by James Philip
Ben Bradlee had no idea where this was going.
“You can imagine,” the woman went on, “how miffed the Ambassador was to discover, a couple of days after the Philadelphia PD and the Pennsylvania National Guard had allowed two car bombs to be exploded outside the British Embassy, that Administration members had been holding secret talks with former Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and former Soviet Representative to the United Nations Zorin.”
Bradlee’s eyes must have been suddenly as wide as saucers.
“How...”
“Trust me, I know. I also know that Admiral McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations is scheduled to fly out to India, ostensibly to discuss the transfer of half-a-dozen old Reserve Fleet ships to the Indian Navy, coincidentally at the same time the USS Kitty Hawk is due to pay a goodwill visit to Bombay.”
The Newsweek Bureau Chief’s head was spinning with possibilities and dark premonitions.
“The thing is, Ben,” Rachel continued levelly. She could have been discussing the price of fruit and vegetables. “The virulence of the Administration’s rhetoric and its repeatedly stated stance of non-involvement in the Persian Gulf sits a little uneasily with the behind the scenes maneuvering of Secretary of State Fulbright and various other luminaries close to the President. Honestly and truly, the docility of the great American press is beginning to feel like a conspiracy of silence back in England. Granted, it may be that we inadvertently find ourselves at cross-purposes, but,” she shrugged, “either way, it would be a dreadful pity if blood was to be shed because something was lost in translation.”
Rachel Piotrowska turned to go.
She hesitated a moment.
“Marion Mimi Beardsley,” she whispered.
Ben Bradlee frowned, recognizing the name for all the wrong reasons and thinking it wise not to reply.
Rachel sympathized with the Newsweek man.
“Marion Mimi Beardsley would be the nineteen year old intern that Jack Kennedy was fucking around the time of the Cuban Missiles thing.”
The man remained silent.
“That would have been around the time the President was also trying to talk China and India out of going to war; the Russians were basing missiles on Cuba and Dr Feelgood – presumably - was injecting JFK with his quack remedies, and,” Rachel smiled a sour, humorless smile, “all the while the golden boy was obsessed by Marion Mimi Beardsley. It was hardly surprising that he took his eye off ‘the ball’, don’t you think?”
Ben Bradlee watched Rachel walk away.
For the first time in his life he was starting to feel really dirty.
The woman had told him nothing he did not know.
He had known all along and he had done...nothing.
Chapter 18
Saturday 13th June 1964
RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, Midtown Manhattan, New York City
The forty-one year old Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program had been born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Furth, Bavaria. German Jews, his family had fled Nazi persecution and arrived, via London, in New York in September 1938. He and his family had swiftly assimilated into the German Jewish immigrant milieu in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, and Heinz had become Henry. After high school he had enrolled as a part-time student at the City College of New York studying accountancy, his first day job being in a shaving brush works.
Drafted into the Army in 1943, aged twenty he had become a naturalized US citizen while undergoing basic training at Spartanburg, South Carolina at the beginning of what was to be an extraordinary three-year military career. Posted to the 84th Infantry Division his fluency in German, allied to the fact that wherever he went he was patently the cleverest man in the room, saw him attached to the Division’s intelligence section. Notwithstanding that he was still only a private soldier he distinguished himself during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Later, due to the paucity of German speakers in 8th Division, he briefly found himself in control of the whole of the occupied, and largely wrecked, city of Krefeld, responsible for restoring civil administration; a task he accomplished in just over a week. Promoted to sergeant, Kissinger had headed a team sent to Hanover to track down former Gestapo officers and stay behind troublemakers. By June of 1945 he was appointed commandant of the Bensheim CIC – Counter Intelligence Corps – in the Bergstrasse District of Hesse responsible for de-Nazification. By 1946, discharged from the Army, Kissinger, still aged only twenty-three, was at Oberursel teaching at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King.
In retrospect his teenage flight from his native land, his forced transplantation into an alien and wholly different foreign culture in Manhattan, the Army, the war and his return to a Germany unrecognizable from his youth during which he had been required to shoulder the sort of burdens which would have crushed most young men, had thoroughly tempered Henry Kissinger in preparation for whatever lay ahead of him in an unknown and unknowable future.
In 1950 the former night school accountancy student at the City College of New York received his AB Degree summa cum laude in political science at Harvard. In 1951 and 1954 he received his MA and PhD while serving as a consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board; his doctoral dissertation – Peace, Legitimacy and Equilibrium – having been a study of the statesmanship of Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, more commonly known as Lord Castlereagh and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich; respectively the architect of the Congress of Vienna and the man who designed the diplomatic shape of Europe in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars.
