by James Philip
‘Don’t be strangers, people,” Sam had grinned lopsidedly, his voice still sore and hoarse from the tubes the hospital had stuffed down his throat when he had reacted badly to Vincent Meredith’s Mickey Finn.
‘Nice people,’ Dwayne had offered as they drove away into the dusk.
Miranda had nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Yes, they were nice people; the trouble was she had not realized it until then.
Returning to the matter at hand she waved the mimeographed sheet listing places and dates.
Okay, okay, this is not working!
“Would everybody please be quiet?” She asked pleasantly.
No, that did not work either.
“WOULD YOU ALL BE QUIET FOR A MOMENT PLEASE?”
Shouting worked better.
Miranda seized the moment.
“I am here to publicise the scheduled meetings of the California Civil Rights Forum. While I am on State property I am not authorized to, nor will I discuss personal matters.”
She smiled the smile she had seen her mother smile a thousand times when she came to conclusion that her interlocutor was an imbecile, or a gossip columnist. Miranda knew that she was not her mother. Her mother was an actress of the old school, an accomplished professional artiste and she was just starting out. Nevertheless, she smiled that smile and behind it she carried on thinking her thoughts.
Dwayne was going back to Georgia tomorrow for at least a fortnight. He wanted to talk to his people in Atlanta, to report back. He hoped to have a few minutes with Dr King.
‘You will come back?’ Miranda had checked once she got used to the idea that he was not going to be around for the next couple of weeks.
‘I promise.’
She had been a mess ever since and that was not like her. She had not slept last night and even while she was subjecting herself to the pointless farrago of this alleged ‘press call’ she was restless and distracted.
It was not as if she and the big guy were any more than friends.
He was not her boyfriend and she certainly was not his girlfriend, but...
Not knowing what exactly they were to each other made it doubly worse and whichever way she tried to rationalise her feelings, every time her thoughts completed another unresolved loop she felt just as big a mess as before.
Why did everything always have to be so complicated?
Chapter 56
Tuesday 28th January 1964
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
“I tell you honestly and directly, Dr King,” Jack Kennedy said with regret, “that at this time the civil rights of colored people are not, and cannot be the primary concern of my Administration. Please do not take this to mean that in any way I denigrate, you or your profoundly held beliefs and convictions, or personally think any less of a man or a woman because of the color of their skin. Like you I am a God-fearing man, I wrestle with my conscience every day of my life. I know that all men and women are created equal in the sight of God and have an inalienable right to be treated as equals in this land and in every land upon the face of this planet. But putting right centuries of wrongs is not the first priority of my Administration.”
The handsome black man seated across the coffee table from the most powerful man in the World pursed his lips, nodded his head almost imperceptibly.
No, of all the things he had imagined his President was going to say to his face – unambiguously and categorically – he had not expected this.
“Then what am I doing here, sir?” He inquired gruffly, for the moment restraining his bubbling inner turmoil and rising anger.
“I wanted to meet you man to man and to tell you,” Jack Kennedy shrugged and grimaced wanly, “man to man about the situation your country finds itself in. And then, when we are both standing in the middle of the same ball park I will talk to you about what I can do to help your movement, and what I am prepared to promise you publicly. And before you ask the obvious question; no, I have not yet finally decided whether I will run for re-election this fall. In some ways it may be the case that I can be of greater service to you this year if I stand aside in November, at least in the short term. Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that one, in fact between you and I, Dr King, there are a lot of things I don’t know the answer to. Like, for example, whether Chief Justice Warren will have me impeached once I have appeared before his Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War.”
Martin Luther King suspected for a split second that the other man was joking; a second look into his green eyes found not mirth, only resignation.
“So, will you hear me out?” Jack Kennedy asked softly.
The face and voice of the African-American Civil Rights Movement inclined his handsome head a fraction to the right, his expression momentarily quizzical.
“You are my President, sir. Why ever would I not hear you out?”
There was no submission in this; it was a statement of fact and a declaration of everything Martin Luther King tried to stand for. He had never asked his white opponents for anything but the justice of dealing with him and his people with the decency, respect and consideration that they professed in their dealings with each other.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was his President as much as he was the most violently bigoted Klansman’s President. Even if one did not respect the man – and King did respect the man despite his rumoured shortcomings and the disaster of the October War – all Americans should honour and respect the office of the President of the United States.
The President, the older of the two men by eleven years in age but past two decades in appearance, worn down as he was by the intolerable, unimaginable horrors of the last year, saw this in Martin Luther King’s questing brown eyes.
