Killing Kennedy

8

JANUARY 8, 1963

WASHINGTON, D.C.

9:30 P.M.

Jackie Kennedy’s bare, tanned shoulders accentuate the pink color of her strapless Oleg Cassini gown. She wears dangling diamond earrings designed by legendary jeweler Harry Winston. Long white gloves come up past her elbows. She makes small talk with a man she adores, André Malraux, the sixty-one-year-old writer who serves as the French minister of culture. The First Lady’s eyes sparkle after a restful family Christmas vacation in Palm Beach, Florida.

On this night, the First Lady is truly a vision.

And, unbeknownst to all but one of the thousand people filling the West Sculpture Hall of the National Gallery of Art, she is also pregnant.

The president stands less than three feet away, paying no attention whatsoever to his wife. He gazes at a dark-haired beauty half his age named Lisa Gherardini. She is blessed with lips that are full and red, contrasting seductively with her smooth olive skin. Her smile is coy. The plunging neckline of her dress hints at an ample bosom. She bears the faintest of resemblances to the First Lady.

There are television cameras, newspaper reporters, and those thousand guests. The president’s every move is being scrutinized, but he is unafraid as his gaze lingers on this tantalizing young woman. He is the president of the United States, a man who has just rescued the world from global thermonuclear war. Everything is going his way. Surely John Kennedy can be allowed the minor indiscretion of appreciating this lovely twentysomething.

Playing to those who might be watching closely, JFK smiles at young Lisa. But he is a changed man since the Cuban missile crisis, and far more enchanted by Jackie than by other women—at least for the time being. That near-catastrophic experience reminded him how deeply he loves his wife and children.

The new Congress begins tomorrow, and the president’s State of the Union address is less than a week away. Kennedy will push for “a substantial reduction and revision in federal income taxes” as the “one step, above all, essential” to make America more competitive in the world economy. But that tax cut will be controversial, a hard sell with the new Democratic Congress. Tonight the burdens of being president of the United States are far more pressing than spending time with Lisa Gherardini.

The president moves on.

But Jackie stays, turning away from Malraux to gaze at the same bewitching young woman. Lisa Gherardini is not actually here in person, but in a painting hanging on the gallery wall. She is also known as La Gioconda, or the Mona Lisa, a wife and mother of five children who sat for this portrait in the early sixteenth century.

Jackie revels in the Mona Lisa’s presence with a feeling of profound success, for it was her persistent dream to bring the world’s most famous painting to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington. About a year ago she made a discreet request to Malraux, who then arranged the loan—much to the outrage of Parisians, many of whom consider America a cultural wasteland.

But this is hardly the first time the Mona Lisa has traveled. Napoléon once hung her on his bedroom wall, gazing upon her each morning. In 1911 the painting was stolen from the Louvre and not returned to the Paris museum for two years. She was moved several times during World War II, to prevent her from falling into Nazi hands. And now Jackie has brought Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to America, where “Mona Mania” is about to break out. Millions of Americans are lining up to view the painting before its return to France in March—and all because of Jackie Kennedy.

John Walker, director of the National Gallery, was against the loan, fearful that his career would be ruined if he failed to protect the Mona Lisa from theft or the damage that might accompany moving a fragile 460-year-old painting across an ocean in the dead of winter. In fact, on October 17, just as JFK and his staff were first grappling with the realities of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Walker called the First Lady and gently told her that bringing the painting to America was a horrible idea. The mere thought of it filled him with dread.

Then, like the rest of America, Walker was soon distracted by the barrage of radio and television reports documenting the Cuban missile crisis. He was deeply touched by Jackie’s maternal nature and the fact that she had insisted on remaining at the White House to be with her husband. Walker realized that the First Lady was a woman of substance, not just a wealthy young lady with a passion for French culture.

So he changed his mind. Long before the Cuban missile crisis was over, he began arranging the Mona Lisa’s trip to America.

Walker’s task was made much easier when JFK ordered the world’s most elite bodyguards to watch over the precious work of art—none other than the men who would willingly take a bullet to protect the president himself: the Secret Service.

The president’s Secret Service code name is Lancer. The First Lady’s is Lace. Caroline and John are Lyric and Lark, respectively. Almost everything and everyone in the First Family’s lives has a code name: LBJ is Volunteer, the presidential Lincoln is SS-100-X, Dean Rusk is Freedom, and the White House itself is Castle. Things that exist temporarily have code names, such as Charcoal, the name given to the president’s residence when he is not in the White House. Most subsets of names and places begin with the same first letter: L for the first family, W for the White House staff, D for Secret Service agents, and so on.

The Secret Service protection given President Kennedy is constant, and contrasts sharply with the protection given Abraham Lincoln a hundred years ago. Back then, the Secret Service did not exist. The agency was not founded until three months after Lincoln’s assassination. Even then, its primary role was to prevent currency fraud, not to protect the president.

In Lincoln’s day, private citizens could walk into the White House whenever they wished. Vandalism was rampant as overenthusiastic visitors stole pieces of the president’s home to keep as souvenirs. The Department of the Interior responded by hiring a select group of officers from Washington’s Metropolitan Police to protect the great building. But as death threats against Abraham Lincoln mounted in the waning days of the Civil War, these police officers shifted their protective focus to the president. Two officers remained at his side from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. Another stayed with Lincoln until midnight, and a fourth man covered the graveyard shift. Each officer carried a .38-caliber pistol.

President Lincoln was never completely safe, though, as his assassination proved. On the night Lincoln was shot in the head, John Parker, the officer who was supposed to be protecting him, was instead drinking beer in a nearby tavern. And even though the president of the United States was shot to death after Parker left his post, the officer was never convicted of dereliction of duty—and, incredibly, was even allowed to remain on the police force.

Before Lincoln’s assassination, there were many (including Lincoln himself) who believed that Americans were not the kind of people who killed their political leaders. One pistol shot by John Wilkes Booth blatantly disproved that theory. Still, some people continued to believe the myth of presidential safety. Lincoln’s death was thought to be an anomaly—even when a second president, James Garfield, was assassinated sixteen years later. Compulsory protection of the vice president didn’t begin until 1962, reinforcing the notion that the vice presidency is a thankless job.

John Kennedy’s bodyguards sport the telltale bulge of .38 revolvers beneath their suit coats. But every other aspect of their protection is furtive. The Secret Service’s motto is “Worthy of trust and confidence,” and the agents reinforce that message through their poise and professionalism. They are athletic men, many of them possessing college degrees and military backgrounds. Drinking beer on duty is out of the question. There are eight agents on each of the three eight-hour shifts, and every agent is trained to handle a variety of deadly weapons. The Secret Service headquarters in the White House is a small windowless office at the north entrance to the West Wing, where an armory of riot guns and Thompson submachine guns provides additional firepower. There are several layers of security between JFK and a potential assassin, beginning at the White House Gates and continuing right up to the black-and-white-tiled hallway outside the Oval Office, where an agent remains on duty whenever the president is working. Should Kennedy need to summon that agent at a moment’s notice, the president can push a special emergency button beneath his desk.

The easiest place to attack the president is outside the White House. The Secret Service need only look to recent events in France for proof. President Charles de Gaulle is virtually untouchable inside the Élysée Palace, where he lives and works. But on August 22, 1962, terrorists opened fire on his motorcade in the French suburb of Petit Clamart. One hundred and fifty-seven shots were fired. Fourteen bullets struck the car, puncturing two tires of de Gaulle’s Citroën, but his driver skillfully steered to safety. Even as the Mona Lisa is unveiled in America, the leader of the assassination plot is on trial in Paris. Jean Bastien-Thiry, a disgruntled former air force lieutenant colonel, will be found guilty and become the last man in French history to be shot by a firing squad.

To prevent an American version of Bastien-Thiry from getting to President Kennedy, eight Secret Service agents travel ahead to survey his upcoming location anytime he leaves the White House. Once the president is out of the White House, eight agents form a human shield around him as he moves.

For those protecting the president, JFK’s almost manic activity is the toughest part of the job.

John Kennedy likes to appear vigorous in public and often risks his life by wading deep into crowds to shake hands. These forays terrify his security detail. Any crazed lunatic with a gun and an agenda can easily take a shot during moments like those. Should that happen, each agent is prepared to place his body between the bullet and the president, sacrificing his own life for the good of the country.

It helps that the agents truly like JFK. He knows them by name and is fond of bantering with them. Despite this familiarity, the men of the Secret Service never forget that John Kennedy is the president of the United States. Their sense of decorum is evident in the respectful way they address Kennedy, a man whose intimate life they well know. Face-to-face, they call him “Mr. President.” When two agents talk about him, he is known as “the boss.” And when speaking to visitors or guests, the detail refers to him as “President Kennedy.”

These Secret Service agents are no less fond of Jackie. The agent in charge of her detail, six-foot-tall Clint Hill (code name Dazzle), has become her close friend and confidant.

Thus it is almost natural that Secret Service protection be extended to the Mona Lisa. The passionate crowds who will surround da Vinci’s painting are similar to the throngs who scream for JFK and Jackie on their travels around the world.

The painting sails to America in her own first-class suite aboard the SS France, where French agents guard her around the clock. She travels by ship rather than plane to safeguard against the possibility of a crash that would destroy the painting forever. Should the luxury liner go down, the special metal case containing the Mona Lisa is designed to float. Only the captain of the SS France is told that the Mona Lisa is on board, and security is so intense as she is brought on that guests speculate that the metal box actually holds a secret nuclear device. But when word finally leaks out about the box’s true contents, passengers transform the ship into a nonstop Mona Lisa party, complete with special pastry cakes and drinking games.

Upon docking in New York, the Mona Lisa is driven to Washington, D.C., by a special Secret Service motorcade that does not stop for any reason. Once again, the four-hour drive is chosen over a simple flight, due to fears of a crash. Secret Service snipers are stationed on rooftops along the way, and Secret Service agent John Campion personally rides next to the Mona Lisa in the black “National Gallery of Art” van. The vehicle is equipped with extra heavy springs to absorb road shocks that could chip flecks of pigment from the canvas.

Upon arrival in Washington, the Mona Lisa is locked behind steel doors in a climate-controlled vault that keeps the temperature at a perfect 62 degrees at all hours. Should the electricity fail, a backup generator will automatically take over. Even in the vault, the Secret Service maintains its vigilance by monitoring her on closed-circuit television.

Their protection of da Vinci’s masterpiece is extraordinary. Yet there is one huge difference between protecting the president and protecting this precious cargo: the Mona Lisa is just a painting. Angry citizens have damaged her on at least three occasions—a vandal once tried to spray-paint her, another attacked her with a knife, and a third threw a ceramic mug at her—and, of course, she was once stolen. But Lisa Gherardini herself has been in the grave for almost five centuries. There is no way she can be shot dead.

The same cannot be said of the president.

That is why the Secret Service never lets its guard down.

Not yet, at least.

“Politics and art, the life of action and the life of thought, the world of events and the world of imagination, are one,” John Kennedy tells the distinguished crowd on hand for the unveiling of the Mona Lisa. The words come out as “Moner Liser” in his clipped Boston accent.

The president and First Lady have never been more popular than they are right now, and never more synonymous with America herself. Also, they are closer than ever as a couple. The Secret Service has noticed that Kennedy seems less interested in other women. Friends have seen the couple shift their relationship from the professional formality that defined the first two years in office. There is a new tenderness to their time together and, in the way they talk to each other, a transformation that has made them history’s first power couple. The United States is “the most powerful nation in the world,” in the words of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, “represented by the most stunning couple imaginable.”

One glance around the packed hall gives evidence to Cassini’s words. Everyone from Supreme Court justices to senators to wealthy diplomats and oilmen are here to pay their respects. Even as the president’s speech brilliantly links the Mona Lisa and the politics of the cold war, it is Jackie who orchestrates every last detail of this very special night. The Mona Lisa may be dazzling—hidden though she is behind bulletproof glass—but the average partygoer spends only fifteen seconds staring at the painting, while some spend all night staring at Jackie. Her beauty, poise, grace, and glamour are unmatchable.

On this night, it is the First Lady, not the Mona Lisa, who owns the room.

Jackie has come to think of the Kennedy White House as a mythical place—what she will later describe as an “American Camelot.” The First Lady is referring to the Broadway musical starring Richard Burton as the legendary King Arthur, the lovely Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere, and Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot. In the play, Camelot represents an oasis of idyllic happiness in a cold, hard world. A growing number of Americans agree with Jackie that the Kennedy White House is a similarly mythical place and a bulwark of idealism in the midst of the cold war.

Even the president is inspired by Camelot. Many nights, Jackie will later admit, he plays the Broadway sound track album on his record player before going to sleep.

But there is a dark side to Camelot, one that JFK’s Secret Service detail knows all too well.

There is a flip side to the president’s popularity polls: 70 percent of the nation may love JFK, but another 30 percent hate his guts. Castro definitely wants him dead. In Miami, many in the Cuban exile community are bitter about the Bay of Pigs debacle and want revenge. In the Deep South, rage at the president’s push for racial equality is so widespread that southern Democrats say that their only smart political choice—if they are to remain in office—is to maintain their firm stand against his domestic policies.

Right here in Washington, the CIA is none too happy about rumors that JFK would like to place the agency under closer presidential supervision by putting Bobby Kennedy in charge. Also, more than a few military leaders at the Pentagon do not trust Kennedy’s judgment. The president has stated aloud that he thinks the generals are capable of attempting to remove him from office.

