Among the papers scattered on the table was a telegram from Martin Luther King to President Kennedy. In Danville, Virginia, when sixty-five Negroes had protested segregation, forty-eight of them had been so badly beaten by the police that they had ended up in the hospital. “The Negro’s endurance may be at breaking point,” King’s cable said. George underlined that sentence.

The group worked intensely on the speech. It would begin with a reference to the day’s events in Alabama, emphasizing that the troops had been enforcing a court order. However, the president would not linger on the details of this particular squabble, but move quickly to a strong appeal to the moral values of all decent Americans. At intervals, Sorensen took handwritten pages to the secretaries to be typed.

George felt frustrated that something so important had to be done in a last-minute rush, but he understood why. Drafting legislation was a rational process; politics, by contrast, was an intuitive game. Jack Kennedy had good instincts, and his gut feelings told him that he needed to take the initiative today.

Time passed too quickly. The speech was still being written when the TV crews moved into the Oval Office and began to set up their lights. President Kennedy walked along the corridor to Sorensen’s room and asked how it was coming. Sorensen showed him some pages, and the president did not like them. They moved into the secretaries’ office, and Kennedy started dictating changes to be typed. Then it was eight o’clock, and the speech was unfinished, but the president was on the air.

George watched the TV in Sorensen’s room, biting his nails.

And President Kennedy gave the performance of his life.

He started off a little too formally, but he warmed up when he spoke of the life prospects of a Negro baby: half as much chance of completing high school, one-third of the chance of graduating college, twice as much chance of being unemployed, and a life expectancy seven years shorter than that of a white baby.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”

George marveled. Much of this was unscripted, and it showed a new Jack Kennedy. The slick modern president had discovered the power of sounding biblical. Perhaps he had learned from the preacher Martin Luther King. “Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed?” he said, reverting to short, plain words. “Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

It was Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby who had counseled patience and delay, George reflected. He rejoiced that now at last they had seen the painful inadequacy of such advice.

“We preach freedom around the world,” the president said. He was about to go to Europe, George knew. “But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly to each other, that this is the land of the free—except for the Negroes? That we have no second-class citizens—except Negroes? That we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race—except with respect to Negroes?”