Free Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch

President Johnson.
    Fortune hid many exotic layers of American antiquity in Florida, which in modern times came to specialize in the sale of dredged swamplands and sunshine dreams. For generations, established St. Augustine families had held or traded franchises on proven tourist attractions. Purists on the city’s historical commission struggled valiantly to put disclaimers on the more egregious frauds, such as the Oldest House and the working site of Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, but facts fell lame before imagination. The Alligator Farm relied upon the sheer atmosphere of the Ancient City, and some historical amusements—most notably Ripley’s Believe It Or Not—shook loose to offer daredevil exhibits of tabloid wonder, such as the Calf With Two Heads. In the 1930s, some polls showed Robert Ripley to be the most admired man in America, just ahead of FBI Director Hoover and far above FDR.
    Since then, St. Augustine guarded a share of Florida’s migrations by promoting buncombe exaggerations on the free enterprise side of tourism, balanced by a rigid uniformity against public controversy. Typically, Archbishop Joseph Hurley preached with genuine horror against the reforms submitted to the new Vatican Council in Rome, especially the proposal that the clergy turn their faces instead of their backs to the congregation during mass. To Hurley, this gesture invited needless popular doubt about the clergy’s claim to sovereign, lineal authority direct from Jesus. He and city leaders treated racial matters as unmentionables, whether historical or current, except for the colonnaded downtown square known as the Old Slave Market. As breezily described by buggy drivers, the site fascinated tourists as the relic of a storied past.
    The priest who guided Vice President Johnson through the old mission was a historian, in charge of Catholic preparations for the four hundredth birthday of the nation’s oldest city, upcoming in 1965. President Kennedy had appointed a federal commission to plan for the Quadricentennial—Johnson was there to swear in its members—and the priest seized his private opportunity to communicate some quieter aspects of a heritage he thought worth reflection: the true dates, the neglected Spanish history in America, the religious toll of seesaw colonial wars, the sacredness of local ground not only to the Vatican but also to the Orthodox Church, which had built a shrine to the first Greek settlement in the Western Hemisphere. To the priest’s discomfort, however, Johnson remained silent for a long time before speaking his first words of the tour. “Fifty-five,” he said. Somewhat unnerved, the priest noticed that the Vice President was staring at a sign beneath the wooden coffin. He explained that indeed Menéndez the Conqueror had died at that age in 1574, and that some 350 years later Spain had donated the coffin back to the mission he had founded in St. Augustine.
    â€œFifty-five,” Johnson repeated. From his own line of work, the priest recognized a mortality reverie without knowing that Johnson was approaching his own fifty-fifth birthday that August, still haunted by a three-pack-a-day smoking habit and a massive heart attack eight years earlier. Once outside, Johnson snapped back to full energy before an honor guard of Catholic schoolchildren. Instead of waving to them, he insisted on shaking each one’s hand, picked up several for hugs and chitchats and ear-pulls, to squeals of delight, and then, just as suddenly tired again, he announced that he was heading to the hotel for a massage and a nap.
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    I N THE N EGRO neighborhood called Lincolnville, George Reedy spent a day of intense mediation at the home of Mrs. Fannie Fulwood, president of the local NAACP. Threats and chaos were normal to him, but to Fulwood—the humbly upright daughter of a railroad worker, who in her forties kept up an arduous schedule as housemaid for the