“Until last fall we,” he guffawed a sardonically deprecatory half-laugh, “I believed that at some level what had happened in October sixty-two might be mitigated by the notion that World War had finally been banished from the face of the Earth. In retrospect the ‘peace dividend’ was premature; and future generations of historians will no doubt pillory me for my hubris and naivety. But then after what we all went through on the day and the night of the October War, what man would not want to honestly believe that the killing was over?”
Martin Luther King let this rhetorical question go unremarked.
“I now know that the ‘peace dividend’ was a terrible mistake,” the President continued, “far from kick-starting the reconstruction of our bombed cities and re-gearing our national economy for the peaceful, better future to which we all so desperately aspire it has brought out the worst in us, divided us and compounded the post-war schism between the Administration and large sections of the House of Representatives. In promulgating the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War it is my hope that by making myself accountable to the House and to the American People in the most public and open way possible, that a beginning can be made in the great work of safeguarding the unity of the Union.”
“The Lord forgives all sinners who repent, Mr President.”
“Ah,” Jack Kennedy sighed, “God in his infinite mercy may forgive me for my trespasses but I never will, Dr King.”
The younger man wondered if his President had ever confessed this to another living soul; he felt unaccountably humble. He remained silent for this was a time for listening.
Jack Kennedy’s lips flinched into a fleeting smile.
“Last fall we believed that we had so thoroughly scourged the lands of our foes that no enemy could possibly emerge again in our lifetimes. Because of this we determined to beat our swords into ploughshares. Members of the Administration counselled me to go slowly but frankly, I took the view that it was better to get the pain over and done with as soon as possible.” He hesitated, hardly crediting the magnitude of his folly. “Shortly before the Battle of Washington I was made aware of the possibility that elements of the United States military had been suborned by traitors wit
hin the Pentagon and the State Department. The TV, radio and newspaper reports you will have read concerning apparent attacks by US aircraft of British warships and bases in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were but the tip of a heinous conspiracy designed to provoke a war with the British and to topple the Administration. For reasons of national security I cannot describe to you the full particulars of what was a monstrous plot against the very fabric of the Union, suffice to say that we came within hours of an all out war with the British. So close that I suspect the verdict of history will be that but for the simultaneous outbreak of what the FBI, the Secret Service and the National Security Council now jointly describe as the ‘uprising of the Southern Resistance Militias’ we and the British would have gone to war with frankly, incalculable results too dreadful to contemplate.!
“The Southern Resistance Militias?” Martin Luther King asked, his brow furrowing.
“The majority of the prisoners taken after the Battle of Washington describe themselves as either ‘members of the resistance’, or ‘God’s militiamen’, or ‘Sons of the South’, or ‘Avengers of the South’. The rebels are a polyglot group of almost exclusively white men drawn from the States of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. Some black men were rounded up in the immediate aftermath of the battle but their involvement in the attempted coup d’état seems to have been of a criminal or an accidental nature, specifically, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many of the rebels hold violently fundamentalist Christian convictions that would not sit well on either your shoulders or mine. Their God is neither a God of love or toleration, their conception of mercy is essentially medieval and incidental to their alleged ‘faith’. Many of these people come from rural backwaters, and a proportion of them claim to have lost loved ones or distant relations in the October War. At this time the Justice Department is making preliminary preparations for the first trials of members of the leadership cadre of the ‘Southern Resistance Militias’. No decision has yet been made as to where these trials will be held, and no firm dates set. At the moment Bobby is looking to schedule the first hearings for some time in April or May.”
“Show trials?” The other man queried.
“No. Absolutely not. These people will be accorded each and every one of the constitutional rights that they were so keen to deny to their fellow citizens.” Jack Kennedy realized that his guest was testing him and had not intended to touch the raw nerve he had involuntarily exposed. “Certain battlefield interrogation methods were of necessity employed in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Washington, but you have my personal assurance that thereafter the constitutional rights of all prisoners have been scrupulously respected.”
Even in faraway Atlanta dark rumours had circulated about the torturing and summary execution of ‘rebels’ at a place called Camp Benedict Arnold outside Washington near to the Civil War battlefield of Manassas.
“Historians will look at our age and judge us as if we had perfect twenty-twenty oversight and understanding of each and every one of the great matters of our day,” Jack Kennedy continued, his tone turning reflective. “Yet even while we speak our British allies are trying to contain – and to understand, which is even harder – an apparently widespread terroristic insurgency that has spread like wildfire across the steppes of Anatolia, overflowed across the Aegean and is threatening to drive them out of Cyprus. At the very time our British friends find themselves over-stretched and beleaguered in the Mediterranean, by events which may eventually threaten our own interests in the Middle East, we find ourselves – by our own hand – weakened and hamstrung. Tomorrow Secretary of State Fulbright flies to the United Kingdom at the beginning of a ten-day period of what he is calling ‘shuttle diplomacy’ to attempt to strengthen old regional alliances in the Mediterranean and hopefully form new ones in North Africa. I plan to follow him to Portugal,” he shrugged, “to cement a new alliance with that country and its leader, Prime Minister Salazar, and then to fly wherever America might find, and rediscover, friends in the old world.”
