The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)“Let the Word Go Forth”:
John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Rhetoricon Civil Rights during
the South’s Second Reconstruction

Yasuhiro KATAGIRI*I
Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, every subsequent president of
the United States has confronted civil rights issues during his tenure as
the nation’s chief executive. All of them, with varying degrees, havebeen compelled to face volatile racial incidents and to deal with theaccompanying public scrutiny and demands to address America’s racial
problems. Indeed, modern presidents since the Second World War havebecome one of the major focal points for civil rights struggles in thenation. And in these respects, John F. Kennedy was no exception.
Since his untimely death on November 22, 1963, the historiographyof President Kennedy and his administration has essentially manifested
two quite contradictory interpretations. Both published in 1965, twoearly biographies of Kennedy—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand
Days and Theodore C. Sorensen’s Kennedy—were penned by those who
occupied the inner circle of the Kennedy administration, knew the president intimately, and held him in high esteem and reverence. For a while
Copyright © 2006 Yasuhiro Katagiri. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Tokai University

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and at least for the rest of the 1960s, these two books solidiﬁed the favorable image of President Kennedy, projecting him as an able and promising chief executive who could have done much more for the good of thecountry.1
The following decade of the 1970s, however, witnessed the emergenceof a parade of revisionist appraisals of the Kennedy presidency—Henry
Fairlee’s The Kennedy Promise (1973) and Lewis J. Paper’s The Promiseand the Performance (1975) to name just a few. Though the speciﬁc subjects and the focuses of interest studied and pursued by them differed,those who found themselves in the “revisionist camp” generally agreed
on one important point—that Kennedy failed to move a reluctant Congress to materialize his advocated policies.2
The revisionist trend, claiming that many of Kennedy’s “promises”
were not kept, neither abated nor was abandoned in the 1980s. Having
studied the civil rights, education, housing, and social welfare policies
under the Kennedy administration, Alan Shank, in his Presidential Policy Leadership (1980), concluded that the president’s “overall performance . . . can only be rated as disappointing,” and that Kennedy failed
to take full advantage of his presidential powers. A similar conclusion
was offered by Herbert S. Parmet’s JFK (1983), where the author evenasserted that Kennedy had simply “capitulated to Congress.”3
To refute these protracted revisionist interpretations depicting
Kennedy as a mediocre president, many of whose domestic policies weredismal failures, the political scientist Irving Bernstein came out with hiscounter-revisionist work in 1991. Giving special attention to the progress
made under the Kennedy administration in the ﬁelds of civil rights, education, unemployment, Medicare, and the Peace Corps, Bernstein’s
Promises Kept contended that many of Kennedy’s campaign promises
were in fact on their way to achievement. “The naked conclusion is,”Bernstein maintained, “that [Kennedy] was a very successful” chief
executive, and that the revisionists were all “dead wrong.”4
To be sure, Bernstein’s excoriation of the revisionists did not deter
them from continuing to voice critical appraisals of the Kennedy presidency. While admitting that Kennedy was a “gifted” politician who had
to react to “events he often neither foresaw nor understood,” Richard
Reeves, for instance, offered his interpretation in President Kennedy(1993) that the president “never made a decision until he had to, and theninvariably he chose the most moderate of available options.”5

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While the Kennedy historiography seemed to be making an eternalinterpretive circulation—from the traditional interpretation to the revisionist one and then to the counter-revisionist appraisals (thus virtuallyback to the traditional one)—in the scholars’ task of deciphering how
effective the Kennedy presidency really was in carrying out his domestic agenda, a few welcome and important additions were made to thehistoriography in the early 2000s. Though it did not deal speciﬁcally with
the Kennedy administration only, Mary L. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil
Rights (2001) shed a provocative light on the impact that the Cold War
had on America’s civil rights reform in the mid-twentieth century.
Dudziak’s work was soon followed and reinforced by an equally persuasive study accomplished by Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War andthe Color Line (2001), and by Brenda G. Plummer’s edited work,
Window on Freedom (2003).6
As Dudziak, Borstelmann, and Plummer all suggested, those presidents who occupied the White House during the Cold War were constantly reminded of and agonized over the vulnerable fact that while
preaching freedom and democracy in its international affairs, the UnitedStates did not practice them at home, notably in its southern states. Under
the Kennedy administration, the nation’s struggles against the Soviet
Union and its Communist bloc for the allegiance of nonwhite countries
in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East kept intensifying. As the survivalof white supremacy in the United States became all the more discernible
in the eyes of the world, the nation’s diplomatic concern with foreign
opinion as well as international pressures both constrained and enhanced
America’s civil rights reform.
Also in the early 2000s, the Kennedy historiography began to include
some theretofore relatively unattended aspects of the Kennedy administration. Among them was an examination of the role of rhetoric in
Kennedy’s presidential leadership and policy making. As in the case of
Dudziak’s work, though it was not intended to be a study exclusively on
the Kennedy presidency, the communication professor Garth E. Pauley’s
The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights (2001) abundantly revealed the
intriguing world of Kennedy’s presidential rhetoric.7
In this paper, which is indebted to and builds upon the Kennedy historiography, I interpret President Kennedy’s civil rights rhetoric andplace it in the historical context where Kennedy endeavored to lead thenation in the early 1960s. By examining both the limitations and potential

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YASUHIRO KATAGIRIthat Kennedy’s presidential rhetoric revealed in confronting the nation’s
race issues, I will trace the eventful journey of his slow but maturing
understanding of civil rights and his administration’s cautious but
advancing policy in the same ﬁeld. Obviously, this article is not the ﬁrst
to advance the notion that President Kennedy was eventually, in themain, driven to civil rights legislation by a series of rapid-ﬁre incidents
on the civil rights front. It is certainly true that those events, as well as
the Cold War restraints and his uneasy relationship with Congress, dictated Kennedy’s course of action. But when he ﬁnally realized that the
problem of civil rights was not regional and self-conﬁning but was
national and all-encompassing, Kennedy strove to make the best use of
his oratorical skills in the form of presidential rhetoric—to inspire black
Americans, to deﬁne and redeﬁne executive and, in a larger sense, federal power, and to educate the general public and, probably most importantly, himself.
II
By the dawn of the 1960s, issues involving public school desegregation generated by the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education ruling and the ever-intensifying civil rights movement in the South, as well as white southerners’ recalcitrant resistanceand sometimes violent reactions to the movement, had already createdsome major constitutional crises. In September 1957, the ﬁrst dramatic
confrontation between a southern state and the federal government overschool desegregation occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas. Republican
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, ever since the Supreme Court announced its Brown decision, had assumed an evasive and at best, anambivalent attitude toward civil rights issues in general and federally initiated school desegregation in particular. But in the end, to protect theconstitutional rights of nine courageous black students, Eisenhower wascompelled to federalize almost ten thousand men and women of the
Arkansas National Guard and to dispatch some twelve hundred troopsof the United States Army to Little Rock.8
Having done that, the president now needed to explain his course ofaction to the American people on nationwide television. In addressing
the nation on September 24, 1957, Eisenhower based the vindication of
his action on two major mainstays—a theme of “law and order” and what
Dudziak has termed the “Cold War imperative”—both of which would

