...King, when he was 28 and famous for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott,met Nixon in March 1957, in Africa, when Ghana celebrated its independence. They agreed to stay in touch and met three months later in Nixon’s office at the Capitol to discuss among other topics the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That summer Nixon worked to strengthen the bill, taking on such powerful Southern Democrats as Richard Russell, who opposed it, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who had been pushing for a weaker version of the voting-rights section.
“I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had,” Dr. King later wrote to the vice president, telling him “how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality… This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” Nixon replied in much the same spirit: “I am sure you know how much I appreciate your generous comments. My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.” They talked frequently after that, and in September 1958, after a deranged black woman in Harlem stabbed Dr. King almost fatally, Nixon was among the first to write to him. He praised King’s “Christian spirit of tolerance,” which he said would ultimately win over “the great majority of American for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are committed.”
Yet in the waning stages of the 1960 presidential campaign, it was Senator John Kennedy that reached out to Dr. King’s wife, Coretta...and Vice President Nixon...did not.
The fullest account of John Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta Scott King is told in Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters. An excerpt of the now-famous Kennedy call to Coretta Scott King was published as an excerpt in the Washington Post:
Kennedy sat up wearily on the bed. "What the hell," he said. "That's a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone."
The phone rang in the King bedroom, where Coretta was dressing to keep an appointment with Morris Abram. Daddy King, who had decided that this situation was grave enough to require the influence of a white lawyer like Abram, was on his way to take her with him.
After greeting her, Kennedy said, "I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me."
It was over within two minutes. Coretta called Mother King fairly bursting with the news, and Shriver sneaked out the back door of the suite before the aides arrived to whisk Kennedy to the plane.
Caroline Cooper and Azmat Khan at AlJazeera picks up the story from there:
The next day, his brother, Robert Kennedy, made a well-placed phone call to a judge, helping secure King's release. The moves earned Kennedy the influential endorsement of one of the country's most prominent civil rights leaders.
"This man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter[-in-law]'s eyes,” King said. "I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy."
The news of the Kennedy brothers' actions spread quickly among the African-American community, in large part because of the Kennedy campaign's efforts.
"The Kennedy campaign made sure they got something, what was called the Blue Bomb, this pamphlet where they advertised what Kennedy had done [for King], and made sure that on the eve of the election, the final Sunday of the campaign, this was distributed at black churches all around the country," Nick Bryant, author of “The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality,” told America Tonight.
But the news gained little traction elsewhere. "I think it slipped past white America," Bryant added. "They had no idea this had happened. Knew little or nothing about it. It was in the back pages of The New York Times."
John Kennedy received 70% of the African American vote (a substantial increase over what Stevenson received in 1956) and with that one phone call (and a little help from Mr. Daley’s “dead voters,” perhaps) possibly won the presidency.
Given that Vice President Nixon had already established a relationship with Dr. King, why didn’t Nixon make that phone call to Mrs. King when she asked for help?
Jeffrey Frank at the Daily Beast explains:
Nixon, however, demurred; he said that it would be “grandstanding” to speak out, according to his aide William Safire. Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy.”
If Nixon had made that phone call to Coretta Scott King or otherwise helped the King family, if Nixon had actually taken action in accordance with the values he laid out in his 1959 letter to Mrs. Richardson, he probably would have won the 1960 presidential election.
We’ll never know if Richard Nixon would have submitted or signed anything like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
We don’t know how the 1960’s would have evolved, whether Nixon would have gotten involved in Vietnam, whether the economic safety net would have expanded even further….this list could be increased infinitely.
The same could be said for the Florida recount in 2000, for example. With a President Al Gore would September 11th attacks or the war in Iraq or the financial crisis happen...then again, would we have had a President Barack Hussein Obama.
Or even the current occupant of the Oval Office?
Would it have even been necessary for a Bernie Sanders to enter the 2016 Democratic primaries, much less could he have won the Democratic nomination for president and won the presidency? Or even if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 general election (then again, with no Iraq War resolution to vote on, would she have won in 2008?)
We simply don’t and can’t know.
The past is the past and the present circumstances are all that we have to work with.
And besides: just perhaps, it’s a good thing that we don’t know what could have been.