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

by James Philip

  At times Rose had done her level best to make Claude Betancourt’s job…impossible.

  The strangest thing was that he had put up with it for so long. On the one hand there was the bungling and the moral corruption of the Kennedy boys in the White House, on the other the back-biting and infighting, the grasping for the wealth of the family; all overseen by the malignant presence of the Countess of the Holy See from her Cape Cod castle.

  The latest news was that as he scrabbled around attempting to cobble together enough support for Jack Kennedy not to be completely humiliated at the Atlantic City Convention in a couple of month’s time; Rose Kennedy’s lawyers were ‘secretly’ preparing a barrage of multi-million dollar suits against his firm for negligence and a failure to enact the instructions laid down in the old monster’s will. Actually, he and his people had been scrupulous in their work, it was just that Rose and ‘the boys’ did not like the size of his bills. That was the trouble with really rich people; they always thought other people should pay their dues. Publicly, he would be accused of not doing enough to guard her Joe Kennedy’s legacy.

  God in Heaven!

  The man’s sons had blown up half the world!

  That would be the Kennedy family legacy for all time!

  If a saint like the Countess of the Holy See could not do anything about that what was he, a mere mortal, supposed to do about it?

  But then he was not even of her Church, so he was always going to betray the family in the end!

  Jackie Bouvier had been right all along about Rose: ‘I don't think Jack's mother is too bright and she would rather say a rosary than read a book.’

  In any event Claude Betancourt had decided there was nothing more he could do in New England. Old Joe Kennedy’s affairs were as ‘sorted out’ as they were ever going to be and if Betancourt and Sallis was going to have to defend itself in a Boston court – after all he had done for the Kennedys in the last thirty years – well, Rose and Jack and Bobby and the rest of that bunch were welcome to get their own lily-white hands dirty.

  Ha, getting their hands dirty cleaning up after themselves!

  That would be a first for the Kennedys!

  The fact that old Joe Kennedy’s fixer found himself in Texas on this hot, dusty day spoke eloquently for itself. If the family had been paying attention the last few weeks it would have noticed that he had washed his hands of the whole lot of them!

  His air-conditioned limousine had bumped and rumbled, rolling like a ship in a rough sea as it kicked up dirt and stones on the grit road, having left Route 290 some miles back to follow a half-surfaced track along the southern bank of the Pedernales River to approach the LBJ Ranch from the east. The Secret Service regarded the ranch’s frontage with the main highway as a dangerously exposed flank which most of the time the Vice President was in residence, was so heavily patrolled as to be virtually impassable. Besides, LBJ was not about to advertise the fact he was entertaining a man whose very name was anathema to the majority of his key Southern Democrat allies.

  Claude Betancourt was surprised to be greeted on the front porch by Lyndon Baines Johnson, his wife Lady Bird and the Vice President’s sixteen year old daughter Lucy. He was even more surprised – although Southern hospitality being what it was, he ought not to have been surprised – by the warmth of his reception.

  “We were all so pleased to hear how recovered your lovely daughter is, Mr Betancourt,” Lady Bird gushed, taking the old man’s arm after her husband had stopped pumping his hand and patting his shoulder. Lucy Baines Johnson had curtsied and smiled so sweetly that it had very nearly melted the visitor’s hard heart. “After everything she has been through. And married, too! We were so sad not to have been able to be in Philadelphia. You must be such a proud father?”

  “Gretchen does me credit I really don’t deserve,” Claude Betancourt had confessed.

  When Betancourt had first known Lyndon Johnson the tall Texan had chain smoked, and seemed as young as his years but that was before in July 1955, aged only forty-seven he had suffered a heart attack that had very nearly killed him. Since then Lady Bird had made him eat more sensibly, and no cigarette had touched his lips but for a man in only his fifty-sixth year Johnson was prematurely aged, often walking and moving with the stiff gait of a man in his sixties or seventies. Nevertheless, having acquired an exaggerated craggy gravitas from his near brush with death it was a thing he used to best effect.

  That was one of the things Claude Betancourt had always admired about LBJ. His differences with the Vice President had been, and probably remained, personal not political; Johnson was the master of the possible, a hugely pragmatic, driven man who had literally hauled himself up by his bootstraps from the humblest of beginnings. Johnson had enjoyed none of the gilded advantages bequeathed to JFK by virtue of his birth; he had had to fight tooth and claw for absolutely everything he had ever achieved. Nothing had come easily to LBJ and in many ways his continuing public loyalty to the Kennedys and to the rapidly disintegrating Democratic Party, frankly astonished Betancourt.

  Lyndon Johnson grinned.

  There was a bottle of Bourbon and two empty tumblers on a table next to the chairs positioned by the broad windows looking through the trees towards the course of the Pedernales River.

