Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy (47 page)

The next morning, in far-off Vietnam, South Vietnamese soldiers are flown aboard U.S. helicopters to combat a Communist stronghold, a move that forces President Kennedy to backpedal publicly on the issue of direct U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, a war that he believes is vital to stanching the worldwide spread of communism.

Meanwhile, thanks to a loan from his brother, Lee Harvey Oswald and his family fly to Dallas. The city simmers with a rage that mirrors Oswald’s ongoing personal unhappiness in many ways. The Deep South swung in President Kennedy’s favor during the election, but there are pockets of militant anger about Kennedy being the first Roman Catholic president, his desire to bring about racial equality, and what some perceive as his Communist tendencies.

This is the environment into which the Oswald family arrives. They land at a Dallas area airport called Love Field, where the president and First Lady will touch down aboard Air Force One in seventeen short months.

Oswald is unhappy that his return to the United States has not attracted widespread media attention—or any media attention, for that matter. But even as he fumes that the press is nowhere in sight, he has no idea that he is being secretly watched—by a very powerful concern.

6

A
UGUST 23
,
1962

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C./B
EIRUT
, L
EBANON

M
IDDAY

The president is impotent.

Or so thinks Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union. Not physically, of course, but in the bruising global arena of realpolitik.

Khrushchev has watched Kennedy closely since the Bay of Pigs, searching for signs of the same weakness and indecisiveness that defined the U.S. president’s handling of that crisis. The sixty-eight-year-old Khrushchev, who came to power after a brutal political battle to replace Joseph Stalin, well knows how to evaluate an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. He does not see a worthy adversary in Kennedy. September will mark Khrushchev’s tenth anniversary in power. He plans on marking the occasion with a celebration of Soviet dominance in the world. If he can humiliate an American president in the process, so much the better.

The Russians, as the Soviets are often called, are flaunting their control of outer space by sending not one but two spaceships into orbit at the same time. The cosmonauts piloting each craft then further parade Soviet mastery of missile technology by speaking to each other through a device known as a radio telephone.

In addition, Khrushchev and his Politburo are thumbing their noses at an international nuclear test ban by exploding two 40-megaton nuclear weapons over the Arctic, one week apart.

They are also building an eighty-seven-mile-long wall through the heart of Berlin, Germany. The wall separates the Soviet-controlled sector from the rest of the city, which is controlled by the Western Allies. The barrier is not meant to keep people out, but to imprison the citizens of Communist East Germany, preventing them from fleeing to the freedom of West Germany. The results are horrific. On August 23, 1962, East German border guards shoot a nineteen-year-old railway policeman who is trying to sprint to the West through a hole in the still-unfinished wall. They watch as the young man struggles to crawl the final few yards to freedom, then do nothing to help him as he collapses and dies.

The same thing happened a week earlier, when another young German was shot while trying to escape East Germany. Again, border guards watched for an hour as the man slowly bled to death. No one was allowed to go to his rescue. Riots broke out in West Berlin to protest the Soviet behavior, but it continues without apology.

Through it all, President Kennedy has refrained from making public threats or even critiquing the Soviet atrocities. Still, the American people overwhelmingly support JFK. He is the most popular president in modern American history, with an average approval rating of 70.1 percent—almost six points higher than Eisenhower’s and a whopping 25 points higher than Harry Truman’s. But the public will not forgive another misstep like the Bay of Pigs, so JFK tiptoes carefully through the high-stakes arena of foreign policy.

*   *   *

Lyndon Johnson does not tiptoe when it comes to foreign relations. The vice president—whose Secret Service code name is Volunteer—now stands up in the front seat of a convertible in Beirut, Lebanon. This “Paris of the Middle East” loves him. He waves to the huge crowds lining the road as he is driven to the Phoenicia Hotel.

No matter where in the world he travels, the vice president wades into crowds, handing out ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters with the initials LBJ stamped on them. Then he launches into a pep talk. Whether it’s a leper in Dakar or a shirtless beggar in Karachi, the vice president is keen to shake his hand and tell him that the American dream is not a myth—that there is hope, even in the midst of poverty.

