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

by James Philip

  Westmoreland had been careful to remain aloof, as distanced as possible from the Secretary of Defence’s ongoing ‘professional differences’ with Admiral Anderson. In common with the majority of his peers Westmoreland deliberately did not have an opinion on whether Anderson was more or less personally culpable than anybody else in the military hierarchy around the President for what had gone wrong in late October 1962. However, he was less convinced when it came to the coterie of admirals who still, by and large, ran the US Atlantic Fleet from their bunkers in Norfolk, Virginia. Some of those guys had questions that needed to be answered and presently seemed to be positively itching to provoke trouble with the British Royal Navy; and that was something his boss, McNamara, the CNO and the President really ought to be doing something about!

  “I’m still waiting,” Robert McNamara said, as if he was reading his advisor’s mind, “for a satisfactory response from Admiral Anderson with regard to the ongoing provocation of the Enterprise Battle Group operating in waters so close to the British Isles at this time?”

  General Westmoreland nodded but remained silent.

  Any day now the first of the first big relief convoys – Operation Manna - from Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, and from practically every other former colony still actively opposing American hegemony, would be arriving in the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Since the October War the United Kingdom had been surviving on dwindling strategic stockpiles, whatever crumbs the Canadians had been able to send to the old country and a trickle of ships returning home from around the World. The Administration’s decision to renege on its treaty obligations and to ignore pre-war trade agreements, effectively shutting the American market to British goods and curtailing British credit lines, had forced the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration to fall back on and practically exhaust its reserves of fuel and foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals and manufactures. The Kennedy Administration had been working on the assumption that sooner or later the UKIEA would come back to the table with a begging bowl. Crudely stated, in that event, it was taken as read that the remaining members of the Commonwealth would inevitably fall back in line with United States political and economic preferences, and thereafter, everybody would live happily ever after!

  But that had not happened; not least because the British had retained control of the Abadan oil fields and refinery complex in Iran, and despite the closure of the Suez Canal to its ships after the October War the UKIEA had succeeded in maintaining an – albeit much reduced from pre-war levels – conveyor belt of tankers between the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope all the way back to the British Isles. With the availability of more tankers once Operation Manna had brought dozens of British registered tankers home, sooner or later the oil from Abadan would become the currency with which the UKIEA started to repay its debts to its Commonwealth allies. By the spring the United Kingdom would still be in a very bad place but it might not be quite the starving, fuel-starved desperate economic and humanitarian basket case that everybody in the Administrations seemed to think it had been the last thirteen months

  Westmoreland was not alone in thinking that the Kennedy Administration’s ongoing post-war inertia, complacency and plain wrong-headedness was worse than infantile. To his mind it was naive and potentially very dangerous. Not only had the Administration failed to mend bridges with the British, or at a very minimum, tied their former allies back into a working military and economic alliance, but the Administration had singularly failed to begin the reconstruction of America’s bombed cities, and by inaction critically weakened the grip of the Federal Government in many areas of the country. Apart from in Central and Southern America where it already had numerous pre-war economically and militarily obedient clients, the Administration had systematically undermined and in some places, comprehensively torpedoed US relations with most if not all its pre-war global allies. Moreover, like all vicious circles, the situation was getting worse fast.

  Westmoreland frowned at his boss.

  McNamara arched a curious eyebrow.

  “You’re giving me that look again, Westy,” he observed glumly.

  Westmoreland almost choked on what he said next.

  “Do the people in the White House understand that millions of people are going to starve in the British Isles this winter if those Operation Manna convoys don’t get through, Mr Secretary?”

  Robert McNamara did not respond.

  Westmoreland continued: “I apologise if you find my next question offensive, sir. But what exactly do you and other senior Cabinet members think the Royal Navy will do if the Enterprise Battle Group interferes with the free passage of those convoys?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  Westmoreland tried not to roll his eyes in exasperation.

  “Mr Secretary,” he said softly, “isn’t that what we all believed before the Cuban Missiles Crisis turned into World War III?”

  Chapter 24

  Monday 2nd December 1963

  City Hall, San Francisco

  The Mayor of San Francisco held the telephone to his head for a moment after Governor Brown put down the handset at the other end of the connection in Sacramento. Publicly, the two men were political adversaries; privately, in the last year the Republican city mayor and the Democrat state governor had worked hand in glove, two men with a common purpose who shared exactly the same fundamental common values. Thirteen months ago the conversation he had just had with Pat Brown would never have happened, in fact he probably would not have taken the call and if he had, the exchange would have been short and not particularly sweet. But that was then and this was now. The West Coast States either worked together or eventually, it was likely they might fall together. Republican and Democrat governors and mayors, elected officers at every level, and most federally elected congressmen and senators in California, Oregon and Washington State had formed a united front to protect their people.

  Fifty-five year old George Christopher, the thirty-fourth Mayor of San Francisco heaved himself to his feet and went to the door to the ante room of his Mayoral Office.

