by James Philip
At the bottom of page three there was a small by-line about widespread civil disorder having been reported in Milwaukee across the news wires. Miranda’s eye lingered on this simply because there was a footnote that eastern Wisconsin was ‘subject to the same Army Information Office restrictions as the Greater Chicago Area’.
There was little discussion in any of the papers Miranda had read in the last few weeks about the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, other that is, than impatient rumblings about when it might finally set a date for its first hearings. Most bets were on mid-July. Likewise, there was much comment about the delay in bringing the first of the ring leaders of the failed coup d'état to trial for their part in the Battle of Washington last December; although one of their lawyers, a striking young woman who had been badly injured during the uprising seemed to be on every other newscast on the TV, and her remarks were voraciously reported on most radio bulletins most days.
Curiously, for some reason CBS kept coming back to the story about the six-month old sinking of the nuclear submarine the USS Scorpion, allegedly sunk by the British HMS Dreadnought, a thing the British Embassy had vehemently denied. It was a story which got a great deal more coverage than the ongoing war over the Falkland Islands. Miranda did not understand why the British, given all their other problems, simply did not let the Argentine have those stupid little islands in the South Atlantic.
There was an opinion piece on the inside cover of the Chronicle about the pros and cons of offering the Europeans (mainly the British) a new ‘Marshall Plan’, following on from a story broken by the New York Times over the weekend. The author of this article suggested sarcastically that it would be a ‘fair’ way to ‘curtail the British predilection for re-fighting lost colonial wars’. Wall Street was all in favor of doling out aid to the British on condition they spent every ‘US tax dollar in America’. Thus far the Administration had said very little about the subject, other than to admit that Secretary of State Fulbright had circulated a ‘briefing paper’ within the Administration. Apparently, no decisions had been taken on the ‘viability of any future assistance package’.
Today’s, or rather, yesterday’s scoop – syndicated under a two day old Los Angeles Times by-line - was the alleged exposé of a two decade-old Kennedy family scandal concerning Rose Marie, the oldest of the President’s four surviving sisters.
“Have you read this stuff about the President’s sister, Darlene?”
“No,” the other woman confessed. “People are always saying bad things about the President,” she added sadly.
Miranda turned the page around for Darlene to read.
THE SHAME OF THE PRESIDENT’S SISTER!
There was an accompanying head and shoulders photograph of a pretty young woman. Her hair was in the style of the 1930s. She smiled serenely into the lens of the camera; she seemed contented, on the cusp of womanhood.
Miranda did not know where to start; it was so awful...
She began to read at the beginning.
“This is the last known picture of Rose Marie Kennedy, the eldest daughter and third child of the late Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Kennedy. Rose, President Kennedy’s eldest sister born on September 13, 1918. Within the family Rose Marie was commonly called Rosemary or just Rosie...”
Miranda’s voice trailed away as she read ahead and tasted the poison to come. She steeled herself to continue. Her brow furrowed as she read aloud.
“During Rose Marie’s birth the midwife ordered Rose Kennedy to keep her legs together,” she paused, tempted to mutter several distinctly un-Christian words to express her incredulity, “forcing the baby’s head to stay in the birth canal until a doctor arrived at the Kennedy’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.”
Darlene was frowning, also.
“That sort of thing would be very, very bad for the baby,” she groaned.
“Relatives of Rosie’s mother later blamed Rosie’s problems on her parents having been second cousins!” A disbelieving sigh was Miranda’s single eloquent comment on this observation. “Rosie was such a placid, pleasant child that nobody outside the family noticed that anything was amiss until she reached her teens. When she was fifteen her mother sent her to the Sacred Heart Convent in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was taught on her own by the nuns and by a special teacher brought in by the Kennedy family. At this time Rosie’s reading, writing and arithmetic skills were judged to be only up to 4th grade standard. It was around this time that Rosie was tested and found to have an IQ score of between 60 and 70 - a mental age of somewhere between eight and twelve years – and started exhibiting signs that suggested she was suffering anxiety and anger because she was a ‘disappointment’ to her parents and her family. At no time did Rose Kennedy admit that her daughter was anything but normal, even though several of Rosie’s siblings suspected something was wrong. The Kennedy children were brought up to be ambitious, to be top of their class in everything, to excel and to shine, and to reflect credit on the patriarch and the matriarch at the helm of the Kennedy ship. What else could explain the shameful fate which eventually befell poor, innocent Rosie?”
Miranda was shaking her head in disbelief.
“According to this article the brothers and sisters privately believed that Rosie was epileptic or mentally ill. This is all too awful,” she repeated, unable to find another word to describe what she had read and was now re-reading for her sister-in-law’s benefit.
“Rosie was very slow at school, desperate to please, but otherwise a happy girl. She did not read much, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ was about her limit but few people looking at her guessed she was a child in a woman’s body. At twenty she was a beauty with a winning smile. Her parents told journalists that she was ‘studying to be a kindergarten teacher’ and that she had an interest in ‘social welfare work’, and embellished this by suggesting Rosie had a ‘longing to go on the stage’.”
