Kennedy's Last Days: The Assassination That Defined a Generation Read online

  The first children in the group are met with a half-strength blast from the fire hoses. It’s still enough force to stop many of them in their tracks. Some of the kids simply sit down and let the water batter them, following orders not to be violent or to retreat.

  Firefighters turn their hoses full force on civil rights demonstrators on July 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama. [Bill Hudson/AP]

  Connor, realizing that half measures will not work with these determined children, then gives the order to spray at full strength. All the protesters are knocked off their feet. Many children are swept away down the streets and sidewalks, their bodies scraping against grass and concrete. Clothing is torn from their bodies. Those who make the mistake of pressing themselves against a building to dodge the hoses soon become perfect targets. “The water stung like a whip and hit like a cannon,” one protester will later remember. “The force of it knocked you down like you weighed only twenty pounds, pushing people around like rag dolls. We tried to hold on to the building, but that was no use.”

  Walter Gadsden, a seventeen-year-old demonstrator, is attacked by a police dog. This photograph enraged people across the country. [Bill Hudson/AP]

  Then Connor lets loose the police dogs.

  Bull Connor watches as the German shepherds lunge at the children, ripping away their clothing and tearing into their flesh.

  By 3:00 P.M., it all seems to be over. The children who haven’t been arrested limp home in their soaked and torn clothing, their bodies bruised by point-blank blasts from the water cannons. No longer bold and defiant, they are now just a bunch of kids who have to explain to their angry parents about their ruined clothes and a missed day of school.

  Bull Connor has won. Or at least it seems that way.

  But among those in Birmingham this afternoon is an Associated Press photographer named Bill Hudson. He is considered one of the best in the business, willing to endure any danger to get a great photo. On this day, Bill Hudson takes the best photo of his life. It is an image of a Birmingham police officer—looking official in pressed shirt, tie, and sunglasses—holding a leash while his German shepherd lunges toward black high school student Walter Gadsden.

  The next morning, that photograph appears on the front page of the New York Times, three columns wide.

  Young marchers head toward Kelly Ingram Park. They will become important symbols of the civil rights movement. [© Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos]

  And so it is that John Kennedy, starting his morning as he always does by reading the papers, sees this image from Birmingham. Just one look, and JFK instinctively knows that America and the world will be outraged by Hudson’s image. Civil rights are sure to be a major issue of the 1964 presidential election. And Kennedy now understands he can no longer be a passive observer of the civil rights movement. He must take a stand—no matter how many votes it might lose him in the South.

  Kennedy makes a point of telling reporters that the picture is “sick” and “shameful.”

  Petitions from around the country, including this one from California, arrived at the White House urging President Kennedy to support the goals of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protests in Birmingham. The petition asks the president “to call for nationwide prayers and national unity of purpose to secure and protect the rights of every citizen under our Constitution.…” [JFK Presidential Library and Museum]

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  JUNE 22, 1963

  Washington, D.C. Late Morning

  THE PRESIDENT AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. walk alone through the White House Rose Garden. This is the first time they’ve met. Kennedy towers over the five-foot-six civil rights leader. Today is a Saturday and the start of a carefully orchestrated series of meetings between the White House and some powerful business groups to mobilize support for the civil rights movement.

  John Kennedy has thrown the power of his office behind the civil rights movement, but reluctantly. It is Bobby Kennedy who is the driving force behind his brother’s new stand.

  May 1963 was a trying month, marked by confrontation after confrontation in Birmingham, spurred by Governor George Wallace. In June, after successfully ensuring that the University of Alabama was integrated, JFK delivered a nationally televised address about civil rights. In a hastily written and partially improvised speech that would one day be counted among his best, the president promised that his administration would do everything it could to end segregation. He pushed Congress to “enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities open to the public.”

  Integration, however, is not just a matter of doing the right thing. JFK’s commitment has far-reaching ramifications. For instance, some Americans think that it is Communists who are supporting the civil rights movement. The last thing Kennedy wants is to be branded a Communist, even though he knows that many in the South think he is.

  And there is another painful truth: Unlike the Cuban missile crisis or even the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the civil rights situation is a problem over which John Kennedy has little direct control. Martin Luther King Jr. is on the front line in this battle. It is King who is in command—and both men know it.

  On June 22, 1963, civil rights leaders meet with Vice President Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the White House. Martin Luther King Jr. is to the left of Kennedy. [JFK Presidential Library and Museum]

  These two politically savvy leaders share a goal. The president warns King to be careful: “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too.”

  Martin Luther King Jr. has five more years to live.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy has precisely five months.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SUMMER 1963

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  LEE HARVEY OSWALD HAS A PASSION in the summer of 1963: reading.

