Walter Reuther, Civil Rights, and the Presidential Election of 1960

n the days leading up to the 1960 presidential election, the Republican Party resounded with a familiar refrain: a vote for John F. Kennedy, the fresh-faced senator from Massachusetts, would leave labour leader Walter Reuther pulling the strings.

Walter Reuther first became headline news in the spring of 1937, when as president of a local branch of the United Auto Workers, he clashed with Ford Motor Company security guards in what became known as the ‘Battle of the Overpass’.

Inspired by the sit-down strikes he and his brothers had observed across Europe, Reuther and the fledgling United Auto Workers had already scored some success organising against General Motors. Now they took their fight to a rough and ready Ford, which responded to a publicised leafleting campaign by leaving Reuther and his fellow union members bloody. Blindsided by Ford’s henchmen in front of the complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Reuther recalled ‘Seven times they raised me off the concrete and slammed me down’.

At the end of 1940, as the United States weighed its involvement in World War II, Reuther authored a plan which would utilise the unused capacity of the auto industry to produce as many as 500 fighter planes each day. The plan was discussed in meetings with President Roosevelt, and sparked debate well into the new year, praised by the president while facing pushback from auto and aircraft companies, who wanted the government to build cut-price factories while they remained masters of their domain.

Reuther elaborated his plan on radio, observing ‘England’s battles, it used to be said, were won on the playing fields of Eton. America’s can be won on the assembly lines of Detroit’. His ideas were put into practice one year later, when the attack on Pearl Harbor compelled America to action. More than any other city, Detroit became the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. On the fifteenth anniversary of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1953, President Eisenhower wrote to Walter Reuther and said:

‘When I last addressed a CIO Convention, I came to thank you for your magnificent performance in World War II in supplying the planes and tanks and ships and arms. You did your job, and you did it well’.

Meanwhile since 1946, Reuther had served as president of the United Auto Workers, now one of the most powerful unions in the country and a driving force sometimes operating with impunity within the Congress of Industrial Organizations. While racial tensions were never far from the surface among workers in Detroit, one of Reuther’s first acts as president of the United Auto Workers was to fight to end racial segregation in America’s bowling alleys. He befriended Hubert Humphrey, a future senator and vice president of the United States.

As president of the United Auto Workers and briefly Congress of Industrial Organizations, Reuther signed collective bargaining agreements with Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, including the labour-defining ‘Treaty of Detroit’. Though his early associations led the likes of J. Edgar Hoover to perpetually identify him as a communist, Reuther worked to expel the influence of Communist Party members inside the labour movement, prompting Humphrey to write:

‘Communist infiltration of the CIO was a direct threat to the survival of all of our country’s democratic institutions. The CIO’s victory over the Communist Party was a significant victory for our nation.’

Though Nikita Khrushchev took pains to distance himself from some of the excesses of Stalinism, when the Soviet premier met with John F. Kennedy in Vienna in the summer of 1961, he told the novice president of the United States of America, ‘We hung the likes of Reuther in Russia in 1917’.

* * *

Forging a relationship with successive presidents from Roosevelt to Truman and Eisenhower, still Walter Reuther had plenty of detractors. Whether it was opposition from inside the labour movement, battles with the big automobile manufacturers and their assorted goons, or political adversaries who lamented his liberal bent and civil rights advocacy, Reuther gathered enemies who were loud and sometimes fierce.

On the night of 20 April 1948, he scarcely survived the blast of a double-barrel shotgun which fired through the kitchen window of his home in Detroit, shattering his right arm and piercing his chest. Reuther received a blood transfusion at Grace Hospital, but contracted both malaria and hepatitis and struggled to regain the use of his right hand.

When Reuther’s brother Victor was almost killed in similar fashion one year later, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:

‘It seems unthinkable that the police have never been able to discover who shot Walter Reuther and because of that, in all probability, the same person perhaps has felt that he could get away with shooting another brother. We have a right to protect men who are working in the interests of their fellow men’.

J. Edgar Hoover, the staunch director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, no doubt disagreed with Roosevelt’s assessment. When the Attorney General Tom C. Clark requested an investigation into the shooting of Walter Reuther, the message relayed back from Hoover was ‘Edgar says no. He says he’s not going to send the FBI in every time some nigwoman gets raped’.

By the late 1950s, the United Auto Workers and Congress of Industrial Organizations had merged with the American Federation of Labor, and collectively the unions were under siege. A select committee formed by the United States Senate had fixed its sights on allegations of impropriety in the field of labour management. Many of the complaints centred around the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which had long carried the stench of racketeering and was now in the midst of a power struggle between Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck.

Hoffa was accused of conspiring with figures from the world of organised crime in his bid to unseat Beck as leader of the Teamsters. Chaired by the Democratic senator John L. McClellan, the select committee worked for three years, during which time it conducted 253 active investigations, served 8,000 subpoenas for witnesses and documents, held 270 days of hearings with a total of 1,526 witnesses, 343 of whom invoked the Fifth Amendment, and compiled 150,000 pages of testimony while issuing various interim reports.

Following stints on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations then as an aide to presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson II, Robert F. Kennedy served as the chief counsel for the McClellan committee. Beginning a dogged pursuit of Hoffa which has been likened to a blood feud, during the course of the hearings Kennedy was accused by the prominent Republicans Barry Goldwater and Karl E. Mundt of attacking Hoffa and the Teamsters as a way of covering for Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers.

Robert Kennedy refuted the charge in his book The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions, which was published in early 1960. In response to some of the more salacious allegations against Hoffa and the growing citations of the McClellan committee, the Teamsters were finally ousted from the AFL-CIO in December 1957. Hearings into the conduct of the United Auto Workers the following February produced no evidence of corruption. But the labour movement had been tarnished, and the link between the Kennedys and Reuther carefully construed to shape public sentiment.

At the climax of the presidential campaign of 1960, the Republican Party hammered down on the keys. Barry Goldwater had already called Reuther a ‘more dangerous menace’ than Soviet Russia. Now he suggested that the United States would not survive ‘four years of Kennedy, Johnson and Reuther’ as he assailed socialism and chastised the labour ties of the Democratic ticket. John F. Kennedy was described as Reuther’s ‘new boy’ by Arthur Summerfield, the Postmaster General and an early advocate of rocket mail.

As America prepared to head to the polls, the Republican candidate Richard Nixon got in on the action. The incumbent vice president had begun the election campaign as a strong favourite, but after faltering in the first of a series of unprecedented presidential debates, the wily Californian was now on the comeback trail.

In a final bid for the state of Texas less than five days before the election, Nixon cast aspersions on the integrity of his Democratic challenger John F. Kennedy. Nixon assured the American public that a vote for him would leave no special interests with back door access to the White House.

A vote for Kennedy on the other hand, Nixon indicated, would leave the presidency in thrall to the unions. Walter Reuther, who Nixon depicted as a ‘labor leader turned radical politician’, would be calling the shots with regard to economic policy and presidential appointments, including the role of Labor Secretary. Attacks on Kennedy’s youth and faith seemed to have fallen by the wayside, so Nixon sent out a distress signal. He warned the American people:

‘I can think of nothing so detrimental to this nation than for any President to owe his election to, and therefore be a captive of, a political boss like Walter Reuther.’

* * *

Back at the start of 1960, it was unclear on whose side organised labour would fall. Richard Nixon, vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower and canny political operator, was the presumptive presidential candidate of the Republican Party. He was fleetingly challenged by Nelson Rockefeller, who instead sought to influence policy from the margins after sagging poll numbers caused him to withdraw from the race. Barry Goldwater and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had declined to run in spite of media speculation. Lodge would become Nixon’s running mate.

The Democratic primaries were more contentious. Only three candidates ran national campaigns, but ‘favorite sons’ who ran only in their home states, and the nature of delegates susceptible to their own whims and outside influences, meant the outcome remained uncertain until the Democratic National Convention in July.

In the primaries John F. Kennedy’s main challenger was Hubert Humphrey, a civil rights advocate and longtime ally of Walter Reuther, who three years earlier seizing upon one of Reuther’s initiatives had introduced the first bill to create the Peace Corps. Humphrey officially withdrew from the race on 10 May after losing in West Virginia, saying that up against the glamorous and well-heeled Kennedy family, he ‘felt like an independent merchant running against a chain store’.

A third national candidate, the independent-minded Wayne Morse, scarcely made up the numbers, finishing behind Kennedy even in his home state of Oregon. Meanwhile ‘favorite sons’ Michael DiSalle, George Smathers, and Pat Brown took Ohio, Florida, and California respectively, with DiSalle and Brown tentatively pledged to support Kennedy.

Still despite dominating the primaries, Kennedy’s difficulties continued to lie elsewhere. National opinion polls suggested a three-horse race, between Kennedy and two senior Democrats who had opted to skip the primaries: Adlai Stevenson II, the losing presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956 who nevertheless remained popular within the party; and Lyndon B. Johnson, the rough-hewn Texan and crafty leader of the Senate.

In February the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of labour unions in the United States, indicated its preference for a Democratic president. Around the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, the unions had supported Stevenson in 1952 and 1956. Now George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, and Walter Reuther as president of the affiliated United Auto Workers, signalled their antipathy to the candidacy of Richard Nixon. Less certain however was their stance on the assembled batch of prospective Democrats.

In private conversations, the AFL-CIO indicated that it would be willing to support the candidacies of Kennedy or Humphrey. Less enthusiasm was voiced for Stevenson and for Missouri senator Stuart Symington, who like Stevenson and Johnson had skipped the primaries, but maintained the support of former president Harry S. Truman plus a number of delegates. Publicly the AFL-CIO suggested it would remain neutral if left with a choice between ‘tweedledum and tweedledee’. The tweedler in this case appeared to be Lyndon Johnson, to whom the unions were adamantly opposed.

