THE PRESIDENCY: The Same Crisis

Twenty minutes after the President arrived at a farewell party for retiring Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson, an aide passed him a message. Ike beckoned to Mamie. “What—another crisis?” she asked. “The same one,” he replied. The President sped downtown to his office in the White House, conferred with Attorney General Herbert Brownell, pored over a press association Teletype copy that lay before him. “Well,” said Ike, “I guess we’ve still got this problem with us.”

The problem was that Arkansas’ Governor Orval Eugene Faubus had once more wrecked a responsible attempt to reestablish the rule of law in Little Rock and to restore the kind of peaceful climate in which his state might get back into step with the rest of the nation industrially, socially, politically, emotionally. This time Faubus had crossed up not only the President of the U.S. but four Southern governors who had worked tirelessly since the recent Southern Governors’ Conference at Sea Island, Ga. to find an acceptable peace formula. One of these Southern governors, a Southern-born, Southern-reared Democrat, considered Faubus’ latest move and threw up his hands. “We had a very clear understanding with this guy,” he said. “He’s emotionally unbalanced, I guess. There’s no other explanation for the way he’s acting.”

“Not to Obstruct.” The week of disappointment began as a week of hope. The four governors—North Carolina’s Luther Hodges, Florida’s LeRoy Collins, Maryland’s Republican Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, Tennessee’s Frank Clement—drove up to the west side entrance of the White House to keep their appointment. (Missing: Georgia’s Faubus-like Governor Marvin Griffin, who backed out at the last minute.) Their historic mission was to try to arrange with the President terms for the withdrawal of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division from Little Rock. Specifically, they proposed that 1) Faubus make a formal declaration that he would now assume responsibility for law and order in Little Rock and also that he “would not obstruct” federal court orders to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School; whereupon 2) the President should turn back the federalized Arkansas National Guard to state control and pull out the paratroopers “as soon as practicable,” i.e., when order has been restored and the court-ordered integration enforced.

Ike used the occasion to set down the legal principles that are the keynote of his conduct in the Little Rock crisis, and that would apply to integration crises to come. Reading from a paper that he and Attorney General Brownell had drawn up, the President noted that: 1) local, not federal, authorities have the responsibility for drawing up school integration plans; 2) local authorities and federal courts—not the President—have the job of setting the desegregation timetable to suit the Supreme Court dictum of desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” but 3) a desegregation order from a federal court “must be obeyed” by state officials, and the specific powers of a state governor “may not be used” to defeat a valid federal court order. Narrowing down to the Southern governors’ Little Rock formula, the President wanted Faubus first to promise to use his police powers positively to enforce federal court orders; eventually the President settled for the Southern governors’ draft that Faubus would promise negatively “not to obstruct” federal court orders. Midway in the meeting, the President set his own personal keynote: “I have never said what I thought about the Supreme Court decision—I have never told a soul—but how I feel about it is immaterial. The fact is that it is the law, and as the President of the U.S. I have the responsibility of seeing that it is enforced.”

“By Me.” After the meeting, the Southern governors walked into the White House Conference Room, got Faubus on the phone, twice read the text of the proposed statement, got his endorsement. Said Faubus to Frank Bane, executive secretary of the Governors’ Conference: “Fine! When do you want me to put it out?” Answer: as soon as possible. But that evening, after Faubus’ statement had clacked in on the press association Teletypes, the President hustled back from the Wilson party with Brownell. underlined sentence after sentence that was not only unacceptable but was an outright contradiction of what Faubus had promised he would say.

“The orders of the federal courts will not be obstructed by me.” wrote Orval Faubus, “and … I am prepared, as I have always been, to assume full responsibility for maintaining law and order in Little Rock.” The words “by me” would give Faubus an out to let someone else do the obstructing, and everybody knew how he had “maintained law and order” before. Burned once by the conference with Faubus at Newport (TIME, Sept. 23), Ike declared the whole statement unsatisfactory, called off the negotiations.

Next day, and the day after that, Faubus resolved any doubts that might have lingered in his favor. “Doubletalk” was his word for the efforts of the President and the Southern governors to make peace. “I write my statements from this end of the line. They can write theirs from that end,” he said. “I am standing pat.”

Faubus claimed that he still had the support of about 85% of the voting Arkansans, but nonetheless his position was growing increasingly uncomfortable. Twenty-five Little Rock businessmen and civic leaders put themselves on record against “violence and the threat of violence or the encouragement of violence”; Businessman Winthrop Rockefeller, who had helped bring in or expand 194 industries and create 12,521 new jobs in Arkansas in 1956. broke silence: “I regard the events of the past month as tragic. I believe in the Constitution of the U.S. and in the law and order which it established.” Little Rock clergymen began a movement to stir the consciences of their congregations (see box).

At his weekly press conference the President, aware that one misplaced word could refuel the crisis, said: “No one can deplore more than I do the sending of federal troops anywhere. It is not good for the troops; it is not good for the locality; it is not really American—except as it becomes absolutely necessary for the support of the institutions that are vital to our form of government . . . These courts are our bulwarks, our shield against autocratic government . . . The mass of America believes in the sanctity of the court . . . The courts must be sustained or it’s not America.”

As the second week of integration in Little Rock began, the troops were still there, and it looked as if they might be there for some time.