Darlene put down the paper in disgust.
“The reporter says that during adolescence Rosie started having temper tantrums and sneaking out from her convent school in Washington, where she had been sent after she left the school in Rhode Island. Joseph Kennedy, her father was worried that Rosie would do something which would reflect badly on him and damage his political career. Around that time he was hoping to be the next President. In November 1941 when Rosie was twenty-three the old monster had her lobotomized!”
Darlene sat up, not entirely sure she had heard what she had just heard.
“Did what?” She mouthed in confusion.
“President Kennedy’s late father believed that a pre-frontal lobotomy,” Miranda paraphrased, planting the tip of her index finger on her brow, “carried out by two charlatans masquerading as doctors, would cure Rosie’s erratic behavior and make sure that she was never an embarrassment to the family. They strapped her down on a table. They must have given her some kind of local anesthetic because she was conscious when they started. They made incisions in her head,” she put down the paper and raised her left hand to touch the other side of her brow, “here and here, they inserted a surgical instrument that the reporter describes as being ‘like a butter knife’, and only stopped ‘wiggling’ it around inside her brain when Rosie stopped making a noise.”
Darlene stared at the other woman.
“That’s the sort of thing Greg says the Nazis did to people in Germany,” she said, struggling to make sense of it.
“The Nazis didn’t try to keep it quiet,” Miranda retorted.
“What happened to Rosie? Afterwards, I mean?”
Miranda read to the end of the article.
“She was unable to walk, talk and she was incontinent. After the ‘operation’ they think that she had a mental age of a two year old.”
“That’s...”
“Awful?”
“Yes, terrible.”
“Apparently, journalists asked President Kennedy about his sister when he was running for re-election to
the Senate in 1958. The Kennedy family told a pack of lies to hush everything up. They put out a story that Rose Marie was too busy working with disabled children to make public appearances at election events. Then in 1961, after the President was elected, the family put out a statement that she was ‘mentally retarded’ making no mention of the fact that they had had her lobotomized!”
Miranda wanted to go on shore and walk up and down the old Bridgeway warning innocent voters that Jack Kennedy was the Devil’s spawn.
“It makes you wonder what else our President has lied to us about!”
Darlene was more concerned with the personal than the political aspects of the horror story.
“What happened to Rosie?”
“Rosie is still alive. She was cared for at the St Coletta School for Backward Youth in a place called Jefferson, that’s in Wisconsin. Until last fall that was; sometime around the time of the Battle of Washington she was moved to a Kennedy family compound on Rhode Island. The reporter says that until their father died last year none of Rosie’s surviving brothers or sisters – there are seven of them including the President – ever visited Rosie. Not once.”
“Can all that be true?”
Darlene asked in a whisper as if she was suddenly afraid the two women were being overheard by the sort of monsters who could put a woman, not much younger than them, through such a barbaric and inhuman ordeal as to leave her as good as dead on the operating table just to avoid the risk of embarrassing an over-powerful man.
“Do you think it is true? Can it be true? The President seems such a good man?”
Miranda was folding the paper on her lap.
“I don’t think the New York Times or the Chronicle would print a thing like this unless there was at least some truth in it,” she shrugged. “I mean, Rosie was, is the sister of the President of the United States.”
“And,” Darlene murmured. She hesitated, her words stuck on her lips. “It is election year...”
Chapter 13
Wednesday 10th June 1964
Luke Air Force Base, Glendale, Arizona
Caroline Konstantis waited for her Air Force driver to jump out from behind the wheel and smartly open her passenger door before she moved a muscle. Her uniform had a stiff, new, rarely worn feel and her figure had filled a fraction since she had had it – and her other ‘sets’ - tailored and re-cut the year before the October War. She had pinned up her hair but even so she carried her cap in her left hand as she stepped into the burning desert heat of the summer afternoon. She used to try very hard not to be a civilian in uniform but not so much lately.
To reach the control tower and its surrounding complex of low, single storey blockhouses her car had had to cross the ‘race track’ twice. Today’s ‘race track’ seemed to weave a jagged figure of eight across the three mile long main runway and the maze of broad disused taxiways, its course marked with hundreds of oil drums and colorful pieces of redundant airfield ‘furniture’. The Air Force car, last year’s Lincoln, had halted for several minutes as a succession of low, lean racers flashed past.
The cars had roared into sight in formation with their motors revving murderously, their tires screeching, squealing and smoking as they slide across the tarmac where, until a year ago a line of silvery North American F-100 Super Sabre jet interceptors of the 4510th Combat Crew Training Wing had stood on the flight line. Caroline was surprised that there was such a large crowd, there were people everywhere, pickups, trucks and private cars parked apparently randomly around the old base buildings and in groups out on the field.
The big race, the second ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ had been held on Saturday and she had expected the circus would have moved on by now. She had arrived in nearby Phoenix late last night, catching the last possible Greyhound convoy out of Oakland over twenty-four hours before. The days when a Greyhound bus could traverse the South West unescorted were just a fading memory. Her convoy had had two California State National Guardsmen on board each bus when it departed the Bay Area. Local Guardsmen had relieved them at the Colorado River, the state line.