Finally, the Mafia, to whom Kennedy was once so close that mobster Sam Giancana referred to JFK as Jack rather than Mr. President, is angry that Kennedy is repaying their years of friendship by allowing Bobby and the Justice Department to conduct an anti-Mafia witch hunt. “We broke our balls for him,” Giancana complains, “and he gets his brother to hound us to death.”

JFK is aware of his enemies. And he knows the threats will not go away, no matter how often he shuts out the world at night by dropping the needle on his hi-fi and listening to Camelot.

If the Secret Service is aware of Lee Harvey Oswald, that fact is nowhere in any record.

Their ignorance is not unusual. Why would the powerful Secret Service be watching a low-level former marine living in Dallas, Texas?

Oswald and Marina are back together again. There is always a heat to their reunions, and their latest is no different. Marina Oswald is now pregnant again.

Despite their very different life circumstances, Jackie Kennedy and Marina Oswald are connected by the fact that they are two young women enjoying the life-changing early days of pregnancy. Jackie is due in September, Marina in October. And one more thing links them: like Jackie, Marina finds JFK to be quite handsome. Which makes her unstable husband more jealous than he usually is.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s life continues to be defined by a balance of passion and rage. On January 27, 1963, as crowds ten abreast line the streets of Washington to view the Mona Lisa, Oswald orders a .38 Special revolver through the mail. The cost is $29.95. Oswald slides a $10 bill into the envelope, with the balance to be paid on delivery. He keeps the purchase a secret from Marina by having the gun sent to his P.O. box and even uses the alias of “A. J. Hidell.”

Oswald has no special plans for his new pistol. Nobody has been making threats on his life, and for now he has no intention to kill anyone. He merely likes the idea of owning a gun—just in case.

January comes to an end, and with it the Mona Lisa’s stay in Washington, D.C. On February 4 another high-security motorcade drives the painting to New York, where “Mona Mania” reaches even greater heights.

January has been an amazing month for the president and Mrs. Kennedy. The glamour surrounding the Mona Lisa has temporarily overshadowed the fear of the cold war. Two years into the Kennedy presidency, and it is clear to the world that John and Jackie are in control of America’s fate.

Thus, Jackie Kennedy may be right: this might just be Camelot—or at least part of it. For her there is no dark side to the story—although it definitely exists.

When Jackie thinks of Camelot, she focuses on the final act of the play, where King Arthur regains his wonder and hope. But she overlooks the rest of the story. Camelot is fraught with tragedy, infighting, and betrayal. There is danger and death. More than half the Knights of the Round Table are slain before the final curtain falls.

And Queen Guinevere, the heroine with whom Jackie so identifies, ends up alone.

9

MARCH 11, 1963

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

8:00 P.M.

The loneliest man in Camelot wants to be president of the United States.

Lyndon Baines Johnson stands bathed in a spotlight. His typewritten speech lies before him on the lectern, but he is not focused on the words. He’s more interested in the two tables of voters somewhere out in the audience who might just make that impossible presidential dream come true someday.

What Lyndon Johnson wants, above all else, is a return to power. He adores power. And he will endure anything to know that heady sensation once again.

Anything.

The vice president searches the room for the “Negro tables,” desperate to know if his political gamble will pay off.

Robert Francis Kennedy also wants to be president of the United States.

With five years to go before the 1968 election, an article by Gore Vidal in Esquire magazine’s March issue picks him to win the Democratic nomination over Lyndon Johnson.

Bobby Kennedy has become such a political force that even the vice president worries he is powerless to stop Bobby from winning in 1968.

It all seems so easy: JFK until 1968, then Bobby takes the White House, and then wins again in 1972, and then maybe even Teddy in 1976 and 1980. The Kennedy dynasty is poised to control the American presidency for the next twenty years. It’s almost a sure thing.

But there are no sure things in politics. And little does LBJ know that insidious forces are possibly targeting Bobby even now—plotting not only the attorney general’s downfall, but that of the entire Kennedy family political dynasty.

August 5, 1962. Marilyn Monroe lies naked facedown on her bed. She is dead. Police investigators see no sign of trauma. The Los Angeles coroner will later conclude that the actress died from an overdose of barbiturates. Yet her stomach is almost completely empty, with no pill residue whatsoever.

The public instantly chalks up Marilyn’s death to a life of excess. The tabloids have firmly established that she is a substance abuser. So there is little public outcry for a closer look at what happened to the glamorous actress.

But there is a darker theory circulating in the precincts of organized crime. Mafia lore suggests that the old Sam Giancana–CIA connection from the Operation Mongoose days is still quietly active. The theory holds that Giancana conspired to have Monroe murdered by a team of four hit men who entered her home, taped her mouth shut, and injected a lethal suppository of barbiturates and chloral hydrate into her anus. This was done to prevent the vomiting that often accompanies an oral drug overdose. The tape was removed from her mouth once she was dead, and Monroe’s body wiped clean.

Giancana’s motivation was revenge for Bobby Kennedy’s ongoing Justice Department investigations into organized criminal activity. The intent of the killers, according to that same Mafia legend, was to implicate Bobby in the murder. However, their plans went awry when Bobby was tipped off by anonymous sources that Marilyn Monroe had unexpectedly died. The attorney general then ordered Peter Lawford to arrange for a private eye named Fred Otash to go over Marilyn’s home with a fine-tooth comb to ensure there was absolutely no evidence of her involvement with the president or the Kennedy family. The two men cleaned up well, even taking Marilyn’s diary.

There was also, however, the issue of Marilyn’s phone records. These would show whom she was talking to in the last forty-eight hours of her life. The story goes on to say that Bobby Kennedy appealed to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to expunge those records. Not wanting to lose the chance to use Monroe’s death for political gain, the legend continues, Los Angeles police chief William Parker obtained a copy of those records and kept them in his garage for years, as blackmail evidence. The tapes, Parker would say, are “my ticket to get Hoover’s job when Bobby Kennedy becomes president.”

Peter Lawford will later claim that Bobby was in Monroe’s home that night, having flown down from the Bay Area, where he was staying with Ethel and four of their children. Lawford’s story, not confirmed by anyone, alleges that Marilyn was going to reveal her former relationship with JFK to the press and that Bobby was present in Los Angeles trying to do damage control.

The recollections of both Lawford and Mafia members have been dissected thoroughly. Neither has been proven true. Nor have the rumors that Bobby and Marilyn were having an affair of their own.

The facts are that Marilyn Monroe phoned Bobby several times throughout the summer of 1962. She was distraught over the end of her affair with JFK and was openly gossiping about it in Hollywood. The press had begun asking questions about the alleged affair, and it appeared that the matter might surface during the 1964 election. Yet the Northern California ranch where Bobby and his family were staying on the night of Marilyn’s death was an hour from the nearest airport and a five-hour drive from Los Angeles. That makes it highly unlikely that RFK could have slipped away without being noticed.

Any involvement by Bobby Kennedy in Marilyn Monroe’s death, whether it was suicide or murder, makes it a conspiracy theory without substance to this day.

There is no question, however, that Monroe’s going public could have been enough to sink a presidential campaign. JFK was perceived to be a dedicated family man. Details of a sordid affair with the flamboyant Monroe would have ruined the image of Camelot.

With family baggage all over the place, Bobby Kennedy knows he is anything but a sure thing for the presidency. Which means he must work extra hard to discredit his main rival, Lyndon Johnson, before LBJ does the same to him.

Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy is quietly backing away from his anti-Mafia investigations.

No sense angering old friends unnecessarily.

LBJ is making new friends. He is thrilled by the presence of black voters at his St. Augustine dinner speech. It is a Monday evening, and the occasion is the five hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding, an event about which LBJ cares little. What matters are the symbolic reasons he flew to Florida in the first place: his courtship of black Americans.

LBJ’s brown eyes scan the mostly white audience in the Ponce de Léon Hotel’s ballroom. Finally, he locates the so-called Negro tables. The vice president insisted upon this act of integration when accepting the speaking engagement.

Johnson sees both tables right up front, a handful of black faces in a sea of white southerners. The people seated there nod their heads somberly as he speaks, appreciative just to be in the room. Tonight marks the first time that blacks have been allowed to eat in this fabled hotel, all thanks to LBJ. Two tables aren’t many, and the change is only for tonight, but at least Johnson can return to Washington bragging that he’s on the front lines of the battle for racial equality.

It’s a powerful feeling. Yet back in Washington, LBJ has all but forgotten what power feels like. On the road, he’s a big deal. People defer to him. He meets with local leaders. He is quoted in the local papers. People want to touch him or enjoy one of his patented high-energy handshakes, the kind where Johnson wraps his meaty fist around another man’s, then holds on for as long as they talk, forging a friendship and, in the old days back in the Senate, winning their vote.

But he is now invisible in Washington. For Johnson, the Kennedy White House is not Camelot. He compares the experience with another c word: castration. LBJ refers to himself as a “steer” or a “cut dog.” The president deliberately excludes him from important meetings, makes jokes about him behind his back, and ignores him at White House dinner parties—if he even bothers to invite him at all.

The president isn’t the only one treating Johnson with contempt. Bobby Kennedy thinks LBJ is a political charlatan. Jackie Kennedy keeps her distance. And the White House staff can barely conceal their disdain. “The Harvards,” as Johnson calls them, make fun of his ill-fitting suits, his slicked-back hair, and the twang of his Texas Hill Country accent. When Johnson commits the faux pas of pronouncing hors d’oeuvres as “whore doves” at one party, he instantly becomes the butt of Washington jokes about his hillbilly ways.

One derogatory nickname for Johnson is “Uncle Cornpone,” as if he were some irrelevant hick instead of the man who got Kennedy elected in 1960 by carrying the Deep South. Some refer to him as “Judge Crater,” for the New York City official who abruptly disappeared in the 1920s and was never seen again. One White House staffer was overheard at a dinner party joking, “Lyndon? Lyndon who?”

But Johnson is anything but gone, and anything but a hillbilly. During his time as Senate majority leader he was masterful at passing difficult legislation. His favorite biblical verse, Isaiah 1:18, exemplifies his passion for building coalitions: “Come now, let us reason together.”

Truth be told, the vice president is a complex man, whose tastes run the gamut from spicy deer sausage to Cutty Sark scotch to Viennese waltzes. And he is almost as sexually active as the president—only far more discreet about how he manages his affairs.

This discretion carries over into politics. The gregarious Johnson has stifled his personality, disciplining himself to be completely silent in meetings in order to avoid offending the president. It’s killing Johnson that he has to endure a nonstop barrage of insults. The vice president has become anxious, depressed, and overeager to please. He barely eats. He has lost so much weight that his always-baggy suits look enormous on him. Even the vice president’s nose and ears appear proportionally larger—like how a political cartoonist might draw him in caricature.

LBJ has almost nothing to do. His phone barely rings. From his office in the Executive Office Building, he can look out the window and see the comings and goings across the street at the White House. Sometimes the vice president will leave his desk to meander through the West Wing hallways, wishing for a meeting to attend or a decision to make. Other times, he’ll take a seat outside the door to the Oval Office, hoping to catch John Kennedy’s eye and be invited inside.

But those occasions are fewer and fewer. The president and vice president will spend less than two hours alone in the year 1963.

Still, Johnson puts up with the abuse. Because, without the vice presidency, he has nothing. There is no Senate opening in Texas for which he can run. And the former Kennedy insider John Connally filled the governor’s seat there just four months ago. But at the end of four more years, Johnson can run for the most powerful job in America.

And why shouldn’t LBJ be president? He served twelve years in the House of Representatives, twelve more in the Senate, and ruled for six years as majority leader. He is versed in foreign policy and domestic legislation and can give a tutorial on the subtleties of backroom wheeling and dealing. There isn’t a more qualified politician in the land.

LBJ is fighting for his political life as he locates the two token tables of racial integration in that St. Augustine hotel ballroom. And while the occasion may officially be the anniversary of the city’s founding, it also marks the day when Lyndon Johnson takes a public stand in favor of civil rights.

The Kennedy brothers have deliberately kept him out of their escalating battle for racial equality. They know that as a southern politician, he could use the issue to gain power.

Johnson understands this as well. And he does everything he can to be at the forefront of JFK’s civil rights campaign.

For Johnson, civil rights has nothing to do with right or wrong. Taking this stand just makes good political sense.

So LBJ waits, castrated and emaciated, hoping it will all pay off.

On March 4, just one week before Lyndon Johnson’s St. Augustine speech, Attorney General Robert Kennedy responds to the Esquire story by telling the press, “I have no plans to run at this time”—which the media know to be code for “I’m running.”

But is he qualified? Bobby Kennedy is a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, and he’s an attorney general who got the job because of his father and brother. Since then, he has often ignored his duties at the Justice Department to serve as JFK’s mouthpiece and sounding board. And the CIA certainly doesn’t approve of his job performance. One popular bumper sticker at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters reads “First Ethel, Now Us.”

But the world is changing drastically, and Bobby Kennedy reflects the youth and vitality of Camelot instead of the stodgy cold war values synonymous with the older Johnson. American culture is under siege by new influences.

A British rock-and-roll band named the Beatles is releasing their first album.

A new comic book character named Iron Man makes his debut.

Writer Betty Friedan ignites a new wave of the women’s movement with her book The Feminine Mystique.

