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

by James Philip

  Decker had watched the TV reports of the suppression of the Bellingham insurrection by the combined National Guards of California, Oregon and Washington State rather than the regular Army, with unmitigated horror. The Governors of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana had initially wanted to act in similar concert to restore order in and around Chicago a year ago; the Administration had vetoed it after pressure from among others, Mayor Daley and an unholy coalition of senior Democrats who presumably, were afraid some kind of scorched earth military solution would destroy what remained of their local power bases.

  The West Coast Governors had bitten the bullet, recognized that if Bellingham had to be razed to the ground to restore their writ across the rest of their lands, so be it. Mayor Daley and his confederates had not had the stomach for that, and unlike the West Coast leaders the President was, it seemed, in Daley’s pocket.

  Perhaps, it was true after all that Daley’s people in Illinois – where Kennedy had carried the state by a mere eight thousand votes – had ‘stuffed’ ballot boxes in an attempt to rig the result in the 1960 election?

  Chicago, a Democrat fortress before the October War, was not any kind of Kennedy family electoral citadel now.

  In any event, it was academic because the genie of revolt and secession was if not completely out of the bottle, then half-way out waving its arms around inciting outright revolution in two states in the heart of the Midwest. Thus far the contagion was still relatively limited, spreading out to the west and north of Chicago but if something was not done about it in a hurry in a month Minneapolis might be under threat, or worse, it and other cities in the path of the rebellion might simply surrender, allow themselves to be subsumed rather than destroyed in a battle that the Philadelphia elite lacked the guts to fight.

  “You know LeMay’s right,” sighed the bespectacled, inscrutable Marine standing by Decker’s left shoulder.

  The fifty-nine year old Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Monroe Shoup had been wounded twice leading ashore the 2nd Marines at Tarawa in 1943. After the Battle of Washington, in which he had personally taken command of the defense of the Pentagon, he had been drafted onto the Chiefs of Staff Committee as a permanent member. Among his other duties he was the Military Governor of the District of Columbia; in which post he had been the man responsible for pacifying the country around the capital, and for ruthlessly hunting down the hundreds of rebels who had escaped the city after the December coup d’état.

  “We’ve let this thing go too far,” Shoup added.

  The two men were alone having sent their respective staffers out of the room. The fact that the two senior soldiers in the US Armed Services had agreed to scrap their existing schedules and meet here, so close to the front spoke eloquently to the gravity of the mounting crisis. The US Army was at full stretch, struggling to undo the eradication of fifty percent of its ‘professional core’ in the October War and the demoralization of the Peace Dividend cutbacks that had, at the time, arbitrarily abbreviated countless previously peerless careers of many of the same men who were now crucial to the success of the re-mobilization of recent months. An army once so comprehensively betrayed by its political masters was not easily restored to its former state and anybody who pretended otherwise was a fool, a charlatan or a senior member of the Kennedy Administration.

  It would be many months before the six new divisions, three armored and three infantry currently reforming in the continental United States would be ready for deployment; until then Decker and Shoup had to work with what they had got. More important, they needed to get a grip on the Midwest battlefield before the full story about the debacle in Illinois and Wisconsin got out.

  In an attempt to keep the blinkers on the great American public a few days more the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay had gone to New Mexico to race sports cars, ostensibly to drag a large section of the Philadelphia Press Corps away from the temporary capital and to stop too many inquisitive eyes and ears poking around northern Illinois for the next few days. If Old Iron Pants was on vacation in Arizona the stories coming out of the Midwest had to be baloney, right?

  Thus far the rigidly enforced news blackout had kept the true scale of the catastrophe off the front pages and off the main bulletins of the big TV and radio networks. Incredibly, the national media was still only speculating about how bad things might be on the Chicago Front; and right now that was exactly the way the Chiefs of Staff wanted it to stay. Fortuitously, the rebels were their biggest allies in this; since they tended to shoot newsmen who strayed into their path on sight. The majority of the people the networks and the big papers had stationed in the area were, understandably, somewhat disinclined to ‘freelance’ too close to ‘the action’ and were therefore almost wholly reliant on the Army Information Service for their copy.

  Basically, Curtis LeMay’s sports car racing circus down in Phoenix was a better story than that from the trenches of Illinois.

  The Chief of Staff of the US Army ruminated a little longer.

  The World was going to Hell in a hand basket and sometimes, well most of the time if he was being honest about it, he wondered if there was a great deal anybody could do about it.

  Before LeMay had flown down to Arizona the Chiefs of Staff had convened in secret onboard the cruiser USS Fargo (CL-106) – the flagship of the Great Lakes Shore Bombardment Squadron – at South Haven, Michigan yesterday morning where the Defense Department’s Special Military Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, three star general William Childs Westmoreland, had briefed the Chiefs on the Administration’s intention to seek a peace, specifically a ‘non-aggression’ treaty with the government of the ‘new’ USSR.

