PRESIDENT KENNEDY flew south to Florida on November 18. In Miami Beach, wearing a dapper bow tie, he delivered a foreign policy speech criticizing military coups and tyranny in Cuba, blending in language of social justice. “It is impossible to have real progress as long as millions are shut out from opportunity and others forgiven obligations,” he told the Inter-American Press Association. “In my own country, we have prepared legislation and mobilized the strength of the Federal Government to insure to American Negroes and all other minorities access to the benefits of American society. Others must also do the same for the landless campesino, the underprivileged slum dweller, the oppressed Indian. Privilege is not easily yielded up….”
Bands, bunting, and cheering crowds marked his motorcade routes past early Christmas decorations, as Kennedy—the first President ever to visit Tampa—sought business support from the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Profits were up, taxes down, and the gross national product had risen from $500 billion to $600 billion in the three Kennedy years, he said, and yet many businessmen feared socialism and bankruptcy, pointing to a national debt ceiling just then raised from $309 billion to $315 billion. Kennedy defended his $11 billion deficit as an aberration smaller than Eisenhower’s 1958 deficit, and pointed out that the postwar federal government had shrunk relative to the states and the total economy. “While the Federal net debt was growing less than 20 percent in these years, total corporate debt—not my debt, your debt—was growing by nearly 200 percent, and the total indebtedness of private individuals rose by 300 percent,” he said, then flashed a Kennedy smile. “So who is the most cautious fiscal manager? You, gentlemen, or us?”
While pushing on that same day through an airport rally, a speech to steelworkers, a military review, and a campaign address at a baseball park, Kennedy did manage to duck with two Secret Service agents into a holding room for a quiet interval with Father Michael Gannon, the historian-priest who had guided Vice President Johnson through St. Augustine’s Catholic mission in March. Gannon made his nervous pitch for a presidential visit in connection with the four hundredth birthday of the Oldest City, surprised that Kennedy’s hair had a more reddish tint than he picked up on television. He presented a gift photograph of the oldest surviving European record in the Western Hemisphere—the first page of the St. Augustine Parish Registers, dated 1595—and, encouraged by Kennedy’s enlivened interest in its survival, showed the President an assortment of drawings, maps, and models for the Quadricentennial celebration, which would include a giant, two-hundred-foot cross on the site where adelantado Menéndez had planted his mission in 1565. President Kennedy promised to keep in touch as he moved off. “What is your name again?” he asked.
ON NOVEMBER 19, Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Heschel appeared together at the annual convention of the United Synagogue of America, in Kiamesha Lake, New York. Since their introduction ten months earlier in Chicago, King had written his letter from the Birmingham jail, delivered hundreds of orations, including his “I Have a Dream” speech and the funeral address in Birmingham, and acquired among the mass of Americans a searing but selective fame. When not making news in a confrontational march, he easily could disappear into the Catskills to nurture private ties, commending the nineteen conservative rabbis who, before the marches of children, had solemnly walked into a Birmingham mass meeting as surprise reinforcements from United Synagogue’s spring meeting.
Heschel introduced King to the convention as a prophet, saying, “The prophets’ great contribution of humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.” With his salute, Heschel also reminded King of the prophet’s burden: “Mere knowledge or belief is too feeble to be a cure of man’s hostility to man, man’s tendency to fratricide. The only remedy is personal sacrifice, to abandon, to eject what seems dear, even plausible, like prejudice, for the sake of a greater truth, to do more than I am ready to understand for the sake of God. Required is a breakthrough, a leap of action.”
From Heschel, King accepted the convention’s Solomon Schecter Award. “Freedom is not some lavish dish that the federal government will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite,” he said. “If freedom is to be a reality, the Negro must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice and to work for it.” In addition to his standard themes, King urged the delegates to rise up against the prevailing wisdom “that we will probably not get a civil rights bill in this session of Congress.” They must agitate for passage with reminders “that our nation is in danger of destroying its soul over this very issue.” King praised Heschel for following the prophets’ example of speaking the harshest truths to the closest kin—in this case for saying that even Jews managed indifference to slow spiritual liquidation under Communism. King added a passage on the plight of Soviet Jews to his address the next day at the annual convention of Reform Jews in Chicago.
On his way there, King stopped over at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport in New York to meet Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison about the Birmingham book project. King’s planned account of the seminal campaign had been plagued not only by buffeting historical aftershocks—Medgar Evers, the civil rights bill, the March on Washington, the church bombing—but also by the loss of Stanley Levison as his practiced intermediary with ghostwriters, book editors, and business agents. Painfully, Levison had broken off his long association with King that fall. Bowing to the edicts of Hoover and the Kennedys, he had banished himself in order to spare his friend the awful choice between principled resistance and threatened damage to the national movement. (“I’m not going to let Martin make that decision,” Levison said.) Since then, unable to tell normal contacts of the spy blackmail, Levison had made awkward excuses—that he had handed the arrangements to Clarence Jones during his vacation, for instance, and was reluctant to take them back for fear of hurting Jones’s feelings. Finally, with the book under threat of being scuttled, the wiretaps heard Levison confide uncomfortably to a friend, “You know, I’m, I’m not going to be seeing him [King], but I have to finish off this book thing that was started.”