The last time Caroline had been in Phoenix it had been a quiet place, off the beaten track; yesterday night it had been like a boom town. Its population was swollen by refugees from the north and a whole new suburb was being thrown up in the desert to the east. The racing enthusiasts, street and circuit fanatics who had come to town for the big event at the weekend had obviously stayed on in droves. If the Air Force had not booked her into a Spartan downtown hotel a week in advance she would have been out on the street all night!
She reminded herself that Phoenix’s revitalization was not untypical of this part of the country. After the war money and people had relocated to the peaceful, undamaged areas of the South and South West. For all the constant barrage of bad news about the so-called ‘Deep South’, Florida, southern Texas, and most parts of Louisiana and practically everywhere west of the Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri excepted, were desperately attempting to get on with business as normal.
Remarkably, moving from east to west by the time a traveler got to California they would be hard pressed to know that there had been a global nuclear war less than two years ago. It was not that the grief and the aftermath of the war was ‘localized’ – the areas hardest hit were big by any measure – it was simply that the North American continent was so huge that the war had left over ninety percent of the nation untouched. Now Americans were doing what they had done though out their history; migrating to where the work, the wealth, and the opportunities seemed brightest. Ordinary people had carried on making rational ‘adjustments’ to cope with the new realities of the land in which they lived. Americans had always migrated to where new horizons, where employment prospects promised a better future. That was after all, the essence of the American dream. Historians and political scientists were already comparing the post-October War upheavals with those of the post-Civil War period; it was natural, profoundly human for people to want to move on, to put the disasters of the past behind them and as in the post-1865 world the recent brush with Armageddon had prompted a new exodus to ‘the West’. Down here in Arizona the tragedy of Buffalo, Galveston, Seattle, Boston and Chicago seemed an awfully long way away; and as for apparent outbreak of widespread lawlessness in Illinois and Wisconsin, or the crushing of the small scale insurrection in Bellingham, well, that might have been going on in another universe.
Of course Phoenix was hardly any kind of exemplar of what the future might hold. Its recent boom was meteoric but self-evidently fragile. Every car nut in the South West descended on the city most months and the second running of the ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ had crowned Phoenix as the new Mecca of the ‘racing craze’ that had spread like a virus across the surrounding states. The travelling circus could move on in the blink of an eye; and then what would become of Phoenix’s overnight transformation?
Caroline tentatively straightened to her full height of five feet six inches. She had snoozed and slept most of the way to Phoenix, physically spent and mentally exhausted after what she already regarded – in fondly rueful hindsight - as her three day ‘quasi-psychotic episode’ in Berkeley.
Never had she been more mindful of taking a care what one wished for!
The Air Force Lincoln had parked close to but not in the shade of the ugly concrete control tower of the former Luke Air Force Base. Caroline looked around, sighed and carefully arranged her cap on her head. She took off her Ray-bans, pocketed them and walked towards the door guarded by two sweating military policemen.
At one point the ‘track’ came within less than fifty yards of the control tower. Five, six, and then a seventh car skidded around a long, tire-burning, sliding curve. Caroline had no idea how fast the cars were speeding; seventy, eight, ninety, a hundred miles per hour because they were a blur as they slashed past. Likewise, she had no idea how they kept apart, each driver knowing intuitively that the tiniest contact might be irretrievably, fatal, ending in a tangle of metal and pos
sibly a fire...
The cars were past, hurtling into the near distance wheel to wheel, kicking up rooster tails of smoking windblown desert dust in their wakes like old fashioned speed boats ripping up the surface of a shimmering lake.
General Curtis LeMay, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was attired in greasy once grey overalls chewing a fat half-smoked cigar on the balcony of the control tower. The fifty-seven year old legend responsible for building Strategic Air Command into the sledgehammer which had bludgeoned the Soviet Union to within an inch of annihilation on the night of the October War, was waving his fists and bawling like everybody else at the rail. Every man in the tower stank of gas and oil, of leather and scorched rubber, each face was etched with smears of grease. Every man that was, apart from the immaculately uniformed Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel and his two guardian armed MPs who had Curtis LeMay’s nuclear football chained to his left wrist.
The press called it the ‘triple key’ principle.
Only the President could order a first strike.
If the President was dead or incapacitated the ‘football’ passed to the Vice President.
If the United States was attacked and the President and the Vice President were incapacitated, or dead, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took the so-called ‘hospital pass’.
A lot of people had been asking themselves why the US needed nuclear weapons at all; but that was before the Red Army invaded Iran and Iraq and everybody discovered that Curtis LeMay’s boys had only done half the job on the night of the war.
Caroline Konstantis stood at the back of the baying mob.
She was in no hurry; had no place she needed to be. That was not to say that right now she would not rather be lying down, or sipping a Mojito in a darkened bar than standing, slowly beginning to broil in the desert sun in the middle of nowhere with a crowd of car nuts. Notwithstanding, she made a concerted effort to concentrate her faculties on the needs of the moment because Curtis LeMay was the last man on earth she needed on her case.