Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Thus, Andrei Kirov’s career had continued.

  His penance had been to be sent to the end of the world.

  Standing well over one-hundred-and-ninety centimetres tall, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, Kirov was a bear of a man and inevitably, sometimes gave the impression of being leaden-footed, clumsy and misleadingly, a little slow-witted. Built like a traditional KGB bruiser, one of the Lubyanka’s hard men, he was in fact, quietly spoken, with a dry sense of humour that he made no attempt to hide. Maddeningly, he remained something of a mystery to Zakharov. He hated it when he could never guess what a man was thinking!

  If he took the base’s Political Officer at face value, then the man was a bumbling time server, happy to while away his life in a backwater. Seryshevo was, due to the vanishingly small number of aircraft still fit to fly, the chronic shortages of spare parts, qualified mechanics and technicians of every description, and the rigorous rationing of aviation fuel, a pleasantly, if isolated, very ‘quiet’ billet.

  On the down side, the Yankees had flattened the two nearest towns, so the night life was limited and since there were eight or nine men for every woman on the base, opportunities for romance were decidedly scarce.

  Which was where, Zakharov had decided, if Kirov had a chink in his armour, opportunity lay.

  “Presumably, you will tell your superiors that I am wasting fuel and using up engine and airframe time,” Vladimir Zakharov put to the KGB man, “when you submit your next report, Comrade Major?”

  Kirov shrugged.

  He might not trust Zakharov; but that was not to say he did not privately admire the man’s tenacity. It took a lot of moral fortitude to keep on fighting so many lost battles.

  “While we maintain men, women and aircraft out here, we might as well let them practice their skills from time to time, Comrade General.”

  “How the Hell am I supposed to do that when your masters won’t let the Red Air Force to exercise with real bombs?”

  Andrei Kirov had respectfully advised Zakharov to stop pestering the people in Komsomolsk to rescind the standing orders about the Kh-20 air-launched stand-off missiles. Personally, he did not consider it unreasonable for the Red Air Force to want to conduct exercises with ‘unarmed’ Kh-20s. The warhead was only a relatively small element of the weapon’s deadweight, and in its absence, mounted below a Tu-95K, crews could experience flying with it – and the effects it had on their aircraft – and run through all the procedures necessary to deploy it. Except of course, to launch it, fully armed at the enemy.

  “That is a wholly operational matter, Comrade General,” Kirov replied, dutifully. Zakharov was not his commanding officer, the two men operated under completely separate chains of command. However, it was inordinately difficult to spy on a man one never talked to, or saw only occasionally. Thus, he had determined to keep on the best possible terms with the irascible Red Air Force man; which meant humouring him sometimes.

  The Red Air Force officer turned on his heel and stomped towards the car which had carried both men out onto the far hardstands, to view the take-off of the Amerikanskaya Mechta.

  As Andrei Kirov trooped after him, Zakharov jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the sound of the now very distant Tu-95.

  “There are ten people on that aircraft. Three of them are payload technicians. There’s nothing for them to fucking do until the fucking aircraft gets home!”

  Andrei Kirov was not so much worried about the waste of manpower, as the effect nearly a day in the air with nothing to occupy her mind would have on the mood of a certain Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna, when she eventually returned to Seryshevo.

  If he had learned anything about her – by inclination she was not exactly an open book – idleness did not bring out the sunny side of her nature.

  He sighed.

  Seryshevo was a shrinkingly small community, these days.

  Zakharov probably already knew all about their illicit liaison.

  The KGB man put this to the back of his mind.

  “Well, as to the inefficient employment of trained personnel, obviously, now that I have been apprised, again of your views on the subject, I will of course, include in my report to the appropriate authorities, Comrade General.”

  “You make sure you fucking do that!

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday 21st February, 1968

  Hyannis Port, Barnstable, Massachusetts

  Claude Betancourt could not help but think of all the other times he had been driven along these same roads down the years. South on Scudder Avenue, across Irving, onto Dale, then a left into Marchant Avenue. Today, the first Secret Service checkpoint was on Dale, otherwise it was not until his Lincoln turned to draw up alongside the front of old Joe Kennedy’s white clapboard house overlooking Nantucket Sound, that members of JFK’s guard detail stepped out into the open.