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later become the pillars of Kennedy’s discourse on civil rights during his
ﬁrst two years as president. Unless the president took afﬁrmative action
to prevent violence and restore peace and order in Little Rock, Eisenhower explained, “anarchy would result.” Rather than confronting the
Little Rock incident squarely as a national moral crisis, the president
anchored his argument on the “law and order” theme and his constitutional duty. “Mob rule,” he continued, “cannot be allowed to override
the decisions of the courts.” And along with this “law and order” theme
came the Cold War imperative. Devoting almost the entire last page of
his four-page-long address to it, Eisenhower reminded the American
people of the “tremendous disservice” and the “harm” that was being
done to the “prestige and inﬂuence” of the United States in world affairs.
“Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to
misrepresent our nation,” he cautioned. Finally, in an attempt not toincite white southerners to further rebellion, the president appealed totheir sense of decency. “The decision of the Supreme Court . . . affects
the South more seriously than it does other sections of the country,”
Eisenhower tried to appease the white South, “[but] from intimate personal knowledge, I know that the overwhelming majority of the people
in the South . . . are of good will, united in their efforts to preserve andrespect the law even when they disagree with it.”9In the end, Eisenhower’s “intimate personal knowledge” of the whiteSouth was proven to be wrong. The day after the president’s address, theJackson Daily News in Mississippi ran the shortest editorial that everappeared on its front page: “TO THE PRESIDENT: (an editorial)
NUTS!” Meanwhile, an anonymous white Arkansan, who identiﬁed
himself simply as “A Patriot,” composed a poem entitled “The Battle
between Ike and Faubus.” After denouncing President Eisenhower as arace mixer in Little Rock and revering Arkansas Governor Orval E.
Faubus who had stood tall to “uphold the rights of our dear ‘southland,’ ”
the poem ended with the following verses: “Old Ike had won and felt
mighty nippy. But God help their souls when they try ‘MISSISSIPPI.’ ”
And to be sure, the nation’s civil rights leaders were equally unhappy.
Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was one of them. “If he[Eisenhower] had fought World War II the way he fought for civilrights,” Wilkins blasted the president, “we would all be speaking German
today.”10
The trilogy revealed in Eisenhower’s address on the situation in Little

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YASUHIRO KATAGIRIRock—the “law and order” theme, the Cold War imperative, and theappeasement of the South with an appeal to white southerners’ sense ofdecency and honor—was eventually inherited by Kennedy in dealing
with the South’s Second Reconstruction. As strange as it may seem, however, these three themes espoused by both Eisenhower and Kennedy
were also adopted, used, and abused by the white South in a completely
different fashion. In order to defend their social, political, and economic
status and privilege, all of which were inextricably connected with raceand caste in southern societies, white leaders often appealed to “law andorder.” While portraying civil rights workers and demonstrators as troublemakers, instigators, and lawbreakers, white southerners generally
regarded those who were committed to the movement as grave violators
and usurpers of local racial autonomy. Southern white leaders also based
their defense of racial segregation on their self-proclaimed decency andhonor—a sense of honor stemming from picturing themselves as noble
paternalists who, in reality, degraded their fellow black southerners tosecond-class citizens or less. In addition, the white South had its own
Cold War imperative as well. Many politicians in the region blindly
resorted to the assertion that black southerners’ quests for social justiceand simple human dignity were nothing more than a foreign enterprise—the “worldwide Socialistic and Communistic conspiracy”—both directed and dominated by what they perceived as despicable outside agitatorsand race-mixers and worse, outright Communists and subversives.11
III
In 1960, when Kennedy campaigned for the presidency, he ran on afairly strong civil rights platform. As he launched his campaign for theWhite House, the Democratic hopeful talked about his image of the presidency at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on January 14.
Kennedy sought to inspire the gathered audience, telling them that as thenation entered a new decade of “the challenging revolutionary sixties,”
the American presidency would “demand more than ringing manifestoes
issued from the rear of the battle.” It would be vital for the next president, he went on, to “place himself in the very thick of the ﬁght . . . [andto] care passionately about the fate of the people he leads.” As he did sowhen he accepted the National Democratic Party’s nomination for presidency in Los Angeles on July 15, Kennedy also frequently criticized
Eisenhower’s handling of the Little Rock crisis, claiming that black“LET THE WORD GO FORTH”

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Americans’ demand to end racial injustice was “strained . . . by timid
executive leadership.” Meanwhile, in his second televised debate withthe vice president and Republican hopeful, Richard M. Nixon, on October 7, Kennedy emphasized that the future president “must establish a
moral tone and moral leadership” to guarantee the concept of equality
before the law. To be sure, his remarks on “moral leadership” wereimmediately drawn into a familiar theme of the Cold War imperative.
Equating the United States with a “goldﬁsh bowl,” Kennedy concluded:“We are a goldﬁsh bowl before the world. We have to practice what we
preach. We set a very high standard for ourselves.”12
Be that as it may, Kennedy’s eloquent and often acclaimed inaugural
address on January 20, 1961—a “familiar paean to Cold War freedom,”
to borrow the words of the historian Eric Foner—made no reference toblack southerners’ struggles at home. “Let the word go forth from thistime and place,” the new president inspired the American people, “thatthe torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . [whoare] unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those humanrights . . . to which we are committed today at home and around theworld.” There, Kennedy spoke about freedom and human rights in a
broad sense. But his focus was on international affairs, and he did not
mention anything whatsoever about the nation’s internal civil rights.
Once he occupied the White House, Kennedy sought to avoid confronting civil rights issues for as much and as long as he could. At the
March 8, 1961, news conference, President Kennedy was pressed by areporter for a clariﬁcation of his position on civil rights. “When I feelthat there is a necessity for a congressional action, with a chance of getting that congressional action,” Kennedy replied passively, “then I will
recommend it to the Congress.” The president, in the words of his two
close advisors—Schlesinger and Sorensen—was “abstractly” against
racial discrimination, but that understanding was “an academic judgement” rather than a deeply rooted personal conviction. “He considered[racial discrimination] irrational,” Harris Wofford, special assistant to
the president on civil rights, concurred, “[but] [i]t was alien to most of
his experience.” After all, there was little in Kennedy’s own world andexperience to create a passion about civil rights and thus to ignite signiﬁcant social changes in the nation’s race relations.13
In addition, the president, as well as his younger brother, Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy, did not regard themselves as moralistic idealists. Rather, they considered themselves as cool-headed pragmatists,

