by James Philip
The Governor of California wanted to get up and kick the television.
If we had right on our side why the never ending hand-wringing?
Did nobody on Capitol Hill have the cajonas to stand up and say: “You know what! The Soviets pushed us too far so we hit them with everything we had! End of story! We had no choice. It was us or them. What were we supposed to do? And anyway, the bastards attacked us first!” For all Pat Brown knew, it was actually true.
Except, if it was true why was the President of the United States of America constantly protesting his innocence like a mobster arrested at a murder scene with a smoking gun in his hand?
Chapter 3
Friday 22nd November 1963
Hotel del Coronado, San Diego
In retrospect Miranda Margaret Sullivan viewed the two years that she had ‘dropped out’ with a mixture of horror, disbelief and self-loathing. At the time she had pretended she was rebelling, that she had been on some kind of revelatory existential journey of self-discovery. Her parents had sent her to the best schools and she had wanted for nothing during her privileged upbringing in a relatively close, moderately flaky, very wealthy Hollywood family. The little sister of three protective brothers – all three were regular guys just like her father – she had been pampered, spoiled, indulged and protected all her young life until she half-escaped to Berkeley. College life had exposed her to real people for the first time, opened her eyes to the endless possibilities of adult life; and she had honestly believed that she was immortal. Partly, that had been the drugs; weed at first, then uppers, downers, and later whatever was on offer. Partly, it had been the incredibly bad company she kept. Partly, it had been because she was tired of being ‘Mummy’s good little girl’, some kind of perfect fairy princess to be dressed up and paraded like a trophy in front of her parents’ friends.
The night of the October War had been – as it had been for so many others – her personal apotheosis. Miranda had had two lives; the one before the war and the one after the war. The person that she had been before the war was a stranger to her thirteen months later; a woman she would probably not now recognise if she met her on the street.
She had tried to kill herself when she discovered she had contracted gonorrhoea and that she was pregnant that week after the war. She had washed down a cocktail of pills with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, collapsed, miscarried and very nearly bled to death. If Aunt Molly had not found her when she did she would have been dead over a year.
Miranda still did not know if Uncle Harvey had told her parents the half of what had happened to her at the beginning of November last year. She suspected – hoped and prayed - he had spun them a quietly plausible web of half-truths and barefaced lies, just enough to discourage them from inquiring too deeply or pressing their daughter when next she surfaced. Her Uncle and Aunt – they were not really her ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’ but Harvey and Molly Fleischer, her parents’ oldest friends and business partners had always been there for her – had locked her up until they were convinced she was ‘clean’, and subsequently pulled every conceivable string to get her re-admitted to Berkeley.
She had earned her degree that summer; not the brilliant degree she would have walked away from Berkeley with if she had not wasted two whole years of her life, but good enough to be going on with. When she was in San Francisco she lived with her Aunt and Uncle, safe from all evil, especially that represented by the company she had kept before the war.
The internship at the Governor’s Office in Sacramento was Uncle Harvey’s idea. She had been doing office work, temping, running errands for his law firm in a building off Union Square since the summer. The work was undemanding, boring a lot of the time; yet oddly fulfilling in ways she still found new and a little baffling. She liked to be busy, to be contributing, and to be anything other than idle. In idleness she remembered the person that she had become when her life had had no direction, no home, nor foundation. Filing, typing, making coffee, answering calls, delivering important letters to the nearby court house had begun to counteract her shame, to distract her from brooding on the time she had wasted and the people she had let down. Of the people she had known immediately before the war she had mostly pity and contempt. All of them except Sam Brenckmann, whose memory still evoked a miasma of conflicting emotions; fondness, regret, anger, exasperation, and guilt...
When the Governor’s Chief of Staff had asked her to ‘go on ahead to set up the Coronado thing’ a week ago her heart had leapt. She knew it was no big deal. Nonetheless, her heart had leapt. It was the first thing in her whole life that she had been trusted with, her first real test. It was a test which she had approached with the keenly methodical zeal that her new, re-born self applied to all problems. She had flown down to San Diego two days ago and walked Larry Lawrence – and his people, a motley crew of real estate hustlers and a couple of over-paid attorneys – through everything.
Twice, just so they got the message.
Her only previous knowledge of the hotel had been drawn from what she recollected of it from Billy Wilder’s film Some Like it Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. In the movie the hotel was called the ‘Seminole Ritz’. She had subsequently learned that before Some Like it Hot the Hotel del Coronado had been the backdrop of at least a dozen earlier films.
Once he had got used to the idea that he could neither fob her off, flirt with her, or bully her, Larry Lawrence had levelled with Miranda and they had got on just fine. The developer had big plans for the old hotel and was a mine of fascinating information about its past; the same glorious past that was to be bedrock of its future restoration, expansion and rebirth.
Larry Lawrence had actually had the nerve to offer her a job!
If she ever got bored working in the Governor’s Office in Sacramento...
