The Politics of Injustice: the Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise.

The Politics of Injustice: The Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise. By David Niven. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 269. $28.00, ISBN 1-57233-212-3.)

Although historians have judged that John F. Kennedy's performance on civil rights issues during the first two years of his administration was weak, vacillating, and ineffective, their criticism has been mitigated by the view that this failure derived largely from his justified calculation that embracing civil rights would have been politically disastrous.

Political scientist David Niven challenges this consensus. He asserts that "Kennedy should have committed to civil rights upon taking office, not just because it was morally right, but because it was politically right" (p. xiv). He contends that the president would have been better off supporting civil rights while abandoning the white segregationist vote in the South. Such a strategy, according to Niven, made sense for four reasons. First, the South was moving away from the Democratic Party. Second, the party's identification with civil rights was increasing as the public support for civil rights grew. Third, the support of African Americans was crucial for the administration. Finally, compromise on a highly charged moral issue was damaging.

Niven begins with an introductory chapter that outlines Kennedy's attitude toward civil rights from his early days in Congress through the 1960 presidential election. He then describes in detail the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the administration reaction to them. The next three chapters lay out the Democratic decline in the South, the developing link between the administration and civil rights and the African American vote, and the dangers of compromise on a moral issue like civil rights. The final chapter attempts to extrapolate political lessons for the present.

This is an interesting thesis but one that rests on no new historical material. Niven's argument is based on speculative and circumstantial evidence-public opinion surveys, voting analyses, and a model of voting behavior on high-intensity issues. Almost no archival sources other than oral history interviews from the Kennedy Library are cited.

In the end, Niven's case is provocative but unconvincing. His problem is that he ignores a series of realities. He omits the implications of the narrow outcome of the 1960 election. He neglects the nature and composition of the United States Senate in the early 1960s. He leaves out the Cold War. He ignores early, dramatic failures of the administration (e.g., the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, and the Vienna summit) that raised questions about its judgment. In this setting, a civil rights effort undertaken by Kennedy would have broken down in Congress, excited a revolt of southern Democrats, and likely pushed the administration to the brink of collapse.

What this book proves more than anything else is that conventional wisdom is not always wrong. There are good reasons that historians and political scientists have come to the conclusion that John F. Kennedy could not afford to embark on a civil rights crusade in 1961. Nothing that David Niven has written demonstrates otherwise.

EDMUND F. KALLINA JR.

University of Central Florida