Ask Not Of Your Country (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 4)

by James Philip

  “My people told you that this meeting is strictly off the record?” The Vice President said sternly.

  “My staff will tell the Press that I came to the DC area on a fact-finding mission,” Gretchen confirmed. “During which I paid courtesy calls on the staff of the Office of Reconstruction.”

  Johnson nodded his approbation.

  The woman raised her coffee cup to her lips.

  She was wearing a minimum of make up; just sufficient foundation to mask the scar tissue on her brow, and to make her lips less pale.

  “It can’t be much fun coming back to DC?” The man suggested quietly. “You must have a lot of bad memories?”

  Gretchen shrugged.

  “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she retorted ruefully. “I was lucky. Thousands of others were not.”

  “It can’t be much fun being accused of aiding and abetting the enemy either?”

  Again, the young woman shrugged.

  “Even alleged traitors have a constitutional right to a fair trial, Mister Vice President.”

  Johnson had been astonished that Claude Betancourt had allowed his little girl – whom everybody knew to be not so much the apple of his eye as the jewel in his family’s crown – to get anywhere near the Battle of Washington Tribunals. The Justice Department planned to arraign the ‘Washington Twelve’, the surviving ring-leaders of the coup d’état of December 1963 sometime in mid-July. The accused were all dead men, everybody knew that; they were guilty of treason, sedition, mass murder, crimes against humanity, rape, etcetera. To a man they were going to the electric chair and Gretchen Betancourt was the last public defender left standing. In a few weeks time she was likely to be the most hated woman in America.

  But LBJ understood exactly why she had put her head above the parapet.

  In years to come everybody would know her name and recognize her face.

  In twenty years time people would remember that she had stood up for justice; and defended the constitution like a Lioness protecting her helpless cubs from pack of rogue males.

  They would remember that she had gone down with all guns firing, that she had stood up for what she believed in even though she had known her cause was hopeless.

  Hollywood would make movies about Gretchen Betancourt!

  Make no mistake she understood the political and moral calculus as well as anybody. The kid had ambitions and she was taking the biggest gamble of her career, early. She had time on her side. She would be the most hated woman in America for a day; but in twenty years, in say, 1984...

  “Nobody will thank you for upholding the constitution,” LBJ observed ruefully.

  Gretchen sobered, met the man’s gaze.

  “With all due respect, sir,” she countered. “It should not be up to me, or anybody else involved with the Battle of Washington Tribunals to uphold the constitution. The President is the man who is supposed to uphold the constitution, sir,” this she offered while quirking a half-smile to soften the blow. “My clients have been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion and thus far, nobody in the Administration has lifted a finger to uphold their constitutional rights.”

  Johnson thought about this.

  Claude Betancourt’s little princess had come here to get his attention; the question was: why?

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, counselor?” He inquired, swatting aside her carefully placed barb.

  Gretchen had been attempting to get past the Vice President’s paternally severe mask. Her father had said that was a waste of time; the man was a born poker player. She sighed, put down her coffee cup and gestured at the room around her.

  “Do you know why this town is called ‘Kensington’, sir?”

  This piqued Johnson’s curiosity.

  “No. But you’re going to tell me, anyway?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gretchen smiled. “This was all farmland until the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built across Montgomery County. Nearby here the railroad crossed the Rockville-Bladensburg Road and in time a small community called Knowles Station grew up around it. I don’t have to tell you, Mister Vice President that in the summer DC gets hot and humid, and back in the 1880s and 1890s unhealthy, too. To cut a long story short a DC realtor and developer called, of all things, Brainard Warner, who had fallen in love with London a few years before started buying up land around Knowles Station. He dreamed of creating a so-called ‘Victorian Community’ as a summer haven for well to do Washingtonians, and in the course of his marketing drive he persuaded the local town council to rename the whole town ‘Kensington’ after his favorite place in London.”

  Johnson said nothing.

  Back in the House he had become famous for cowing opponents by employing the ‘Johnson treatment’. He would out-stare a man, or stand over him, looming threateningly until he got his way.

  “Sometimes,” Gretchen said, “we can become so caught up in the,” she hesitated, ‘passions and issues of the moment that we forget our past friendships and where our future best interests lie.”

  Johnson nodded but remained silent.

  His conscious mind understood that he was listening to Claude Betancourt’s messenger. And yet something also told him that the attractive brunette less than half his age sitting before him as if she owned the room was coloring that message with her own subtle, shrewd nuances.

  The kid was a player.

  A real player!

  Gretchen had three elder male Betancourt siblings, and a much younger sister from her father’s various marriages. The sons were attorneys and bankers, each as anonymous in New England society as any child of the Betancourt lineage could possibly be; and suddenly Johnson realized why the father had ‘bet the ranch’ on his eldest daughter.