Fully alerted by the installation early in November of the six wiretaps on King himself, FBI agents overheard the advance logistics in time to be posted from the Idlewild gate to the meeting room at the Intercontinental Hotel, on lookout when King met Levison and Clarence Jones. “Notwithstanding trying circumstances, both from a climatic and security standpoint,” headquarters later boasted, “our New York agents were able to secure a photograph of the aforementioned three individuals.” Oblivious to the substance of King’s business, Hoover sent the photograph to Robert Kennedy as vindicating fruit of the King wiretaps—and as potential evidence in a criminal spy trial.
As King headed for Chicago, Heschel flew from Idlewild to Rome for emergency intercession with Cardinal Bea at the Vatican. Word had leaked into the New York Times a month earlier of Bea’s long-standing consultations with Jewish leaders before November 18, when the Vatican Council formally opened debate on the 399-word schema entitled “The Relation of Catholics to Non-Christians and Especially the Jews.” In a jolting departure from the hushed pomp of two thousand church fathers in spectacular raiments, three Patriarchs denounced the schema as a political surrender to Israel, and Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini—Archbishop of Palermo, Sicily, spokesman for the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy—accused Cardinal Bea of heresy, saying the integrity of the faith forbade “giving honorable mention” to Jews. When Bea rose to address the crisis himself the next day, November 19, bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica applauded before he spoke a word.
The historic Vatican Council—first since 1870, thirteenth of the millennium—seethed with conspiracy and emotional intrigue by the time Heschel arrived. Mysterious couriers delivered to every delegate a crudely anti-Semitic monograph. Pope Paul VI was rumored—accurately, as it turned out—to be planning a year’s postponement of the entire Jewish question, moving to bury public acrimony with a stunning announcement
that in January he would become the first Pontiff since the original Apostle Peter to set foot in the Holy Land.
Heschel took action most directly against an amendment that conditioned Bea’s entire reform upon the eventual acceptance of Christianity by Jews. “As your Eminence knows,” he wrote Bea, “such an implication would deeply hurt the sensitivity of the Jewish people. The enemies of the Church will spare no effort in maintaining that the whole document is intended to bring about the end of the Jewish faith.” With this letter, Heschel managed at last to gain a private evening audience with the besieged cardinal. Bea’s staff urged Heschel not to panic. The Church would defeat the offending amendment, they predicted, but delay might well be prudent. Bishops from Africa and South Asia, who had almost no exposure to Jews, thought the schema should be perfected as part of a larger statement on non-Christian religions. Cardinal Bea himself counseled patience. “What is put off is not put away,” he said.
A bullet interrupted. While escorting Rabbi Heschel back across the Tiber River to his hotel, one of Bea’s aides was struck by an inscription in the Piazza Cavour: “The light shining in the darkness.” Another fixed upon the eerie hush among even the boisterous young people on the streets of Rome, whose whispers about a faraway murder in Dallas told of changes let loose in the world.
PART TWO
New Worlds Passing
13
Grief
REPORTERS from the press bus banged through the double doors of the Dallas Trade Mart, desperate to know why the motorcade had left them. Finding no clues in the blank stares of the two thousand waiting guests at the presidential fund-raiser, one of them called the New York Hearst office and shouted “Parkland Hospital” in a tone that drove them all back through the banquet hall. The Herald-Tribune correspondent bowled over a waiter carrying a tray of vegetable dishes and ran on without a backward glance. One observer retained a surreal perception of fear and awe “moving across that crowd like a wind over a wheatfield.” It registered with such clarity that the luncheon companion of Federal District Judge Sarah Hughes cried tears of apprehension even before a rumor of gunshots reached their table.
Outside the hospital, a disembodied radio voice announced, “The President of the United States is dead—I repeat…” just as Tom Wicker of the New York Times ran by Lyndon Johnson’s limousine convertible, parked askew. Not far away, a hovering cloud of Secret Service agents shoved Johnson at a trot into three unmarked police cars and lurched off for the airport amid clashing orders about how to avoid follow-up assassins. Some agents shouted for more speed through the red lights, others for fewer sirens and motorcycle escorts so as not to attract attention. The Johnsons boarded Air Force One just ahead of Judge Hughes, who administered the presidential oath barely two hours after the rifle shots, and the jet roared off for Washington above a carload of reporters giving chase.
Lady Bird Johnson summoned the will to ask gently whether she might help Jacqueline Kennedy change clothes from her pink suit flecked with blood, one glove and one stocking thickly smeared. The new widow declined with a glint of ferocity—“I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” she said—then lapsed toward stoic remove. That night from his vice president’s office, Johnson exchanged phone calls with world leaders and confidants. “Just ah, think, think, think,” he urged Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, pleading for advice to “unite the country to maintain and preserve our system in the world because I, if it starts falling to pieces…why we could deteriorate pretty quick.”
