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

[Jim DiEugenio]

This series is about what I call the Posthumous Assassination of JFK. The efforts of the MSM and cheapjack writers to lessen his presidency in order to take the sting out of his assassination.

Back in about 1967-68, JFK was recognized for what he was, the best president on ciivl rights since Lincoln. That was not going to be allowed to stand, so Larry Sabato went to work on it in 2013. ANd then with the RFK and MLK fiftieth and the JFK fifty fifth, three books came out to further the smear.

Personally, I can only take so much of this baloney. So I spent about three months reading about 45 books on the subject, and filling five tablets full of notes. As usual, do not trust the MSM on anything about the Kennedys, either their lives or their deaths. JFK and RFK were even better on civil rights that I thought they were. And some people they were helping think that Bobby might have been killed over that.

Do you know who Charles Houston was? David Hackett? You should. Did you know the War on Poverty was not Johnson's idea. It was JFK's. And like many programs of Kennedy's it was changed by LBJ. For the worse.

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-...ory-part-1

[James Lateer]

I think that JFK was about equal to FDR on wanting to help blacks and the poor. I think RFK was at times better than either mostly because of RFK's Don Quixote type personality which ran hot and cold at various times. LBJ was an unpredictable pragmatist and fence-sitter on the issue of Civil Rights, but he DID have a broad vision for the entire social scenario regarding Civil Rights.

But what most people would not agree with is my firm belief that the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960's were passed due to a tacit agreement of the Civil Rights leaders to keep their silence about the JFK conspiracy.

That is the only way to explain the desperation displayed by LBJ on the LBJ phone calls when discussing the matter. LBJ was under the gun, possibly literally on this position.

The overhang of the huge baggage of the JFK murder is just never properly understood even by veteran researchers and experts. It's very difficult to re-create in one's imagination the ridiculous level of tension that had to exist following the unexpected murder of the beloved and much-admired JFK. In that atmosphere, anything could have happened and many goods things did happen like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They just didn't necessarily happen due to idealism, however. They happened in many cases due to self-interest and/or self-preservation.

James Lateer

[Jim DiEugenio]

Once you read the series, you will see my reason for writing it.

The MSM through cheapjack writers like Levingston, Tye, and Bryant, and Dyson for his own racial agenda have been trying to denigrate what JFK and RFK did in this field.

So i decided to do a lot of research and read about 45 books on it.

It turns out that its like Vietnam in reverse. With Vietnam you had a record that was hidden and obfuscated for decades. With civil rights you had a record that was out there and then these guys tried to bury it with shovels of dirt.

LBJ hijacked Kennedy's war on poverty. Plain and simple.

[Jim DiEugenio]

I should add another important point.

I started this essay for the reasons stated above.

But as I wrote it, especially parts 3 and 4, I started to think about the subject as it directly relates to the assassination.

See, JFK made his nationally televised speech on civil rights just five months before Dallas. He then endorsed the March on Washington in July, and that took place just three months before Dallas.

Now if you read McBride's book and as he describes just how rightwing the DPD was, and how many were actually KKK members, and you read what he says about Bill Alexander and also Jim Leavelle, and how the latter referred to the JFK murder as "just another south Dallas nigger killing"; IMO, Kennedy's strong integration stance had something to do with the choice of Dallas as the site, and also the perps understanding of how the DPD would react to JFK's murder.

[James Lateer]

After looking over the excellent and very conscientious reviews of the books related to Civil Rights, I can express extreme respect for anyone, especially a "white guy" who reads 45 books on Civil Rights. That's one in a million and my hat is off to Mr. DiEugenio in this regard. That is sincerity which is way beyond ordinary sincerity.

If one had to generalize, it looks like Ike takes the cake for the biggest advances in Civil Rights. We have to give Ike credit for (1) knowing the philosophies of Earl Warren when he appointed Warren to the Supreme Court and (2) unlike the Kennedy brothers' methods, he did not hesitate to send the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock.