  “On the night of the war,” Gretchen explained, apparently drifting off at an irrelevant tangent, “all the assumptions and plans I had made about the life I was going to live went out of the door,” she went on. “I was afraid but I was angry, also. Livid, actually. I’m still afraid and I’m still a little angry, and a couple of months ago we all discovered that we hadn’t won the war after all. Back in April we learned that Chicago, Buffalo, Seattle, Galveston and South Boston had been destroyed for nothing. One can only imagine how our friends in England feel about all this. We got away with one fifth, or perhaps one-sixth of the casualties the British suffered that night.”

  The thing that Johnson was finding fascinating was that the young woman was not talking to him as a supplicant but as an equal; he was the Vice President of the United States of America but she knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he was the one who was in trouble, that he was the one who needed her and without being pushy or in any way crass about it, she was telling him that he badly needed to listen to what she was about to say to him. A third party looking on would have seen none of this but then unless you had skin in the game it was impossible to really explain what was going on to an outsider.

  “And now,” Gretchen continued pleasantly, “the Administration is well on its way to endorsing the Fulbright Doctrine.”

  The Vice President’s eyes narrowed a fraction; otherwise he was inscrutable. The nation’s foreign policy – such as it was – had been low on the priority list of the Administration in the aftermath of the October War. Dean Rusk, J. William Fulbright’s predecessor had been in retrospect a broken man and an unholy coalition of vested interests comprising the FBI, the CIA, the fragmented apparatus of Federal Disaster Management, Wall Street, the oil industry and a plethora of competing military factions in the Pentagon had largely succeeded in hijacking key elements of the Administration’s post-war ‘diplomacy’. The result had been the FUBAR – one of Curtis LeMay’s favorite acronyms standing for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair – apology for a ‘foreign policy’ which thus far succeeded in alienating Australasia, India and the British Commonwealth, convinced the Canadians that they were living in a house next to a hundred foot tall psychotic mad axe man, inflamed South American neo
-fascists to seize power in Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina, led the Spanish to think they could besiege Gibraltar with impunity and very nearly resulted in a shooting war with the United Kingdom back in December.

  In January the ‘problem’ with the British had been patched up by the temporary reinstatement of the 1958 US-UK Defense Treaty. Unfortunately, as Bill Fulbright had pointed out at the time there had never been a snow flake’s chance in Hades of getting that pact ratified by Congress and shortly before the Administration formally ‘reneged’ on the January agreement all Hell had actually broken out in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East at exactly the moment the US had neither the military resources, nor the political appetite for new ‘foreign adventures’. And of course, it was election year and there was a recognition that sending GIs to the Persian Gulf would wipe out the Democratic Party and JFK’s re-election campaign so absolutely that in ten years time nobody would even remember that there had ever been such a thing as ‘the Democrats’.

  Bill Fulbright was continually telling anybody who would listen that ‘good intentions and high morals should never have been permitted to mix with the development of a great nation’s foreign policy in the first place’. He hated it but he had been around long enough to know that you played the game with the cards you were dealt, not the ones you would have picked from the pack if you were a crooked dealer.

  “Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood the general thrust of, or the thinking underlying the Fulbright Doctrine,” Gretchen offered coyly.

  The Vice President realized he had allowed his thoughts to wander.

  He snapped back into the here and now.

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “you’d be better discussing these matters with the Secretary of State, Mrs Brenckmann.”

  Gretchen brushed this aside like a master swordsman contemptuously parrying the inept swipe of a novice’s cutlass.

  “The last time I visited the State Department it did not end very well,” she reminded the man. “Part of the building fell on top of me, I got shot and poor Under Secretary Ball died.”

  Johnson smiled; he could not help himself smiling.

  “Secretary Fulbright’s thinking,” Gretchen said as if she was thinking aloud and hoping Johnson would put her right on one or two areas of detail upon which she was a little fuzzy. “Is that with the re-emergence of the Soviet Union as a viable major World power there is a very real prospect of a second global nuclear war.”

  The Vice President nodded.

  “A thing,” his visitor declared, “that must never be allowed to happen again.”

  “Yes,” the Texan concurred.

  “Logically,” Gretchen rejoined, “it follows that the Administration is prepared to go to almost any lengths to secure a peace treaty with the Russians.”

  Johnson considered the proposition.

  He hesitated just long enough to communicate to Claude Betancourt’s envoy that the Fulbright Doctrine was not the completely ‘done deal’ in his mind that it was to the rest of the President’s inner circle.

  However, despite his hesitation when he spoke the words spilled from his lips as if he was still reading from the same script as the rest of the Administration.

  “The President will go to any lengths to avoid a new war with the USSR,” he declaimed quietly, like a loyal Vice President was bound to do. “Any lengths.”

  Gretchen digested this.

  It seemed that the man who was a heartbeat away from the Presidency was, as her father believed, unsold on the new ‘all or nothing’ thinking coming out of the State Department.

  “That’s very interesting, sir.”

  The man and the woman rose to their feet, she rather more gingerly than the tall Texan.

  “You be sure to convey my regards to your father, Mrs Brenckmann.”