  “That girl of yours will light fires under the asses of the DOJ’s people when the Battle of Washington tribunals get under way!” He observed with no little pleasure. Despite having been Democrat Majority Leader in the House throughout Eisenhower’s Presidency LBJ had no love for the complacent Washington – and now Philadelphia – elite and the sclerotic, virtually moribund institutions of the Federal Government.

  “Yes,” Claude Betancourt conceded ruefully, “I’m afraid she will.”

  “Why’d you let her get herself into a bare-knuckle fight with those assholes at Justice?” In a moment the Vice President had retreated from the directness of the interrogative. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir?”

  The two men settled in cushioned cane chairs and Johnson poured generous measures of amble liquid into each tumbler.

  “That’s an interesting question, Mr Vice President,” the older man confessed. He was the best part of two decades his host’s age, a man who had forever operated behind the scenes and around the fringes of the Kennedy family. Even now he remained largely anonymous except to the people who actually cared about where the real power and influence lay. He had allowed the most precious thing in his life, his brilliant, beautiful daughter to openly take on the same entrenched ‘establishment’ that he had been so careful to avoid challenging his entire adult career. “I think the answer has, for once in my life, rather more to do with a father’s love for his child than politics. Gretchen is a free spirit and it would have been unspeakably cruel to cage her as if she was some exquisite, unique song bird.”

  Lyndon Johnson arched an eyebrow.

  He picked up his drink.

  “Lady Bird won’t let me smoke. She weighs my food, she tells me when I have to come back home to rest. My girls aren’t any better. Daddy this, daddy that,” he chuckled, “without the ones we love we ain’t nothing!”

  Claude Betancourt took it as read that the other man would know Gretchen was hand in glove with the FBI in the affair of the traitorous former special agent granted special immunity to hunt down the perpetrators of the Bedford Pine Park atrocities in Atlanta. It was in that enterprise – rather than in her defense of the Battle of Washington ring leaders - that the real dangers to his daughter’s future career most likely lay; a thing that LBJ would understand perfectly.

  He took the whiskey tumbler offered to him; and unflinchingly met the Vice President’ stern, penetrating gaze. Symbolism was sometimes everything in politics and by coming to Stonewall, Claude Betancourt had told Johnson that Jack Kennedy had finally lost the Party.

  The man who had been born in a ramshackle farmhouse not far from where the two men now sat, the oldest of five children brought up in grinding poverty and of
ten hungry, who had been eased out of the Presidential ticket in 1960 by the wealth, slanders and duplicity of the Kennedys, was now the Democratic Party’s last best hope of salvation.

  Johnson savored the moment as whiskey burned in his throat.

  He had known his post Battle of Washington pact with Jack Kennedy would only last as long as it suited the President. When it became obvious that he and the President’s men were heading in opposite directions on the ‘Middle East question’, over the absence of any real movement on the civil rights crisis that was tearing areas of the Deep South to pieces, and that his role in the re-election campaign had become one of ‘keeping sweet the Governors who did not want to be seen in public with either Jack or Bobby Kennedy’ he had read the writing writ large upon the wall. JFK’s people, Bobby mainly, were hawking around for an alternative running mate; ‘somebody who could bring the big labor unions back into the stockade’ and who would ‘speak to the New England heartlands’ better than the son of an impoverished dirt farmer from the back of nowhere.

  The dysfunction within both the Party and the Administration was graphically illustrated by the invidious situation of LBJ loyalist Marvin Watson, the man who had stepped into Kenny O’Donnell’s post - White House Appointments Secretary, an outdated title which actually described the post of Chief of Staff – after the Battle of Washington. That the man at the heart of the White House could be so marginalized, basically left out of the loop on so many important decisions was ludicrous and but for Johnson’s pleas he would have resigned weeks ago.

  “Bobby’s been talking to Hubert Humphrey,” Claude Betancourt said blandly. “And Eugene McCarthy, but I’m sure you’ve heard those rumors too.”

  Johnson nodded.

  He and the President’s younger brother had concluded a watchful short-lived rapprochement that spring; a rapprochement that the state of the polls had now extinguished although publicly Bobby still behaved as if nothing had changed.

  “The last thing the ticket needs is a bleeding heart liberal,” he remarked sourly.

  The odd thing about Lyndon Johnson’s career was that for all that he was a man nurtured by, and who had grown up in the bosom of the Southern Democrat citadel, he was anything but trapped in the past. Not that he was any kind of starry-eyed idealist. Had he not been a ruthlessly ambitious operator unfettered by ideological baggage, or any guiding philosophy, or deep-seated beliefs it would have been impossible for him to do business with a man like Claude Betancourt who was, by any standards, his natural enemy. Conversely, that Claude Betancourt understood Johnson so much better than anybody in the inner first circle of the Kennedy Administration was hardly surprising; for neither he or Johnson was a man who had ever let high-sounding principles get in the way of doing what needed to be done.

