by James Philip
Eisenhower had treated the interview as a paternal exercise, immensely careful not to tread on his successor’s toes or in any way point up his relative inexperience. That was the day Kennedy realized why Eisenhower had been America’s greatest World War II general, and exactly how he had navigated his country out of the Korean conflict and through two peaceful terms in the White House despite the turmoil in South East Asia, the Suez imbroglio and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising; while all the time steadily building up the US’s defenses and promoting the onward march of global economic expansion. Ike had left office with a country united, ready to step confidently into the future...
“I heard you, Bobby.” The two brothers were alone on the porch where a week ago Jack Kennedy had met Margaret Thatcher. The lady had known he was selling her down the river but she had come to Cape Cod anyway. It had been her duty to try to renew a failing alliance and to his dying day the President who had sent her home to face her enemies empty handed would wonder if he had made the second worst mistake of his life. “The situation in Wisconsin is out of control. I read General Decker’s report.”
“If we pull all those troops out of Mississippi and Alabama things will go to Hell, Jack!”
“Yes, I know.”
“You promised Doctor King...”
“I promised Doctor King that the Federal Government would protect him and his marchers all the way to Philadelphia. I will do that. Just like when he walks up the steps of City Hall on 4th July I’ll be there waiting for him.” Jack Kennedy was rocking backwards and forwards in the old rocking chair as his brother paced restlessly.
Notwithstanding the seven-and-a-half years difference in their ages, their divergent temperaments and the fact that many men in ‘Bobby’ Kennedy’s position would have chaffed to have lived for so long in his brother’s shadow; the siblings were the heart and sinew of what remained of the fractious, dangerously dysfunctional Administration that had swept into the White House three-and-a-half years ago with such great hopes. Back in the spring of 1961 the World had seemed to be full of possibilities; now there was just the foul taste of disillusion in their mouths.
Out on Nantucket Sound a recently re-commissioned 1945-era destroyer quartered the seas, inshore two patrol boats mounting 50-caliber machine guns in their bows patrolled vigilantly. Beyond the nearby picket fence Secret Servicemen stalked, out of sight the landward perimeter of the compound was guarded by Marines.
Jackie was bringing the children back from Camp David tomorrow. At a time like this a man needed his family around him.
“Fulbright says Nasser has regained control of things in Cairo,” Jack Kennedy observed. “That’s good. If the Soviets had got their own people in power in Egypt God alone knows what would have happened next.”
Nobody in the Administration talked about the Red Army’s unstoppable progress south through Iraq to the northernmost shores of the Persian Gulf, or that the great refinery complexes – the biggest in the World - on British-held Abadan Island would soon be wrecked, or in Russian hands.
The post-Shah regime in Iran had pleaded for US support; the CIA had people ‘in country’ close to the ruling Junta, listening stations had been set up in the south and the option of sanctuary in the US had been extended to the leadership and their families. The fact that Carrier Division Seven – the mighty USS Kitty Hawk and many of the most technologically advanced warships in the world – was in the northern Indian Ocean had soothed the worst terrors of the Iranian ruling class, and for the time being prevented the Saudi Royal Family wholly casting their lot in with the British.
“CIA says the Russians may be behind the Chicago situation, Jack!” The Attorney General protested vehemently. “How do we justify sitting down with Dobrynin and Zorin when we know the bastards are stirring up a civil war in the Midwest?”
Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin had been Soviet Ambassador to the United States at the time of the October War. Valerian Alexandrovich Zorin was the man who had famously clashed with Adlai Stevenson in the Security Council of the United Nations in the lead up to the war. Both men had been held under house arrest ever since.
The President collected his thoughts.
“The CIA didn’t notice two Soviet tank armies massing on the borders of Azerbaijani Iran in the months ahead of the invasion in April,” he sighed. This was a debate he had already had with other senior Administration insiders including Bob McNamara and LBJ. The Secretary of Defense had eventually deferred to the ‘party line’ but Lyndon Johnson had told him to his face that he needed to get his ‘head out of his arse in a hurry!’
“Jack, that’s not...”
“The CIA didn’t see the attack on Malta coming either, Bobby,” the older brother went on. “The truth is that none of us saw the Battle of Washington coming; and none of us really know what’s going on in the heads of the people we’re fighting in Illinois and Wisconsin. I should never have listened to Daley and the others back in the spring. In fact I shouldn’t have listened to anybody who said they understood what was going on in the Midwest!”
Bobby Kennedy opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it and leaned against the nearest porch balustrade. Although the gunshot wound to his left calf he had suffered during the attempt on Jack’s life in the Oval Office after the Battle of Washington in December had healed up, it still pained him sometimes.
“General Decker says purging so many National Guard units in the spring was a bad mistake,” Jack Kennedy went on. “He wants officers and men re-instated en masse with no questions asked. Even with the reserves previously allocated to the Middle East Expeditionary Force to draw on he says he doesn’t have enough men and that practically all the equipment he needs is in the wrong place. He says he can take out the TV and radio stations in rebel hands with air strikes but that won’t stop what’s going on leaking out. Not now. He’s formally asked me to authorize all measures short of ABC strikes.”
