Edge of Eternity (69 page)

‘Draw up a budget.’

‘Pete’s on his way over here now. We can make some calls.’

‘If you put in your own money, I’ll match it.’

‘Thank you!’ Jasper had no intention of spending his own money. But a budget was like a newspaper gossip column: most of it could be fiction, because no one ever knew the truth. ‘We could get the first issue together for the beginning of term, if we’re quick.’

‘You should run that story about South African investments on the front page.’

Jasper’s spirits had lifted again. This might even be better. ‘Yeah . . .
St Julian’s News
will have a bland front page saying “Welcome to London”, or something. Ours will be the real newspaper.’ He began to feel excited.

‘Show me your budget as soon as you can,’ Daisy said. ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jasper.

29

In the autumn of 1963, George Jakes bought a car. He could afford it and he liked the idea, even though in Washington it was easy enough to get around on public transport. He preferred foreign cars: he thought they were more stylish. He found a dark-blue five-year-old two-door Mercedes-Benz 220S convertible that had a classy look. On the third Sunday in September he drove to Prince George’s County, Maryland, to visit his mother. She would cook him dinner, then they would drive together to Bethel Evangelical Church for the evening service. These days it was not often he had time to visit her, even on a Sunday.

Driving along Suitland Parkway with the top down in the mild September sunshine, he thought about all the questions she would ask him and what answers he would give. First, she would want to know about Verena. ‘She says she’s not good enough for me, Mom,’ he would say. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘She’s right,’ his mother would probably say. Not many girls were good enough for her son, in her opinion.

She would ask how he was getting on with Bobby Kennedy. The truth was that Bobby was a man of extremes. There were people he hated implacably: J. Edgar Hoover was one. That was fine by George: Hoover was contemptible. But Lyndon Johnson was another. George thought it was a pity that Bobby hated Johnson, who could have been a powerful ally. Sadly, they were oil and water. George tried to imagine the big, boisterous Vice-President hanging out with the ultra-chic Kennedy clan on a boat at Hyannis Port. The image made him smile: Lyndon would be like a rhinoceros in a ballet class.

Bobby liked as hard as he hated, and, fortunately, George was someone he liked. George was one of a small inner group who were trusted so much that even when they made mistakes it was assumed they were well intentioned and so they were forgiven. What would George say to his mother about Bobby? ‘He’s a smart man who sincerely wants to make America a better country.’

She would want to know why the Kennedy brothers were moving so slowly on civil rights. George would say: ‘If they push harder, there will be a white backlash, and that will have two results. One, we’ll lose the civil rights bill in Congress. Two, Jack Kennedy will lose the 1964 presidential election. And if Kennedy loses, who will win? Dick Nixon? Barry Goldwater? It could even be George Wallace, heaven forbid.’

These were his musings as he parked in the driveway of Jacky Jakes’s small, pleasant ranch-style house and let himself in at the front door.

All those thoughts fled his mind instantly when he heard the sound of his mother weeping.

He suffered a moment of childish fear. He had not often known his mother to cry: she had always been a tower of strength in the landscape of his youth. But, on the few occasions when she had given in, and howled her grief and fear uncontrollably, little Georgy had been bewildered and terrified. And now, just for a second, he had to suppress the revival of that boyhood terror, and remind himself that he was a grown man, not to be scared by a mother’s tears.

He slammed the door and strode across the little hallway into the parlour. Jacky was sitting on the tan velvet couch in front of the television set. Her hands were pressed to her cheeks as if to hold her head on. Tears streamed down her face. Her mouth was open, and she was wailing. She was staring wide-eyed at the TV.

George said: ‘Momma, what is it, for God’s sake, what happened?’

‘Four little girls!’ she sobbed.

George looked at the monochrome picture on the screen. He saw two cars that looked as if they had been in a smash. Then the camera moved to a building and panned along damaged walls and broken windows. It pulled back, and he recognized the building. His heart lurched. ‘My God, that’s the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham!’ he said. ‘What did they do?’

