Killing Kennedy

realizing that half measures will not work with these determined children, then gives the order to spray at full strength. Every protester is knocked off his or her feet. Many children are swept away down the streets and sidewalks, their bodies scraping against grass and concrete. Clothing is torn from their bodies. Those who make the mistake of pressing themselves against a building to dodge the hoses soon become perfect targets. “The water stung like a whip and hit like a cannon,” one child will later remember. “The force of it knocked you down like you weighed only twenty pounds, pushing people around like rag dolls. We tried to hold on to the building but it was no use.”
    Then Connor lets loose the police dogs.
    A German shepherd’s jaws bite down with 320 pounds of pressure—half the force of a great white shark or a lion. But the German shepherd is much smaller than these predators. Pound for pound, the Birmingham police dogs are unmatched in their bite force.
    Bull Connor watches with glee as the German shepherds lunge at the children, ripping away their clothing and tearing into their flesh. Connor, a pear-shaped, balding man who wears glasses, appears mild-mannered. But in actuality he is a vicious good old boy whose beliefs are even more racist than those of Governor Wallace. The public safety commissioner wades into the thick of the action, encouraging policemen to open the barricades so that Birmingham’s white citizens can get a better view as the police dogs do their worst.
    By 3:00 P.M ., it all seems to be over. The children who haven’t been arrested limp home in their soaked and torn clothing, their bodies bruised by countless point-blank blasts of water cannon. No longer bold and defiant, they are now just a bunch of kids who have to explain to their angry parents about their wrecked clothes and a missed day of school.
    Once again, Bull Connor has won.
    Or at least it seems that way.
    But among those in Birmingham this afternoon is an Associated Press photographer named Bill Hudson. He is considered one of the best in the business, willing to endure any danger to get a great photo. He has ducked bullets during the Korean War and dodged bricks while covering the civil rights movement.
    On this day in Birmingham, Bill Hudson takes the best photo of his life. Appropriately, it’s in black and white. He snaps it from just five feet away. The photograph is an image of a Birmingham police officer—looking official in pressed shirt, tie, and sunglasses—encouraging his German shepherd to take a chunk out of black high school student Walter Gadsden’s stomach.
    The next morning that photograph appears on the front page of the New York Times , three columns wide, above the fold.
    And so it is that John Kennedy, starting his morning as he always does by reading the papers, sees this image from Birmingham. Disgusted by what he sees, Kennedy makes a point to tell reporters that the picture is “sick” and “shameful.”
    Just one look and JFK instinctively knows that America and the world will be outraged by Hudson’s image. Civil rights are sure to be a major issue of the 1964 presidential election. And Kennedy now understands he can no longer be a passive observer of the civil rights movement. He must take a stand—no matter how many votes it might lose him in the South.
    Meanwhile, the reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. is on the rise. He will soon see the Birmingham situation resolved in his favor, thanks to the Children’s Crusade. After Bull Connor’s initial “victory,” the public pressure against Alabama authorities becomes so intense that change is inevitable.

    This photograph of a nonviolent civil rights protester being attacked by police dogs brought the brutality of Bull Connor’s police force to national attention. (Bill Hudson/Associated Press)
    Despite the triumph, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Fitzgerald Kennedy are not on the same page. In fact, they are on a collision course.
    *   *   *
    Civil disobedience is not limited to the American civil rights movement.
    Five days after the children of Birmingham peacefully march into that wall of water cannons and police dogs, and two days after a U.S. Army lieutenant is killed by the Viet Cong just outside Saigon, a crowd of Buddhists gathers in the South Vietnamese city of Hue. It is May 8, 1963, the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha.
    The protesters have come to demonstrate against a new law set forth by President