So, say you’re a freshly inaugurated president in January 1961. What is the most pressing domestic issue you need to address?
Need help? Okay. How about the fact that nearly half the country is operating as an Apartheid state? You’ve just defeated Richard Nixon narrowly with the help of an enthused black vote. On the other hand, you also won because you carried Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, the Carolinas, and half of Alabama.
Technically, you have 63 Democrats in the Senate, but it takes 67 votes to cut off debate and kill a filibuster (the threshold was lowered to sixty in the 1970’s). But that’s not even your problem. You can go in a wide swath from Virginia down to Florida and across to Texas, and you won’t find a single Republican senator (although Republican John Tower of Texas will be elected shortly). There are at least 22 Democratic senators from Jim Crow states.
So, how do you proceed? Let’s ask Kennedy’s point-man on Civil Rights, his counsel Lee C. White:
I was fortunate to have been President Kennedy’s civil rights counsel and to have continued in that capacity with President Johnson through March of 1966. When JFK moved into the White House, civil rights leaders and African Americans in general sensed that there was a new attitude in the federal government, that doors would more readily swing open for consideration of their great concerns. And, of course, they were correct…
…One of the first JFK actions was to establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and designate the vice-president as its chairman. With his usual vigor and industriousness, LBJ talked Hobart Taylor, a brilliant lawyer and the son of one of his black friends and supporters in Texas, to be the staff director. With whites and blacks, lawyers and businessmen, and Taylor’s pushing spirit, the Committee produced a program known as Plans for Progress, which amounted to pledges by corporations to increase the number of minority employees by an agreed percentage over a specified period of time. The program was not without its critics, who contended that it was window dressing because there were no sanctions and the program was the equivalent of the federal government awarding “Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval.”
Word reached Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, who passed on the criticism to JFK. I wound up with the assignment to check it out. Working with Taylor and George Reedy, an assistant of LBJ and later his press secretary, I went over the numbers and the nature of the Plans for Progress program and concluded that it was a step in the right direction, that there were no sweetheart deals, and that the participants on both sides were sincere. The major deficiency was that there was no statutory underpinning for the program and that it was not possible to require or enforce sanctions. Ultimately, Congress did create the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. was its first chairman.
So, you see, what was at first seen as mere window dressing led to something more concrete. Liberals complained about the Kennedy administration providing little more than lip service to the most pressing issue of the day. But, the truth was that the administration didn’t have the votes to do what needed to be done. Those votes wouldn’t come until after Kennedy’s assassination and the landslide election of 1964. All administrations face constraints. That doesn’t mean that they don’t make progress. And, when they try to put the best face on that progress (inadequate, though it be), liberals always feel doubly-insulted (or hippie-punched, if you prefer). That’s just how we roll.
You know, without all that complaining nothing would have gotten done. But, you’d think we’d get a little more sophisticated about it over time.