And best of all, LBJ believes this. Johnson was raised in poverty himself. He knows firsthand the ravages of neglect and substandard living conditions. In many ways, the vice president has a far deeper emotional connection with the unwashed crowds along the side of the road than with the wealthy diplomats who host him.

Johnson is larger than life, a towering dynamo with basset hound bags under his eyes and sweat rings soaking his shirt. Back in Washington, he mopes around, bemoaning his lack of power. But when he travels abroad, Johnson is a rock star. His foreign antics are becoming legendary, particularly his impulsive habit of halting motorcades so he can jump out of his personal convertible limousine and into crowds to press the flesh.

Beirut is no different. This is the first layover on a nineteen-day trip that will also see stops in Iran, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Italy. Lebanon was just supposed to be a refueling stop for his 707, but when Johnson learns that he is the highest-ranking American official ever to visit the Land of Cedars, he can’t help himself. The refueling stop suddenly becomes an official visit, and the vice president is soon whisked from the airport and into the heart of Beirut.

As his motorcade slows down, Johnson spots a crowd of children at a roadside melon stand. He orders his driver to halt. Whipping off his sunglasses to make eye contact, Johnson bounds over to the startled kids and tells them about the power of the American dream. Some of the children look confused. A teenager wearing a “Champion Spark Plugs” cap is told that the United States stands behind the “liberty and integrity” of Lebanon.

Johnson’s voice is booming, and he waves his arms as he speaks. Secret Service agents hasten to surround him, once again annoyed at the vice president’s ignorance about security. Then, in a flash, Johnson is back in the front seat of his car, standing tall, waving to the crowds with both hands as he continues into the heart of Beirut.

Lyndon Johnson is a persnickety traveler. In addition to his limousine, he travels with cases of Cutty Sark scotch and a special shower nozzle whose needlelike jets of water he prefers. He demands a seven-foot-long mattress in each hotel room, to accommodate his large frame—not that he sleeps much: long after his staff has gone to sleep, LBJ is still at work, making phone calls back to Washington and reading diplomatic cables.

Originally, Johnson fought JFK over being used as a roving ambassador, but now he has come to love this aspect of his job. In Washington his craving for authority has many in the White House referring to him as Seward, a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s power-hungry secretary of state. But on the road, Johnson truly does have power. He speaks for the president, but just as often veers off message to speak his own mind, which are moments he relishes.

But the Kennedys, John and Bobby, are annoyed with Johnson, especially when he speaks irresponsibly. On one trip to Asia, he praises South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who tortured and killed an estimated fifty thousand suspected Communists. Incredibly, Johnson pronounces Diem to be the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” a pronouncement that leads some to question the vice president’s very sanity.

In Thailand, LBJ conducts a 3:00
A.M
. press conference in his pajamas. On that same trip, he is warned that patting people on the head is considered an offense in Thai culture—whereupon he immediately bounds onto a local bus and rubs his very large hands on the heads of its passengers.

Johnson does one better in Saigon: while holding a press conference in his steamy hotel room, he suddenly strips naked, towels the sweat from his body, and puts on a fresh suit—all while answering questions from the media.

But there’s no need for disrobing in Beirut. The Phoenicia Hotel is just two blocks from the blue Mediterranean. The August heat is tempered by a cool sea breeze. This will be one of the longest trips Johnson has ever undertaken, but the vice president is reveling in every minute, because for each one of these nineteen days away from the United States, he will be the most powerful and respected man in the room.

*   *   *

At the same time, at home, Bobby Kennedy is engaged in a completely different power struggle, one best epitomized by an incident that happened seven years ago.

Mississippi, 1955. A fourteen-year-old African American boy named Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till is visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta town of Money. Till is from Chicago and has come to the Deep South to see for himself where his mother grew up. He had polio as a small child, which caused him to develop a stuttering problem. But though just five foot, four inches, Emmett now looks mature enough that he often passes for an adult. A close look at his smooth face, however, reveals that he is still very much a child.