In late February, the Eisenhower administration led by vice president Nixon met with Meany and Reuther to establish an action programme towards the employment of black workers on federal construction contracts. While Meany personally pledged to refer black workers, contractors and unions remained in disagreement over the source of the problem, with contractors alleging discrimination on the part of local unions in Washington, D.C.

The action programme was announced by a presidential committee on government contracts, established by executive order and lacking the force of law. Nixon said that the programme had ‘a good chance of making a breakthrough’ on behalf of black workers. But if the meeting was meant to foster a wider rapprochement between the Republican administration and union leaders, the project seemed doomed from the start.

In March, reports suggested growing support for Kennedy among auto workers, but Walter Reuther explicitly stated ‘I have no candidate for president’, adding that he would remain neutral until both party conventions were said and done. However he remained a vocal critic of President Eisenhower, while downplaying persistent links to the Kennedy campaign. Old allegations of bias continued to roil the soon to be defunct McClellan committee. Meanwhile union leaders estimated that 250 of the 1,500 delegates at the Democratic National Convention would be affiliated to the AFL-CIO.

* * *

In the week leading up to the Democratic National Convention in the middle of July, both Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson confirmed their candidacies. While Stevenson had consistently outperformed Johnson in the national polling, it was Johnson who posed the more serious threat.

The stalwart Stevenson, admired for his elegant oratory and for keeping the lights on in the early 1950s in the face of mounting opposition, nevertheless staled on the back of successive presidential defeats. Johnson seemed like a pragmatic option, possessing the stature and connections that came from serving as Senate majority leader and the capacity to unite the party with its traditional stronghold in the South.

From the very beginning of his campaign, Kennedy had faced a slew of criticisms, which centered around the viability of his candidacy given his lack of experience and Catholic faith. In 1928 the Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith – the first and only Catholic presidential candidate prior to Kennedy – had lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover with anti-Catholic sentiment on the ticket. The old charge was that Catholics pledged allegiance not to their country but to the Pope.

Fliers informed voters that Protestant marriages would be annulled and their offspring rendered illegitimate if Smith won the White House. A resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which in accord with its anti-immigrant rhetoric considered Catholics ‘alien’ and ‘un-American’, sent out postcards to prospective Democrats saying, ‘We now face the darkest hour in American history’. Smith was even resoundingly beaten in his home state of New York.

Kennedy on the other hand had managed to quell some of the concerns around his Catholicism with his decisive victory in West Virginia, an overwhelmingly Protestant state. His faith would remain a factor but no longer seemed a barrier to victory. The charge of inexperience, led by former president Truman, would prove more difficult to combat.

As his own candidacy crept into view, Lyndon Johnson redoubled the attack on Kennedy. Surreptitiously encouraging his supporters to pose the Catholic question, levelling furtive accusations towards Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, now Johnson traduced his opponent’s health. He asserted that Kennedy had Addison’s disease, a fact the family took pains to conceal. India Edwards, formerly vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, now co-chairman of the Citizens for Johnson, said that Kennedy would not be alive if not for regular cortisone treatments, and suggested all candidates submit themselves to a health test.

Yet as the sun rose on the first day of the convention, the path cleared for Kennedy amid scrambling behind the scenes. Telephone calls from the luxury confines of his white Cadillac and the diligent efforts of his brother Robert F. Kennedy seemed to rally a slender majority of delegates. Johnson responded by challenging Kennedy to a televised debate, while throngs gathered outside the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena shouting odes to Adlai Stevenson. New Jersey and Illinois were still theoretically up for grabs, while California and Pennsylvania wavered.

Hubert Humphrey released the delegates he had acquired early in the primaries, most of whom were expected to fall behind Kennedy. Stuart Symington held slim hope but maintained the following of around 100 delegates. His steadfast supporter Harry Truman stayed at home, complaining the Kennedys had ‘rigged’ the convention.

Most observers thought that Kennedy won when the debate with Johnson aired the following afternoon, amid an atmosphere of surprising conviviality. After Kennedy spoke for ten minutes, Johnson opened his speech by agreeing with ‘every word’ the senator from Massachusetts had uttered. He declared that neither religion nor region should decide the outcome of the convention. The pair threw several mild-mannered barbs, before Kennedy concluded praising Johnson’s strengths in the Senate.

Unbeknownst to all but a select group of insiders, Kennedy was strongly considering Johnson as his running mate. Johnson appeared to provide everything which Kennedy lacked: legislative grit and votes south of the Mason-Dixon. Johnson for his part proved willing to relinquish his role in the Senate for a path to the presidency. The sudden move risked fracturing Kennedy’s support among northern liberals, but there was a more pressing concern, and it came directly from the mouths of organised labour.

Bobby Kennedy, already wary of Johnson, paced the corridors of the Biltmore Hotel, made telephone calls, and joined close advisor Ken O’Donnell on an impromptu visit to Walter Reuther’s hotel suite at the nearby Statler Hilton. There the gathered labour leaders responded angrily to the notion of Johnson for vice president. United Auto Workers vice Leonard Woodcock spoke of betrayal, adding ‘our whole theme had been to unite behind Kennedy to stop Johnson’. George Meany echoed the cries of ‘double-cross’ and ‘sell-out’.

The unions threatened to nominate their own candidate for vice president, but Jack Kennedy never wavered. On the second day of the Democratic National Convention, the party signalled a big-budget commitment to civil rights. On the third day, they nominated John F. Kennedy for president. On the first ballot, he received 806 votes versus 409 for Johnson, with Symington, Stevenson, Humphrey, and the assorted favourite sons left to share the remaining 306 delegates.

The following day, the newspapers were left scrambling as the convention confirmed the surprise choice of Johnson for vice president. Soon the union between north and south was being hailed as a political masterstroke. Meany and Reuther reluctantly fell in line, communicating their support for the Democratic ticket to labour leaders in New York.

In the years to come, Reuther would visit the White House almost every week to discuss the Great Society and the War on Poverty with President Lyndon B. Johnson. But the strained events of the Democratic National Convention of 1960 cemented a lasting animosity between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy.

* * *

Congress had been preoccupied since the start of the year with the issues of civil rights and health care for the elderly. An editorial in The New York Times on 4 January set the scene, discussing the work of the Civil Rights Commission, the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, and ongoing attempts to desegregate schools despite fierce opposition in the South.

Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark decision of the Supreme Court, had since 1954 declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The ruling however did little to guide or enforce desegregation, until one year later the decision in Brown II delegated the task to district courts and local authorities, ordering them to comply ‘with all deliberate speed’. The language was interpreted by many Southern states as a license to postpone and prevaricate, less ‘deliberate speed’ than ‘at our leisure’.

In 1957, Orval Faubus, the Democratic governor of Arkansas, ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower intervened, sending elements of the 101st Airborne Division to accompany the students and uphold Brown, but a year later Faubus responded by shutting down the entire school district, a period remembered in Little Rock as ‘The Lost Year’. In Virginia, the Democratic senator and local party leader Harry F. Byrd declared a plan of ‘massive resistance’ which also culminated in the closure of schools.

Faubus and Byrd remained popular. In 1958, a Gallup poll named Faubus one of the ‘Ten Most Admired Men in the United States’, while Byrd received fifteen Electoral College votes in 1960, as eight unpledged electors from Mississippi, six unpledged electors from Alabama, and a faithless elector from Oklahoma preferred the segregationist Democrat from the South. The faithless elector from Oklahoma voted for Republican challenger Barry Goldwater as vice president, while the fourteen unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama selected Byrd supporter Strom Thurmond as his prospective running mate.

So it was perhaps optimistic when Thurgood Marshall, then executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was quoted in the Times editorial of 4 January suggesting ‘the period of crisis and massive resistance to school integration has passed’. Surely some southern white people, Marshall hoped, would rather ‘have some integration than no schools at all’.

In the meantime a federal grand jury in Biloxi prepared to hear the facts in the case of Mack Charles Parker, a black man who had been accused of raping a pregnant white woman in Mississippi, and was lynched three days before he was due to stand trial. Despite confessions and an extensive FBI investigation, nobody was ever indicted for the murder. And the United States Commission on Civil Rights, established by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, had published a series of recommendations around voting rights and desegregation in September, setting the stage as Congress returned for the new year.

* * *

Civil rights legislation was like a thorn in the side of Congress during the spring of 1960. With the Democratic Party hopelessly divided, especially in an election year the Republicans were happy to sit back and watch their opponents squirm.

On 12 January, Everett Dirksen and Charles Halleck, the leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate and the House, emerged from a White House conference with President Eisenhower to issue a challenge to the Democrats. Beyond restraints on federal spending, they wanted the Democrats to pass meaningful legislation on civil rights.

Though Eisenhower had won comfortable election victories in 1952 and 1956, since the 1954 midterms, the Democratic Party had controlled both Senate and House. A constructive working relationship between Eisenhower, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, and House speaker Sam Rayburn nevertheless paved the way for Eisenhower’s legislative agenda, while as minority leaders, Dirksen and Halleck became adept at playing internal divisions within the Democratic Party for Republican gain.

The Republicans could shop around for support on economic and social issues, or simply stand back in the hope that the Democrats would combust. As Congress entered a new session, civil rights legislation proposed by President Eisenhower lay dormant in the Rules Committee of the House. At the time the Rules Committee was made up of eight Democrats and four Republicans, but the Democratic representatives were neatly fractured, with four northerners and four southerners, of the type chastised by their opponents using the name of the short-lived segregationist Dixiecrats.

For decades Southern Democrats had acted to stymie civil rights legislation, briefly splintering to form their own party when President Truman adopted civil rights as a campaign issue in 1948. Now a civil rights bill was stuck in the close confines of the Rules Committee, and Congress was playing the blame game. Northern Democrats accused Halleck of conspiring with the southerners in exchange for support for Eisenhower’s policy programme. Halleck responded, chiding the Democrats for their apparent dysfunction in spite of their superior numbers.