  Chapter 5

  Saturday 6th June 1964

  Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia

  Ivan Allen, the fifty-three year old 52nd Mayor of Atlanta, had embraced the need for change long before the tragic events of 7th February in Bedford Pine Park, although like many good men he had walked a long – somewhat winding road - towards his own personal epiphany. He was a businessman turned politician, a pragmatist by nature who was inherently more interested in what made sense than by what this, or that, racial ideology or political dogma dictated. That said, he had been brought up in the Old South of Jim Crow, born and bred in the place where if anywhere, most Southerners believed the war for secession had been (tragically) lost, and when he had run to be Mayor of Atlanta he had had no alternative but to run on the same segregationist ticket as his rival Lester Maddox.

  However, unlike Maddox, a dyed in the wool bigot who had refused to serve blacks in his restaurant and had been a virulent advocate of states’ rights in the 1961 Mayoral race, Allen’s campaign had broadcast hope. Virtually the entire non-white electorate of the city – approximately forty percent of all eligible voters – had swung in behind him. Not just because he was the least worst option for Mayor but because when he was on the stump he talked about the future, not the past, and it was obvious that he had plans for the betterment of the lives of all the city’s peoples.

  On his first day in office Allen had ordered the removal of all WHITE and COLORED signs from city hall, and one misstep apart – building a wall between a black and white neighborhood, which he later came to bitterly regret – by the time of the atrocity of 7th February no other big city Mayor in the Deep South had done more to promote inter-communal and racial understanding.

  Within weeks of assuming office he had started to winnow out the petty regulations and the entrenched nineteenth century bigotry which forbade the city to employ blacks in anything other than menial jobs. More ought to have been achieved faster and probably would have been, had it not been for the Cuban Missiles War. He ought to have done more. The one saving grace was that people in the black districts of Atlanta knew that unlike his predecessors he had done something and that he honestly wanted to do a lot more for them. Not because he was saint but because it was the right thing to do; and in Georgia that made him so different from most white men in positions of power and authority as to make him to all intents, unique.

  After the Bedford Pine Park shootings there had been isolated local riots and low-level mostly non-violent ongoing civil unrest in Atlanta but nothing comparable to the conflagrations in Mississippi and neighboring Alabama. Whereas elsewhere in the south order had not been restored until the National Guard and Marines had shot dead hundreds and whole districts had burned down, Atlanta had been an island of relative calm amidst a sea of troubles. Although at the time of the shootings Allen would not have described himself as any kind of personal friend of Dr Martin Luther King; the two men had encountered each other many times, always in the spirit of Christian charity and understanding, and he and his wife had met King’s wife, Coretta and been introduced to several of his children.

  In those terrible days after the shooting while Dr King fought for life the surviving leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, members of King’s family and Allen had visited black neighborhoods and pleaded for patience. People in those beleaguered, angry streets had been astonished to see their white Mayor, his wife and the Atlanta Police Department Chief, Herbert Jenkins unarmed and hatless, entrusting their safety to the good will of people who had no reason to trust them, accompanying community leaders and worshippers from Dr King’s Ebenezer Street Chapel going from door to door asking for restraint in the face of intolerable provocation.

  Allen had found himself in homes and speaking in halls and chapels in parts of Atlanta where no previous Mayor had ever stood, or even driven through, talking about how when he had joined the family business in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression he had started off in the basement of the company’s Atlanta store, ‘learning the ropes’ from a long-time black employee. It had been a shock being a privileged ‘college boy’ fresh out of the Georgia Institute of Technology brandishing his
Degree in Commerce one day; and the next to be the lowliest of the low receiving a practical education in the business from the very bottom up! It helped that he had discovered very early in his political life that his faith – he was a devout Presbyterian – gave him common ground and cause with many of his constituents in the black neighborhoods of his city. In retrospect, looking back over the last four months he was painfully aware of what he, his city, his state and his country had very nearly lost on that dreadful day in early February.

  The Bedford Pines atrocity had not wrought any kind of miracle of reconciliation in Atlanta. Two hundred years of history could not be wiped away in a single day or by a single act. The atonement of one white man or tens of thousands of white men could not undo the iniquities of slavery and the unjust settlement of a war that had ended almost a hundred years ago. To pretend otherwise was to live in a fool’s paradise.

  The thing was not the journey it was the taking of the first dangerous steps, the laying of foundations for men of good will to build upon in the years to come.

  Four months on the Bedford Pine Park shootings had brought together every man and woman of good will in Atlanta and on this sweltering summer day. They had come to Oakland Cemetery to remember the dead and to think of all those who had lost friends and loved ones.

  Big public address speakers had been positioned on poles around the north eastern quadrant of Oakland Cemetery. The Atlanta PD estimated at upwards of a hundred thousand people had massed in Potters Field and the Black section of huge graveyard. There were television cameras, scores of photographers and journalists of ever political and social leaning in the city. Later today the March on Philadelphia would parade through Atlanta at the outset of its historic – and everybody prayed non-violent – trek to the nation’s temporary capital.

  Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the Governor of Georgia was winding up his remarks on the low podium. He was practically invisible to the great crowd behind a battery of perhaps two dozen microphones.