—
Harry Truman had eaten rubber chicken at more political dinners than he could remember, let alone count. Sometimes it was good rubber chicken. The fried drumsticks he’d had in Kentucky on his 1948 reelection campaign he did still remember, and fondly. The stuff he’d downed in Reno on that same campaign he also recalled, but not so happily. He’d had the trots for most of a week after that banquet.
What was on his plate here in Buffalo tonight wouldn’t go down in either of those columns. He could eat it. It wasn’t interesting. If it had been a baseball player, it would have been a backup infielder with a decent glove who hit .250 but had no power. Serviceable. Not memorable.
A local politico named Steven Pankow stood up to introduce him. Pankow aspired to be mayor of Buffalo after the next election. He might well make it. He had the self-confidence, the glibness, and the money he’d acquired from a successful career selling cars.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great privilege to present to you the President of the United States, Mr. Harry S Truman,” he said from the lectern. He also had a slight Polish accent, which in this part of the country was in itself a political asset of sorts.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Pankow,” Truman said as he walked to the lectern. Then he said it again into the mike. He got a warm hand from the crowd of dignitaries and other prosperous upstate Democrats. Applause never went stale. He went on, “Thank you all for coming to the museum today to take a look at the dinosaur.”
That won him a laugh, maybe a bigger one than the joke deserved. But many a truth was spoken in jest. He’d volunteered for his own political extinction, but he would have been pushed if he hadn’t jumped.
“The cast always changes, but the show goes on,” he said. “It has to. We need to elect as many Democrats as we can in November, from the top of the ticket all the way down, to make sure the so-and-sos on the other side do as little damage as possible. The way things look, the Republicans seem to be running on the slogan ‘Throw the rascals in!’ ”
He got another laugh for what looked like another jesting truth. The real problem, or what looked like the real problem to Truman and the rest of the pols in the room, was that the Republicans were all too likely to throw their rascals in and the ones who were Democrats out.
“We’ve held the White House and Congress for the past twenty years,” Truman went on. “Oh, the Republicans took Congress a few years ago, but they made such a do-nothing mess of it, the people made them give it back two years later.”
They blistered their palms clapping for that. Had the President been in the audience instead of giving the speech, he would have clapped, too. He’d won the tag Give ’Em Hell Harry not least by tearing into the Republican-led Congress when he was running for his own term in 1948. That had gone a long way toward giving him the election.
“They say we can’t win this upcoming Presidential race. They sure do say a lot of stupid things, don’t they?” Truman grinned out at the crowd. “I say they’re full of hooey. I’d say they were full of something else, something from the barnyard, but we have ladies present. I do want to remind you of a picture somebody took of me four years ago. I was holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune with a big old headline—DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. So tell me, folks, did Dewey defeat Truman?”
“No!” everybody shouted.
“That’s right. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman. If he had, you wouldn’t be here today putting up with my hot air,” Truman said. “And whoever gets our nomination this time around can win the same way I did. All he has to do is work hard, never give up, and remember he’s running for the little man, not for the fat cats. Fat cats always vote Republican. They’ve got other things wrong with ’em, too.”
They whooped and hollered. They liked him fine when he was laying into the GOP. When he had to talk about the war and the punishment America had taken and how things in Europe and Korea were going…No, he wasn’t so popular then. If he had been, he would have run again. So he steered clear of anything that had to do with foreign affairs as far as he could—which wasn’t far.
“We’ve got us a fine field of candidates,” he said. “The way it looks to me is, we’ve got a better field than they’ll run in the Kentucky Derby next week. This is the state Averell Harriman comes from, of course. He’s a fine man. Since he spent time in Moscow as a diplomat during the last war, he knows the Russians as well as any American is likely to. If I haven’t found peace by the time I leave office, I know he’ll make a good one.”
No, he couldn’t ignore the wider world, however much he wanted to. He won more applause, tentative at first but then growing. Everyone wanted a good peace. Finding terms both sides could accept was the hard part.
