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
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.