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recognizing in what areas and to what extent they could possibly carryout their administrative agenda, particularly those related to domestic
issues. As a pragmatist, the president was well aware of the political landscape which he had been thrown into. While Kennedy’s presidential
campaign had emphasized the dawning of renewed politics with his
youth, vitality, wit, charm, and challenge to antiquated racial and religious bigotry, the basic political alignments of the early 1960s remained
the same as those which Presidents Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had
dealt with. Which is to say, that Kennedy, too, had to hold together the
National Democratic Party’s diverse and fragile coalition of blacks,
white southerners, rural and small-town Protestants, and urban and bigcity Jews and Catholics. Furthermore, President Kennedy understoodthat many of the important items on his legislative agenda were virtuallyin the hands of southern senators and representatives on Capitol Hill,
who then chaired more than half of the thirty-eight congressional standing committees. The president knew that he had “no muscle” to stand on
a par with Congress. “I can’t [even] get a Mother’s Day resolution[passed through Congress],” Kennedy once lamented with much frustration. However ill-favored it was for the president, Kennedy realizedthat he simply could not afford to alienate such powerful and segregationist politicians as Senators James O. Eastland from Mississippi andRichard B. Russell, Jr., from Georgia by pushing his civil rights policies.14
In discouraging the powerful southern committee chairs—many ofwhom were rabid segregationists—from holding his civil rights policies
hostage to his other important programs, Kennedy was virtually compelled to rely on a heavy use of executive orders. For instance, his 1961
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States alone lists a total of
sixty-seven executive orders. A number of the Kennedy administration’svital programs, including the organization of the Peace Corps and thecreation of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (where the “afﬁrmative action” concept was ﬁrst put forward infederal antidiscrimination policy), were launched by these executive
orders. Even by relying on his presidential prerogative, it took a year andten months for Kennedy to realize one of his campaign promises. During
the second Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, Kennedy assured theaudience that if elected, he would take prompt executive action on discrimination in federally supported housing projects with “a stroke of the
President’s pen.” Almost two years after he took the helm of the nation,

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President Kennedy eventually signed an executive order on November
20, 1962, to “take every proper and legal action” for preventing discrimination in federal housing facilities. By then, however, the nation’s
civil rights organizations had had to remind Kennedy of his own “strokeof-the-pen” promise by “mailing him pens by the thousands.”15
In President Kennedy’s ideal world, there should have been no Communists overseas and no segregationists at home. But unfortunately forhim, his contemporary world had plenty of both. And while Kennedy
struggled to deﬁne the proper place of civil rights in his own mind andin his administration’s overall agenda, the president, as he had done during his Senate years, tried to focus his time, resources, and attention onworld affairs. Some civil rights leaders understood Kennedy’s conspicuously vulnerable position. Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP,
for example, saw the president as being “intellectually in sympathy withthe civil rights movement.” But obviously, not every civil rights leader
was as kind and sympathetic as Wilkins regarding Kennedy’s profoundlack of apprehension of and commitment to the nation’s race issues. Withharsh words, James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE), once appraised the president as follows: “Jack
Kennedy was . . . ignorant on civil rights in particular and blacks ingeneral at the time he became president.” And it was Farmer who ﬁrst
decided to focus the nation’s attention on civil rights issues by daring totest Kennedy’s willingness to uphold black Americans’ constitutionalrights.16
In the late spring of 1961, only a few months after his inauguration,
Kennedy came face to face with the ﬁrst constitutional crisis over black
civil rights under his administration when the Freedom Riders, who wereorganized by Farmer, headed for Mississippi determined to make racial
desegregation in interstate travel facilities a reality. But before the Riders
reached Mississippi, they had received violent “welcomes” from thelocal white mobs at Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery in
Alabama. The violence against the Freedom Riders suddenly became thecenter of national and international press coverage. While Attorney
General Kennedy tried to move the Freedom Riders out of Alabama as
quickly as possible, he pleaded with them for a “cooling-off ” period.
Both dismayed and outraged, Farmer told a reporter: “We had been cooling off for 100 years [since the Emancipation Proclamation]. If we got
any cooler[,] we’d be in a deep freeze.”17
The president was embarrassed and angered by the Freedom Riders’272

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persistent posture. The disaster and debacle of the Bay of Pigs invasionin Cuba had seriously spoiled his reputation only a few weeks earlier,and now Kennedy was preparing for his ﬁrst presidential overseas trip
to meet Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev at a summit conference tobe held in Vienna. The white Alabamians’ violent reactions and resistance that greeted the nonviolent Freedom Riders and the accompanying international attention could not possibly help the president, who wasthen desperate to prove himself to be “a conﬁdent and accomplishedworld leader.” “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses!,” Kennedy
vented his frustration on Civil Rights Advisor Wofford at the WhiteHouse. Having less than two weeks to attend the face-to-face conferencewith the leader of the Communist bloc, the president felt that he wasbeing “nagged and nitpicked and nibbled to distraction” by his own
American people—the southern blacks and the white liberals on one
hand, and the southern white segregationists and conservatives on theother hand. After all, those brave Freedom Riders, according to AssistantAttorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach, were considered “a pain in
the ass” by Kennedy, who kept calling the incident “this . . . civil rights
mess.”18
While Kennedy publicly and ostensibly made it clear at a press conference that he believed “everyone who travels . . . should enjoy the fullconstitutional protection given to them” and that there was “no questionof the legal rights of the . . . Freedom Riders to move in interstate commerce,” the president and his attorney general secretly struck a deal with
Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett. Their veiled agreement wasmediated by Senator Eastland who, as the all-powerful chair of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, once boasted that he had “put a special
pocket in [his] pants” where he dutifully kept a number of civil rightsrelated bills to prevent their passage in Congress. As a result, theKennedys decided that they would not enforce the Supreme Court’s 1960
Boynton v. Virginia ruling, which would have given the Freedom Riders
their constitutional rights to use any public facilities at the Jackson,
Mississippi bus terminal. In return for the Kennedy administration’s concession, Governor Barnett promised that he would make sure there
would be no violence used against the Freedom Riders. Though the president and the attorney general barely avoided bloodshed in Mississippi,
they ended up putting the Freedom Riders at the mercy of the local police
and judges by giving in to the state’s segregation laws.19
The day after the ﬁrst group of the Freedom Riders wheeled into

