In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 14 The 1960 Election I DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR JOHN F. KENNEDY except vote for him. Another thing I did, however, was to give some advice to his opponents at one of the pivotal moments in the 1960 election campaigna moment that tested the willingness of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration to support Martin Luther King. Fortunately for me, but not for Nixon, the Nixon campaign didn't take my advice. In October of 1960, of course, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard M. Nixon. William Rogers was then attorney general. The deputy attorney general was Lawrence E. Walsh, who had been a federal district judge in New York. The assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division was "Ace" Tyler, Harold R. Tyler, who also later became a federal district judge in New York. The chief of the Appellate Section of the Civil Rights Division was Harold Greene, who later became a federal district judge here in the District of Columbia. He's the federal district judge supervised the divestiture of AT&T. Now, there we were in 1960, a couple of weeks before the election, and Nixon and Kennedy were in a very close race, an extremely close race. Rogers, who was a very close friend of Nixon, was on the campaign train with him, and the Department of Justice was being run by Acting Attorney General Ed Walsh. I got a telephone call to come to Walsh's office right away. When I got there I found Ace Tyler and Harold Greene also going in to see Walsh. We went into his office and Walsh showed us an AP [Associated Press] ticker tape. The ticker tape said that the police in Georgia had just arrested Martin Luther King at a sit-in demonstration and this was a violation of the 255 With All Deliberate Speed terms of his probation for a traffic conviction, and he was being held in jail. Walsh didn't say so, but it was obvious to all of us in that room that Walsh saw this as a golden opportunity to help Nixon if the Republican administration could get Dr. King out of jail. This would help the Republicans get the black vote. So, Walsh asked, what can we do to get him released? Can we file for habeas corpus? And I was the expert, the Supreme Court expert in the room, the civil rights expert, and they were looking to me for advice on this thing. I told them habeas corpus was out. Government couldn't file any petition on behalf of Dr. King; he would file on his own behalf. "What about getting him out on bail? What else can we do?" Walsh was getting more and more frantic and hysterical as the hours dragged on. We sent people to the library to look up cases we thought of. Was there any language in this case or in that case? And we couldn't find anything. My argument was that if we were to file some frivolous petition or other, we would just make ourselves look ridiculous, it would be transparently political, it would boomerang, and this wouldn't do us any good, it wouldn't do King any good, and so on. But Walsh would not give up, he loosened his tie and paced the floor, and we just sat there, and somebody would say something and somebody else would bat it down, and everybody was getting more and more frantic: and miserable about the whole thing, and King was still in jail. Well, it was time to go home, supper time, I think about 6:30 P.M. or so. I had been in Walsh's office all afternoon with Greene and Tyler. At 6:30 I had a thought. I said, "You know, instead of our sitting here trying to think of something now, why doesn't the president issue a statement from the White House, saying that he is appalled and distressed that Martin Luther King should be imprisoned because of his efforts to secure constitutional rights of American citizens; and that therefore Eisenhower as president had asked the Attorney General to look into it and to do everything that could properly be done by the United States government to assist in securing Dr. King's release." I said, why doesn't he put out that statement right away tonight, and tomorrow we'll take it from there, we'll see what happens. Walsh immediately said...

Share