Atomic, biological and chemical weapons were off the menu.
Everything else was in play.
“Heck, Bobby,” he groaned, “we’re about to start dropping Napalm on our own people!”
Chapter 12
Tuesday 9th June 1964
Yacht ‘China Girl’, Sausalito, California
China Girl had once been a rich man’s plaything, a seventy-three foot brigantine rigged yacht built from Oregon spruce before the First World War. Legend had it that she had been moored off Coronado Island most summers in the roaring twenties but sometime in the fifties, thirty years after her glory days she had ended up moored, a half-forgotten hulk in Richardson Bay.
Miranda Sullivan’s brother, Gregory, had researched the history of the China Girl, and had shared the whole story with his ‘little sister’ more than once. Greg was the kind of outgoing, enthusiastic, unselfish guy who naturally assumed all other right thinking people shared the majority of his interests, fascinations and loves. Of her three ‘big brothers’ he was the sweetest by a country mile; the least driven and perhaps the only one of the four Sullivan siblings wholly lacking in personal demons.
Miranda had demons enough for both of them!
She had never really talked to anybody about the feelings she had had for Dwayne John. Everything had happened so quickly she was still coming to terms with their re-born relationship at the time of his death in Atlanta.
Her life had been fucked up a long time before she had had a drug-blurred one night stand with Dwayne on the night of the October War. They had both been in a bad place, out of their heads, and not seen each other again until he was illegally arrested in San Francisco by the FBI. She had been instrumental in getting him freed and after that things had sort of...just happened.
The Governor had appointed her Secretary of the California Civil Rights Forum (CCRF), Dwayne had been her nominated liaison with the NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – on the CCRF and by the time he returned to Atlanta to help organize the Bedford Pine Park m
arch and rally things between them had...developed.
She had missed him dreadfully when he left the West Coast; it was like a part of her was incomplete and she had known that when he came back to California they would be together...
Catching herself brooding she snapped out of it.
Miranda recollected that afternoon at the Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland when Greg and his now wife, Darlene, had turned up for their mother’s several times delayed sixtieth birthday party, and Greg had broken the news that he and Darlene were getting married, and demanding a loan to purchase the China Girl. Miranda had though her father was going to have a stroke and her mother had, very nearly, swooned; their angst had been so palpable it would have been comic had it not been so revelatory.
To her parents Darlene was white trash, a gold-digger who had traduced their innocent, unworldly baby boy into bed to get her hands on the Sullivan family fortune.
How then would her parents have taken the news she planned to marry a black man intimately involved with the African-American Civil Rights Movement? A man who was an openly declared, dedicated disciple of Doctor Martin Luther King? They would most likely have both had seizures! It was one thing for Greg to go off the rails; they had never had terribly high hopes of him. But she was their little princess...
Darlene Lefebure had never been any kind of gold-digger. It was not that she was unworldly, or dreamy like Greg. She had grown up on what middle class Americans liked to call ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, been mistreated and abused by a stepfather who would have killed her had not she and Dwayne, her unlikely childhood friend in a town where blacks and whites never dated because that was a sure fire way to get lynched, jumped on the first greyhound out of Jackson, Alabama a year before the October War. Gold-diggers planned and schemed; Darlene and Greg had met by an accident of fate only because Miranda had already been involved in Dwayne John’s and Darlene Lefebure’s troubles of last November. It all seemed so improbable, too improbable but then after the last couple of years nothing really surprised Miranda.
She had tried to keep going, thought she was doing okay.
But then the FBI had wanted to talk to her about Dwayne and Doctor King had written to her, inviting her to ‘be with our fellowship’ at Oakland Cemetery to ‘honor our fallen in our own hallowed ground’.
One day she had been discovered at her desk in the Governor’s Office in the State Capitol at Sacramento staring into space, catatonic, deaf to everything. She had sat that way two or three hours, nobody knew exactly how long until her boss, Governor Brown’s Chief of Staff, had suggested she take an indefinite sabbatical. Her job would be waiting for her when she came back; that apparently came straight from the Governor’s lips.
That was nearly five weeks ago.
Greg had wanted to go with her to Atlanta; she had vetoed that. Darlene was six months pregnant and his place was with her here in Sausalito.
Greg must have had one of his now bi-monthly ‘this is the way it is going to be’ conversations with her parents – marrying Darlene had made him prone to unexpected bouts of assertiveness and their parents respected that in exactly the same way they despised ‘going with the flow’ – because her attorney big brother Ben junior and his wife, Natalie, had flown out to Georgia with her, chaperoning her every minute of every day she was in Atlanta. Well, almost every minute. She had been fortunate enough to meet Doctor King privately, been invited to worship at the Ebenezer Street Chapel on the morning of the day of the Bedford Pine Park Memorial Service, and to join the communion in Sunday worship the following day.
Ben and Natalie had brought her home yesterday.