The draconian U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island is closed for good. As if to mark the event, the CIA expands its powers even further into J. Edgar Hoover’s world by creating a domestic operations division.

Bobby Kennedy is aware of his cultural influence; he well understands the Camelot allure. Yet he is still obsessed by his rivalry with Lyndon Johnson. In fact, he hates him. Bobby does such a poor job of hiding his loathing that friends once presented him with a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll, complete with stickpins.

The one thing Bobby can’t stand is a liar, and he believes that Johnson lies all the time.

Still, there is something in Johnson that inspires fear in Bobby. He once told a White House staffer, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable man I know.”

And so two intense and ruthless politicians are set against each other. But neither one has an inkling about the calamity that is now just eight months away.

Lee Harvey Oswald is growing more isolated. He has turned a closet in his home into an office. There he writes angry diatribes about the world around him. Oswald is growing increasingly agitated, and people are beginning to fear him.

On March 12 in Dallas, just one day after Lyndon Johnson’s speech in St. Augustine, Oswald decides to buy a second gun to go along with the pistol he keeps hidden in his home. This time it’s a rifle, purchased through the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman magazine. The Italian Mannlicher-Carcano, model 91/38, was made in 1940 and originally designed for the Italian infantry during World War II. This is not a gun designed for hunting animals, but for shooting men. As a former Marine Corps sharpshooter, Oswald knows the difference, just as he also knows how to clean, maintain, load, aim, and accurately fire such a weapon.

Of all the amazing things happening in the world in March 1963, this simple mail-order purchase would seem to have little significance. In fact, nothing will have a greater impact on world events than this nineteen-dollar Italian war-surplus bolt-action rifle.

The weapon arrives on March 25. Marina complains that they could have used the money for food. But Oswald is pleased with the purchase and gets in the habit of riding the bus to a dry riverbed for target practice against the levee.

On March 31, while Marina is hanging diapers on the clothesline to dry, Oswald steps into the backyard dressed all in black. His new pistol is tucked into his belt. He brandishes the rifle in one hand and holds copies of two Communist newspapers in the other. He demands that an amused Marina take photographs of him. He plans to send them to the Worker and the Militant to show that he is prepared to do anything to wage class warfare.

On April 6, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald is fired from his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His Communist rants have grown offensive to his coworkers, and his bosses claim that he has become undependable.

On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides it’s time to kill someone.

10

APRIL 9, 1963

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MIDDAY

The man with seven months to live is talking to Winston Churchill.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy stands in the White House Rose Garden before a large, warmhearted crowd. Churchill, the ninety-two-year-old former prime minister whose inspirational courage helped save Britain during World War II, watches live by satellite from his home in London. The purpose of this Rose Garden gathering is to make Winston Churchill an American citizen—the only foreign leader since Lafayette to be so honored.

“A son of America though a subject of Britain,” Kennedy begins his speech, referring to the fact that Churchill’s mother, née Jenny Jerome, was a U.S. citizen, “has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American nation.”

Churchill’s fifty-one-year-old son, Randolph, stands at JFK’s side. Jackie Kennedy stands directly behind her husband. The Rose Garden is filled with diplomats and acquaintances from the United States and England. The president’s father, Joseph, who served as ambassador to Great Britain just prior to the Second World War, watches from a wheelchair inside the White House, the elder Kennedy having experienced a stroke two years prior.

But even as John Kennedy stands before this idyllic gathering, seeing the warmth and smiles that come with honoring such a distinguished and legendary world leader, his thoughts are never far from another “Churchill”—and another war that is gaining steam.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who first sent American soldiers to Vietnam to stem the flow of communism in Southeast Asia. But it was John Kennedy who ordered a gradual escalation in the number of troops since taking office, hoping to ensure that Vietnam did not fall to communism and thus perhaps begin a domino effect that would see other Asian nations turn their backs on democracy.

But Kennedy’s good intentions have gone awry. The handful of American “advisers” in Vietnam has now swelled to almost sixteen thousand pilots and soldiers. American pilots are dropping napalm firebombs from the sky to destroy the Viet Cong army that is now fighting the U.S.-backed Saigon regime. Thousands of Viet Cong soldiers have been killed—as have thousands of innocent Vietnamese peasants. “The charred bodies of children and babies have made pathetic piles in the middle of the remains of the marketplace,” the Associated Press reported after one such bombing incident.

American pilots fly hundreds of missions over Vietnam every month. A systematic process of defoliation has begun, with American airplanes spraying chemicals over the jungle to kill all vegetation that might hide enemy soldiers. Of course, the crops of many innocent farmers are destroyed in the process. This “scorched earth” policy will eventually come back to haunt the United States in a number of ways.

The CIA has joined in the fight in Vietnam, conducting covert search-and-destroy missions in the Communist north. Gunners aboard American helicopters have free rein to open fire on the peasants who turn and run when they see Hueys come sweeping in over the treetops. The assumption is that the farmers run because they are the enemy, not that they might be superstitious and terrified about aircraft that have suddenly invaded the skies above their primitive villages.

John Kennedy believes that America needs to end the Vietnam conflict—though he is not quite ready to go public with this. “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” he will tell Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Bartlett off the record. “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the Communists and get the American people to reelect me.”

To safeguard his chances for reelection, the president cannot, and will not, pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam until after the 1964 election. The war is still popular with voters. In the meantime, he hopes to contain U.S. involvement, reading his briefing books each morning and praying that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem doesn’t do anything stupid or irresponsible to inflame the situation.

Diem is a Catholic, just like the Kennedys. But his faith is almost fanatical, causing him to lose focus on fighting communism. He is now fighting a war on two fronts. The first is against the Viet Cong; the second is a holy war against Vietnam’s majority Buddhist population.

Yet it is Diem whom Vice President Johnson once famously praised as “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” The Kennedy brothers hate that gross exaggeration. Unlike the real Winston Churchill, Diem is not a firm and steadfast friend of the American people or the United States of America. He is a mass murderer, concerned only about his own glorification.

And that narcissism will soon doom him.

In the Rose Garden, Kennedy concludes his remarks. He now listens as Randolph Churchill reads from a speech his father has prepared. “Our past is our key to our future,” says Churchill, in words that make Kennedy and the British icon sound like two very similar statesmen. “Let no one underrate our energies, our potentialities, and our abiding power for good.”

But not every man believes in an abiding power for good.

John Kennedy is hardly a violent man. He dislikes guns and even abhors hunting animals. The same cannot be said for Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, on a hot April night, Oswald hides in the shadows of a Dallas alleyway. His new rifle is pointed at Major General Ted Walker, an avowed anticommunist.

Walker sits in the study of his Dallas home intently poring over his 1962 tax returns. The fifty-three-year-old West Point graduate is a closeted gay man and a famous opponent of communism. The date is April 10, and he is home alone on this Wednesday night, having just returned from a controversial trip around the country. The desk lamp is the room’s only light. A small window looks out into the darkness. Normally, Walker might crack the window to let in the sweet spring air, but it was a record-high ninety-nine degrees today. It’s still hot, even at 9:00 P.M. Walker is running the air-conditioning.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s hiding spot in the alley is just forty yards away. He watches Walker’s every move through the telescopic sight of his Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The hum of the air-conditioning unit drowns out the sound of Oswald’s carefully choreographed movements. He is now concealed behind Walker’s back fence, the barrel of his rifle poking through the latticework. There is a church near Walker’s home, where the congregants have gathered for a midweek service on this Wednesday evening.

The oppression of the workingman courses through Lee Harvey Oswald’s veins. He finds strength in the ideals of communism and socialism. After almost a year back home in America, he has become even more enraged by what he perceives as the injustice of the capitalist system. He is angry enough to kill any man who speaks out against communism.

Which is why he is aiming his brand-new rifle with murderous intent at Ted Walker’s head. The former general is at the very top of the list of people whom Oswald despises. Eighteen months ago, Walker was asked to leave the army after telling a newspaper reporter that Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt were most likely Communists. He resigned his post rather than retire, a symbolic gesture of defiance that cost him his pension. Since then, the veteran of World War II and the Korean War has devoted himself to political causes. He ran for governor of Texas as a Democrat—an odd alignment for a man so politically far to the right, especially one living in Dallas, a violent city where Democrats are such a minority that many of them are wary of openly expressing their beliefs.

After finishing last in that election—which was won by John Connally—Walker traveled to Mississippi, attempting to block the integration of the University of Mississippi. Two people were killed and six U.S. Marshals were shot in the ensuing riot, after which Walker was temporarily sent to a mental institution and held on federal charges of sedition. It was Bobby Kennedy himself who ordered that Walker be charged for acts of violence against the civil rights of an American citizen.

But Oswald doesn’t care about civil rights. He has come to Walker’s home because the Worker, the Communist newspaper to which he subscribes, has targeted the general as a threat to its beliefs. And because of Walker’s recent participation in Operation Midnight Ride, a Paul Revere–like barnstorming tour to warn Americans about the scourge of communism. The Mississippi grand jury’s decision not to press charges against Walker was Oswald’s motivation for purchasing a rifle. Since the Mannlicher-Carcano’s arrival, Oswald has traveled frequently by bus to the area around Walker’s home. He has walked the streets and alleys, studying and sketching and learning the lay of the land, memorizing escape routes and the church schedule. Oswald took several photographs of the area and developed them at work before being fired on April 6. All his intelligence is stored in a special blue loose-leaf notebook.

Oswald knows that Walker spends most evenings in his study. The short distance between the alley and that room makes Walker impossible to miss.

Oswald didn’t tell Marina where he was going tonight. But before leaving their apartment, he jotted down a note detailing what she should do if he is arrested. The note contains details about the bills he has paid, how much money he has left to her, and where the Dallas jail is located. Oswald wrote the note in Russian, just to be sure Marina understood every word. He left the note on his desk, in that small closet he’s converted into a study. She knows not to go in there, but if he’s missing long enough, Oswald is sure she will enter the room.

Back in the alleyway, Oswald quietly takes aim. Walker is in profile, viewed from his left side. The general wears his dark hair slicked close to the scalp. Oswald can see every strand through his scope. He has never shot a man before, nor even fired a gun in anger. But he spent hours on the firing range back in his Marine Corps days, and these last few weeks, he has been diligently working on his shot down in the dry bed of the Trinity River, using the levee walls as a backstop. It’s almost comical that a man plotting a murder takes the bus to and from target practice, and indeed to and from the murder scene itself. But Lee Harvey Oswald has no choice. He doesn’t own a car.

Walker sits, transfixed by the numbers on his tax forms. Oswald takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. He knows to exhale before firing, and to time the squeezing of the trigger with the end of that breath leaving his body. He also knows to gradually increase pressure on the trigger, squeezing it slowly rather than jerking it.

Back when he was in the marines, he rarely took practice at the rifle range seriously, openly laughing about the red “Maggie’s drawers” flag that was raised whenever he missed a target. But he can shoot extremely well when he wants to, as his Marine Corps “sharpshooter” qualification proves.

Now he wants to.

Oswald squeezes the trigger. He fires just one shot. Then he turns and runs as far and as fast as he can.

“I shot Walker,” Oswald breathlessly tells Marina. It’s 11:30 at night. She has already read the note and is worried sick.

“Did you kill him?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he replies in Russian.

“My God, the police will be here any minute,” she cries. It is an irrational fear, for the police have absolutely no idea who shot at Walker. “What did you do with the rifle?”

“Buried it.”

Oswald turns on the radio to see if he’s made the news. Marina, meanwhile, is terrified and anxious. She paces and frets, while her exhausted husband finally lies down on their bed and falls into a deep and immediate sleep.

The Walker assassination attempt is in the newspapers and on the radio the next morning. Oswald hangs on every word, though he is appalled to learn that he missed Walker completely. Eyewitnesses claim they saw two men fleeing the scene in a car, and Dallas police are looking for a gun that fires a completely different sort of ammunition than the kind Oswald fired. Oswald is crestfallen. He shot at Walker because he wanted to be a hero in the eyes of the Communist Party; he wanted to be special. Now not only has he botched the easiest shot he will ever take but the police are looking for a completely different man. Police will later surmise that the bullet ricocheted off the windowpane, missing Walker’s head by just three inches. Oswald’s telescopic sight, designed to look far into the distance, would have blurred the windowpane for Oswald, meaning that he didn’t even know it was in the way as he took aim and fired.

But none of this matters to Lee Harvey Oswald right now. He is worse than a failure; he is anonymous.

Three days later, Lee Harvey Oswald burns his blue loose-leaf notebook. Walker’s house is being guarded around the clock, and a second attempt on his life would be almost impossible. Still, Marina knows that her husband is unstable and tenacious. His hatred for those who would oppose communism is powerful and real.

Deeply afraid, she suggests something drastic: she wants to move the family to New Orleans. She believes that the police will come knocking on their door any minute. Having grown up in the repressive Soviet police state, she lives in fear of being marched off to jail in the middle of the night and disappearing forever.

On April 21, Marina spots Oswald getting ready to leave the house with a pistol tucked in his waistband. It’s a Sunday. He’s wearing a suit. Marina furiously demands to know where he’s going. “Nixon is coming,” Oswald tells her. “I’m going to go check it out.”

The former vice president has just made headlines by demanding the removal of all Communists from Cuba. Like General Walker, Richard Nixon has been making a political name for himself by denouncing Communists.

