by James Philip
“It’s the President, sir!”
“He collapsed...”
“They had to work on him for several minutes before the ambulances arrived...”
Johnson had marched grimly into the huge, vaulted lobby of the former Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank Building – a building he had personally recommended as the Philadelphia White House on grounds of its grandeur and proximity to City Hall – soon after the decision was taken to relocate the Federal Government to Pennsylvania the previous winter.
His entrance coincided with the gurney carrying the stricken President of the United States of America rolling out of the basement lift to be instantly surrounded by heavily armed Secret Servicemen and Marines. Medics were holding saline drips high in the air, there was a spider’s web of tubes leading down into the inert, apparently lifeless body on the trolley. A man in scrubs shouted and the emergency team halted; immediately he began pumping Jack Kennedy’s chest.
Beside the gurney the President’s younger brother was watching, horrified in his helplessness.
Johnson stopped to put a fatherly arm around the Attorney General’s shoulders.
“You go with Jack, Bobby,” the tall, craggy-faced Texan said. “Talk to me when you get to the hospital.”
The Situation Room was crowded.
Johnson strode in, his bodyguards parting the crowd.
“Anybody who doesn’t need to be here ought to be somewhere else!” He declared. “What the fuck is going on in the Gulf, Curtis?” He demanded as the room cleared.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was the coolest man in the room, the freshest and the hardest eyed.
“The Brits hit us with all they got,” the veteran bomber leader reported. He sighed and for a moment Johnson thought he was lost for words. “And then they went straight back to fighting the Russians.”
“What about Sixth Fleet?”
Curtis LeMay straightened to his full height, squared up to the Texan.
“Clarey surrendered the fleet.”
“Jesus!” The Vice President groaned. “Somebody tell me that we’re talking to the Brits?”
McGeorge Bundy, his illness-wrecked face a gaunt mask raised a feeble hand from where he had sunk into a chair after Johnson’s arrival.
“Fulbright has been on the phone to the Embassy off and on for the last couple of hours. Lord Franks and his people are very polite but they’re not in the mood for talking. Lord Franks told Bill that a de facto state of undeclared war exists between the UK and the US.” He forced a ghastly grimace. “You need to hear what Premier Thatcher told the President after the attack on the Centaur battle group...”
Johnson swung on Curtis LeMay.
“General, remove anybody from this room who doesn’t need to be here!”
Presently, the Vice President settled in the Commander-in-Chief’s chair.
“Play it!” He ordered gruffly.
There was a short interregnum which Johnson employed to fix his face against all evil.
‘Mr President, I will not let this stand! Do you hear me?’
A woman spurned, humiliated and so angry she literally did not care what happened next.
‘Do you hear me, Mr President?
Jack Kennedy’s voice was that of a man who has no defense. His was the disorientation of a man who had been caught with his pants down around his ankles on top of another woman and he knew the affair was going to end badly.
‘Yes, I hear you, Prime Minister...’
“This will not stand.’
Lyndon Johnson resisted the urge to shut his eyes and to bury his head in his hands.
‘Be assured that I will use every gun, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon that I have at my disposal...”
JFK heard this the day before the Brits sank the fucking Kitty Hawk and he honestly believed he was still calling the shots?
‘Every weapon that I have. I swear I will avenge this betrayal one day. Do your worst. I will fight you with my own eye teeth if I have to! My own eye teeth! May you rot in Hell!”
Johnson was suddenly looking hard at Curtis LeMay.
The Vice President might not have had the stellar ‘good war’ back in the 1940s that his President had enjoyed; he had been that much older, and consequently served higher up the food chain than the young tyro who lived off those heroic PT-107 days ever since. However, unlike JKF, Johnson had worked on the staffs of the real movers and shakers of the Pacific War, thereby acquiring an invaluable insight into the minds of top military men.
“What operations are presently in hand in the Middle East, General LeMay?” He asked bluntly.
The airman seemed relieved to be able to make his confession.
“In accordance with undertakings given to the Soviets six aircraft of the 319th Bomb Wing are in the air within one hour’s flying time of its failsafe point over the Black Sea, sir. Pre-positioned KC-135 Tankers of the 7th Air Refueling Squadron will rendezvous with the 319th’s birds in approximately ninety minutes, sir.”
Johnson took several seconds to make sense of this.
“You’re telling me that SAC B-52s are flying ground support operations for the fucking Russians?”
“Yes, sir,” Curtis LeMay confirmed disgustedly.
KC-135’s based in Spain had been scrambled to top up the B-52s over the Western Mediterranean, landed and followed the bombers east. The 319th Bomb Group had been tasked to fly to the Middle East at such short notice SAC was making up the operation plan as it went along.
Without being consciously aware that he had stood up Lyndon Johnson discovered he was on his feet with his clenched fists resting on the Situation Room conference table. The red mist descended, his heart pounded hurtfully in his chest.
“No!” He spat angrily. “Not while I live, gentlemen!”
