by James Philip
“Basically, yes.”
“This would be the Administration that has just told the British that they’re on their own in the Middle East?”
“That’s State Department business. We don’t operate like that in Justice.”
The weirdest thing was that Gretchen knew she was not going to make a decision about the proposition until she had talked it through with Dan.
“Okay,” she smiled. “Let me think about it.”
Chapter 16
Saturday 13th June 1964
RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, Midtown Manhattan, New York City
If fifty-one year old Richard Milhous Nixon was in any way intimidated or irritated by his host’s choice of venue for their meeting he was at pains not to show it. In fact given that he was known to be a serious, less than gregarious man whose temperament still bore the marks of his Quaker birth, a casual observer might have drawn the conclusion that he was in a positively sunny mood that morning.
It was said that on a clear day from his eerie high in the eight hundred and fifty feet tall seventy-storey centerpiece of the Rockefeller Centre, the man Nixon had beaten to the Republican Presidential nomination in 1960, could see over thirty-five miles in every direction. The great Art Deco skyscraper had been completed two years after the one hundred and two-storey Empire State Building, the tallest building of a complex of nineteen structures erected on a twenty-two acre site between 48th and 51st Streets by the father of the man who was now the Governor of New York State. The Rockefeller Center was then, and remained to this day the largest private construction project in history.
If Richard Nixon had been in Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller’s shoes he would have made the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza his campaign headquarters, too; more pertinently, he would not have agreed to this meeting in this place at such short notice if last week’s California Primary had not thrown the race for the Republican nomination into such abject chaos.
The great and the good of the Party had approached Nixon last year looking for a candidate whom they could anoint just before President Kennedy’s infamous ‘Moon Speech’ in Houston. At the time nobody had seriously considered the possibility that Jack Kennedy would run for a second term and a Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey ticket, no matter which man went for the Presidency had been polling better than any viable Republican alternative. The Party had been looking to Nixon, with the tacit support of one of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller or John Cabot Lodge, to run a ‘long campaign’ to ‘wear down’ the likely Democrat contenders before any of them had a chance to get out onto the stump. Nixon had rejected those approaches; and it had turned out to be one of the wisest decisions of his whole political career.
The three leading candidates had thus far cancelled each other out: sixty-one year old Henry Cabot Lodge junior appealed to a past that no longer existed; fifty-five year old Arizonan Senator Barry Goldwater’s strident call to slash the Federal Government’s interference in states’ rights and to ‘free the markets and American industry’ amounted to waving some kind of mythical magic wand to cure all the country’s ills and rang horribly hollow in the post-Cuban Missiles War, post-Battle of Washington world; while Nelson Rockefeller, whom many hard-liners regarded as no more than a ‘conservative Democrat’, was beginning to look as if he was going to stumble just short of the finishing line...again.
Richard Nixon regarded Cabot Lodge as a spent force. Goldwater was still talking about ‘rolling back the Soviet Union’ as if there had been no October War. There was no point doing business with Cabot Lodge, and he had more or less ruled out any kind of meeting of minds with Goldwater. However, the Rockefeller scenario was less straightforward. Rockefeller was, in GOP terms, a moderate, a liberal and in the same way Goldwater united some elements of the right of the Party, Rockefeller was the leading – possibly the only viable - candidate of the progressives.
For Nixon the political calculus was simple; he was a man neither of the left or the right who courtesy of his eight years as Eisenhower’s faithful – and dutifully obedient – Vice President between 1952 and 1960 still retained a public ‘presence’ and an aura of pre-Cuban Missiles catastrophe ‘reliability’. He had put his name forward in several primaries in the spring but not campaigned, held himself aloof from the GOP’s increasingly internecine machinations.
He had been biding his time, awaiting his moment.
And eventually his moment had dawned.
Goldwater 32%. Rockefeller 28%. Cabot Lodge 9%. Nixon 31%.
His home state of California had wedged open the door; and at last the way to the White House was open again.
In politics as in life timing is everything.