“I know how you look,” Marina says. Her husband’s idea of checking out a situation is to fire a shot at a human being. It’s quite clear that Lee Harvey needs to be saved from himself.

Then, showing just how powerful she can be when pushed to the limit, Marina Oswald pushes her husband into their tiny bathroom and forces him to remain there. Her husband is a prisoner the rest of the day. By the time she sets him free, it’s clear that, for his own good, Lee Harvey Oswald must leave Dallas.

Five days after John Kennedy’s Rose Garden speech, the president and First Lady formally announce that she is pregnant. This marks the first time that a sitting president’s wife will have a baby since Grover Cleveland’s spouse gave birth in 1893.

Americans respond with warmth and enthusiasm—and more than a little surprise. For although she is four months along, Jackie still doesn’t show the slightest sign of expecting. The baby will sleep in the same white crib that John Jr.used as an infant. Drapes and a new rug will be added to a small room in the residence as it is transformed into a nursery.

With every passing moment, the Kennedys seem to be living an idyllic life, where everything goes right and each day is more glamorous than the one before it. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, whose shoulders sagged and whose face grew lined and weary from the strains of being president, John Kennedy truly enjoys the job—and it shows. Friends have noted how much he has grown as a leader during his time in office, and the vigor with which he tackles his work.

But America is changing rapidly. John Kennedy will soon be forced to use every bit of these hard-won presidential skills to manage turbulent times. The tense challenges that have dogged his presidency—Cuba, Vietnam, Mafia power, civil rights, and even his personal life—have not disappeared.

For now, they are merely simmering—and as spring becomes summer in 1963, these problems will explode.

11

MAY 3, 1963

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

1:00 P.M.

“We’re going to walk, walk, walk. Freedom … Freedom … Freedom,” the protesters chant as they march out through the great oak doors of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It is a Friday, and these young black students should be in school. Instead, they have gathered to march for civil rights. Some are less than ten years old. Most are teenagers. They are football players, homecoming queens, track stars, and cheerleaders. Most are nicely dressed, in button-down shirts and clean slacks for the boys, and dresses and bows for the girls.

The marchers number more than one thousand strong. All have skipped class to be here. Some of them even climbed over locked gates. Their goal is to experience something their parents have never known for a single day of their lives: an integrated Birmingham, where lunch counters, department stores, public restrooms, and water fountains are open to all.

The Children’s Crusade, as Newsweek magazine will call it, fans out and marches across acre-wide Kelly Ingram Park. “We’re going to walk, walk, walk,” they continue to chant. They are peaceful, almost spiritual. Yet electricity courses through the group, for what they are doing is completely illegal. “Freedom … Freedom … Freedom.”

The protesters plan to march into the white business district and peacefully enter stores and restaurants. More than six hundred students were arrested doing the same thing yesterday. The youngest was just eight years old. This earned the Children’s Crusade national recognition. About a thousand miles away, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy actually scolded the black civil rights leaders who had organized the children’s march, stating that “schoolchildren participating in street demonstrations is dangerous business. An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us wants to pay.”

Even Malcolm X, one of the fieriest black leaders in America, railed against the Children’s Crusade, stating that “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.”

But these kids want to be here. Many have come against their parents’ wishes. Nothing can stop them. They know that if their mothers and fathers were to do the marching, their arrests could cause them to lose jobs, or days and weeks of income.

They know that this march is not just about public toilets; this march is an act of defiance. A few days before he took office, just four months ago, Alabama governor George Wallace made one thing crystal clear: “I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state, and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” Later, at his inaugural, he proclaimed, “I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom … Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us … In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”

Those words are a call to arms for blacks and whites alike who disagree with Wallace. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Birmingham earlier in the spring to fight for integration. Local black leaders, fearing retribution from their white creditors, told King they didn’t want him in town. The civil rights leader ridiculed their fears, implying they were cowardly, thus shaming them into joining the fight.

But despite the best efforts of King and his close friend Ralph Abernathy, the fight for Birmingham stalled just a week ago. After months of protests and arrests, the national media lost interest. There was no longer money to pay the bail for the hundreds being arrested. And the size of the protests dwindled. The segregationists, led by Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, were on the verge of winning. Connor, a sixty-five-year-old former member of the Ku Klux Klan, has enjoyed this battle tremendously and takes great delight in the thought of keeping blacks “in their place.”

The first children’s march, on May 2, altered Connor’s plans. When it is done, thousands gather in the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak about the courage of the children. And King swears that the demonstrations will continue. “We are ready to negotiate,” he tells the press. “But we intend to negotiate from strength.”

But Bull Connor has other plans.

“We’re going to walk, walk, walk. Freedom … Freedom … Freedom.”

The Children’s Crusade has now reached the shade of Kelly Ingram Park’s elm trees. The temperature is a humid eighty degrees. Ahead, the marchers see barricades and rows of fire trucks. German shepherds, trained by the police to attack, bark and snarl at the approach of the young students, and an enormous crowd of black and white spectators lines the east side of the park, waiting to see what will happen next. The black adults taunt the police, even as the marchers begin singing “We Shall Overcome.”

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the protesters before they set out from the church, reminding them that jail was a small price to pay for a good cause. They know not to fight back against the police or otherwise provoke confrontation when challenged. Their efforts will be in vain if the march turns into a riot.

Bull Connor can’t afford to let these kids get to the white shopping district. He has ordered Birmingham firefighters to attach their hoses to hydrants and be ready to open those nozzles and spray water on the marchers at full force—a power so great that it can remove the bark from trees or the mortar from a brick building. If the protesters reach the shopping district, using the hoses might damage expensive storefronts. The marchers need to be stopped now.

The first children in the group are met with a half-strength blast from the fire hoses. It’s still enough force to stop many of them in their tracks. Some of the kids simply sit down and let the water batter them, following orders not to be violent—or to retreat.

Connor, realizing that half measures will not work with these determined children, then gives the order to spray at full strength. Every protester is knocked off his or her feet. Many children are swept away down the streets and sidewalks, their bodies scraping against grass and concrete. Clothing is torn from their bodies. Those who make the mistake of pressing themselves against a building to dodge the hoses soon become perfect targets. “The water stung like a whip and hit like a cannon,” one child will later remember. “The force of it knocked you down like you weighed only twenty pounds, pushing people around like rag dolls. We tried to hold on to the building but it was no use.”

Then Connor lets loose the police dogs.

A German shepherd’s jaws bite down with 320 pounds of pressure—half the force of a great white shark or a lion. But the German shepherd is much smaller than these predators. Pound for pound, the Birmingham police dogs are unmatched in their bite force.

Bull Connor watches with glee as the German shepherds lunge at the children, ripping away their clothing and tearing into their flesh. Connor, a pear-shaped, balding man who wears glasses, appears mild-mannered. But in actuality he is a vicious good old boy whose beliefs are even more racist than those of Governor Wallace. The public safety commissioner wades into the thick of the action, encouraging policemen to open the barricades so that Birmingham’s white citizens can get a better view as the police dogs do their worst.

By 3:00 P.M., it all seems to be over. The children who haven’t been arrested limp home in their soaked and torn clothing, their bodies bruised by countless point-blank blasts of water cannon. No longer bold and defiant, they are now just a bunch of kids who have to explain to their angry parents about their wrecked clothes and a missed day of school.

Once again, Bull Connor has won.

Or at least it seems that way.

But among those in Birmingham this afternoon is an Associated Press photographer named Bill Hudson. He is considered one of the best in the business, willing to endure any danger to get a great photo. He has ducked bullets during the Korean War and dodged bricks while covering the civil rights movement.

On this day in Birmingham, Bill Hudson takes the best photo of his life. Appropriately, it’s in black and white. He snaps it from just five feet away. The photograph is an image of a Birmingham police officer—looking official in pressed shirt, tie, and sunglasses—encouraging his German shepherd to take a chunk out of black high school student Walter Gadsden’s stomach.

The next morning that photograph appears on the front page of the New York Times, three columns wide, above the fold.

And so it is that John Kennedy, starting his morning as he always does by reading the papers, sees this image from Birmingham. Disgusted by what he sees, Kennedy makes a point to tell reporters that the picture is “sick” and “shameful.”

Just one look and JFK instinctively knows that America and the world will be outraged by Hudson’s image. Civil rights are sure to be a major issue of the 1964 presidential election. And Kennedy now understands he can no longer be a passive observer of the civil rights movement. He must take a stand—no matter how many votes it might lose him in the South.

Meanwhile, the reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. is on the rise. He will soon see the Birmingham situation resolved in his favor, thanks to the Children’s Crusade. After Bull Connor’s initial “victory,” the public pressure against Alabama authorities becomes so intense that change is inevitable.

Despite the triumph, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Fitzgerald Kennedy are not on the same page. In fact, they are on a collision course.

Civil disobedience is not limited to the American civil rights movement.

Five days after the children of Birmingham peacefully march into that wall of water cannons and police dogs, and two days after a U.S. Army lieutenant is killed by the Viet Cong just outside Saigon, a crowd of Buddhists gathers in the South Vietnamese city of Hue. It is May 8, 1963, the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha.

The protesters have come to demonstrate against a new law set forth by President Ngo Dinh Diem that makes flying the Buddhist flag illegal in Vietnam. It is Diem’s great desire to convert his country to Catholicism, and vital to that effort is the systematic subjugation of the nation’s Buddhist majority. Diem—whose regime President Kennedy has long supported, but whose anti-Buddhist stance is contrary to American foreign policy—denies promotions to officials known to be Buddhist and looks the other way when Roman Catholic priests organize private armies that loot and demolish the pagodas where the Buddhists worship. To give his crusade credibility in the eyes of the American government, Diem insists that Buddhism and communism are the same—a suggestion akin to J. Edgar Hoover’s quiet belief that civil rights and communism are synonymous.

Now, as the three thousand unarmed Buddhist protesters gather near the Perfume River to voice their frustrations, government police and troops fire into the crowd. Bullets and grenades scatter the marchers, killing one woman and eight children in the process.

In the ensuing public outrage, Diem blames the deaths on his Viet Cong opponents—even though the police and army were clearly South Vietnamese. The so-called Buddhist crisis escalates when Diem refuses to punish the men who did the shooting.

Tensions grow throughout Vietnam during the month of May. Diem, like Bull Connor in Birmingham, appears to have the upper hand. Nothing can be done to end his reign of terror. On June 3, government troops once again attack Buddhists in Hue, using tear gas and dogs to disperse the demonstrators. But the crowd will not leave and continues to reassemble. Now the Buddhists turn violent, shouting obscenities at their government attackers. Finally, South Vietnamese troops pour an unnamed red liquid on the heads of Buddhists who are sitting in the streets praying. Sixty-seven of these men and women are taken to hospitals with burns covering their scalps and shoulders.

Unable to control the protesters any longer, Diem’s soldiers place the entire city of Hue under martial law.

Still, just as the Birmingham integration movement was losing steam before the Children’s Crusade gave it new life, so the Buddhist crisis has begun to bore members of the foreign press. Diem’s persecution of Buddhists has become old news.

But on June 11, 1963, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk will give those reporters something to write about.

It is almost 10:00 A.M. as Thich Quang Duc sits down on a crowded Saigon thoroughfare. He is dressed in a flowing saffron robe. Duc is an ordained member of the Buddhist clergy, a monastic who lives a meditative life of poverty. This morning he has chosen to protest the government crackdown on his beliefs by burning himself to death.

This is not an impulsive decision. Many within the Buddhist community have sought someone who would immolate himself to draw attention to their plight. Such a startling gesture can’t help but attract media coverage from around the world. Indeed, the day before, members of the foreign press were told to be in front of the Cambodian legation the next day if they wanted to see something special.

Not many journalists accept the invitation, so few are on hand to witness the gray Austin sedan driving slowly toward the intersection of Phan Dinh Phung Boulevard and Le Van Duyet Street. Three hundred and fifty Buddhist protesters carrying banners in Vietnamese and English that denounce the Diem regime follow right behind.

The Austin stops at the intersection. Thich Quang Duc gets out, gathering his robes about him as he does so. A cushion is placed on the street, and the aging monk sits down. He assumes the lotus position and begins to recite the words “return to eternal earth Buddha” over and over again.

Duc has come to this point in his life willingly, but nothing has prepared him for the moment when a fellow protester pours five gallons of gasoline over his bald head. The fuel soaks his robes and flows down his back until the cushion on which he sits is saturated.

The protesters gather in a circle around Duc to prevent the police from interfering. In one hand the monk holds a string of oak prayer beads. In the other he holds a match.

Duc lights the match.

There is no need to touch the flame to his person, because the fumes are enough to make his body burst into fire. His face, as seen through the flames, is a mask of pure agony. But Duc does not cry out or even make a sound. His skin turns black. His eyelids are fused shut. Yet as one minute passes, and then another, he still does not die.

The police cannot get to him; they are blocked by that protective circle of protesters. When a fire truck tries to get close enough to drench the monk with water, other monks throw their bodies beneath its wheels to stop it.

Finally, after ten agonizing minutes, Thich Quang Duc topples forward, dead.

His fellow monks lift the charred corpse into the coffin they have brought with them for this moment. The destroyed body does not fit, and one of Duc’s arms sticks out from the lid as they carry him back to the Xa Loi Pagoda. His heart, they discover later, despite the intensity of the flames, is not badly damaged. The monks remove it from Duc’s chest cavity and place it on display in a glass chalice.

