Killing Kennedy (27 page)

Then the president hears the sound of children’s laughter. Curious, JFK pokes his head into the room from which it is coming. Two little girls sit up in bed. They are young, just three or four years old. Both have bandages covering large portions of their bodies.

“What’s wrong with them?” he asks Dr. Walsh.

They’re burn victims, explains the doctor, who goes on to add that one girl may soon lose the use of her hands.

The president pats his pockets, searching for a pen. He doesn’t have one. This isn’t unusual. The only thing he carries in his pockets is a handkerchief.

Special Agent Newman and Dr. Walsh come up with a pen. A nurse, seeing that the president has no paper, finds a scrap from the nurse’s station. Then JFK writes a note to the children, telling them to be courageous, letting them know that the president of the United States cares for their well-being. The nurse assures him that she will give the note to their parents. “Nothing was ever said about it,” Newman will later recall. “He just went on to do what he had to do—to see his son. This was part of the dichotomy of the man—the rough-cut diamond.”

Patrick Bouvier Kennedy dies just two hours later. “He was such a beautiful baby,” the president laments to top aide Dave Powers. “He put up quite a fight.”

Kennedy is holding young Patrick’s hand as the child breathes his last. As the president absorbs the terrible moment, he is well aware that his grief is not private. The nurses, doctors, and his own staff watch to see how he handles this awful moment. Slowly, JFK leaves the room and wanders the hospital hallway, keeping his pain to himself.

*   *   *

In the outside world, there is so much going on. A movie about Kennedy’s old boat, PT-109, is a popular summer hit, further burnishing the president’s heroic image. The political situation in Texas is a growing mess that the president himself will try to fix by visiting the state in a few short months. In Chicago, mobster Sam Giancana is swearing revenge on the Kennedy brothers for tightening surveillance on his alleged criminal behavior. Ninety miles from Florida, Fidel Castro is in a rage about ongoing American covert activity in Cuba. In the nation’s capital, Martin Luther King Jr. is about to direct hundreds of thousands of civil rights protesters onto the Washington Mall. In Vietnam, the chain-smoking Catholic despot Diem is out of control. And, finally, in New Orleans, a ne’er-do-well named Lee Harvey Oswald is under arrest for distributing Communist literature, leading the FBI finally to reopen their investigation into his behavior.

But right now none of that matters to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The president’s son has died. He lived just thirty-nine hours. The grief is almost too much to bear.

JFK takes the elevator back upstairs to the room in which he had been sleeping. There, he sits down on the bed, lowers his head, and sobs.

“He just cried and cried and cried,” Dave Powers will later remember.

*   *   *

Sixty-five miles to the south, Jackie is also overcome with agonizing grief. The press swarms outside the hospital at Otis Air Force Base. A few hours later, the president arrives to be with his wife.

Even in the midst of her incredible pain, the First Lady can see how much her husband is also suffering. Gently, she reminds him that they still have each other, as well as John and Caroline.

“The one blow I could not bear,” Jackie tells JFK, “would be to lose you.”

14

A
UGUST 28, 1963

W
ASHINGTON,
D
.
C
.

A
FTERNOON

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” begins Martin Luther King Jr. His words are scripted. His mannerisms are unusually stiff, as befitting a man speaking before such a massive audience for the first time.

Daniel Chester French’s iconic white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln looms over King’s shoulder. One of Lincoln’s fists is curled into the sign language letter
A
; the other displays the sign language
L
. The Great Emancipator’s shoulders are slumped, and his head is slightly lowered, as if he still carries the great burden of being president. It has been one hundred years since Lincoln freed the slaves, and now King is telling a crowd of hundreds of thousands that black Americans are still not free.

The crowd is silent as he begins his speech. He can hear them fidgeting. The applause is light and polite, when it comes at all. King reminds them that America is still a segregated nation, one hundred years after the slaves were freed. It is a powerful thought, but his matter-of-fact delivery robs the words of their full impact.

King rambles on, the sound system carrying his voice out across the Mall and television cameras transporting his voice and image into homes across the nation.

John Kennedy is considered a great orator for his speeches’ carefully chosen words and phrasing, as is Dr. King. But on his best days, Reverend King takes his oration to an even higher level than Kennedy by adding the techniques learned from countless Sunday mornings speaking from the pulpit: thunder and whisper as his voice rises and falls, the changing pace as the reverend speeds up and slows down to make the listener hang on his every word, the stretching or shortening of syllables to accentuate a point. King, in particular, is fond of coming down hard on the letter
t
when he desires emphasis.

Normally, King’s delivery is fearless and sure, transforming words of damning rage into a hopeful prayer.

But today his delivery is flat. His long syllables and prepared words sound no different from those of any of the day’s other speakers. Martin Luther King Jr., truth be told, is dull.

He talks about poverty and the fact that America separates black from white. Today is the eighth anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder. King’s words testify that little has changed since then.

Many in the crowd have traveled hundreds of miles to be here today. They are black and they are white. The day has been long, filled with hours of speeches—many of which have been downright boring.

But Martin Luther King Jr. is the man they’ve waited to hear. And the fatigue and the heat and the claustrophobia are all forgotten as these 250,000 people strain to hear his every word. They have come for the cause of civil rights, but they have also come to hear the great orator shape this day for them. As they listen to the speech, King’s mellifluous voice carrying out over the reflecting pools between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, the audience knows in their hearts that King will rally them to greatness.

This is their expectation: that before this speech is done, Martin Luther King Jr. will say something so powerful that this day will never be forgotten.

The crowd listens closely, but as King’s speech passes the nine-minute mark, he has said almost nothing that excites them.