  “When Miss Miranda Sullivan arrives from the Governor’s Office you can show her straight in,” he directed, his voice a little distracted. Stepping back into his office he moved to the window and gazed out onto the sunlit plaza several floors beneath his feet. City Hall was a great Beaux-Arts building whose proportions matched those of many state capitols. Erected between 1913 and 1915 to replace the previous City Hall, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, on a completely new and much larger site two blocks away from where its forerunner had stood, the cupola of San Francisco City Hall was forty-two feet higher than that of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. From a vantage point high in City Hall a man could be forgiven for thinking that he was the master, if not perhaps of everything he beheld, but of a substantial part of the vista before him. However, the man who had been Mayor of the greatest city on the West Coast since 1956 had never, ever, made that mistake.

  Born George Christophes in Greece, the future Mayor of San Francisco’s parents had brought him to America in 1910 at the age of two. He had grown up in the South Market Street area of the city, Greektown. Raised in a hard school he had become his family’s breadwinner at the age of fourteen when his father died. Later he had resumed his interrupted education, studying for a degree in accounting at the Golden Gate College, and eventually he had prospered, albeit it modestly. A practical man used to long hours and hard work, attentive to detail and aware that nothing that was worth doing was easy, he had first stood - unsuccessfully - for Mayor in 1951. Elected in 1955 he had been a man on a mission. By then George Christophes had become George Christopher as befitted a man who - although he never forgot his Greek-American roots - viewed the American Dream not through romantic rose-tinted lenses but from the perspective of a life characterised by solid, practical achievement. In the mid-fifties the city had badly needed a good bookkeeper and that was what it had got in the
shape of its new Mayor, an expert bean counter with the organisational and emotional intelligence essential to improve the lot of the ordinary man and woman on the streets of the great port.

  It was Christopher’s Administration that was responsible for bringing the New York Giants baseball team to the city in 1958 - where they rebranded as the San Francisco Giants – and in finding the funding to build Candlestick Park on derelict land at Candlestick Point. Under his mayoralty large districts of the city, including neighbourhoods neglected since the 1930s had been redeveloped, and slums eliminated, often in the face of determined opposition from vested interest groups and communities defending appalling living standards in the name of the preservation of ‘cultural integrity’. On the Bay shoreline the Embarcadero Center and the Golden Gateway projects had necessitated the removal of the historic wholesale market to Alemany. Urban renewal in the Japantown and Fillmore districts, the building of the new Hall of Justice and the new Ferry Building had also been intensely controversial decisions but in Christopher’s vision for the city, each was a vital long-term investment in the future of San Francisco.

  Perversely, nothing had so discredited him with one highly vocal section of his constituency than the recent demolition of the Fox Theatre on Market Street and Polk Street. Just after the October War the owners had offered the building to the city for a ‘bargain’ million dollars. He had rejected the ‘offer’ out of hand. At a time when George Christopher was preoccupied with funding the building and rebuilding of schools and firehouses, and struggling to buttress the city’s finances against the strains imposed by accommodating a sudden influx of refugees pouring into the city with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, even if he had had a spare million bucks he would not have wasted it on an old movie house that had not paid its way in years.

  Motivated by his own experience of anti-Greek prejudice and discrimination as a child Christopher had gained enormous notoriety for his outspoken stand on civil rights. He had once offered a black man to whom a Forest Hills real estate agent had refused to sell a property his own home. It was no publicity stunt. It was because of Christopher’s commitment that the city of San Francisco had, for example, funded ground-breaking ongoing mental health and drug rehabilitation programs. Moreover, when the House Sub-Committee on Un-American Activities provoked a large demonstration outside City Hall by holding sittings in the Supervisor’s Chambers, Christopher had fearlessly courted the hated committee’s opprobrium by informing the Federal Government that the Committee was not welcome in city buildings.

  Now the Mayor of San Francisco sighed long and hard.

  Governor Pat Brown had done him a big favour warning him that J. Edgar Hoover was renewing his attempt to undermine the fragile racial harmony of the city. Christopher had enough on his plate without the Federal Bureau of Investigation using elements of his Police Department to pursue its Director’s obsession with persecuting the leading Afro-American figures in the civil rights movement, and therefore, playing fast and loose with the constitutional rights of American citizens living in his city.

  George Christopher had met the willowy blond who walked into his office like a model down a – now sadly flattened – Paris catwalk carrying a slim black attaché case at a few minutes after ten that morning, several times over the years. He had known Harvey and Molly Fleischer, the kid’s godparents for twenty years and always welcomed the opportunity to be photographed with Ben and Margaret Sullivan, the movie star parents from whom Miranda had inherited her god-given looks, more than once. For all that the Fleischers and the Sullivans were staunch ‘big ticket donor’ Democrats, like many Americans their party affiliations were more from habit than political conviction, and the Mayor of San Francisco had learned early in his political career that it did not pay to hold that sort of thing against people who were not, nor would ever be, his enemies.

  “Thank you for seeing me at such short notice, sir,” Miranda smiled, as if she was addressing a favourite uncle she had not spoken to for some months.

  George Christopher took the young woman’s hand.

  He waved her to a chair in the window.

  “Governor Brown said you had information that I needed to know, young lady?” He asked, not beating about the bush.

