Page 94 of Jackie

“So what happened?”

“They walked out. The woman, Lorraine Hansberry, said to me, ‘You and your brother are the best a white America can offer, and if you don’t understand, we’re without hope.’ She’s the one who walked out first. A woman.”

“Does that surprise you?” I say. “A woman has less to start with, so she has less to lose.”

I feel Bobby shift away. I’ve sensed it before, almost a current of guilt that will sometimes cross his face, and I remember that morning, years ago, when I lost the baby and woke up in a daze to those pale hospital walls, the ceiling falling toward me, and he was the one who was there.

—

It’s Bobby who pushes Jack to speak on national TV about civil rights on June 11, the day students show up to register at the University of Alabama. Many on Jack’s team are against it, worried about the Southern vote. Even Sorensen warns him not to weigh in unless there’s a crisis.

“The governor blocking the door of that school is a crisis,” Bobby says.

An hour before airtime, they’re scrambling to nail down the points of Jack’s Report to the American People on Civil Rights. The speech is unfinished when he sits down for the cameras, but once he’s on air, I can tell the words are alive for him. And watching him, I can feel that his conviction—his sense of a moral imperative—has changed.

The next day when he comes home for lunch, he tells me a Mississippi man, Medgar Evers, was shot in the back in front of his children outside his own house. He got up, staggered thirty feet to his doorstep, gripping his car keys, then collapsed. He was brought by ambulance to an all-white hospital. They refused to treat him.

“So he might have lived,” I say. I feel sick.

“The bullet went through his heart, Jackie. He wouldn’t have lived.”

We’re alone at lunch, the children playing outside.

“How long did it take him to die, Jack?”

“He’ll receive full military honors.”

“They’re cowards.” He looks at me; I say it again. “Cowards.”

—

Just before he leaves on a two-week trip to Germany and Ireland, he sends legislation to Congress against discrimination, empowering the justice department to order desegregation. He asks Congress to stay in session until a civil-rights bill is enacted. That afternoon, Bobby comes to the Residence to tell Jack a group of civil-rights leaders has asked to meet, to discuss a march on Washington they’ve planned for August.

“They’ve been planning a march since FDR,” Jack says.

“This is different.”

“Try to talk them out of it?”

“Already tried.”

“There can’t be violence, Bobby.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“What we’re talking about is a problem that involves 180 million people.”

“You’re going to come out and say that?”

Jack glances at me; I am sitting at one end of the sofa, listening.

“If that’s where we’re headed,” he says, “yes.”

“Bring Johnson in,” I say. “On this one issue you should. When he spoke in the South, he insisted he wanted Blacks on the platform with him and refused to come if they weren’t.”

“Who told you that?”

“His wife.”

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