It did not matter that if the 28th Republican Convention – due to be held at the Cow Palace, San Mateo, California between July 13th and 16th – convened tomorrow the contest would be between Goldwater and Rockefeller, who between them owned seventy percent of the delegates. California had injected Nixon into the race and of all the candidates his were the cleanest hands. His ill-advised gubernatorial challenge to Pat Brown in the fall of 1962 excepted, he had stepped back from the rough and tumble of politics since his defeat to JFK in November 1960. He was still a relatively young man, unsullied by the October War and the criminal mishandling of its aftermath. If in this divided Union there was still room for a ‘unity’, or perhaps, a ‘healing’ nominee then it was not inconceivable that he might be just that man.
Not ‘inconceivable’ but problematic.
The problem was that while his highly tuned political antennae told him that the time might not be now; his heart was telling him that it was his duty to do something. His confidence had never really recovered after his narrow defeat to Jack Kennedy back in 1960; and losing out so badly to Pat Brown in the race for the Governorship of California in the febrile days after the October War in 1962 had been a real kick in the guts. After that he had been like a boxer down on the canvass for several months and it was only recently that he had regained his appetite for the fight. Nothing had so reinvigorated him than the things he was seeing and hearing all around him as he travelled the disunited Union.
In retrospect standing against Pat Brown in 1962 had been unforgivable hubris; he had been a two-term Vice President, Ike’s faithful lieutenant for eight years in which the Korean Conflict had been ‘shut down’ and relations with the Soviets managed peacefully. Ike would never have allowed the Cuban ‘situation’ to have got out control; and neither would Richard Milhous Nixon if he had been President in October 1962...
Nixon collected his faculties.
Dipping his toe in the California primary had been no more than testing the waters. Today’s meeting was more of the same; he had a week or two yet before he decided which way to play his cards.
If Nelson Rockefeller imagined he had come to Midtown Manhattan as a supplicant that was fine by Nixon. Politics was politics but the facts on the ground were the facts on the ground. Whoever won the Presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in five weeks time was going to find himself in a three, or perhaps a four-way race – an out and out dog fight - with whatever was left of the Democratic Party, the Deep South’s leading demagogue, George Wallace of Alabama in league with, or set against an unholy Democratic States’ Rights alliance managed by the Byrd Organization and likely headed up by that bastion of reaction Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Anybody who said he knew how that Devil’s brew was likely to pan out was an idiot or a charlatan.
The last time there had been a genuine three or four-way Presidential race had been in 1860, when Lincoln had been elected because John C. Breckinridge (Southern Democrat), Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat), and John Bell of Tennessee had stood on a Constitutional Union ticket. Lincoln had polled less than forty percent of the popular vote in that last anti-bellum General Election, with his two democratic opponents between them polling over three hundred and sixty thousand more votes. That election had
not actually caused the Civil War – that conflagration had been brewing for a generation – but it had hastened its onset and arguably, ensured that it went on for a lot longer than any sane man would have thought possible on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration.
Richard Nixon was not one of those men who believed that history repeated itself; but he was a man who saw parallels in the events of 1860-1861 which he did not want to see repeated in 1964-1965.
The Governor of New York was waiting for him in his palatial penthouse conference room at the northern end of the top floor of the giant, slab-sided skyscraper. Nixon had considered bringing his own entourage but decided to come alone; Rockefeller, like a robber baron of old, often surrounded himself with a circus of followers, mainly paid hirelings. Seasoned old stagers like the former Vice President suspected it was an admission of weakness not strength on the part of the handsome, darling of the Republican left. Walking alone into what might be a Lion’s den was the ultimate test of a real player’s fortitude; so he had come alone despite the objections of his Chief of Staff, John Haldeman.
Haldeman had been in advertising since he came out of the military, he was a hard case, the loyalist of the loyal who had been with Nixon in 1960 and 1962. Normally, Nixon took his counsel but today he had had a feeling, a gut feeling, that this was a thing best done alone.