“Now, I wouldn’t mind if Mr. Harriman were to be the nominee, but I also wouldn’t mind if any of the other leading candidates got the nod.” Truman liked Harriman at least as well as any of the others, and better than most. But he wasn’t about to endorse him publicly. As near as he could tell, his endorsement would be the kiss of death for whoever was unlucky enough to get it.
“The most important thing is, whichever candidate wins the nomination, we all have to get behind him and work for him as hard as we can. No Dixiecrats this time around, please. No so-called Progressives. We’re all Democrats together, consarn it, and we’ve got to stick together as Donkeys against whichever jackass the Elephants run against us. Thanks very much, folks!”
He got a laugh and applause this time. It looked more and more as if the junior Senator from Wisconsin would bear the Republicans’ standard. Without the war, Truman would have bet on Eisenhower. But a general’s luster tarnished when men were fighting and dying all over again. Senator Taft kept trying to pretend Senator McCarthy didn’t exist. It wasn’t working.
Well, this bash cost twenty-five bucks a plate. Some good, solid cash would flow into the Democratic coffers from it. You needed ward-heelers to campaign for your candidates, not just the national ticket but the local men like Steven Pankow as well. You needed flyers and pamphlets and billboards. You needed more money for radio spots. And, in this modern world, you needed more money still for TV ads. Politics had never been cheap. These days, getting somebody elected was ridiculously expensive.
As the gathering started to break up, Truman pressed the flesh and chatted with his supporters. That was also part of the game. If they could imagine they knew you, they’d work harder on the campaign.
“Nice introduction,” the President said when he clasped Pankow’s hand. “You kept it short, and that’s the most important thing.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Pankow replied. “Keep walloping the snot out of those damn Russians—that’s all I’ve got to tell you. And never trust ’em further than you can throw ’em. They’ll cheat if they get half a chance. A quarter of a chance, even.”
“I have noticed that, yes,” Truman said. A man who spoke with a faint Polish accent might well be one of the few people on earth who trusted Russians even less than Truman did. His reasons would be personal and historical, not political, but that only made them more sincere.
A limousine with a police escort took Truman to the airport. Red lights flashed, clearing traffic from the road. It was after midnight; there wasn’t much traffic to clear. Spotlights guided the limo to the waiting Independence. As soon as the President climbed the wheeled stairway and boarded the DC-6, its engines thundered to life and the big props began to spin.
The plane rolled down the runway. It smoothly climbed into the air. Truman leaned back in his seat with a weary sigh. Washington soon, Washington and the war.
—
Boris Gribkov peered out through the Tu-4’s Plexiglas windscreen. All he saw was ocean. Waves in the North Atlantic rolled on endlessly from the northwest toward the southeast. He circled between Norway and Iceland, low enough and far enough away from land that radar sets on Jan Mayen and the Faeroes wouldn’t spot him. Patrol planes…Patrol planes were a chance he simply had to take.
&nb
sp; Although the sun had set, it was a long way from dark. He was up near the Arctic Circle, farther north than Leningrad and its famed white nights. That was another chance he had to take. He wouldn’t have had to worry about it during the winter. It was May, though. Things happened when they happened, not when it was most convenient for them to happen.
He spoke to the radar operator over the intercom: “Anything?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question, or even the tenth.
“No, Comrade Pilot. I’m sorry,” Arkady Oppokov replied. The first few times, he hadn’t apologized.
Muttering to himself, Gribkov spoke to the navigator instead: “We are where we’re supposed to be?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question, either.
“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” Svyatoslav Filevich replied.
“You’re sure?” Boris knew he wouldn’t have asked that question of Leonid Tsederbaum. He’d had confidence in the Jew. He might not have asked it of Yefim Arzhanov, either. But they weren’t here. Filevich was.
“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” he repeated. It also wasn’t the first time Gribkov had asked him that.