For the Kennedys, of course, I am referring to the use of only Federal Marshalls to combat the insurrection at Ole Miss in 1962, a decision which placed thousands in needless jeopardy.

Looking back, that use of Federal active duty military by Ike is probably the most extreme governmental response to anything inside the US. since Hoover ordered MacArthur to move against the Veterans in Washington in 1933.

If one has to generalize, then there is probably not any difference at all between the Presidents from FDR onwards when it comes to belief and actions in black Civil Rights. I don't even think President Obama distinguished himself in that arena.

As Trump has made all too clear, that once the legal impediments to black's right to vote and residential and workplace discrimination were overcome, the real big problem for blacks was ignored or made worse (as by the Daley's in Chicago).

That problem is the existence of crime-ravaged ghettos where most blacks live. There has been no real success in finding widespread employment for these blacks. Name me one President who has called out this problem and tried to solve it.

Sadly, Donald Trump has probably done more for blacks than any of the post-FDR Presidents by bringing African-American unemployment so low and OPPOSING CHEAP LABOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION which, by definition, affects blacks more than any other group.

But it is a noble cause to attempt to relate the tribulations of the various Presidents in striving for Civil Rights FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS.

Kudos.

James Lateer

[Jim DiEugenio]

Four Presidents: A Comparison of Civil Rights Actions and Achievements

[TABLE]
[TR]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]

FDR[B](13 years in office)[/B]

[/TD]
[TD]

TRUMAN[B](7 years in office)[/B]

[/TD]
[TD]

EISENHOWER[B](8 years in office)[/B]

[/TD]
[TD]

KENNEDY[B](3 years in office)[/B]

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

1

[/TD]
[TD]Fair Employment Practices in Defense Plants (FEPC)
[/TD]
[TD]Integrated the Military
[/TD]
[TD]Sent troops to Little Rock in 1957
[/TD]
[TD]Orally committed to backing the Brown decision
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

2

[/TD]
[TD]Appointed African Americans as policy advisors
[/TD]
[TD]Tried to pass a civil rights bill
[/TD]
[TD]Established Civil Rights Commission
[/TD]
[TD]Indicted school officials who defied court orders on Brown
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

3

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Made speeches on civil rights in 1952
[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Created a Free Schools district when Virginia decided to drop public education
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

4

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]First administration to join civil rights cases as a plaintiff, not a friend of the court
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

5

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Petitioned the ICC to integrate interstate busing and terminals
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

6

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Systematically began to file cases to break down denial of voting rights in the South
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

7

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Financed voter registration drives in the South
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

8

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Began the drive to ban poll taxes with the 24th amendment
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

9

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Started a massive and rigorous affirmative action program in all branches of federal government
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

10

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Announced that no member of his administration would join a segregated establishment or speak at a segregated event
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

11

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Revived FDR's FEPC with the CEEO
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

12

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Established rigorous contract and grant requirements to integrate private colleges in the South
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

13

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Established a program to make federal contractors follow non-discriminatory hiring practices
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

14

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Carried out court orders to integrate the last public universities in the South
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

15

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Exploiting an exception to the law, sent in federal marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi and to Alabama during the Freedom Rides
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

16

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Signed the Housing Act of 1962
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

17

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Negotiated a settlement to the Birmingham demonstration in 1963
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

18

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Endorsed the March on Washington in 1963
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

19

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]In a nationally televised address of 6/11/63, made the most forceful presidential address on civil rights since Lincoln
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

20

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Established the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights in 1963 to represent victims of civil rights abuses in the South
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]

21

[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD]Submitted the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began a massive lobbying program to pass it


[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

[Jim DiEugenio]

As anyone can see from the chart above, the evidence does not back up Mr Lateer. In fact, its not even close.

Plus, he is factually wrong on three points.

1.) Kennedy did send in troops to Ole Miss in 1962.

2.) Eisenhower let Faubus run amok for over THREE WEEKS in Little Rock before the mayor literally had to beg him to do something.

