Killing Kennedy

flesh.
    Beirut is no different. This is the first layover on a nineteen-day trip that will also see stops in Iran, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Italy. Lebanon was just supposed to be a refueling stop for his 707, but when Johnson learns that he is the highest-ranking American official ever to visit the Land of Cedars, he can’t help himself. The refueling stop suddenly becomes an official visit, and the vice president is soon whisked from the airport and into the heart of Beirut.
    As his motorcade slows down, Johnson spots a crowd of children at a roadside melon stand. He orders his driver to halt. Whipping off his sunglasses to make eye contact, Johnson bounds over to the startled kids and tells them about the power of the American dream. Some of the children look confused. A teenager wearing a “Champion Spark Plugs” cap is told that the United States stands behind the “liberty and integrity” of Lebanon.
    Johnson’s voice is booming, and he waves his arms as he speaks. Secret Service agents hasten to surround him, once again annoyed at the vice president’s ignorance about security. Then, in a flash, Johnson is back in the front seat of his car, standing tall, waving to the crowds with both hands as he continues into the heart of Beirut.
    Lyndon Johnson is a persnickety traveler. In addition to his limousine, he travels with cases of Cutty Sark scotch and a special shower nozzle whose needlelike jets of water he prefers. He demands a seven-foot-long mattress in each hotel room, to accommodate his large frame—not that he sleeps much: long after his staff has gone to sleep, LBJ is still at work, making phone calls back to Washington and reading diplomatic cables.
    Originally, Johnson fought JFK over being used as a roving ambassador, but now he has come to love this aspect of his job. In Washington his craving for authority has many in the White House referring to him as Seward, a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s power-hungry secretary of state. But on the road, Johnson truly does have power. He speaks for the president, but just as often veers off message to speak his own mind, which are moments he relishes.
    But the Kennedys, John and Bobby, are annoyed with Johnson, especially when he speaks irresponsibly. On one trip to Asia, he praises South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who tortured and killed an estimated fifty thousand suspected Communists. Incredibly, Johnson pronounces Diem to be the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” a pronouncement that leads some to question the vice president’s very sanity.
    In Thailand, LBJ conducts a 3:00 A.M . press conference in his pajamas. On that same trip, he is warned that patting people on the head is considered an offense in Thai culture—whereupon he immediately bounds onto a local bus and rubs his very large hands on the heads of its passengers.
    Johnson does one better in Saigon: while holding a press conference in his steamy hotel room, he suddenly strips naked, towels the sweat from his body, and puts on a fresh suit—all while answering questions from the media.
    But there’s no need for disrobing in Beirut. The Phoenicia Hotel is just two blocks from the blue Mediterranean. The August heat is tempered by a cool sea breeze. This will be one of the longest trips Johnson has ever undertaken, but the vice president is reveling in every minute, because for each one of these nineteen days away from the United States, he will be the most powerful and respected man in the room.
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    At the same time, at home, Bobby Kennedy is engaged in a completely different power struggle, one best epitomized by an incident that happened seven years ago.
    Mississippi, 1955. A fourteen-year-old African American boy named Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till is visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta town of Money. Till is from Chicago and has come to the Deep South to see for himself where his mother grew up. He had polio as a small child, which caused him to develop a stuttering problem. But though just five foot, four inches, Emmett now looks mature enough that he often passes for an adult. A close look at his smooth face, however, reveals that he is still very much a child.
    Emmett’s mother has warned him that there is a big difference between Chicago and Mississippi, and she isn’t talking about the weather. Just a week before Emmett’s trip south, a black man was shot dead in front of a courthouse not far from Money. His killers will soon be