On 17 February the Rules Committee relented and agreed to send a civil rights bill to the floor. The Senate had been engaged in theoretical discussions around voting rights, but with tangible legislation on the horizon, a rancorous response was led by senator Richard Russell Jr. from Georgia, a leader of the cross-party conservative coalition and a figurehead for the Southern Democrats.

Political cartoons by Hugh Haynie of The Louisville Courier-Journal and Bill Mauldin of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reprinted in the Times, showed Lyndon Johnson in one panel beating the drum of civil rights while straddling two horses pulling in opposite directions, and in the other Johnson trying to cut in on Nixon as the Republican candidate danced with the dishevelled embodiment of civil rights.

In Nashville, students like John Lewis had begun to stage sit-ins at lunch counters in nonviolent protest of segregation. A Times photo series on 6 March showed how such protests had spread to Raleigh, North Carolina and Portsmouth, Virginia while setting off two days of rioting in Chattanooga, Tennessee. George Meany and Walter Reuther would soon throw in their support for boycotts of chains which refused to serve black people at lunch counters. Back in Washington the filibuster loomed, and senators played sleight of hand via legislative amendments, while others attempted to water down provisions on voting rights.

In addition to federal support for desegregated schools and equal job opportunities, the legislation circling the Senate proposed the appointment by federal courts of ‘referees’ who would report on discriminatory voting practices. The Southern bloc appeared to be heavily outnumbered, and resorted to a record-breaking filibuster while wearing on their opponents through the use of quorum calls.

A quorum requests the presence of a majority of senators on the floor of the chamber, in whose absence legislation grinds to a halt. Southern senators checked into hotels under false names, and took to sleeping on couches or in cloakrooms and cots so as to spring quorum calls in the dead of night, the sort of endeavour favoured by Strom Thurmond, a master of the filibuster.

When the Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon attempted to collect signatures for a cloture petition, bringing the oratory to a close and calling for a swift vote, the Republican Thruston Morton of Kentucky ripped the petition into pieces on the floor of the Senate. In fact Morton was a moderate acting in favour of civil rights legislation, who feared a cloture vote would press the matter before a cross-party alliance had secured the necessary two-thirds support.

Eventually movement came from the House, which passed a bill on 24 March. The majority vote overcame the firebrand rhetoric of congressmen John Bell Williams of Mississippi and L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, who spoke of Confederate flags and straitjackets and bloodshed, adding ‘It won’t be long now before the official slaughter of the white people in the South begins’.

Against President Eisenhower’s wishes, the House bill contained no provision for the establishment of a commission on equal job opportunities, intended to end racial discrimination in the hiring of workers by government contractors. The bill did however incorporate many of the suggested measures on voting rights, including ‘referees’ who might report on discriminatory voting practices. And it contained some federal backing for desegregated schools, plus a section on explosives in the wake of attacks on black properties and churches, particularly in the city of Birmingham, Alabama.

The Senate immediately took up the House bill, compelled by majority leader Lyndon Johnson. After a series of amendments which took measures on explosives and the obstruction of court orders outside the explicit realm of civil rights, the bill passed on 8 April by a vote of 71-18. At the heart of the bill, federal courts could appoint referees with powers to act in cases of voter discrimination. Denial of the legal right to vote would now constitute contempt of court.

State election officials were obliged to maintain voting records for a period of twenty-two months, and the bill also bolstered the work of the Civil Rights Commission. Liberal Democrats swiftly decried the legislation as a compromise, wrought and won by the South. They bemoaned the lack of federal grants for desegregated schools, and the absence of any provision towards equal job opportunities. But their objections also served a tactical purpose, levelling a charge of complicity at Lyndon Johnson, who was still vying with Kennedy as the Democratic primaries gathered pace.

The bill returned to the House, where it finally passed on 21 April by a vote of 288-95. Echoing the sentiments of a growing number of detractors, Thurgood Marshall condemned the complexity of the process meant to secure voting rights, suggesting ‘it would take two or three years for a good lawyer to get someone registered under this bill’.

Making its way to the White House, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was signed into law by President Eisenhower on 6 May. Viewed as a symbolic gesture, too convoluted to impact the coming election and too fragmented to bring about lasting change, the act nevertheless added momentum as the civil rights movement gained pace.

* * *

On 30 March, President Eisenhower declined federal responsibility for the health care needs of the elderly. A bill introduced to the House by Aime Forand of Rhode Island, a longstanding health care advocate and New Deal Democrat, proposed comprehensive health coverage for people over 65 years old as part of the Social Security system. Eisenhower preferred a voluntary programme led by local governments and the states.

Three days earlier in Detroit, John F. Kennedy had made a speech at a United Auto Workers rally gathered in support of the Forand bill. He spoke of the 9.5 million people – three out of five Americans beyond the age of 65 – who struggled on an income of less than $1,000 per annum, lamented the rapidly rising cost of doctors’ bills and hospital stays, and admonished the Eisenhower administration for a lack of action.

He summoned the spirit of Winston Churchill, who fifty years earlier had spoken of descending into the abyss and grappling with the evils of poverty, ‘as sometimes you see after an explosion at a coal mine a rescue party advancing undaunted into the smoke and steam’.

Kennedy portrayed himself as the head of such a rescue party. He argued that the administration ‘would rather save its precious budget surplus, than save the health, the self-respect, and the economic welfare of our older citizens’. With a final flourish, he shone the beacons, saying:

‘Today in America there are those who would shut the door of hope on our older citizens, who would deny them the medical care which they so desperately need. But there are others who will not let that door be closed – who intend to fight for the right of all men to live out their lives in dignity and in health. That rescue party is on the way – and there are more of us – and we are stronger – and we will prevail.’

When hearings on the health issue commenced in early April in the Senate, Walter Reuther was scheduled as the first witness. In the event Reuther’s plane was grounded in Pittsburgh owing to bad weather, but his statement, read in front of the Senate subcommittee, raised a furor. Reuther accused Eisenhower of walking back promises to the elderly, prompting minority leader Everett Dirksen to shout down what he decried as a ‘stinking statement’.

Eisenhower, at the urging of vice president Nixon, moved towards a voluntary programme subsidised by the federal government, without any increase in Social Security taxes, with health insurance provided by private companies and the programme administered by the states. On 11 April, the front page of The New York Times portrayed intensive lobbying efforts and an influx of mail, even in the midst of civil rights legislation describing health care for the elderly as ‘easily the No. 1 issue before Congress this year’.

While reiterating the government’s opposition to compulsory health insurance as part of an expanded Social Security system, health secretary Arthur Flemming accepted that many older people were struggling in the face of high premium costs. As he studied the problem and civil rights legislation lay before Congress, the Times reported on 18 April from Washington, ‘Not much is expected to be done in either house tomorrow, because the Washington Senators and the Boston Red Sox open the American League season here’. It was the beginning of the baseball calendar, and Eisenhower was flying in from a golfing retreat in Augusta to throw the first pitch.

* * *

At the start of May, Nixon emerged as the face of Republican health care efforts, which would be limited to a means-tested subsidy paid directly to insurance companies, but still set the vice president apart from senior Republicans who remained steadfast against any kind of bill. Meanwhile the American Medical Association took up its familiar role on behalf of the insurance companies.

Back in 1949, President Truman had inaugurated his second term with calls for a Fair Deal, an ambitious series of policy proposals which included universal health care and expanded Social Security provision alongside civil rights legislation and increased spending on education. The American Medical Association led the opposition, branding Truman’s health care initiative ‘un-American’ and saying that his proposals amounted to ‘socialized medicine’. Now the association attacked Walter Reuther, accusing him of ‘seeking to stampede Congress into hasty and dangerous legislation’ under the guise of helping the elderly.

The proposal issued by the Eisenhower administration offered insurance to those over the age of 65 which would cover 80 percent of all costs exceeding $250. The programme would therefore only apply in cases of so-called ‘catastrophic’ illness. Arthur Flemming estimated that it would be available to 12,500,000 people, all but 3,500,000 of the 16,000,000 people over the age of 65, who would be excluded as high earners. Those eligible would pay $24 per year to subscribe, with the programme free for those already receiving public assistance. And the costs would be divided evenly between the states and federal government.

The administration was already calling its programme ‘Medicare’, a term coined by the media in the late 1950s when Aime Forand first outlined his health care proposals. Walter Reuther had been an early supporter, telling the House Committee on Ways and Means in 1959 that it was time to ‘quit fighting ideological windmills and deal with basic human needs’. Now Democrats opposed the Eisenhower version of Medicare, questioning its coverage and financial viability, still preferring to raise extra taxes through the Social Security system.

Predictably the American Medical Association attacked the plan for other reasons, arguing that most elderly people could live quite happily within the bounds of private health insurance. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, renewed the charge of ‘socialized medicine’.

By June the House Committee on Ways and Means had approved a more modest package, which would supplement existing public assistance programmes with smaller federal grants to the states. The total cost of the programme had decreased from a proposed $1,200,000,000 to $325,000,000. The bill passed a lopsided vote in the House, but Democrats hoped that the Forand bill might be resurrected in the Senate.

Allegations emerged against Lyndon Johnson, suggesting that he was willing to use health care legislation as a bargaining chip in return for campaign support. At the end of June, he helped to bring a modified version of the Forand bill before the Senate, which swiftly adjourned for summer recess with preparations for the convention season well underway.

* * *

Whatever opinions Walter Reuther expressed in private regarding the vice presidential nomination of Lyndon B. Johnson, in public following the Democratic National Convention he brimmed with support for the party ticket. After declaring his enthusiasm for Kennedy, by August he was even full of praise for Johnson, calling the Senate majority leader an ‘excellent’ candidate.

