Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  What was wrong with those people in the White House?

  Her guy had argued with his Democratic protagonists that complaining about the GOP redesigning electoral districts in its favour, while at the same time allowing Southern Democrat segregationists to camp out in Jim Crow’s backyard was just plain dumb. But then the bleeding-heart liberals and the red necks within the Party had always hated each other a lot more than they had the Republicans.

  All of which Gretchen had thought she understood but actually, did not. Plainly not, because in hindsight equating the resurgent activist mainstream of all the young people who had swelled the Party’s ranks in the last year, its restored war chest and its slow but steady rise in the polls with a genuine sense of national purpose, had been…just plain dumb.

  McGovern, Wallace and the Kennedy family political machines had surfed the wave and carried on fighting the fights which had so undermined LBJ in 1964. That McGovern, the party’s liberal heart had carried New Hampshire by a country mile was like handing Richard Nixon a giant hammer with which to squelch all hope. To many Americans Nixon might be a mean, duplicitous bastard but he was their mean, duplicitous bastard and he had brought peace in our time, or at least, the promise of it; not by thinking good thoughts, or by doing good deeds, or by feeding the poor or alleviating the suffering of the dispossessed of America’s wars, but by letting his enemies know that he would do whatever was necessary to crush them beneath his heel!

  George Wallace was the champion of the White Supremacists and segregationists in the South, the unlikely mouthpiece for all those poor white Americans who felt themselves the forgotten victims of the October War, neglected by the ‘great men’ in DC, and for all those people who did not see why African-Americans should get to join – and lengthen - the same line they had to stand in.

  Nobody really knew what the Kennedys stood for but ‘Teddy’ had run Wallace close for second place and that said something, although God alone knew what, about the state of the Democrats in New Hampshire.

  Then, out on the fringe, just in everybody’s eyeline there was the blustering presence of Curtis LeMay, good old ‘Bombs Away’, ‘Iron Pants’ himself, the saviour of the Union on the night of the October War, and again a year later when he had flown into the capital to personally take command at the height of the Battle of Washington, who had appeared at just two hustings during the primary; and now the smart money was on him joining forces with George Wallace.

  This time last year, Gretchen would have ignored gossip like that; it was too absurd to take seriously. Now, well, the Democrats seemed Hell-bent on racing down the shortest road to perdition and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Which, all things considered, was probably why her father-in-law had just sacked her.

  Albeit, very politely, respectfully and with no little verisimilitude.

  He had thanked her for all the hard work she had put in over the last year; and freely admitted that but for her prompting he would never have ‘started this thing’.

  But he had sacked her all the same.

  That was when he had informed her that he had been talking to Larry O’Brien; who would be taking over next week but with whom he had already been ‘working behind the scenes.’

  The Ambassador had apologised for not telling her about that sooner; he felt bad about it - and she knew he did - but that was politics.

  Gretchen had forgiven him in a heartbeat.

  Her father-in-law had put his arm about her shoulder.

  Then her mother-in-law had given her the sort of maternal hug that she had never got from either her birth mother or her stepmother.

  Gretchen had suggested that ‘it will look better if I resign’.

  So, that was what she was about to do, claiming family responsibilities and concerns that if she continued in her present role, it might lead to conflicts of interests with her husband’s ‘nationally important’ work.

  That, at least, was credible.

  Dan was, after all, a Clerk to the United States Chief Justice, Earl Warren, the former Republican Governor of California, and to boot, the designated official drafter of the final report into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, presently in its final stages of preparation and due to be published the day after the November General Election.

  Gretchen had known all along that that was going to be a problem both for her husband, and her father-in-law. Just not how big a problem.

  Again, that was…dumb.

  She had made a lot of dumb mistakes recently.

  Walter Brenckmann was not the sort of guy one could easily package, or manage and she ought to have realised that he had had his own strategy, right or wrong all along.

  Her husband was right: Dan said she was a bad loser and she was going to have to get better at hiding it!

  In the meantime, what she was not going to do was start feeling sorry for herself, because that did not work either in her family or in the one, she had been lucky enough to marry into.

  Chapter 8

  Friday 8th March, 1968

  Situation Room, Headington Quarry, Oxford

  The woods and undulating leafy grounds south of ‘The Kilns’ and Holy Trinity Church, respectively the house in which C.S. Lewis, the author of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, had once lived and the church in which he had preached in 1942 on the topic of religion and pleasure, were now home to an ever-expanding government complex.

  The Prime Minister’s new official residence, Churchill House, lay behind high red brick walls with a view to the north of the roof of Holy Trinity in a reshaped landscape dotted with young, freshly planted beech and ash trees, and connected to the newly commissioned Situation Room by a strip of fresh tarmac above ground, and out of sight, an underground passage way which curved through the foundations of the buildings springing up all over the compound, some ten to fifteen feet below the surface.