Boris fumed. That was all he could do. No, he could also eye his fuel gauge and worry. If his crew didn’t find a milch cow pretty soon, he’d have to abort and fly back to Murmansk. That would effectively end his career. They wouldn’t blame his crewmen. They wouldn’t blame the milch cow’s pilot. They’d blame him, for not flying the mission he was ordered to fly. He had the responsibility, and blame was the other side of that coin.
He was about to query Oppokov yet again when the radar operator suddenly exclaimed, “I have a target, Comrade Pilot! Bearing 270, speed 300 kilometers an hour, range fifteen kilometers, altitude…a long piss above the sea. That’s got to be why I’ve had so much trouble picking it up.”
“Here’s hoping.” Gribkov swung the Tu-4 west. He wasn’t much more than a long piss above the sea himself. His last couple of practice runs at in-flight refueling had been low-level missions. He knew how to do it. He’d done it. It still made him nervous every time.
He also hoped the plane Oppokov’s set had found wasn’t another thirsty calf. That would be a colossal balls-up. He didn’t know what he’d do then. Head back to Murmansk, he supposed, and try to take his medicine like a man.
But the pilot of the Tu-4 ahead waggled his wings when he spotted Gribkov. The tail gunner flashed a green lamp. Anton Presnyakov answered with a red one. Here, milch cow and calf had to connect without radio contact. The Soviet Union didn’t control this stretch of ocean, which was putting things mildly. The enemy was bound to monitor every frequency.
Up Boris came, taking station astern of the milch cow. Its pilot deployed the filler cable. Lev Vaksman used his own to catch that one and guide it to the wingtip recess where it needed to go.
“We are taking on fuel, Comrade Pilot!” the engineer said. He didn’t sound amazed the way he had the first time, but he still seemed excited.
“My gauge also shows it,” Gribkov replied. “Wait till we’re good and full before you turn loose of it.”
“Yes, sir!” There was an order Vaksman agreed with.
Uncoupling went as smoothly as the rest of the process. Boris waved to the milch cow’s pilot as he pulled away. He didn’t know whether the other man could see him, but he made the effort.
That milch cow kept circling. Boris didn’t know how many calves it could feed. What he didn’t know, no interrogator could tear out of him. On the kinds of missions he flew, capture was only too possible.
“What’s our course now, Svyatoslav?” he asked the navigator.
“Comrade Pilot, I suggest 225. That will send us out into the wider ocean about equidistant between the Faeroes and Iceland,” Filevich replied. “We want to stay as far from land as we can.”
“Think so, do you?” Boris said dryly. “Good enough. Course 225 it will be.” He swung the Tu-4 to the southwest.
Every kilometer brought deeper darkness as the sun sank farther below the horizon. That was all to the good. The Americans and English could read a map. They knew where the ocean gaps were. Aerial patrols and radar-carrying picket ships watched them. But if the Tu-4 stayed low, an enemy plane’s radar looking down from above had trouble telling its echo from that of the Atlantic. Picket ships couldn’t spot it from very far away. Its IFF insisted it was an American plane itself.
On and on. On and on. No attacks. No challenges. They’d made it through one danger zone. The next one, the bad one, was still hours away. After a while, Presnyakov said, “It’s a big ocean, isn’t it?”
“Not next to the Pacific,” Boris answered. He’d made that flight. He’d come back from it, too. Maybe he could do it again. That would be something to brag about! (Though poor Tsederbaum would tell him otherwise.)
On and on. He swallowed a benzedrine pill, then another one. They would have their way with him later, if there was a later. For now, they kept him awake and made him alert. On and on. He saw no freighters heading for England. With luck, no freighters saw him, either.
“We are approaching the East Coast of the United States,” Filevich reported some time later. He sounded awed. “We should make landfall over Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
Before long, Gribkov saw lights ahead. The Yankees didn’t bother with a blackout in this part of the country. Radar made navigation easier, but lights helped. The Tu-4’s IFF went right on claiming it was just another B-29 on its lawful occasions. Why a B-29 would be roaring along without lights at an altitude that made skyscrapers dangerous and heading straight for the capital of the USA was a question the IFF couldn’t answer.
