He was a quiet man with a thankless job, and he never became a household name or famous Washington face. But Lee C. White, who died at 90 this past October, played a crucial and effective behind-the-scenes role as White House civil rights adviser for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, at the height of the movement to make America live up to its founding creed.
Like Kennedy’s close adviser Ted Sorensen, a fellow Nebraskan, White first went to work for JFK in the Senate, and after leaving the Johnson White House in 1966, he would go on to chair the Federal Power Commission (now known as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). But it was in his five years as the White House’s chief point man on civil rights that he left the most lasting legacy.
He got the job in late 1961, when his predecessor, Harris Wofford, grew weary of Kennedy’s temporizing on civil rights and left to work for the Peace Corps. It fell to White to reassure restive civil rights groups, who wanted Kennedy to propose a comprehensive desegregation law, and he brought patient diplomacy and a self-effacing sense of humor to the task.
“I was never told as much, but I believe that the president did not want a high-profile big-name assistant handling civil rights issues and attracting attention,” White would recall in his 2008 memoir, Government for the People. “That made me a natural to take it over.”
As a candidate for president in 1960, Kennedy had vowed to end discrimination in federally financed housing “with the stroke of a pen.” But upon taking office, no such executive order was forthcoming, as the president sought to placate the segregationist Southern barons who dominated Congress. Not until November 1962 did the president issue the order, and even then it applied only to housing built in the future.
“It took a hell of a lot more struggle and examination than I think we realized, and I’m sure the candidate realized, when he uttered those famous words,” White would remember. “Toward the end of ’61 and ’62, a lot of people began sending ink and pens for the president. To the extent that you can laugh about a joke when you’re the butt of it, he thought it was pretty damn funny. We sent the pens to some school for the retarded. We didn’t want them to go to waste.”
But in June 1963, when Kennedy at last decided to propose the sweeping bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was White who worked feverishly to coordinate the White House lobbying campaign with lawyers, church groups, business people, civil rights leaders and others. In tandem with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and other top officials at the Justice Department, White arranged for the care and feeding of the grassroots constituencies whose support would be crucial for passage of the bill.
He kept up the same efforts for Lyndon B. Johnson, and in 1965, as Johnson prepared to propose what became the landmark Voting Rights Act, it was White who urged him to address the joint session of Congress, in which the president memorably vowed, “We shall overcome.”
White, the son of a grocer in Omaha, was a shrewd judge of people, and he quickly learned to read Johnson’s mood. “When LBJ was angry, there was no doubt about it,” he once recalled. “He looked down at me and saw an invisible tag saying, ‘Inherited from Kennedy. Won’t understand.’”
But Johnson also relied greatly on White’s counsel. After White’s death, his fellow White House aide Bill Moyers told the Washington Post that Johnson often made the trek to White’s small second-floor office in the West Wing to seek his advice, rather than summoning him to the Oval Office—a gesture of respect not accorded to others.
White saw the realities and limits of Washington at close range, but his outlook remained upbeat. “I am a Democrat, and a proud one,” he wrote in his memoir. “I believe that government ‘for the people’ can and should strive to improve the lot of its citizens and provide for the nation’s security. As a dyed-in-the-wool optimist and a native Nebraskan, I even believe it is possible there could be a Republican administration that would espouse and try to achieve those goals. Regardless of political parties or affiliation, we as a nation need to reaffirm and adhere to the guiding principles of our Constitution.”