Which was not remotely likely any time soon.
Miranda’s father had once told her that ‘lots of people have imagination’ and that ‘lots of people have crazy ideas’ but that ‘hardly anybody has real vision.” She had not made up her mind whether Larry Lawrence had real vision but she had been genuinely intrigued by his ambitious vision for how he planned to resurrect the Hotel del Coronado.
The history of the Hotel del Coronado could be said to have begun on 19th December 1880 when three ‘magnates’ bought Coronado and North Island – that is, the island and the sandy spit joining it to the mainland – for $110,000. The three men were Hampton L. Story, of the Story and Clark Piano Company of Chicago, Jacob Gruendike, President of the First National Bank of San Diego, and the Indiana born railway man, tycoon and early promoter of the Bell Telephone Company, Elisha Spurr Babcock. At that time southern California was experiencing its first runaway real estate boom and nothing fuelled a local ‘boom’ it seemed, more than the erection of a new grand hotel. Things had looked uniformly rosy for the newly formed Coronado Beach Company, whose prospectus brazenly boasted that it had been launched with capital of ‘One Million Dollars!’
Unfortunately, by the time the hotel actually opened for business in 1888, a great wooden structure – then the largest wooden building in the United States - built in the fashionable Victorian beach style to be the biggest ‘resort hotel’ in the World with three hundred and ninety-nine luxurious rooms constructed on a sandy spit where little over a year before only rabbits and coyotes had roamed, the South California land boom, like countless economic ‘bubbles’ before and since, had violently deflated very nearly overnight. To add insult to injury, it happened that across the bay, San Diego itself had fallen into a vicious spiral of recession and retrenchment, and its population had fast begun to decline as one after another enterprise failed and panicking banks called in their loans.
Miranda had not been surprised to learn that the three original investors in the Coronado Beach Company had faced ruin. Such was the fate of so many of America’s pioneering entrepreneurs. A gang of ‘white knights’ – speculators and chancers who saw an opportunity for a kil
ling rather than men of honour riding to the rescue out of the goodness of their lily white hearts – had quickly stepped in to ‘take the hotel off the hands’ of the desperate former owners of the huge ‘pink elephant’ on the sands. In the way of these things the fittest, the bravest and the richest man invariably comes out on top, and by 1890 only one man was left standing, thirty-seven year old John Dietrich Spreckels. It happened that Spreckels also owned the Arizona and San Diego Railway, possibly the most significant well-spring of the city’s later growth and development in the train age before automotive and air travel took over the North American Continent. It seemed that the Spreckels family had owned the Hotel del Coronado until as recently as 1948.
In the good times the hotel had had an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a Japanese tea garden, tennis courts, its own yacht club and had been the base for fishing expeditions and hunting trips along the coast. During the Prohibition Era it was a famous oasis for the party set. In the twenties and thirties it had been the playground of the Hollywood elite but World War II had put an end to the society high jinks. Half of North Island had been taken over by a naval air station and the resort had become a billet, an over-crowded transit camp, for thousands of airman passing through on the way to America’s foreign wars.
Notwithstanding that the Hotel del Coronado’s story was one of decline in the post-war years Larry Lawrence was determined to do something about it. If the October War had not torpedoed the real estate market he would have already knocked the resort down and started throwing up condominiums. However, like any pragmatic businessman in the face of an untimely setback he had swiftly moved on to Plan B. Equally pragmatically, he had concluded that if Plan B was going to have any prospects of success, he needed it to be publicly endorsed by the people who mattered.
Top of the list of people that mattered was California State Governor Pat Brown, Miranda Sullivan’s boss.
Politics did not really interest Miranda. It would not have mattered if Governor Brown was a Democrat or a Republican. She did not really care. The fact was that she had fallen in love with the Office of the Governor of California. Very nearly from the moment she had walked through the outer door on her first nervous morning in Sacramento, she had felt as if she belonged, that she had arrived in a place where what she did mattered, right at the very living, beating heart of things. It was not that the Governor wielded great power – he did not – simply that the Office of the Governor of California possessed, if it wished to mobilise it, influence and resources which, if used wisely, had an unambiguously direct positive impact on the lives of real people. Governor Brown could not issue diktats that this or that should be done – other than in specific limited circumstances – but he could do a huge number of mainly little things which effected the way in which Californian society lived today and planned for the future. The Office was potentially a power for both good and bad; it so happened that Pat Brown was, she had decided, a profoundly ‘good’ man in exactly the same way she and many millions of Americans now suspected that Jack Kennedy was not.
Listening to the President of the United States of America speaking in far away Houston she recollected that Larry Lawrence had claimed that L. Frank Baum had written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while staying at the Hotel del Coronado. Apparently, he was supposed to have based his description of the Emerald City on the resort. Miranda was not so sure about the veracity of that latter statement. Her degree at Berkeley had been in Sociology, Anthropology and English Literature, and in some half-forgotten alcove of her memory she recalled reading somewhere that Baum had based the Emerald City on sights he had seen at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
The President was almost pleading with his audience in Texas.