  It was one of those wintery, squally days when the wind blew across Cape Cod carrying Atlantic spume and the threat of the next storm. The cold, damp air knifed through Claude Betancourt’s heavy overcoat, and pinched at his lined face, watering his rheumy eyes.

  “It’s good to see you, Claude,” Jack Kennedy smiled, clasping the old man’s hand firmly as his visitor clambered stiffly out of the car.

  The former President was dressed in slacks and a thick cardigan. His hair was duller, perhaps greyer than Betancourt recollected from their last meeting over a year before, otherwise, he looked well, albeit older than his years but then most people did these days.

  “You look well, Mister President,” the old man replied. Then, frowning concern he asked: “Forgive me, I heard Jackie was unwell…”

  A flicker of pain crossed the former President’s handsome face, confirming what his visitor had heard on the grapevine. Jackie had miscarried and been hospitalised for over a week earlier that month and the Kennedy clan had closed ranks, in ways it had not done for many years.

  “Jackie is recovering well. The kids are a great strength to us both at this time.”

  “I’m sure they are. Believe me when I say the thoughts of your many, many friends have been with you the last few days.”

  His host grimaced, and gave the Chairman of the Democrat National Committee a rueful look.

  “Do we have that many friends, these days?”

  Claude Betancourt sighed, shrugged.

  “You’d be surprised, Mister President.”

  They walked inside and the younger man helped the older slip his arms out of his coat. Claude Betancourt had suspected, without quite knowing why, that the old house would be unchanged; nevertheless, he was a little surprised by the bareness of the rooms through which he walked.

  “One day,” JFK explained, reading his thoughts, “we’ll move in properly. For the moment the house on Irving Avenue does us just fine. We may head out to the West Coast this summer,” he went on reflectively, “maybe, it’ll be a little less claustrophobic over there.” He grinned self-deprecatingly at this. “Yeah, I know that sounds cockamamie, Claude.”

  There was a two-thirds filled crystal decanter and two glasses waiting for the two men on a low table in the window looking south over the sea. A roaring fire burned in a nearby hearth.

  The younger man took Claude Betancourt’s elbow, guided him to a comfortable chair before joining him.

  “We ought to drink to something?” He suggested wryly.

  His visitor nodded.

  “Old Joe senior?” He offered.

  JFK smiled lopsidedly.

  “You and Pa always used to meet in this room.”

  Claude Betancourt nodded, a little disconcerted by how a flood of memories clattered, dissonantly through his head.

  “If you’re going to ask me to talk Bobby and Teddy out of standing against your guy,” the former President said quietly as he poured single malt whiskey into the two tumblers, and pressed one into the old man’s bony hands, “that’s not going to happen, Claude.”

  The man who had been the Kennedy clan�
�s behind the scenes legal fixer smiled, and unhurriedly tested the peaty aroma of the Scotch.

  “No,” he murmured. “I’m not going to ask you to do that.”

  Jack Kennedy’s eyes narrowed.

  “No?” He queried, wondering what he was misreading into the scion of the Betancourt family’s visit.

  “I think Bobby should stand.”

  “Oh…”

  “Teddy will just get his fingers burned; but Bobby putting himself out there, front and centre will exorcise a lot of the bad feeling in the Party. He ought to look at it as an investment in the future.”

  Despite himself, Jack Kennedy was intrigued. He wondered if he was missing something; something very important.

  “How does that work, Claude?”

  “It works because you took the blame for October 1962 when you testified to the Warren Commission. That, in turn, made it possible for Nixon to do the same for the litany of blunders that led to the war in the Midwest. It meant you were, and Nixon will be, a one-term President. You, of course, knew that; but Nixon doesn’t. That’s because he’s a crook, and you aren’t. There’s a lesson for the future in that, don’t you think, Mister President?”

