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

by James Philip

  That was more or less the line the Administration had spun the Washington press pack and disseminated to the TV networks after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, and the catastrophe of Jack Kennedy’s first botched summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, and in retrospect time and again throughout the fortnight running up to the Cuban Missiles War.

  Another sheet of printout, raggedly torn off the overheating machines in the main office was thrust under Ben Bradlee’s nose.

  No, that can’t be right!

  “The Brits are claiming that they shot down four B-52s, Kenny?”

  “What? No! No! No!” The man at the other end of the line objected in what sounded like abject despair. “That’s impossible!”

  “One of the B-52s crashed on the island of Gozo,” the Newsweek Bureau Chief continued, his incredulity morphing into a sense of despair. “The Brits claim they picked up half-a-dozen survivors from the B-52s they shot down over the sea...”

  Kenny O’Donnell hesitated.

  “We have to keep a lid on this, Ben!”

  Bradlee guessed what was to follow.

  “The President is personally asking...”

  The Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek Magazine had stopped listening. If the President was still in control of the White House - forget whether he was in control of anything else - he would have been the one on the line. That neither Jack nor Bobby Kennedy was free, able or willing to work the phones to keep this thing quiet spoke volumes about the depth and immediacy of the new disaster towards which the country was sleepwalking.

  No, not sleepwalking; this felt more like riding on the footplate of a runaway locomotive heading towards a cliff!

  Ben Bradlee hung up and rang his wife.

  “Don’t ask any questions,” he said abruptly, the way things were going there might not be time for a discussion and he could apologise for his rudeness another time. If there ever was another time; right now he put the odds on that at about sixty-forty against. “Grab the kids and get out of DC.” He and Antoinette – ‘Tony’ – his second wife had had a charmed marriage. They had met in the mid-fifties, and after divorcing their respective spouses had practically married into the Kennedy set. They had been honorary members of the Hyannis Port elite, regularly dining with Jack and Jackie, embedded as deep inside Camelot as it was possible to be without actually being recruited by the National Security Agency or being actively on the Hyannis Port staff payroll. The dream had tarnished somewhat since the October War, now it seemed it was likely to come to a fiery end at any moment. “Don’t argue, Tony. The masterminds at the Pentagon and Langley have persuaded the Spanish and the Italians to launch a proxy war against the British, and it sounds like Curtis LeMay’s finest have just Pearl Harboured the Royal Navy at Malta!”

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House might not be able to join up the dots and figure out what was almost certainly likely to happen next but anybody in DC with a passing acquaintance with reality knew precisely what might happen next.

  Royal Air Force V-Bombers could already be on their way to take out the East Coast cities, and, axiomatically, Washington itself. If the British attacked there would be no repeat of the October War ‘chicken shoot’ over Canada; a generation of RAF bomber crews had exercised constantly, assiduously for both conventional and nuclear war alongside their US Air Force counterparts. The Brits were not flying turbo-prop Tu-95s equipped with late 1940s electronic warfare suites, if they attacked they would be flying in state of the art modern jet bombers equipped to evade and survive the murderous aerial killing zones of the skies over Poland, the Baltic, White Russia and the Ukraine. Hell, the planned role of the British V-Bomber force in any war with the Soviets had been to ‘clear the road through the Soviet air defences’ for SAC; that was how good the RAF was!

  If the Brits attacked then they would get through...

  “Just grab the kids and get out of DC, okay...”

  Bradlee’s wife was silent for a brief moment.

  “I love you,” she said.

  And the line went dead.

  Chapter 34

  Saturday 7th December 1963

  Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles

  It had rained overnight. So hard that Judy had awakened in the early hours and never managed to truly get back to sleep until Sam had crept into the bedroom sometime before daylight. It did not occur to her to ask him where he had been all night, or complain that he smelled of tobacco smoke. She did not own him and he certainly did not own her. They had what they had, their ‘relationship’ was what it was, and it did not need to be any more complicated than that. And besides, she loved it when he slid his arm under her head, and gently rested his free hand on her swollen belly in the dark, humid warmth of the bed. It was a month since they had had sex, well, properly. She was too big and he was too worried, convinced that she was ten times more delicate than she actually was. Sabrina said men were useless when it came to babies. They were useless about the whole pregnancy ‘thing’ in fact. Much to Judy’s surprise her friend had confessed that she had two, very nearly grown up children a few days ago.

  ‘They live with Lamar and his bitch wife, Rita, in Reno,” she had explained derisively. ‘I left when they were this high,’ she had gestured at her right hip. ‘I never wanted kids. Would you believe I was afraid Lamar would leave me if I didn’t come across? Jesus, I don’t who that woman I used to be was!’

  Notwithstanding, Sabrina had got obsessively protective about Judy’s advanced pregnancy. She would not allow anybody to smoke in the same room, was forever fussing around her friend with cups of herbal tea, shrieked in horror when Judy tried to lift so much as a cushion, and berated her angrily when she attempted to pick up a broom or to move the crockery that continually piled up in the communal kitchen at the back of the old house.