Chapter 55
Saturday 4th July 1964
City Hall, Philadelphia
Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, the re0instated Ambassador to the United States of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rose to his feet as Lyndon Johnson swept into the first floor room overlooking the crowds gathering on Market Street and 15th Street, and in the open areas in front of City Hall. Yesterday’s storms had blown through, cleared the air promising a warm, balmy afternoon.
The Russian had not met the Vice President since before the October War, their previous encounters being brief, terse affairs.
Hands were shaken perfunctorily.
Johnson made no gesture inviting his guest to take a seat.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Ambassador,” the towering Texan declared, folding his arms across his chest. “I don’t give a goddam what you people concocted with JFK’s boys. Because of those mistakes,” he snarled angrily, “what we have on our hands is a situation which could go nuclear at the drop of a hat.”
Dobrynin had been brought to City Hall to confer with President Kennedy; he did not know what to make of the Vice President’s arrival or his obvious hostility.
“Forgive me, I...”
“President Kennedy is fighting for his life in Thomas Jefferson Hospital. He was taken ill at the White House earlier this morning. I only learned the substance of the matters under discussion by our two governments in the last few hours. You need to tell your government that I will respect the agreed provisions concerning a five-year bi-lateral non-aggression pact between our countries on condition that there is an immediate cease fire in the Persian Gulf by all parties.”
Dobrynin opened his mouth to speak, shut it again.
Lyndon Johnson was not negotiating with him he was dictating terms.
“Soviet forces in Iran and Iraq will unconditionally disengage and withdraw to the 31st Parallel.” The Vice President was leaning towards, and a little over the shorter man. The ‘treatment’ had only just begun. “That’s LATITUDE THIRTY-ONE DEGREES NORTH,” he reiterated. “Just so we understand each other. That movement needs to start happening sometime in the next four hours or I will order the Strategic Air Command
B-52 wings already airborne in the region to bomb your forces, and if necessary, what’s left of your miserable fucking country back to the Stone Age!”
Dobrynin suddenly had ice in his veins, freezing his spinal cord and momentarily robbing him of the capacity to reply.
“Do we understand each other, sir?”
Chapter 56
Saturday 4th July 1964
British Embassy, Wister Park, Philadelphia
Lord Franks put down the phone and looked to his deputy, Sir Patrick Dean and the two women in the room. His wife Barbara smiled supportively, Rachel Piotrowska frowned an unspoken question.
The chanting of the gathering crowd – already perhaps two or three thousand strong in the nearby park – battered the closed windows of the Embassy. The mood of the protestors was ugly and the taint of tear gas pervaded the whole compound. The Philadelphia PD had cleared the street at the front of the building and cordoned off the road for two hundred yards in either direction; more National Guardsmen had arrived to form a long line of rifles behind the hard-pressed riot police in the park.
“There is no fresh news from the Thomas Jefferson Hospital. President Kennedy remains gravely ill. His wife and children are flying up from Camp David and apparently, Archbishop Krol has been called to his bedside to be on hand should it become necessary to administer the last rites.”
The British Ambassador rose stiffly to his feet and walked to the window; the others gravitating to his side.
“Vice President Johnson has mandated a cease fire in the Gulf and he is prepared to back it up with whatever force is necessary. This has already been communicated directly to England and he asks that I do whatever is in my powers to persuade our government to ‘play ball’.”
He looked to the Chargé d’affaire.
“Would you please be so good as to set up a link to Oxford please, Patrick?”
The other man nodded, patted the Ambassador’s arm supportively and departed.
Down in the basement papers were being fed into two old wood-burning stoves, the smoke from the half-blocked old forgotten flues was drifting west towards the city on the light afternoon airs.
When full realization of what had happened in the Persian Gulf and the fact that the US Sixth Fleet had been surrendered into British hands without a shot being fired, America would briefly, be shocked and then monumentally enraged. Nothing was quite so corrosive to human reason than communal humiliation; there would be calls for revenge, to lash out and never had the US been more of a dangerously wounded behemoth. That even now its hamstrung military – fighting a brutal war in the Midwest, mutilated by savage budget cuts, its once great Navy smashed and interned half-way around the World – still held the balance of global nuclear terror in its mighty hands.
The British Ambassador had spoken emolliently to Lyndon Johnson, promising to work for peace but in his heart he knew that whatever bonds had once tied the old and the new World were probably fractured beyond repair in his lifetime. All that could be hoped for was that somehow, in some way the war in the Gulf could be prevented from spreading. It mattered not who had betrayed whom; less still who had fired the first shot. Thousands of British, Commonwealth and American lives had been lost in the last two days in an insane undeclared war between former allies.
The facts as to what had happened would emerge, piecemeal in the coming days and weeks; the reasons why might never be fully established.
“What is there to stop Johnson attacking us anyway?” Rachel asked quietly.
