What it takes
Posted: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:21 PM by Sam Singal
By Andy Franklin, NBC News senior producer
If there’s one word Barack Obama likes more than "change," it’s "hope." It punctuates his speeches and has a prominent place in the title of his autobiography. After Obama’s win in Iowa, change and hope became all the rage in presidential politics, among Democrats and Republicans alike. For Hillary Clinton, political survival meant blunting that winning message, even as she made it a part of her own. She didn’t have much time; just four days separated Iowa from New Hampshire. Midway through that gauntlet, facing the double threat of Obama and John Edwards in the ABC News debate, she fought back. It was a show of emotion as vivid as the one that came two days later. But this wasn’t weepy vulnerability; it was full-throated anger. "I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change," Clinton said. "And we don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered."
"False hopes." That was an opening for Obama, and he went for it. Over the next two days, he told New Hampshire crowds, "We don’t need leaders to tell us what we can’t do. We need leaders to tell us what we CAN do, and inspire us." Obama gave examples: Sending a man to the moon. Rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II. Freeing the slaves. Extending voting rights to women. And he invoked the name of one of America’s greatest visionary leaders, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: What if Dr. King’s dream had been abandoned as a "false hope"?
On Monday January 7, the day before the New Hampshire primary, a Fox News reporter quoted Obama’s remarks about King to Senator Clinton during an interview, and asked her to respond. This is what she said:
"Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."
Suddenly, we were on a trip in the Wayback Machine, hurled back in time to the civil rights era of the early 1960’s. A fair reading of Clinton’s remarks (and a knowledge of her record) makes clear she was not trying to play a race card (though she did anger blacks and whites by seeming to sell Martin Luther King short, a mistake she later tried to correct). But by invoking President Lyndon Johnson, and implicitly identifying with his political skills, she WAS offering a reading of history -- and that reading is fair game.
First of all, President Johnson didn’t "pass" the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Congress did, with Johnson’s prodding, after much delay and a bitter debate that began well before Johnson took office. For his part, Martin Luther King Jr. had emerged as a national figure during the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950’s, when he was not yet 30 years old. King was soon America’s preeminent civil rights leader, and by 1963 his strategy of nonviolent confrontation had triggered racial clashes across the South, with King in the thick of it. He was not yet the revered figure he later became; he was detested and feared by many whites, even so-called "moderate" whites, who thought he was a troublemaker, trying to do too much too fast. King had no patience for such thinking. From a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell that April, he wrote, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." And King was critical of President Kennedy’s civil rights policy, saying that in succeeding Eisenhower, Kennedy had merely substituted "an inadequate approach for a miserable one."
It’s true that President Kennedy’s early stand on civil rights was cautious at best. Kennedy had been elected by the narrowest of margins and had little political room to maneuver, and civil rights was an explosive, divisive issue. Kennedy may have hoped to hold off on civil rights until the 1964 election gave him a stronger mandate, but events soon forced his hand. By 1963, the struggle over civil rights was tearing the country apart, with televised images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on protestors, the bombing and torching of people’s homes, and an American governor barring a schoolhouse door to block integration. As historian Robert Dallek points out, the struggle was also an international embarrassment, reflecting poorly on America as it competed with the Soviets on the world stage during the Cold War. The American people began to realize that something had to change, and finally, so did the president. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy gave one of the defining speeches of his presidency, saying, "The time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise" of equal rights, a promise made but not kept since the Civil War. "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free," Kennedy acknowledged. As if to prove his point, black civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Jackson, Mississippi just hours after Kennedy’s speech.
President Kennedy backed up his words with a strong civil rights bill, sent to Congress later that month. It promptly disappeared into the House Judiciary Committee, even as the civil rights struggle pressed on. That summer, one of the biggest demonstrations in American history unfolded on the Washington Mall, with Martin Luther King as its keynote speaker. We remember that speech for its soaring "I have a dream" rhetoric, but King also had this to say:
"We have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy… Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."
It was a whirlwind, all right. Less than three weeks later, the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama left four young girls dead. In November, Kennedy’s civil rights bill went to the House Rules Committee, where it seemed destined to be bottled up indefinitely. Then the world turned upside down. John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson of Texas became president of the United States. Two days after the nation buried its fallen leader, Johnson went before a joint session of Congress and 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 so long." Johnson made the bill a priority, and used his considerable political skills to push it through the House, and then the Senate. Both bodies dragged their feet, even in the face of JFK’s memory. It took months, and Johnson had help, including from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois. At one point, Dirksen quoted Victor Hugo on the Senate floor, saying, "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come." It helped end a 75-day filibuster -- one year after Kennedy’s landmark speech.
Meanwhile, Dr. King kept up the pressure, saying that any compromise in the civil rights bill "would be a tragic error on the part of the Administration -- both morally and politically." And it couldn’t have escaped anyone’s notice -- including the president's -- that of all the people who had made a difference in 1963, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who was chosen as Time’s Man of the Year.
The Civil Rights Act finally passed, and when Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964 -- two days before Independence Day -- Martin Luther King Jr. was there to see him do it, promising that he would waste no time putting the new law to the test. (Later that year, King was awarded the Nobel peace prize.) Robert F. Kennedy was there as well; his brother’s tragic death seven months earlier had put a strong wind at the backs of those who supported and fought for the bill -- including Lyndon Baines Johnson.
So, did it "take a president" to make civil rights the law of the land in 1964, as Hillary Clinton claimed? Historian and Johnson biographer Robert Dallek calls that sort of thinking "reductionist," saying, "It took both Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson to get this done," along with a reluctant Congress that was finally pushed, prodded and shamed into action by the collective will of the American people. But, Dallek says, "the weight of importance goes to Dr. King, and the circumstances put in place by King’s assertive campaign for civil rights."
Happy birthday, Martin. We now return to the 2008 presidential campaign, already in progress.
