Miranda had nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Yes, they were nice people; the trouble was she had not realized it until then.
Returning to the matter at hand she waved the mimeographed sheet listing places and dates.
Okay, okay, this is not working!
“Would everybody please be quiet?” She asked pleasantly.
No, that did not work either.
“WOULD YOU ALL BE QUIET FOR A MOMENT PLEASE?”
Shouting worked better.
Miranda seized the moment.
“I am here to publicise the scheduled meetings of the California Civil Rights Forum. While I am on State property I am not authorized to, nor will I discuss personal matters.”
She smiled the smile she had seen her mother smile a thousand times when she came to conclusion that her interlocutor was an imbecile, or a gossip columnist. Miranda knew that she was not her mother. Her mother was an actress of the old school, an accomplished professional artiste and she was just starting out. Nevertheless, she smiled that smile and behind it she carried on thinking her thoughts.
Dwayne was going back to Georgia tomorrow for at least a fortnight. He wanted to talk to his people in Atlanta, to report back. He hoped to have a few minutes with Dr King.
‘You will come back?’ Miranda had checked once she got used to the idea that he was not going to be around for the next couple of weeks.
‘I promise.’
She had been a mess ever since and that was not like her. She had not slept last night and even while she was subjecting herself to the pointless farrago of this alleged ‘press call’ she was restless and distracted.
It was not as if she and the big guy were any more than friends.
He was not her boyfriend and she certainly was not his girlfriend, but…
Not knowing what exactly they were to each other made it doubly worse and whichever way she tried to rationalise her feelings, every time her thoughts completed another unresolved loop she felt just as big a mess as before.
Why did everything always have to be so complicated?
Chapter 56
“I tell you honestly and directly, Dr King,” Jack Kennedy said with regret, “that at this time the civil rights of colored people are not, and cannot be the primary concern of my Administration. Please do not take this to mean that in any way I denigrate, you or your profoundly held beliefs and convictions, or personally think any less of a man or a woman because of the color of their skin. Like you I am a God-fearing man, I wrestle with my conscience every day of my life. I know that all men and women are created equal in the sight of God and have an inalienable right to be treated as equals in this land and in every land upon the face of this planet. But putting right centuries of wrongs is not the first priority of my Administration.”
The handsome black man seated across the coffee table from the most powerful man in the World pursed his lips, nodded his head almost imperceptibly.
No, of all the things he had imagined his President was going to say to his face — unambiguously and categorically — he had not expected this.
“Then what am I doing here, sir?” He inquired gruffly, for the moment restraining his bubbling inner turmoil and rising anger.
“I wanted to meet you man to man and to tell you,” Jack Kennedy shrugged and grimaced wanly, “man to man about the situation your country finds itself in. And then, when we are both standing in the middle of the same ball park I will talk to you about what I can do to help your movement, and what I am prepared to promise you publicly. And before you ask the obvious question; no, I have not yet finally decided whether I will run for re-election this fall. In some ways it may be the case that I can be of greater service to you this year if I stand aside in November, at least in the short term. Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that one, in fact between you and I, Dr King, there are a lot of things I don’t know the answer to. Like, for example, whether Chief Justice Warren will have me impeached once I have appeared before his Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War.”
Martin Luther King suspected for a split second that the other man was joking; a second look into his green eyes found not mirth, only resignation.
“So, will you hear me out?” Jack Kennedy asked softly.
The face and voice of the African-American Civil Rights Movement inclined his handsome head a fraction to the right, his expression momentarily quizzical.
“You are my President, sir. Why ever would I not hear you out?”
There was no submission in this; it was a statement of fact and a declaration of everything Martin Luther King tried to stand for. He had never asked his white opponents for anything but the justice of dealing with him and his people with the decency, respect and consideration that they professed in their dealings with each other.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was his President as much as he was the most violently bigoted Klansman’s President. Even if one did not respect the man — and King did respect the man despite his rumoured shortcomings and the disaster of the October War — all Americans should honour and respect the office of the President of the United States.
The President, the older of the two men by eleven years in age but past two decades in appearance, worn down as he was by the intolerable, unimaginable horrors of the last year, saw this in Martin Luther King’s questing brown eyes.
“Until last fall we,” he guffawed a sardonically deprecatory half-laugh, “I believed that at some level what had happened in October sixty-two might be mitigated by the notion that World War had finally been banished from the face of the Earth. In retrospect the ‘peace dividend’ was premature; and future generations of historians will no doubt pillory me for my hubris and naivety. But then after what we all went through on the day and the night of the October War, what man would not want to honestly believe that the killing was over?”
Martin Luther King let this rhetorical question go unremarked.
“I now know that the ‘peace dividend’ was a terrible mistake,” the President continued, “far from kick-starting the reconstruction of our bombed cities and re-gearing our national economy for the peaceful, better future to which we all so desperately aspire it has brought out the worst in us, divided us and compounded the post-war schism between the Administration and large sections of the House of Representatives. In promulgating the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War it is my hope that by making myself accountable to the House and to the American People in the most public and open way possible, that a beginning can be made in the great work of safeguarding the unity of the Union.”
“The Lord forgives all sinners who repent, Mr President.”
“Ah,” Jack Kennedy sighed, “God in his infinite mercy may forgive me for my trespasses but I never will, Dr King.”
The younger man wondered if his President had ever confessed this to another living soul; he felt unaccountably humble. He remained silent for this was a time for listening.
Jack Kennedy’s lips flinched into a fleeting smile.
“Last fall we believed that we had so thoroughly scourged the lands of our foes that no enemy could possibly emerge again in our lifetimes. Because of this we determined to beat our swords into ploughshares. Members of the Administration counselled me to go slowly but frankly, I took the view that it was better to get the pain over and done with as soon as possible.” He hesitated, hardly crediting the magnitude of his folly. “Shortly before the Battle of Washington I was made aware of the possibility that elements of the United States military had been suborned by traitors within the Pentagon and the State Department. The TV, radio and newspaper reports you will have read concerning apparent attacks by US aircraft of British warships and bases in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were but the tip of a heinous conspiracy designed to provoke a war with the British and to topple the Administration. For reasons of national security I cannot describe to you the full particulars of what was a monstrous plot against the very fabric of the Union, suffice to say that we came within hours of an all out war with the British. So close that I suspect the verdict of history will be that but for the simultaneous outbreak of what the FBI, the Secret Service and the National Security Council now jointly describe as the ‘uprising of the Southern Resistance Militias’ we and the British would have gone to war with frankly, incalculable results too dreadful to contemplate.!