At the same time vice president Nixon, his position secure as the Republican nominee, began to cast aspersions on the close relationship between Kennedy and organised labour, suggesting the Democrat had already ‘paid the price for labor’s support’. Thruston Morton, who doubled as chairman of the Republican National Committee, called Kennedy ‘a pawn of party spokesmen and pressure groups’, condemning Reuther among the stream of visitors to the Kennedy home on Cape Cod.

When Congress returned in the autumn, Republicans sought new civil rights legislation, partly borne of conviction, partly to embarrass the Democrats and steal thunder from their post-convention civil rights plank. When Kennedy sponsored a minimum wage bill in the Senate, he was heckled by Republicans while Southern Democrats once more resorted to quorum calls as a form of protest.

Kennedy meanwhile restated his commitment to health care reform, which would remain one of the core tenets of the New Frontier, the plan of action first outlined during his convention acceptance speech. It was the twenty-five year anniversary of Social Security, and Kennedy patched up his differences with Eleanor Roosevelt, shoring up his support among liberal ranks.

With Kennedy and Johnson now working in tandem, health care for the elderly took centre stage in the Senate. Their latest strategy was to amend rather than scrap the bill passed by the House, which had the backing of the Eisenhower administration plus many Southern Democrats.

Eventually three competing proposals emerged before the Senate. The bill which had made its way through the House Committee on Ways and Means, now known as the Kerr-Mills bill, would be means-tested and offered limited federal grants. The amendments supported by Kennedy and Johnson called for an expansion of the Social Security system, paid for by additional Social Security tax. And a compromise introduced by Jacob Javits, the New York Republican, supported by vice president Nixon, was broadly in line with the original Eisenhower administration proposals, meaning no Social Security provision but wider coverage and a larger share of federal funds.

Health secretary Flemming offered tentative administration support for the Javits proposal, as the Senate headed towards a vote. But the various divisions within the Senate held firm. The Javits proposal was defeated along party lines, by a vote of 67-28. The social security plan backed by Kennedy was defeated 51-44, as Southern Democrats allied with Republicans. The Kerr-Mills bill was all that remained, and it passed by a resounding margin of 91-2.

A conference of senior Senate and House members quickly resolved any lingering differences, and the bill was signed into law by President Eisenhower on 13 September. Administered by the states, costing the federal government an initial $202,000,000 rising to $340,000,000 within five years, the law laid a foundation for the future expansion of health care assistance, but already it was assailed on all sides.

As the bill was passing the Senate, Kennedy discussed it alongside his efforts towards a higher minimum wage, saying that if Congress was not prepared to pass meaningful legislation, ‘I favour desisting here and taking the issue to the people’. Eisenhower made a relatively rare interjection of behalf of Nixon, chiding in the face of their substantial congressional majorities the continuing divisions between Democrats.

Kennedy made criticism of the new health bill a cornerstone of his election campaign, renewing calls for broader support for the elderly in the form of a substantial Medicare programme. Nixon also got in on the act, promising further measures after describing the new bill as ‘most inadequate’.

* * *

Towards the end of August, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations officially threw its support behind Kennedy, with just one abstention among the nearly 150-strong group of union leaders. An A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, could not justify an endorsement because he said there was not enough difference between the two candidates.

Walter Reuther saw plenty of differences. At least when it came to the failings of the Eisenhower administration, he could compile a long list. Domestically there were the ongoing disputes between organised labour and federal contractors. In an economic report delivered to Kennedy in August, Reuther chided the administration for what he described as deflationary hard money policies, citing rising unemployment and warning that another recession was imminent.

Directing his argument to minority groups, Reuther said that under President Truman, the average dollar income had increased 30 percent among white families and 45 percent among non-white families. By contrast under Eisenhower and Nixon, the unemployment rate among non-white workers was now almost twice the rate of the white labour force. Recent legislative efforts towards civil rights and health care reform had proven grossly insufficient.

The United States was also in the middle of a Cold War, and Reuther said that eight more years of Republican rule would ‘give Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev the world by default’. In fact Nixon had visited Moscow in the summer of 1959, and invited Khrushchev back to the United States, where he made a round-trip in late September.

Accompanied by Henry Cabot Lodge and beginning with the White House in Washington, D.C., Khrushchev visited New York where he met with Eleanor Roosevelt. In Los Angeles he lunched at 20th Century-Fox with Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, and flashed with anger when he was denied a trip to Disneyland. The Soviet supreme then clashed with Walter Reuther over dinner in San Francisco, before touring the Bay Area by boat and admiring the IBM cafeteria. Khrushchev brought his visit to a close with tours of farms in Iowa and steel plants in Pittsburgh.

Liberal policies at home and a reduction in conventional military forces despite the sometimes fiery rhetoric led to a thaw in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. For a time, space seemed to serve as the main realm of competition. The Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in October 1957, and the following year Eisenhower responded by establishing NASA. Lyndon Johnson had led the charge, but by 1960 politicians and members of the general public alike were still concerned that the United States was lagging behind in terms of international prestige and military technology.

Kennedy, who had coined the notion of a missile gap, pressed the issue during the election campaign. Framing his critiques in terms of national prestige, his slogans – which pledged to ‘get America moving again’ and described the country ‘on the edge of a New Frontier’ – could apply equally to the space race, missile defence, domestic rights, or economics.

Offering different perspectives on the United States’ standing in space, Nixon took a hard line against the Soviet Union, while Kennedy focused on the shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration, prompting a stern rebuke from a Republican ‘truth squad’ which had taken to following him stump to stump around the country.

By then relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had deteriorated markedly. In May a U-2 spy plane was shot down by Soviet Air Defence Forces, while performing aerial reconnaissance in an attempt to gauge the extent of Soviet missile capacity. The United States initially recognised the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but a few days later the Soviets produced Francis Gary Powers, who had been piloting the plane on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The incident occurred days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which was to bring together the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France for talks on disarmament and the division of Berlin. When Eisenhower refused to apologise for the U-2 incident after a public dressing-down, Khrushchev hastily left the summit.

As the election campaign progressed, attention turned towards Cuba, with fears that the country would fall under Soviet influence as the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro embarked on an encompassing programme of nationalisation and cracked down on internal opposition.

In September, Castro flew to New York for the General Assembly of the United Nations. After storming out of a Midtown hotel owing to a cash dispute, he and his entourage moved to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. There Castro held court, receiving foreign leaders and dignitaries like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, the civil rights leader Malcolm X as the Nation of Islam thronged the streets, and artists including the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and the poet Allen Ginsberg.

When Eisenhower snubbed the Cuban by holding a luncheon with other Latin American heads of state, Castro threw a lavish banquet for the staff of the Hotel Theresa. He said that he felt more at home in the historic black neighbourhood, among the ‘poor and humble people of Harlem’.

Most important of all, Castro met at the Hotel Theresa with Nikita Khrushchev, who made an elaborate show of his journey by motorcade into Harlem. The New York Times called their meeting ‘the biggest event on 125th Street since the funeral in 1958 of W. C. Handy’, the self-styled Father of the Blues. Khrushchev later wrote of the opportunity to make a ‘double demonstration’, against the discriminatory racial policies of the United States while showing Soviet favouritism towards Cuba.

Castro and Khrushchev reciprocated the applause when they delivered their speeches to the United Nations. Eisenhower had opened the session with a conciliatory tone, but Khrushchev upbraided the West and demanded the ouster of secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, before Castro spent four and a half hours condemning American aggression towards Cuba, in a speech which remains a General Assembly record.

A few weeks later as the session drew to a close, Khrushchev brandished his shoe to interrupt a statement by the Philippine delegation. The visits of Castro and Khrushchev to New York helped to elevate foreign policy as a leading concern among voters heading into the election.

Wading readily into the international arena, while Khrushchev remained in New York, Walter Reuther was one of fourteen signatories of a statement condemning ‘the continued spiritual liquidation of the Jews’ in the Soviet Union. But as the election approached, the president of the United Auto Workers kept his sights firmly fixed on domestic matters.

* * *

Beyond civil rights issues, the Republican Party saw in the candidacy of Kennedy an opportunity to make waves in the South. Following the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws enacted by white Southern Democrats had helped to maintain a Democratic stranglehold over what became known as the ‘Solid South’. Prior to 1948, Democratic candidates had dominated the South in every presidential election with the exception of Al Smith in 1928, amid a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment.

Like Smith before him, Kennedy was a Catholic of Irish heritage, born and raised and closely identified with political currents in the North. Civil rights issues continued to stretch the political divide, but the South was also more strongly Protestant, and tended to be more isolationist in matters of foreign policy, while domestically favouring small government spending and opposing organised labour groups.

In 1948, the civil rights platform adopted by President Truman led to the rise and fall of the segregationist Dixiecrats. Democrats from the Deep South, angered by an executive order which sought to end discrimination in the armed forces, pledging themselves in the name of states’ rights, selected the Democratic governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond to run against the sitting president. Thurmond won in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, while Truman carried the rest of the South. But Democratic hegemony south of the Mason-Dixon was beginning to crack.

Eisenhower won a growing number of Southern states in 1952 and 1956, as the public remained enamoured with the five-star war general, who served as a moderate Republican after initially being courted by the Democrats. By 1960, the Catholic question, another Democratic nominee hailing from the distant North, and fretting over the budget deficit in addition to civil rights issues meant that everything was to play for in the South.

Yet Nixon never targeted Kennedy’s Catholicism. In this instance the dogged Californian – from the Checkers speech to Watergate known for his political posturing and dark machinations – remained principled beyond reproach. Back in May, in the midst of health care discussions, Nixon responded to the religious question by praising Kennedy’s service in war and peace. He said that from personal experience he knew the senator from Massachusetts would ‘put his country and the Constitution above other considerations’, adding that both men shared a ‘basic belief in God’.