Chapter 57
Saturday 4th July 1964
City Hall, Philadelphia
Something dreadful had happened. Something dreadful on the scale of Pearl Harbor or the fall of the Philippines in the winter of 1941-42; something so bad that even before people knew what was actually going on, that it was going to scar the nation’s psyche for a generation. There had been two great naval battles in the faraway Persian Gulf, one a bloodless victory and then a second which nobody was pretending had been in any way bloodless, or any kind of victory. A day or two ago the oilfields of the cradle of civilization had seemed an awfully long way away – they could have been on a different planet for all most Americans cared or knew – but today the distant battles felt as if they had taken place in Hampton Roads. The all-pervasive unease was visceral, something one could almost touch and yet Americans were doing what they always do at times of crisis; complaining, speculating and carrying on with business as normal.
Or that at least was what the Dan and Gretchen Brenckmann had decided to do. They had VIP, ring-side tickets for the biggest game in town and no matter that any time soon the US and the USSR might be lobbing thermonuclear hand grenades at each other – most likely with the British in between the heavyweights busily dropping bombs on both sides – they were going to be at what, on any other day, had the makings of being one of the most historic events in the whole story of the Republic.
This was the day that the President of the United States signaled to the World that Abraham Lincoln’s century-old emancipation of the slaves meant that every man, woman and child in America was as free and as equal under the sight of the law as any other.
Big scaffolding stands had been erected flanking the steps of City Hall in such a way as to not obscure the line of sight down Market Street. There had been a huge debate about ‘which’ City Hall steps ought to host today’s jamboree, in the end Congress had determined that since the largest available ‘open space’ in the surrounding otherwise build up and enclosed cityscape was on the west side of the great building, that was where the crowds would be channeled and all the ‘speechifying’ would take place. Everything had been done in a frantic rush even though everybody knew that the March on Philadelphia had been due to reach the makeshift capital on Independence Day over five months ago.
‘But,’ as his wife had told Dan Brenckmann more than once in recent months, ‘what do you expect if you leave it to our lawmakers and legislators to organize anything.’
Neither of the newlyweds dwelt on things they could do little or nothing about.
Dan’s parents were in Oxford England – his father was Ambassador to the Court of Woodstock – and therefore at the nexus of the transatlantic political firestorm, very much strangers in a strange land.
Dan’s older brother Walter was onboard the Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf; and although it was impossible to imagine anything really bad befalling him on the biggest, most powerful warship in the World, Gretchen and he still worried about him.
In fact Dan suspected his wife was more worried about Walter than he was. Gretchen and his brother had formed the foundation of an enduring friendship last year when she had hidden out in the family’s Boston house to escape the rapacious DC press corps. Dan had never really gotten to the bottom of it but Gretchen wrote regularly – most weeks – to Walter and he always wrote back with, what was for Walter, revelatory candor and loquacity. None of which had ever been any kind of secret; Gretchen shared every letter with Dan but he was wise enough to know that despite the happiness of their marital situation Gretchen would always carry a small, unrequited flame in her heart for his brother.
The Brenckmann’s settled in their reserved seats, held hands and looked one to the other. Fifteen yards away technicians were testing the battery of microphones on the rugged platform perched on the steps. There were Philadelphia PD officers and crisp-suited Secret Service men everywhere.
In the distance there was muted cheering and clapping.
The March was coming; led by its handsome, charismatic leader it was as if the Pied Piper was guiding the faithful towards their unknown destiny. America was changing all around them and there were suddenly tears in Gretchen’s eyes.
“We should start having babies,” she said in a whisper, oblivious to the other people moving into their seats all around her and her husband.
Dan smiled, squeezed his wife’s hand.
“Yes,” he agreed, smiling broadly.
“Seri
ously,” Gretchen sniffed. “If we come through this we should start having babies as soon as possible.”
The man leaned towards her and planted a soft kiss on her lips.
He had loved Gretchen Louisa Betancourt from the moment he laid eyes on her at that dire ‘Partnership At Home’ afternoon ‘get together’ in Quincy over a year before the war. Quincy had been blown away that awful October night that he Gretchen had sat on veranda of her father’s house in Wethersfield, Connecticut.
They had thought they had survived the end of the World.
Now it was all happening again.
But at least they had each other.
Chapter 58
Saturday 4th July 1964
Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, California
“I cannot imagine welcoming the Reverend King and his marchers for freedom on a day when America faced such grave danger.”
Nathan Zabriski and Caroline Konstantis had turned on the radio to hear the speeches from Philadelphia an hour ago. There had been delay upon delay, with announcers filling time with the frightening snippets of news and hearsay circulating in the capital. There had been two great naval battles in the Persian Gulf, heavy bombing raids and some kind of massive ‘clash of armor’ in the deserts of southern Iraq and Iran. In the Mediterranean there was a quote ‘tense standoff’ between the British Royal Navy and the US Sixth Fleet. The governments of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal among others had condemned ‘American’ and ‘Soviet’ aggression in the Middle East. There were unconfirmed reports that nuclear weapons had been used – it was not known by whom – in Iraq and in the Persian Gulf.
