King and the other civil rights leaders had not eaten since breakfast. When the president realized this, he ordered coffee and sandwiches for them from the White House kitchen.

Maria got them all to line up for a formal photograph, then the discussion began.

King and the others were riding a wave of elation. After today’s demonstration, they told the president, the civil rights bill could be toughened up. There should be a new section banning racial discrimination in employment. Young black men were dropping out of school at an alarming rate, seeing no future.

President Kennedy suggested that Negroes should copy the Jews, who valued education and made their kids study. Maria came from a Negro family who did exactly that, and she agreed with him. If black kids dropped out of school, was that the government’s problem? But she also saw how cleverly Kennedy had shifted the discussion away from the real issue, which was millions of jobs that were reserved for whites only.

They asked Kennedy to lead the crusade for civil rights. Maria knew that he was thinking something he could not say: that if he became too strongly identified with the Negro cause, then all the white people would vote Republican.

The shrewd Walter Reuther offered different advice. Identify the businessmen behind the Republican party and pick them off in small groups, he said. Tell them that if they don’t cooperate, their profits will suffer. Maria knew this as the Lyndon Johnson approach, a combination of cajolery and threats. The advice went over the president’s head: it just was not his style.

Kennedy went through the voting intentions of congressmen and senators, ticking off on his fingers those likely to oppose the civil rights bill. It was a dismal register of prejudice, apathy, and timidity. He was going to have trouble passing even a watered-down version of the bill, he made clear; anything tougher was doomed.

Gloom seemed to fall on Maria like a funeral shawl. She felt tired, depressed, and pessimistic. Her head ached and she wanted to go home.

The meeting lasted more than an hour. By the time it finished, all the euphoria had evaporated. The civil rights leaders filed out, their faces showing disenchantment and frustration. It was all very well for King to have a dream, but it seemed the American people did not share it.

Maria could hardly believe it but, despite all that had happened today, it seemed the great cause of equality and freedom was no farther forward.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Jasper Murray felt confident he would get the post of editor of St. Julian’s News. With his application he had sent in a clipping of his article in the Daily Echo about Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Everyone said it was a great piece. He had been paid twenty-five pounds, less than he had got for the interview with Evie: politics was not as lucrative as celebrity scandal.

“Toby Jenkins has never had a paragraph published anywhere outside the student press,” Jasper told Daisy Williams, sitting in the kitchen in Great Peter Street.