by James Philip
“Thank you for inviting me to Maryland, Mister President,” Martin Luther King said, his tone quietly, profoundly sonorous as befitted the occasion. “I have prayed that this meeting will be the first step on the road to the fulfilment of the dream of a fairer, better America.”
Jack Kennedy held onto King’s hand a second or so longer.
“Yes,” he agreed before suddenly quirking a peculiarly boyish half-smile. “I hope so, too, Dr King.”
And then the two men were walking unhurriedly but in step away from the landing field towards the tree line, a little apart from their small entourages both men considering their impressions of each other. It was not that this was their first meeting because it was not; but this was their first unchoreographed encounter. In the next few hours they planned to speak freely, alone or with only a single key aid present. This was to be a meeting of minds and neither man knew how that was going to turn out.
In the President’s cabin the First Lady was waiting, every inch as regal and charming as she always seemed on TV. King was surprised to be introduced to the President’s children, six year old Caroline and three year old John.
The First Lady looked tired and soon ushered her offspring away.
“You must miss your children when you leave Atlanta?” Jack Kennedy inquired as the cabin cleared around the two men. He knew his guest had four children, the youngest just a baby in arms.
“I surely do, Mister President.”
As the two men settled in wicker arm chairs either side of a low table heavily laden with coffee pots and bone china cups and saucers, Martin Luther King heard the door close at his back and with a soft, almost electric shock he realized that he was alone with the most powerful man in the World.
The President had unbuttoned his jacket and clasped his hands across his lean belly as he viewed the man his younger brother had consistently described to him as being ‘the most remarkable man I think I have ever met’. Bobby had a tendency to get carried away with hyperbole – that was the lawyer in his soul and probably the thing that would stop him ever winning the Presidency – but he had a knack of looking a man in the eye and recognizing if he was dealing with a man with whom he could do business.
Martin Luther King had started down the road to his destiny standing next to Rosa Parks in Montgommery, Alabama in 1955, mounting the first co-ordinated non violent protests against the perfidious Jim Crow Laws. These evil statutes enacted in the 1890s enforced the de jure segregation of the races in all public buildings – and by extension on public transportation – in the former states of the defeated Confederacy. The first Jim Crow law in 1890 proscribed ‘separate but equal’ status for African Americans; and from Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico the canker of segregation had been set in legal stone ever since.
In leading the 385 day Montgommery Bus Boycott in 1955 King had been directly assaulting one of the untouchable, holy shibboleths of the Southern Democrat wing of Jack Kennedy’s own party. In 1957 King had become the first President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the year before the October War he had unsuccessfully confronted segregation in Albany, Georgia; and he had since been arrested by George Wallace’s goons leading a campaign of passive civil disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama. Last summer he had attempted to organise a ‘March on Washington’ but been dissuaded in this endeavour by the desperate entreaties of several senior cabinet members. The ‘march’ was cancelled only at the last minute when Nicholas Katzenbach – the man who had faced down George Wallace at ‘the schoolhouse door’ - Bobby Kennedy’s deputy at the Department of Justice had flown to Atlanta and explained that the FBI was convinced that the march would end in a bloodbath, long before it got anywhere near the District of Columbia. Katzenbach had explained that in the ‘present precarious internal security situation we simply do not have enough soldiers on the ground to protect you, or your people’.
“It may be that our country is at a crossroads, Dr King,” the President asserted. “The war left several of our great cities desperately damaged. As many as five million Americans died and the World beyond our shores is a much changed place.” He sighed. “I think we lost our way last year,” he confessed quietly.
The man in the chair across the table was eager to speak but something made him hold his peace. It was nothing he could put his finger on; just a sense that whatever he had thought was going to happen when he met the President of the United States of America, it seemed he had been mistaken.
Jack Kennedy smiled wanly.
“The normal form for meetings such as this, Dr King,” he observed, “would be for your people and my people to get together and agree whatever needs to be agreed, or disagreed, freeing us to swap anecdotes, drink coffee and generally shoot the breeze until it is time to call in the photographers, the TV people and the Washington Correspondents of the Post, The Times and Newsweek. For what it is worth I recommend that when we’re done you talk to Ben Bradlee at Newsweek. Ben’s close to the Administration, well, Bobby anyhow, and you can rely on him to give you a fair hearing and to report what you actually say to him. I don’t know about the rest of the ‘news circus’. What happened in DC in December has re-written the old play book. I digress. Forgive me. The other convention that normally mitigates against genuine discussion and any possibility of a real meeting of minds in situations such as the one in which we find ourselves today, is that I would customarily expect you to come to me,” he shrugged in apology, “in quasi supplication, or perhaps, high dudgeon either to deliver a list of demands, or simply to be seen to be bearding the monstrous occupant of the Oval Office in his lair for the consumption and pacification of your own constituency. For all I know you may have come here with a list of demands, likewise, you may need to cement your standing with your people by claiming to have waved your fist in my face.”