Nelson Rockefeller was, as expected, flanked with a dozen aides, advisors and staffers, predominantly although not exclusively male, crew cut and dressed in expensive suits.
Nixon was pleasantly surprised when the room cleared as soon as the civilities had been concluded, leaving the Governor of New York, the former Vice President and Rockefeller’s long-time adviser, the widely respected Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program sizing each other up.
“It’s good to see you again, Dr Kissinger,” Richard Nixon smiled.
Chapter 17
Saturday 13th June 1964
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Newsweek Bureau Chief Ben Bradlee had moved his family to the state capital when he had established the new office in Philadelphia a couple of blocks from City Hall. He lived and worked in the big city five days a week, tried to get back home for the weekends. Things hardly ever worked out that way; but he joked that the next time there was a nuclear war he was going to feel a lot happier about it knowing that Antoinette ‘Tony’ and the kids were not living in a big city. There would have been a time when he would have felt guilty about being a member of a class that could afford to park his family in the country, just in case there was another war. But that was then and this was now.
“I didn’t know if you’d actually turn up, Ben,” the willowy blond smiled as she rose from the bench overlooking the slow flowing Susquehanna River. At this time of year the river was beginning to subside, exposing the muddy flanks of the scrub-topped islands in the stream.
Ben Bradlee had not been the only man in Philadelphia who had done a double take the first time he encountered the new head of Station of the British Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – mingling in diplomatic circles in the halls of the nation’s temporary capital. However, the woman who now styled herself Rachel Piotrowska was no kind of skeleton in his personal or professional cupboard.
The last time she had been in town – Washington DC before the war – she had been Hannah Ziegler, a German émigré courtesan, way out of his class. She had had burning red hair then, and a reputation for predatory conquests. Practically everybody had suspected that she was spying for somebody; but nobody had known for whom and she had had so many powerful friends and patrons that nobody had been brave enough to ask too many questions.
“Rachel?” Bradlee inquired, risking a smile.
The woman was dressed like an American housewife, her frock straight off the peg at Macy’s or some other big store and her makeup was applied with the garish liberality that seemed in vogue with matronly women approaching a certain age. It was as if she wanted to give every appearance of being mutton dressed up as lamb.
They shook hands.
“Nobody knows I’m here,” she said. “I was born Rachel Angelica Piotrowska in Lodz,” she added. “In nineteen twenty-eight, for what it is worth.”
“Okay...”
“And before you ask,” she went on pleasantly, her voice wryly accented, “I am not here to implicate you in anything underhand.”
Ben Bradlee took this with a pinch of salt.
The woman’s Newsweek file contained a picture of her on the arm of the Aga Khan, and gossip that she had once been the mistress of the late Shah of Iran. The last time she was in the US she had been the dazzling star of Washington high society for six months in 1961 before like a supernova suddenly winking out, she had disappeared without trace. And now she was back; the one acknowledged spy on the staff of the British Embassy in Philadelphia.
“No, really,” Rachel assured him. “Is it true that the Washington Post has lined you up as its next managing editor, Ben?”
How could she know that?
Ben Bradlee was already starting to think this meeting was a big mistake.
The woman’s eyes roved along the river bank, flicked past the man’s shoulder.
“Yes. I’ve been talking to the Post,” he conceded.
“I think it would be just up your street,” Rachel decided. “Shall we walk?”
Harrisburg had once been the most heavily industrialized – and therefore, polluted - town in the north east; but that was long ago and in the intervening decades nature had reclaimed the abandoned mills and factories, and garden suburbs had spread slowly up into the hills and down almost to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shady trees and idyllic paths lined the sides of the great river which meandered through the old town. That same river which now ran clean had been black with the spoil and effluent of industry only fifty years ago. Harrisburg’s industry had moved north to Pittsburgh and Ohio where it was free to expand, spread its wings and blight new landscapes.
“I didn’t agree to this meeting to talk about me,” Ben Bradlee reminded the woman.