  Although those talks, or more accurately, ‘contacts’ were at an early stage it had been communicated to the assembled Chiefs that other than the naval and air units already earmarked for ‘peace keeping duties’ in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, no further military resources other than those already in theatre would be ‘expended’ in the coming six-month period outside the North American continent.

  Westmoreland had stressed that this assumption was for planning purposes alone since if the United States was suddenly the subject to a new external threat the whole strategic calculus would inevitably alter over night. Notwithstanding, all Army and Marine Corps units reforming in the US, and all air and naval ‘assets’ being returned to service would be available for exclusively continental deployment. In other words the aircraft, men and materiel that the Chiefs of Staff had been husbanding and holding back in anticipation of an imminent transfer to Arabia and the Persian Gulf, would heretofore be available for employment at home.

  Since presently some two hundred aircraft, three hundred tanks self-propelled guns, and approximately twenty-four thousand men were encamped awaiting embarkation on fast transports at half-a-dozen East Coast ports this had come as something of a shock to the Chiefs. Up until that moment the Chiefs of Staff had been operating on the prudent assumption that the US would implement long standing arrangements – commitments enshrined in treaties both acknowledged and unacknowledged - to build up a powerful ‘blocking’ force in Saudi Arabia to frustrate any Soviet attempt to seize the oilfields of that Kingdom. Consistent with this the Chiefs had interpreted the Administration’s anti-British pronouncements as a public screen behind which it fully intended to honor – albeit it selectively, in the spirit if not to the letter – the majority of the promises it had made to Premier Thatcher back in January and acted accordingly.

  ‘Westy’ Westmoreland’s unequivocal confirmation that ‘America First’ actually meant ‘America Alone’; that it was not just a political slogan but a statement of the future foreign policy of the country had, in effect, kicked over the existing geopolitical chess board.

  Contagion...

  If Decker had had those twenty-four thousand men available for deployment in the Midwest a month ago Milwaukee would not be a disaster zone now. With the equivalent of three fully-equipped me
chanized infantry brigades he could still probably contain the revolt short of Minneapolis, albeit at incalculable cost in men, materiel and human suffering.

  But then what?

  How many hundreds of thousands of men on the ground was he going to need to retake and make safe the territory which would have been lost by then? When law and order breaks down, when anything goes, when criminals, shysters, people whose politics were so far to the right or left that in normal times they were disregarded as cranks, and crazed religious zealots took over what happened next?

  Contagion...

  Something similar had almost happened in Seattle; but Governor Rosellini had had that hard arse Colin Dempsey running the show in the critical weeks after the war. Here in north eastern Illinois Mayor Daley and his people had had the political clout to ensure that their people got looked after first while everybody else was left to their own devices. It was hardly surprising the crazies had moved in and Chicago had become a magnet for anybody with a grudge against anything in the Midwest. Nobody had fed the starving or cared for the sick and the dying, the threads that bind modern civil society had frayed and a new order had arisen from the ashes of the great city. This was like the Bellingham scenario but writ on a truly Biblical scale; it ought to have been crushed at birth, not left to fester and breed, let alone permitted to spread its malignant spores north and west into virgin undefended and indefensible territory where countless good people still lived.

  Decker straightened.

  The President had ordered the Joint Chiefs to ‘put an end to the Chicago uprising by any means’ but stipulated that ‘I don’t want another Bellingham’. Like most two-bit politicians the President wanted it both ways; consequently, the other Chiefs half-expected expected their Chairman, Curtis LeMay – despite his strident strictures to his colleagues - to resign when he got back from racing his favorite Allard sports car in New Mexico.

  In the meantime the war-fighting muscle needed to delay the advance of the horde which had broken out of Chicago sweeping all the way north to the Canadian border, and or, west to Minneapolis had had to be taken from the southern suburbs of the city.

  “We ought to have finished this in April when we had the chance,” Decker said grimly. He had the equivalent of two under strength, relatively immobile infantry brigades padded out with lines of communications troops dug in on a roughly east-west line; Hyde Park - the University of Chicago campus – Midway Airport – La Grange - Naperville – Aurora. The line was porous in places, especially out towards the exposed flank beyond Aurora but two M-60 equipped cavalry regiments were held in reserve north of Joliet, and another further forward at Blue Island. Until a couple of months ago he could have held the south of the city indefinitely but then the rebels had started shelling the districts south of the line. After that the roads had been clogged with refugees needing to be fed and watered, and by Presidential edict ‘cared for’ by the US Army. Most of the troops deployed on ‘humanitarian duties’ had still not rejoined their units, and nobody on his staff cared to hazard a guess how many men had simply deserted and gone home once they escaped the trenches of Chicago. “But we didn’t.”

  The forces he needed now had been frittered away reinforcing National Guard units in the South, preserving law and order in the northern cities; casually thrown away like chips in a high stakes poker game so that the President could buy a ticket to stay in the Democratic primaries.

  The nation had been short-changed.

  He took a final breath.

  “Call everybody back into the room please.”

