In short, he positioned himself not as a champion of civil rights but as a defender of law and order. As he would say again and again to his southern critics, he sent troops to Little Rock to uphold the courts. The country was faced with “open defiance of the Constitution,” and if he were to tolerate that, he would invite “anarchy.” His decision, he told one southern senator, had nothing to do with “integration, desegregation or segregation”: he aimed to uphold the law. To fail in that duty was “to acquiesce in anarchy, mob rule, and incipient rebellion,” which would “destroy the Nation.”