  In truth, Margaret Thatcher had taken very little interest in the design or the building of Churchill House, or in the development of the adjacent compound, or of its complex bunker system. With regard to the latter, most of the major decisions had been taken as long ago as the summer of 1964, shortly after the apparatus of the emergency government had shifted from Cheltenham to Oxford, and Parliament had met for the first time in Christ Church Great Hall.

  Many of the most important decisions had been taken without reference to her, or to other senior ministers. Time had seemed short, and the grip of the government at the time, in those dreadful days, tenuous. Thus, the ‘government bunkers’ were to be bomb proof but not ‘Atomic Safe’; which meant that they and their connecting tunnels were constructed in relatively shallow holes in the ground and then over-topped with four to ten feet-thick reinforced concrete carapaces, resistant to typical Second War-vintage bombing but not, to even a moderate sized – kiloton-yield - nearby nuclear explosion. Cost and resources had been at a premium, and in fact, still were but the baseline assumption had been that nobody had seriously considered that a future thermonuclear war would be remotely survivable in the United Kingdom; so, the main security worry for the planners in Oxford had always been that of terroristic or criminal attacks on the would-be seat of governance. And for that high walls, good lines of sight for the troops and police who would defend the compound, and ‘sensibly’ hardened, below ground installations, had seemed sufficient.

  As it was, most of the subterranean world of the Headington Quarry Government Establishment (HQGE) – completed at the end of 1965 – had quickly been utilised as conference, meeting, communications, and its largest ‘bunker’ designated the Government Secure Situation Room (GSSR), or as it was known to insiders, just the ‘Situation Room’.

  A large amount of seemingly uncoordinated building work was still going on above ground, mainly across the southern and south western quadrants of the complex where eventually, many of the country’s key political leaders and military men would have apartments or residences so that, especially in a crisis, everybod
y who needed to be ‘on the spot’ might be comfortably accommodated. In practice, apart from the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the staff of the Prime Minister’s Private Office, few ministers or senior officials, were overly enthusiastic about moving onto the ‘building site’ that parts of the compound remained, and were likely to remain, for at least the next two years; they and, in many cases, their families were already perfectly happy, positively well-established in the nearby city, or lodged in the government estates cropping up north of Woodstock.

  The machinery of the Home Civil Service, Parliament and the Headquarters Staffs of the Armed Services had had nearly four years to become comfortably ensconced in and around Oxford, and the very idea that senior administrators, politicians and staff officers of the primary armed services should up sticks and move to ‘the Quarry’ was, and had been for some time, something of a dead letter. Even had their husbands been amenable to such a proposition; the wives of the key senior officers and civil servants, were not!

  Since last autumn the normal business of Cabinet Government had been conducted in Heath House, a three-storey functional – some said ‘ugly’ – office block constructed directly above the buried Situation Room bunker. Heath House accommodated the offices of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Henry Tomlinson and his youthful Principal Assistant, thirty-year-old Robin Butler, and the joint secretariat of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office, with Cabinet Committees meeting in its airy top floor conference room.

  For full Cabinet meetings chaired by the Prime Minister or her deputy, Lord Carington, Churchill House had a custom-designed suitable room situated on the ground floor of its north wing. It was a standing joke that the Prime Minister and her twins, fourteen-year-old Carol and Mark, lived like ‘church mice’, only occupying a small suite of rooms on the first and second floors of the south wing of the over-large, supposedly mock-Tudor residence.

  It was said – many were the apocryphal tales which had attached themselves to the Lady’s skirts in her incident and controversy-filled time as premier – that the Prime Minister had been horrified to discover, when the building was already well advanced, that Churchill House was to be built very nearly in the image of the first, post-October 1962 Government House at Cheltenham, the seat of the United Kingdom Emergency Interim Administration (UKIEA) led by Edward Heath until his sad death in December 1963.

  Her abiding memories of that miserable old pile in Gloucestershire were of freezing winters, ghastly paintings on the wall, plumbing that only worked intermittently and the nightmare, life and death decisions that she and her colleagues had had to make every single day…

  Lieutenant Colonel Sir Steuart Pringle, since handing over the command of the Prime Minister’s Bodyguard Detachment, Margaret Thatcher’s personal military adjutant, kept in step, the man respectfully half-a-pace behind his principal’s left shoulder, as they entered the brightly lit Situation Room that late afternoon in March.

  Above ground, dark clouds scudded across nearby Oxford and rain fell in premature April-shower-like squalls. The past winter had been relatively mild – easily the kindest since 1962 - snow only having fallen this far south on a couple of days but the rains had been unrelenting in the last month. The Thames was in flood – in spate in places – and many square miles of the ruins of West and Central London were under several feet of dark, churning water. The flooding had driven the task forces of engineers, builders, divers, tunnellers and the hardiest of settlers away from the great river, temporarily halting the ongoing mining of the ruins of the old square Mile, as they sheltered on the high ground where the first resettlement villages had begun to rise from the ashes.

  There was flooding elsewhere in England, in the north and the south and south west where babbling streams which had dried up some years ago, had become torrents, re-filled time and again by storm upon storm rolling in from the North Atlantic.

