Excerpt: 'Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice'

Sept. 29 -- Anyone who has wondered just what was said inside the White House during the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s can get an inside look with the new book Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice.

Authors Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell weave in actual transcripts of secret recordings that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made about the racial turmoil in America in the early 1960s, including heated phone calls between Kennedy and government leaders in Birmingham, Ala., and late-night conversations that Johnson had with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here is an excerpt.

Chapter 1: The Twentieth-Century Struggle

"Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us put aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole." So declared President Lyndon Johnson, in a speech to the nation on a July evening in 1964, the day he signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

The Civil Rights Act was a milestone in the history of the U.S. civil rights movement. In the eyes of many, the complex legislation, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodation, employment, and federally funded programs, was the most important civil rights law in nearly a century, and leaders in the struggle for racial justice hailed its passage enthusiastically. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth described it as "the second emancipation of the America Negro," while the NAACP's Roy Wilkins likened it to the Magna Carta. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the country's foremost African American leader, declared that this "monumental" legislation had emerged from the cauldron of mass meetings and marches, and was then "polished and refined in the marble halls of Congress." The result, he said, was an "historic affirmation of Jefferson's ringing truth that 'all men are created equal.' "

In asking Americans to "help eliminate the last vestiges of injustice" from their country, Lyndon Johnson, the first southerner to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson, noted that the bill was the product of months of "careful debate and discussion," which had been initiated by John Kennedy, "our late and beloved president." While true in the narrowest sense, Johnson's observation did not convey a larger and more significant truth, namely, that the 1964 legislation was the product of decades of toil by countless men and women who had devoted their lives to working for racial justice in twentieth-century America.

If the movement to abolish American slavery was the noblest cause of the nineteenth century, then the civil rights struggle was the most heroic crusade of the twentieth. Indeed, the quest for racial justice in modern America was a continuation of the historic effort of a century before, when a group of determined individuals sought to compel the nation to end slavery and realize America's age-old promise. While it had taken a bloody war to sweep slavery from the national landscape, the twentieth-century civil rights movement was wrenching in its own right and, if not as cataclysmic, nearly as dramatic.

The story of the civil rights crusade has become part of the mythos of America, as towering heroes, possessed of great dignity and greater courage, labored energetically in the quest for justice. Arrayed against them were less noble figures, who, with equal zeal, worked to thwart the aspirations of the reformers. Whether a particular figure was a hero or a villain was of course a matter of one's perspective.

Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks; Bull Connor and George Wallace — the names have become part of the nation's collective memory, as have the events that brought them to prominence. The 1954 Supreme Court decision, which famously declared segregation in education to be "inherently unequal"; the determination of the residents of Montgomery, who chose to walk rather than ride on Jim Crow buses in December 1955; the gathering on a peaceful August afternoon in 1963 when thousands came together in the nation's capital; and the shocking murder of four little girls in Birmingham that same year-the story of the struggle is etched in the minds of Americans, whether they lived through the events themselves or viewed them on the film clips that have become a staple part of the diet of American schoolchildren.

While many recognize the significance of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, few recall that the struggle began not in those years but decades earlier. Emerging late in the nineteenth century, the modern quest for racial justice was peopled by extraordinary figures, many of whom are now remembered only dimly or not at all. Black and white freedom fighters worked tirelessly and often at great personal risk to extract justice from the heart of a nation that had long proclaimed itself the source of freedom and democracy in the world. That the United States was unwilling to provide either to all its citizens was one of the supreme ironies of the struggle, a campaign that unfolded slowly but inexorably over the first half of the twentieth century.

To have believed early in the last century that schools would one day be integrated and legal racial discrimination ended would have seemed a case of hope vanquishing reality. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, it would begin to happen, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented the culmination of years of work. With its passage, and the enactment the following year of the Voting Rights Act, the legal wall that had stood for so long between African Americans and full citizenship came tumbling down.

The history of the struggle has been told many times before, often as the story of courageous African Americans whose collective actions forced a reluctant federal government to defend and protect the rights of all Americans against a system that had long denied justice to blacks. And that is as it should be told, for what finally compelled the federal government to act were the assiduous efforts of black Americans who were determined to end legal discrimination.

