Kennedy's Last Days: The Assassination That Defined a Generation (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

JUNE 22, 1963

Washington, D.C. Late Morning

T
HE PRESIDENT AND
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
J
R.
walk alone through the White House Rose Garden. This is the first time they’ve met. Kennedy towers over the five-foot-six civil rights leader. Today is a Saturday and the start of a carefully orchestrated series of meetings between the White House and some powerful business groups to mobilize support for the civil rights movement.

John Kennedy has thrown the power of his office behind the civil rights movement, but reluctantly. It is Bobby Kennedy who is the driving force behind his brother’s new stand.

May 1963 was a trying month, marked by confrontation after confrontation in Birmingham, spurred by Governor George Wallace. In June, after successfully ensuring that the University of Alabama was integrated, JFK delivered a nationally televised address about civil rights. In a hastily written and partially improvised speech that would one day be counted among his best, the president promised that his administration would do everything it could to end segregation. He pushed Congress to “enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities open to the public.”

Integration, however, is not just a matter of doing the right thing. JFK’s commitment has far-reaching ramifications. For instance, some Americans think that it is Communists who are supporting the civil rights movement. The last thing Kennedy wants is to be branded a Communist, even though he knows that many in the South think he is.

And there is another painful truth: Unlike the Cuban missile crisis or even the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the civil rights situation is a problem over which John Kennedy has little direct control. Martin Luther King Jr. is on the front line in this battle. It is King who is in command—and both men know it.

On June 22, 1963, civil rights leaders meet with Vice President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the White House. Martin Luther King Jr. is to the left of Kennedy.
[JFK Presidential Library and Museum]

These two politically savvy leaders share a goal. The president warns King to be careful: “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too.”

Martin Luther King Jr. has five more years to live.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy has precisely five months.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SUMMER 1963

New Orleans, Louisiana

L
EE
H
ARVEY
O
SWALD HAS A PASSION
in the summer of 1963: reading.

After he shot at Walker and developed an interest in Nixon, Marina decided that they should leave Dallas for New Orleans. Oswald spends the month of June working as a maintenance man for the Reily Coffee Company there. His employers are not thrilled with his job performance, complaining that he spends too many of his working hours reading gun magazines.

Marina knows that her husband is applying for a visa that could return them to the Soviet Union, even though she doesn’t want to go. In fact, because he is applying separately for his own visa, it appears he may be trying to send Marina, who is again pregnant, and their daughter, June, back to Russia without him.

Lee Harvey Oswald is far from the great man he believes he will one day become. Right now he is a drifter who spends his time off trying to make wine from blackberries, barely clinging to employment, and treating his family like a nuisance.

Reading fuels Oswald’s rage. He devours several books a week. The topics range in subject matter from a Chairman Mao biography to James Bond novels. Then, during the first weeks of summer 1963, Oswald chooses to read about a subject he’s never before explored: John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy said that this was his favorite book about himself. After the assassination, Manchester wrote an in-depth description of Kennedy’s last days.
[Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company]

In fact, Lee Harvey is so enchanted by William Manchester’s bestseller
Portrait of a President
that after returning it to the New Orleans Public Library, he checks out Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
.

The collection of essays, which won John Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, is about the lives and actions of eight great men. Lee Harvey Oswald reads JFK’s carefully chosen words and is inspired to hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage.

Profiles in Courage
was published in 1957 when Kennedy was a senator. Kennedy writes about eight senators who acted bravely and honestly in hard situations.
[© Cardinal Publishers Group]

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

AUGUST 28, 1963

Washington, D.C. Afternoon

“
F
IVE SCORE YEARS AGO, A GREAT
A
MERICAN,
in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” begins Martin Luther King Jr.

The huge statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial is right behind King. 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.

He talks about poverty and the fact that America separates black from white.

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.

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. The audience know in their hearts that King will rally them to greatness.

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

“I have a dream!” King proclaims.

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.

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 every word of King’s 16-minute speech.

By the time King winds up for the finish, he is shouting into the microphone. 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. The two men—divided by a century of racial injustice—are forever linked in history from this day forward.

Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd of marchers on August 28, 1963.
[© Associated Press]

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

The crowd on the Mall erupts in applause.

*   *   *

In the White House, John Kennedy watches King’s speech on television with Bobby and their brother Teddy, who was elected to John’s former Senate seat for Massachusetts in 1962.

President Kennedy meets with the organizers of the March on Washington in the Oval Office after Martin Luther King Jr. (third from the left) gave his speech.
[© Associated Press]

The attorney general is a major advocate for the civil rights movement. Since King announced the March on Washington three months ago, Bobby has become its behind-the-scenes organizer. Working closely with his staff at the Justice Department, Bobby 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 is 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.

The president and his brothers watch King’s speech with interest, praying that he will deliver on the promise of this great march on Washington.

One hour later, an exultant Martin Luther King Jr. meets with John Kennedy in the Oval Office. There are 11 other people in attendance, 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.