His mother said: ‘The whites bombed the Sunday School!’

‘No! No!’ George’s mind refused to accept it. Even in Alabama, men would not bomb a Sunday School.

‘They killed four girls,’ Jacky said. ‘Why did God let this happen?’

On television, a newsreader’s voice-over said: ‘The dead have been identified as Denise McNair, aged eleven –’

‘Eleven!’ said George. ‘This can’t be true!’

‘. . . Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Carole Robertson, fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, fourteen.’

‘But they’re children!’ said George.

‘More than twenty other people were injured by the blast,’ the newsreader intoned in a voice devoid of emotion, and the camera showed an ambulance pulling away from the scene.

George sat down next to his mother and put his arms around her. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.

‘Pray,’ she replied.

The newsreader continued remorselessly. ‘This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years,’ he said. ‘The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings.’

‘Pray?’ said George, his voice trembling with grief.

Right then he wanted to kill someone.

*  *  *

The Sunday School bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

At the funeral, Martin Luther King said: ‘In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers.’ George tried to follow that counsel, but he found it hard.

For a while, George felt public opinion swinging towards civil rights. A congressional committee toughened Kennedy’s bill, adding the ban on employment discrimination that the campaigners wanted so badly.

But a few weeks later the segregationists came out of their corner fighting.

In mid-October an envelope was delivered to the Justice Department and passed to George. It contained a slim, bound report from the FBI entitled:
Communism and the Negro Movement: A Current Analysis.

‘What the fuck?’ George murmured to himself.

He read it quickly. The report was eleven pages long and devastating. It called Martin Luther King ‘an unprincipled man’. It claimed that he took advice from Communists ‘knowingly, willingly and regularly’. With an assured air of inside knowledge it said: ‘Communist Party officials visualize the possibility of creating a situation whereby it could be said that, as the Communist Party goes, so goes Martin Luther King.’

These confident assertions were not backed up by a single scrap of evidence.

George picked up the phone and called Joe Hugo at FBI headquarters, which was on another floor in the same Justice Department building. ‘What is this shit?’ he said.

Joe knew immediately what he was talking about and did not bother to pretend otherwise. ‘It’s not my fault your friends are Commies,’ he said. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘This is not a report. It’s a smear of unsupported allegations.’

‘We have evidence.’

‘Evidence that can’t be produced is not evidence, Joe, it’s hearsay – weren’t you listening in law school?’

‘Sources of intelligence have to be protected.’

‘Who have you sent this crap to?’

‘Let me check. Ah . . . the White House, the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.’

‘So it’s all over Washington, you asshole.’

‘Obviously, we don’t try to
conceal
information about our nation’s enemies.’

‘This is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the President’s civil rights bill.’

‘We would never do a thing like that, George. We’re just a law enforcement agency.’ Joe hung up.

George took a few minutes to recover his temper. Then he went through the report underlining the most outrageous allegations. He typed a note listing the government departments to which the report had been sent, according to Joe. Then he took the document in to Bobby.

As always, Bobby sat at his desk with his jacket off, his tie loosened, and his glasses on. He was smoking a cigar. ‘You’re not going to like this,’ George said. He handed over the report, then summarized it.

‘That cock sucker Hoover,’ said Bobby.

It was the second time George had heard Bobby call Hoover a cock sucker. ‘You don’t mean that literally,’ George said.

‘Don’t I?’

George was startled. ‘Is Hoover a homo?’ It was hard to imagine. Hoover was a short, overweight man with thinning hair, a squashed nose, lopsided features and a thick neck. He was the opposite of a fairy.

Bobby said: ‘I hear the Mob has photos of him in a woman’s dress.’

‘Is that why he goes around saying there is no such thing as the Mafia?’

‘It’s one theory.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Make an appointment for me to see him tomorrow.’