  After he shot at Walker and developed an interest in Nixon, Marina decided that they should leave Dallas for New Orleans. Oswald spends the month of June working as a maintenance man for the Reily Coffee Company there. His employers are not thrilled with his job performance, complaining that he spends too many of his working hours reading gun magazines.

  Marina 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 Marina, who is again pregnant, 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 time off trying to make wine from blackberries, barely clinging to employment, and treating his family like a nuisance.

  Reading fuels Oswald’s rage. He devours several books a week. The topics range in subject matter from a Chairman Mao biography to James Bond novels. Then, during the first weeks of summer 1963, Oswald chooses to read about a subject he’s never before explored: John F. Kennedy.

  Kennedy said that this was his favorite book about himself. After the assassination, Manchester wrote an in-depth description of Kennedy’s last days. [Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company]

  In fact, Lee Harvey is so enchanted by William Manchester’s bestseller Portrait of a President that after returning it to the New Orleans Public Library, he checks out Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

  The collection of essays, which won John Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, is about the lives and actions of eight great men. Lee Harvey Oswald reads JFK’s carefully chosen words and is inspired to hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage.

  Profiles in Courage was published in 1957 when Kennedy was a senator. Kennedy writes about eight senators who acted bravely and honestly in hard situations. [© Cardinal Publishers Group]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AUGUST 28, 1963

  Washington, D.C. Afternoon

  “FIVE SCORE YEARS AGO, A GREAT AMERICAN, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamatio
n,” begins Martin Luther King Jr.

  The huge statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial is right behind King. It has been one hundred years since Lincoln freed the slaves, and now King is telling a crowd of hundreds of thousands that black Americans are still not free.

  He talks about poverty and the fact that America separates black from white.

  Many in the crowd have traveled hundreds of miles to be here today. They are black, and they are white. The day has been long, filled with hours of speeches.

  But Martin Luther King Jr. is the man they’ve waited to hear. And the fatigue and the heat and the claustrophobia are all forgotten as these 250,000 people strain to hear his every word. They have come for the cause of civil rights, but they have also come to hear the great orator shape this day for them. The audience know in their hearts that King will rally them to greatness.

  “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Martin Luther King Jr. preaches.

  And then, for the first time, he belts out the phrase that will come to define this day forever.

  “I have a dream!” King proclaims.

  And then he tells them about that dream. King describes an earthly paradise where blacks and whites are not divided. He dreams that even a hostile Southern state like Mississippi will know such wonders.

  He is putting into words the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement. And for the people in the crowd to hear it stated so powerfully and clearly has them beside themselves with emotion and pride. Black and white alike, they hang on every word of King’s 16-minute speech.

  By the time King winds up for the finish, he is shouting into the microphone. The image of Lincoln gazing over his shoulder is profoundly moving as King calls upon the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is clear to all who stand out on the Mall that King plans to finish what Lincoln began so long ago. The two men—divided by a century of racial injustice—are forever linked in history from this day forward.

  Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd of marchers on August 28, 1963. [© Associated Press]

  “Free at last, free at last,” he quotes from a spiritual, “thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

  The crowd on the Mall erupts in applause.

  * * *

  In the White House, John Kennedy watches King’s speech on television with Bobby and their brother Teddy, who was elected to John’s former Senate seat for Massachusetts in 1962.

  President Kennedy meets with the organizers of the March on Washington in the Oval Office after Martin Luther King Jr. (third from the left) gave his speech. [© Associated Press]

  The attorney general is a major advocate for the civil rights movement. Since King announced the March on Washington three months ago, Bobby has become its behind-the-scenes organizer. Working closely with his staff at the Justice Department, Bobby has quietly guided the march into a shape that can be easily controlled. He made sure that the Lincoln Memorial was the site of King’s speech, because it is bordered on one side by the Potomac River and on the other by the Tidal Basin. This would make crowd control smoother in case of riots and also keep marchers away from the Capitol Building and the White House.

  The president and his brothers watch King’s speech with interest, praying that he will deliver on the promise of this great march on Washington.

  One hour later, an exultant Martin Luther King Jr. meets with John Kennedy in the Oval Office. There are 11 other people in attendance, so this visit is not a summit meeting between the president of the United States and the most powerful man in the civil rights movement. But Kennedy makes sure King knows he’s been paying attention to the day’s events.

  “I have a dream,” he says to King, adding a nod of the head to show approval.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1963

  Birmingham, Alabama

  BUT THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON does not change the ongoing racial battle in the American South. Less than three weeks after America listened to Martin Luther King Jr. dream about black boys and girls in Alabama joining hands with white boys and girls, 26 black children are led into the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for Sunday morning services. They are due to hear a children’s sermon on “The Love That Forgives.”