Before dawn on Saturday, November 23, President Kennedy’s body arrived at the White House from overnight autopsy at the Naval Medical Center, and was placed under military honor guard in the East Room. Sargent Shriver sent home to retrieve a small carved wooden crucifix that a Benedictine priest had given him and his wife, Eunice, Kennedy’s sister, as a wedding present. He laid the crucifix at a corner of the casket and placed a portable prie-dieu, or kneeling frame, beneath it on the floor. All was prepared—the corpse’s waxen face sealed from view on orders of Robert Kennedy—before the new president and his wife arrived among dignitaries to pay respects in whispered bewilderment.
As Johnson’s first business caller that morning, J. Edgar Hoover attempted to correct panicky errors of the previous day, when he had reported the murder weapon as a Winchester and a Secret Service agent among the victims. By now, FBI teams had traced the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository from the manufacturer through a Chicago sporting goods dealer to a mail order buyer under the name A.J. Hidell, whose receiving post office box in Dallas had been rented by Lee H. Oswald, the suspect under custody. Agents were rushing ballistics and fingerprints among a thousand details, but even Hoover confessed perplexity when Johnson asked about intelligence reports that suspect Oswald, a former expatriate to the Soviet Union, had visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City two months earlier. “That’s one angle that’s very confusing,” Hoover told Johnson.
By one later survey, the average American adult watched ten hours of television news uninterrupted by commercials that Saturday—a pounding, repetitive mix of helpless mystery and bonding drama. That evening, long after former President Eisenhower and the senior members of the Cabinet, economist Walter Heller took his brief turn in the solemn procession of visitors who heard the new president ask their help through the emergency. Johnson also begged patience, saying he was not as quick-witted or sophisticated as his predecessor, but Heller noticed, after he reported how many points the stock market had dropped on assassination day, that Johnson calculated the loss at 3 percent before he could. Heller informed Johnson that he had given President Kennedy a status report about the economy only four days earlier on November 19. He omitted anecdotal details that would be maudlin during the wake—how toddler John Kennedy, Jr., had forced Heller and the stiff National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to eat imaginary slices of cherry-vanilla pie off his plastic tea set, serving so many that Heller said, “I have to talk to your daddy first,” and how Kennedy had pilloried bankers with a rakish term that the reserved Heller euphemistically recorded as “his favorite expression.”
For Heller, who chaired the new Council of Economic Advisers, it was a risky, impulsive leap even to mention his esoteric poverty workshops on an occasion that cried out for brief solace. Since spring, when President Kennedy had proposed his controversial plan to lower tax rates, Heller’s economists had pushed for a poverty initiative to offset the tax cut, whose benefits would flow disproportionately to wealthy citizens. And since June, when Kennedy had introduced his civil rights legislation, the economists had recommended a different balance based on the prevailing image of poor people as white hillbillies and migrant workers. “Having mounted a dramatic program for one disadvantaged group [the Negroes],” Heller told President Kennedy, it seemed “both equitable and politically attractive” to offer a program “specifically designed to aid other disadvantaged groups.” To Johnson, Heller acknowledged that Kennedy had qualified his interest in poverty with an instruction to “make sure that we’re doing something* for the middle-income man in the suburbs,” and he only slightly exaggerated his presidential mandate to keep formulating an “attack on poverty.”
This was more than enough for Johnson. “That’s my kind of program,” he said with enthusiasm. Heller had been processing the unfinished program under sleepy trial titles such as “Human Conservation and Development,” but now Johnson said to “push ahead full-tilt.” The President often recalled that as a young teacher in 1928 he had watched hungry Mexican children chew discarded grapefruit rinds behind his schoolhouse at Cotulla, Texas†—that their poverty had gnawed at him more than his own, and that his proudest moment as a young congressman was in 1939, when his dam project and his federal cooperative had lit up 90 percent of the farms in the Texas Hill Country with their first electricity for water pumps and radios and washing machines, lifting aeons of toil from hardscrabble people. That was the purpose of government, he told Heller.
To make his point physically, as was his habit, Johnson forcefully shut the door that Heller had opened to leave, then grabbed the arm of the nonplussed economist to announce up close that he was a Roosevelt New Dealer at heart.
The next morning, Sunday, November 24, as Blackjack the riderless funeral horse escorted the casket to public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda, Johnson attended services at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church nearby on Capitol Hill. The Rev. Bill Baxter urged his congregation not to forget that the shock of the assassination had dissolved the callous, selfish divisions of ordinary life, revealing them as insignificant against the shared bonds beneath. Visibly moved, Johnson covered his face with his handkerchief during the hymn “America the Beautiful.” Afterward, he walked spontaneously into the parish hall to shake hands, seeming to find relief in the contact. His Secret Service detail, already agitated by this first public outing since Dallas, roughly challenged more than a few churchgoers and practically dragged Johnson into his car minutes before a voice cried out on the street: “Jesus Christ, they’ve shot Oswald.” Millions of NBC viewers had just witnessed the first murder ever broadcast on live television.
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