fifteen minutes.’ J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI as his personal fiefdom
for a half century, did not pass Rowe’s warning to his titular boss, Robert
Kennedy.
No policemen were in sight as the buses arrived, Connor claimed, because
they were visiting their mothers on Mother’s Day. As the bloodied Peck
looked out the window next to the loading platform, he saw thirty men,
including Tommy Rowe, carrying bats, bicycle chains, and lead-lined bats.
Resigned to their fate, the riders disembarked only to be beaten senseless.
Peck was left for dead and needed fifty-three stitches to close the gashes. By
the time the police arrived, the thugs had vanished in waiting cars. Governor
John Patterson had no sympathy for the riders, because ‘when you go
somewhere looking for trouble, you usually find it.’ Although the FBI had
photographic proof that Rowe participated in crimes that he was supposed
to prevent, it paid him $22,000 over a five-year career as an informant.
The sickening violence put pressure on the president, but Kennedy hesi-
tated to act, beyond requiring an anti-discrimination clause in federal con-
tracts. With his wealth and Harvard education, the Boston-bred Kennedy
was far removed from powerless black southerners, and he regarded civil
rights as a minor irritant that could divide his party and cost him reelection.
Unreconstructed southern Democrats like James Eastland, Richard Russell,
and Howard W. Smith hated the very idea of civil rights – ‘civil wrongs,’ in
their view – and they had a stranglehold on Kennedy’s program in Congress.
To curry their favor, Kennedy withheld civil rights legislation, delayed deseg-
regating public housing, kept the Civil Rights Commission on a short leash,
and appointed racist judges to the federal bench. Kennedy cynically believed
that such actions would not alienate black voters from the Democratic party
as long as he cultivated black leaders with money, patronage, and sympath-
etic words. Moreover, the president believed that the principle of federalism
assigned law enforcement to local officials. Most important for Kennedy,
national survival came first, and he fretted that black demands during the
Cold War sent the wrong signal to Moscow when Berlin and central Europe
were threatened. He ordered an aide to ‘tell [the riders] to call it off. Stop
them!’
Although the Kennedy administration feared that more racial violence was
likely, it wanted to avoid using army troops in Alabama in a repeat of the
Little Rock crisis. Robert Kennedy explained his reluctance to use force in the
deep South: ‘Now maybe it’s going to take a decade; and maybe a lot of peo-
ple are going to be killed in the meantime.... But in the long run... it’s the
best way to proceed.’ That left the administration with two choices. Ideally,
governor Patterson would protect the riders, but if not, US marshals would
be sent in. When the attorney general called to discuss the matter with
Patterson – ‘our great pal in the South’ – the governor’s aide said he had ‘gone66 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT