driven by politics or by goodwill? Cynics see only a man of callous manipulation, and torchbearers for Kennedy see only his grace and humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized, both impulses inspired Kennedy’s call, and they did not necessarily contradict each other. And that ninety-second conversation laid massive expectations on the Kennedy presidency. Before he even settled into the White House, Jack Kennedy was put on notice that blacks from Harlem to Montgomery expected him to listen to their leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hear their cries for equality. (Levingston 19-22).

 

Martin Luther King never gave Kennedy total credit for his release from the Georgia state prison.  A recording of an interview of him conducted December 21, 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a man who intended to write a book about the civil rights movement has King saying the following.

 

"Well, I would say first that many forces worked together to bring about my release," King said. "I don't think any one force brought it about, but you had a plurality of forces working together.  …

 

"Now, it is true that Sen. Kennedy did take a specific step.  He was in contact with officials in Georgia during my arrest and he called my wife, made a personal call and expressed his concern and said to her that he was working and trying to do something to make my release possible.

 

"His brother, who at that time was his campaign manager, also made direct contact with officials and even a judge in Georgia, so the Kennedy family did have some part, at least they expressed a concern and they did have some part in the release, but I must make it clear that many other forces worked to bring it about also."

 

The interviewer never finished the book and the tape was lost until the man's son rediscovered it five decades later while rummaging through dilapidated boxes left there by his father (Duke 1-2).

 

I detect regret in King’s remarks made later about his relationship with Richard Nixon.  “I always felt that Nixon lost a real opportunity to express … support of something much larger than an individual, because this expressed support of the movement for civil rights in a way. And I had known Nixon longer. He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, getting, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me, you see” (Frank 4). 

 

Knowing what transpired during the next five years, I am gratified that Kennedy, not Nixon, made that necessary call. 

 

 

Works cited:

 

Duke, Allan.  “Rare recording of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about John F. Kennedy released.”  CNN.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/us/mlk-kennedy-recording/index.html

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Hiegel, Taylor.  “Remembering Kennedy's micro-targeting in the 1960 election.”  NBC News.  November 2, 2015.  Web.  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/remembering-kennedys-micro-targeting-1960-election-flna2D11641336

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/