“No,” she agreed, “you agreed to it because it was too good an opportunity to miss and the people at the Post haven’t actually offered you the managing editor job yet, Ben.”
Bradlee did not rise to the bait.
“Do you know what a ‘Head of Station’ like me actually does in a friendly country?” The woman asked.
“Spy?”
“No, we leave that sort of thing to others. There’s a Naval, an RAF and a Military attaché at the Embassy; gathering intelligence is their jobs. My job is to talk to all the people Lord Franks, our Ambassador, cannot speak to. Nobody at the Embassy would dream of actually ‘spying’ on you.”
Ben Bradlee grunted an uneasy laugh.
“Okay. What were you doing here in sixty-one?” He countered, he hoped with a lightness of touch.
“Perhaps, I wasn’t working for the British in those days, Ben,” the woman replied enigmatically.
Washington during the first months of the Kennedy Administration was a party city; Camelot had come to town and overnight DC was no longer the drab, predictable place it had been for the eight long years of the Eisenhower Presidency. In retrospect Bradlee had been swept along by the euphoria like everybody else.
Ben Bradlee’s recent estrangement from the Kennedy circle was common knowledge in Philadelphia. He and Jack Kennedy had been close friends for many years and the cooling of relations between them had coincided with his former contacts within the US intelligence community cold-shouldering the Newsweek Bureau Chief.
“What goes around comes around,” Rachel observed.
To a passerby the couple might be mistaken for a husband and wife strolling on a sunny morning, perhaps on the way to a leisurely lunch, presumably conversing about the practical minutiae of their shared lives.
Privately, Bradlee was asking himself how much the woman knew about his past involvement with the CIA and whether it was about to become a problem. In the
early 1950s at the time his friendship with the future President was first blooming, Bradlee was on the staff of the US Information Educational Exchange – the USIE, later known as USIA controlled by the Voice of America – responsible for producing films, speeches, news items, research papers, magazine articles and propaganda materials for the Central Intelligence Agency. Bradlee had worked with the CIA in Europe to ‘spin’ the coverage of the trial and subsequent execution of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. In the mid-1950s Bradlee was not only close to the then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but personally close to James Jesus Angleton. Bradlee’s second wife, Antoinette Pinchot, whom he had married in 1957 was a confidante of Angleton’s wife, Cicely d'Autremont; and the sister of Mary Pinchot Meyer whose husband, Cord Meyer was heavily involved in Operation Mockingbird, a major CIA campaign to subvert and influence the media...
“Is your wife’s sister still one of the President’s mistresses?” Rachel inquired idly. From what she had heard the playboy who had blown up the World in October 1962 had been more or less unmanned by the experience. “Or has Jack passed her on to his little brother?”
Bradlee halted in mid-stride.
He was surprised to be met by a seraphic smile.
“That’s better,” the woman cooed. “I wasn’t sure I had your full and undivided attention.”
“What do you want?”
“Cards on the table?”
“Yes.”
“I want to know if I can trust you, Ben.”
That was ridiculous; they could never trust each other!
“Really?” He retorted with less civility than he meant.
“See, we understand each other perfectly,” Rachel concluded. “Jack Kennedy and Prime Minister Thatcher came to ‘an understanding’ at Hyannis Port a little over a week ago. It was a very one-sided ‘understanding’ but one that we, the British were prepared to go along with. Mrs Thatcher, from what I can understand, was of the view that an agreement which avoided armed conflict between our two countries was a thing worth ‘taking home’. In lieu of reparations a new Marshall Plan, the Fulbright Plan, was agreed and in return we, as an earnest of our good intentions, agreed to share intelligence again with the US, and to do nothing to undermine JFK’s re-election campaign. Incidentally, there are a lot of things we can do to torpedo JFK. If we wanted to, that is. That was probably why he signed up to the Fulbright Plan. The problem is that here we are, not a fortnight later, and the President, or if not the President, then all his men, are communicating their intention to renege on every single one of the undertakings Mrs Thatcher took home from Cape Cod.”
