California Dreaming (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA)

by James Philip

  “Gretchen is hiding out with us for a few days,” Joanne explained.

  “Hi,” the other woman said stepping into the lobby. Her brown eyes were wide with pleasure; it was very obvious that she could hardly wait to become reacquainted with Joanne’s dashing naval officer son.

  Joanne sighed.

  Gretchen was a clever girl. Hopefully, Junior would let her down gently when she worked out that she was completely wasting her time.

  Chapter 23

  Monday 2nd December 1963

  The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia

  That morning found forty-seven year old Robert Strange ‘Bob’ McNamara, the eighth US Secretary of Defence in a melancholy and more than normally troubled state of mind. Mostly, this was because of what he was learning, little by little, about the bloodbath at Bellingham. If as was likely retaking Bellingham was a sign of what was to come in restoring the Federal Government’s writ across the Great Lakes states and elsewhere in the west, it was now clear that the job could not, should not, and never should have been left in the hands of a state governor. Sitting in his palatial office in the biggest building in the World at the very nexus of what remained of American military might, he was convinced that the President had made a terrible mistake in not permitting him to intervene in the North-West earlier, and in not making the restitution of the rule of law in that sad state an object lesson in National versus State power politics.

  Californian born, McNamara had been one of the Whiz Kids who had rebuilt the Ford Motor Company after 1945, serving as Ford’s President before taking over at the Pentagon in 1961 with a remit – if not a blank cheque – to modernize and rationalise the nation’s military machine. Bespectacled, with a banker’s urbanity and a mind that seized on big problems with analytical precision and pragmatic dexterity, he was as universally admired as he was distrusted. He was undoubtedly the most brilliant man ever to have been appointed Secretary of Defence; and the American military establishment had never come to terms with it.

  Nobody needed to tell Bob McNamara that the most frightening aspect of the Bellingham affair was that it unequivocally highlighted the limits of the Kennedy Administration’s power. He had warned from the outset that there ‘was no real war dividend’ to be spent, or misspent to appease a mutinous House of Representatives, or a Democratic Party in open rebellion against the so-called ‘Kennedy faction’, or to in some way compensate the American people for the nightmare that many millions of them were still living through in the areas around the dead zones that used to be thriving cities, towns and suburbs. To attempt to stave off the folly of the proposed ‘peace dividend’ he had proposed two closely argued and rigorously researched options for a post-war US Military; one, a scaled down model in which the principle task of the armed forces was one of global peacekeeping, and two; a greatly reduced ‘homeland’ defence organisation that capable of defending the North American continent. Both options had involved deep structural cuts and eventually, envisaged military budgets reducing over several years – five to ten years – to approximately sixty percent of the 1961 dollar spend. However, ignoring his stridently expressed objections the Administration had decided to enact his second option not in five to ten years, but in five to ten months. The result had been chaos; precisely as he had predicted. Big quick cuts could only be made by slashing indiscriminately at the front line strength of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, while leaving the bloated command, control, logistical, and procurement structures largely intact creating – in business terms - a huge managerial and back office overhead riddled with and hamstrung by multiple redundancies and replications of function and authority overseeing a rapidly shrinking real front line military capability. Tens of billions of dollars worth of hardware had been mothballed or scrapped, fleets, squadrons and divisions had been disbanded, flooding the North American labour market with new skilled workers whose sudden availability had caused fifteen percent fall in blue collar wages in just the last four months.

  All this at a time when inflation was rising and the loss of so many military pay cheques had reduced the Government’s income from tax by over twelve percent, at the same time Federal outgoings to cover new military pensions, tens of thousands of statutory end of service awards and gratuities, and the concomitant hike in new ‘special’ Veterans Association expenditure to a level some eleven times higher than the last complete budget year before the war threatened the viability of the entire 1963-64 Federal Budget. All of which, and more, McNamara had predicted but nobody in the White House had listened.

  Moreover, notional ‘peace dividend’ savings had already been removed from the forthcoming defence budget and redirected to Federal Emergency Management and Relief Budgets held by and controlled by several other government departments, including Interior, Labour and in a special Treasury ‘fallback contingency reserve’. The effect of these ‘technical forward accounting adjustments’ left huge holes in even the reduced Pentagon budget for 1964-65. In effect as of 1st April 1964 he had no idea – within tens of billions of dollars – how much money he had to play with and therefore, no idea what ‘defences’ the United States of America would, or could afford after that date. It was chaos!

  Apart from any other consideration, taking a giant ‘peace dividend’ all in one mouthful had inevitably forced an involuntary massive – seismic probably better described it - re-alignment in the balance of the whole American military-industrial complex; for which the Administration had made little or no provision to counteract by aggressively deploying any of the structural levers – for example like adjusting Central Bank interest rates, or printing more or less money - at its disposal.

  Unfortunately, the Secretary of Defence had been outvoted in Cabinet and now America was where it was!

  Basically, the Pentagon was up a creek without a proverbial paddle.

  McNamara ought to have resigned in the spring.

