Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot Part 21

King laughs off the warning. Kennedy gets even more worried.

But Air Force One is waiting. This will be the president's first visit to Europe since the Cuban missile crisis. The cold war situation is still very tense. JFK will be leaping from one political quagmire and into another.

Before he leaves, JFK needs to know that King understands the problem.

Kennedy counters the reverend's evasiveness. He uses the Profumo affair to explain the potentially volatile link between his presidency and King's crusade.

JFK can be vague when he speaks, diplomatically letting listeners draw their own conclusions. But now he is painfully direct. There can be no mistake: King must sever his ties with Communists and be cautious about his infidelities.

"You must be careful not to lose your cause," the president warns. His point couldn't be clearer. "If they shoot you down, they'll shoot us down, too. So be careful."

The president of the United States has made his point. There is no more time. JFK cuts their conversation short and walks off to catch a plane.

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

John Fitzgerald Kennedy has precisely five months.

In the meantime, the battle for control of the White House has begun. As the afternoon meeting in the Cabinet Room gets under way, President Kennedy is already on his way to Europe, taking with him most of his top staff. It is left to Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy to finish the civil rights agenda of June 22.

Lyndon Johnson is holding court. The president has unexpectedly placed him in charge, fearing a confrontation if he did not. The vice president sits in the president's chair at the center of the oblong table in the Cabinet Room. Notable for its headrest among a sea of back-high chairs, this chair is the acknowledged center of power. Bobby Kennedy sits on the far side. Twenty-nine civil rights leaders pack the small room. There aren't enough chairs. Many are forced to stand along the walls. Left unsaid is that there have never been so many black faces in the Cabinet Room.

For Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, this is the ideal opportunity to show the gathering just who is boss.

The vice president does so by speechifying, proving to the civil rights leaders that he is their ally. Lyndon Johnson keeps his mouth shut as often as possible when the president presides over a meeting. It's his way of keeping a tight rein on his pa.s.sion for grand speeches. But now that he's in charge, Johnson rambles on and on about civil rights, an issue for which he has become pa.s.sionate since his speech in St. Augustine. He followed this up with another address, on Memorial Day, at the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania.

That eloquent speech was a triumph. Coming at the end of May, it had the effect of placing Johnson in compet.i.tion with the Kennedys for leaders.h.i.+p on the civil rights issue. Upon his return to Was.h.i.+ngton, Johnson had begged for "fifteen minutes alone with the president," in order to build on that success. Kennedy granted that request. Johnson used that time to wedge himself further into the civil rights battle.

Lyndon Johnson's long-winded Cabinet Room speech does not please Bobby Kennedy. Civil rights are his issue, and it was largely at his urging that his brother joined the cause. Bobby doesn't just want Lyndon off civil rights; he wants him out of the White House altogether. With Johnson's political power in the South rapidly declining, the Kennedys might not need him on the ticket in 1964. There is a good chance they can win the state of California, whose thirty-two electoral votes more than make up for losing the twenty-five that Johnson might have delivered with Texas. There is also growing evidence that Johnson has become so weak in his home state that Texas will be lost, even if LBJ remains on the ticket.

There is even talk of a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964.

So Bobby is fearless as he sits across the Cabinet Room table from Johnson-fearless enough to be rude.

The attorney general crooks a finger, beckoning Louis Martin, a black newspaper publisher. "I've got a date," he whispers as Martin comes to his side. "Can you tell the vice president to cut it short?"

Martin is terrified. He knows both men are capable of great rage. Martin diplomatically returns to his place along the wall.

Bobby doesn't waste any time. He beckons Martin again. "Didn't I tell you to tell the vice president to shut up?"

Now Martin has no choice. He owes Bobby Kennedy a favor-a very big favor. When Louis Martin's good friend Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for civil rights demonstrations in 1960, Bobby swung support to King's cause by placing a sympathetic phone call to the reverend's wife, Coretta. Of course, that phone call also helped the Kennedys politically, swinging the black vote behind JFK.