Martin Luther King was fascinated, tingling with a guilty excitement.
“Forgive me,” his President drawled, betraying momentarily the depth of his underlying weariness, “but prior to your arrival I was informed that the British are so worried about the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, that they are in the process of mounting an operation to remove nearly forty nuclear weapons from a pre-October War storage facility near Limassol, Cyprus.”
“Don’t we have any ships or aircraft or GIs in the area, Mr President?”
“We pulled out of the Mediterranean last year. There are mothballed bases in the Saudi Arabian peninsula and we maintain friendly contacts with Israel – theoretically several of their air bases are available to our aircraft in an emergency – but otherwise we disengaged from that theatre of operations when the Sixth Fleet was disbanded last summer. We have a number of aircraft and a few Marines in Italy and bases in Spain, all of which are presently locked down while investigations continue into the events of early December.”
“The attacks on British ships?”
“Yes,” the President confirmed tersely. “That, the bombing of Malta and the involvement of traitors within the State Department and the CIA in encouraging the Spanish to believe that we the United States stood behind General Franco’s regime in a proxy war fought on our behalf against the British.”
The implications of this made the hairs on the back of Martin Luther King’s neck stand on end as if he was positioned in the center of a powerful electrical field.
“So,” Jack Kennedy went on, his manner increasingly like that of a man trudging determinedly across an ever muddier ploughed field, “for one reason or another we find ourselves militarily enfeebled at the very time that unsuspected, and frankly, unimagined internal and external threats to the Republic are emerging. This at the same time it has become imperative to remove the Federal Government from Washington DC to Philadelphia. As if this itself was not a nightmare, and it is, the House of Representatives is out for the Administration’s blood, it is election year, and our only militarily robust ally – the United Kingdom – is preoccupied with feeding its people largely because Congress blocked the Administration’s attempts to send aid last year, and is almost certainly strategically over-stretched in the Eastern Mediterranean; an area which is a virtual intelligence black spot at this time. As we speak the US Atlantic Fleet is mobilising every available ship and submarine to sail for the Mediterranean; that’s how concerned the Administration and the Chiefs of Staff are about what might be going on over there!”
Jack Kennedy’s quietly persistent vehemence hung in the air between the two men.
“Oh, and I might be impeached at any time,” he added, grinning boyishly as if this was the least of his worries. “But that’s not the thing. Last year the Administration prevented you bringing the Southern Civil Rights Movement to Washington. In so doing the Administration knocked the wind out of the sails of your movement; and subsequently riots and civil disorder across the South last summer and fall happened anyway. I should have stood my ground; you should have marched on Washington.”
The President of the United States of America leaned towards his guest.
“This year when you march on Philadelphia,” he said quietly but with an iron purpose, “I give you my word that will stand beside you on the steps of City Hall when you address the nation.”
Chapter 57
Tuesday 28th January 1964
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
“You gotta tell me where we’re going sooner or later, Pa?” Isaac Cheney suggested respectfully in an unnaturally timid voice for such an obviously vigorous and well-constructed young man.
Father and son were sitting in the window of the greasy diner on a dusty road near the ever-expanding city limits of the state capital. Galen Cheney viewed his younger son with a thoughtfulness that almost amounted to indulgence.
“I reckon we’ll head up to Vicksburg via Natchez. After that we’ll head over to Jackson and Meridian on Interstate 20.”
“We’re headed for Meridian?”
The father shook his head.
“No, there are brothers and sisters in Atlanta who need our help, son.”
Isaac Cheney thought about the two long guns he had lovingly cared for these last few months now stored in the hidden compartment in the trunk of the rusty old Dodge parked outside the diner.
“What’s in Atlanta, Pa?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there. That won’t be for two or three days. There’s no hurry and we don’t want any trouble with state troopers.”
Isaac grinned nervily.
The only person he had ever felt comfortable with was his father; the man he knew – much to his confusion – seemed to terrify everybody else. Even his big brother Mickey was afraid of Pa although Isaac had never seen his father raise his hand to him.
Pa and Mickey had had some kind of fight the morning they left Texas City; something to do with the girl Sarah Jane that Pa had made him go with the night before. Pa had said Sarah Jane would cry but that he had to be strong.