They crossed the Delaware Bay, then zoomed low over Dover, Delaware. Another stretch of water—the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis, Maryland, was a small town.
Faizulla Ikramov, the radioman, knew some English. “They seem to be wondering about us, Comrade Pilot,” he reported. “They don’t know what we are, though. We’re so low and so hard to pick up, they aren’t sure we’re anything.”
“Good,” Boris said. Washington was only a few minutes away. “We put it between the White House and the Capitol, if we can,” he reminded navigator and bombardier. “They’ve tried to kill the great Stalin. Now we go after Truman.”
The little river called the Anacostia guided them. At Filevich’s word, Gribkov turned west before it joined the Potomac. As soon as the bomb fell free, he swung north and jammed the throttles past the red line. There’d be enough delay to let the Tu-4 get clear…if everything went well.
Unlike his crewmen, he’d been through atomic explosions before. He rode out the hideous flash and the shock waves, then went east, back toward the Atlantic, again. “They’re going crazy, Comrade Pilot!” Ikramov told him. “Crazy!”
“Good,” Boris said once more. “If they don’t come to their senses till we’re out over the water, we may even get away with this.” A submarine from the Red Fleet was supposed to be waiting at a precise point of latitude and longitude. If it was, if he could ditch this Tu-4 as he had the other after bombing Seattle, he and his crewmates might see the rodina again.
Seven and a half minutes after they bombed Washington, another great flash of light came from behind them. “Bozhemoi!” Anton Presnyakov exclaimed. “What was that?”
“Another dose of the same medicine,” Gribkov answered. “Can’t be anything else. The imperialists gave Moscow three. Washington deserves at least two.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the copilot agreed. “I didn’t know another plane was on the way, though.” He laughed a shaky laugh. “Security!”
“That’s right. Security.” Boris hadn’t known, either. The other blast might have knocked down his Tu-4—or he might have taken out the other one. But neither mischance happened. Both planes carried out their missions. Now they had to live through them.
SOMETIMES HARRY TRUMAN could sleep on the Independence despite noise and turbulence. When you were flying nonstop from one coast to the other or crossing the Atlantic,
you had to be able to do that. For a trip from Buffalo home to Washington, the President didn’t feel like making the effort. He’d sleep after he got to the White House.
Or so he thought. The Presidential airliner was about fifteen minutes—say, fifty miles—from landing when an aide came back from the direction of the cockpit. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Major Pesky says there’s some kind of flap about the airspace over Washington,” the man said. “We’ve been asked to divert to Richmond.”
“I don’t think Richmond is even slightly diverting,” Harry Truman said. The aide winced, which was what puns were for. Truman continued, “Some kind of flap, you say? Does the pilot know what’s going on?”
“Sir, I told you as much as he told me,” the man said.
“Well, go back up and find out why they’ve got their knickers in a twist,” Truman said. “I don’t want to head for Richmond unless we’ve got to.”
The aide had just started up the aisle again when sudden harsh glare burned away the night and blazed in through every window on the DC-6, swamping the airliner’s lighting system. Truman sat frozen in his seat. He knew—knew too well—what that flash had to mean. Somehow or other, the Russians had got through.
That was his first thought. His second one made him bury his face in his hands. Bess and Margaret hadn’t come to Buffalo with him. His wife and daughter were waiting back at the White House.
Or they had been. He couldn’t let himself contemplate his own troubles, though. The country had just taken an uppercut to the chin. Truman stood. He pushed past his aide and stuck his head into the cockpit. “Major Pesky, don’t take me to Richmond. If you can’t land in Washington, go to Baltimore. That’s close enough so I can get to Washington in a hurry—by helicopter, if I have to.”
Without looking back at him, the pilot answered, “Sir, I’d rather not. They may hit Baltimore, too, while they’re less likely to go after a smaller city like Richmond. Since I don’t know how bad the casualties are in Washington, I’m obliged to keep you as safe as possible. I may do best just to circle as long as I can.”
Fallout Page 41