3.) Eisenhower actually tried to talk Warren out of favoring the plaintiffs in the Brown case. That is also in my article, which I have a hard time thinking Lateer actually read.

Eisenhower and Nixon were terrible on this issue. They allowed all kinds of schemes and dodges not to abide by the Brown decision. Neither man, while in the White House, ever backed that decision. In fact they actually ridiculed the decision. And then Ike criticized the Kennedys for trying to get equal voting rights.

This left Kennedy with a huge mess in front of him. Which is why he had to do all those things I listed above. JFK did three times as much as all the presidents before him in about 1/7 the time. Plus, he did not have to be extorted to do them, as FDR or Truman were by Philip Randolph. For instance, to name just one of over twenty things, immediately, on his first day in office, he originated the idea of affirmative action.

Trump has done so much for African Americans? Did you read Omarosa's book? Or are you a big Kanye West fan?

By embracing Kris Kobach, and backing his committee, Trump showed he was all for getting Afro Americans off the voting rolls by any means necessary.

JFK and RFK ripped down the southern system of Jim Crow laws that was in effect for about 70 years. If that is not a great achievement then what the heck is?

[James Lateer]

It's a privilege to even be in a discussion with an expert on JFK and Civil Rights such as Mr. DiEugenio.

Nobody can question the fact the the Civil Rights movement gathered considerable steam during the brief JFK tenure as President. But I'm not sure that the analysis of just listing things relating to JFK and Civil Rights compared to other things listed for Ike Truman and FDR is really an incisive comparison of the personal committment and the internal feelings and motivations of the various Presidents listed.

Given that Mr. DiEugenio is one of the few top "conspiracy authors" along with Peter Dale Scott and others, I often question whether one can list statements made in speeches by Presidents alongside of (1) laws passed and (2) actions such as ordering troops into battle.

For any reader who wants a unique and valuable analysis on these same issues which are wonderfully accented by Mr. DiEugenio, I would suggest "The Austin-Boston Connection" by authors Garrison Nelson, Anthony Champagne and others.

Those authors are professional political science professors. They successfully argue that the reason that Massachusetts and Texas dominated the leadership of the House of Representatives from 1938 to 1988 was that Texas and Massachusetts had the least number of black voters of any major States. They argue that this fact enabled Massachusetts and Texas politicians to chart a course on Civil Rights that was not dominated by either black voters OR Southern KKK types.

This theory matches with the idea that JFK was not particularly interested in black civil rights until it cascaded onto his desk as President. But I think we all realize that JFK was probably the most idealistic President at least since Abraham Lincoln or James Garfield.

As for the Ole' Miss riots, below is a quote from Wikipedia which demonstrates the hesitation in handling the Ole Miss riots which contributed to injuries and loss of life:

"President Kennedy reluctantly decided to call in reinforcements in the middle of the night under the command of Brigadier General Charles Billingslea. He ordered in U.S. Army military police from the 503rd and 716th Military Police Battalions, which had previously been readied for deployment under cover of the nuclear war Exercise Spade Fork, plus the U.S. Border Patrol and the federalized Mississippi National Guard. U.S. Navy medical personnel (physicians and hospital corpsmen) attached to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Millington, Tennessee, were also sent to the university."

He and RFK had tried to rely on US Marshalls who were not up to the task of riot control.

James Lateer

[Jim DiEugenio]

Sir:

If its such an honor to debate this with me, then you should go ahead and read my articles.

The reason that happened at Ole Miss is explained there.

One week before, JFK began to gather a military force at Milington Air Base.

Abrams drew up a contingency plan for their entry to Ole Miss.

Two things happened that caused the riot to get out of control.

1.) Barnett withdrew his police force before Katzenbach got there

2.) Katzenbach's communciation network went down.

That is why the military got there late. Kennedy was not reluctant to use them at all. That is why he had 20,000 of them at the base. He also brought 3,000 to Tuscaloosa.

[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