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
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
