Simeon Booker, a reporter for Ebony magazine, was on the line, calling for the Attorney General. As often happened in those days, Booker got John Seigenthaler, then Robert F. Kennedy’s administrative assistant, who died last week at eighty-six. It was May, 1961, and Booker was with the Freedom Riders, civil-rights activists who were protesting segregated travel by attempting to ride buses into Jim Crow states. The riders had been stopped and beaten in Anniston, Alabama, and now the action was moving to Birmingham and Montgomery. As Seigenthaler recalled in an oral history conducted in the nineteen-seventies, Booker’s message was succinct: “Man, it’s real shit down here,” Booker said. “It’s rough.”
Seigenthaler found the attorney general, who promised Booker that the Administration would send someone to help. Bobby Kennedy then rang his brother, who asked, “Well, who have we got?”
“John’s here, he can go,” Bobby Kennedy said.
And so Seigenthaler went. His credentials? As he told the story down the years, his main qualification was the sound of his voice. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Seigenthaler was garrulous, engaging, and indisputably a son of the South. “I’d go in, my Southern accent dripping sorghum and molasses, and warm them up,” he later said. In theory, Seigenthaler’s task was to work with the Alabama authorities to get the Freedom Riders to safety; in practice, he saw a woman being attacked outside the Montgomery bus station and saw no choice but to intervene. A white demonstrator brandishing a piece of pipe fractured his skull, and the personal representative of the President of the United States and the Attorney General lay on the pavement for half an hour. Booker had been right: it was rough. When Bobby Kennedy called Seigenthaler in the hospital afterward, he wryly asked, “How is my popularity down there?” Without missing a beat, Seigenthaler replied: “If you’re going to run for public office, don’t do it in Alabama.”
The response was classic Seigenthaler—at once charming and true. It would be easy to romanticize such a life, to treat the story of John Seigenthaler as a kind of civic fairy tale. Yet long before his death, Seigenthaler bridged the worlds of journalism and of public service in ways that made him an inspiration not in retrospect but in real time. With Seigenthaler gone, arguably only Ben Bradlee remains as a newspaper editor of truly transformative national scope. That smallest of clubs just grew even more exclusive.
As a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean in the nineteen-fifties, as an aide and adviser to Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department, and as editor and publisher of the Tennessean from the sixties into the nineties, Seigenthaler was courageous and canny, fearless and tireless. (He took one last leave to advise R.F.K. in the 1968 Presidential campaign.) Seigenthaler embodied the best that journalism could be, calling it as he saw it, but he also understood that much of life unfolds in the twilight. It was an insight that led him to be at once tough and generous.
Born in Nashville, in 1927, Seigenthaler was raised as a Roman Catholic and approached the world with a peculiarly Catholic sense of tragedy and of possibility. He knew the world was fallen but believed deeply in redemption, in progress, and in the duty of every soul to try to make the world at least a little better. He understood the injunction that to whom much is given, much is expected, and, grateful for his own life, he held himself to account.
Seigenthaler adored the arena of public life. He helped carry Robert Kennedy to his grave, was the first to suggest that a young Albert Gore, Jr., run for a House seat, and remained a thoughtful, unapologetic voice for liberal causes in a region whose politics have run ever redder in the twenty-first century. He never slowed down, keeping up a formidable speaking and charitable schedule until the end.
As a reporter for the Tennessean in the nineteen-fifties, Seigenthaler did groundbreaking investigations on corruption in the Teamsters. He believed his work would be of interest to the Kennedys, who had made headlines probing Jimmy Hoffa, and took pains to get his stories in front of Robert Kennedy, who soon admitted the Southerner to his intimate circle. Ethel Kennedy made the trip to Nashville this week to pay her respects to her late husband’s fallen lieutenant.
The work of most of his days, however, was not at the Camelot round table but in the Tennessean newsroom, where he presided over a powerful daily at a time when dailies were, well, powerful. Reflecting on Seigenthaler’s career, Bruce Dobie, writing in the Nashville Scene, captured his ethos perfectly:
And he loved it all. If journalism really is the first rough draft of history—the phrase is Philip Graham’s—then it requires at least a few practitioners with an epic sensibility and an appreciation of the possibilities of political life. Seigenthaler had both, for he had played his part in the great American saga of the age and had seen how the world looks to those charged with the responsibility of government. There will be many moments in the coming years when those in Nashville and beyond will wish that they, like the Kennedys, could once more send John Seigenthaler into the fray to seek the truth and protect the powerless—all with a melodious accent and an inescapable sense of the joy of the fight.
Jon Meacham, who lives in Nashville, is the author, most recently, of “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.”
Photograph by Mark Humphrey/AP.
