Kennedy v. Nixon: The Presidential Election of 1960

7. Civil Rights and the General Election Campaign

135 7 Civil Rights and the General Election Campaign “I’ve got a suitcase of votes and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” —Martin Luther King Sr. after JFK assisted in Martin Luther King Jr.’s release from a Georgia prison As the presidential debates ended in rancor over Cuba, another event that attracted relatively little attention at the time influenced the presidential race and symbolized a rising issue that would loom large in American politics in the 1960s. The event was the jailing of Martin Luther King Jr. The subsequent turmoil over it injected King and civil rights into the presidential campaign and offered a portent of things to come. When John F. Kennedy formally announced his candidacy on January 2, 1960, he did not know who Louis Martin was. In fact, according to one observer, JFK was not aware of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Ten months later, Louis Martin was one of the individuals responsible for John Kennedy’s victory in the general election. Although it would be an exaggeration to portray civil rights at the center of the Kennedy campaign or the presidential race, it was becoming a major social and political issue. One of the important stories of 1960 is how John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon dealt with the race issue, of which the celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. incident was the most visible manifestation.1 In the world in which John F. Kennedy grew up, there was little contact with African Americans.2 Even as late as 1960, America remained to a large extent a collection of island communities, as the historian Robert Wiebe has phrased it. Outside the South and a few other areas, one could live and have little or no day-to-day contact with African Americans. The United States of 1960 was a country where long-distance telephone calls were still an adventure, where telephone exchanges still bore names, and where jet travel was new. Blacks simply were not a factor in the everyday life of John F. Kennedy or Richard M. Nixon. The Californian probably had marginally more exposure to blacks and other minorities in his years before 136 * Kennedy v. Nixon coming to Washington. The only African American Kennedy spent any time with was his valet George Thomas, who, according to Richard Reeves, had “literally been a gift from Arthur Krock, who had repaid past favors from Joe Kennedy by sending Thomas over to take care of Congressman Jack Kennedy.”3 Although both men possessed a sense of fair play and equal treatment, until they came to Washington in 1947, race was not a matter that impinged on their lives and thought. Even after 1947, it had minimal impact. Both Kennedy and Nixon were much more interested in foreign policy issues and Nixon in communist subversion. From their appearance in Washington in 1947 until 1960, civil rights was at best a secondary or tertiary concern for them. If John F. Kennedy had no particular associations with African Americans , he did possess a natural antipathy for discrimination, since Irish Americans had been the target of ethnic prejudice for more than a century in Massachusetts. When the future president ran his first race for Congress in 1946, he made a statement on behalf of civil rights. His pro–civil rights position was also part of his Senate campaign of 1952 against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. First as representative and then as senator, JFK took consistent stands in favor of civil rights. By nature and temperament, though, Kennedy was not a natural advocate. His celebrated detachment and lack of emotion created a gulf between him and both blacks and whites who felt moral outrage over segregation and discrimination. Harris Wofford reflected that Kennedy found the racial situation in the United States “appalling” and “irrational ” but evaluated any action of his on its political consequences.4 In 1956, JFK’s pro–civil rights position wavered. In Chicago, the Massachusetts senator came close to winning the vice-presidential nomination. In the convention vote, Kennedy received significant support from the South. This southern endorsement had relatively little to do with JFK and much more to do with the hostility to Kennedy’s opponent, Estes Kefauver, who was widely despised in southern political circles. Nevertheless, with Kennedy working toward the presidential nomination after 1956, the memories of the convention offered strong possibilities for winning southern votes. That required moderating his earlier positions and...