Outside of the Nixon campaign, Kennedy’s Catholic background remained a popular concern and a subject of sometimes fiery debate. On 7 September, a group of 150 Protestant ministers and laymen led by Norman Vincent Peale issued a statement which said that religion would be a ‘major factor’ in the election, calling it ‘inconceivable that a Roman Catholic president would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies with respect to foreign interests’.

Peale and the gathered Protestant leaders even suggested that the election of a Catholic might bring an end to the freedom of speech. The statement was swiftly condemned by major politicians including Harry Truman, and by liberal theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr. At the same time President Eisenhower independently denounced the religious question, saying that he and Nixon had long since agreed not to raise the issue on the campaign trail.

Then in the middle of September, Kennedy accepted an invitation to speak in front of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a bastion of the Presbyterian faith. The Kennedy campaign had already begun sending out memorandums, but the speech in Houston became their candidate’s definitive statement on the separation of church and state. Kennedy said:

‘I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as president – on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling, or any other subject – I will make my decision in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.’

Kennedy’s appearance in Houston was well received, and did much to quell the religious issue. The unprecedented series of four nationally televised debates which brought the presidential campaign to a climax served to further humanise the senator from Massachusetts, scarcely touching upon religion.

* * *

In the run-up to the first debate in Chicago on 26 September, the established print media remained scornful of the whole enterprise. They feared the televised debates would serve ‘more for entertainment than enlightenment’, intimating that they would pale in comparison to the seven meetings in 1858 between Senate challengers Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Those debates, which centred upon slavery in the United States, succeeded in raising the national profile of Lincoln, and remained the benchmark for close argumentation and handsome rhetoric.

Kennedy launched into the first debate in Chicago with an attack on the foreign policy failures of the Eisenhower administration. As the broadcast was watched from home by approximately 70 million Americans, Nixon appeared gaunt and pale. The vice president had barely recovered from an enforced stay at Walter Reed Hospital after injuring his knee on a car door and contracting a staph infection, and in the race to catch up, had been busily campaigning hours before the start of the debate.

The candidates discussed farm policy and the minimum wage in addition to foreign affairs, economic growth, and taxes. Nixon repeated the familiar assertion that Kennedy was too inexperienced to become president. Reviewing the debate, The New York Times suggested that the candidates had been mostly concerned with ‘image projection’, noting that Nixon appeared ‘wearing pancake makeup to cover his dark beard’ and ‘dabbed frequently at the perspiration that beaded out on his chin’.

The historian Henry Steele Commager was more pointed, warning ‘televised press conferences in future campaigns could be a disaster’. ‘The present formula of TV debate is designed to corrupt the public judgement and, eventually, the whole political process’, he wrote, adding ‘The American presidency is too great an office to be subjected to the indignity’.

Voters were just as likely to relish the opportunity to see the presidential candidates up close, while in contrast to reams of print, the debates offered accessible summations of policy. The first debate has become legendary for the perception that Nixon won among most radio listeners, while television viewers preferred the bronzed and charismatic Kennedy. That account lacks supporting evidence, but national polls and internal surveys among Democrats showed a crucial shift towards the younger candidate.

Nixon had been warned off the debates by his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, who saw no advantage in exposure for the sitting vice president. At the end of the first debate, Nixon was reportedly called by his mother, who asked if he was unwell, while Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley said ‘My God, they’ve embalmed him before he even died’ and the Chicago Daily News asked ‘Was Nixon Sabotaged by TV Makeup Artist?’

Ahead of the second debate, Nixon turned down the thermostat to avoid sweating. The remaining debates were watched by smaller audiences of around 60 million people, so that by the end of the four debates, approximately 115 million Americans had seen some of the spectacle as it unfolded before them on television.

The candidates clashed over Cuba and the administration’s handling of the U-2 incident, talked national prestige and nuclear testing, and offered differing perspectives on civil rights and labour disputes. But much of their time was spent arguing over Quemoy and Matsu, two small islands a few miles off the Chinese mainland, which were at the centre of a Cold War dispute between China and United States ally Taiwan. Having fallen behind after the first debate, Nixon steadily made up ground.

* * *

Between debates on 12 October, it was Kennedy’s turn to visit Harlem and the Hotel Theresa. Speaking in front of the hotel alongside his wife Jackie Kennedy, the venerable Eleanor Roosevelt, Harlem representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and the activist and future congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Kennedy gestured towards the potential of the United States as a symbol of liberty and contrasted his and Nixon’s records on civil rights.

Advocating for an increase in the minimum wage, Kennedy issued a clarion call for equal opportunities, describing the disadvantages black Americans faced in the realms of education, housing, and employment. ‘We want to build a stronger America’, he said, meaning ‘We want to provide equality of opportunity for that child and that child’. He concluded with a push to get out the vote, closing:

‘So I come to Harlem today to ask you to join us, to register this week, to vote, to stand for progress, to move, to go forward, until the United States achieves this great goal of practicing what it preaches.’

One week later, Martin Luther King Jr. was among the fifty-two activists arrested for engaging in sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters across downtown Atlanta. While some of the group saw their charges dismissed, King was held for violating probation in relation to an earlier traffic offence, and was sentenced to six months of hard labour. Both presidential candidates saw the incident as an opening as they raced to secure the black vote.

Nixon asked Eisenhower for a presidential pardon, but when Eisenhower declined, Nixon sat on his hands, unwilling to stir up a fuss. His silence dismayed even some of his keenest supporters, including Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the colour line and become a Major League Baseball star. Robinson visited Nixon to plead King’s case, and reportedly left the ten-minute meeting with tears of frustration in his eyes.

Kennedy showed cannier instincts. Though there were concerns among some of his closest advisors that he would appear to be grandstanding, further damaging his prospects among white Democrats in the South, Kennedy nevertheless worked to secure King’s release. He made a private phone call to the Democratic governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver, and while Robert Kennedy continued to battle behind the scenes, now Jack telephoned King’s wife Coretta, at the time pregnant with the couple’s third child. Expressing his concern, Kennedy pledged his support for King.

There had been lingering doubts around Kennedy’s commitment to the civil rights issue. During the Democratic primaries, he had been forced to contend with Hubert Humphrey, who had made his name at the 1948 convention in the face of Southern opposition with a rousing speech in favour of civil rights. Kennedy had declined to participate in the District of Columbia primary owing to Humphrey’s support there among the African American electorate. Instead in the lead-up to their decisive encounter in West Virginia, Kennedy had combated the religious question by accusing Humphrey of dodging the draft.

In the shadows of the Democratic National Convention in July, Vandiver had secured a commitment from Kennedy in exchange for the governor’s support. Kennedy promised Vandiver that as president, he would never send federal troops into Georgia to enforce the integration of schools.

As news of the telephone call to Coretta Scott King trickled out to the press, some Kennedy advisors feared it would cost him the election. Instead amid growing pressure, Martin Luther King Jr. was released from Reidsville State Prison the next day. When he stepped off the plane back in Atlanta, he told reporters, ‘I understand from very reliable sources that Senator Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible. For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency’.

King was committed to impartiality in the forthcoming election, and therefore would not explicitly endorse Kennedy. His father Martin Luther King Sr. had no such qualms. In his autobiography, King wrote of his disappointment in Nixon, who he had known longer given the former Californian senator’s long stint as vice president. Martin Luther King Sr. in turn regarded himself as a Nixon supporter, while instinctively scorning the idea of a Catholic president. But when Kennedy intervened on his son’s behalf, Martin Luther King Sr. publicly switched sides.

The Associated Press dispatched Kennedy’s words of comfort to Coretta Scott King across the nation. The Chicago Defender, a black institution, printed a photo of King being embraced by his family under a headline which read ‘Hail Sen. Kennedy’s Role in Cleric’s Release’. The New York Post sent reporters into Harlem who found residents indignant over Nixon’s refusal to even comment on the case.

All things being equal, King thought that he probably would have endorsed Kennedy prior to the presidential election of 1964. Arrested twenty-nine times for a series of nonviolent protests, during one of his toughest spells behind bars King composed the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’.

The open letter, written in April 1963, argued that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and embark on direct action in the name of civil rights. Before the letter was published in full later that summer, King and his fellow protesters received bail at a cost of $160,000, paid for by Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers.

* * *

Kennedy and Nixon received timely boosts as Harry Truman, the former president and Kennedy critic, agreed to stump coast to coast for the Democratic campaign, while President Eisenhower belatedly put to one side his sometimes frosty relations with Nixon. In his strongest words since the party conventions in July, Eisenhower accused Kennedy of downgrading the image of the United States, beating the campaign trail in late October with ten days to go before the election.

Proposals for a fifth presidential debate were nixed as the candidates disagreed over prospective topics and negotiating practices. Meanwhile tempers over the Cold War came to a boil.

The Eisenhower administration had just imposed an economic embargo on Cuba as the nationalisation of private enterprise gathered pace. As the two countries issued complaints and indictments through the United Nations, media outlets in the United States reported on the execution of American citizens while Cuba repeatedly accused the United States of economic and military aggression. The embargo would cover everything but medical supplies and foodstuffs.

Cuba swiftly retaliated to the embargo by nationalising another 166 American enterprises, seizing the assets of companies including Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Coca-Cola. Absent another debate, the presidential candidates grappled with the matter through the press. In a statement Kennedy urged American aid for Cuban ‘fighters for freedom’, prompting Nixon to lament his opponent’s ‘shockingly reckless proposal’, which he said might lead to a third World War.

The Cubans continued to allege clandestine military action, scorned by the United States who accused the Castro regime of engaging in an ‘invasion hoax’. Yet secretly back in March, Eisenhower had allocated more than $13 million to the Central Intelligence Agency for a programme of covert action in Cuba. Its explicit aim was ‘to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S. in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention’.