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Jackson, President Kennedy personally went before a joint session ofCongress on May 25 to deliver an extraordinary State of the Union
address. In his “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National
Needs,” Kennedy announced that he intended to “promote the freedom
doctrine.” “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America,
Africa and the Middle East,” he declared, “[and] [t]hey seek an end to
injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” The president asked Congress todouble the combat power and capability of the United States Army toprotect freedom’s “great battleground” overseas and to help him commence the race to the moon. But not to mention the Freedom Ride
incident, no reference was made at all to the “injustice, tyranny, andexploitation,” that black Americans were suffering from, in “the wholesouthern half ” of the United States. After all, the nation’s “race relations” were subordinated to the “race to the moon,” and civil rights issues
were not included in what the president termed those “urgent national
needs.”20
Thereafter, the Freedom Riders continued to pour into Jackson and,by the end of the summer of 1961, approximately three hundred participants had been arrested and put in jail. At one point, White House Civil
Rights Advisor Wofford suggested that President Kennedy go on national television and say “a few stout words” on the incident. But the president stayed behind, letting his younger brother speak in a televisioninterview that the administration had “no sympathy with segregationists,
but segregation is far better than having it decided in the streets, withbeatings.” In the end, Kennedy’s eloquence on civil rights revealed in
his presidential campaign could not be detected in the wake of theFreedom Ride incident, nor was his executive power enforced.21
As Kennedy’s ﬁrst year in the White House neared its end, the administration evaluated its domestic and overseas achievements. Surprisingly, the civil rights issues that the administration perceived as its“accomplishments” were listed as part of the document entitled “Major
Foreign Policy Measures Taken by the Kennedy Administration.” “[T]heorderly evolution of desegregation in the United States” had “had afavorable effect overseas,” the White House patted itself on the back,“[and] [p]rogress in the ﬁeld of civil rights and education have [sic] been
noteworthy.” The administration’s self-praise, however, did not reﬂect
the complex and volatile nature of civil rights at home. Though the president’s reticence on black civil rights and Mississippi’s honor were both

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preserved at the sacriﬁce of those brave Freedom Riders in the spring of
1961, the eventual confrontation between the Kennedy administrationand the white South was only temporarily spared.22
IV
As the anonymous Arkansan had ominously predicted in the aftermathof the 1957 Little Rock crisis, in the fall of 1962, Mississippi, once again,
became a major battleﬁeld for black civil rights over the successful
desegregation attempt by James H. Meredith at the all-white Universityof Mississippi, better known as Ole Miss. Only a day after Kennedy’s
inauguration in January 1961, true to the young president’s words,
Meredith, a twenty-seven-year-old black veteran of the United States Air
Force, set out to do what he could do for his country, his native state,and his race. Serving in the Air Force for almost a decade from 1951 to
1960, the native of Attala County, Mississippi, was in the military “topreserve and protect the rights and privileges of democracy” that he himself “didn’t in fact enjoy.” When he got out of the Air Force and cameback to his native state, where racial segregation and discrimination were
kept intact, Meredith was determined to do everything that he possibly
could to right the wrongs for himself and for his fellow black Americans.
Soon, breaking down the high wall of the state’s white supremacy
became his “absolute conscious decision.”23
After a series of ensuing legal battles, on June 25, 1962, the UnitedStates Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals directed Federal District Judge
Sidney C. Mize of Mississippi to order the University of Mississippi toadmit Meredith as its ﬁrst black student. Though the court had spoken,
the grave question, as in the case of the 1957 Little Rock crisis, remainedunanswered: who would enforce the federal court order? In the WhiteHouse, while Kennedy and his advisors were determined that Meredith
should eventually attend the university, they were also desperate to ﬁnd
a way to avoid direct military confrontation with Mississippi. Indeed,
the president was “very, very reluctant to use troops” and believed that“the one bad mistake Ike made was to send troops into Little Rock.” If
Kennedy repeated Eisenhower’s “bad mistake” in Mississippi, it would
certainly cost the president southern Democratic support that he thenneeded in Congress and might even ruin his bid to be renominated as theparty’s presidential hopeful in 1964. Thus, Kennedy preferred andsought a political solution. Accordingly, on September 15, 1962—two

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days after Mississippi Governor Barnett proclaimed that his “sovereignstate” would not surrender to the federal government during his statewide
television address, Attorney General Kennedy made his ﬁrst call toBarnett on behalf of his brother to try to seek a way out. It was the beginning of the Kennedy administration’s secret telephone conversations
with the Mississippi governor. And it also marked the opening of the
bizarre and tortuous process of their dead-end negotiation with Barnett.24
On September 20, Barnett personally blocked Meredith’s ﬁrst attempt
to register as a student at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. Two days
later, in Washington, D.C., Kennedy’s previously recorded remarks werebroadcast at the ceremony that commemorated the centennial of the
Emancipation Proclamation held at the Lincoln Memorial. “[T]he essential effort, the sustained struggle, was borne by the Negro alone withsteadfast dignity and faith,” the president said, “[and] [i]t can be said . . .
that Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves, but that in this century
since, our Negro citizens have emancipated themselves.” Placing special emphasis on the black Americans’ struggles in the nation’s long ﬁght
for equality and justice, Kennedy concluded: “Like the proclamation wecelebrate, this observance must be regarded not as an end, but a beginning.” Despite his noble words that the centennial ceremony signiﬁed a“beginning” to reassure freedom to all the citizens, Kennedy kept hoping
to avoid personal involvement in the Ole Miss affairs and a predictable
federal-state confrontation with Mississippi—Senator Eastland’s beloved state. In so doing, the president let the attorney general be theadministration’s representative voice. Asked about his thoughts on theMississippi affairs by President Kennedy, Sorensen, the president’s
speechwriter and advisor, concurred in Kennedy’s judgment “to stay outof it personally for the time being.” “The deﬁance [of Mississippi] shouldbe [construed as being] against the majesty of the United States,”
Sorensen wrote back to the president, “[but] not John F. Kennedy.”25
However, the veiled negotiation between the young attorney generaland the wily old governor of Mississippi did not get them anywhere.
Finally, on September 29, the president personally placed his ﬁrst call toBarnett from the Oval Ofﬁce. “I’m glad to talk to you, Governor,”
Kennedy tried to charm the Mississippi segregationist. But their ensuing
ﬁve-minute conversation was ﬁlled with chaos and confusion. Attentive
listening to the telephone conversation tapes recorded by the WhiteHouse and careful reading of their transcripts reveal a discrepancy
between the two deeply troubled chief executives, trying to achieve

