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The Other Lesson. Even before the battle was over, recriminations began ringing out. Governor Barnett put the blame for the violence on "inexperienced, nervous, trigger-happy'' U.S. marshals, who, he said, started firing tear gas unnecessarily. But the mob had inflicted injuries on eight marshals before the first tear-gas gun was fired. The Kennedy Administration blamed Barnett. claiming that he failed to keep his promise to help maintain order. The state cops made no effort to disperse the gathering mob. and soon after the serious violence started they withdrew from the campus. Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson later explained lamely that the police had to withdraw when the marshals started shooting tear-gas guns because the World War I-type police gas masks could not filter out tear gas.
Barnett was undoubtedly to blame. both for failing to help preserve order, and for bringing on the crisis in the first place. So was the Ole Miss faculty, whose members timidly failed to make any serious effort to quiet down the students. And so was the Kennedy Administration. President Kennedy could have learned one lesson from Eisenhower's performance in the Little Rock crisis: if forced to intervene, then intervene with sufficient force. That is what Ike did, and there was no death toll in Little Rock, nor any serious casualties. From the time of Meredith's first attempt to register under federal court orders, he was a sort of U.S. Government ward, accompanied by federal officials and transported in federal planes and cars. But not until hours after the attackers besieged the marshals in the Lyceum did Kennedy commit enough force to do the job. Even after Barnett personally blocked Meredith twice, the Administration tried a third time with the same demonstratedly inadequate two-man escort. Each successive failure made Barnett more of a hero to segregationists. And when the President finally committed a force of 500-odd marshals, which in turn proved to be inadequate, his timing was terrible: by following Barnett's advice to put Meredith on the campus on Sunday, before the TV speech, he enraged Mississippians, who looked upon the move as a kind of federal treachery.
Signs of Thaw. But despite all the mistakes, all the knavery, the hate and violence. Meredith was enrolled at Ole Miss. Justice was done. And soon afterward a sort of semi-normalcy began gradually returning to the campus and the town. At midweek the Pentagon began withdrawing troop units. Army Secretary Cyrus R. Vance issued an order sending home 8,000 of the 11,000 Mississippi National Guardsmen who had so recently been called into federal service. Voices of common sense and moderation began speaking up in Mississippi. The Ole Miss student body had been sobered to the extent that it put up surprisingly little protest when the Defense Department, to forestall further violence, ordered the weekend homecoming game (Ole Miss v. Houston) shifted from Oxford to the stadium in Jackson, 170 miles away.