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

John Kennedy watches King’s speech on television with Bobby and their brother Teddy, who was elected to John’s former Senate seat for Massachusetts in 1962.

President Kennedy meets with the organizers of the March on Washington in the Oval Office after Martin Luther King Jr. (third from the left) gave his speech. [© Associated Press]
    The attorney general is a major advocate for the civil rights movement. Since King announced the March on Washington three months ago, Bobby has become its behind-the-scenes organizer. Working closely with his staff at the Justice Department, Bobby has quietly guided the march into a shape that can be easily controlled. He made sure that the Lincoln Memorial was the site of King’s speech, because it is bordered on one side by the Potomac River and on the other by the Tidal Basin. This would make crowd control smoother in case of riots and also keep marchers away from the Capitol Building and the White House.
    The president and his brothers watch King’s speech with interest, praying that he will deliver on the promise of this great march on Washington.
    One hour later, an exultant Martin Luther King Jr. meets with John Kennedy in the Oval Office. There are 11 other people in attendance, so this visit is not a summit meeting between the president of the United States and the most powerful man in the civil rights movement. But Kennedy makes sure King knows he’s been paying attention to the day’s events.
    “I have a dream,” he says to King, adding a nod of the head to show approval.

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    SEPTEMBER 15, 1963
    Birmingham, Alabama
    B UT THE M ARCH ON W ASHINGTON does not change the ongoing racial battle in the American South. Less than three weeks after America listened to Martin Luther King Jr. dream about black boys and girls in Alabama joining hands with white boys and girls, 26 black children are led into the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for Sunday morning services. They are due to hear a children’s sermon on “The Love That Forgives.”
    The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is the same congregation that launched the Children’s Crusade on Birmingham in May 1963. It stands just across from the park where Bull Connor’s police dogs bit into the flesh of innocent black teenagers and elementary school students. The church has earned a special level of hatred from the white supremacist groups that still battle to block the integration of Birmingham.
    The children attending church this Sunday morning cannot possibly know that four members of the Ku Klux Klan have planted a box of dynamite near the basement. The force of the explosion that shatters the spiritual calm of the church service at 10:22 A.M. is so great that it doesn’t just destroy the basement, but also blows out the back wall of the church and destroys every stained-glass window in the building but one. That lone surviving window portrays an image of Jesus; all but the face of the figure remains intact.

The victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing (clockwise from top left): Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14; and Addie Mae Collins, 14. [© Associated Press]
    The window is symbolic in a sense, because most of the children in the basement this Sunday morning survive the horrific tragedy. However, four of them—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair—do not.
    Their dream has come to an end.

This stained-glass window was partially intact after the bombing that killed four children and injured twenty-three others. [LOC, DIG-highsm-05062]

 
    CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    SEPTEMBER 25, 1963
    Billings, Montana Late afternoon
    E VEN IN THE MIDST OF TRAGEDY, Kennedy must campaign. He stands in the rodeo ring at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, addressing an overflowing crowd. Billings, Montana, has a population of just 53,000, and it appears as if every single citizen has come out to cheer the president. A marching band