  Presently, building work had been suspended across much of the HQGE site because the ground was waterlogged, with some areas reduced to seemingly bottomless swamps. It did not help that all the quarrying over the centuries, which had led to a pitted, undermined landscape, drained poorly and that in the haste to get work started back in 1964, only the northern sectors of the site had been properly readied for the subsequent building work. It now seemed as if completely new drainage channels and significant back filling, was going to have to take place before building re-commenced that summer.

  The gloom and the wet seemed to have got into everybody’s souls, feeding into a mood of weary despondency. October 1962 seemed like it was a long time ago, and yet, as if it was just yesterday. Ironically, the survivors, having lived through the aftermath, finally had had a little time, breathing space between crises which now tended to arrive singly, rather than in battalions. To have survived was a blessing, albeit one tainted with guilt, and the knowledge that the air around one, the ground upon which one stood and the water that sustained life was poisoned, and would be for hundreds of years. Some chose to believe that life was good, and getting better for most people. And possibly, less dangerous; nevertheless, how one came to terms with what had been lost, and the as yet unquantified, unknowable scale of the radiological consequences of the cataclysm bore particularly heavily on the shoulders of parents, and couples who wondered if it was either Christian, or sensible to contemplate bringing children into this despoiled world.

  That so many, perhaps a majority of the peoples of the British Isles were struggling to see a way ahead, any kind of future for themselves and their children, living now or unborn, was hardly inexplicable. The October War and its ghastly aftermath had disproportionately winnowed, hollowed out the youngest and the oldest demographics; children were precious as never before in living memory, and the generation of grandfathers and grandmothers who ought to have been a repository of experiences, perspectives lost to the young, and barely a shadow of its pre-war presence. Three-quarters of the under ten year-olds, and approximately the same percentage of persons over the age of sixty in October 1962 were no longer alive. As tragic, was the decimation of young teenagers, over half of all youngsters between the ages of eleven and sixteen at the time of the war had perished. Even had this not been in the context of the headline casualty figures of the war – people still argued over the numbers but at least thirty-five percent of the population of England had died – the cruellest cut had been the way disease and hunger, the cold and the dangers of life in the chaos of the year following the disaster, had fallen unjustly, mercilessly upon the young, the future of the nation.

  Truly, one was grateful for small mercies.

  In Oxford, now the permanent official capital of the British Isles, made so by an Act of Parliament which had come into effect on 1st January, the year or so since the cessation of major hostilities in France had hastened a return to what passed for business as usual, and everybody had seized the opportunity to take stock.

  Everybody.

  In the government, in the broader political milieu, in the military from chiefs of staff to squaddies and troopers, from the denizens of the Royal Navy’s wardrooms to the lower decks, airmen flying the latest F-4Phantom IIs of the RAF, to the humblest ground crew erk, and on the streets of the cities and towns, villages and hamlets of England, Wales, Scotland and Ulster, everybody was beginning to hope the worst was over, and that despite their worst fears, that the peace might be here to stay.

  And if it was, they were living in a new world.

  If only they could trust the fragile evidence of their eyes.

  There were no guarantees but the liberation of France, for British and Commonwealth arms achieved at a fraction of the cost in blood and grief of the defence of Cyprus and Malta, and the killing grounds of Iraq and Iran in 1964, had struck a chord in the communal psyche. The French campaign had not been a back to the walls, against the odds, no surrender struggle; it had been about saving a nation from tyranny, and giving succour to the innocents and not to put too fine a point on it, the British p
eople felt good about it.

  The Government’s popularity had declined somewhat since the halcyon days of March 1965 when Margaret Thatcher’s National Conservatives had swept aside a disorganised, frankly shambolic, oddly arrogant Labour and Co-operative Party; but consistently polled well above the levels Harold Macmillan’s pre-cataclysm administration had ever achieved. Given that the French campaign had ended so well – unless you had been a Communist – the only disappointing aspect of the affair was that the Conservatives had not reaped a richer reward in terms of public opinion, and had to settle for a stabilisation of their ten point, give or take a couple of percent, mid-1966 lead in practically all of the polls in the last fifteen months. At a general election, although representing a slump in support from 1965, that sort of lead would still convert into another, if not landslide, then very, very solid victory with a majority of well over a hundred seats in the House of Commons.

  For any sitting government, this was political capital beyond the dreams of avarice, pretty much a guarantee of a second term of up to five years in which to continue to carry on the good work of the last three.

  Things were looking up!

  Other than in Ulster, British forces had seen no major action for more than a year; and farther afield, even before the Sverdlovsk ‘Process’ had kicked in, the Soviet threat had been in retreat in Western Europe, as proven conclusively by the unwillingness, or the inability of the Soviets, to decisively influence the course of the end game in France. Even in the Middle East, things had quietened down and for the first time since the winter of 1963-64, most of the fleet was actually back in British waters.

  The Army was slowly re-equipping, re-training and tentatively slimming down, mostly by releasing men into the Territorials, or the Reserve so that tradesmen could return to civilian life to bolster the first, tentative steps towards reconstruction.