  Sabrina had got so worked up that she had started taking out her existential angst on Sam until Judy had taken her by the arm, led her to the sofa, sat her down and explained the way ‘I see things’.

  Judy was fine with her lover hanging out most days and nights in the bars and clubs of the Sunset Strip. He was a musician, that’s what he did. Some guys were born to work nine to five, to come home and sit in front of the TV or next to the radiogram reading their paper while their wives did their best to be minor domestic deities. Sam was not that sort of guy and they were much closer in those times that they were actually together when they gave each other space in which to be the people they had been before they met, and probably would be for the rest of their lives. When they had been on the run, or trapped in the tented camp outside Vancouver last winter they had fucked a lot – physically, they could not have been more intimately close – but they had not really got to know and love each other until they had arrived in California and gotten used to the fact that they had survived.

  ‘If Sam was around all the time I’d end up scratching his eyes out,’ Judy had explained to her friend and thankfully, Sabrina had calmed down a little in the week since the two women had had their little chat.

  “Are you awake?” Sam murmured.

  His hand gently stroked her belly, and she answered his question by pressing back into his arms.

  “I wonder sometimes if we have any right to bring a baby into the World,” she murmured to the father of her unborn child in a tiny, sleepy voice.

  “Because of the radiation?”

  “That, and the way everything is so unreal...”

  “Was real ever that good before the war, babe?”

  “You know what I mean,” she protested feebly, her heart not in it. “What if the baby is sick?”

  The man was silent.

  “You hear and read about kids born since the war,” Judy persisted. “But nobody knows if the ones that are okay are really okay?”

  “Nobody knows if the ones who they say aren’t okay,” Sam pointed out, “which seems to about the same number as before the war, aren’t okay either, babe.”

  This was true but h
aving ventilated her deepest terrors Judy could not easily retreat back into the safe cocoon of her rational self.

  “It’s unreal here in LA,” she whispered. “You don’t see anybody with burns. There are hardly any blind people. And nobody really talks about the war even though you know everybody thinks about it all the time and it’s always there, in the background like a big black cloud just below the horizon. That’s why people love your songs. You put into words the things they want to say but they are afraid to say out loud. The Government pretends the war is over, that we’re all safe now. But we’re not safe; none of us will ever be safe again.”

  Sam sighed, carefully recovered his arm from under Judy’s face, and propped himself on an elbow in the darkness.

  “Don’t you think it was weird how we never thought about the future when we were getting out of Bellingham, or when we were in that refugee camp in Canada,” he offered vaguely, “not having any kind of future made things easier, I suppose. It is all a state of mind. We weren’t safe before the war; we just didn’t know it. Nothing has changed except people.”

  Judy rolled onto her back.

  “Do you want to know a secret?”

  “What, babe?” Sam chuckled; immensely relieved Judy’s mood seemed to have lifted.

  “I feel incredibly horny!”

  Chapter 35

  Saturday 7th December 1963

  Cathedral Avenue, Washington DC

  Gretchen Betancourt had got up early and gone for a long walk to clear her head. Her father had rented her the nice upmarket apartment in an old house on Cathedral Avenue, a picturesque tree-lined street. In summer the trees in leaf would provide shade and rustle reassuringly in the breeze, but at this season the branches were bare and the vista unobstructed. Washington Zoo, the National Observatory and the National Cathedral were all with easy walking distance of her comfortably appointed home from home which meant that the apartment had to be very expensive; but she did not think about that very often. Nothing cost that much when one’s father was a wealthy, incorrigible old rogue intent on promoting his daughter’s prospects.

  It was only now, after she had had a little time to consider recent events that she was a little guilty about the way she had treated Dan Brenckmann.

  Dan was a good guy; he deserved better.

  However, she was only a little guilty about it.

  Otherwise, she had no regrets at all.

  On Monday she had an appointment with the twenty-third United States Under Secretary of State, Dean Rusk’s number two at the State Department and the man who, reputedly, had pulled most of the foreign policy strings since the October War. Gretchen had been so eager – shamelessly so – to prepare herself for that interview that she had spent most of the last forty-eight hours trying to find out as much as she could about George Wildman Ball, the man she hoped to soon be working for at ‘Foggy Bottom’, the Main State Building at 2201 C Street.

  She had been so determined to be ‘well informed’ that last night she had called her father. The old rascal had been hugely amused that she had turned to him for advice, and flattered, although he was not about to admit it in so many words to his pesky and disputative youngest child. It had turned into a long telephone call – a seminar on the ‘dog’s breakfast’ that presently constituted the United States of America’s post-war foreign policy - and she had lain awake in bed afterwards trying to sort the facts from the chaff of gossip and her father’s mostly apocryphal anecdotes. In a way she almost hoped her father was less ‘well informed’ than he thought he was; especially about the military and ideological quagmire the Administration was, for apparently incredibly bizarre reasons, getting dragged into in South East Asia.