In the months that follow, other monks will also martyr themselves. And one South Vietnamese official will even make the mistake of telling a reporter, “Let them burn and we shall clap our hands.”

As in Birmingham, this moment is the beginning of the end for those who hold power in Saigon. And once again, an Associated Press photograph will make the difference.

Malcolm Browne, the AP Saigon bureau chief, was one of the few journalists to witness the immolation of Thich Quang Duc. His picture of the burning monk horrifies people around the world. And as with Bill Hudson’s photo of police dogs attacking innocent protesters, that shot will become one of the most enduring and iconic images of the 1960s.

And again, John F. Kennedy will read his morning papers horrified by the photograph. Instantly, the president knows that his Vietnam problem has just escalated. He can no longer support President Diem. The world will turn on the Vietnamese leader after such a horrific image.

Diem must go.

The question facing John Kennedy, his fellow Catholic, is how?

It is 5:45 P.M. on May 29 in Washington, D.C. President John Kennedy has had a busy day of back-to-back meetings in the Oval Office. Yet his burgundy tie is neatly cinched around his neck and his tailored navy blue suit coat looks as immaculate as when he put it on after his 1:00 P.M. nap. Right now, JFK is needed in the Navy Mess, on the lower level of the White House. He rises slowly from his desk, stretching his back as he does so, then begins the short walk downstairs.

The president has no illusions over what is about to transpire. Today is his forty-sixth birthday. His staff has abruptly disappeared, leading him to believe that they have already made their way to the Navy Mess for what is supposed to be a surprise party.

The cares of the world are never far from Kennedy’s shoulders, even during a time of celebration. So as he walks to a party in his honor, there is a third incendiary situation looming over his administration. This problem has nothing to do with race or religion or war. Instead, it is about that most primal of all human longings: sex. And it has far more potential to end his presidency than does Birmingham or even Vietnam.

JFK has long been aware that revelations about his philandering would ruin not only that carefully burnished image of him as a family man but also his political future. Now he need look no further than Great Britain to see exactly what that downfall might look like. John Profumo, a dapper forty-eight-year-old British war hero and politician, has been caught having an affair with a twenty-one-year-old call girl named Christine Keeler. Profumo is married, and his wife, former film star Valerie Hobson, has chosen to forgive him. If Profumo were any other man, the embarrassing story might end there.

But John Profumo is also Britain’s secretary of war and one of the most powerful men in the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. And not only is Christine Keeler sleeping in his bed, but she is also having sex with a deputy Soviet naval attaché. When first confronted about his affair in the House of Commons, Profumo denied it. On June 5, he will be forced to admit that he lied. A disgraced Profumo will be shunned by his colleagues and forced to resign.

Profumo will disappear from the government and high society. His humiliation will be so complete that he will undertake extraordinary measures to seek redemption. He will volunteer to scrub toilets at a London shelter for the poor—a penance that he will continue to perform long after Queen Elizabeth restores his social status in 1975 by making him a Commander of the British Empire.

Prime Minister Macmillan is not guilty of a single indiscretion, but he is the man ultimately responsible for any secrets Profumo might inadvertently have leaked to his mistress. Seventy-one percent of the British public is in favor of either Macmillan’s resignation or the chance to vote for a new prime minister via an immediate general election.

John Kennedy is riveted by the scandal. The similarities between himself and Profumo are too many to be ignored: both are nearly the same age, both have glamorous wives, both are decorated World War II veterans, and both men even go by the nickname Jack.

But there is no comparison in their womanizing. JFK’s indiscretions go far beyond those of Profumo. John Kennedy has been extremely fortunate so far that no women have stepped forward to boast about bedding the president. And he has no reason to believe that any of the women who spent the night in the White House were spies. But as his brother Bobby reminds him, even one woman going to the tabloids could ruin him. The damage would go far beyond the innuendos Marilyn Monroe spread around Hollywood before her untimely death.

The irony is that Jackie’s pregnancy has made John Kennedy more devoted to his wife and family than ever before. His staff has continued to see the president and First Lady holding hands and spending far more time together—though only Jackie bears witness to the president saying nightly prayers on his knees. Back in March, Secret Service agents were stunned when JFK actually showed up at the airport to greet Jackie, Caroline, and John upon their return from a trip. “The president had clearly missed his family and was eager to see them,” agent Clint Hill will later write.

As Jackie’s pregnancy becomes more visible, the Kennedys are spending more weekends together at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland that Dwight Eisenhower famously named for his grandson. Situated on 125 acres in the Catoctin Mountains, the thickly forested retreat features miles of trails for walking, a large main cabin known as the Aspen Lodge, a putting green, a driving range, a skeet-shooting facility, horse stables, and a heated outdoor pool. Wire fences patrolled by Marine Corps guards ring the entire facility. Best of all to the Kennedy family, Camp David is one of the only places in the world where a Secret Service agent does not hover nearby every minute of the day. The marines are deemed enough to protect the First Family.

Now, in the Navy Mess, it is Jackie who leads the chorus of “Happy Birthday” the instant her husband enters the room. He feigns surprise as a glass of champagne is slipped into his hand and his staff gathers around to present an array of gag gifts.

But Jackie Kennedy has more surprises up her sleeve. For the party later moves from the Navy Mess to the presidential yacht, Sequoia. Only family and a few close friends are invited. As Sequoia cruises slowly up and down the Potomac, the quiet birthday gathering turns into a raging party. Dom Perignon 1955 flows, and music from a three-piece band blares in the aft salon. The Twist has gone out of style, but it’s the president’s favorite, so the band plays Chubby Checker again and again. Secret Service agent Clint Hill will later say that he’s never seen John and Jackie Kennedy having more fun together, “doing the twist, the cha-cha, and everything in between.”

The cruise is set to end at 10:30, but JFK is having so much fun that he orders the skipper to take her out for another hour. And another. And yet another, all the while ignoring the lightning and rain that keep Bobby, Ethel, Teddy, and the rest of the party indoors.

It’s 1:20 in the morning when the Sequoia finally docks. Washington is asleep. John and Jackie Kennedy are awash in the romance of a very special evening. The Birminghams and Vietnams and Profumos will once again confront the president in the morning, but for now those problems are very far away.

The man with six months to live doesn’t contemplate it, but those closest to him may remember his last birthday party as his very best.

12

JUNE 22, 1963

WASHINGTON, D.C.

LATE MORNING

“You’ve read about Profumo?” John Kennedy asks his guest.

The president and Martin Luther King Jr. 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. In a few hours, the president will board Air Force One for a trip to Europe, temporarily leaving the racial inferno behind. This will put control of White House business into the hands of Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, whose feuding has reached an all-time high.

Before he goes, JFK has an important point to make to Reverend King. The president has hard evidence, provided by J. Edgar Hoover, that the civil rights leader has something in common with the disgraced British politician John Profumo.

In not so many words, the president is warning King to be smart and control his libido.

For both their sakes.

John Kennedy has thrown the power of his office behind the civil rights movement, but he has done so reluctantly. The president has no black friends. The nearest he comes to indulging in black culture is dancing to Chubby Checker. In John Kennedy’s world, blacks are primarily valets, cooks, waiters, and maids. His forefathers were poor immigrants from Ireland who quickly took advantage of America’s freedoms to achieve prosperity. JFK takes liberties for granted, even as generation after generation of children descended from slaves have never known such opportunities.

Bobby Kennedy is a driving force behind his brother’s new stand. Bobby has become such a zealot for civil rights that his first name is considered an insult in the South. John Kennedy’s finally standing up for the black man is a victory for Bobby as well.

May 1963 was a trying month, marked by confrontation after confrontation in Birmingham spurred by the racist Alabama governor George Wallace. The battles rage on. On June 11, after successfully ensuring that the University of Alabama was integrated, JFK delivered a major 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.”

The very next day, civil rights activist Medgar Evers is shot dead in the driveway of his Mississippi home.

Integration, however, is not just a matter of doing the right thing. JFK’s commitment has far-reaching ramifications. For instance, some Americans equate civil rights with communism. The last thing Kennedy needs during the height of the cold war is to be branded a Communist and a Negro sympathizer—even though he knows that many in the Deep South will immediately make that improbable leap.

And then there is Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing. This fact is well-known throughout the civil rights movement. King spends the majority of each month away from his home and from his wife, Coretta, who knows not to question him about his faithfulness. According to FBI surveillance and the admissions of his good friend Ralph Abernathy, King has sex with prostitutes, hangers-on, and even other men’s wives. When pressed by friends, he does not deny the indiscretions, explaining that he needs sex to curb his anxiety during intense times when he is often very lonely. (Nearly a decade after Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in 1968, the FBI files on his private life will be sealed until the year 2027.)

Because Director Hoover believes King is a Communist, the FBI has been tapping King’s phones and bugging his motel rooms for a year and a half. Hoover is obsessed with bringing King down. The FBI chief describes the civil rights leader as a “tomcat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.” Hoover fumes when King is named Time magazine’s 1963 Man of the Year. (Kennedy won in 1961; Johnson will win in 1964.) J. Edgar Hoover actually spends hours listening to the secret recordings made of King’s assignations. The president and attorney general are both informed of what is being recorded. Jackie Kennedy, who thinks King is a phony, will later remember her husband confiding the contents of a tape recording in which King “was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of an orgy in the hotel and everything.”

The most infamous King recording will take place on January 6, 1964, at Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel. As recounted in Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire, King is caught on tape saying, “I’m [having sex] for God. I’m not a negro tonight!”

None of these shenanigans would normally matter to John F. Kennedy. What King does in private is the good reverend’s business. But the president has thrown in with the civil rights movement. Kennedy and King, its most prominent voice, are politically shackled at the wrist—like it or not.

And the president doesn’t like it one bit. His alliance with King runs counter to every careful strand of his political DNA. There are enormous parallels between the two men. Kennedy can be impulsive in some aspects of his life, but he is precise and cautious when it comes to preparing for an election. King’s infidelities, alleged Communist sympathies, and relentless pursuit of civil rights make their public association an enormous political risk. Even standing here in the relative privacy of the Rose Garden with Martin Luther King makes Kennedy sweat. “King is so hot,” an exasperated JFK confided to Bobby before the reverend’s arrival, “that it’s like [Karl] Marx coming to the White House.”

Martin Luther King Jr. could not care less about the president’s discomfort. In fact, he’s turning up the heat. Dr. King is planning a mass demonstration for August, on the Washington Mall. This moves the civil rights battle from the Deep South and into full view of the Oval Office. “What if they pee on the Washington Monument?” a horrified Kennedy says when he hears the news.

The president’s words underscore a 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 lines in this battle. After his victory in Birmingham, it is King who is in command—and both men know it.

Now JFK wants some of that power back. “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” he warns the civil rights leader.

King does not know. However, he doesn’t rattle easily. The reverend is round to Kennedy’s lean, and short to Kennedy’s tall. Their upbringings couldn’t have been more different. But Martin Luther King Jr. is every bit as educated, well-read, and politically savvy as the president. He didn’t come this far by buckling to white men.

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 passion 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 passionate 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 competition with the Kennedys for leadership on the civil rights issue. Upon his return to Washington, 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 Godfather 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 Washington, D.C.’s ultimate power broker.

Lee Harvey Oswald has two passions 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 fictitious name of A. J. Hidell that list him as president of Fair Play, and even submits a passport 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 cockroaches. 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:

But today the specter of death doesn’t seem to matter. It is Saturday, June 29, 1963. An estimated hundred thousand Irish citizens line the streets of that raucous port city on the west coast of Ireland. Six hundred Gardai, police, are there to hold back the cheering crowds.

Due to Jackie Kennedy’s history of troubled pregnancies, she did not make the trip to Europe, as she so famously did two years ago. John Kennedy has the adulation of the crowds all to himself.

Many questioned why the president would go to Europe at such a volatile time. The title of an editorial in last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times asked, “Is This Trip Necessary?”

“In the face of much adverse comment and good reasons not to go,” the editorial went on to say, “President Kennedy is proceeding with his trip to Europe at a most inauspicious time.”

But John Kennedy knows the power of good political timing, and the trip has been a smashing success. At a time when the civil rights controversy has threatened to damage his presidency, the European trip proves that he is clearly the most popular and charismatic man in the world. More than a million Germans lined his motorcade route in Cologne when he arrived there a week ago. Twenty million more Europeans watched him on television. And another million greeted him in West Berlin. There, to chants of “Ken-ne-DEE,” he won over the crowd with a powerful prodemocracy speech. “All free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin,” said the president. “And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”

The crowd went wild.

JFK’s Berlin speech was a security nightmare for the Secret Service. The president stood alone and unprotected on a podium as thousands looked on. The crowd wasn’t checked for weapons, and many watched from rooftops or open windows. John Kennedy, in the words of one agent, was a “sitting duck.”

Or, in the words of another agent: “All it takes is one lucky shot.”

In Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearing that Kennedy’s popularity would lead to an erosion of support in East Berlin, quickly flew to that divided city to reassert his nation’s claims. He and Kennedy did not meet. In fact, crowds a fraction of the size that greeted Kennedy even noticed that Khrushchev was in town, underscoring JFK’s amazing popularity and sending a clear message that Khrushchev’s power was on the wane.

