When asked about King’s plea in a press conference on February 6 Ike said, “[I have] a pretty good and sizable agenda on my desk every day, and as you know I insist on going for a bit of recreation every once in a while. . . . I have expressed myself on this subject so often in the South, in the North, wherever I have been, that I don’t know what another speech would do about the thing right now.” In an act of astonishing bad taste, he then departed Washington for 10 days of turkey shooting at the Humphrey plantation in Georgia. Knowing that Eisenhower was in the South, King sent another
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