Wrongly, she had imagined her parents would probably try to enroll her in a ‘rest home’, or at least attempt to talk her into signing up for ‘therapy’. In the event Ben and Natalie had delivered her to the foot of the gangplank of the China Girl, and after exchanging uneasy pleasantries with Greg and Darlene – the former they regarded as a harmless dreamer, and the latter as a creature from a foreign country of which they knew little – they had meekly departed.
A note from Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP had been waiting for her.
‘I think attending the Bedford Pine Park Memorial in Atlanta is a great act of personal moral courage on your part. I am sorry I was unable to be there with and for you but hope to meet with you again soon. Unfortunately, my recent hospitalization prevents me fulfilling a number of previously scheduled speaking engagements and from attending several forthcoming meetings on CCRF business...’
Although she had only met Terry Francois the first time last fall she had come to regard the former Marine and long-time NAACP campaigner as a friend whose wise counsel and advice had been invaluable in her work with the CCRF. The poor man had been injured in an automobile crash – the taxi he was riding in had been in collision with a truck in the Mission District three weeks ago – and he was still in traction.
‘The last thing I want to do is impose on you. I know this is a bad time. But if you could see your way clear to picking up a couple of my commitments I would be very grateful to you. I am thinking particularly of an event at Berkeley – a NAACP sponsored rally at which I was going to talk about Atlanta and the start of the March on Philadelphia. And the monthly NAACP gathering at the Third Baptist Church when again, I was intending to speak of the Memorial in Atlanta and the March...’
Miranda had shown the note to her brother and her sister-in-law.
‘You should tell those college kids up at Berkeley about Dwayne,” Darlene had suggested timidly. Before Gregory came on the scene the two women had been at daggers drawn; however, that seemed like an age ago. It helped that Darlene had got used to the idea that Miranda was the one member of the Sullivan family who was actually happy for her and Greg.
Amenities onboard the China Girl were limited so she had gone ashore and rung through to Terry Francois’s office from a payphone booth on the Bridgeway. Terry’s secretary, a boisterously maternal woman called Florence had been beside herself with pleasure and relief to hear her voice.
‘It’s about the dates in Mr Francois’s diary at Berkeley and the Third Baptist Church...’
Florence quickly explained that if she could not ‘do them’ that was fine. It was just that ‘Terry thought of you first!’
‘It is okay. I’ll do them both.’
Most days before she went to Atlanta Miranda had curled up in the bunk in the forward ‘stateroom’ and slept, or lain staring at the bulkhead with little or no sense of passing time. Some days she walked along the Sausalito quaysides. A couple of times she had gone shopping with Darlene, a shorter, smaller woman who was already getting very big but not slowing down at all as her pregnancy developed.
Miranda recollected her mother had allegedly retired to her bed practically from the moment of conception to the birth of all her offspring. Darlene had carried on with her cleaning jobs in Marin County and the big houses behind the sea front nearby until about the time Miranda had had her breakdown. Gregory was a teacher and eighth to tenth grade teachers did not get to make their fortune, any kind of fortune, in California or in any other state of the Union.
Darlene entered the long low main deck saloon.
It was the first compartment Greg had made habitable before, with several friends and some of the older kids from his school, the ‘restoration crew’ had moved below decks. Large sections of the boat remained unexplored, uninhabitable and probably hazardous, including the old engine room. It was a warm day and she was feeling the heat.
Miranda had been reading yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Going to Atlanta had reconnected her with something, although it was too early to specify exactly what. She felt different, less separate from things and curious again. It was as if she had gone away somewhere the day she heard Dwayne was dead and Atlanta had been not an act of remembrance and mourning – although it had been that too – but some kind of existential gateway
back into the present.
The Chronicle carried a lot of West Coast stories but it was still a national paper, preoccupied with the same ‘big challenges’ that faced the rest of the US. It was a sign that despite what many people on the TV and the radio wanted Americans to think, a majority of people still believed in some meaningful way that there was still such a thing as America, and that patriotism really did signify strength through togetherness.
Lately, the news agenda was dominated by four stories: the jostling for the nominations of the respective parties for the Presidential nomination, Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Philadelphia and the ongoing violence across most of the South, inflation and the rocketing price of gas at the pumps, and the re-emergence of the Soviet Union as a military force in the Middle East.
This latter seemed an awfully long way away from California and most days the Chronicle and its main competitor the San Francisco Examiner treated this as a page six or seven story because apart from the Red Army gradually moving south towards the Persian Gulf nothing much was actually going on. Everybody tacitly assumed that sooner or later the US Navy or Curtis LeMay personally, or with several B-52 Bomb Wings would put the Russians in their place and the threat to the oil fields of Arabia – which most Americans honestly believed they owned because they also thought, mistakenly, in exactly the same way they assumed that the Rockefeller family in some way held Standard Oil and half the World’s known oil reserves in trust for the nation - would quietly ‘go away’.
It was a peculiarity of American politics that whereas the President and the other presidential hopefuls said a lot about ‘the Election’, each other, the state of the economy, and occasionally about the Civil Rights movement and the troubles of the Deep South, the Kennedy brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, John Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon hardly ever talked about ‘the situation in the Persian Gulf’. A visitor from Mars would wonder if any of the Presidential pretenders could even find Basra or Abadan on the map.