  Chapter 11

  Tuesday 9th June 1964

  The Kennedy Compound, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts

  The President’s decision to cancel the next four day’s campaign events had caught his immediate entourage completely by surprise; his unplanned retreat that evening to Cape Cod had thrown the whole Administration into chaos.

  That morning the true scale of the unfolding military, civil and humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Midwest had begun to break in the national press; but the President had not known that was going to happen when he had summarily aborted that week’s campaigning.

  The Press had seemed more interested in Curtis LeMay’s planned ‘racing break’ in Arizona than in anything that was going on in Washington DC. During his hours touring the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Shoup – ahead of his return to the ‘Chicago Front’ - and his carefully choreographed whistle stop perambulations around the massive building sites of the monumental new capital soon to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes of the old, the President had seemed noticeably lack luster, a little hunched and tired. Even when he had stood in the Oval Office of the scaffolding-encased White House there had been no real spark, little trace of the legendary public insouciance. Although for the most part his expression had been suitably somber, as befitted a man visiting places where so many good men and women had died; he had been sadly, visibly detached as if the whole experience of returning to Washington had somehow overwhelmed him.

  The news that Margaret Thatcher’s government had survived and the calamitous intelligence that that the majority of the State Department’s ‘transatlantic’ friends in the British Parliament – rather than seamlessly assuming the reins of power – were about to be exiled from Oxford and sent back to their country seats, had hardly registered with the President.

  By the time Jack Kennedy got back to Hyannis Port he was in a state of near physical and mental collapse, a thing he had ordered should not be communicated to Jackie and the kids at Camp David.

  After the Battle of Washington he had thought he had seen a way forward; but then the Russians had invaded Iran and in that moment he had seen the terrible error of his ways. Fate was mocking him. He had tried to steer a path through the gathering darkness but ended up stumbling blindly into new, unimagined dark places. It was as if all the lies had finally caught up with him. Events had exposed his Achilles Heel, a defective moral compass that could swing no further out of alignment without irrevocably spinning out of control. He was leading his country towards disaster and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  Worse, he was ill again and his strength was failing.

  God had granted him six months of health and vitality, even a few days without excruciating pain and debilitating nausea. He had recovered his libido, discovered there were still a few women in the western World who wanted a mass murderer between their legs. However, those fleeting days of grace were at an end.

  Women had once fawned on him, given themselves to him with a laugh or a giggle, often awestruck, dazzled by the JFK magic. He cringed now when he recollected the evening he had told the late British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan that he got a headache if he went a day without sex. The old man had smiled what now seemed like a horribly hollow smile.

  Jack Kennedy had first been diagnosed as suffering from Addison’s disease in London in 1947, aged thirty, shortly after he was elected Congressman for the 11th District of Massachusetts. The symptoms of the condition included severe and often incapacitating pains in the legs, back and abdomen, random attacks of vomiting and diarrhea, bouts of hypoglycemia, fevers and at the extreme end of the spectrum, convulsions, psychosis and episodes of syncope. He had suffered each and every one the classic symptoms at one time or another since winning the Presidency, and frequently many of them combination at the same time. Frequently, during meetings with foreign leaders and ambassadors he had experienced relatively minor manifestations of Addison’s; confusion, slurred speech brought on by low blood pressure and the sudden onset of lethargy. His problems had been compounded when, subsequent to entering the White House hypothyroidism, another rare endocrine disease, had been identified.

  Jack Kennedy had always been the sickliest of the Kennedy brothers but that had not mattered until his elder sibling, Joe, had been killed in a flying accident in England in August 1944. Joseph Kennedy (junio
r) had always been his father’s anointed political flag bearer, not the fragile, reckless playboy second son...

  “Jack, did you hear what I just said?”

  The President blinked out of his melancholy introspection and met the gaze of his thirty-nine year old brother.

  Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy had worked tirelessly to get his re-election campaign back on the road. No man had flown more miles or worn out his voice more frequently in the last few months. It was easier for him; he had never lost his faith, partly, his brother suspected because in his heart he knew that he had done everything that could humanly have been done to avert the October War; whereas for his brother – the Commander-in-Chief - there would always be an insidious canker of doubt. History might one day conclude that a madman in a submarine had lit the final touch paper to the most dreadful war in history; or that the real blame lay with the lunatic who had flushed those Cuban-based ICBMs that hit Galveston and Florida but Jack Kennedy knew that he was the one who – for whatever reason, right or wrong – had actually commanded the final, all out nuclear attack on the military forces, bases and cities of the Soviet Union.

  The Cuban Missiles War had come out of nowhere as he had always feared the real crisis of his presidency might. He had learned the limits of his power early in his time in the White House with the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. Afterwards, he had respectfully approached his predecessor - the man who he still considered to be the greatest living American – Dwight Eisenhower, and sought his advice.

  The old man had sat in the Oval Office and without censure, with the cool understanding of a man who had been responsible for wielding the great weight of US military power in war and peace, and asked Kennedy ‘were you sure you had all the right people in the room before you authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion?’