John F. Kennedy’s European presence even affects the arrogant French president, Charles de Gaulle. From his perch in Paris, de Gaulle has become the bully of Western European politics, but he has more than met his match in JFK, prompting an amazed New York Times writer to marvel that “for the first time, President de Gaulle had been confronted by a Western leader whose ideas on that future are as firm as his own, whose confidence in the ultimate triumph of his ideas is as great and who, finally, speaks for the most powerful nation in the community.”

Kennedy and de Gaulle do not meet on this trip, but the French leader watches every move the president makes.

And then comes Ireland.

“If you go to Ireland,” Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell pointed out when Kennedy adds it to his European itinerary, “people will just say it’s a pleasure trip.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” the president replied. “A pleasure trip to Ireland.”

He has been lauded everywhere he has traveled in the small island nation, hailed as a victorious returning son.

Galway comes on his fourth day in Ireland, and it’s clear by his easy smile and the playful way he interacts with the locals that the pressures of domestic affairs, foreign problems, and the impending birth of his third child seem a million miles away.

Three hundred and twenty children from the Convent of St. Mercy greet the president’s helicopter as it lands on a grassy seaside field at 11:30 A.M. Each of the children is dressed in orange, green, or white, and arranged so that together they form the Irish flag.

Then it is into an open-top limousine for the short drive to Eyre Square, at the center of the city. At one house, Kennedy orders the driver to stop so that he can spend a few minutes talking with the women standing out front.

The speech he gives in Eyre Square is the most heartwarming and personal of JFK’s entire presidency, harkening back to the emotional beginnings of his political career in Boston. The president is utterly at ease as he looks out upon the thousands who fill the square, which will one day be renamed in his honor. This visit is not a campaign stop, or a fund-raising dinner, or even one of those significant historical occasions he might mark with a speech filled with gravity and somber words.

This is a visit from a man whose heart has been touched by the people of his homeland at a time when he needs that very much, and who hopes that his words might do the same for them. “If the day was clear enough, and you went down to the bay, and you looked west, and your sight was good enough, you could see Boston, Massachusetts,” he tells the adoring crowd.

“And if you could,” he continues, “you would see down there working on the docks there some Doughertys and Flahertys and Ryans and cousins of yours who have gone to Boston and made good.”

And then the president asks for a show of hands from the crowd, asking the people of Galway if they have a relative in America. The square is instantly filled with hands thrust to the sky. The crowd roars in laughter and recognition, and bursts into applause. The president is truly one of their own.

The impact is overwhelming. Kennedy’s words speak to a belief in the American dream. But those words are more than a dream to these people. No child of an immigrant in the history of the world has returned to his homeland and enjoyed this sort of adulation. Just one look at Kennedy as he gazes out over the crowd is proof that a family can come to America with nothing and someday reach the highest level. John F. Kennedy, a son of Ireland, is now the most powerful man in the world.

Left unsaid on that day is that black immigrants to America still don’t have that opportunity. But Kennedy is working on it.

“If you ever come to America,” the president closes, after talking about the bright days he has spent in Ireland, “come to Washington. And tell them, if they wonder who you are at the gate, that you come from Galway. The word will be out and when you do, ‘Cead Mile Failte’—One hundred thousand welcomes.

“Thank you and good-bye.”

Kennedy is driven back through town and returns to his helicopter just forty-five minutes after arriving. The love of his homeland courses through his veins. The president has nothing to fear in this motorcade, from these people.

Thousands of snapshots are taken of JFK that day. Many of them remain hanging in the pubs and homes of Galway.

13

AUGUST 7, 1963

OSTERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS

MORNING

Enjoying the New England summer, a very pregnant Jackie Kennedy leans on a chest-high fence rail watching five-year-old Caroline’s horseback riding lesson. The First Lady and the children are spending the summer at a rented cottage named Brambletyde, just a short distance from the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port. Normally, the First Family would stay in the house they own adjacent to the compound property.

The president’s father and Bobby Kennedy own homes right next door. This enclave has long been the family oasis for planning campaigns, celebrating weddings, or just playing a spirited game of touch football. The Kennedy presence has put Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on the map.

So much so that hordes of tourists now invade the area each summer. The raucous crowds have gotten in the habit of trampling shrubbery and causing traffic headaches on the narrow beachfront streets in their desire to catch a glimpse of JFK and Jackie. The Hyannis Port property is also a security nightmare for the Secret Service, which is why the First Family has rented a more secluded residence for the summer of 1963. Jackie and the children are there all the time, while the president commutes from Washington on weekends.

Brambletyde is concealed by thick woods and is accessible only by driving down a narrow one-lane gravel road. From both a privacy and a security standpoint, renting the home makes perfect sense.

There is another reason Jackie chose Brambletyde: she doesn’t want any of the press taking photos of her pregnant. She doesn’t even go into town, letting the head of her Secret Service detail, Clint Hill, pick up the tabloids she secretly loves to read.

Today is Wednesday. Hill is taking the day off. The veteran agent is vigilant in his protection of the First Lady. He works six days a week, sometimes sixteen hours a day. But now Special Agent Paul Landis is taking his place. Landis stands near the riding ring, keeping a trained eye on the First Lady while Special Agent Lynn Meredith, of the “kiddie detail,” hovers nearby to protect Caroline.

Suddenly Jackie feels a sharp pain in her abdomen. Then another. Soon the pain won’t stop. “Mr. Landis, I don’t feel well,” she says, sensing a crisis. “I think you’d better take me back to the house.”

“Of course, Mrs. Kennedy.” But there is no urgency in Landis’s movements.

“Right now, Mr. Landis,” Jackie commands. Her breathy voice has a sharp edge.

Landis rushes to the car and holds open the rear door. Jackie’s face has a fearful look as she slides into the backseat. The pain is coming from her womb. Her growing panic is caused by painful memories of the two troubled earlier pregnancies that ended in the loss of children. Jackie miscarried in 1955. Her second pregnancy resulted, on August 23, 1956, in a stillborn baby girl, whom she and her husband christened Arabella. The loss of even a single child is staggering. Losing two, even more so. But to lose a third baby, particularly after delivering two healthy children, would be intolerable for Jackie.

So although the First Lady is just a few short weeks away from a full-term delivery, she takes nothing for granted when it comes to her unborn baby’s welfare.

Caroline stays with Agent Meredith as Landis drives eighty miles an hour down the narrow road, at the same time radioing ahead to have a doctor and a helicopter on standby.

The First Lady’s anxiety increases as it becomes clearer that she’s going into labor. “Please go faster,” she commands.

The time has come to get to a hospital—immediately. Should Landis be unable to get there in time, it’s very likely that the Secret Service agent will be forced to pull over and personally deliver the president’s child in the backseat of a government sedan.

Agent Landis presses down harder on the gas.

In Washington, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy confronts a different kind of problem. Polls show that his popularity in the crucial state of Texas has dipped to an all-time low—and continues to drop. The state is growing increasingly conservative and Republican. Lyndon Johnson has lost all political power there. This hurts not just in potential electoral votes, but in the wallet, too. Texas has long been a major source of Democratic campaign funding, thanks to the deep pockets of its wealthy oilmen and other big-business people. And once upon a time, LBJ could be counted upon to deliver that money. But now Texas governor John Connally, a conservative Democrat, holds the purse strings—and behind the scenes, he is not a big Kennedy fan.

Therein lies the problem: JFK has been pushing Johnson to arrange a fund-raising trip to Texas. But Johnson knows that such a trip will reveal his lack of clout, making it obvious to the president that Connally will be the man delivering the big donors to the Kennedy campaign. This will further erode any chance of Johnson remaining on the ticket.

Making matters even more complicated, not only has LBJ deliberately avoided arranging any trip by the president to Texas, but Governor Connally is also trying to prevent Kennedy from coming to the state. Both are Democrats, but the governor knows that any public appearance he makes with Kennedy will cost him dearly with Texas voters.

But John Kennedy needs Texas and its money. He is determined to make the trip a reality.

That is the problem hanging over the president’s head on the morning of August 7. In an instant, it will be almost completely forgotten.

Secret Service agent Jerry Behn approaches the desk of Evelyn Lincoln. It is 11:37 A.M.

Special Agent Behn discreetly informs the president’s secretary that Jackie is being airlifted to the hospital at Otis Air Force Base, located near Falmouth, Massachusetts, on the western edge of Cape Cod. The agent also tells Lincoln that the First Lady doesn’t want her husband to be disturbed, in case the labor pains are a false alarm.

Evelyn Lincoln, knowing the president’s deep emotional involvement in Jackie’s pregnancy, steps into the Oval Office anyway.

“Jerry tells me that Mrs. Kennedy is on her way to Otis,” she says calmly, passing along the message without trying to upset the president or his guests unnecessarily.

It doesn’t work. The meeting is immediately adjourned. A hasty series of phone calls confirm that Jackie is being sedated and is about to deliver the Kennedys’ new child by Caesarean section. The president summons Air Force One.

But all four of the president’s airplanes are unavailable today.

JFK doesn’t care. He demands an airplane, any airplane, immediately.

One hour later, as the president of the United States, his Secret Service detail, and select members of his staff race to Otis Air Force Base crammed inside a small six-passenger JetStar aircraft, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy takes his first breath. The president’s second son weighs just four pounds, ten and a half ounces.

However, there are grave concerns about that breath. It appears shallow and labored. The baby grunts as he exhales. His skin has a bluish pallor, and his chest wall is retracted. The infant is immediately placed in an incubator.

Baby Patrick is assigned a Secret Service agent, even though it’s becoming clear that the only direct threat against the newborn’s life comes from within his own body. The lungs are among the last organs to develop in the womb, and young Patrick is suffering from hyaline membrane disease, the most common form of death among children born prematurely.

The First Lady is still sedated from her Caesarean and doesn’t know of the problem. As soon as the president arrives, he takes command. He huddles with Dr. John Walsh to discuss the status of his new son. The doctor explains that there is a chance Patrick might die. Kennedy immediately summons the base chaplain to baptize Patrick, ensuring that his son will go to heaven, based upon the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Dr. Walsh then makes the suggestion that Patrick be moved to Children’s Hospital in Boston, which has state-of-the-art facilities for treating hyaline membrane disease. The president immediately agrees.

At 5:55 P.M., as Jackie is still shaking off the grogginess of her sedation, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is placed in an ambulance for the hour-long drive to Boston.

This child is precious cargo. Far dearer than the Mona Lisa. So like the famous painting, Patrick makes the journey escorted by a full complement of Massachusetts police. Sirens wail as the ambulance pulls away from the air force hospital.

The caravan does not stop. The baby’s life must be saved.

Now comes the waiting. Jackie Kennedy remains in her ten-room maternity suite, recovering. So it is the president who moves on to Boston to hold vigil at Children’s Hospital. This is a far different man from the one who, in 1956, waited three days before returning from Europe to see his wife after her first miscarriage. Now he stares helplessly at the thirty-one-foot-long experimental high-pressure chamber in which the small body of his son gasps for air. Patrick can clearly be seen through the chamber’s small windows. The intensive care unit is cleared of all visitors whenever JFK is on the floor, which only adds to the president’s solitude.

“How are things with little Patrick?” Evelyn Lincoln gently asks. She has made the trip to Boston to help the president manage the many details of his office that still need his attention.

“He has a fifty-fifty chance,” JFK responds.

“That’s all a Kennedy needs,” she assures him, knowing that her longtime boss will appreciate this sort of encouragement.

World leaders and good friends barrage Kennedy with phone calls and messages, but he never takes the focus off his newborn son. The president has a deep love for children. This baby, conceived in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, holds special significance. This is the child who would have never entered the world if the crisis had ended in global thermonuclear war. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who is named for JFK’s paternal grandfather and for Jackie’s father, has been a source of pride and concern ever since the day the First Lady announced she was pregnant.

The president has a room at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking Boston Common, where he spends the first night of Patrick’s life restlessly passing the hours reading up on documents for a nuclear test ban treaty. But he prefers to spend the second night closer to his ailing son and moves from the luxury of the Ritz-Carlton to an empty hospital room.

At 2:00 A.M. on August 9, Secret Service agent Larry Newman gently awakens him. JFK gets up in an instant and rides the hospital elevator to the pediatric unit on the fifth floor, along with Dr. Walsh and Special Agent Newman. The Secret Service veteran has seen a great deal during his time on the White House detail and knows the president’s moods and personal issues intimately. Newman, who admits he doesn’t cry easily, has himself been on the verge of tears during this heartbreaking ordeal.

Now Special Agent Newman sees anguish settle upon the president’s shoulders. Dr. Walsh is informing JFK that Patrick is in grave condition and is unlikely to survive until the morning. The baby’s underdeveloped young lungs aren’t functioning properly. He has begun to suffer prolonged periods of apnea, with his body refusing to breathe at all.

The elevator door opens. The hallway is dark and empty at this early hour. John Kennedy begins the slow trek to the intensive care unit to gaze upon his dying son.

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

AUGUST 28, 1963

WASHINGTON, D.C.

AFTERNOON

“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.

The children attending church this Sunday morning cannot possibly know that four members of the Ku Klux Klan have planted a box of dynamite near the basement. So the explosion that shatters the spiritual calm of the church service is completely unexpected. The force of the blast is so great that it doesn’t just destroy the basement, but also blows out the back wall of the church and destroys every stained-glass window in the building—all but one. That lone surviving window portrays an image of Jesus Christ ministering to a group of small children.

