Edge of Eternity (58 page)

It was meant well, Maria knew, but she felt it was ill judged. King's dream came from the depths of vicious repression. Jack Kennedy had been born into America's privileged elite, powerful and rich: how could he claim to have a dream of freedom and equality? Dr. King obviously felt this too, for he looked embarrassed and changed the subject. Later, in bed, the president would ask Maria where he had taken a wrong step, she knew; and she would have to find a loving and reassuring way to explain it to him.

King and the other civil rights leaders had not eaten since breakfast. When the president realized this, he ordered coffee and sandwiches for them from the White House kitchen.

Maria got them all to line up for a formal photograph, then the discussion began.

King and the others were riding a wave of elation. After today's demonstration, they told the president, the civil rights bill could be toughened up. There should be a new section banning racial discrimination in employment. Young black men were dropping out of school at an alarming rate, seeing no future.

President Kennedy suggested that Negroes should copy the Jews, who valued education and made their kids study. Maria came from a Negro family who did exactly that, and she agreed with him. If black kids dropped out of school, was that the government's problem? But she also saw how cleverly Kennedy had shifted the discussion away from the real issue, which was millions of jobs that were reserved for whites only.

They asked Kennedy to lead the crusade for civil rights. Maria knew that he was thinking something he could not say: that if he became too strongly identified with the Negro cause, then all the white people would vote Republican.

The shrewd Walter Reuther offered different advice. Identify the businessmen behind the Republican party and pick them off in small groups, he said. Tell them that if they don't cooperate, their profits will suffer. Maria knew this as the Lyndon Johnson approach, a combination of cajolery and threats. The advice went over the president's head: it just was not his style.

Kennedy went through the voting intentions of congressmen and senators, ticking off on his fingers those likely to oppose the civil rights bill. It was a dismal register of prejudice, apathy, and timidity. He was going to have trouble passing even a watered-down version of the bill, he made clear; anything tougher was doomed.

Gloom seemed to fall on Maria like a funeral shawl. She felt tired, depressed, and pessimistic. Her head ached and she wanted to go home.

The meeting lasted more than an hour. By the time it finished, all the euphoria had evaporated. The civil rights leaders filed out, their faces showing disenchantment and frustration. It was all very well for King to have a dream, but it seemed the American people did not share it.

Maria could hardly believe it but, despite all that had happened today, it seemed the great cause of equality and freedom was no farther forward.

J
asper Murray felt confident he would get the post of editor of
St. Julian's News
. With his application he had sent in a clipping of his article in the
Daily Echo
about Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech. Everyone said it was a great piece. He had been paid twenty-five pounds, less than he had got for the interview with Evie: politics was not as lucrative as celebrity scandal.

“Toby Jenkins has never had a paragraph published anywhere outside the student press,” Jasper told Daisy Williams, sitting in the kitchen in Great Peter Street.

“Is he your only rival?” she asked.

“As far as I know, yes.”

“When will you hear the decision?”

Jasper looked at his watch, although he knew the time. “The committee is meeting now. They'll put up a notice outside Lord Jane's office when they break for lunch at twelve thirty. My friend Pete Donegan is there. He'll be my deputy editor. He's going to phone me immediately.”

“Why do you want the post so badly?”

Because I know how bloody good I am, Jasper thought; twice as good as Cakebread and ten times better than Toby Jenkins. I deserve this job. But he did not open his heart to Daisy Williams. He was a little wary of her. She loved his mother, not him. When the interview with Evie had appeared in the
Echo,
and Jasper had pretended to be dismayed, it had seemed to him that Daisy had not been completely deceived. He worried that she saw through him. However, she always treated him kindly, for his mother's sake.

Now he gave her a softened version of the truth. “I can turn
St.
Julian's News
into a better paper. Right now it's like a parish magazine. It tells you what's going on, but it's frightened of conflict and controversy.” He thought of something that would appeal to Daisy's ideals. “For example, St. Julian's College has a board of governors, some of whom have investments in apartheid South Africa. I'd publish that information and ask what such men are doing governing a famous liberal college.”

“Good idea,” Daisy said with relish. “That'll stir them up.”

Walli Franck came into the kitchen. It was midday, but he had evidently just got up: he kept rock-and-roll hours.

Daisy said to him: “Now that Dave's back in school, what are you going to do?”

