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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
At least one of Pickering's current supporters, the columnist Bill Minor of the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, has asserted that Gartin "had little to do with the [Sovereignty] commission's operations," despite the glaring public record to the contrary. Among other things, Gartin, in connection with the commission, directed an unsuccessful effort to destroy Tougaloo College, the only racially integrated institution of higher learning in the state, in 1964. Gartin's leadership role in the commission is amply documented in the commission's now opened files.
After the Atlantic City Democratic convention, Gartin accused President Johnson of personally "master-minding the insults" directed at the white segregationist Regular Democrats. He urged voters to support the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights bill.
The new evidence reveals, in addition, that some time before the Democratic convention Gartin was meeting with officials of the Mississippi Republican Party concerning the upcoming election, and promising to help give the voters a "clear choice" in November. As part of fulfilling that promise, Gartin undertook what he later described as an important effort -- what he called "converting" his law partner, Charles Pickering, to the Republicans.
Gartin himself held back from switching parties, although one Republican leader wrote him to extend an invitation, noting that "we need you and your guiding hand on our side also." But Gartin saw no problem in working hand-in-glove with the Republicans behind the scenes in order to ward off the menace of desegregation -- and to deliver to the Republicans his pro-segregation law partner, Pickering.
As he wrote to Republican Party official F. Hobson Gary on Sept. 21, 1964: "This boy, Charles Pickering, is a very able person and I think he will mean a great deal to the Republican party in Mississippi." Gartin went on to say: "Personally, I have been so busy converting my law partner lately that I haven't been out too much, but I still think Goldwater will easily carry the state."
It is clear from his papers that Gartin prevailed upon Pickering not simply to reject Johnson's candidacy because of his civil rights stands, but to reject the Democrats entirely and join the Republicans -- and to help offer Mississippians what Gartin called "a clear-cut choice" in the election.
Yet if Carroll Gartin was the "guiding hand" behind "converting" Pickering, the young lawyer was not a thoughtless convert. Far from putty in his mentor's hands, Pickering thought and talked a great deal before making his decision. By Gartin's account, Pickering kept him "busy." But finally, Pickering was convinced that, in the wake of the national Democrats' moves on civil rights, both pragmatism and principle dictated that he leave the party and join the Republicans, whose presidential candidate had conspicuously voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and who went on to win nearly 90 percent of the Mississippi vote in the fall election.
When he announced his switch, Pickering, not surprisingly, said nothing about Gartin's role in his conversion. But he made it clear, albeit sometimes by code words, that the national Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights was the chief reason he decided to bolt. Although his "converting" may have begun before the convention in Atlantic City, he cited the convention's attack on the segregated practices of the Mississippi Regular Democratic Party.
"The people of our State," Pickering told a local newspaper at the time he switched, in a report cited during his 2002 Senate testimony, "were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention. And this has convinced me beyond a doubt that Mississippians do not now and will not in the future have any useful place in the National Democratic Party."
Pickering went on to say in a UPI report, dated Sept. 10: "I see in the Republican Party our only hope of rescuing our national government from an ever increasing tendency toward socialism."
That was exactly the way other defecting pro-segregationists in Mississippi had defended their decision since Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act in early July.