The window is symbolic in a sense, because almost all of the children in the basement this Sunday morning survive the horrific tragedy. However, four of them—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair—do not.

Their dream has come to an end.

15

SEPTEMBER 2, 1963

HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS

NOON

“Oh, God,” reads a small plaque given to the president, “thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

On this Labor Day, John Kennedy sees a small boat bobbing in the distance as he removes his American Optical Saratoga sunglasses and eases himself into a wicker chair on the grass of Brambletyde’s beachfront yard. Sitting directly across from the president, CBS journalist Walter Cronkite does the same, preparing for one of the biggest TV interviews of his life. Today the subject is the rough waters and turbulent swells being navigated by the president of the United States. Both men wear dark suits, even as the September sun beats directly down on them. Cronkite crosses his legs, while Kennedy’s are stretched out in front of him. The wind messes up JFK’s carefully combed hair, forcing him to reach up absentmindedly every few minutes to press it back into place. The balding Cronkite has no such problem.

At forty-six, roughly the same age as Kennedy, Walter Cronkite is considered the nation’s premier television newsman. He and the president have an easy rapport, and JFK is so comfortable that he leans back in his cushioned chair during parts of the interview, just as he does when thinking over a tough problem in the Oval Office.

The two men casually banter as they are miked for sound and then sit quietly opposite each other as the final ten seconds before taping are counted down. Cronkite acknowledges an off-camera signal, and the interview begins.

The broadcaster aims his questions at JFK in a delivery that alternates between baritone rumble and easy drawl. His interviewing style is disarming and even warm, no matter how sharp his queries. As a result, Kennedy remains completely at ease. The interview sounds like a conversation between two friends well-informed about American politics. And truth be told, that isn’t far from Cronkite’s mind-set. He is a devoted Democrat, although he skillfully hides that fact from his viewing audience.

“Do you think you’ll lose some Southern states in ’64?” Cronkite asks.

“Well I lost some in ’60, so I suppose I’ll lose some in, uh, maybe more in ’64,” Kennedy smiles wistfully, forced to reveal a painful political weakness. Cronkite is letting Americans in on a secret known only to pollsters and veteran politicians. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell, but I would think we were, I’m not sure that, uh, I’m the most popular figure in the country today in the South. But that’s all right. I think we’re going to have to wait and see a year and a half from now…”

There is now a fighting spirit in the president’s eyes. The mere talk of the next election excites him. He loves the thrill of the political battle. JFK also loves being president. He is an adrenaline junkie, relishing the rush of competing for power.

Cronkite presses the president. “What do you think the issues might be in ’64?”

“Well, of course, abroad would be the security of the United States. Our effort to maintain that security. To maintain the cause of freedom. At home I think it’s the economy. Jobs. Opportunity for all Americans.”

The president, without consulting notes, then rattles off a long list of statistics. He presses for a tax cut, to ward off a recession, he says, and backs it up with detailed financial specifics about the way in which cutting taxes would stimulate the economy.

Cronkite finally gets around to the touchy subject of Vietnam. With every passing day, Americans are becoming more concerned about U.S. involvement in that troubled nation. The ongoing and well-publicized oppression of the Buddhists has made some Americans forget that communism is the primary reason U.S. troops are in Vietnam. There are growing cries for America to leave Southeast Asia and let the Vietnamese fight their own war.

“Everyone has said the administration would apply diplomacy in Vietnam,” Cronkite begins, emphasizing the second syllable with a short letter a (“NAM” as in ram). “Which I’d assumed we’d been trying all along. What can we do in this situation that seems to parallel other famous debacles of dealing with unpopular governments?”

Cronkite has a soothing on-camera presence that television viewers have grown to trust. The president knows that convincing this newsman of his views on Vietnam is the same as convincing the voters watching at home.

“The war is going better,” JFK begins. “But that doesn’t mean that the events of the last two months aren’t very ominous. I don’t think that if greater effort isn’t made by the government, that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it.”

The president stops short of saying that U.S. troops should be removed, despite the fact that dozens of Americans have already been killed fighting another country’s battles. He voices his concerns that if Vietnam falls to the Communists, then so will the rest of Asia. JFK lists the countries that will topple, beginning with Thailand and continuing all the way to India. “We’re in a desperate struggle with the Communist situation,” he insists, “and I don’t want Asia to pass into the control of the Chinese.”

Kennedy’s voice intensifies, showing his disdain for both Vietnam’s president Diem and those enemies that would spread communism around the world. This is not the John Kennedy whom some consider to be an affable young man who was elected based on good looks and his father’s money. JFK has grown into a true world leader. He combines discipline with a powerful work ethic, knowledge, guts, and compassion.

The interview ends after twenty minutes. The president immediately pulls his sunglasses from his breast pocket and slips them back on. He and Cronkite make small talk about the cost of producing a half-hour television show, but their attention soon turns to a small sunfish sailboat skimming lazily across the water. It is a dot on a sea that stretches endlessly across the horizon. Both men are sailors, fascinated by the water.

The weather in the bay is calm. Turbulence is not far away. Nevertheless, the interview has gone flawlessly. The president can now relax with his family for the rest of the afternoon, enjoying a time of peace amid all the sadness and turmoil of the previous month.

Kennedy and Cronkite shift the conversation to sailing until it is time to remove their microphones. Inside Brambletyde, just a few feet away, a grieving Jackie Kennedy hides from the cameras—and the world. The president has been spending more time not just with Jackie, but with Caroline and John, too, swimming in the ocean, allowing them to ride in the presidential helicopter, and attending Caroline’s riding lessons. The president has urged his wife to put on a brave face for the media, but she’s just not ready.

However, Jackie will soon break her self-imposed seclusion. She has decided to spend a few weeks in Greece with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in order to ease her mourning. The mere thought of that trip, which is still a month away, brings a rare smile to the First Lady’s face.

Walter Cronkite and John Kennedy say good-bye. And on this perfect Labor Day afternoon, with the wind blowing in off the Atlantic and the sun warming their faces, neither man can possibly know that it will be Cronkite who will appear on national television in just twelve weeks to make an announcement that will shock the world.

16

SEPTEMBER 25, 1963

BILLINGS, MONTANA

LATE AFTERNOON

November 21 and 22 are looming.

Those dates reside in the back of John F. Kennedy’s mind as he stands in the rodeo ring at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, addressing an overflow crowd. Billings, Montana, has a population of just fifty-three thousand, and it appears as if every single citizen has come out to cheer on the president. A marching band only adds to the pageantry.

“The potential of this country is unlimited,” Kennedy begins, and it’s almost as if he is talking about himself. In the past five days alone, he has helped Montana’s farmers by approving a massive wheat sale to the Soviet Union, brokered a global ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, cut income taxes, and even stood before the UN General Assembly promising to send men to the moon. JFK’s speech that day was so outstanding that even the Soviets applauded.

The sunlight is fading but still warm as the president speaks in the open-air dirt arena, the Rocky Mountains towering in the near distance. The day smells like autumn. Kennedy’s coat and tie look stiff compared to the jeans and cowboy boots worn by many in the audience, and his Boston accent is almost jarring in this iconic western setting. And when Kennedy speaks about the wonders of the American West, he quotes Henry David Thoreau—a man from Massachusetts who never crossed the Mississippi.

But the good people of Montana don’t mind a bit. They hang on the president’s every word, thrilled that John Fitzgerald Kennedy has come to their town as part of his eleven-state swing through the West. The president’s focus is on shoring up support for his upcoming campaign. Back in 1960, Nevada was the only western state Kennedy carried. Not only did he lose Montana and its four electoral votes, but Yellowstone County voted against JFK by a margin of 60 percent to 38 percent.

But that was three years ago.

Today, the president was mobbed when Air Force One landed at the Billings airport. Men and women of all ages pressed forward to shake his hand. Kennedy, much to the chagrin of his Secret Service bodyguards, put his life at risk by eagerly wading into the crowd. He knew that nothing would make these people happier than to go home tonight and say they had touched the president. Thousands lined the motorcade route to the fairgrounds, including men on horseback.

It would seem that JFK might just win Montana if the election were held tomorrow. And success in the West is a vital part of Kennedy’s reelection strategy. A victory in Texas, for example, would almost guarantee his victory in 1964.

And so Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell has selected November 21 and 22 as the likely dates of Kennedy’s eagerly anticipated Texas fund-raising trip.

The president envisions a grand tour of the state, with stops in five major cities: San Antonio, Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Texas governor John Connally, the conservative Democrat who has been maintaining a discreet political distance from the president, is quietly in favor of a less ambitious itinerary. Dallas, for instance, is not Kennedy territory. It is a city where “K.O. the Kennedys” bumper stickers are displayed. And parlor games about “Which Kennedy do you hate the most?” are commonplace. Children boo the president’s name in classrooms, and a popular local poster of Kennedy designed to look like a mug shot bears the inscription “Wanted for Treason. This Man Is Wanted for Treasonous Activities Against the United States.”

Even more ominous are the pro-assassination jokes—a situation made all the more troubling by the extraordinary murder rate in Dallas. More murders are committed in Texas than any other state, and more homicides occur in Dallas than anywhere else in Texas. The state does not regulate or register firearms, and 72 percent of the murders are by gunshot.

There is no question that John F. Kennedy’s visit to the “Southwest hate capital of Dixie,” as Dallas has been called, is fraught with complications.

The president will discuss this issue, along with other details of the trip, with John Connally next week at the White House. In yet another confirmation that Lyndon Johnson has no place in John Kennedy’s future plans, the vice president has been neither invited to that meeting nor even told it will take place.

One statistic about the Texas trip is most glaring of all: more than 62 percent of Dallas voters rejected John Kennedy in 1960.

But JFK loves a challenge. If Billings, Montana, can be won over, then why not the “Big D”?

Meanwhile, at the exact same time President Kennedy is speaking in Montana, Lee Harvey Oswald is already on his way to Texas—and beyond. Dressed in casual slacks and a zippered jacket, Oswald rides Continental Trailways bus 5121 bound for Houston. From there he will change buses and travel due south to Mexico City. Unlike the American forces (which included among them a young Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee) that took a year to make that journey during the Mexican-American War of 1846, Oswald will make the trip in just one day.

Oswald is traveling like a man who is never coming back. He has no home, because he has just abandoned his squalid New Orleans apartment. When the landlady came around demanding the seventeen dollars in back rent, Oswald put her off with a lie and later sneaked out in the dead of night.

The sum of Oswald’s worldly possessions are now divided among his wallet and the two cloth suitcases stowed in the bus’s luggage bay.

As for a family, Oswald no longer has one. Two days ago he sent the very pregnant Marina and their nineteen-month-old daughter, June, back to live with Marina’s friend Ruth Paine outside Dallas. Marina has been Oswald’s unwitting pawn these past few months, her Soviet citizenship vital to his goal of returning to the Soviet Union. It is unclear if she knows he is traveling to Mexico—or that he had to leave the country to travel at all.

But Oswald has hatched a clever new scheme—one that doesn’t require Marina. So just as he abandoned their apartment, now he also abandons his family. Every mile that Trailways 5121 travels past the pine thickets and swampland of the Texas coastal highway puts Lee Harvey Oswald one mile farther away from the shackles of his turbulent and bitter marriage.

Oswald has temporarily abandoned plans to return to the Soviet Union. Instead, he dreams of living in the palm tree–fringed workers’ paradise of Cuba. But it’s impossible to attain a Cuban travel visa in the United States because the United States and Cuba have severed diplomatic relations. Thus Oswald is taking the bus to Mexico City in order to visit the Cuban embassy there.

Lee Harvey Oswald never fits in, no matter where he goes. He is not an outcast because that would mean allowing himself to join a group before being rejected by it. Instead, he is something far more unpredictable—and ultimately more dangerous: he is a parallel member of society, a thin-skinned loner operating by his own rhythms and rules, constantly searching for that place where he can hunker down, for that identity that will allow him to be the great man he so longs to be.

Oswald believes that Cuba is such a place. And in his mind he has done plenty to impress the Cuban dictator, Castro. Oswald’s time in New Orleans passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was his way of proving his loyalty to Fidel. Marina Oswald will later claim that Lee Harvey even planned to hijack an airplane that would take him directly to Havana.

At 2:00 A.M. on the morning of September 26, Lee Harvey Oswald changes buses in Houston, switching to Continental Trailways 5133. One day later, he arrives in Mexico City. Throughout the journey he is chatty, even boastful, desperate to impress his fellow passengers. He regales them with tales of his time in the Soviet Union and his work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He even makes a point of showing them the Soviet stamps in his passport. Whenever the bus stops for a food break, the rail-thin Oswald devours heaping platters of Mexican cuisine. He doesn’t speak Spanish, which he’ll need to learn for his new life in Cuba. So, for now, he orders by jabbing a finger randomly at a menu item and hoping for the best.

In his wallet, Oswald carries close to two hundred dollars, a Mexican tourist card that allows him one fifteen-day trip to that country, and two passports—one from his Soviet days and the other brand-new, recently issued by the U.S.government. In his blue athletic bag, Oswald has wedged a Spanish-English dictionary, newspaper clippings that prove he was arrested while agitating on behalf of Cuba, his Russian-language work permit from his time in Minsk, and proof of his marriage to a Soviet citizen. Oswald also carries a pad containing notes explaining that he speaks Russian and is a devoted friend of the Communist Party.