Walli put instant coffee into a cup. “Practise the guitar,” he said.

Daisy smiled. “If your mother were here, I guess she would ask if you shouldn't try to earn some money.”

“I don't want to earn money. But I must. That's why I have a job.”

Walli's grammar was sometimes so correct that it was hard to understand. Daisy said: “You don't want money, but you do have a job?”

“Washing beer glasses at the Jump Club.”

“Well done!”

The doorbell rang, and a minute later a maid showed Hank Remington into the kitchen. He had classic Irish charm. He was a chirpy redhead with a big smile for everyone. “Hello, Mrs. Williams,” he said. “I've come to take your daughter out to lunch—unless you're available!”

Women enjoyed Hank's flattery. “Hello, Hank,” Daisy said warmly. She turned to the maid and said: “Make sure Evie knows Mr. Remington is here.”

“Is it
Mr.
Remington, now?” said Hank. “Don't give people the idea that I'm respectable—it could ruin my reputation.” He shook hands with Jasper. “Evie showed me your article about Martin Luther King—that was great, well done.” Then he turned to Walli. “Hi, I'm Hank Remington.”

Walli was awestruck, but managed to introduce himself. “I'm Dave's cousin, and I play guitar in Plum Nellie.”

“How was Hamburg?”

“Great, until we got thrown out because Dave was too young.”

“The Kords used to play in Hamburg,” Hank said. “It was great. I was born in Dublin but I grew up on the Reeperbahn, if you know what I mean.”

Jasper found Hank fascinating. He was rich and famous, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, yet he was working hard to be nice to everyone in the room. Did he have an insatiable desire to be liked—and was that the secret of his success?

Evie came in looking great. Her hair had been cut in a short bob that mimicked the Beatles, and she wore a simple Mary Quant A-line dress that showed off her legs. Hank pretended to be bowled over. “Jesus, I'll have to take you somewhere posh, looking like that,” he said. “I was thinking of a Wimpy bar.”

“Wherever we go, it will have to be quick,” Evie said. “I've got an audition at three thirty.”

“What for?”

“A new play called
A Woman's Trial.
It's a courtroom drama.”

Hank was pleased. “You'll be making your stage debut!”

“If I get the part.”

“Oh, you'll get it. Come on, we'd better go, my Mini's parked on a yellow line.”

They went out and Walli returned to his room. Jasper looked at his watch: it was twelve thirty. The editor would be announced any minute now.

Making conversation, he said: “I loved the States.”

“Would you like to live there?” Daisy asked.

“More than anything. And I want to work in television.
St. Julian's News
will be a great first step, but basically newspapers are obsolete. TV news is the thing now.”

“America is my home,” Daisy said musingly, “but I found love in London.”

The phone rang. The editor had been chosen. Was it Jasper, or Toby Jenkins?

Daisy answered. “He's right here,” she said, and handed the receiver to Jasper, whose heart was thudding.

The caller was Pete Donegan. He said: “Valerie Cakebread got it.”

At first Jasper did not understand. “What?” he said. “Who?”

“Valerie Cakebread is the new editor of
St. Julian's News.
Sam Cakebread fixed it for his sister.”

“Valerie?” When Jasper understood he was flabbergasted. “She's never written anything but fashion puffs!”

“And she made the tea at
Vogue
magazine.”

“How could they do this?”

“Beats me.”

“I knew Lord Jane was a prick, but this . . .”

“Shall I come to your place?”

“What for?”

“We should go out and drown our sorrows.”

“Okay.” Jasper hung up the phone.

Daisy said: “Bad news, obviously. I'm sorry.”

Jasper was rocked. “They gave the job to the current editor's sister! I never saw that coming.” He recalled his conversation with Sam and Valerie in the coffee bar of the student union. The treacherous pair, neither had even hinted that Valerie was in the running.

He had been outmaneuvered by someone more guileful than himself, he realized bitterly.

Daisy said: “What a shame.”

It was the British way, Jasper thought resentfully; family connections were more important than talent. His father had fallen victim to the same syndrome, and in consequence was still only a colonel.

“What will you do?” Daisy said.

“Emigrate,” Jasper said. His resolve was now stronger than ever.

“Finish college first,” Daisy said. “Americans value education.”

“I suppose you're right,” Jasper said. But his studies had always come second to his journalism. “I can't work for
St. Julian's News
under Valerie. I gave in gracefully last year, after Sam beat me to the job, but I can't do it again.”