The programme proposed a mixture of propaganda, covert intelligence, the development of paramilitary forces outside of Cuba, and logistic support for military operations on the island. So far this had entailed the training of small groups of rebels in Florida and Mexico City, supply drops into Cuba, and the early stages of an assassination plot involving Mafia figures and poison pills. Further details in the attempt to oust Castro would be subject to the approval of Eisenhower’s successor.

* * *

From a position of strength as the senior candidate at the time of the party conventions, now the embargo on Cuba and a strong stance over Quemoy and Matsu were helping Nixon claw his way back into the race.

Both candidates continued to straddle the North-South divide while seeking to court the growing black electorate. Where Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, and poll tax and property requirements had failed in the act of suppression, it was an electorate which since the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had tended towards the Democrats.

The Kennedy campaign hoped to rectify the sizeable shift which had occurred during the Eisenhower administration, shoring up their support among black voters. Through a combination of moral pang and political instinct, the resounding success of Kennedy’s response to the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. might offset potential losses in the South.

Nixon on the other hand put the South first. Even before his apparent snub raised the ire of King’s supporters, he had been quick to quash the suggestion of his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, who pledged before an audience in East Harlem that a Nixon presidency would appoint the country’s first black Cabinet member. Nixon refused to make the same commitment, retorting that he only wanted ‘the best man possible’ as Republican strategists feared pushback from the South.

In a sign of the changing times, Kennedy campaigned in traditional Republican territory in Pennsylvania, while Lyndon Johnson, the formidable Texan, scrambled to refortify the ‘Solid South’. Bringing a tour of eight states to a close in Louisiana in the middle of October, the vice presidential candidate was pleased by the nature of his support. His standing in the Senate had won over eighteen Southern Democrats, including the prominent segregationists Richard Russell Jr. and Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland and John C. Stennis of Mississippi. But behind the scenes Johnson continued to fret over Democratic prospects in Virginia, Florida, and his home state.

In a final push four days before the election, on 4 November Johnson was back in Texas, where he hoped to deliver an address to a Democratic rally in Dallas. Between the Baker Hotel where he was staying and the Adolphus Hotel where the address was to take place across the street, Johnson was met with cries of ‘We want Nixon!’ and banners which called him ‘traitor’ and ‘Judas’. Accompanied by his wife Lady Bird, Johnson pressed through the mob of wealthy conservatives, orchestrated by Republican congressman Bruce Alger. As cries of ‘traitor’ and ‘socialist’ flew threw the air, one protester snatched Lady Bird’s gloves and tossed them into the gutter.

As the presidential campaign drew to a climax, the religious question threatened to rear its head, over the protestations of both candidates. At the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York towards the end of October, both Kennedy and Nixon agreed that religious bigotry was much less of a factor than it had been back in 1928. Kennedy expressed his confidence that the American public would focus on ‘the real issues of our time’, and Nixon reciprocated, adding:

‘Religion should not be an issue in this campaign and it will not be, certainly, if those of us who are of good will – as Senator Kennedy is, and I am, and we would trust our supporters will be – do everything we can to keep the real issues before the American people.’

Still according to The New York Times, conservative Protestants turned their pulpits into political stumps in the week prior to the election, cautioning their congregations against a Catholic president. And over the ostensible wishes of the Republican leadership, Grand Old Party leaflets responded to allegations against Henry Cabot Lodge by accusing Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy of antisemitism.

Meanwhile the Democrats rebounded on the issue of American prestige, as Kennedy stumped the South and hopped coast to coast in the company of Adlai Stevenson. California was still up for grabs, while in New York the Republicans also boasted a united front, as President Eisenhower backed up candidate Nixon. Between economic assaults which claimed that a Kennedy presidency would bring about unchecked inflation, the party was busy sharpening its knives over Walter Reuther.

* * *

In the middle of October, Walter Reuther had found himself at the centre of a new controversy owing to a page in the United Auto Workers magazine Solidarity. Widely distributed in the city of Detroit, the page carried illustrations of the Statue of Liberty opposite a hooded and torch-wielding member of the Ku Klux Klan. The accompanying text issued a challenge, asking ‘Which do you choose? Liberty or bigotry’.

Giving a speech in Detroit on 17 October, President Eisenhower encouraged voters not to be swayed by ‘evil propaganda’, in remarks widely construed as referring to the United Auto Workers pamphlet. The complaint, made explicit by Republican representatives, was that through images of Liberty and the Klan the United Auto Workers were directly contrasting Kennedy and Nixon, effectively chastising Nixon supporters as bigots.

Assuming responsibility for the pamphlet as president of the United Auto Workers, Reuther expressed his regret, saying that it had not been the intention of the union ‘to imply that people who may disagree with us politically are therefore bigots’. Reuther explained that the illustration was not meant as an attack on Nixon, but rather as commentary on the religious question, with ‘bigotry’ the charge levelled at those who would denigrate Kennedy solely for being Roman Catholic.

One week earlier, Barry Goldwater had led the Republican charge against Reuther, campaigning in what was still considered the Democratic heartland of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The influential senator from Arizona, a member of the conservative coalition and a future presidential candidate, attacked Reuther in a wide-ranging speech which focused on traditional values, constitutional liberty, and states’ rights.

Rejecting Kennedy’s talk of a ‘new frontier’, Goldwater called the old frontiers just fine for him. Criticising the Nixon campaign for a perceived lack of aggression, Goldwater still vouched for his fellow Republican, suggesting that the United States would struggle to survive ‘four years of Kennedy, Johnson and Reuther’. He assailed the ‘abnormal legal privileges’ afforded to union leaders, and stressed that a Kennedy presidency would embark on a period of scarcely precedented political activism. According to the Times, after speeches denouncing Reuther and socialism, hundreds of spectators rushed the podium to shake hands with the senator and pledge support for his fight.

Goldwater had previously called Reuther ‘a more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do in America’. Now the United Auto Workers pamphlet had added fervour to the cause. A few days later Arthur Summerfield, an Eisenhower supporter and the Postmaster General of the United States, declared that Kennedy was under the control of Reuther.

Conjuring a legacy of political influence, he said Reuther ‘has found himself a new boy’. Citing what he described as an economic crisis in the state of Michigan, Summerfield suggested that under Reuther’s influence the whole country might become ‘the hapless guinea pig in a welfare state experiment’. He feared that Reuther would exercise boundless control over the executive branch.

Then on 3 November, Richard Nixon echoed the call. On a final tour of Texas which had earmarked the city of Houston, the Republican candidate delivered a speech which accused Kennedy of being ‘captive’ to Reuther. Nixon said that if he were elected president, no ‘leader of labor, business or any other group will have a key to the back door or even the side door of the White House’. On the other hand, Nixon stressed:

‘If my opponent is elected president, Walter Reuther, the labor leader turned radical politician, will have a lot to do with calling the tune in the White House with regard to economic policy and presidential appointments. The chances are that Reuther will name and control Mr. Kennedy’s Secretary of Labor.’

Nixon omitted these remarks from other destinations across the Deep South, where he called Castro a ‘little pipsqueak’ and Kennedy a ‘pied-piper from Boston’ while taking pains to distance himself from the Cabinet pledge of Henry Cabot Lodge. But just four days before the election, his allegations against Reuther ran as the top story in The New York Times.

Reuther responded, accusing Nixon of desperation in the face of a rising tide of Kennedy support. He said that following a ‘brief flirtation’ with the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon was ‘now firmly embracing Senator Goldwater and the most backward and reactionary forces in the Republican Party’.

Nixon for his part remained adamant that support for Kennedy had peaked. Gesturing towards national surveys, he predicted that he would even take New York, adding ‘if the tide continues, I will win by one of the biggest electoral victories ever’. One way or another, the United States was ready to head to the polls.

* * *

From the tumult of civil rights and renewed calls for health coverage, to Cold War tensions, religious controversies, and the embittered divide between North and South, the election campaign of 1960 still carried the air of something new. There were the first nationally televised presidential debates, and an early controversy over the use of doctored footage as Republicans accused the Kennedy campaign of duplicitous editing of the first debate.

A five-minute television film promoted by the Democratic National Committee appeared to show Nixon nodding in agreement to every word Kennedy had said. Republicans called the film ‘vicious political trickery’, drawing comparisons with old practices like cropped or trick photographs. Together with the pamphlet produced by Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers, they suggested a ‘Kennedy pattern of distortion’ and a willingness to win whatever the cost. A subsequent film on the costs of elderly care summoned similar outrage, as Republicans argued that Kennedy had elided some of the benefits provided by private insurance.

Before Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird were mauled in Dallas, up in Michigan vice president Nixon had been force-fed his lunch. Delivering a message on the perils of communism in the Republican bastion, some dissenting voices among the gathered crowd of spectators pelted the presidential hopeful with foodstuffs. According to The New York Times, ‘a total of five eggs and three tomatoes were thrown in the general direction of the vice president’, with Nixon’s press secretary Herb Klein blaming ‘goon squads’.

Rallied in the final stretch by former and sitting presidents, if Kennedy appeared to possess the tacit support of Martin Luther King Jr., Nixon could count on the televangelist Billy Graham, who accompanied him for a speech at the South Carolina State House underneath a banner which warned the Democrats, ‘Dixie is no longer in the bag’.

If Nixon could boast the backing of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, Kennedy countered with Henry Fonda and pack master Frank Sinatra, who reworked the Oscar-winning ‘High Hopes’ to serve as the official Kennedy campaign song. Presidential elections were on the cusp of a new wave of celebrity endorsement. The press still leaned heavily in favour of the Republican Party, but Kennedy was rapidly closing the gap.