Like all true Communists, Lee Harvey Oswald is an avowed atheist, so he does not pray for his journey’s success. Instead, he puts his faith in that thick stack of documents he now carries.

But Oswald knows that the journey is a gamble. He might get all the way to Mexico City and be denied. If that happens, the precious dollars spent on travel, food, and lodging will have been squandered. But it is a risk he must take.

The bus arrives in Mexico City at 10:00 A.M. Oswald once again drifts, immediately separating himself from his new acquaintances. He checks in at the Hotel de Comercio, just four blocks from the bus station, at a rate of $1.28 per night. And though exhausted after the grueling twenty-hour bus ride, he walks immediately to the Cuban embassy.

John Kennedy is traveling west. Lee Harvey Oswald is traveling south. And Jackie Kennedy is traveling east. She and her sister, Lee, are off for Greece. There they will spend two weeks aboard the yacht Christina, owned by the shadowy womanizer Aristotle Onassis, a man who has been under surveillance by the FBI for almost twenty years due to his unscrupulous business practices. Among other things, Onassis has been investigated for fraud against the American government and for violation of U.S. shipping laws in the mid-1950s. It’s no wonder that, back in 1961, when the First Lady went abroad alone on a goodwill tour, President Kennedy issued very firm instructions to Jackie’s Secret Service detail: “Whatever you do in Greece, do not let Mrs. Kennedy cross paths with Aristotle Onassis.”

The swarthy Greek shipping magnate is more than twenty years older than Jackie, and three inches shorter. He’s also one of the richest men in the world. His yacht has been the scene of many a society function, and men such as JFK and Winston Churchill have been aboard it. The last time the First Lady was on board the 325-foot-long Christina, which is renowned for such opulent features as solid-gold faucets, was almost ten years ago, as a guest with JFK. At that time, Jackie Kennedy thought the boat vulgar and was particularly disgusted by the bar stool covers made of whale scrotums. But now her sister is pursuing Onassis romantically, even though the portly Greek is having an affair with opera star Maria Callas. Understanding the situation, Jackie is coming along to offer emotional support.

The First Lady would never dare be photographed in a bikini on U.S. soil. The image of her in a revealing bathing suit would be scandalous, and perhaps even politically damaging for her husband. But Greece is half a world away from the restrictions and cares of being the First Lady.

Jackie needs a break from all that. For the next two weeks she wants nothing more than to be pampered and free-spirited. The First Lady has lost all of her baby weight. It would be a shame not to flaunt her newly slim figure in the privacy of her opulent surroundings. So she makes sure her staff puts a bikini in her suitcase before she boards the TWA 707 for Greece on October 1.

It has been exactly fifty-two days since she endured the tragedy of baby Patrick’s death. It is exactly fifty-two days until she will endure another unspeakable tragedy.

17

OCTOBER 6, 1963

CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND

10:27 A.M.

The president of the United States is furious. John Kennedy steers a golf cart to Camp David’s military mess hall for Sunday Mass. The paved path meanders through a thick wood, taking him past the Hawthorn, Laurel, Sycamore, and Linden guest cabins on his three-minute journey. With him are five-year-old Caroline and John Jr., who will turn three next month. But it is not politics that is on the president’s mind—his trip to Texas is set. (After meeting with Governor John Connally two days ago, the much-needed political foray is a done deal.) Nor is it the pressures of the office. And it is certainly not his children who have JFK annoyed—the president is excited to be spending time alone with Caroline and John. He has even asked legendary Look magazine photographer Stanley Tretick to take some informal photos of them at play.

No, what’s making the president so angry is the First Lady. She won’t come to the phone.

It’s bad enough that Jackie Kennedy is cavorting around the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis, a man whom the president does not trust. But it’s far worse that pictures of her Greek adventures are front-page news around the world, leading many to ask why the president is allowing his wife to spend time with a man who has been investigated for fraud against the U.S.government. Perhaps worst of all, however, Aristotle Onassis is a known philanderer.

A simple phone conversation with Jackie might lessen Jack’s tension. But the First Lady is now unreachable. Even when the president plans ahead and accounts for the time change, the most powerful man in the world cannot speak to his wife. JFK doesn’t know whether she’s avoiding him or if the Christina truly lacks modern communication technology.

The situation is not just making Kennedy angry—it’s making him jealous.

Four months. Four long months. That’s how long it will take for Lee Harvey Oswald to obtain a Soviet visa, which it turns out he needs before Cuban officials will grant him travel documents.

But Oswald doesn’t have enough money to wait four months. He needs to go to Cuba now.

And so he stands toe-to-toe with consul Eusebio Azcue at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, arguing with him over the Soviet visa. The conversation long ago stopped being civil. Oswald is “highly agitated and angry,” in the eyes of one employee of the Cuban consulate. Instead of being deferential to the man who controls his entry into the Communist country, Oswald is yelling at him.

Finally, Azcue has had enough. The diplomat in him is gone, and he speaks candidly with the American. “A person like you,” Azcue tells Oswald in fractured English, “in the place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, are doing it harm.”

Azcue concludes by telling Oswald that he will never get the paperwork to enter Cuba.

The consul turns and strides back to his office, leaving Oswald crushed: his dream of escaping to Cuba is over. A consular employee hands Oswald a scrap of paper with her name and the embassy’s contact information on it, should he ever want to try again.

A despondent Oswald stays the weekend in Mexico City, loading up on the local food and taking in a bullfight. But his despair is growing.

He then takes the bus back to Dallas, where he rents a room at the YMCA and looks for work. He sheepishly phones Marina, who is still living with family friend Ruth Paine and is due to deliver the Oswalds’ second baby any day. Paine is a Quaker housewife who was introduced to the Oswalds by George de Mohrenschildt, the well-educated Russian with possible CIA connections whom Oswald met in the summer of 1962.

Ruth Paine speaks a smattering of Russian, which helps to make Marina feel more at home. All Marina’s possessions are stored in Paine’s garage. Among them is a green-and-brown rolled blanket in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle is concealed. Ruth Paine, being a peace-loving Quaker, would never allow the gun in her garage, but she has no idea it’s there.

Oswald regales Marina with tales of Mexico, but also admits that his trip was a failure. Marina listens, and believes that there is a change for the better in her husband. But she refuses to live with him. So, while looking for work, Oswald phones his wife when he can and sometimes hitchhikes from Dallas out to the Paine residence to see her.

Finally, thanks to a kindly reference from Ruth Paine, he finds a job. It is menial labor for a man with Oswald’s relatively high IQ of 118, and involves nothing more than placing books into boxes for shipping. But he and Marina are happy nonetheless. Maybe it’s a sign of a new beginning.

At 8:00 A.M. on Wednesday, October 16, Lee Harvey Oswald reports for his first day on the job at the Texas School Book Depository. The seven-floor redbrick warehouse is located on the corner of Elm and North Houston and overlooks Dealey Plaza, named for a onetime publisher of the Dallas Morning News. Most fortuitously, Parkland Memorial Hospital is just four miles away, should Marina go into labor with the new baby while Oswald is at work.

On October 18, Oswald gets a birthday surprise: the Cuban embassy in Mexico City has inexplicably reversed itself and granted him a travel visa. But it’s too late. He has moved on.

On October 20, Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald is born at Parkland Memorial. Lee Harvey doesn’t immediately go to see his wife and child, fearful that the hospital will present him with a bill he cannot pay.

This absence from the life of his newborn daughter is something Marina and the baby will have to get used to. Because Lee Harvey will not be around to watch young Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald grow up.

Jackie Kennedy is back in Washington. Between her summer on Cape Cod, two September weeks in Newport, Rhode Island, and the two weeks in Greece, she’s been gone from the White House for almost four months. The date is October 21, and it’s suppertime in the White House. The First Lady has invited Newsweek correspondent Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, over for a late meal. They will dine in the White House family residence on the second floor, which Jackie renovated in 1961, hand-selecting the antique wallpaper portraying scenes from the American Revolution.

And while tonight’s meal will be light and the conversation lively, this room has ghosts. President William Henry Harrison died here in his bed from pneumonia back in 1841. Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, took ill and died here in 1862. And Lincoln himself was embalmed in this room after being shot dead. Finally, just before the turn of the century, this high-ceilinged chamber served as the bedroom of William McKinley, who was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.

This impromptu dinner is the sort of get-together the First Lady enjoyed so often before baby Patrick’s death. It’s been a long time since the Kennedys had friends over just for fun. And while Jackie has canceled all formal social obligations until January 1964, this simple supper is an attempt to begin a normal daily life again. She waited until late afternoon to confirm that the president’s schedule was clear. The Bradlees received their invitation only at 7:00 P.M. but were more than happy to drop everything and come over.

The president has had a terrible day. The ongoing racial unrest down in Birmingham and the pitched battles over civil rights legislation here in Washington have left him in a foul mood. But the Bradlees are perhaps the Kennedys’ closest friends in Washington, and the president knows that, with them, his words are off the record. So Jackie did well by inviting Ben and Tony. JFK sits in his shirtsleeves sipping a drink and blowing off steam by talking politics across the table. Much of the conversation revolves around what he plans to do if he is reelected. “Maybe after 1964,” Kennedy repeats over and over. “Maybe after 1964.”

But 1964 might not be a year of victory, and John Kennedy knows that. Things are darkening in Camelot. Even Jackie’s recent vacation has turned out to be a liability. Her fondness for European culture and fashion have long contrasted with the more down-to-earth sensibilities of the American public. The First Lady’s extraordinary popularity once made her impervious to political attacks. This is no longer the case.

Less than two months after she suffered the brutal pain of losing a child, Republicans in Congress have decided that she is fair game. They publicly bash her for the Greece trip, accusing the First Lady of being nothing more than a pleasure-seeker. “Why doesn’t the lady see more of her own country instead of gallivanting all over Europe?” wonders Congressman Oliver Bolton of Ohio.

The press is also writing lengthy stories about the frequent parties on the Onassis yacht. Some writers are painting the First Lady as self-indulgent. “Does this sort of behavior seem fitting for a woman in mourning?” asks the Boston Globe. One published photograph even shows a carefree Jackie being assisted onto the Christina by a strapping, young, bare-chested, and sun-bronzed male crew member. Another image, of Jackie sunning herself in a bikini, was splashed on front pages all around the world. For the first time, the First Family is under siege from the media.

The UPI newspaper syndicate is even questioning the First Lady’s morals, suggesting that her sunbathing is too sensual. “Mrs. Kennedy allows herself to be photographed in positions and poses which she would never permit in the United States,” reads the story. The writer goes on to add archly that it would be common courtesy for the president and First Lady to reciprocate by inviting Aristotle Onassis to the White House next time he’s in the United States.

Now, at the White House dinner table, the First Lady’s deep tan is the most obvious reminder of her husband’s political fragility. But she seems oblivious to the pain she’s causing. Jackie defends Onassis to her husband and the Bradlees, telling them that the Greek is an “alive and vital person”—which, of course, only makes the president angrier.

John Kennedy does not know everything that did, or did not, happen on board the Christina. He does know about the massages, caviar dinners, and shots of vodka. He also understands that his wife is drawn to the Christina’s opulence and to the vast wealth of Aristotle Onassis. What the president doesn’t know is whether his wife was unfaithful, though it’s most likely that she was not, especially accompanied as she was on board by her sister, who had designs on Onassis. But the president senses that something is troubling his wife, and he has already confided to Ben Bradlee about “Jackie’s guilt feelings.”

Now he uses that guilt to his advantage.

“Maybe now you’ll come to Texas with us next month,” the president says with a cautious smile. He is determined that Jackie make this journey. And not just to answer the charges that she has seen more of Europe than of America. The First Lady is far more popular in the South than he is, particularly among female voters. Jackie hasn’t made a campaign appearance since 1960, but her presence in Texas might deflect some of the animosity surrounding the president’s visit. “Jackie will show those Texas broads a thing or two about fashion,” JFK says.

The fact is that Jackie actually wants to be at his side—no matter what. She is tired of being away from her husband.

It was in this spirit that Jackie bared her soul to JFK in a handwritten letter on October 5, shortly after the Christina put out to sea.

“If I hadn’t married you my life would have been tragic, because the definition of tragic is a waste,” she wrote in the privacy of her personal stateroom, named for the Greek island Chios. As is her habit, Jackie substitutes dashes for normal punctuation. The First Lady goes on to admit that she’s actually sorry for their daughter, Caroline, because it will be impossible for her to marry a man as wonderful as her father.

The Kennedy marriage can be restrained at times; many things are left unsaid. But on other occasions the simmering passion is so palpable that the American people sense it just by watching JFK and Jackie stand side by side. The heat between the president and the First Lady is undeniable, and that sentiment flows through her written words. Jackie writes line after line on the Christina that day, until the simple love note stretches to seven pages long.

“I loved you from the first day I saw you,” Jackie’s letter confesses. Their ten-year anniversary had been September 12. “Ten years later, I love you so much more.”

Now, two weeks later, in the White House, this man whom she so adores wants to take her on a trip to Texas. How can she possibly say no?

“Sure, I will, Jack. We’ll just campaign,” the First Lady responds. Whatever happened on the Christina is in her past. Her future is gazing at her intently with those beautiful greenish-gray eyes of his.

“I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want.”

The First Lady then reaches for her red appointment book and pens the word Texas across November 21, 22, and 23.