  “Yes, sir,” she confirmed, extracting a slim Manila file from the black attached case, which she placed on the floor by her feet. “The Governor suggested I prepare brief summary reports for your eyes only. Names, addresses, that sort of thing, and particulars of which San Francisco PD stations appear to have been induced by the FBI to co-operate in this matter.”

  Christopher accepted the Manila file but did not open it.

  Before the October war the Mayor would have been indifferent to the presence of Federal investigators – be they FBI, National Security Council, Secret Service, US Armed Forces SIB, or whatever – operating on his streets. Lately, he viewed practically everything the Federal Government did with intense suspicion. Basically, ever since the war the Administration in Washington had been a hindrance, not a help to the good governance of his and, he imagined, every other big city and state in the Union. These days whenever somebody from DC arrived in town he knew he had a problem. His counterpart in Oakland was being run ragged in the wake of the shooting of Admiral Braithwaite and his wife, and the whole Alameda base was in lock down by the Navy. He did not want or need that the poison spreading across the bay to his city.

  “What is the connection between the Sequoyah Country Club killings and the FBI’s anti-constitutional activities in San Francisco?” He prompted sombrely.

  Miranda Sullivan was dressed plainly. Like a young blue collar housewife, in fact in an off the rack brown jacket over a shapeless white blouse, and a calf-length pleated grey skirt. Her short off the shoulder blond hair was clipped back, and she wore a modest gold band on her third finger. Margaret and Ben Sullivan’s little girl would have to do that to discourage male staffers back in Sacramento hitting on her. Contrary to some of the things he had heard about her – all of which went back before the war - she was a sensible girl, obviously.

  “The only witness to the Sequoyah road shootings is a Miss Darlene Lefebure. She came to San Francisco from Alabama about two months before the October War in company with a Mr Dwayne John. At the time they left Alabama Miss Lefebure was twenty years of age, and Mr John was a fortnight short of his twenty-second birthday. Miss Lefebure and Mr John were separated on the night of the October War and have not seen each other since.”

  George Christopher waited patiently for the punch line.

  “Mr John,” Miranda Sullivan explained, “is a peripheral associate of Dr Martin Luther King’s organisation in Atlanta. He acts as a courier for Dr King.” She guessed that she did not have to expand on Dwayne John’s role but she did anyway. “You may be aware that the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempts to monitor Dr King’s communications with all his associates, sir,” she remarked. “Dwayne John carries confidential communications to Dr King’s supporters. For example, to men like Terry Francois, with whom you will have worked in that gentleman’s capacity as the President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.”

  “Yes, I know Terry Francois. He is a man of the highest principles. A good American.”

  “Quite, sir. Dwayne John was arrested by the FBI with the assistance of members of the San Francisco PD last week and has been held in the lockups of two separate city police stations without charge during that time. He is currently being held at Mission Police Station at 1240 Valencia Street on a Federal warrant issued by a judge in Washington DC. A lawyer sent to the station by the Governor’s Office was denied access to Mr John yesterday evening. I attended Mission Police Station at eight o’clock this morning and was also refused access to Mr John. I ascertained at that time that Mr John has not been charged with any extraditable offence under California law.”

  “Okay, okay,” the Mayor groaned. “The FBI is playi
ng hardball. What’s the problem?”

  “The FBI is holding Miss Lefebure incommunicado at a safe house in Berkeley,” Miranda replied evenly. “It is likely that they had her under surveillance, or were at the very least, cognisant of her general whereabouts, at the time of the shooting of Admiral Braithwaite and his wife because of their interest in Dwayne John.”

  The Mayor of San Francisco did not want to get involved in this. Whatever was going on he definitely did not want to get involved. Intuitively, he knew the young woman sitting in his office understood as much and had no intention of doing anything likely to cause him embarrassment.

  “Why are you telling me this, Miss Sullivan?”

  “Because my boss, Governor Brown, thinks that you need to know about it, sir. And,” she shrugged, her lips momentarily forming a thin pale line, “I was once, very briefly, acquainted with both Miss Lefebure and Mr John, and there is therefore, a possibility that I might become a liability to the Governor if this thing becomes public knowledge in the wrong way. I blame myself,” she confessed, “I walked into this without thinking things through.”

  George Christopher cut to the chase.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Miranda eyed the file she had given the Mayor.

  “It occurred to me that Terry Francois would know how best to use the information in that file, sir.”

  The Mayor of San Francisco smiled thinly.

  “I imagine he will,” the man agreed.

  Chapter 25

  Monday 2nd December 1963

  US Navy Flag Plot Room

  The Pentagon, Arlington Country, Virginia

  In retrospect the oddest aspect of that afternoon’s ‘Situation Table’ was not the presence in person of the Chief of Naval Operations and his Deputy, nor the presence of a three-star Army General, but that nobody mentioned by name the Washington Post. On the day when that paper still carried a front page by line about the affair that United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was allegedly having with the winsome twenty-four year old daughter of Democratic Party eminence grise Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt – the Post made a big thing about always using the family’s long-discarded French baronial title – the minds of all of those gathered around the Flag Plot Room ‘Situation Table’ had been concentrated, not altogether wonderfully, by stories actually buried respectively on the seventh and eighth pages of the Post.