President Kennedy, bound by his own inclinations and by the Southerners of his party, had worked himself into a corner where on all sides he received less criticism for doing nothing substantive in civil rights than for doing a little bit. Governor Rockefeller seized the moment to attack Kennedy’s civil rights record. At an NAACP rally in upstate New York, he proclaimed what Clarence Mitchell had been saying in private. Trenchantly, Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s much-publicized plan to make racial progress through presidential appointments, charging that the President’s most critical
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