Kennedy had not planned to make civil rights the focus of the second half of his first term, and he worried about the prospect. The president was concerned that the civil rights issue “was going to be his political swan song,” his brother Robert said. “We used to discuss whether what had been done was the right thing to do, just the fact that I’d gotten him into so much difficulty. We used to talk about it every three days, because there was so much attention focused on it at that time in an unpleasant way.” If the civil rights legislation failed, while other legislation was delayed, Kennedy
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