Like anyone over 55, Carl Sanders remembers where he was when he heard John F. Kennedy had been shot: the 7th green of Augusta National’s famed golf course.
Georgia’s young, business-minded governor was playing politics with a couple railroad executives when two State Patrol cars suddenly pulled up. “The president and vice president have been assassinated,” they said. They had come to escort him back to Atlanta for his own safety.
Stunned, the governor rushed off with the officers, wondering, “What in the world is happening to this country?”
Sanders had a inkling, though. A month earlier, he had instructed his longtime confidant, J.B. Fuqua, to dissuade Kennedy from coming to Atlanta to speak at Georgia Tech. Ugly, integration-related violence was roiling the region, and Sanders, a Southern moderate who had the ear of the White House, worried that a visit by the Yankee president might ignite unrest in a state that had been comparatively orderly.
“We felt things were getting hot; it wouldn’t be politically good for him to come,” Sanders recounted Tuesday in his 52nd-story law office.
Today, Sanders is a legal eminence who built an international firm with 700 lawyers. He’s 88 and still erect, but this week needed a brace cinched tight over his monogrammed dress shirt to shore up an aching back.
Fifty years ago, Sanders was a 38-year-old, first-year governor with huge upside. The handsome World War II pilot and former University of Georgia quarterback was guiding his state through tumultuous times and was seen as a man headed for big things.
In fact, there were rumors the telegenic Sanders might end up on the 1964 ticket, replacing Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was reviled by Kennedy’s brother Bobby. After all, earlier in the year the White House had pointed to Sanders as a shining example “of the emerging spirit of the South.”
“It was one of the things in the wind, that Carl Sanders might be a candidate for vice president,” recalled Zell Miller, the former governor and U.S. Senator who at the time was a state senator from the mountains. “At the time, Carl Sanders was seen as a Voice of the South. He was a hot property.”
Historians largely believe the Kennedys would have held their noses and stayed with Johnson in the 1964 election. But some, like renowned LBJ biographer Robert Caro, contend Kennedy was starting to believe Johnson might be a liability in his quest for re-election.
Sanders heard the talk and appreciated the constant compliments that came from the Kennedys.
“They had to have the South (to get elected); they needed allies,” said Sanders, who heard indirectly that the Kennedys liked him and North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford as possible replacements for Johnson. “I thought it could happen. But I didn’t think it would happen.”
Sanders met Kennedy in the mid-1950s through a mutual friend and became friendly with the future First Family in 1960 when he supported Jack. When running for governor in 1962 Sanders staked himself out as moderate, yet practical, candidate, calling himself a “segregationist, but not a damned fool.”
Federal intervention in Southern elections was inciting resistance, so Sanders through an intermediary asked Bobby Kennedy not to send federal election registrars to Georgia. Such a move, he worried, would create an angry backlash that might damage his candidacy.
The White House called off the registrars, Sanders recalled. “They realized that I had been fair and reasonable all along.”
Around the time of his election, word came that Fort Gordon, the Army base near his hometown of Augusta, was being closed. He asked Sen. Richard Russell to help, but the veteran politician declined, saying he had signed off on the closing. Instead, the incoming governor called the White House, got in a plane with Fuqua, sat down with the president and saved the base. Kennedy, he knew, needed all the friends he could have in the South.
The year 1963 saw seismic changes in Georgia politics. The first black legislator in generations came to office. Conservative rural areas lost their unfair strangle-hold on the legislature, courtesy of the courts.
Sanders burrowed in to pass an ambitious agenda, modernizing state infrastructure and thinking. Newspapers often invoked the term “New Era.”
After the assassination, Sanders flew to Washington to attend Kennedy’s now iconic funeral.
Two days later, Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress to carve out a bold agenda: “No memorial, oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought,” the new president said to a storm of applause.
The New York Times noted “some political base-touching in the galleries” with the new First Family sitting with guests “carefully assembled to emphasize Democratic party unity.”
Among them, in addition to the mayors of New York and Chicago, was Carl Sanders, the telegenic face of the New South.
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