In the end Martin Luther King Jr. was among the advocates and political pundits who believed that Kennedy’s intervention on his behalf in Georgia went a long way towards deciding the race. Following the gains made among black voters in the South by President Eisenhower, Kennedy had succeeded in swinging black votes in his favour by seven percentage points, enough to make a difference in as many as nine states.

Nixon on the other hand held a few choice words for Republican congressman Bruce Alger, who had orchestrated the Mink Coat Mob which showed such contempt for Lyndon Johnson in Dallas. Nixon wound up winning more than 62 percent of the vote in Dallas, one of his largest margins of victory in any major American city. But the Democrats came from behind in the rest of Texas, swinging the crucial state and its 24 electoral votes by a tally of just two percent.

Even in the moment, swarmed and jostled by some of his most fervent detractors, Johnson had realised that he could play the incident in Dallas for support. Taking Lady Bird by the hand, he had pressed into the midst of the mob anyway. And rising above the melee, he said ‘It is outrageous that in a large civilized city a man’s wife can be subjected to such treatment. Republicans are attacking the women, and the children will probably be next’.

When Johnson visited Houston later that evening, placards and banners already read ‘We apologize!’ and ‘The Republicans decided for me today: I’m for Kennedy and Johnson’. Alger had said, ‘I don’t think it is rude to show a socialist and traitor what you think of him’, but he soon came to regret the incident. Nixon later remarked ‘we lost Texas in 1960 because of that asshole congressman in Dallas’.

By the time of the next presidential election in 1964, Richard Nixon was in the political wilderness, from which he would return to finally assume the presidency in 1968. He still lost that year in the state of Texas, before triumphing in 1972 with two-thirds of the popular vote as the Republican Party for the first time swept the South. Dallas in the meantime was left reeling. Come the election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the assassination of John F. Kennedy had made Dallas the ‘City of Hate’.

* * *

In the 36 hours prior to election day on 8 November, vice president Nixon travelled 7,100 miles by jet. A whirlwind final day of campaigning saw him visit Anchorage, Alaska, Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan, before he ended the day in Chicago with a call for voters regardless of party affiliation to choose ‘the best man’ and ‘put America first’.

In Michigan, Nixon persevered through a marathon four-hour telethon, in which the Republican candidate fielded questions from voters across the United States. From Chicago he appeared as part of a three-way televised broadcast alongside President Eisenhower in Washington and the Boston-bred Henry Cabot Lodge. Nixon spoke of a ‘great tide’ now flowing in his direction, and deflecting the charge of his opponent, said that a Kennedy administration would amount to ‘retreat, defeat and stagnation’. Before the telethon in Michigan he recited a ditty to the crowd outside of the auditorium, in ode to a former Democratic president:

‘There was a man who had a mule. When you looked at it in the face, it looked almost human. But when you looked at it from the rear, it looked like Harry Truman’.

Kennedy meanwhile spent the final day of the presidential campaign stumping closer to home. After one last sweep of New England, he returned to a rousing reception at the jam-packed Boston Garden before heading to Faneuil Hall for a final televised speech.

During the course of the day, Kennedy had called Nixon ‘unfit’ for office, and said that the vice president was incapable of telling the American people the truth regarding the country’s faded prestige. Now between film clips which drew from his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association and his performance in the first presidential debate, he called the election more than a race between two parties and two candidates. Instead Kennedy described ‘a race between the comfortable and the concerned, a race between those who want to lie at anchor and those who want to go forward’.

The following morning, Kennedy and his heavily pregnant wife Jackie voted at a public library in Boston as well-wishers lined the street. Nixon cast his vote early in a private home in Whittier, California near where he had grown up, and after speaking briefly with some of the locals wanted ‘to get away from it all for a little while’. He drove more than a hundred miles to Tijuana, Mexico where he lunched with the mayor.

That night Nixon watched the results unfold from a suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, while Kennedy remained at his campaign base at the family compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.

Before midnight The New York Times went to press with a headline which read ‘Kennedy Elected President’. The television networks CBS and NBC had already predicted a landslide for Kennedy, but the press had jumped too early and Nixon began bridging the gap.

Kennedy had built a strong lead across the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest, but Nixon began making up ground in rural parts of the Midwest and across the West Pacific. Despite Nixon’s earlier assertions and the efforts of state governor Nelson Rockefeller, Kennedy was clearly on course for victory in New York, and he managed to turn Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But the race remained tight in Missouri and Illinois and in New Mexico and Texas, while Nixon was gaining by the moment in search of his home state of California.

Turner Catledge, the managing editor of The New York Times, began to worry that his paper had made the wrong pronouncement. In his memoirs he recalled hoping that ‘a certain Midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through’.

By 3 a.m. the advantage in Illinois and Texas put Kennedy on 265 electoral votes, just four short of victory. Nixon gave a speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel which motioned towards defeat while stopping short of a concession, saying ‘if the present trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States’. The note of uncertainty left Kennedy in limbo, and he went to bed without making a statement.

By mid-morning both candidates had awoke to an apparent Kennedy victory. With enough electoral votes in the bag to secure the presidency, Nixon and Eisenhower sent congratulatory wires to Hyannis Port, where Kennedy emerged for a brief acceptance speech. He said:

‘The election may have been a close one, but I think that there is general agreement by all of our citizens that a supreme national effort will be needed in the years ahead to move this country safely through the 1960s. I ask your help in this effort and I can assure you that every degree of mind and spirit that I possess will be devoted to the long-range interests of the United States and to the cause of freedom around the world. So now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and for a new baby.’

Not wanting to appear to concede twice, Nixon referred to his speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel and departed on the next flight for an impromptu family vacation in Key Biscayne, Florida.

The final tally showed Kennedy with 303 electoral votes and Nixon with 219, while the Southern Democrat and ardent segregationist Harry F. Byrd received 15 votes from disgruntled electors in Mississippi, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Out of almost 69 million votes cast, Kennedy triumphed with an advantage of less than 113,000 in the popular vote, the slimmest margin of the twentieth century.

Small swings in Missouri and Illinois, where Kennedy won by less than one percent of the vote, would have left both candidates short of victory. Shifts in Illinois and Texas would have handed the presidency to Nixon. On the back of absentee ballots, the Republican eventually came from behind to claim his home state of California more than a week after election day. Just as black voters proved pivotal across the South, the Catholic vote appeared to have helped rather than hindered Kennedy in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

While Nixon tended to his sense of resignation in Key Biscayne, machinations were afoot back in Washington. Senior Republicans had begun to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Texas, the home of Lyndon Johnson, and especially in Illinois, where the Democratic mayor of Chicago Richard J. Daley controlled operations in Cook County, by far the most populous county in the state.

Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater denounced Daley and the political machinery of Chicago. The common accusation was that Daley had summoned the dead, counting scores of the deceased among Democratic totals. The margin of 46,257 in Texas seemed out of reach, but in Illinois only 8,858 votes separated the candidates.

Leonard Hall, Nixon’s campaign manager, and Thruston Morton, the Republican National Committee chair, visited Nixon in Key Biscayne and urged him to action. Eventually at the instigation of Hall and Morton the Republican Party pressed for recounts in eleven states, sent aides and operatives to gather evidence in Illinois, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Missouri, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and mounted a slew of legal challenges which stretched into the new year.

But Texas had already certified Kennedy as the victor. In Illinois, Morton announced the creation of a ‘National Recount and Fair Elections Committee’, while the historically Republican Chicago Tribune opined ‘the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that Nixon was deprived of victory’. However a month after the election on 12 December, Thomas Kluczynski, a circuit court judge with ties to the Democratic Party, finally threw out the Republican suit. The only change effected by Republican challenges as they dragged on into the beginning of 1961 saw Hawaii shift from Nixon to Kennedy after a recount.

Nixon anyway showed little appetite for the fight. He felt that if he was going to lose, it was better for his future prospects if he at least appeared to lose graciously. He later wrote that he feared a loss of American prestige if there was even the suggestion ‘that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box’.

On 11 November, three days after the election, Nixon issued a statement distancing himself from any recount. President Eisenhower and the Attorney General William Rogers were already against an election challenge, while even Thruston Morton confined his hopes to the state of Illinois.

* * *

By the end of 1960, John F. Kennedy was set to become the thirty-fifth President of the United States. His victory was confirmed by the Electoral College on 19 December, after lingering doubts over Illinois and the stance of some Southern electors were laid to one side, leaving the president-elect with 300 electoral votes, a comfortable majority. Only the state of Hawaii awaited a recount.

As vice president and presiding officer of the Senate, it was up to Richard Nixon to make Kennedy’s victory official before Congress. Bidding a ‘somewhat unprecedented’ farewell to the chamber in light of his narrow defeat, Nixon offered his ‘best wishes’ to Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in a session on 6 January.

Presented with conflicting documents for Hawaii, Nixon awarded its three electoral votes to Kennedy on the basis of the latest count. To rounds of applause before a largely Democratic audience, he said, ‘This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for president has announced the results of an election in which he was defeated’, calling the occasion a ‘striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system’. He elaborated:

‘In our campaigns, no matter how hard they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.’

Finally Nixon said, ‘I now declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected President of the United States’.

After all the protestations and name-calling in Illinois, Republican efforts to swing the state through recounts and legal challenges had petered out. Instead the party looked towards future elections, hoping that Republicans fired with anger over the fraud allegations would campaign in 1962 and 1964 with renewed zeal, casting an ever more watchful eye over Democratic practices.

Meanwhile Kennedy embarked on a presidential transition. In December he selected Truman stalwart Dean Rusk as his Secretary of State, managing to convince Adlai Stevenson to settle for a role as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, with policy privileges and Cabinet status. Robert Kennedy was the contentious pick for Attorney General.

