“California was peaceful, Mr Vice President,” Marshall smiled, shaking his host’s hand. “Governor Brown would not be drawn on any of the major issues I raised with him.” He shrugged. “But then neither of us expected a great deal from our meeting. I hadn’t been out to the West Coast since before the war,” he went on, adding: “it was instructive.”
Johnson and his wife nodded, saying nothing.
Marshall sighed.
“I was honored to attend a service at which the NAACP ‘blessed’ those among its number who were preparing to leave to join the March on Philadelphia.”
Lyndon Johnson took this as his cue to lead his guest into the privacy of his lair to continue the conversation. The plan was for Marshall to stay over at the ranch that evening and to travel back to Philadelphia on the Air Force Boeing 707 carrying LBJ’s retinue north. They would have plenty of time to talk, swap gossip and to ‘clear the air’ but both men were eager to ascertain if they were still of the same mind over the things which really mattered to them.
Marshall’s work for the NAACP had been complicated rather than curtailed by his appointment in 1961 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, responsible for hearing cases in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the District of Connecticut, all four Districts of New York and in the District of Vermont.
The appointment ought to have been the beginning, not the end of the Kennedy Administration’s campaign to confront head on the unwritten color bar that still blighted the US legal system. Over the years Marshall had prevailed in all but three of the thirty or so cases he had brought before the Supreme Court but alone he could achieve only so much.
“Hoover’s people tell me Philadelphia will be a powder key by the time Dr King’s people march up to the steps of City Hall,” Johnson said, cutting to the chase.
Very few people knew that Thurgood Marshall — until Martin Luther King junior’s explosion onto the national stage unquestionably the most formidable black lawyer in American history — had been for many years been on friendly terms with the Director of the FBI. That was not to say that they were on the same side of the Civil Rights debate, far from it and the two men had clashed — privately and often angrily since the October War — over the FBI’s ongoing persecution of the moderate elements of the Dr King’s organization.
However, the two men remained on good terms because Marshall was wary, a little afraid of the extremists who had attached themselves to King’s flag and had viewed King’s leadership of the Civil Rights movement as reckless right up until the Bedford Pine Park atrocity.
“Director Hoover sees threats beneath every stone,” Marshall pronounced sternly. “The Atlanta murderers are still out there. There are dark forces at work. It worries him that all the leading figures in the Civil Rights movement, the Administration and Congress, not to mention many leading citizens, military officers, judicial figures and leaders of our society will all be in one place at one time.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the sooner you are back in Philadelphia the better,” Marshall grinned, allowing his mask of severity to slip.
The two men had sat down.
Johnson nodded thoughtfully.
“I won’t stand against the President,” he said, sucking his teeth. “I’m coming back but I’m not jumping ship. We got ourselves into this mess and it’s our duty to see this thing through.”
Thurgood Marshall contemplated this for several seconds.
“Governor Brown will lose the Party in California if he backs the President at Atlantic City. Without his delegates the President cannot carry the convention.”
“Did Pat Brown actually say that?”
“As good as.”
The Vice President was silent.
“If the California Democrats were ever in the same party as people east of the Mississippi they aren’t any more,” Marshall declared. “The West Coast Governors are actually pursuing the civil rights agenda the Administration talked about enacting in 1961. California, and maybe Oregon, not so much Washington State because of all the war damage, are already different countries to the rest of America. The people out there are more worried about what’s going on in the Midwest than they are about anything coming out of Philadelphia.”
Lyndon Johnson was aware the other man’s gaze had settled on his face.
“What would you do if you were President?” Marshall asked.
The Texan grunted, expelling a terse guffaw.
“That’s the thing,” he confessed. “I haven’t a goddammed idea what I’d do if JFK stepped aside, or God forbid something bad happened to him. And you know what?”
His stare was agate hard, unrelenting.
“Any man who says he knows what he’d do if he was President now is a goddam liar!”
Chapter 38
Dwight Christie had half-expected to be beaten up and dragged insensible into a bandit hideaway in the woods. Actually, he was walked through the trees along the lake shore for some minutes and then inland into a clearing, where a group of about a dozen military-style green-grey tents were laid out on a square grid around a central mess awning. One or two ragged men in leathers and grubby fatigues looked up when Christie was led past the central area, mostly there were just women, children, and teenage boys hanging around or working. Nobody, absolutely nobody met Christie’s eye.
“Isaac says he knows this guy?” This from the man of the former special agent’s own age as he pushed Christie ahead of him into a tent externally no different from any of the others.
Christie’s eye began to adjust to the darkness.
“Was he carrying?” Demanded the familiar voice; the question was uttered lowly from within the gloomy interior as the flap fell back into place blocking out most of the watery morning sunshine.
“No.”
Galen Cheney had been lying, fully clothed on a camp bed.
His hair had grown longer and his face was gaunt, aged.
Painfully, he swung his legs over the side of the cot, planted them on the ground and stood up. He swayed, looming over the two newcomers.
“For what it’s worth I got the women away from the Texas City compound before the Feds got there,” Christie said. “In case you were wondering, Mikey didn’t make it.”
It was literally a life or death gamble lying to Cheney but one he had thought about long and hard. The FBI had kept everything about the hunt for the Atlanta killers secret; so secret it had made hunting Cheney and his son Isaac down virtually impossible. That was why they had had to do business with him. They had no way into Galen Cheney’s mind, no way to get close to him unless they got lucky, and even in the unlikely event they eventually caught up with him no way of ensuring that the Agency dodged the blame for not catching him sooner. That was why they had offered Christie a deal; whichever way this thing turned out he would be the fall guy.
He regretted putting Billy Murdoch in hospital but it was not as if he had had much choice in the matter. Back in Albuquerque he was resigned to his fate when he reckoned all he had to look forward to was a jail time, a Kangaroo court and the electric chair but he was not about to be J. Edgar Hoover’s patsy!
“Mikey stayed inside the compound and set off the sump,” the gasoline-dynamite booby trap the Cheneys had planted at the heart of their Texas City compound, he explained “so I could get the women away.”
Big lies were the best, simplicity was king.