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something unachievable. While Kennedy, as the nation’s chief executive, needed to exercise his constitutional duty to uphold and carry out
the federal court orders, Barnett had his own constitutional responsibility to abide by Mississippi’s constitution and laws providing racial segregation. “Well, now, here’s my problem,” the president got on to themain question: “I didn’t . . . put him [Meredith] in the university, but on
the other hand, under the Constitution, I have to . . . carry that order out.”
Barnett, meanwhile, began to make a plea for the president’s understanding: “[Y]ou . . . know what I am up against, Mr. President. I took
an oath . . . to abide by the laws of this state. . . . I’m on the spot here.”“[T]he problem is, Governor,” Kennedy also gave vent to his sentiments,“that I[’ve] got my responsibility, just like you have yours.” Later on thesame day, President Kennedy reluctantly signed the already prepared
proclamation document, federalizing the Mississippi National Guardand authorizing Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance to call out troops tosend to Ole Miss if it became necessary. A moment before signing the
document, Kennedy looked up at Assistant Attorney General Norbert A.
Schlei and asked gingerly: “Is this pretty much what Ike signed in 1957
with the Little Rock thing?” Assured that it was, the president went on
to subscribe his name to the document.26
As Eisenhower had done ﬁve years earlier, Kennedy now needed toaddress the nation on television to explain his course of action and more
importantly, to prevent possible riots on the Ole Miss campus over
Meredith’s registration. Sorensen later recalled that the president rewrote
his speech several times to make sure that the federal government “wasmerely carrying out” court orders and “was not forcing anything down
the throats of Mississippians” on the initiative of the White House. Using
the word “tyranny,” instead of the word “anarchy” that was used by
Eisenhower in 1957, Kennedy followed his predecessor’s “law andorder” discourse in his September 30, 1962, address. Reminding theAmerican people of the fact that the United States was “founded on theprinciple that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty
and deﬁance of the law is the surest road to tyranny,” the president
emphasized that his “obligation under the Constitution . . . to implement
the orders of the court” was “inescapable.” Having said that, Kennedy
had special words for white Mississippians in general and the Ole Miss
students in particular, appealing to their “tradition of honor andcourage”: “You have a new opportunity to show that you are men of
patriotism and integrity. . . . It lies in your courage to accept those laws

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277

with which you disagree as well as those with which you agree.” But forthe president, the Ole Miss crisis was not merely a national issue where“the honor” of Ole Miss and Mississippi was “in the balance.” Invoking
the Cold War imperative, the president reminded the white South that“[t]he eyes of the Nation and of all the world are . . . upon all of us.”27
Thus, imitating Eisenhower’s discourse in the wake of the Little Rockcrisis, Kennedy’s address ended up with focusing on the “law and order”
theme, the president’s obligatory constitutional duty, the Cold War
imperative, and an appeal to white Mississippi’s “sense of honor.” Andby delivering such an address, Kennedy made exactly the same mistakeas that of Eisenhower, where he merely perceived the Ole Miss crisis as“a legal contest” and “a problem of enforcement,” rather than understanding the issue as part of the whole country’s moral dilemma. By thetime Kennedy began his nationwide address, the campus riots had
already ﬂared up at Ole Miss. The majority of students did not hear orheed the president’s appeal to their “sense of honor.” And to subdue thenight of terror that had brought two deaths, some twenty-three thousand
federal troops were dispatched by the Kennedy administration. “Welacked,” Special Assistant Edwin O. Guthman to Robert Kennedy later
admitted, “a sense of Southern history.” Strained, the president wearily
asked his younger brother if there would be “any more like this one coming up soon.” The attorney general had disappointing news, telling
Kennedy that he “could look forward to losing at least one more state’s
electoral votes” if he ran for the 1964 presidential election. Alabama
would be the next battleground.28
V
On January 14, 1963, George C. Wallace, the newly inaugurated governor of Alabama, set out to make himself a renewed symbol of southern deﬁance in Montgomery. During his gubernatorial campaign in theprevious year, Wallace had made it clear that if the federal government,by its court orders, forced the state to desegregate its public universities,
he would defy such “illegal” orders “to the point of standing in theschoolhouse door.” After the debacle of the Ole Miss crisis, southernwhite segregationists had been in a desperate search for someone andsomething to cling to. And in January 1963, they found their “someone”
in Wallace and “something” in his ever-intensifying deﬁant posture. To
be sure, the southern deﬁance personiﬁed in the Alabama governor also

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renewed black southerners’ resolves to tear down the high wall of racial
segregation and discrimination. By the spring of 1963, over ten thousand
civil rights demonstrators—both black and white—had been arrested in
the former Confederate states.29
In April 1963, the worst racial and racist violence exploded in
Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been invited
to lead nonviolent demonstrations against the city’s racial and racist
practices. Public Safety Commissioner T. Eugene “Bull” Connor’s ferocious use of police dogs and ﬁre hoses to disperse the demonstrators on
May 3 gained national and international attention for the civil rights campaign, as well as for the ugliest face of southern deﬁance. King, who had
been arrested and jailed more than two weeks earlier, wrote his famous“Letter from Birmingham Jail” on April 16, where he made his forthright “confession” that he had “been gravely disappointed with the whitemoderate,” tacitly criticizing the Kennedy administration. “I have almost
reached the regrettable conclusion,” King painfully wrote in his dark jailcell, “that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s [sic] Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner,
but the white moderate,” who was “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” On May 4, when President Kennedy met with the delegates of aliberal political organization—the Americans for Democratic Action—in the Oval Ofﬁce, his frustration over the Birmingham incident was evident. “Birmingham is the worst city in the South,” the president did notmince his words, “[and] it is an intolerable situation.”30
While making Birmingham a major battleﬁeld for civil rights,
Alabama Governor Wallace was preparing to “toss the gauntlet before
the feet of tyranny” of the federal government. A federal district court,
as Attorney General Kennedy gloomily predicted in the aftermath of the
Ole Miss crisis, had ruled that the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa
must admit two black students—Vivian J. Malone and James A. Hood.
Alabama, then, remained as the only state in the nation whose higher
educational institutions refused to admit blacks. Unlike Mississippi
Governor Barnett, Wallace was a shrewd and calculating politician. And
having learned a lesson from his neighboring state’s desegregation incident, Wallace understood how far he could possibly carry out his deﬁance of the federal government. But at the same time, as in the case ofBarnett, the Alabama governor was not willing to simply retreat fromthe federal “tyranny” without a ﬁght. Wallace needed a little farcicalshow at the schoolhouse door, where the governor would be able to indi-