Jack Kennedy held up a hand.
“In a purely figurative fashion,” he qualified. “Today, with your indulgence, sir,” he said, his voice reacquiring the gravitas appropriate to that of the office of the President of the United States of America, “you and I will speak plainly to each other. But first, I propose to share with you the reality of this country’s situation because unless you and I understand each other frankly, I do not believe we are going to get anywhere.”
Chapter 54
Tuesday 28th January 1964
Community Meeting Hall, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania
The sleepy community of Fort Washington, a small satellite of greater Philadelphia situated some miles to the north east of the city center would inevitably, one day be swallowed up by the expanding urban sprawl of its giant neighbour. However, for the present it sat separate from the city in leafy, wooded hills that were slowly acquiring a coating of fresh snow as the cavalcade of limousines and staff cars with their small, fluttering flags and banners wound through the twisting country roads to the old meeting house which had been requisitioned and ‘secured’ the previous day.
The Federal Government might have officially commenced its re-location en masse to Philadelphia over a fortnight ago but right now, chaos ruled in downtown Philly and nobody in their right mind would attempt to claim that anywhere other than City Hall was remotely ‘secure’ or ‘safe’.
The Navy Department was leading the charge to Philadelphia, it was already ensconced on the Camden side of the Delaware River opposite the docks, the State and Justice Departments were hot on the Navy’s heels moving into the new ‘Philadelphia White House’ – an imposing structure modelled on the Pantheon in Rome attached to a thirty-one floor tower block a few hundred yards from City Hall, the designated temporary home of the House of Representatives – but today’s business was best conducted as far as possible from the ‘madding crowds’.
The Vice-President of the United States of America was deep in his thoughts as he viewed the wintery Pennsylvania countryside sliding by the window of his armoured limousine. One part of his mind was back in Maryland wondering how the ‘summit’ with
Martin Luther King was progressing; but the weight of his deliberation was focused on the coming conference. He and Jack Kennedy had made a pact and in many ways, today was the first significant test of whether that pact was actually worth a mess of beans.
The conundrum was very simple.
Either he spoke for the President or he did not.
One of his aides had given him a short talk about the history of ‘Fort Washington’; it was always useful to have small talk available to break the ice when one was welcoming folks to a shindig.
This part of Pennsylvania had been settled by German immigrants in the early years of the 18th century. A man called Philip Engard had purchased a hundred acres of land on what subsequently became Susquehanna Road and Fort Washington Avenue, and the settlement’s founding name had been Engardtown for about fifty years. Fort Washington was an accident of the Revolutionary War. George Washington and the Continental Army had retreated to and camped at Engardtown in October 1777 after the Battle of Germantown, lingering awhile to regroup before skirmishing anew with the British Army of occupation in Philadelphia under the command of General William Howe in the first week of December at White Marsh. Falling back again, this time briefly, into his hurriedly fortified emplacements at Engardtown, Washington had drawn breath and then marched his army to Valley Forge. Apparently much of the modern settlement of Fort Washington sat within the boundaries of those Revolutionary War earthworks. History had left the town unmolested another eighteen decades before in July 1956, it was the location of the worst ever railway smash in the United States; two North Pennsylvania Railroad trains colliding near the old Sandy Run station resulting in the death of over a hundred people, many of whom were children from the Kensington area of Philadelphia travelling to Sheaff’s Wood for a Sunday school picnic.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was in an unusually reflective mood as he mulled questions of history and the consequences that inevitably ensued. But for the October War his thoughts would have been directed solely at the New Hampshire Primary scheduled for early March. 1964 was a Presidential Election year but thus far nobody had declared, and LBJ had no idea if come March Jack Kennedy’s name would even be on the New Hampshire ballot.
History was a funny thing; always so much simpler and less messy when viewed from afar. Real life was never straightforward, there was never only the one best, let alone a self-evidently obvious course to follow. The reality of getting things done in a World in which practical politics was everything was that compromise, fudge and complication blurred what academics called ‘the big picture’. Lately, he ruminated a lot about the night of the October War.
The Cuban Missiles Crisis had surprised the Administration but it had hardly been a bolt from the blue. Nor had it suddenly got ‘hot’. At the time the first photographs of missiles and missile launchers on Cuba had landed on the President’s desk. the Administration’s main focus had been on preventing the two most populous countries on the planet – China and India – going to war over Tibet. Moreover, all that summer and fall they had been preoccupied with the incendiary condition of many of the southern states. Things were worst in Mississippi but Alabama and Georgia were not far behind; a great swathe of the American south had seemed to be on the verge of an uprising, the outbreak of widespread communal violence seemed inevitable and the Administration was, by that point, sickeningly aware of the limits of its power to do anything to stop that violence if it once took hold. Right up until those spy plane photographs of missiles on Cuba had arrived in the White House the Administration had been more worried about what was going on in Oxford, Mississippi than it had been in Berlin or Havana.