The room is not big enough to hide Martin's discomfort. It's obvious to everyone around the table that something is going on. Lyndon Johnson is speaking from his bully pulpit in the chair with the headrest, while Bobby has now twice called the fifty-year-old Martin to his side.

Martin is held in such high esteem that he will one day be known as "the G.o.dfather of Black Politics." So this is not a minor underling whom Bobby has summoned. This is a man known to everyone. And the attorney general has clearly whispered some angry words in Louis Martin's ears.

Martin carefully maneuvers between the many bodies and chairs. Lyndon Johnson pretends not to notice-even though he's a man who notices everything.

Martin is cautious. His progress around the table is not fast, and no one takes his eyes off him.

Lyndon Johnson is speaking as if nothing odd is happening. It's true that all eyes are upon him-but only because Louis Martin is finally standing behind him.

Martin bends over and places his lips near Johnson's ear. The vice president never stops talking.

"Bobby has got to go and he wants to close it up," Martin whispers.

Johnson turns his head so that his eyes bore directly into Louis Martin's. The vice president gazes at him icily but never once stops talking.

In fact, much to the rage of Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson rambles on for another fifteen minutes.

This battle for control of the White House is not about the ten days JFK will be in Europe but about that all-important spot on the ticket in 1964. And while Lyndon Johnson may have finished his speech, Bobby's move let everyone know who held the real power in the room.

Bobby Kennedy is winning this war. The more Lyndon Johnson realizes this, the sicker and more depressed he will become. Reversing his previous weight loss, LBJ will grow very fat over the course of the summer as a result of this despondence. His face will become mottled, leading some to think he has begun drinking heavily.

The Kennedy brothers have broken the man who once considered himself Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.'s ultimate power broker.

Lee Harvey Oswald has two pa.s.sions in the summer of 1963: reading and lying.

He spends the month of June working as a maintenance man for the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans. Oswald collects unemployment even though he has a job. He writes to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York about all he is doing on its behalf. He prints business cards in the fict.i.tious name of A. J. Hidell that list him as president of Fair Play, and even submits a pa.s.sport application with false information. Lee Harvey Oswald has become an ardent Communist, with the intention of committing yet another bold act to further that political cause.

Oswald's employers are not thrilled with his job performance, complaining that he spends too many of his working hours reading gun magazines.

Marina lives with him in yet another apartment she can't stand. The family sleeps on pallets, and she sprays a ring of bug repellent on the floor each night to keep away the c.o.c.kroaches. She 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 the pregnant Marina 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 off time 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, as summer 1963 concludes its first weeks, Oswald chooses to read about subject matter he's never before explored: John F. Kennedy.

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.

Even in the midst of the squalor and depression that define the Oswalds' New Orleans summer, 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.

On day seven of his trip to Europe, John Kennedy rides in an open-air convertible through the narrow, twisting streets of Galway, Ireland. The crowd is manic and presses in close toward the Cadillac. The many tight turns force the president's driver to slow the car to a crawl. Some Secret Service agents believe that seaports such as Galway are higher-risk environments than inland cities because of their large immigrant populations, but as is always the case when a motorcade route causes the president's car to slow down for a turn, the intersection has been thoroughly prechecked by an advance team of agents.

But the tight turns are not the only potential hazard: the buildings lining the route are mostly two stories tall. The distance between their upper windows and the president's motorcade is a third of the distance between General Ted Walker and the alley where Lee Harvey Oswald hid on the night of April 10, 1963.

In fact, John F. Kennedy is traveling through the ideal kill zone. One man with a gun could squeeze off a shot and escape into the throngs in a matter of seconds. And the president is clearly aware that such a thing might happen. He has been thinking quite a bit about martyrs lately and has become fond of quoting a verse by Irish poet Thomas Davis:

We thought you would not die-we were sure you would not go;

And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow-