Oh yes. Or John Doar. John was a holdover. John was in the Civil Rights
Division under Eisenhower—he was a Republican—and he was there when
Robert Kennedy came in. He stayed. He's so much a kennedy. It's hard to
imagine anybody more in the Kennedy pattern than John.
I never met Robert Kennedy more than three times. Did you ever hear about
that little off-the-record lunch that we had? I think this sort of
symbolizes a lot that was happening then, too. It suggests some of the
naivete, and the stupidity, and the ignorance, and everything else that
was going on. Early in 1961, Robert Kennedy asked Ralph McGill, or maybe
McGill suggested it to Kennedy, I think that's the way it happened. At
any rate, the idea was that McGill was to bring a few southerners up to
the Department to give a seminar for Robert Kennedy and some of his
leaders. So, McGill recruited a bunch of us. I think he pretty much
turned the recruiting over to Harold, who by this time, was already in
Washington. So, we went to Washington to have lunch with the Attorney
General. I can't remember everyone who went. The only black I can
remember being there was John Wheeler. I think Will Campbell was there,
and Johnny Popham was there. I think Claude Sitton was there too. There
were probably about ten-fifteen of us. We all assembled in the Attorney
General's anteroom at the appointed time, and then were led through the
Attorney General's office. It's huge, like an auditorium. He wasn't at
his desk, but we were led by that, and behind his office was the
Attorney General's private dining room. That's where we were all taken
and seated. Kennedy made his appearance, and walked around and shook
hands with everybody. My first realization was that he had a very limp
handshake. That's something I guess a lot of politicians develop,
because they don't like to get beat up. The small features of that lunch
stay in my mind more clearly than the big ones. I don't know whether we
were given seats, or whether we just sat down, but I ended up sitting
next to John Doar, whom I'd never met before. There was Kennedy and Doar
and Marshall, and
Page 26 there must have been a couple
others, maybe Goodman and maybe Seigenthaler. The other thing I remember
is that we were all brought in some chicken dish, except Kennedy, who
had corn chowder and the other Department of Justice people had corn
chowder, except John Doar, who had the chicken. So right then, I began
to think pretty well of John Doar. He was the only guy there who
wouldn't follow the leader. This is the way that meeting went. Kennedy,
at some point, turned to McGill, and said, "All right, Mr. McGill, it's
your meeting." And McGill made some statement, and then we went around
the table, and each of us in turn said something. I seemed to be about
midway around, and I didn't want to repeat things that other people had
said. As each person said something, I eliminated that from my mind. I
ended up making a little statement about the Citizens' Council. During
all of this, Kennedy just sat and looked in the most non-expressive, but
non-approving, kind of way. He seemed still pretty suspicious of all of
us. We'd all been adjured that we were not to discuss this meeting with
anybody. Finally, the circle was completed, and it got around to
whomever was last man, and Kennedy said, "Thank you, gentlemen," and he
got up and left. And that was it. The rest of us stayed there, minus
him. We talked for a while. That was the state of the Kenedy
Administration's top level approach at that time.