For his Secretary of Defense, Kennedy turned to the world of business, wrangling the newly promoted president of Ford, registered Republican Robert McNamara. Divesting all stock holdings to avoid any conflict of interest, McNamara estimated that his role in the Kennedy administration would come at a personal cost of around $3 million.

At the same time Kennedy met with George Meany, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, their first meeting since the election as Meany had spent time abroad. Two days later with Meany in tow, Kennedy appeared on the doorstep of his home in the Georgetown district of Washington to announce Arthur Goldberg as his incoming Secretary of Labor, a position he would now assume following his work as general counsel of the United Steelworkers of America and special counsel of the AFL-CIO. The New York Times described Goldberg as ‘one of the closest associates of organized labor ever to serve in the labor post’.

If Walter Reuther took a back seat in these particular discussions, he still loomed large as Kennedy set out his stall ahead of inauguration day. Analyses of the Kennedy victory highlighted the important role played by organised labour, and especially the trio of Reuther, Goldberg, and Alex Rose, president of the United Hatters Union and chairman of the Liberal Party of New York.

Despite public claims of neutrality, Reuther, Goldberg, and Rose had worked behind the scenes to bolster Kennedy’s candidacy since the beginning of March. As Kennedy excelled during the primaries and headed into the Democratic National Convention with a tangible but precarious lead, the trio sought to combat the Catholic issue while bringing together the various wings of the Democratic Party, reconciling Kennedy with supporters of Humphrey and Stevenson.

Now Kennedy was seeking advice in the realm of foreign policy, with the suggestion of a role for organised labour within the State Department. Labour leaders had been pushing for a representative who might explain the attributes of the American system to rapidly industrialising nations in Asia and Africa. In this instance Meany and Reuther clashed over potential candidates owing to the different tenor of their foreign policy concerns, with Meany more content with the conventional hard line shown towards communist countries under the Eisenhower administration.

In the meantime Reuther prepared to wrap his work as a member of the Committee on Government Contracts. Headed by vice president Nixon, the committee was still seeking to end discriminatory practices in employment and housing wherever jobs and projects engaged federal funds. But the committee had been widely derided as ineffective during the long course of the election, and would be replaced by Kennedy with a committee boasting more explicit goals.

As he continued to fill his cabinet positions, Kennedy sought to capitalise on the pledge made by Henry Cabot Lodge. For Postmaster General, he touted William L. Dawson, the longstanding member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, who in 1949 had become the first African American to chair a congressional committee. Dawson would have served as the first black Cabinet member in the history of the United States, but he turned Kennedy down, preferring to continue his work in the House.

* * *

It would be 1966 before America saw its first black Cabinet member. Robert Weaver, the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency under Kennedy, was elevated to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Lyndon Johnson, a newly established cabinet post.

As senators neither Kennedy nor Johnson had seemed inherently drawn towards civil rights issues. Understanding the divisions within his party and wary of associating too closely with grassroots activists, for the first years of his presidency Kennedy stayed away from civil rights.

Then in the wake of integration efforts in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, which included the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, on 11 June 1963 Kennedy delivered a televised report on civil rights to the American people. Forcing the segregationist governor George Wallace to step aside, federal officials authorised by Kennedy had integrated the University of Alabama earlier that day.

In his most famous address on the subject of civil rights, Kennedy said that the United States had been ‘founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened’, urging equality from the restaurant and theatre to every school and voting booth. With echoes of his speech in Harlem in front of the Hotel Theresa, he charted a course of inequality facing black citizens from the moment of birth.

Pledging action in Congress and asking every American to do their part, Kennedy gestured towards events in Alabama and said ‘the fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city’. America in the words of the president ‘for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free’. Careful not to chide the South, he added:

‘We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.’

Just a couple of days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had denounced Kennedy on the front page of The New York Times, saying that compared to Eisenhower on civil rights, Kennedy had only managed to substitute ‘an inadequate approach for a miserable one’. Now after the president’s televised address, King expressed in private, ‘Can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!’

In America hope flickered through the clouds of conflict. A nuclear test ban treaty, the civil rights March on Washington, and a presidential committee on women’s rights were punctuated in the fall of 1963 by affairs in Vietnam and violence in Birmingham. When white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on 15 September, killing four young girls, Kennedy expressed a ‘deep sense of outrage and grief’ while King called the murder ‘one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity’.

Then Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November, but his successor Lyndon Johnson took up the gauntlet. In his first address to a joint session of Congress on 27 November, the first southern president since Woodrow Wilson said, ‘no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought’.

After passing the House and being amended by the Senate, it was majority whip Hubert Humphrey who finally managed to bring fifty-four days of filibuster to a close, overcoming the vehement opposition of the Southern bloc to pass civil rights legislation by a vote of 73-27. He received support across the aisle from minority leader Everett Dirksen, who alongside House counterpart Charles Halleck remained one of the faces of the Republican Party throughout the 1960s. Together their regular press conferences and television appearances led the press to dub ‘The Ev and Charlie Show’.

First outlined by President Kennedy in the summer of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson on 2 July. Medicare was next on Johnson’s agenda, with added gusto once he won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the November presidential election.

Navigating Wilbur Mills and the cost-conscious House Committee on Ways and Means, managing to extract the bill from the recalcitrant Rules Committee, opposed all the while by the American Medical Association, on 30 July 1965 Johnson signed a bill which enacted Medicare and Medicaid as part of an expanded Social Security system. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 became law during a ceremony hosted by Harry Truman, who Johnson praised for ‘planting the seeds of compassion and duty which have today flowered into care for the sick and serenity for the fearful’.

One week later the Voting Rights Act of 1965 capped a spell of sweeping domestic reform which did much to shape the modern United States. Guided through the Senate by Dirksen and majority leader Mike Mansfield, carried on the back of bloody civil rights marches in Selma, the act gave teeth to the effort to end discriminatory voting practices in the South, dispatching federal examiners to register the disenfranchised while banning literacy tests and other longstanding impediments.

With Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and John Lewis among the attending guests, the act was signed into law under the rotunda of the Capitol Building on 6 August. President Johnson called the day ‘a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield’.

Whatever reservations Walter Reuther and organised labour had shown over the vice presidency of Lyndon Johnson back in 1960, in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s commitment to civil rights, Reuther emerged as one of the new president’s key supporters.

Amid labour disputes, Reuther and the United Auto Workers strongly backed Johnson’s election campaign in 1964. And before Vietnam shifted the focus to foreign affairs, fatally weakening the president’s hold over his own party, through regular visits to the White House and the appointment of key advisors to government posts, Reuther kept close contact as Johnson devised the Great Society and War on Poverty.

* * *

Reuther also remained close to Bobby Kennedy. Warding him away from the vice presidency in 1964 as relations remained tense between he and Johnson, Reuther shared his devotion to civil rights and offered advice on labour relations. Jack Kennedy once remarked of his younger brother, ‘He might once have been intolerant of liberals as such because his early experience was with that high-minded, high-speaking kind who never got anything done. That all changed the moment he met a liberal like Walter Reuther’.

Robert Kennedy left the cabinet of Lyndon Johnson in the autumn of 1964 to run for the Senate. Aided by Johnson’s overwhelming election victory, he won the seat and represented the state of New York, before his fledgling candidacy for the presidency in 1968 was cut short when he was assassinated on 5 June in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Walter Reuther lost two allies that year. He had organised and spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to the hundreds of thousands gathered by the Lincoln Memorial. And he had bailed King out of jail in Birmingham and marched alongside him in Selma.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Auto Workers, King had written to Reuther and in glowing terms told him, ‘You have demonstrated over the years that you can stand up in moments of challenge and controversy. One day all of America will be proud of your achievements’.

Like Reuther, King had survived previous attempts on his life. But in early April 1968, two months before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, King travelled to Tennessee to support the Memphis sanitation strike, an ongoing response to the death of two sanitation workers. On the night of 3 April he ascended the mountaintop, with a speech that said ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land’. By the following evening he had been gunned down as he leaned out over his Lorraine Motel room balcony.

On 8 April, Reuther accompanied Coretta Scott King as she continued the march in Memphis in her late husband’s honour. When Reuther and his wife May were killed in a plane crash in 1970, Coretta Scott King eulogised Reuther, saying ‘He was there in person when the storm clouds were thick’.

Robert Kennedy meanwhile delivered news of King’s death as he made an improvised speech in front of a black audience in Indianapolis. The senator from New York and Hubert Humphrey, the sitting vice president, were fresh off meetings with President Johnson, who had decided not to seek reelection. Dividing union support, Kennedy and Humphrey emerged as the front-runners for the Democratic nomination, leaving the anti-war Eugene McCarthy in their wake. Kennedy’s death in June gave Humphrey free rein at the party convention.

Richard Nixon met with Coretta Scott King in the days following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, and attended his funeral. After his slender defeat in 1960, a stunning loss to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election caused him to lash out at the press, declaring ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference’. Now Nixon was back, on course to defeat Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan to once more become the Republican candidate for president. His years in the wilderness were over.

* * *

Bibliography

Califano, Joseph A. The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (Simon & Schuster, 1991)

Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. III (Vintage, 2003)

Caro, Robert A. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV (Vintage, 2013)

Dallek, Robert An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Penguin, 2013)

Farrell, John A. Richard Nixon: The Life (Vintage, 2018)

Lichtenstein, Nelson Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (University of Illinois Press, 1997)

Loomis, Burdett A. ed. The U.S. Senate: From Deliberation to Dysfunction (SAGE, 2011)

O’Farrell, Brigid She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker (Cornell University Press, 2010)

Offner, Arnold A. Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (Yale University Press, 2018)

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)

Schlesinger, Arthur M. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Mariner Books, 2002)

White, Theodore H. The Making of the President 1960 (Harper Perennial, 2009)

Cover image: John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail in Detroit on Labor Day 1960. (Credit: Tony Spina/The Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University)