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279

cate to his fellow Alabamians and to the world that he was forced to giveup his campaign pledge to the formidable might of the federal troops.31
True to his own vow, on June 11, 1963, Governor Wallace stood
before the door of Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama campus, physically blocking the enrollment of Malone and Hood in deﬁanceof a federal court order by “standing in the schoolhouse door.” In
response, Kennedy issued an executive order, federalizing the seventeen
thousand-man Alabama National Guard. Three hours later, the commanding general of the national guard strode to the door of the auditorium and informed Wallace—his former commander-in-chief: “It is mysad duty to ask you to step aside.” The governor backed down, andMalone and Hood were registered without violence.32
VI
While June 11, 1963, marked the inevitable demise of “massive resistance” staged by Alabama, the “Heart of Dixie,” it also marked the beginning of the Kennedy administration’s full-ﬂedged commitment to thecause of black Americans’ civil rights struggles. Although he was eventually forced to order the Alabama National Guard into federal service,
now with the two black students having safely been enrolled at the university, Kennedy no longer needed to explain his action to the nation.
But the president, seeing the occasion as an important and appropriate
moment, decided to address the nation on the most pressing domestic
issue—civil rights. Going on national television, Kennedy did not wantto merely “explain” what had happened on that day. Rather, he wished
to “talk about” civil rights to the American people. After all, the Freedom
Ride incident, the Ole Miss crisis, the white violence against thenonviolent protesters in Birmingham, and Governor Wallace’s deﬁant
stand “in the schoolhouse door” all had shown the president “how stubborn, savage, [and] deeply rooted” the nation’s racial problems were.
Kennedy’s close advisors, however, disagreed with the president.
Special Assistants Kenneth P. O’Donnell and Lawrence E. O’Brien did
not believe that Kennedy should personally get involved in the matter.
Sorensen, who had suggested that the president stay out of the Ole Miss
crisis in the previous year, was simply dubious. Attorney General
Kennedy was virtually the only one who strongly urged his brother toaddress the nation. Nonetheless, Sorensen immediately began to workon the president’s speech. The time was running short, and Kennedy

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YASUHIRO KATAGIRI

actually would have to wholly extemporize the concluding part of his
address.33
In fact, in the span of just two days in June 1963, Kennedy gave two
major addresses that would be long remembered: one on civil rights andthe other on the quest for world peace. On June 10, the day before theUniversity of Alabama desegregation crisis, the president announced, in
his address delivered at American University’s commencement ceremony, that he and Khrushchev had agreed to start high-level discussions,“looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive [nuclear] test ban
treaty.” Close reading of this June 10 address, however, reveals that
Kennedy not only hoped to generate public support for the proposed
nuclear test ban treaty in world affairs, but also sought to make an important connection between world peace and human rights at home.
“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peaceand freedom here at home,” the president suggested. “It is the responsibility of the executive branch . . . to provide and protect that freedom forall of our citizens by all means within their authority,” he continued,“[and] [i]t is the responsibility of the legislative branch . . . , whereverthat authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate.” But that was
not enough, Kennedy reminded the audience, for it was also “the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights
of all others.”34
In concluding his remarks, the president got to the heart of the matter:“All this is not unrelated to world peace. . . . And is not peace, in the last
analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out ourlives without fear of devastation . . . ?” Throwing this profound question
to the nation and, much more than that, to himself, Kennedy was in searchof redeﬁning his civil rights policies. Though the president used thewords “human rights” instead of “civil rights,” Kennedy’s American
University address, which is often regarded and acclaimed as a major
turning point in his overall foreign policy, was in fact an early expression of the president’s June 11 address in the aftermath of the Universityof Alabama crisis.35
At 8:00 P.M., Washington time, on June 11, 1963, Kennedy went on
national television with an unﬁnished speech text that was entitled“Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights.”
Incorporating, for only the second time, the exact words “civil rights” ina title of his address and offering his impassioned moral argument on
black civil rights to the “American people” as a whole, Kennedy laid“LET THE WORD GO FORTH”

281

aside the legal and constitutional arguments that had marked his previous public discourse on the issue. No longer did Kennedy try to appease
the South, “explaining” his constitutional “duty” and “obligation” touphold “law and order.” Instead, the president now emphasized the moral
imperative that he and the nation faced. “This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone,” Kennedy said, “[but] [w]e are confronted primarily with a moral issue.” Another marked departure from his earlier
rhetoric on civil rights was made in terms of Kennedy’s overcoming of
the Cold War imperative that had prevented the president from grapplingwith the issue. It was true, Kennedy continued, that the United States
preached freedom around the world: “[B]ut are we to say to the world,and much more importantly [emphasis added], to each other that this is
the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-classcitizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast[e] system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?” Here, the president professed that the nation should confront civil rights as “a moral
crisis,” not because of its adverse effect on the country’s image in world
affairs, but because it deserved to be treated as an imperative issue in its
own right.36
And ﬁnally, revealing his plan to ask Congress to enact civil rights
legislation and “to make a commitment . . . to the proposition that race
has no place in American life or law,” Kennedy hoped that “every
American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience” about the nation’s racial injustice. “This is not a sectional issue,”the president added, “[but] [d]ifﬁculties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union.” His realization,that the malignancy of racial injustice and hatred was not conﬁned to theSouth, reﬂected the president’s slow but steady understanding of thenation’s racial problems. Legally imposed or not, Kennedy began to see,
the whole system of racial segregation and discrimination was no longer
the South’s “peculiar institution,” as American slavery was once termed.
In truth, with racism being a deﬁnite factor, the nation would soon witness the most intense and recalcitrant resistance to court-ordered school
busing during the 1970s in Boston—the political home ground of the
Kennedys.37
As promised, eight days after his historic address, on June 19, 1963,
Kennedy sent a package of civil rights legislation to Congress. The
president insisted that the legislation would be needed “not merely forreasons of economic efﬁciency, world diplomacy and domestic

