American Experience; Freedom Riders; Interview with Evan Thomas, 1 of 2

[Interviewer] Talk about the Kennedys and really where their interests lay at the beginning of the administration. [Thomas] It's important to remember that when John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address, his famous inaugural address, he didn't mention civil rights. It was all about American responsibility to the world, but not to its own people that way. That was almost an afterthought and it was something that John F. Kennedy came slowly to. [Interviewer] One of the things that John Lewis said is that one of the things they wanted to do with the Freedom Rides was to kind of test this new administration, there was this feeling that the Kennedy's were looser on civil rights than Eisenhower, they wanted to test them. [Thomas] I think it was unclear where the Kennedy's were on civil rights when they took office. There was an important moment in the campaign when John F. Kennedy called Corretta Scott King to sympathize after Dr. King was thrown into jail for pretty much nothing down in Georgia and Bobby

Kennedy, the President's brother, President-elect's brother-- excuse me, I may need to re-do that. Because he wasn't President-Elect. It wasn't clear what the Kennedy's thought about civil rights. During the campaign John F. Kennedy did call Corretta Scott King, Dr. King's wife, when King was thrown in jail down in Georgia to express sympathy and Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy's campaign manager, helped get King out of jail. It was an important stroke that pleased a lot of black voters so that gave encouragement to the civil rights community but those were singular acts, they weren't really part of a larger strategy so it was unclear where the Kennedy's were going on civil rights. [Interviewer] On the other hand, they're kind of-- during the campaign, they're kind of straddling this fence, because they have to woo John Patterson was an early supporter, so talk about that. [Thomas] You have to remember that in

1960, the south was solidly Democratic, the base of the Democratic party was the essentially white-voting south. So the Kennedy's had to be careful about antagonizing southern governors and the whole southern establishment which was segregationist, so it was a little tricky for them to be reaching out to black folks at a time when they need the votes of southern whites. They did it in kind of Kennedy's way of straddling the fence and they did by showing sympathy to Dr. King, pleased the black voters, and it actually, those acts of calling JFK's wife-- excuse me, calling Martin Luther King's wife, and helping King get out of jail, those acts did pick up a lot of votes, black votes, in northern industrial cities. After King got out of jail and before the election the word was put out, "the Kennedy's had done this thing," in black communities, and black turned out and voted in significant numbers for Kennedy in November so they were able to have

it both ways, both with southern whites and northern blacks. [Interviewer] At least for a while. [Thomas] For a while. [Interviewer] It seemed that I want to talk a little about John Patterson, the Governor of Alabama, is-- also on the other hand you have these northern blacks and black people were supporting Kennedy, but you also have this governor was running a segregationist ticket who was an early supporter of John Kennedy. [Thomas] Governor Patterson in Alabama was a friend of the Kennedy's, a supporter. However when the Freedom Riders started on their journey and Bobby Kennedy, then the attorney general, had to reach out to Patterson to make sure that the trip could go on, Patterson basically posted a "no fishing" sign, he was nowhere to be found and it was early sign, it irritated Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy a short temper and he was wondering "where is our friend, Governor Patterson on this?" He knew that it was a difficult situation but he wasn't getting a lot of help out of the white power structure in Alabama and

that irritated Bobby Kennedy. [Interviewer] Do you think that the white power structure in the deep south had, in their turn, some expectations of the Kennedy's? [Thomas] It's hard to know what politicians really think and it's significant for instance that when King was thrown in jail in Georgia, Bobby Kennedy, JFK's campaign manager, does this very secret end run with the Governor of Georgia, Vandiver, to get King out of jail. In other words, those governors were not totally unmindful of the politics of this, they couldn't be completely intransigent. They could see which way the tide was going and it was going against them, slowly but-- southern politician, some of them were just out-and-out segregationists and racists, Mississippi, later Governor Wallace of Alabama, but some southern white politicians could see that we were in a new day and they were trying to find their way

however carefully to accommodating all interests, and that was sort of where the Kennedy's were, was in this in-between state. Neither-- certainly not segregationist in the case of the Kennedy's, but not quite there on embracing the civil rights movement. [Interviewer] Okay, let's cut for a second. One thing that's really been interesting is talking to people about this and it seems to be some-- let me ask you a question. What did Robert Kennedy, what did RFK know about the Freedom Rides as they were starting? [Thomas] Bobby Kennedy was told about the Freedom Riders by a student he made-- student he met, but he heard about it right in the middle of the Cuban Missile-- excuse me, let me re-do this. Bobby Kennedy was told about the Freedom Riders by, I believe, a student he had met, but it happened when he was totally absorbed with Cuba, the way the CIA was invading Cuba in April of