She had heard this spiel many times; basically, the wicked Soviets were to blame and that explained everything.
“They said nothing to us and ordered their nuclear forces to attack the United States of America and its European allies on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962. I prayed that night. For our souls, for all of our souls. I prayed for the souls of friends and foes alike for we are all alike in God’s sight. And then I knew what I must do. My fellow Americans, that was the darkest night of my life because I knew that for all our sakes, I could do no other than to uncover the sword of everything that was right and just in the world in your defence. In your defence and in the defence of the free World. In defence of the inalienable values passed down to us by our founding fathers...”
“Wasn’t Rice University where the President made his ‘Moon Speech’ just before the war?” The Governor asked, in between sipping his coffee.
“Yes, sir,” said a senior aide standing at Miranda’s shoulder. “Something along the lines of ‘no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space,’ and ‘we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ I’m sure that was at Rice last year.”
One of Miranda’s brothers, David, at twenty-seven the middle of her three elder siblings, had started a post-doctoral fellowship at Rice University in September. David had a contract with Lockheed which he never, ever talked about. The last time brother and sister had spoken over the phone, coincidentally, about a week ago, he had chatted in generalities about how he was settling into life at Houston. Rice University was not overlarge but it was notoriously picky about who it let in. It was a private, research driven institution with long-established – borderline incestuous - links with the American aerospace industry and therefore, to the Pentagon. President Kennedy had made the ‘Moon Speech’ at Rice because he had known it would go down well at Rice, an island of friendly territory in what was otherwise politically hostile country.
“A little over a month before the war,” the President of the United States of America proclaimed, the pitch of his voice dropping momentarily to a magisterial baritone, “I committed this great country to the goal of putting a man – an American – on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of this decade. As I told Congress in 1961, I believe that no single space project in this period will be more impressive to Mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. I say to you, my fellow Americans, that having passed through the valley of the shadow of death we owe it to the rest of Mankind to think the unthinkable and to fulfil our manifest destiny!”
There was a stunned mutter of applause, and then a mounting crescendo, followed by foot stamping and screaming.
“To those who say...” The clamour drowned out the President’s voice. He tried again after a few seconds. “To those who say that the great work of putting an American on the Moon is a sideshow, ephemeral to the business of reconstruction. To those who say that a Moon Program will take scarce funds away from rebuilding our broken cities. To those who say that it is our Christian duty to offer succour to our enemies before we invest in our own national destiny...”
There was a rising chant in the background.
“To the Moon!
“To the Moon!”
“All the way to the Moon and back!”
“Let me speak to the naysayers thus,” Jack Kennedy declaimed, his voice quivering with emotion and presumably, with floods of crocodile tears in his eyes. “America cannot put right every wrong in this world, nor should America feel honour bound to attempt to so do. America was attacked. America was terribly wounded. Do the naysayers honestly believe that America should forever accept the burden of the aggressor’s guilt upon itself? I tell you now that I will never apologise to the American people for doing my duty. I will never apologise for standing up to evil. I will never apologise for having met force with force even though I will carry the memory of our brave fallen with me to my grave. What, I ask you, my fellow Americans, what shall our legacy to our children and our grand children be? Will that legacy be a world in ruins or a world in which Mankind looks to the stars?
Shall we forever turn our faces back to the past, down into the darkness of the valley of death, or shall we lift our eyes upwards to look upon the sunlit uplands of hope and infinite new possibilities?”
“To the Moon!”
“To the Moon!”
“All the way to the Moon and back!”
Miranda registered the shocked, disbelieving silence in the room all around her. And in that moment of numb quietness could not help but think of L. Frank Baum scribbling away, lost in some writer’s altered mind state in a room not a million miles away from where the Governor of California and his entourage now sat; imagining the World of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, Almira Gulch the Wicked Witch of the West and Professor Marvel, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself...
Chapter 4
Saturday 23rd November 1963
USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600)
Alameda, San Francisco
Before the October War Submarine Squadron 15 had been slated to form at Apra Harbour, Guam, with its strength gradually building up between late 1963 and early 1965 as the Polaris ballistic missile submarines of the Lafayette and James Madison classes were completed.
After 27th October 1962 stationing so many Polaris boats so far from the continental United States had suddenly seemed a less good idea; and besides, the war had been won and future plans required less than half the previously projected number of SSBNs to be at sea at any given time. Therefore, it had been decided that Submarine Squadron 15, along with its designated Tender, the nineteen thousand ton newly built USS Hunley - AS-31 - should be based at Alameda, in San Francisco Bay. Moreover, while five of the ten James Madison class boats under construction would be mothballed immediately upon completion, Submarine Squadron 15 would initially comprise a mix of up to a dozen George Washington, Ethan Allen and the first batch of Lafayette class vessels.
