Miranda raised her hands to quiet the crowd.
“But that is not why I am here tonight… ”
She waited as if she perfectly, intuitively understood how the mood of the gathering would rise and fall, like waves in a Pacific storm breaking on the rocky coast of the Golden Gate.
“The man I loved is dead. He died standing between Doctor Martin Luther King — the greatest living American of our time — and the cowardly assassin’s bullets… ”
People were on their feet around Caroline.
Nathan took her hand and they stood up.
“But we are not here,” Miranda continued, “to talk about what is past. We cannot change the past. The dead are dead, lost to us other than in our memories and our dreams. We are here tonight to talk about and to look to the future. A better future for us, our brothers and sisters of color, and our children and their children’s children… ”
The whole building was rocking with the foot stamping.
Miranda Sullivan waited patiently.
“Terry Francois has asked me to assist in his work in the Bay Area in the coming days but at the end of the month I will be boarding a plane for Philadelphia to march with Dr King… ”
The tumult took even longer to subside now.
“I know that those of you who cannot come to Philadelphia will also be marching with Dr King in spirit… ”
Caroline had watched football crowds reduced to a state of ecstatic communal intoxication by the nervous exhaustion and elation of the occasion. She had never imagined an American audience could be so helpless in any speaker’s hands.
“If I may I will leave you with a parting thought. A question framed by Dr King as he lay desperately ill in hospital in Atlanta in February.” Miranda paused, her gaze sweeping around the auditorium. “Having saved so many of his children from the apocalypse of October nineteen sixty-two what right thinking man can any longer deny the hand of a merciful God in human affairs?”
She waited, looking around the auditorium.
“I leave you the words of Dr King,” she went on, her voice that of a humble supplicant. “Forgive those who have trespassed against me. Do not surrender to the darkness of vengefulness but walk with me down the brightly lit road that the Lord has prepared for us all… ”
Chapter 31
Claude Betancourt had known that the Vice President would view his visit with the understandable caution of a man putting his hand into a lucky dip who has just heard the angry rattle of a western diamondback rattlesnake. That was why he had asked Gretchen to make the first — necessarily oblique — ‘peace feeler’ towards the wily Texan, and gone to such extraordinary lengths to convince everybody in Philadelphia that he was spending the weekend at McDermott’s Open recuperating from a mild case of heat stroke.
Not that the weather down in Texas was any more conducive to clear, rational thinking than the heat wave currently engulfing the temporary capital. Morning temperatures had soared to the high nineties Fahrenheit and stubbornly stuck around a hundred degrees most afternoons the last week; at night the heat had hardly abated. Fortuitously, he had spent a small fortune ensuring the Cherry Hill mansion he had gifted to his ungrateful daughter and son-in-law was fully air-conditioned; so while others fled to the Jersey Coast or to their country hideaways to escape the enervating heat and stifling humidity of the city, nobody would have thought twice about the widely circulated news that ‘that Machiavellian old bastard Betancourt’ had retreated under Gretchen’s roof. Not many people knew that the newlyweds had already moved out; but the numerous armed guards around McDermott’s Open were amply sufficient to convince the Philadelphia press pack that he was in residence.
“There will be a lot of trouble with my people in the South,” Lyndon Baines Johnson decided, clunking his tumble of Bourbon on the low table between the two men. A warm breeze blew across the veranda from the direction of the Pedernales River, invisible beyond the trees to the north. “Of course we should be behind the civil rights thing,” he went on, irritably, “but we have to give them old boys something even if they’re kicking our asses up and down the fucking Mississippi. That’s just politics! But those boys in New England think its personal!”
Those boys happened to be the President of the United States and his little brother, the Attorney General and therein lay the problem.
“Jeez,” LBJ complained. “Back before that goddammed Bedford Pine Park thing happened we had a handle on this shit. All of it! Jesus! We had a plan for Chicago and we’d agreed among ourselves to give the Brits enough support for them to hold the line in Europe and the Mediterranean without us having to send GIs overseas. Honest to God, for a month or two I believed that Bill Fulbright was a fucking magician. That was a Hell of a deal he cut. We send some ships to the Mediterranean and the Brits fight all the shitty little wars that somebody has to fight if the whole fucking World isn’t going to go to shit! If we’d had the courage to run on that platform we’d have been twenty points ahead of Goldwater, or Rockefeller, or Cabot Lodge, or Nixon or whoever the Republicans put up against us by now. As for that bastard Wallace in Alabama, come November he’d have been what he’s always been, a one issue loser!”
Claude Betancourt did not think that Jack Kennedy’s road back to the White House was ever going to be, or could ever have been, that straightforward but the Vice President’s judgment was essentially sound; back in February the Administration had somehow, against all odds, regained a semblance of control over events. At the time the Bedford Pine Park atrocity had seemed like a hump in the road, not an impassable roadblock guarded by M-60 tanks.
Where it had all gone wrong was in the Administration’s paralysis in the aftermath of the invasion of Iran and Iraq by an apparently resurgent — demonstrably not annihilated — Soviet Union at the time of the Battle of Malta in early April; which, in turn had led to a disastrous clash of personalities within the Democratic hierarchy hamstringing the military’s plans to crush the Chicago rebellion in the spring. It was hard to imagine any two events short of a second global nuclear war which could have so comprehensively eradicated what little remained of the credibility of the Kennedy Administration.
If the President had emerged a little more regularly from his Hyannis Port enclave or any of the other bunkers he lived in between his increasingly infrequent travels he might actually have heard, from the lips of real people, in what unimaginably low esteem he was now held by the majority of Americans. But of course, these days he only talked to people who agreed with him which was probably why he honestly believed he was being — in some shrewd way that was beyond the comprehension of most observers — politically adroit in publicly kicking the Brits when they were down after the Cape Cod Summit. His poll ratings had spiked a few points higher for about a week before falling like a stone.
Nobody liked a bully who stomped on an apparently beaten foe.
America First had become a poison which had fatally corroded the Administration from within. In embracing it so violently Jack Kennedy, having always previously attempted to claim the moral high ground, had got onto his knees into an unwinnable mud-wrestle with half-a-dozen no holds barred street fighters. Scenting the blood in the water the Republicans were belatedly showing signs of an unstoppable revival. The emergence of a likely Rockefeller-Nixon ticket — it was anybody’s guess whose name would actually be on the top of that ticket — had lifted the GOP’s morale at precisely the moment Democrat spirits were in near terminal decline.