A fellow of the faculty in Harvard’s prestigious Department of Government during the fifties, Kissinger had worked with and for, and directed or consulted on behalf of a raft of high profile think tanks, academic and governmental forums and committees; including the Centre for International Affairs, the National Security Council’s Operations Coordinating Board, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Rand Corporation. In 1957 he published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Prior to assuming the directorship of the Harvard Defense Studies program, he had worked for two years for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project.
Although he had supported Rockefeller’s nomination in 1960 only a fool made the mistake of thinking that Henry Kissinger, the man who was by a country mile the foremost Republican foreign policy thinker of the latter years of the – essentially, status quo - Eisenhower era, was in any way Nelson Rockefeller’s man.
Richard Nixon had known Kissinger for many years.
Superficially, Nixon had always been a Republican hawk, a man who paid lip service to many of the ‘rollback’ preferences of the right of the Party. He had been Vice President to the man who was, after George Washington, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, the greatest American soldier in history, a living legend, and it had been the Eisenhower Administration’s policy to resist further Marxist expansion wherever it threatened short of all out global war. Everybody had known that; and the Soviets had acted accordingly. But that was then and this was now, and Nixon saw all too clearly the dreadful pitfalls of failing to underpin ‘America First’ with a coherent, rational approach to foreign affairs consistent with the long-term geopolitical strategic interests of the United States.
Before the surprise Soviet attack on Malta and the Red Army’s move into Iran and Iraq, the Kennedy Administration had looked as if it was in control; that somebody at the top had finally got a grip again. Since then it was blindingly obvious that it was being swept along by events. Criminally, it had failed to lock the British – whom any idiot in the State Department ought to have realized was the US’s one sure bulwark against renewed Soviet expansionism – into a generation-long alliance. The way the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty had been allowed to lapse and the muddled-headed ever shifting policy towards the Middle East was a recipe for God alone knew what future disasters...
“Good to see you again, Mr Vice President,” Henry Kissinger half-smiled, shaking Richard Nixon’s hand.
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Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger and Nixon were standing at windows commanding the magnificent view north towards Central Park, and across the East River to Astoria, Jackson Heights and the length of Long Island where, many miles away the horizon dissolved into the haze.
Nixon turned back to Nelson Rockefeller.
The billionaire grandson of the founder of Standard Oil was a handsome, much more telegenic but profoundly less driven man than himself, a man to whom lavish philanthropy and a love of the arts was probably as important to him as anything he honestly believed he might achieve in politics, but who nevertheless felt that it was his duty to pursue high office. He was the living embodiment of the great American tradition of Andrew Carnegie and countless others, it was not enough just to be wealthy; God had smiled on him and he owed it to his fellow man to repay that trust. He had served in the Administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eisenhower, albeit in second level non cabinet posts, done his time in government in preparation for greater things. Thus, Nelson Rockefeller was at once a giant of the world of commerce, the arts, and could not but also bestride the stage of politics, presently as Governor of New York State and, in his own eyes, as a worthy contender for the Presidency in November.
“Henry,” Rockefeller said portentously, “takes the view that sooner or later the Administration’s Mediterranean-Middle East policy will, quite literally, blow up in Jack Kennedy’s face. If Henry will forgive me for paraphrasing his thoughts on this and related matters,” the mogul glanced apologetically to the inscrutable academic, “the next President of the United States will probably be the man with the most credible plan to ‘clean up the mess’.”
Richard Nixon thought the calculus was rather more complicated than that; even as things stood Jack Kennedy was going to leave his successor – only the Democrats still thought a candidate called Kennedy was electable to any public office in the US, which was a Hell of a compliment to the party machine old Joe Kennedy had created, and that Claude Betancourt had somehow reinvigorated in recent months – a country on the verge of anarchy. If things got much worse there might not actually be a Union left by November!
Nixon moved to stand at the window, staring out across the most astounding cityscape in Christendom. Overseeing the avenues of skyscrapers, with the great city stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, a man could not help but be enthralled, infused with the latent might and majesty of New York. The city was emblematic of what the nation should be, invincible, irrepressible, undefeated and yet America was tearing itself apart. He understood why so many people had been seduced by the idea of ‘America First’; it was the easy answer even if it was a failed nineteenth century solution to a twentieth century crisis.
America First was intuitively what most Americans wanted; a self-flagellating ordinance that mortgaged the futures of all their children.
There were plenty of nearby chairs; none of the men made a move to sit down. Instead, the Governor of New York and Henry Kissinger joined Nixon at the window, each man staring into the void between them and street level thinking their own thoughts.
US politics was about oil.