‘Okay. In the meantime, let me go through the Levison wiretaps. If Levison is influencing King towards Communism, there must be evidence in those phone calls. Levison would have to talk about the bourgeoisie, the masses, class struggle, revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin, Marx, the Soviet Union, like that. I’ll make a note of every such reference and see what they add up to.’

‘That’s not a bad idea. Let me have a memo before I meet with Hoover.’

George returned to his office and sent for the transcripts of the wiretap on Stanley Levison’s phone – faithfully copied to the Justice Department by Hoover’s FBI. Half an hour later a file clerk wheeled a cart into the room.

George started work. Next time he looked up was when a cleaner opened his door and asked if she could sweep his office. He stayed at his desk while she worked around him. He remembered ‘pulling all-nighters’ at Harvard Law, especially during the absurdly demanding first year.

Long before he finished it was clear to him that Levison’s conversations with King had nothing to do with Communism. They did not use a single one of George’s key words, from Alienation to Zapata. They talked about a book King was writing; they discussed fund-raising; they planned the march on Washington. King admitted fears and doubts to his friend: even though he advocated non-violence, was he to blame for riots and bombings provoked by peaceful demonstrations? They rarely touched on wider political issues, never on the Cold War conflicts that obsessed every Communist: Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam.

At 4 a.m. George put his head down on the desk and napped. At eight he took a clean shirt from his desk drawer, still in its laundry wrapper, and went to the men’s room to wash. Then he typed the note Bobby had requested, saying that in two years of phone calls Stanley Levison and Martin Luther King had never spoken about Communism or any subject remotely associated therewith. ‘If Levison is a Moscow propagandist, he must be the worst one in history,’ George finished.

Later that day, Bobby went to see Hoover at the FBI. When he came back he said to George: ‘He agreed to withdraw the report. Tomorrow his liaison men will go to every recipient and retrieve all copies, saying it needs to be revised.’

‘Good,’ George said. ‘But it’s too late, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Bobby. ‘The damage is done.’

*  *  *

As if President Kennedy did not have enough to worry about in the autumn of 1963, the crisis in Vietnam boiled over on the first Saturday in November.

Encouraged by Kennedy, the South Vietnamese military deposed their unpopular President, Ngo Dinh Diem. In Washington, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy woke Kennedy at 3 a.m. to tell him the coup he had authorized had now taken place. Diem and his brother, Nhu, had been arrested. Kennedy ordered that Diem and his family be given safe passage to exile.

Bobby summoned George to go with him to a meeting in the Cabinet Room at 10 a.m.

During the meeting an aide came in with a cable announcing that both Ngo Dinh brothers had committed suicide.

President Kennedy was more shocked than George had ever seen him. He looked stricken. He paled beneath his tan, jumped to his feet, and rushed from the room.

‘They didn’t commit suicide,’ Bobby said to George after the meeting. ‘They’re devout Catholics.’

George knew that Tim Tedder was in Saigon, liaising between the CIA and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, pronounced Arvin. No one would be surprised if it turned out that Tedder had fouled up.

Around midday, a CIA cable revealed that the Ngo Dinh brothers had been executed in the back of an army personnel carrier.

‘We can’t control anything over there,’ George said to Bobby in frustration. ‘We’re trying to help those people find their way to freedom and democracy, but nothing we do works.’

‘Just hang on another year,’ said Bobby. ‘We can’t lose Vietnam to the Communists now – my brother would be defeated in the presidential election next November. But as soon as he’s re-elected, he’ll pull out faster than you can blink. You’ll see.’

*  *  *

A gloomy group of aides sat in the office next to Bobby’s one evening that November. Hoover’s intervention had worked, and the civil rights bill was in trouble. Congressmen who were ashamed to be racists were looking for a pretext to vote against the bill, and Hoover had given them one.

The bill had been routinely passed to the Rules Committee, whose chair, Howard W. Smith, from Virginia, was one of the more rabid conservative Southern Democrats. Emboldened by the FBI’s accusations of Communism in the civil rights movement, Smith had announced that his committee would keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.