“I agree,” Daisy said. “It makes you look like a second-rater.”

Jasper was struck by a thought. A plan began to form in his mind. He said: “The worst of it is that now there won't be a newspaper to expose such things as the scandal of college governors having investments in South Africa.”

Daisy took the bait. “Maybe someone will start a rival newspaper.”

Jasper pretended to be skeptical. “I doubt it.”

“It's what Dave's grandmother and Walli's grandmother did in 1916. It was called
The Soldier's Wife.
If they could do it . . .”

Jasper put on an innocent face and asked the key question. “Where did they get the money?”

“Maud's family were rich. But it can't cost much to print a couple of thousand copies. Then you pay for the second issue with the income from the first.”

“I got twenty-five pounds from the
Echo
for my piece on Martin Luther King. But I don't think that would be enough . . .”

“I might help.”

Jasper pretended reluctance. “You might never get your money back.”

“Draw up a budget.”

“Jack's on his way over here now. We can make some calls.”

“If you put in your own money, I'll match it.”

“Thank you!” Jasper had no intention of spending his own money. But a budget was like a newspaper gossip column: most of it could be fiction, because no one ever knew the truth. “We could get the first issue together for the beginning of term, if we're quick.”

“You should run that story about South African investments on the front page.”

Jasper's spirits had lifted again. This might even be better. “Yeah . . .
St. Julian's News
will have a bland front page saying ‘Welcome to London,' or something. Ours will be the real newspaper.” He began to feel excited.

“Show me your budget as soon as you can,” Daisy said. “I'm sure we can work something out.”

“Thank you,” said Jasper.

I
n September of 1963 George Jakes bought a car. He could afford it and he liked the idea, even though in Washington it was easy enough to get around on public transport. He preferred foreign cars: he thought they were more stylish. He found a dark-blue five-year-old two-door Mercedes-Benz 220S convertible that had a classy look. On the third Sunday in September he drove to Prince George's County, Maryland, to visit his mother. She would cook him dinner, then they would drive together to Bethel Evangelical Church for the evening service. These days it was not often he had time to visit her, even on a Sunday.

Driving along Suitland Parkway with the top down in the mild September sunshine, he thought about all the questions she would ask him and what answers he would give. First, she would want to know about Verena. “She says she's not good enough for me, Mom,” he would say. “What do you think of that?”

“She's right,” his mother would probably say. Not many girls were good enough for her son, in her opinion.

She would ask how he was getting on with Bobby Kennedy. The truth was that Bobby was a man of extremes. There were people he hated implacably: J. Edgar Hoover was one. That was fine by George: Hoover was contemptible. But Lyndon Johnson was another. George thought it was a pity that Bobby hated Johnson, who could have been a powerful ally. Sadly, they were oil and water. George tried to imagine the big, boisterous vice president hanging out with the ultra-chic Kennedy clan on a boat at Hyannis Port. The image made him smile: Lyndon would be like a rhinoceros in a ballet class.

Bobby liked as hard as he hated, and fortunately George was someone he liked. George was one of a small inner group who were trusted so much that even when they made mistakes it was assumed they were well intentioned and so they were forgiven. What would George say to his mother about Bobby? “He's a smart man who sincerely wants to make America a better country.”

She would want to know why the Kennedy brothers were moving so slowly on civil rights. George would say: “If they push harder there will be a white backlash, and that will have two results. One, we'll lose the civil rights bill in Congress. Two, Jack Kennedy will lose the 1964 presidential election. And if Kennedy loses, who will win? Dick Nixon? Barry Goldwater? It could even be George Wallace, heaven forbid.”

These were his musings as he parked in the driveway of Jacky Jakes's small, pleasant ranch-style house and let himself in at the front door.

All those thoughts fled his mind instantly when he heard the sound of his mother weeping.

He suffered a moment of childish fear. He had not often known his mother to cry: she had always been a tower of strength in the landscape of his youth. But, on the few occasions when she had given in, and howled her grief and fear uncontrollably, little Georgy had been bewildered and terrified. And now, just for a second, he had to suppress the revival of that boyhood terror, and remind himself that he was a grown man, not to be scared by a mother's tears.

