The word came back from Birmingham; King was going full speed ahead with the campaign. The administration had asked him not to press now, with Police Commissioner Bull Connor still in office, but King had protested that the movement had a momentum of its own, it could not be stopped.
He put down the phone and sighed. “That damn preacher is going to fuck me out of a second term,” he said, to the air.
There was no rancor in the words that was not totally personal. For the son of a rich man, he had grown up peculiarly free from the casual bigotry of the upper classes. He had moved through Riverdale and Palm Beach and Hyannis Port without picking up any of the nasty, small burrs of prejudice that clung to most such people. Perhaps it was the curiosity he had inherited from his mother, for he had traveled more than most young Americans and met all sorts of people, high and low, and as long as they didn’t bore him, he did not judge them. The war was part of it; all sorts of men were thrown together by chance, and you might owe your life to someone with a very different pedigree.
However it happened, he had come to an ease with people that was genuine. At his inauguration, as he waltzed gracefully and naturally with the wives of Negro officials, the word spread through the Negro community like an electric current. Eisenhower, though he had sent the troops to Little Rock, had kept a distance from people of a darker shade. Adlai Stevenson, the great liberal, had asked a friend to telephone Coretta Scott King when Martin was in jail, but he did not speak to her, on the excuse that they had not been formally introduced. (A young white civil rights worker named Harris Wofford was convinced that it was really Stevenson’s discomfort with Negroes, which he had observed on more than one occasion. He switched his allegiance to Kennedy.)
His instincts, when he acted too fast to be tempered by caution — came from a basic decency and sense of fair play. During the campaign, his staff bickered loud and long over whether the candidate should telephone Mrs. King when her husband was jailed on a trumped-up charge in Georgia. How would it play in the South? But when his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver walked into his hotel room and said he ought to make a call, the candidate, weary from a long day’s campaigning, said, “What the hell, that’s the decent thing to do.” The phone call may have won him the election.
His brother Bobby, whose emotions lay much closer to the surface, blew his stack and screamed that Shriver and his allies could have wrecked the whole campaign. But then, a few days later, when Bobby learned that King was going to get five months on a chain gain for driving with an out-of-state license, and was denied bail, he ignored good form and legal ethics to call the judge personally and ream his ass, saying that any decent American judge would have King out on bail by sundown. He was.
The man in the Oval Office sat back in his chair and thought about race, something he did not like to do. What the hell more did King want, anyhow? He had used his Justice Department as a battering ram to force open Ole Miss, to protect the Freedom Riders, to enforce voting rights. Didn’t that man understand he had a whole world to contend with? An entire legislative package — education, housing, highways, defense — to get through Congress? A network of southern senators and congressmen could be coiled into an iron mesh that would keep anything from getting through. If you moved slowly enough, carefully enough, stroked and flattered and favored, you could get past them. But King was not going to let him do it.
Damn.
He’d had no background and no particular interest in matters of race when he came to public life. Harry Belafonte had briefed him, during the campaign, and found him untutored and unemotional on the matter, but willing to learn. Belafonte had told him it was King, not Jackie Robinson or any of the other Negro celebrities, who was the key to the hearts of the colored people; Belafonte said that civil rights would become to them a sacred crusade, and it was Martin who was at its center.
The preacher’s father — after the phone call — came out for Kennedy, “despite his Catholicism.” The candidate learned of the statement as he was walking towards the campaign plane, carrying three-year-old Caroline in his arms.
“That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it?” he mused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” Then he grinned. “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”
When he had met with Belafonte, he knew Martin Luther King only as a preacher who had led a bus boycott in Montgomery, a minor figure on the political scene. How odd, he thought, that two men from such different places and such different temperaments should have been cast in leading roles in the ever-fascinating theater of politics.
The two had met, on occasion, but they were always somewhat ill at ease with one another. Perhaps it was because each man saw in the other something missing in himself. For Martin Luther King, conscience called him to huge and noble deeds, into the lions’ den. Yet there was a side of him that loved the celebrity status those deeds brought with them. He railed against the “Cadillac preachers” who neglected the needs of their people, but he also loved riding in Rockefeller’s private plane and dining with the literati on Martha’s Vineyard and being called personally by Lawrence Spivak of Meet the Press. He envied the ease with which John Kennedy moved in that glittering world, envied his seeming freedom from the tortured conscience that would let the preacher accept the amenities but have difficulty enjoying them. Beyond that glittering world lay a dark path to Golgotha, and he would go down the path if that was to be his destiny.
The man in the Oval Office wanted no truck with Golgotha, and had no intentions of going there. He found the preacher’s talk of noble suffering pretentious cant; he’d had a taste of suffering and wanted no more. King’s intensity, his focus on the moral dimensions of every situation, struck him as narrow and stifling. He guessed that Martin couldn’t take a piss without pondering its meaning. He certainly couldn’t have escaped agonizing about the girls in the motel rooms.
The Irish played politics with zest; it was, after all, a sport. There was little of the gamesman in the tortured preacher, he thought. And yet. Yet … He had a sense that the preacher brought out the best in him, arranging the choices in such stark terms of good and evil that he was forced to throw caution to the wind and side with the good. He did well when backed into corners. But he wanted to reach for the stars, and King was always making him stare at the ugliness at his feet. There was something in Martin Luther King that he lacked; he did not understand it, exactly, but he knew it without giving voice to it. Bobby had it. His father had it, too, in a very different way. He thought that if the preacher had not been so schooled in the ways of God, he would have made a great Irish pol.
He got up, walked to the window and looked out. It was dusk, his favorite time, and the ghosts were beginning to stir. He had the strange sensation that he and the preacher would be a part of those stirrings one day, that the two of them were locked together in some strange dance that would probably last as long as they lived. Where it would lead, he had no idea. He only knew the music would not stop.