Two minutes later all that changes.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in the White House, John Kennedy watches King’s speech on television. It is exactly three weeks since Jackie went into labor with baby Patrick. She is mourning in seclusion on Cape Cod, her easy smile replaced by a solemn downward gaze and her eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses. The president has been vigilant about breaking away from Washington whenever possible to be with her.

But today, a Wednesday, is one day he absolutely must be in Washington, D.C. Bobby Kennedy and their brother Teddy, the new senator from Massachusetts, join JFK as he watches King begin speaking.

The attorney general is a major advocate for the civil rights movement, but his relationship with Dr. King is strained. Part of this is because he has heard J. Edgar Hoover’s wiretap recordings of King, and part is because Bobby is being protective of the president.

Since King announced the March on Washington three months ago, it is Bobby who has become its reluctant organizer. He knows that his brother’s foray into civil rights will fail if the rally at the Lincoln Memorial turns hostile or is sparsely attended. So the attorney general, working closely with his staff at the Justice Department, has quietly guided the march into a shape that can be easily controlled. He made sure that the Lincoln Memorial was the site of King’s speech, because it’s bordered on one side by the Potomac River and on the other by the Tidal Basin. This would make crowd control smoother in case of riots and also keep marchers away from the Capitol Building and the White House.

Bobby ensured that Washington’s police dogs were not on the scene, because dogs would remind people of Bull Connor and Birmingham. He saw to it that all bars and liquor stores were closed for the day, portable toilets were available to avoid his brother’s fear about public urination, and that troops were on standby at nearby military bases in case the crowd turned into a mob. To avoid the appearance that the civil rights movement was supported only by blacks, Bobby worked with the United Auto Workers Union to encourage attendance by its white members. And he even arranged for an aide to position himself below the speaker’s platform with a copy of Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World (in His Hands)” to be played over the sound system the instant one of the day’s speakers said something inflammatory or anti-American.

Nothing can be done that reflects poorly on the White House or its belated push for civil rights.

And all this, to support Martin Luther King Jr., a man of whom Bobby acidly commented just last night, “He’s not a serious person. If the country knew what we know about King’s goings-on, he’d be finished.”

Just as the Kennedys would be finished if the country knew about the president’s goings-on.

So it is that the president and his brothers watch King’s speech with great interest, praying that their unlikely political ally will deliver on the promise of this great march on Washington.

*   *   *

“We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Martin Luther King Jr. preaches—and that is exactly what he is doing right now, on the verge of swerving away from his prepared speech to quote from the Old Testament book of Amos.

King’s anxiety is so great that he often develops painful stomach problems before a big event. But now his nervousness is gone. His voice begins to rise. His long syllables become staccato. He hits hard on the letter
t
in the word
ghetto
.

Looking out across the Mall, King can see that the weariness of those hundreds of thousands listening to his speech has vanished. His voice rises. He has spoken in paragraphs until now, but, as the words begin to flow, those paragraphs become simple, powerful declarative sentences.

Martin Luther King Jr. has found his rhythm.

Gone is the monotone. Gone is the matter-of-fact delivery. He stands in the pulpit now, a minister exhorting his flock. King’s voice turns golden.

And then, for the first time, he belts out the phrase that will come to define this day forever:

“I have a dream!” King proclaims.

Now Martin Luther King owns the crowd. The entire Mall is in a fever pitch.

And then he tells them about that dream. King describes an earthly paradise where blacks and whites are not divided. He dreams that even a hostile southern state like Mississippi will know such wonders.

This dream of King’s is a complete and utter fantasy in America right now. But he is putting into words the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement. And for the people in the crowd to hear it stated so powerfully and clearly has them beside themselves with emotion and pride. Black and white alike, they hang on King’s every word. In a speech that is just sixteen minutes long, King has proved that today is truly, as he hoped, the greatest day for civil rights in American history.

By the time King winds up for the great finish, he is shouting into the microphone, flecks of spittle bursting from his mouth. The image of Lincoln gazing over his shoulder is profoundly moving as King calls upon the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is clear to all who stand out on the Mall that King plans to finish what Lincoln began so long ago and that the two men—divided by a century of racial injustice—are forever linked in history from this day forward.

“‘Free at last, free at last,’” he quotes from a Negro spiritual, “‘thank God almighty, we are free at last.’”

As the crowd on the Mall erupts in applause, knowing they have just seen and heard a profound moment in their nation’s history, John Kennedy turns to Bobby and passes judgment on what he has just seen.

“He’s damned good.”

*   *   *

One hour later, an exultant Martin Luther King Jr. meets with John Kennedy in the Oval Office. There are eleven other people in attendance, including Lyndon Johnson, so this visit is not a summit meeting between the president of the United States and the most powerful man in the civil rights movement. But Kennedy makes sure King knows he’s been paying attention to the day’s events.

“I have a dream,” he tells King, adding a nod of the head to show approval—and that his fears about King have been temporarily set aside.

*   *   *

But the March on Washington does not change the ongoing racial battle in the American South. At 10:22
A.M.
on September 15, 1963, less than three weeks after America listened to Martin Luther King Jr. dream about black boys and girls in Alabama joining hands with white boys and girls, twenty-six black children are led into the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for Sunday morning services. They are due to hear a children’s sermon on “The Love That Forgives.”

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is the same congregation that launched the Children’s Crusade on Birmingham in May 1963. It stands just across from the park where Bull Connor’s police dogs bit into the flesh of innocent black teenagers and elementary school students and has earned a special level of hatred from the white supremacist groups that still battle to block the integration of Birmingham.