Unlike earlier civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, the legislation of 1964 mandated an aggressive expansion of federal power and represented a convergence between grassroots activism and decisions made on the national political level. For a variety of reasons both noble and pragmatic, the Civil Rights Act was supported by northern and western legislators, Justice Department officials, and the White House, all of whom responded to the words and deeds of civil rights leaders and activists who had worked for racial justice in the 1950s and 1960s. The law's passage in 1964 was the product of local efforts and federal activism. Neither by itself would have been sufficient, a fact amply demonstrated by decades of unsuccessful efforts to enact civil rights law. But together, grassroots reformers and national political leaders overcame formidable obstacles that had long made the passage of effective legislation unlikely if not impossible.

In many accounts of the civil rights movement, the federal government has been portrayed as either passive or, worse yet, hostile to the aims of the reformers. It has been said that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy were unwilling to kneel before the altar of civil rights and that it was not until Lyndon Johnson entered the White House that the executive branch demonstrated a genuine commitment to work for change. And there is much to commend this view, although Truman and Kennedy were considerably more supportive of the movement's aims than Eisenhower was. If Truman and Kennedy feared that endorsing civil rights would spell the end of their political careers or the fragmentation of their party, Eisenhower seemed at best ambivalent about the moral necessity of the domestic struggle. The former general evinced little willingness to lead the country toward confronting institutionalized racial discrimination in the 1950s, and just as white Americans preferred to maintain the status quo, Eisenhower was content to do the same.

The tape recordings made by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson open a new window onto the civil rights struggle. Although they do not invalidate earlier pictures of presidential uneasiness with civil rights reform, they do demand that we consider the obstacles two presidents faced in working for change. By allowing us to examine more clearly than before each man's commitment to the domestic crusade, these transcribed conversations reveal a dimension of the civil rights story that has never been fully considered, and they show that the White House played an active and constructive part in the quest for racial justice.

In highlighting the role played by the executive branch, the tapes in no way minimize the determination, skill, and heroism manifested by countless black Americans —leaders and followers — who helped transform the landscape of American race relations. The story of the struggle over civil rights should not be written according to the rules of a zero-sum game: there is not a fixed amount of credit to go around. Adding to the list of those who contributed to the passage of the 1964 bill does not mean that others need to be removed.

Until midway through the Kennedy administration, the White House was a reluctant partner in the civil rights struggle, as the President and some of his advisers viewed the demands of the movement's leaders as politically naive and even unreasonable. But that changed in 1963, largely because of the brutal events in Birmingham that May, which made an often apathetic country sit up and take notice. In response to the violence in Alabama, the Kennedy administration proposed legislation more sweeping than any federal civil rights reform since the 1870s, and while Kennedy never fully overcame his ambivalence about the bill, his reservations were political not moral.

But Lyndon Johnson would be different, for unlike his predecessor, he was wholly determined to do whatever was necessary to pass effective civil rights legislation. About this, Johnson was passionate and adamant, and he staked his political future on passing the 1964 bill. Had Johnson not made civil rights the number one priority of his first months in office, it might have been some time before Congress passed meaningful legislation. While Johnson has rightly been blamed for his failings in Southeast Asia, it is appropriate to credit him for his achievements on civil rights at home.

To be fair, the two Presidents faced different challenges, and the transcripts highlight different aspects of their presidencies. A substantial portion of the Kennedy tapes shows the President responding to crises, whether at Ole Miss or Birmingham. Confronted with dangerous and unpredictable situations, Kennedy did not have the luxury of careful deliberations, and his primary concern was to contain the chaos that threatened to engulf the South. Johnson, on the other hand, faced only a legislative crisis. The moral stakes may have been high, but violence and social disorder were not immediate concerns. Only in the weeks before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, confronted with the murder of three volunteers in Mississippi and the specter of a white backlash against the act, did Johnson have to contend with the same level of immediate danger on a civil rights issue as Kennedy had to in 1962 and 1963. Kennedy's ambivalence toward reform, therefore, may have been aggravated by his understandable sense that the South was a tinderbox waiting to ignite, while Johnson had the more straightforward task of dealing with a complicated congressional morass.

Both Kennedy and Johnson were political animals, who rarely made a decision without closely considering its political consequences. But civil rights had long been framed as a moral question, and those who led the campaign for race reform based their demands not on the ephemera of domestic politics but on timeless questions of right and justice. In the discussions and debates on the 1964 bill, the moral and the political were often merged. In the halls of Congress as well as in the Oval Office, advocates and opponents of the bill made it clear that what was just would have to be reconciled with what was possible in Washington and throughout the country.