Emmett’s mother has warned him that there is a big difference between Chicago and Mississippi, and she isn’t talking about the weather. Just a week before Emmett’s trip south, a black man was shot dead in front of a courthouse not far from Money. His killers will soon be acquitted.

Emmett tells his mother he understands the southern racial climate and promises to be careful. This will turn out to be a false promise.

The teenager arrives at the small two-bedroom home of his sixty-four-year-old great-uncle Moses Wright on August 21, 1955. Three days later, on a Wednesday, he and some of his teenage relatives drift over to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a small mom-and-pop operation that caters mostly to local sharecroppers. It is 7:30 at night. The twenty-four-year-old owner, Roy Bryant, a former soldier, is away in Texas, hauling shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn, a petite woman with black hair and dark eyes, is running the store.

Emmett is among eight young blacks who pull up to the store in a 1946 Ford. All are between thirteen and nineteen years old. They meet up with another group of black teens that is already playing checkers at tables on the store’s front porch. Emmett, hundreds of miles from home and trying his best to fit in, shows the group a picture of a white girl in his wallet and then brags that she was a sexual conquest.

The crowd, which now numbers almost twenty teenage boys and girls, can’t believe their ears. Such an intermingling of the races is unheard of in Mississippi. Public restrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants there are segregated. A black man would never even dream of shaking hands with a white man, unless the white man extended his hand first. Blacks lower their gaze when talking to whites, always showing them respect, referring to them as “Mister” or “Missus” or “Miss,” and never by their first name. So Emmett Till’s claim that he not only spoke with a white girl but also took her clothes off and lay with her is met with monumental disbelief.

So they tell Emmett to prove it. They dare him to go inside the grocery and talk to Carolyn Bryant. Sensing danger, Emmett tries to back out. But that spurs the group on, and they begin taunting him for being chicken. Emmett surrenders. He pulls open the screen door and steps into the store. He walks over to the candy case, where he asks for two cents’ worth of bubble gum. When Carolyn hands him the gum, Emmett places his hand over hers and asks the married mother of two young boys for a date.

Back home in Chicago, a man touching a woman’s hand might not be considered a big deal. But in the Deep South, skin-on-skin contact between blacks and whites is forbidden. When money is exchanged in stores, a black person will place it on the counter rather than into the white person’s hand. Similarly, when the change is returned, it is also placed on the counter. And Emmett didn’t just touch a married white woman, he asked her for a date.

Carolyn pulls away, astonished. Emmett reaches for her again, this time around her waist. “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby,” he assures her. “I been with white girls before.”

Angrily, she pushes him away. Emmett finally leaves the store. But he is soon followed by the furious woman, who is racing to her car to get her husband’s handgun. It’s getting late, and she now fears for her safety.

But Emmett Till means her no harm. He is in the habit of substituting whistling for words when his stutter sets in, as he does now, whistling at Bryant. Carolyn Bryant is shocked again. And so are the black teenagers watching the scene unfold. They “knew the whistle would cause trouble,” the official FBI report will read. “And they left in haste, taking Till with them.”

When Roy Bryant returns home and hears what happened, he wastes no time in conducting his own personal criminal investigation. On August 28, at 2:30
A.M
., he bangs on the door at the home of Emmett’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Roy is accompanied by his friend, J. W. “Big” Milam.

Big Milam is twelve years older than Roy Bryant. He is a hulking, extroverted Mississippian who quit school after the ninth grade and fought the Germans in World War II. Each man carries a Colt .45 handgun—a revolver for Bryant and an automatic for Milam. The men force Moses to take them to “the nigger who did the talking.”

A frightened Moses leads the two men into a small back bedroom, where Emmett and three cousins share a bed. Big Milam shines a flashlight in the boy’s face. “You the nigger who did the talking?”