  He would have resigned, as would others in the Administration, but for the dark cloud of guilt which hung over them all. He almost envied McGeorge Bundy, the United States National Security Advisor. Mac had been struck down by illness, and sidelined shortly after the war. Mac had been with the President in the Oval Office on the night of the war, and lived and breathed every moment of the catastrophe.

  McNamara had been in the situation room at the Pentagon that night.

  Ground Zero = Pentagon.

  He too had thought it would all end in a brilliant flash of light and a bolt of searing heat. Conventional wisdom before the October War had been that the great building would be the first target on the Soviets’ ‘hit list’. If it had been that would have been better in so many ways.

  The Secretary of Defence had written his resignation that morning.

  Enough was enough!

  The ‘peace dividend’ had to be halted. Too much damage had already been done and somebody had to stop the bleeding before it was too late. The country had blundered into the cataclysm, now it was cutting off its arms to spite its face. In any other country on the planet the military would probably have mounted a coup d’état; and he and his Cabinet colleagues would have been lined up against a wall and shot!

  As if the wanton, piecemeal degradation of the nation’s military might was not bad enough; the sickening stench of corruption now seemed to infect the whole body politic. None of the billions of dollars from the spurious ‘dividend’ was getting anywhere near men, women and children on American streets; and rightly, there was near mutiny in the middle ranks of Pentagon staffers. The military had been pushed too far and Robert McNamara was ashamed of his part in the farrago. The very men who had done their President’s bidding and won the most terrible war in human history had been obliged to watch the callous dismantling of their careers’ work, and the betrayal of their men – and women – in uniform. And for what? The notional savings of the headlong cuts had already been spent several times over by an unholy alliance of legislators, industrialists, bankers, farmers and every kind of
DC shyster imaginable in an orgy of acquisition, stockpiling, and financial gerrymandering the likes of which would have shamed a prohibition bootlegging mogul. Since the summer there had been so much funny money in circulation that the New York Stock Exchange had boomed at exactly the same moment the national economy had lurched towards a slump. Sitting in his cloistered sanctuary at the heart of the Pentagon, McNamara was daily put in mind of those people who allegedly moved the deck chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic, or of a certain deranged Emperor who had fiddled while Rome burned.

  No, it was time to go!

  Once upon a time he might have drawn comfort from the immutable, concrete permanence of the Pentagon. To cheer his spirits he used to recollect the day in 1961 that his military subordinates had ‘inducted’ him into his new castle keep. On that day everything had seemed possible, Camelot was being built in the District of Columbia upon the rock-like fortress of the Pentagon and he had lapped up the proudly restated litany of facts about the Department of Defence building with the cheerful, businesslike sobriety that his new post demanded.

  There was very little about the biggest building in the World that was not impressive.

  ‘The Pentagon had been designed by George Edwin Bergstrom, a native of Neenah, Wisconsin,’ but that was only the tip of the iceberg of the epic story of the construction of the giant war palace of the United States of America. Experience in the Great War – of 1914 to 1918 – had conclusively exposed the shortcomings of the nineteenth century ways of organising and directing overseas wars in the industrial age. Prior to the Pentagon the Department of War operated out of the Greggory – yes, it really did have two ‘g’s’ - Building, hastily erected on Constitution Avenue. The Greggory Building was never big enough for the job and the Department of Defence had ended up dispersed in buildings all over Washington DC and in neighbouring Maryland and Virginia. Moreover, the subsequent construction of a new War Department Building at the intersection of 21st and C Streets in Foggy Bottom had hardly scratched the problem. It was only after Hitler invaded Poland that one man, the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had finally grasped the nettle.

  Once Stimson had persuaded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in May 1941 of his case, things had moved at breakneck speed. Well, breakneck by DC standards. By July, the project was in the capable hands of the head of the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps, Arkansan Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell. It was Somervell who got things moving. George Bergstrom, working as chief architect with David J. Witmer had designed the building in just five days and nights between 17th and the 22nd July 1941. The main contractor, John McShain of Philadelphia, had broken ground less than two months later on 11th September. It was Somervell who was responsible for appointing the then forty-five year old Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Richard Groves to the project; and it was Grove’s herculean achievement in overseeing the construction of the Pentagon for the US Army that later made him the automatic choice to head the Manhattan project.

  The original plan was to build an irregular pentagon-shaped building on the site of the Department of Agriculture’s Arlington Experimental Farm. This idea was quashed when President Roosevelt decreed that the new building should in no way obscure the view of Washington DC from the Arlington National Cemetery. Subsequently, Hoover Field, an old airfield across the Potomac River near the Arlington Farms site was adopted. Although the topography and drainage of the new location caused difficulties and necessitated the clearance of the Hell’s Bottom slum neighbourhood, the new site’s shape and dimensions permitted the construction of a building with a regular-sided pentagonal footprint.

