Kennedy - President John F. Kennedy - The Tide Turns: African Americans Enter the Executive Ranks; Special Issue: the Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

On February 12, 1963, Lincoln's birthday and approximately 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, President John F. Kennedy sponsored a White House reception for 800 African-American leaders and their spouses. Even though Martin Luther King Jr. had extended his regrets, virtually every other black leader came. This unprecedented reception symbolized how far the White House had come in reaching out to the black establishment.

Already by that date, Kennedy had advanced more African Americans to substantive federal positions than any president before him, leading the NAACP's Roy Wilkins to remark, "Kennedy was so hot on the department heads, the cabinet officers, and agency heads that everyone was scrambling around trying to find himself a Negro in order to keep the President off his neck."

Kennedy also had selected five black federal judges; five may now seem few, but prior to Kennedy's presidency only one African American, William Hastie, was serving on the federal bench. Included in Kennedy's nominations was Thurgood Marshall. In light of his role in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall's nomination to the second circuit court of appeals in New York was an important symbol of presidential support for civil rights.

When Kennedy took the oath of office, serious questions remained about this commitment. As a congressman and then senator from Massachusetts--a state that lacked a sizable black population--Kennedy had not been particularly sensitized to the problems of African Americans, though he had supported civil rights legislation in the 1950s. Certainly Kennedy's political ambitions had made him sensitive to Southern feelings, and he attempted to paper over the contradiction between the two camps by adopting a moderate course designed to win over both African Americans and Southern whites.

As president, Kennedy proceeded gingerly in the face of stark political realities, including his miniscule election victory, a stronger conservative coalition in Congress and unfavorable public opinion. His reluctance to embrace the cause of the Freedom Rides, his acceptance of an emasculated open housing order, his refusal to protect civil rights workers in voting registration drives in the deep South, his appointment of segregationists to federal judgeships in the South, and his delaying of civil rights legislation until the summer of 1963 disappointed many black activists.

Kennedy's civil rights critics tended to play down the obvious advances that stemmed from his administration's actions, including the president's unflinching defense of the Brown decision in the crises at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, his vigorous commitment to a major civil rights bill in 1963, and his overall denunciation of racial injustice.

Like African Americans of his own day, historians continue to debate Kennedy's record on racial matters. Interestingly, both his contemporaries and latter-day historians have neglected to examine the president's two black appointments to the White House staff-appointments that exceeded his predecessors' commitments, but which seem woefully inadequate today.

Andrew Hatcher, Kennedy's deputy press secretary, became the most senior African-American member of the administration's White House staff. The bespectacled, stocky Hatcher--the father of seven children, one of whom attended Caroline Kennedy's White House nursery school--was usually mentioned in the contemporary press without reference to color and is barely alluded to in subsequent scholarly publications on Kennedy.

Once the managing editor of the Sun Reponer, an African-American newspaper in San Francisco, Hatcher had in the late 1950s served as an assistant labor commissioner of California in the administration of Democrat Governor Edmund Brown. In 1960 he joined the Kennedy campaign, where he was reunited with Pierre Salinger, with whom he had shared the joys and woes of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns of the 1950s. When Salinger became President Kennedy's press secretary, he requested that Hatcher serve as his associate.

As deputy White House press secretary, Hatcher helped coordinate press activities, fielded requests from the 625 correspondents and 125 photographers regularly assigned to the White House, and in the absence of Salinger conducted news conferences and press briefings. On Inauguration Day, he briefed the press from the steps of Kennedy's Georgetown home. At Kennedy's first press conference, the symbolic importance of Hatcher's position became evident when television cameras revealed only two men seated behind the president--Salinger and Hatcher.

From the outset, however, Hatcher faced difficulties from the nearly lily-white, stodgy Washington press corps, which resented the implication that an African American could manage such a sensitive position. They soon whispered that a black newsman was only interested in civil rights and that he could not possibly understand such complicated matters as the gross national product.

Hatcher was particularly needled at news briefings, which caused some journalists to mention this fact in their stories. One particularly painful incident occurred in the fall of 1961 at Kennedy's summer home at Hyannis Port. Following a Hatcher briefing, reporters criticized him in writing for leaving out a line in a Khrushchev letter and for misspelling Tufts College in a press release and for generally being ill-informed.

Hatcher refused to use race as an excuse for the abuse. When a discussion arose about reassigning him, he refused to quit. There was a period in which he ate his meals alone and kept his problems to himself. Ultimately, by tenaciously working harder, he gradually won the respect of senior correspondents.

Frank Reeves, the other African American on Kennedy's White House staff, served only six months as a special assistant to the president. A graduate of Howard University Law School and an attorney, the 44-year-old son of a cab driver and father of two children had been active in local politics in Washington, D.C., and in national Democratic politics in the 1950s. In 1960 he was on the campaign staff of Hubert Humphrey and became the Democratic Parly's first black national committeeman. Although Reeves believed that Kennedy had soft-pedaled civil rights as a senator, he nevertheless joined Kennedy's campaign following Humphrey's withdrawal from the nomination race and after Kennedy had impressed him with his sincerity and frankness. During the campaign, Reeves introduced Kennedy to America's black leadership, including Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph, and persuaded black community leaders to support the Democratic nominee.

Following the election, Reeves was considered for a district judgeship and for membership on the board of commissioners of the District of Columbia. He ended up accepting the appointment of special assistant to the president, the first African American to serve in that capacity. Working closely with Harris Wofford and others, Reeves played a major part in the further desegregation of government facilities and--in response to Kennedy's well-publicized inauguration Day comments about the U.S. Coast Guard--in the desegregation of that organization. He also contributed to black federal appointments, especially to the Internal Revenue Service, and communicated extensively with African-American leaders to solicit their views.

Reeves received excellent cooperation and support from Kennedy staffers--at least until he refused to publicly explain or justify the president's reluctance to press for civil rights legislation in 1961. As a member of the administration, Reeves was expected to promote the president's position to the black community. Whether his refusal to do so contributed to his departure from the White House in July 1961 is difficult to ascertain. Whatever the reason, Kennedy, who wished to appoint an African American to the District of Columbia's board of commissioners, which hitherto had always been white, nominated Reeves.

Just prior to Reeves' Senate confirmation, however, an anonymous call to the Washington Daily News charged that he had eight liens against him covering, a 10-year period for failure to pay income and property taxes. The allegation turned out to be true, which led to the withdrawal of Reeves' nomination and to his dismissal from the administration. Reeves, who acknowledged that he "let down people who believed in me," went on to become a law professor at Howard and an active member of the civil rights community.

Although now largely forgotten by the public, Andrew Hatcher and Frank Reeves remain important figures; three decades after their White House heyday, they mirror the racial progress and the enduring problems of the Kennedy era.

James N. Giglio is a professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University and the author of The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (University Press of Kansas).

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