  The younger man sipped his drink.

  “Heck, Claude. You were as close to my old man as anybody. Like father, like son. I don’t think there’s much I can teach you?”

  The old man shook his head, half-smiled.

  “History, context,” he murmured. “FDR kept your Pa close to him right up until he didn’t need him anymore, Jack. Or rather, right up until he wasn’t a threat to him. FDR brought him back from London once he decided that old Joe was the problem, not the solution to his British dilemma. Your Pa could still have run for President in 1944; but then the Japs bombed Pearl Harbour and all bets were off. In October 1962 what happened, happened. That’s what posterity will remember in a hundred years from now. Nixon knew he had a problem in the Midwest; he was asleep at the wheel and we got to have a second Civil War. Because of that millions of Americans died for no reason. That’s how Nixon will be remembered; and that’s how my guy will tell it to the people.”

  A contemplative silence fell between the two men, broken only by the footsteps of the two Secret Servicemen who had followed them into the old house as they patrolled what Claude Betancourt now realised was an otherwise empty building.

  Gretchen had said it would be a good sign if JFK wanted to talk to him alone, without witnesses.

  His daughter was disconcertingly wise sometimes.

  Goodness, that girl was a chip off the old block!

  Not that she got everything right; Gretchen bless her, was still prone to bouts of wishful thinking and impetuosity. Never mind, she learned from her mistakes. One day she would even forgive him for not taking her into his confidence about the real reason he had come to Hyannis Port today.

  The former President’s half-smile was deceptive.

  Jack Kennedy changed the subject.

  “I hear things aren’t going so well for Ambassador Brenckmann, Claude?”

  This drew a rueful guffaw.

  “Walter’s a hell of a litigator,” JFK’s guest groaned, “but he let the others steal a march on him and he’s far too damned…decent. Joanne’s illness last fall didn’t help. Things will look up when she joins him on the stump.”

  “Bobby’s people say he’ll be wiped out in New Hampshire?”

  This drew a mildly scoffing sigh.

  “Walter spent three years on destroyer escorts in the Atlantic in the Second War,” Claude Betancourt went on, unashamedly sanguine. “Then he conned a Fletcher class ship through the last two years of the first Korean conflict. I bet he never raised his voice in all those years. Sooner or later, this country will get the truly good man it deserves in the White House.”

  Jack Kennedy looked into his glass.

  “Yeah, well. That guy sure as hell wasn’t me, Claude.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “You’d have been a great two-term President but for those goddamned missiles on Cuba…”

  “I slept with Marilyn, Claude. And others. I was a fucking playboy for two years and then I blew up the world!”

  Claude Betancourt took another sip of his drink, savoured it, then put down his tumbler. There was a wicked mischief in his grey, tired eyes.

  “Nobody’s perfect, Jack.”

  JFK laughed.

  That did not happen very often.

  “Heck, I never worked out how you always took the edge off the old bootlegger, Claude!”

  “He was never a bootlegger,” the older man objected gently, his thoughts turning, as often they did these days, to his long association, and friendship with the dead patriarch of the Kennedy clan.

  He suspected that Jack was the only one of the sons who had worked out that the old man and his father had been, in many ways, partners, their fortunes – in life and politics, business and the public eye - inextricably linked, and that in making sure that the bodies, figuratively speaking, stayed buried after ‘the old bootlegger’ passed away, Claude Betancourt had been making absolutely certain that his own past deeds also stayed safely in the ground, out of sight and mind.

  “No. he just had an uncanny knack of identifying the inside line when it mattered. But then what did Roosevelt think was going to happen when he made him Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission?” Another shake of the head. “Or his rival think, when they sat back and allowed him to steal a march on them by cornering the import market for Scotch Whisky when prohibition came to an end? And as for letting him put both hands, virtually uncontested, into the cookie jar in Chicago in the thirties, well, God only knows what the competition was doing when all that was going on!”

  Jack Kennedy smiled, and shook his head.