1961 and that's what was on Bobby Kennedy's mind, not the Freedom Riders. He forgot about it until it came up in the press, until the Freedom Riders were actually rolling in May, that's when he really started to pay attention. He knew about it, but this shows you his level of attention, he forgot about it. [Interviewer] In some ways, it seems like, this is a word that just came to me, that the Kennedy's were going to be ambushed by civil rights, that as they come in, it's a thing, but it's on the horizon, but its not what it becomes. [Thomas] The Kennedy's, when they came into office, were not worried about civil rights, they were worried about the Soviet Union. They were worried about the Cold War, they were worried about the nuclear threat, they were worried about foreign policy, they had a long list, mostly foreign policy issues, that they were worried about before they got to civil rights. They were mindful of it as kind of a distant thing on the horizon, but it was not their main focus and more than that, when civil rights did pop up,

they regarded it as a bit of a nuisance, as something that was getting in the way of their agenda. You have to look at it from their perspective: they wanted the United States to look strong to the world, to the rest of the world, and unified, and for freedom. Well pretty bad image for the country this was supposed to be for freedom to have these Freedom Riders and to have the civil rights movement out there in the streets saying "you're not for freedom, you're for oppression, and you're for Jim Crow," and that's a bad image to be projecting about the United States and that image was an annoying-- was a nuisance to the Kennedy's. [Interviewer] So what was the reaction when the Bobby Kennedy heard about the Freedom Riders, what was his reaction? [Thomas] I think both RFK and JFK, when they heard about the Freedom Riders, just wanted it to go away. JFK was vocal about it, "get them off those buses, stop it." He really didn't have any truck for it, because he was getting ready for a summit meeting with Khrushchev

in Vienna and he just didn't want the distraction. Bobby Kennedy's a more mixed picture, Bobby Kennedy is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. He has got to deal with legal issues about the south and he has some pretty tough legal issues like de-segregating the schools and he's starting to pay a little bit of attention to "what am I going to do about southern resistance to the Supreme Court's order back in 1954 that separate is not equal and we've got to desegregate the schools," and these states are resisting him and he was in a mode of "I got to enforce the law here," so that's one aspect. Equally, maybe more important for Bobby Kennedy, he had a sense of justice. It just bothered him that black people were getting the short end of the stick in the south, he didn't think about it that much initially but he has a very real sense of social conscience and it just-- it started as a little thing but it grew with him. [Interviewer] If you can just a little bit, because I love some of the things your book talks about Bobby Kennedy's personality and he's very complicated, you can't do it in a ten-second

soundbite, but he does have kind of this prickly strength. [Thomas] Bobby Kennedy was a tough guy, that was as his mode, that was his role, to be the president's tough guy, and so he's ornery, he's difficult, he doesn't like distractions and nuisances but he also has a short fuse when it comes to social justice. He doesn't like it when people are mistreated. Those sides of Bobby Kennedy were in conflict. On the one hand he's the president's enforcer, "make the civil rights stuff go away, get it off the screen, don't let it bother us," but on the other hand, "gee, black people down in the south are really getting hurt and I am the chief law enforcement officer and I'm supposed to uphold the laws of the United States, and maybe I should do something about this." [Interviewer] Keep an eye on the window, there was a--