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YASUHIRO KATAGIRI

tranquility—but, above all, because it is right.” In concluding his message, he had special words for the lawmakers from the South. “I . . . ask
every member of Congress to set aside sectional and political ties, andto look at this issue from the viewpoint of the Nation,” Kennedy pleaded,“[and] I ask you to look into your hearts . . . for the one plain, proud andpriceless quality that unites us all as Americans: a sense of justice.” Thepresident’s appeal notwithstanding, as later events would reveal, thosesouthern politicians and their white constituencies were far from readyto “set aside” their “sectional ties” and to abandon their cherished “southern way of life.”38
VII
Though Kennedy himself “did not indulge in comparisons,” Sorensen
recalled, the president “was not averse” to those who regarded his civilrights address to the nation and the following special message toCongress as “the Second Emancipation Proclamation.” At the same time,
Kennedy always felt that his “Proclamation” was going to be “his political swan song.” Five days after the March on Washington took place inthe nation’s capital, on September 2, 1963, the president appeared on
CBS’s television news program and was asked by Walter Cronkite
whether he thought that he would “lose some Southern States” in theupcoming 1964 presidential election if he ever ran. Admitting that his
renewed civil rights policies had “caused a good deal of feeling” against
his administration in the South and in other parts of the country, Kennedy
replied decisively: “I am not sure that I am the most popular political ﬁgure in the country today [and particularly] in the South, but that is allright.”39
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the president wrote
in early 1963, “was only a ﬁrst step—a step which its author unhappily
did not live [long enough] to follow up.” Neither could Kennedy live
long enough to follow up his own. On November 22, 1963, he wasgunned down in Dallas, Texas, in the most controversial assassinationin United States history. The remarks that the president intended to deliver to the dinner party for Texas Democrats in Austin on that fateful day
echoed his determination made on June 11 that he would continue “tomake a commitment . . . to the proposition that race has no place inAmerican life or law.” “There is no noncontroversial way to fulﬁll our“LET THE WORD GO FORTH”

283

constitutional pledge to establish [racial] justice,” Kennedy wrote in theundelivered speech, “but we intend to fulﬁll those obligations because
they are right.”40
Making sense of the 1960s is an important and yet unﬁnished business. Likewise, as the vicissitudes of his historiography have attested,making sense of President Kennedy, his administration, his hopes anddreams, and his anguish and despair is an equally weighty but incomplete task. “It was a long river, with many rapids, and the passage was
too fast,” Wofford, who served as Kennedy’s special assistant on civilrights, once recollected in describing the volatile decade of the 1960s.
And just as the “long river” did, Kennedy, who represented the era as
the nation’s chief executive, sometimes took wrong turns and inﬂicted
terrible damage to the country. The obvious discrepancy that existed
between the words and the deeds of Kennedy in confronting civil rights
issues in his ﬁrst two years as president clearly manifested his anguishand despair. Even the political scientist David Niven’s harsh words that“President Kennedy stood in the way of civil rights progress, delaying
and denying the rights of African Americans” might have some merit.41
However, in the ﬁnal analysis, having eventually realized his responsibility to chart the course of the “long river,” President Kennedy, in his
ﬁnal months, placed substance and ideals above rhetoric and political
expediency in the ﬁeld of civil rights, thus conveying his hopes anddreams to his fellow citizens. After undergoing a tortuous process ofmaturing and learning to deﬁne and redeﬁne the proper place of civilrights in his presidency, John F. Kennedy ﬁnally “[l]et the word go forth”
to fulﬁll his long-expected “moral leadership” to secure racial justice athome, simply because it was “right.” But his high resolves were nevergiven a chance to be fully heard, tested, and appreciated by what
Kennedy had called the “new generation of Americans.”
NOTES
1
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House(Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1965); and Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York:
Harper and Row, 1965; repr. New York: Bantam, 1966).
2
Henry Fairlee, The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973); and Lewis J. Paper, The Promise and the Performance: The
Leadership of John F. Kennedy (New York: Crown, 1975).
3
Alan Shank, Presidential Policy Leadership: Kennedy and Social Welfare (Boston:
University Press of America, 1980), 158, 263; and Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The
Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial, 1983), 353.

284

YASUHIRO KATAGIRI

Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 7.
5
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Proﬁle of Power (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1993), 19.
6
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold
War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001); and Brenda G. Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom:
Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003).
7
Garth E. Pauley, The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from
Roosevelt to Nixon (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2001).
8
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower
Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984),
192; and “Episode 2: Fighting Back, 1957–62,” in Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil
Rights Years series, Blackside, Boston, 1986, videocassette.
9Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review
41 (Nov. 1988): 61–120; and White House, press release, “Text of the Address by the
President of the United States, Delivered from His Ofﬁce at the White House, Tuesday,
September 24, 1957, at 9:00 P.M., EDT,” pp. 1–4, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential
Library, Abilene, Kansas, consulted Feb. 25, 2003 <http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/
dl/LittleRock/PressRelease924571.pdf> to <PressRelease924574.pdf>.
10Erle Johnston, Mississippi’s Deﬁant Years, 1953–1973: An Interpretive Documentary with Personal Experiences (Forest, Miss.: Lake Harbor, 1990), 71; “The Battle
between Ike and Faubus,” n.d. [1957], folder: “Circuit Riders, Inc.—Correspondence,”box 14, Myers G. Lowman Papers, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford
University, Stanford, California; and James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education:
A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), 82.
11Gaines M. Foster, “Confess[ing] Ethical Lapse,” commentary on the author’s paper
entitled “ ‘Because It Is Right’: President John F. Kennedy and His Rhetoric on Civil
Rights during the South’s Second Reconstruction,” twenty-second Gulf South History
and Humanities Conference of the Gulf South Historical Association, Pensacola Beach,
Florida, Oct. 17, 2003, p. 4, in the author’s possession by courtesy of Gaines M. Foster,Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Ross R. Barnett, “Oral History Interview with
Ross R. Barnett,” recorded interview by Dennis O’Brien, May 6, 1969, transcript, p. 3,
Oral History Program, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; Barnett,“Statement of Governor Ross R. Barnett of Mississippi before U.S. Senate CommerceCommittee, July 12, 1963,” record nos. 99–69–0–12–1–1–1 to 9–1–1, p. 2–1–1, Recordsof the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Archives and Library Division,
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson; and Yasuhiro Katagiri,“When the South Collided with the ‘Great Arsenal of Democracy’: Southern Segregationists’ Use and Abuse of American Values to Resist the Civil Rights Movement,”
The 39th American Studies International Conference: Rethinking Traditional American
Values in a Global Context [American Studies Association of Korea, Seoul] (2004):
197–210.
12
John F. Kennedy, “The Presidency in 1960: Address by Senator John F. Kennedy,”
Jan. 14, 1960; Kennedy, “Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States,” July 15, 1960;
Kennedy, “Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy: Second Joint
4