When analysts had briefed the President and senior cabinet member about the range and likely payloads of the missiles in the U-2 pictures from Cuba, Bobby Kennedy had passed a weary hand across his brow and dryly inquired: ‘Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?’
Notwithstanding, posterity would condemn the Administration out of hand but on that day in late October 1962 and all through that long, terrible night they had been groping their way through a geopolitical and military landscape fogged with the smoke of battle, shocked and frightened men trying to do what they honestly believed was the right thing.
Jack Kennedy had not sought his counsel before he unleashed the firestorm; and to this day he did not know what he would have said to his Commander-in-Chief had the question been asked...
That was then, this was now.
The rising clamour for state’s rights had been temporarily stilled by the December uprising; a narrow window of opportunity had opened and he was the man who was in charge of the heavy lifting that was necessary to shore up the Union against further shocks.
J. William Fulbright, Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department had arrived at the meeting hall shortly ahead of the Vice President’s cavalcade. He and the Vice-President shook hands.
“Winter in New England,” the tall Texan grinned at his old sparring partner. Fifty-eight year old Missouri born Fulbright had been the junior senator for Arkansas since January 1945. In the days when Johnson had been the ringmaster of the US Senate, Fulbright had been the Chairman of two key Committees in the House; between 1955 and 1959 Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, and since 1959 Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was still, officially, Chairman of that latter committee because ‘the House’ had yet to extract its collective thumb from its collective arse to elect a new Chairman. “Now that’s a thing for two old Southern Democrats like us, Bill!”
Fulbright was a no less impressive man physically than he was intellectually but Johnson understood why Jack Kennedy had not put Fulbright’s name forward for the State Department in 1961 – on the face of it Fulbright’s publicly stated ‘internationalism’ would have sat more happily in a Nixon Administration – but he was not alone in thinking that if Fulbright had been at the helm of American foreign policy in the two years before the Cuban Missiles imbroglio, things might not have turned out so badly in October 1962.
“You and I need to talk before the generals get here,” Fulbright declared sternly. “I know the Peace Dividend cuts have been halted and that the President plans to reinstate our former military clout but in the meantime we have to pull in our horns.” He shrugged in apology. “Hell, Lyndon, I know the last thing you need is an old dog like me lecturing you on what you already know...”
The Vice-President chuckled.
“It’s kind of academic, anyway,” he retorted dryly. “LeMay and the others know what’s coming but it’ll rest a lot easier with them if we can throw them a bone or two they aren’t expecting.”
Some thirty minutes later the main players were seated around an oval table beneath the high, airy rafters of the old hall. An open fire burned in a hearth at one end of the building, electric heaters had been installed to keep the ambient temperature somewhere in the high fifties Fahrenheit. All aides and junior staffers had been summarily dismissed from the conference and nobody was taking notes; because this was not the sort of ‘forum’ anybody wanted to be reading about in somebody else’s memoires ten, fifteen, or twenty or more years time.
The Secretary of State sat to the Vice-President’s right hand, General Curtis LeMay, since the Battle of Washington the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee to his left. Seated clockwise around the table was Admiral David Lamar McDonald the Chief of Naval Operations, General David Monroe Shoup, the Commandant of the Marine Corps and currently also the Military Governor of the District of Columbia, General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson the acting Chief of Staff of the Army, three star General William Childs Westmoreland the Personal Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara (who would have attended the meeting with Westmoreland had he not been snowed in at Andrews Air Force Base), and Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, Commander-in-Chief of the Washington State National Guard currently on attachment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.
“Bill,” the Vice Preside
nt nodded. “You have the floor.”
Fulbright looked around the table, making eye contacts. He knew Curtis LeMay, not well, but he knew him well enough to be confident that he had the measure of the senior military officer in the room. At least in the sense that he knew what to expect of ‘old iron pants’. Of the others, only Westmoreland had made any effort to meet with and or, offered to brief him, or to put himself at the new Secretary of State’s disposal while he ‘worked’ himself into his ‘role at the State Department’. McDonald, the Navy man was supposed to be a ‘breath of fresh air’ in comparison to his predecessor, Admiral Anderson; after the October War Anderson and his political boss, McNamara had hardly exchanged a civil word. ‘Johnny’ Johnson was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, supposedly an able and ‘safe’ pair of hands, his predecessor having been killed by a sniper at the height of the Battle of Washington. David Shoup had gone ashore with the 2nd Marines at Tarawa. By far the most interesting participant in today’s proceedings was the grey-haired, grey moustached man in freshly pressed combat fatigues conspicuously lacking insignia of rank or unit, sitting next to the Secretary of State.