  “Hey, the old man always said you were the only one who knew where all the bodies are buried, Claude.” Then the former President sobered. “But not Walter, I’d guess. You’d have made damned sure about that.”

  Claude Betancourt thought about it.

  “You give me too much credit, Jack.”

  “Do I? Tell me that you and Pa didn’t plan to get me into the White House from the moment I got back from the war,” the younger man reminded his visitor. “So, what about Ambassador Brenckmann? Maybe, just maybe, it’s time you told me the whole story, Claude?”

  His visitor thought about it.

  “Yes, it is true that your father always had his eye on Walter. And others, too. It happened that it made sense for you to run with LBJ in 1960. You’d have lost if we’d magicked Walter out of nowhere. Not that it was a realistic prospect in those days. He wouldn’t have touched politics with a barge pole back then. He still wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Operation Chaos…”

  JFK snorted his doubts.

  “Was anybody actually tapping Ambassador Brenckmann’s phone last year? Or surveilling his family, Claude?”

  The old man shrugged.

  “That’s the way it seemed last year,” he sighed, a wan expression fixed on his lined face.

  “Yeah, sure!”

  Claude Betancourt finished his drink.

  “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t matter, one way or the other. The fact is, that Walter thinks his President two-timed him. You may believe he’s a schoolboy. He’s not. He’s just a good man; the sort of man who never walks by on the other side of the street. That’s why I need you to keep Bobby and Ted in the race until the beginning of May, Mister President.”

  The 35th President of the United States blinked.

  The Massachusetts primary was on the 30th April; whatever happened between now and then it was odds on that a candidate with the name ‘Kennedy’, be it a cat, dog or one of his siblings would likely carry that, if no other, state in the race to become the Democrat candidate for the Presidency.

  Jack Kennedy’s political antennae were twitching now, violently, near to spasm. He had been out of this game since July 1964, imagined himse
lf distanced, divorced from the dirtiest hardball game in town. However, right now, his head was full of possibilities, problems, killer chasms in the road to the White House.

  After New Hampshire, the DNC was trying to organise a Wisconsin ‘caucus’ worth twenty conference delegates to the winner sometime in late March. There was already gossip that this might be a ‘fix’ but only Claude Betancourt would know about that. Then there were two big, ‘killer’ primaries in the last seven days of April, first in Pennsylvania, and then in…Massachusetts.

  George McGovern…

  The old man wanted to stop George McGovern getting so far out ahead so fast that the race was over before it really started. So, he needed a spoiling campaign, something to slow the Senator from South Dakota’s sprint to the Democrat nomination.

  Traditionally, the circus would have moved on through Indiana and Ohio in early May – nobody knew if there would be straw polls in either state, or conclaves of some kind yet – before the primaries in Nevada and West Virginia ahead of the next vital test in Florida a week before the real clinchers in California and New Jersey. There were delegates to be picked up in Oregon and South Dakota but the normal end game in Illinois simply was not, for obvious reasons, going to happen this year.

  And now Claude Betancourt the Chairman of the DNC - was telling him that he did not care what happened in April because, presumably, he was gaming the race according to a different set of rules, and assumptions; but how on earth did allowing his brothers to carry Massachusetts help his guy, Ambassador Walter Brenckmann?

  Did the old rascal have another, dark horse candidate waiting in the wings?

  No, that was too Machiavellian even for Claude Betancourt; and Gretchen, Ambassador Brenckmann’s daughter-in-law and campaign manager, would never have signed up for that…

  Jack Kennedy had hesitated to agree to this meeting. Regardless of his doubts about the wisdom of his younger brothers’ involvement in the Democrat primaries, absurdly, talking to Claude Betancourt felt a little like treating with the enemy. He knew that was ridiculous but loyalties were funny, contrary things in politics and he had begun to wonder who, exactly, was pulling the strings these days across the sprawling Betancourt empire given that its eminence grise was so intimately involved, behind the scenes, in financing and pulling the strings in all aspects of Democrat Party politics.