“LET THE WORD GO FORTH”

285

Radio-Television Broadcast,” Oct. 7, 1960, all at John F. Kennedy Presidential Library,
consulted July 11, 2005 <http://www.jfklibrary.org/j011460.htm>, <http://www.jfklibrary.org/j071560.htm>, and <http://www.jfklibrary.org/60–2nd.htm>; and The Great
Debates: John F. Kennedy vs. Richard M. Nixon, prod. ABC News, MPI Home Video,
Orland Park, Illinois, 1989, videocassette.
13
Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 280; John
F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” Jan. 20, 1961; Kennedy, “The President’s News
Conference of March 8, 1961,” both in Public Papers of the Presidents of the UnitedStates: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1962), 1, 157; Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1978), 287;
Sorensen, Kennedy, 529; and Harris Wofford, recorded interview by Berl Bernhard,
Nov. 29, 1965, transcript, pp. 10–11, Oral History Program, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
14
Makoto Saito, “John F. Kennedy wo megutte” [Of John F. Kennedy], in Kennedy
to Amerika seiji [Kennedy and American Politics], ed. Kazumi Fujimoto (Tokyo: EXP,
2000), 283–84; Hugh D. Graham, Civil Rights and the Presidency: Race and Gender in
American Politics, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32; Gerald
S. Strober and Deborah H. Strober, “Let Us Begin Anew”: An Oral History of the
Kennedy Presidency (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 287; and Andrew J. Young, Jr.,
recorded interview by Thomas H. Baker, June 18, 1970, transcript, p. 4, Oral History
Collection, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas.
15“Appendix B—Presidential Documents Published in the Federal Register, 1961:
Executive Orders”; John F. Kennedy, “Statement by the President upon Signing Order
Establishing the Peace Corps,” Mar. 1, 1961; Kennedy, “Statement by the President upon
Signing Order Establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment
Opportunity,” Mar. 7, 1961, all in Public Papers, 1961, 840–43, 134–35, 150; Kennedy,“Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy: Second Joint RadioTelevision Broadcast,” Oct. 7, 1960, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, consulted
July 11, 2005 <http://www.jfklibrary.org/60–2nd.htm>; Kennedy, “The President’s
News Conference of November 20, 1962,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of theUnited States: John F. Kennedy, 1962 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1963), 832; andKenneth R. Mayer, With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8.
16
Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 157; Roy Wilkins, recorded interview by Thomas H. Baker, Apr. 1, 1969, transcript, p. 2, Oral History Collection, Lyndon
B. Johnson Presidential Library; and Strober and Strober, “Let Us Begin Anew,” 278.
17
Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 299; Reeves, President Kennedy, 134;
and Strober and Strober, “Let Us Begin Anew,” 299.
18
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 159; Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings:
Making Sense of the Sixties (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980; repr.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 125; Reeves, President Kennedy, 126,
133; and Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 159.
19
John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference of July 19, 1961,” in Public
Papers, 1961, 517; Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission:
Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 87; andBoynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960).
20John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,”
May 25, 1961, in Public Papers, 1961, 397; and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters:
America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 477–78.
21
Reeves, President Kennedy, 133.

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Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 163.
James H. Meredith, “An Oral History by James H. Meredith,” recorded interview
by Yasuhiro Katagiri, Jan. 11, 1994, transcript, p. 14, ref. no. B-M559mo, Archives andLibrary Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
24
Nicholas D. Katzenbach, recorded interview by Paige E. Mulhollan, Nov. 12, 1968,
transcript, pp. 9–10, Oral History Collection, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library;and Strober and Strober, “Let Us Begin Anew,” 302.
25
John F. Kennedy, “Remarks Recorded for the Ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial
Commemorating the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Sept. 22, 1962, inPublic Papers, 1962, 702; and Theodore C. Sorensen to John F. Kennedy, memo, Sept.
28, 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, consulted July 11, 2005 <http://www.
jfklibrary.org/meredith/days_b_01.html>.
26
Item #4A1, dictabelt #4A, transcript; item #2, audiotape #27, audiocassette, both in“Integration of the University of Mississippi,” Presidential Recordings, President’s
Ofﬁce File, John F. Kennedy Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library;and Branch, Parting the Waters, 659.
27
Sorensen, Kennedy, 544; and John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the
Nation on the Situation at the University of Mississippi,” Sept. 30, 1962, in Public
Papers, 1962, 727–28.
28
Pauley, The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights, 212; Sorensen, Kennedy, 546,
552; Edwin O. Guthman, We Band of Brothers (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
181; and Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 325.
29
E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the
University of Alabama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 154.
30
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: New American Library,1964), 84; and tape #85, May 3–8, 1963, Meetings Recordings, Presidential Recordings,
President’s Ofﬁce File, John F. Kennedy Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library.
31
George C. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace,”Jan. 14, 1963, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, consulted
Apr. 2, 2003 <http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/inauguralspeech.html>.
32
Kennedy vs. Wallace, prod. Robert Drew, Direct Cinema, Santa Monica, California,
1988, videocassette.
33
Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 325, 343; and Kennedy vs. Wallace,videocassette.
34
John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University inWashington,” June 10, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States:
John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1964), 463–64.
35
Ibid., 464.
36
John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil
Rights,” June 11, 1963, in Public Papers, 1963, 469. The ﬁrst time Kennedy used theexact words “civil rights” in a title of one of his addresses was when he sent a special
message to Congress on February 28, 1963. See, in this regard, Kennedy, “Special
Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” Feb. 28, 1963, in Public Papers, 1963,
221–30.
37John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil
Rights,” June 11, 1963, in Public Papers, 1963, 468–69.
38
John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights and Job
Opportunities,” June 19, 1963, in Public Papers, 1963, 494.
22
23

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287

Sorensen, Kennedy, 569; Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert
Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (NewYork: Bantam, 1988), 176; and John F. Kennedy, “Transcript of Broadcast with Walter
Cronkite Inaugurating a CBS Television News Program,” Sept. 2, 1963, in Public
Papers, 1963, 650–51.
40John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” Feb. 28, 1963;
Kennedy, “Remarks Intended for Delivery to the Texas Democratic State Committee inthe Municipal Auditorium in Austin,” Nov. 22, 1963, both in Public Papers, 1963, 222,
897.
41
Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 3; David Niven, The Politics of Injustice: The
Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), xvi.
39