He slammed the door and strode across the little hallway into the living room. Jacky was sitting on the tan velvet couch in front of the television set. Her hands were pressed to her cheeks as if to hold her head on. Tears streamed down her face. Her mouth was open, and she was wailing. She was staring wide-eyed at the TV.

George said: “Mama, what is it, for God's sake, what happened?”

“Four little girls!” she sobbed.

George looked at the monochrome picture on the screen. He saw two cars that looked as if they had been in a smash. Then the camera moved to a building and panned along damaged walls and broken windows. It pulled back, and he recognized the building. His heart lurched. “My God, that's the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham!” he said. “What did they do?”

His mother said: “The whites bombed the Sunday school!”

“No! No!” George's mind refused to accept it. Even in Alabama, men would not bomb a Sunday school.

“They killed four girls,” Jacky said. “Why did God let this happen?”

On television, a newsreader's voice-over said: “The dead have been identified as Denise McNair, aged eleven—”

“Eleven!” said George. “This can't be true!”

“—Addie Mae Collins, fourteen; Carole Robertson, fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, fourteen.”

“But they're children!” said George.

“More than twenty other people were injured by the blast,” the newsreader intoned in a voice devoid of emotion, and the camera showed an ambulance pulling away from the scene.

George sat down next to his mother and put his arms around her. “What are we going to do?” he said.

“Pray,” she replied.

The newsreader continued remorselessly. “This was the twenty-first bomb attack on Negroes in Birmingham in the last eight years,” he said. “The city police have never brought any perpetrators to justice for any of the bombings.”

“Pray?” said George, his voice trembling with grief.

Right then he wanted to kill someone.

•   •   •

The Sunday school bomb horrified the world. As far away as Wales, a group of coal miners started a collection to pay for a new stained-glass window to replace one smashed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

At the funeral, Martin Luther King said: “In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers.” George tried to follow that counsel, but he found it hard.

For a while George felt public opinion swinging toward civil rights. A congressional committee toughened Kennedy's bill, adding the ban on employment discrimination that the campaigners wanted so badly.

But a few weeks later the segregationists came out of their corner fighting.

In mid-October an envelope was delivered to the Justice Department
and passed to George. It contained a slim bound report from the FBI entitled:

COMMUNISM AND THE NEGRO MOVEMENT

A CURRENT ANALYSIS

“What the fuck?” George murmured to himself.

He read it quickly. The report was eleven pages long and devastating. It called Martin Luther King “an unprincipled man.” It claimed that he took advice from Communists “knowingly, willingly and regularly.” With an assured air of inside knowledge it said: “Communist Party officials visualize the possibility of creating a situation whereby it could be said that, as the Communist Party goes, so goes Martin Luther King.”

These confident assertions were not backed up by a single scrap of evidence.

George picked up the phone and called Joe Hugo at FBI headquarters, which was on another floor in the same Justice Department building. “What is this shit?” he said.

Joe knew immediately what he was talking about and did not bother to pretend otherwise. “It's not my fault your friends are Commies,” he said. “Don't shoot the messenger.”

“This is not a report. It's a smear of unsupported allegations.”

“We have evidence.”

“Evidence that can't be produced is not evidence, Joe, it's hearsay—weren't you listening in law school?”

“Sources of intelligence have to be protected.”

“Who have you sent this crap to?”

“Let me check. Ah . . . the White House, the secretary of state, the defense secretary, the CIA, the army, the navy, and the air force.”

“So it's all over Washington, you asshole.”

“Obviously we don't try to
conceal
information about our nation's enemies.”

“This is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the president's civil rights bill.”

“We would never do a thing like that, George. We're just a law enforcement agency.” Joe hung up.

George took a few minutes to recover his temper. Then he went
through the report underlining the most outrageous allegations. He typed a note listing the government departments to which the report had been sent, according to Joe. Then he took the document in to Bobby.

As always, Bobby sat at his desk with his jacket off, his tie loosened, and his glasses on. He was smoking a cigar. “You're not going to like this,” George said. He handed over the report, then summarized it.

“That cocksucker Hoover,” said Bobby.

It was the second time George had heard Bobby call Hoover a cocksucker. “You don't mean that literally,” George said.

“Don't I?”

George was startled. “Is Hoover a homo?” It was hard to imagine. Hoover was a short, overweight man with thinning hair, a squashed nose, lopsided features, and a thick neck. He was the opposite of a fairy.

Bobby said: “I hear the Mob has photos of him in a woman's dress.”

