Part Six
FLOWER
1968
41
Jasper Murray spent two years in the army, one year of training in the US and one of combat in Vietnam. He was discharged in January 1968 without ever having been wounded. He felt lucky.
Daisy Williams paid for him to fly to London to see his family. His sister Anna was now editorial director of Rowley Publishing. She had at last married Hank Remington, who was proving to be more enduring than most pop stars. The house in Great Peter Street was strangely quiet: the youngsters had all moved out, leaving only Lloyd and Daisy in residence. Lloyd was now a minister in the Labour government and therefore rarely home.
Ethel died that January, and her funeral was held a few hours before Jasper was due to fly to New York.
The service was at the Calvary Gospel Hall in Aldgate, a small wooden shack where she had married Bernie Leckwith fifty years earlier, when her brother, Billy, and countless boys like him were fighting in the frozen mud trenches of the First World War.
The little chapel could seat a hundred or so worshippers, with another twenty or thirty standing at the back; but more than a thousand people turned up to say goodbye to Eth Leckwith.
The pastor moved the service outside and the police closed the street to cars. The speakers got up on chairs to address the crowd. Ethel’s two children, Lloyd Williams and Millie Avery, both in their fifties, stood at the front with most of her grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren.
Evie Williams read the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke. Dave and Walli brought guitars and sang ‘I Miss Ya, Alicia’. Half the Cabinet were there. So was Earl Fitzherbert. Two buses from Aberowen brought a hundred Welsh voices to swell the hymn singing.
But most of the mourners were ordinary Londoners whose lives had been touched by Ethel. They stood in the January cold, the men holding their caps in their hands, the women shushing their children, the old people shivering in their cheap coats; and when the pastor prayed for Ethel to rest in peace, they all said Amen.
*
George Jakes had a simple plan for 1968: Bobby Kennedy would become President and stop the war.
Not all of Bobby’s aides were in favour. Dennis Wilson was happy for Bobby to remain simply the Senator from New York. ‘People will say that we already have a Democratic President and Bobby should support Lyndon Johnson, not run against him,’ he said. ‘It’s unheard of.’
They were at the National Press Club in Washington on 30 January 1968, waiting for Bobby, who was about to have breakfast with fifteen reporters.
‘That’s not true,’ George said. ‘Truman was opposed by Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace.’
‘That was twenty years ago. Anyway, Bobby can’t win the Democratic nomination.’
‘I think he’ll be more popular than Johnson.’
‘Popularity has nothing to do with it,’ Wilson said. ‘Most of the convention delegates are controlled by the party’s power brokers: labour leaders, state governors and city mayors. Men like Daley.’ The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, was the worst kind of old-fashioned politician, ruthless and corrupt. ‘And the one thing Johnson is good at is in-fighting.’
George shook his head in disgust. He was in politics to defy those old power structures, not give in to them. So was Bobby, in his heart. ‘Bobby will get such a bandwagon rolling in the country that the power brokers won’t be able to ignore him.’
‘Haven’t you talked to him about this?’ Wilson was pretending to be incredulous. ‘Haven’t you heard him say that people will see him as selfish and ambitious if he runs against a Democratic incumbent?’
‘More people think he’s the natural heir to his brother.’
‘When he spoke at Brooklyn College, the students had a placard that said: “Hawk, Dove – or Chicken?”’
This jibe had stung Bobby and dismayed George. But now George tried to put it in an optimistic light. ‘That means they want him to run!’ he said. ‘They know that he’s the only contender who can unite old and young, black and white, and rich and poor, and can get everyone working together to end the war and give blacks the justice they deserve.’
Wilson’s mouth twisted in a sneer but, before he could pour scorn on George’s idealism, Bobby walked in, and everyone sat down to breakfast.
George’s feelings about Lyndon Johnson had undergone a reversal. Johnson had started so well, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and planning the War on Poverty. But Johnson failed to understand foreign policy, as George’s father, Greg, had forecast. All Johnson knew was that he did not want to be the President who lost Vietnam to the Communists. Consequently, he was now hopelessly enmeshed in a dirty war and dishonestly telling the American people he was winning it.
The words had also changed. When George was young, ‘black’ was a vulgar term, ‘colored’ was more dainty, and ‘Negro’ was the polite word, used by the liberal New York Times, always with a capital letter, like ‘Jew’. Now ‘Negro’ was considered condescending and ‘coloured’ evasive, and everyone talked about black people, the black community, black pride, and even black power. Black is beautiful, they said. George was not sure how much difference the words made.
He did not eat much breakfast: he was too busy making notes of the questions and Bobby’s answers in preparation for a press release.
One of the journalists asked: ‘How do you feel about the pressure on you to run for President?’
George looked up from his notes and saw Bobby give a brief, humourless grin, then say: ‘Badly. Badly.’
George tensed. Bobby was too damn honest sometimes.
The journalist said: ‘What do you think about Senator McCarthy’s campaign?’
He was talking not about the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy who had hunted down Communists in the fifties, but a completely opposite character, Senator Eugene McCarthy, a liberal who was a poet as well as a politician. Two months ago Gene McCarthy had declared his intention of seeking the Democratic nomination, running as the anti-war candidate against Johnson. He had already been dismissed as a no-hoper by the press.
Now Bobby replied: ‘I think McCarthy’s campaign is going to help Johnson.’ Bobby still would not call Lyndon the President. George’s friend Skip Dickerson, who worked for Johnson, was scornful about this.
‘Well, will you run?’
Bobby had lots of ways of not answering this question, a whole repertoire of evasive responses; but today he did not use any of them. ‘No,’ he said.
George dropped his pencil. Where the hell had that come from?
Bobby added: ‘In no conceivable circumstances would I run.’
George wanted to say: In that case, what the fuck are we all doing here?
He noticed Dennis Wilson smirking.
He was tempted to walk out there and then. But he was too polite. He stayed in his seat and carried on making notes until the breakfast ended.
Back in Bobby’s office on Capitol Hill, he wrote the press release, working like an automaton. He changed Bobby’s quote to: ‘In no foreseeable circumstances would I run,’ but it made little difference.
Three staffers resigned from Bobby’s team that afternoon. They had not come to Washington to work for a loser.
George was angry enough to quit, but he kept his mouth shut. He wanted to think. And he wanted to talk to Verena.
She was in town, and staying at his apartment as always. She now had her own closet in his bedroom, where she kept cold-weather clothes she never needed in Atlanta.
She was so upset she was near tears that evening. ‘He’s all we have!’ she said. ‘Do you know how many casualties we suffered in Vietnam last year?’
‘Of course I do,’ said George. ‘Eighty thousand. I put it in one of Bobby’s speeches, but he didn’t use that part.’
‘Eighty thousand men killed or wounded or missing,’ Verena said. ‘It’s awful – and now it will go on.’
‘Casualties will certainly be higher this year.’
‘Bobby has missed his shot at greatness. But why? Why did he do it?’
‘I’m too angry to talk to him about it, but I believe he genuinely suspects his own motives. He’s asking himself whether he wants this for the sake of his country, or his ego. He’s tormented by such questions.’
‘Martin is too,’ Verena said. ‘He asks himself whether inner-city riots are his fault.’