The whole window was-- Talking about states' rights, so was states' rights relevant? [Thomas] Well state's rights was the excuse that the south used but it was a moral justification for a morally untenable position. It really didn't hold water, it was ultimately just thrown out, rejected, ignored by the court. [laughter] [Interviewer] In your book you use the term "congressional barons" and say the Kennedy's feared them, what does that mean, who are the barons and why do they have power? [Thomas] In the early '60s congress was still largely controlled by southern committee chairmen who had been there for a long long time, Senator Eastland of Mississippi, Senator Russell of Georgia,

and the Kennedy's had to pay attention to them because they had a lot of power, you want to get anything through Congress, you got to go through those committee chairmen. Those committee chairmen were all segregationist, they're all pro- states' rights, they hated the civil rights movement, so that was a problem for the Kennedy's. [Interviewer] So what did that mean in terms of policy? Did it again mean that you had to kind of walk this fence, that you had to appease them, what did it mean? [Thomas] The Kennedy's did appease those southern chairmen, particularly in judgeships, Eastland in particular, of Mississippi, controlled judiciary committee nominations and so Kennedy had to put up with some pretty bad-- Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general and President Kennedy, had to put up with some pretty bad judges in order to appease those southern committee chairmen. [Interviewer] And just in very general terms, we don't really want to go into the judgeship, but just the idea of-- because I think, tell me if I'm wrong, that this is for a while this is part of the story, where the Kennedys

are kind of trying to walk this line and say "maybe we can make everybody happy." [Thomas] Politics are messy at all times and they were very messy in 1961 when you had essentially a southern white-controlled Congress because you had these old committee chairmen that had been there forever, they had real power, they could block anything the Kennedys wanted to do, so the Kennedys had to balance great and get along with Senator Eastland and Senator Russell and if Senator Eastland wanted a segregationist judge, well that was too bad he was gonna get it, there wasn't much Bobby Kennedy could do about it so there was a lot of appeasement going on to the power structure. At the same time Kennedy was trying to do his best to enforce the civil rights laws and also moving to this new place where he wanted to advance the civil rights laws. [Interviewer] Let's cut for a minute. Okay, so the first real incident on these Freedom Rides is in Anniston, the burning bus, the same day that the beatings in Birmingham--

what was the reaction for RFK, JFK, what was the reaction to this? [Thomas] When the Kennedys heard about the burning of the bus they were shocked like a lot of Americans but President Kennedy's reaction was "stop them, get them off that bus, make this go away." Bobby Kennedy's reaction was a little different. He was irritated by it for sure as a distraction but he was the Attorney General and he felt that he had to help the-- had to protect them, had to reach out to protect them. So he sent his own aide, John Seigenthaler, down to kind of hold the hands of the Freedom Rider and look into all this, and he tried to get some reaction out of state officials to get them to protect the Freedom Riders. He called Governor Patterson's office, an aide said basically that Patterson had gone fishing, which irritated Kennedy even more. They had to find

a driver so Attorney General calls Greyhound, says, "I want to speak to Mr. Greyhound, whoever that is," typical Bobby Kennedy impetuousness, and he's-- there was a tape recording of this that was later played and released that shows Kennedy kind of bossing around the Greyhound folks saying, "come on, surely somebody can drive a bus, can't they?" Typical Bobby Kennedy, and when that got out, it showed that the Attorney General of the United States was on the case and he was trying to make this thing, he may not have liked it, but he was trying to protect the Freedom Riders. [Interviewer] I'm going to ask you again because I want it kind of slid in from the bus riots in Anniston-- [Thomas] Oh I forgot the sequence of it. [Interviewer] It's fine, you had the sequence right, just for the film I'd like them to be two different things. [Thomas] But you have to remind me of the sequence, did they riot first and the bus burning second? There were two. [Interviewer] --this thing that happens in Birmingham with the Greyhound bus so now the second wave is there and

these SNCC students are trapped, they're stuck in the bus station in Birmingham, talk about that. [Thomas] The SNCC students are stuck in the bus station in Birmingham and the Attorney General wants to get them a driver and so he calls up Greyhound in typical Bobby Kennedy way, says "where's Mr. Greyhound, I want to speak to Mr. Greyhound," and he gets the run around and he says "surely somebody can drive a bus down there," he's angry, he's hot, he's impatient. A transcript of that conversation was recorded and the conversation transcript was released. Once it got out into the newspapers, it was clear to a lot of people that Kennedy was on the case, that he was trying to do something for the Freedom Riders and that's when the south learned that Bobby Kennedy was maybe not a friend of the south, I'm talking about the white south, and the name Bobby became a kind of an epithet thereafter. He was deemed to be this Washington enemy of the salad-white south. [Interviewer] Great. Cut right here.