Martin Luther King had not expected the President’s grip to be so dry or firm, nor had he anticipated the steely resolve in the man’s green eyes. Although he enjoyed increasingly warm and frank relations with the President’s younger brother, Jack Kennedy had remained a closed book to his guest. The Kennedy brothers had come late to the ‘party’ in addressing the civil rights agenda. Likewise, they had been slow to disentangle themselves from the nonsensical ‘un-American activities’ inquisitions of the previous decade. Worse, when he ran for the White House JFK had been at pains not to risk completely alienating the segregationist South Democrat wing of the broad, unholy church that was the modern Democratic Party. The Baptist preacher from Atlanta would have held this against his President had he not already been a man well versed in the realities of practical, everyday politics. If Kennedy had lost all of the South to Richard Nixon in November 1960 he would never have won the White House; and nobody in Georgia or anywhere else in the South imagined a Nixon Presidency would have been good news for people of color. This being the case for the moment he would give Jack Kennedy the benefit of the doubt; in politics expediency, not necessity was the mother of invention.
“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.”