Oil, coal and steel, Wall Street and so much else; but in the end everything came back to oil because without oil there was no American economic behemoth, and there would be no more American dreams. Maybe one day somebody would make nuclear power portable enough and clean enough to drive the modern world; until that day came everything the three men saw before them was built on oil. Latin American and Indonesian oil which would have flowed all around the World before the October War, Texan and Californian fields previously priced out of the market by cheap Saudi crude had easily filled the pre-war ‘production gap’; the country was awash with fuel, its refineries ready to cook off and export their production to overseas markets that no longer existed. The looming ‘energy deficits’ that economists had forecast with greater and greater alarm throughout the fifties had gone away; for now anyway although the doom mongers talked about a reprieve of eighteen months, possibly two years, dismissing the Administrations projections of a ‘ten year energy sufficiency window’ as the ramblings of mad men.
What happened in the Persian Gulf mattered to every American.
“The Administration has boxed itself in,” Henry Kissinger said weightily. “Secretary of State Fulbright is operating with his hands tied behind his back. There is only so much he can say to reassure our friends and allies in the Middle East when his interlocutors know that President Kennedy has vetoed the deployment of ground forces in the region. The recent failed coup in Cairo has effectively knocked the Egyptians out of the equation; in other circumstances the Israelis would seek to take advantage of the Nasser Regime’s vulnerability.”
He shrugged, went on, addressing his remarks to the cityscape the other side of the window.
“The British have shrewdly created a structural ambiguity in Western relations throughout the Arab world. Presently, it is unclear to whom they have made guarantees. Conversely, they have made an unconditional military commitment to defend their concessions in Iran at Abadan, and to maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf. At the same time the British have avoided further diluting their forces in the Mediterranean. While we,” he sighed, “have left the largest naval force available to us, the Sixth Fleet, hostage to events in that sea, while at the same time deploying significantly more than fifty percent of the war-fighting capability of the Seventh Fleet away from the Pacific, where we also have vital interests to the Indian Ocean where, at this time we have none. Or rather, no vital interests that we are publicly, or as I understand the situation, diplomatically, willing to defend. Sending the USS Kitty Hawk and her escorting fleet into waters so close to a war zone, that is, the Persian Gulf, without a clear mandate and mission is incredibly dangerous, gentlemen. No good will come of it even if by some outrageous stroke of good fortune nobody makes a mistake and the whole thing does not result in a disaster.”
Nelson Rockefeller turned his back to the view.
“What do we think Jack Kennedy and Bill Fulbright have got in mind?” He asked bluntly.
Kissinger shrugged.
“That depends on if we believe the Administration is actually talking to the Russians, Governor.”
Richard Nixon brushed aside this verbal parry.
“I disagree,” he declared, his voice more sanguine than he felt.
Neither of his companions spoke.
“I’ve got no problem with talking to the Russians,” Nixon explained. “Ike would never to have stopped talking to Ambassador Dobrynin in the first place. Locking him away in the country like that was a mistake.”
His invocation of Eisenhower’s sure tenure at the wheel of state was noted for future reference by both Rockefeller and Kissinger.
Richard Nixon looked thoughtfully down into the city hundreds of feet beneath his feet.
“The real question is: what exactly are we talking to the Russians about?”
Chapter 19
Monday 15th June 1964
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
General Curtis LeMay had taken exception to the Commander-in-Chief summoning him to what he regarded to be a completely unnecessary meeting. The President and other senior members of the Administration did not need further briefings on the deteriorating situation west of Lake Michigan. What needed to happen was for somebody in the Administration to start making hard decisions; hard decisions which ought to have been taken weeks and months ago.
Had the President heeded his advice back in April the Administration might have been dealing with the public backlash of a short, sharp – granted brutal – snuffing out of the smoldering fires in Chicago rather than worrying what do about a firestorm raging out of control in northern Illinois and across large tracts of Wisconsin.
At a conservative estimate something like twenty thousand square miles of Illinois and Wisconsin was now directly under the control of the insurgents and another ten thousand square miles
under dire threat. There was some hope that summer storms – thundery and squally – forecast over the next few days might slow the advancing tide of rebellion spreading north west up Interstate 94 through Madison towards still – thankfully – distant Minneapolis, and west along Route 151 towards the Iowan border crossing at Dubuque. Some hope but not a lot while the roads remained intact and the majority of bridges still stood standing. Likewise, as long as the rebel horde was permitted to live off the land over which it was spreading, like a malignant plague, it was hard to envisage anything halting the nightmare short of the Mississippi.
Minnesota and Iowa ought to be under martial law by now, guarding against the possibility of rebels emerging out of the countryside to seize vital towns, railheads, airfields, bridges and road junctions deep in the interior tens or hundreds of miles behind US lines.
The Governors of Iowa and Minnesota had demanded troops and emergency supplies but thus far resisted any attempt to in any way supplant or even reduce their own summary emergency powers.
Curtis LeMay felt as if he was fighting war that his political masters were trying to pretend was happening in somebody else’s god-dammed country!
Jesus wept!