“Is that why he goes around saying there is no such thing as the Mafia?”

“It's one theory.”

“Jesus.”

“Make an appointment for me to see him tomorrow.”

“Okay. In the meantime, let me go through the Levison wiretaps. If Levison is influencing King toward Communism, there must be evidence in those phone calls. Levison would have to talk about the bourgeoisie, the masses, class struggle, revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin, Marx, the Soviet Union, like that. I'll make a note of every such reference and see what they add up to.”

“That's not a bad idea. Let me have a memo before I meet with Hoover.”

George returned to his office and sent for the transcripts of the wiretap on Stanley Levison's phone—faithfully copied to the Justice Department by Hoover's FBI. Half an hour later a file clerk wheeled a cart into the room.

George started work. Next time he looked up was when a cleaner opened his door and asked if she could sweep his office. He stayed at his desk while she worked around him. He remembered “pulling all-nighters” at Harvard Law, especially during the absurdly demanding first year.

Long before he finished, it was clear to him that Levison's
conversations with King had nothing to do with Communism. They did not use a single one of George's key words, from
alienation
to
Zapata.
They talked about a book King was writing; they discussed fund-raising; they planned the march on Washington. King admitted fears and doubts to his friend: even though he advocated nonviolence, was he to blame for riots and bombings provoked by peaceful demonstrations? They rarely touched on wider political issues, never on the Cold War conflicts that obsessed every Communist: Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam.

At four
A.M
. George put his head down on the desk and napped. At eight he took a clean shirt from his desk drawer, still in its laundry wrapper, and went to the men's room to wash. Then he typed the note Bobby had requested, saying that in two years of phone calls Stanley Levison and Martin Luther King had never spoken about Communism or any subject remotely associated therewith. “If Levison is a Moscow propagandist, he must be the worst one in history,” George finished.

Later that day, Bobby went to see Hoover at the FBI. When he came back he said to George: “He agreed to withdraw the report. Tomorrow his liaison men will go to every recipient and retrieve all copies, saying it needs to be revised.”

“Good,” George said. “But it's too late, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Bobby. “The damage is done.”

•   •   •

As if President Kennedy did not have enough to worry about in the autumn of 1963, the crisis in Vietnam boiled over on the first Saturday in November.

Encouraged by Kennedy, the South Vietnamese military deposed their unpopular president, Ngo Dinh Diem. In Washington, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy woke Kennedy at three
A.M
. to tell him the coup he had authorized had now taken place. Diem and his brother, Nhu, had been arrested. Kennedy ordered that Diem and his family be given safe passage to exile.

Bobby summoned George to go with him to a meeting in the Cabinet Room at ten
A.M
.

During the meeting an aide came in with a cable announcing that both Ngo Dinh brothers had committed suicide.

President Kennedy was more shocked than George had ever seen him. He looked stricken. He paled beneath his tan, jumped to his feet, and rushed from the room.

“They didn't commit suicide,” Bobby said to George after the meeting. “They're devout Catholics.”

George knew that Tim Tedder was in Saigon, liaising between the CIA and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, pronounced “Arvin.” No one would be surprised if it turned out that Tedder had fouled up.

Around midday a CIA cable revealed that the Ngo Dinh brothers had been executed in the back of an army personnel carrier.

“We can't control anything over there,” George said to Bobby in frustration. “We're trying to help those people find their way to freedom and democracy, but nothing we do works.”

“Just hang on another year,” said Bobby. “We can't lose Vietnam to the Communists now—my brother would be defeated in the presidential election next November. But as soon as he's reelected, he'll pull out faster than you can blink. You'll see.”

•   •   •

A gloomy group of aides sat in the office next to Bobby's one evening that November. Hoover's intervention had worked, and the civil rights bill was in trouble. Congressmen who were ashamed to be racists were looking for a pretext to vote against the bill, and Hoover had given them one.

The bill had been routinely passed to the Committee on Rules, whose chair, Howard W. Smith, from Virginia, was one of the more rabid conservative Southern Democrats. Emboldened by the FBI's accusations of Communism in the civil rights movement, Smith had announced that his committee would keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.

It made George furious. Could these men not see that their attitudes had led to the murder of the Sunday school girls? As long as respectable people said it was all right to treat Negroes as if they were not quite human, ignorant thugs would think they had permission to kill children.