  The air was cold but the spits of rain were few and far between as Gretchen quartered the streets around her apartment that morning, and gradually, the cobwebs cleared. Preparation was a prerequisite of a successful first meeting. First impressions were vital, a bad first impression could never be undone and one wasted so much time in undoing damage when one could and should be seizing new opportunities. There had been no real opportunity to understand what made Nicholas Katzenbach tick and that had nearly been her undoing. She was not about to make the same mistake a second time.

  It would be George Ball’s fifty-fourth birthday in two weeks time. He had been a protégé of Adlai Stevenson; the Governor of Illinois, Ambassador to the United Nations and doyen of post-1945 Democratic Party liberalism. Ball, a banker and diplomat had been with Stevenson in both of his unsuccessful Presidential campaigns in the fifties. Since the October War there were those who suspected that Ball had become semi-detached from the rest of the Administration, disenchanted with the renewed isolationism in Congress, and philosophically disillusioned and undermined by the sudden irrelevance of his lifelong Eurocentric outlook. However, nobody really knew the truth of the matter because Ball was that rare thing in American political life, the soul of discretion. Nevertheless, persistent rumours circulated that latterly he had fallen out with his boss, Dean Rusk, and most of the President’s closest advisors over, of all things, Vietnam. Or that, at least, was what Gretchen’s father had said. For her part she had no idea how significant that was - for her rather than for the Vietnamese, that was - whose welfare and wellbeing had never been and were unlikely to become her concern. What did concern her was the medium to long-term wisdom of becoming too closely associated with a man who was, potentially, threatening to become a pariah within the Kennedy Administration.

  However, putting that concern aside practically everything else she heard about George Ball was unambiguously impressive. Back in the 1945 war he had been a senior official in the Lend Lease program, and immediately after the war been appointed Director of the Strategic Bombing Survey – of Germany – based in London. Later he had worked with Jean Monnet on the implementation of the Marshall Plan, and in 1950 he had helped write the Schuman Plan; the basis of the future European Coal and Steel Community, the organisation which had become the European Economic Community with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. George Ball was a very serious player, definitely a man who got things done which inferred that if he and the people closest to the President had fallen out over South East Asia that might be a big problem. On the other hand, if there had been such a big falling out and George Ball was still in post it also spoke to his weight within the Administration, a thing greatly in his favour.

  Nevertheless, the Vietnam thing kept nagging Gretchen.

  Gretchen did not think her father would have deliberately lied to her, or over-hyped the competing agendas at play within the Administration over a country of which she, in common with ninety-nine percent of Americans, knew little and cared less. It was all very curious.

  Curious and in a funny sort of way, fascinating.

  Having stripped away the overburden of State Department hyperbole what she was left with was the improbably reality that the President and most of his key advisors – but not Under Secretary of State George Ball the nation’s primary author of post-October War foreign policy initiatives – enthusiastically wanted to prop up a corrupt, brutal, fundamentally obnoxious anti-democratic puppet regime in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam against the threat posed by an even more impoverished, but Communist, as opposed to simply Fascistic, regime in North Vietnam under the leadership of Lucifer’s right hand man in Asia, whose name was Ho Chi Minh. To achieve this end the United States Government had fomented a coup earlier that year to put the right sort of despot – that is, a pro-American despot –in power in Saigon, a dirty business in which George Ball had participated, presumably with the whole-hearted backing of the men in the White House. However, his ongoing lack of enthusiasm for the project had been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back vis-a-vis South Vietnam, because – according to Gretchen’s father - the Under Secretary of State had since robustly cavilled against the President’s subsequent reinstitution of a pre-October War scheme to send US ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’ – Ame
rican GIs - to prop up the ‘new’ regime in Saigon.

  Against the wishes of his boss at State, Dean Rusk, George Ball had made his case against the deployment of additional ‘advisors’ to Saigon directly to the President. During that meeting the Under Secretary of State had reminded the President of the humiliating defeat of the old colonial power in Vietnam, France, at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That event had been so catastrophic that it had destroyed French power and influence in Asia overnight. Indochina had been the graveyard of one former great power and it could easily be again. ‘Mr President, if we do this then within five years we will have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles of Vietnam and we will never find them again!’

  While to Gretchen the logic of this was compelling it seemed the President of the United States of America had dismissed George Ball’s warning, pretty much out of hand. Only an acute shortage of troops – a direct and one would have though, predictable, consequence of the ‘peace dividend’ cuts that had, and were continuing to salami slice the US Army’s manpower on the mistaken, publicly stated and restated premise that the ‘President has no plans to ever send GIs overseas to fight another war’ – had thus far restricted the ranks of the ‘advisors’ and ‘trainers’ in South Vietnam to a force of less than two thousand men. Even this initial ‘investment in the future of South East Asia’ had been kept secret from the American people. According to Gretchen’s father – notwithstanding nobody knew where the GIs were going to come from - the President eventually meant to send up to eleven thousand US ‘advisors’ to Indochina.

  ‘Arithmetic was never the Kennedy boys’ strong suit,’ Gretchen’s father had declaimed dryly. ‘Old Joe Kennedy was always there to bankroll whatever they touched. Why would they need to know the real cost of things or how to count?’

  What with one thing and another it was all very perplexing.