The Kennedys and Civil Rights: How the MSM Continues to Distort History

[James Lateer]

After reading through the four part article by Jim DiEugenio on the Kennedys and Civil Rights, I would like to offer my critique of Mr. DiEugenio's 100 page long critique of various books on the subject. I would state this critique by listing my major points of contention:

1. The Civil War and the newly formed Republican Party (as of 1866) started off at a very high level of idealism about the racial issue. In some ways you could almost say the US is still going downhill from the height of idealism reached in the last half of the 1860's on the racial issue.
   
2. Mr. DiEugenio criticizes Teddy Roosevelt for bad-mouthing his black troops in the Spanish-American War while missing the obviously salient fact----even at the very apex of legalized segregation (Plessy v Ferguson in 1896) you still had black troops fighting in the Army in 1898.
   
3. Teddy Roosevelt had dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House but Woodrow Wilson previewed the infamous film Birth of a Nation at the White House. So even around 1912 you had power brokers playing both sides of the racial street. The White House only got the name "White House" in 1901 as a sop to racists to make it look like the Presidency was mainly for White People.
   
4. After the 1860's there was continuous back-and-forth on the racial issue right up until the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Not much changed during this 100 years.
   
5. Mr. DiEugenio should have painted a complete and accurate three-dimensional picture of the major forces at work on the race question from 1860 to 1960. The first was the KKK. The KKK was organized for black racial purposes, but it was also equally about Prohibition, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and immigration. You can't present the history of the Civil Rights movement without accurately and completely depiciting the KKK.
   
6. The central role of clandestine Senate and House Committees during the period 1930-1970 can't be omitted.
   
7. Senator Joseph McCarthy, his committee and Senator James O. Eastland and his Senate Internal Security Subcommittee are barely mentioned by Mr. DiEugenio despite the fact that they were the ringleaders of opposition to Civil Rights Progress.
   
8. James Dombrowski is not mentioned even though Dombrowski basically invented the Civil Rights movement in the South post-World War II.
   
9. The issue of Communism as it was intertwined with the Civil Rights movement was not discussed in Mr. DiEugenio's lengthy article. But it was a real involvement with actual Communists in the company of Dr. Martin Luther King that was a major problem.
   
10. It was fear of Communist infiltration that led Robert Kennedy to approve the wiretapping of the phone of MLK.
    
11. You can start tracing the career of RFK from his attendance at the University of Virginia Law School to his leadership role on the side of McCarthy in the McCarthy Committee (before his employment by the Democrats on the committee) and from there forward. In the early 1950's, RFK, JFK, McCarthy and Nixon were all basically the same in their politics.
    
12. It was Mayor Daley in Chicago who deliberately designed the concept of the Black Ghetto through the Chicago Planning Commission which build the gigantic public housing projects on the south side of Chicago to effectively imprison Chicago blacks.
    
13. As brilliantly described in the book Austin-Boston Connection by Nelson and others, there were a group of about 25 to 30 Northern Catholic Democrats like Daley, Senator Thomas Dodd, the Kennedys and Speaker John W. McCormack who were totally allied with Southern Racists right up until JFK was shot. Mr. DiEugenio does not delve into this central issue which is, of course, central to everything described in the JFK review by him.
    
14. Mr. DiEugenio fails to relate any of the unique work of Dr. Jeffrey Caufield found in his book on General Edwin Walker. The entire Civil Rights movement came very close to being outlawed and branded as Communist by the SISS Committee of Senator Eastland in October and November, 1963. How can such important facts and information be ignored, not just by Mr. DiEugenio but by basically all of the supposed experts whose books are reviewed in Mr. DiEugenio's lengthy article?
    
15. The role of Justice Hugo Black and the Southern Conference for Christian Welfare, though at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, is totally ignored by Mr. DiEugenio and the authors he is quoting.
    
16. Although giving LBJ appropriate credit for launching the War On Poverty as a cure for the ghetto blight suffered by blacks, Mr. DiEugenio doesn't IMHO really assess the degree to which this feeble program succeeds or fails to solve this problem. In retrospect, the War on Poverty was pretty much like pissing in the ocean IMHO. Nor has there been even an iota of success in dismantling the Urban Ghetto which was invented and pioneered by Northern Catholic "Liberal" Democrat Richard J. Daley and his allies post-WWII.
    
17. In putting such emphasis on the book by reactionary journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Mr. DiEugenio makes (what I think is) a fundamental mistake. That is, if you are only agreeing or disagreeing with right-wing reactionary authors, or lambasting "professional leftist" authors like Chomsky, etc. then you are inevitably limiting your scope. As stated above, probably the three most important books on the DiEugenio subject matter are Gothic Politics of the Deep South by Robert Sherrill, The Austin-Boston Connection by Nelson, Champagne et.al. and General Walker… by Dr. Jeffrey Caufield. I might also add the biography of James A. Dombrowski by Frank T. Adams.
    
18. For the above reasons, I would urge students of the Civil Rights Movement as described in Mr. DiEugenio's article to only spend time reading authors who have unique and groundbreaking information, rather that wasting time on "popular" authors like Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (a real loser) and Theodore Sorenson.
    

James Lateer