  The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is the same congregation that launched the Children’s Crusade on Birmingham in May 1963. It stands just across from the park where Bull Connor’s police dogs bit into the flesh of innocent black teenagers and elementary school students. The church has earned a special level of hatred from the white supremacist groups that still battle to block the integration of Birmingham.

  The children attending church this Sunday morning cannot possibly know that four members of the Ku Klux Klan have planted a box of dynamite near the basement. The force of the explosion that shatters the spiritual calm of the church service at 10:22 A.M. is so great that it doesn’t just destroy the basement, but also blows out the back wall of the church and destroys every stained-glass window in the building but one. That lone surviving window portrays an image of Jesus; all but the face of the figure remains intact.

  The victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing (clockwise from top left): Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14; and Addie Mae Collins, 14. [© Associated Press]

  The window is symbolic in a sense, because most of the children in the basement this Sunday morning survive the horrific tragedy. However, four of them—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair—do not.

  Their dream has come to an end.

  This stained-glass window was partially intact after the bombing that killed four children and injured twenty-three others. [LOC, DIG-highsm-05062]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1963

  Billings, Montana Late afternoon

  EVEN IN THE MIDST OF TRAGEDY, Kennedy must campaign. He stands in the rodeo ring at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, addressing an overflowing crowd. Billings, Montana, has a population of just 53,000, and it appears as if every single citizen has come out to cheer the president. A marching band adds to the pageantry.

  It seems that JFK might just win Montana if the election were held tomorrow. And success in the West is a vital part of Kennedy’s reelection strategy. A win in Texas, for example, would almost guarantee his victory in 1964.

  And so Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell has selected November 21 and 22 as the likely dates of Kennedy’s eagerly anticipated Texas fund-raising trip.

  The president envisions a grand tour of the state, with stops in five major cities: San Antonio, Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Texas governor John Connally, a conservative Democrat who has been maintaining a discreet political distance from the president, is quietly in favor of a less ambitious itinerary. Dallas, for instance, is not Kennedy territory.

  JFK surrounded by Secret Service personnel deep in a crowd in Billings, Montana, in September 1963. [JFK Presidential Library and Museum]

  The president will discuss this issue, along with other details of the trip, with John Connally next week at the White House. One statistic about the Texas trip is most glaring of all: More than 62 percent of Dallas voters did not vote for John Kennedy in 1960.

  But JFK loves a challenge. If Billings, Montana, can be won over, then why not Dallas—the “Big D”?

  Kenny O’Donnell (right) often accompanied the president on official trips. Here he and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, visit a military base in North Carolina. [JFK Presidential Library and Museum]

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1963

  Texas and Mexico City

  WHILE PRESIDENT KENNEDY IS SPEAKING in Montana, Lee Harvey Oswald is already on his way to Texas—and beyond. He is on a bus bound for Houston. From there, he will change buses and go south to Mexico City.

  Oswal
d is traveling like a man who is never coming back. He has no home, because he has just abandoned his squalid New Orleans apartment. When the landlady came around demanding the $17 he owed in back rent, Oswald put her off with a lie and later sneaked out in the dead of night.

  The sum of Oswald’s worldly possessions is now divided among his wallet and the two cloth suitcases stowed in the bus’s luggage bay.

  The application Lee Harvey Oswald filled out in Mexico asking for a visa to go to Cuba. [Charles Tasnadi/AP]

  As for a family, Oswald no longer has one. Two days ago he sent the very pregnant Marina and 19-month-old June to live with Marina’s Quaker friend Ruth Paine, outside Dallas. George de Mohrenschildt had once again intervened to help the Oswalds. He introduced them to Ruth Paine.

  Oswald distributing flyers in New Orleans. [© Corbis]

  Ruth Paine speaks a smattering of Russian, which helps to make Marina feel more at home. Marina has stored all the family possessions in Paine’s garage. Among them is a green-and-brown rolled blanket in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle is concealed. Ruth Paine, being a peace-loving Quaker, would never allow the gun in her garage, but she has no idea it’s there.

  Oswald has hatched a clever new scheme—one that doesn’t involve Marina. He dreams of living in the palm-tree-fringed workers’ paradise of Cuba. But it’s impossible to get a Cuban travel visa in the United States because the United States and Cuba have severed diplomatic relations. So Oswald is taking the bus to Mexico City in order to apply at the Cuban embassy there.

  Lee Harvey Oswald never fits in, no matter where he goes. He is constantly searching for a place where he can belong, a place that will allow him to be the great man he so longs to be. Oswald believes that Cuba is such a place. And in his mind he has done plenty to impress the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. Oswald spent time in New Orleans passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a group that wants the United States to end its economic boycott of Cuba. He feels that should prove his loyalty to communism.