  The final plan incorporated a seven-floor building – five above and two below ground – with over six-and-a-half million square feet of floor space and seventeen-and-a-half miles of corridors. Each level had five broad ring corridors, and within the building was a five acre open air plaza that Pentagon insiders dryly came to refer to as ‘ground zero’ in the late 1950s, given that it was the likely aiming point for any Soviet missile or bomber strike on Washington. Constructed at breakneck speed employing between twenty and thirty thousand men and women at any one time, even two decades after its completion the building’s statistics were still astounding. Erected under the exigencies of war its design had used the absolute minimum quantities of steel; meaning that the main fabric of the Pentagon was reinforced concrete, mixed employing nearly seven hundred thousand tons of sand dredged from the Potomac, an exercise which had created a large lagoon at the mouth of the river. Construction had been completed in just sixteen months at a cost in 1943 dollars of $83 million.

  However, notwithstanding the Pentagon’s gargantuan measurements – each of the five sides was seventy-seven feet high and nine hundred-and-twenty-one feet long –McNamara had inherited a building that was very much of its time and to some extent, trapped in the past. Putting aside its vast bureaucratic sprawl and the inevitably disconnected inter-service rivalries within it which spawned ludicrous duplications of work and mind-bogglingly inefficient working practices, the Pentagon had been built in an era of segregation and because it was in Virginia, not the District of Columbia, it had still been segregated when he walked through its doors in 1961.

  McNamara had discovered much to his disgust that racial segregation – which he personally found morally and practically repugnant as a businessman, public official and as a human being in equal measure - had had significant deleterious structural implications for the design of the Pentagon. Absurdly, there were separate eating and washroom areas for whites and blacks, and extensive signage throughout the building managing the ongoing racial segregation. Whites dined above ground, blacks beneath ground. On each floor there were separate black and white washrooms, each separated in location and by gender to comply with the racial legislation in force at the time of its construction, and still in force in Virginia at the time he became Secretary of Defence. Bob McNamara might not have been able to achieve very much at the Pentagon before the October War but he had prevailed upon the President to abolish all segregation by race or colour in Government buildings by an Executive Order dated 4th July that year...

  The Secretary of Defence’s senior personal secretary entered the room.

  “General Westmoreland is here, sir.”

  Forty-nine year old three-star United States Army General William Childs Westmoreland was McNamara’s ‘point man’ with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Westmoreland’s was a name already being bandied around as a future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. ‘Westy’ as he was known to insiders had a growing reputation as a ‘corporation executive in uniform’, making him exactly the sort of man that the former Ford Motor Company President needed at his side as he struggled to simultaneously manage the ‘peace dividend’ and to reorganise what was left of America’s dislocated military might into the formidable machine it still ought to be, peace dividend cuts or not.

  The two men shook hands and sat in easy chairs away from the Secretary of Defence’s big polished desk.

  “The Chief of Naval Operations is threatening to resign again,” McNamara told the man who was his de facto military special advisor and professional conduit to the Joint Chiefs.

  Westmoreland nodded. The news came as no surprise to him.

  Admiral George Whelan Anderson had been appointed Chief of Naval Operations in August 1961. Ever since then his relations with the Secretary of Defence had been on a downward spiral. Shortly before the night of the October War the CNO had ordered – yes, actually ordered – McNamara out of the Pentagon’s Flag Plot Room when he had sought clarification of the Navy’s operational protocols in connection with the interception, stopping and forcing to the surface of the four Foxtrot class Soviet submarines that the Atlantic Fleet had been tracking ever since they departed the Kola Inlet, near Murmansk at the beginning of October 1962. McNamara had described the incident as ‘mutinous’ and in the light of what had followed, he had held Anderson to blame for the incident in which the USS Beale
had been destroyed. Despite his protests the President had refused to sack Anderson, and subsequently rejected the CNO’s resignation. Things had got so bad between McNamara’s Office and the Chief of Naval Operations that communications were now conducted almost exclusively between Westmoreland and the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald, a no-nonsense Georgian who, possibly in the light of his boss’s breakdown of communication with the Secretary of Defence, seemed like a veritable scion of affable rectitude. It helped more than somewhat that McDonald and Westmoreland got on as famously as an army general and an admiral were ever likely to get on, given the legitimate and traditional rivalries of their respective services.

  “COMSUBPAC,” Westmoreland prefaced, pausing to allow himself a rueful grin, “that’s Rear Admiral Clarey, flew in from Pearl Harbour last night, Mr Secretary. The Navy are paranoid about the command and control of their submarines. I believe that there was some kind of issue with one of Submarine Squadron Fifteen’s boats out of San Francisco. Admiral Anderson is all over it like a rash. I get the impression somebody’s head is going to roll.”

  “One of our Polaris submarine’s had a command and control issue?” Robert McNamara asked, flatly. He had not felt so cold inside since that first Cuban-launched missile had initiated over Galveston Island thirteen months ago.

  “The Chief of Naval Operations says he suspects the USS Sam Houston was mistakenly ordered to assume the operational posture of a hostile SSBN. That’s a standard exercise protocol. I requested more information on your behalf, sir, but Admiral Anderson promises a fuller report only when his people have had more time to crawl over the whole thing. The USS Sam Houston has returned to port and all her weapons and communications systems have been locked down until the Navy Department Special Investigation Branch has completed its work out at Alameda. SIB is looking into any possible connection between the murder of Read Admiral Braithwaite and his wife and this business.”