Kennedy's Last Days: The Assassination That Defined a Generation by Bill O’Reilly

to Russia without him.
    Lee Harvey Oswald is far from the great man he believes he will one day become. Right now he is a drifter who spends his time off trying to make wine from blackberries, barely clinging to employment, and treating his family like a nuisance.
    Reading fuels Oswald’s rage. He devours several books a week. The topics range in subject matter from a Chairman Mao biography to James Bond novels. Then, during the first weeks of summer 1963, Oswald chooses to read about a subject he’s never before explored: John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy said that this was his favorite book about himself. After the assassination, Manchester wrote an in-depth description of Kennedy’s last days. [Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company]
    In fact, Lee Harvey is so enchanted by William Manchester’s bestseller Portrait of a President that after returning it to the New Orleans Public Library, he checks out Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage .
    The collection of essays, which won John Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, is about the lives and actions of eight great men. Lee Harvey Oswald reads JFK’s carefully chosen words and is inspired to hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage.

Profiles in Courage was published in 1957 when Kennedy was a senator. Kennedy writes about eight senators who acted bravely and honestly in hard situations. [© Cardinal Publishers Group]

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    AUGUST 28, 1963
    Washington, D.C. Afternoon
    “ F IVE SCORE YEARS AGO, A GREAT A MERICAN, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” begins Martin Luther King Jr.
    The huge statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial is right behind King. It has been one hundred years since Lincoln freed the slaves, and now King is telling a crowd of hundreds of thousands that black Americans are still not free.
    He talks about poverty and the fact that America separates black from white.
    Many in the crowd have traveled hundreds of miles to be here today. They are black, and they are white. The day has been long, filled with hours of speeches.
    But Martin Luther King Jr. is the man they’ve waited to hear. And the fatigue and the heat and the claustrophobia are all forgotten as these 250,000 people strain to hear his every word. They have come for the cause of civil rights, but they have also come to hear the great orator shape this day for them. The audience know in their hearts that King will rally them to greatness.
    “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Martin Luther King Jr. preaches.
    And then, for the first time, he belts out the phrase that will come to define this day forever.
    “I have a dream!” King proclaims.
    And then he tells them about that dream. King describes an earthly paradise where blacks and whites are not divided. He dreams that even a hostile Southern state like Mississippi will know such wonders.
    He is putting into words the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement. And for the people in the crowd to hear it stated so powerfully and clearly has them beside themselves with emotion and pride. Black and white alike, they hang on every word of King’s 16-minute speech.
    By the time King winds up for the finish, he is shouting into the microphone. The image of Lincoln gazing over his shoulder is profoundly moving as King calls upon the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is clear to all who stand out on the Mall that King plans to finish what Lincoln began so long ago. The two men—divided by a century of racial injustice—are forever linked in history from this day forward.

Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd of marchers on August 28, 1963. [© Associated Press]
    “Free at last, free at last,” he quotes from a spiritual, “thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
    The crowd on the Mall erupts in applause.
    *   *   *
    In the White House,