  Which made it all the more bizarre that Jack Kennedy had decided to ‘do business’ with the Soviets without sub-contracting the deal out to the one man in the Administration – Lyndon Johnson - best qualified to play hardball with Dobrynin and Zorin. Letting Bobby anywhere near those negotiations was madness and while the President’s little brother – whose ruthlessness was of the superficial college boy frat society type liable to be too often compromised by what he and his brother construed to be ‘good intentions’ – was just plain dumb. J. William Fulbright was a safe pair of hands, granted; but what was he supposed to do when the Kennedy brothers were constantly trying to conduct international affairs in ways consistent with their infantile, blinkered sense of corporate moral probity?

  Claude Betancourt had still not got to the bottom of what the President had actually promised British Prime Minister Thatcher at Hyannis Port. White House insiders were making bad jokes about how Jack Kennedy had ‘taken advantage’ of the naive little English housewife; but nothing the old man had heard about Margaret Thatcher from any of his sources in the CIA or from his people in England gave him any confidence that it was remotely possible that JFK had scored a significant coup at the Hyannis Port Summit. The British had gone home without making an embarrassing public fuss and that itself spoke volumes for what they thought the President had promised them. Moreover, everything he was hearing told him that the Brits had had vastly superior intelligence on the Russian post-October War recovery than any of the US armed services or intelligence agencies. In fact everything pointed towards Jack Kennedy in some way buying off the Brits, possibly with the as yet unspecified ‘Fulbright Plan’ or some other undisclosed assurances of aide or military support. The notion that the Administration planned to just let the Brits ‘hang’ in the Persian Gulf – a suggestion widely circulating in Philadelphia – was, to Claude Betancourt’s mind, too insane to contemplate.

  Troublingly, if there was any truth in it, it changed everything.

  That such lunacy was actually being discussed spoke volumes to the inherent un-electability of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November, even assuming he – against the odds – got re-nominated at Atlantic City in a couple of months time.

  Lyndon Johnson was watching the old man closely.

  “What’s on your mind, Claude?”

  “What would you do now if you were the President?”

  The Texan guffawed, looked away.

  “You mean what would I do if I didn’t shoot myself first?” He retorted disgustedly. “It ain’t going to happen, anyway.” His expression was suddenly agate hard, his stare angrily intense. “I don’t trust the fucking Russians any further than I can spit. JFK was supposed to get the Brits under control at Cape Cod. I said throw them a fucking bone if you have to. Jeez...”

  Claude Betancourt felt icy fingers clutching his heart, throat.

  “There ain’t going to be no fucking ‘Fulbright Plan’. God dammit! Those fucking schoolboys almost got us into a shooting war with the Brits in December! Now it’s all happening again!”

  The Vice President clunked his tumbler down so hard on the table that some of its contents spilled.

  He did not notice.

  “Now we’re talking to the same bastards who killed ten million Americans because of Cuba!” The Texan tried and failed to rein in his angst. “I didn’t tell you this but JFK sent the top guy in the Navy to fucking Bombay to personally deliver ‘the President’s’ orders to the commander of Carrier Division Seven....”

  Claude Betancourt was silent.

  “As if that wasn’t bad enough,” the Vice President scoffed, exasperated, “now old Joe Kennedy’s attorney comes all the way down to Stonewall to ask me what I’d do if I was President!”

  Chapter 29

  Saturday 20th June 1964

  Headquarters of 32nd Infantry Division, Madison, Wisconsin

  Major General William Bradford Rosson listened to the comforting rumble of the Wright R-3350 radial engines of the two A-1 Douglas Skyraiders circling high above the besieged city. If the politicians had authorized the unrestricted use of air power – what little that was actually available to the newly cobbled together ‘Michigan-Illinois-Iowa-Minnesota Command’ – a month ago Milwaukee might not have fallen and Madison might not now be an island in the mid-stream of the nightmare.

  The rebels had given up on taking Madison by frontal assault; instead, the enemy sniped at its perimeter, lobbed shells into the city while the greater part of the horde swept north up Interstate 90 and west along Route 18. The rebels had changed their tactics within hours of the arrival of the Skyraiders. Now the horde had dispersed and was moving in a great, scattered diaspora to the west offering few if any opportunities to attack concentrated groups of people or vehicles.

  Ominously, war supplies looted from arsenals in Milwaukee and elsewhere along the western shore of Lake Michigan were beginning to appear in greater quantities in front of Madison. M-48 tanks, M113 APCs, and big Army trucks were trundling towards the State Capital. Around the city all the roads had been cut.

  There was no good news.

  Worse, the nature of the enemy was becoming daily less opaque.

  Rosson re-focused on t
he two prisoners.

  A man and a woman, kids really. Ragged, dirty, angry-eyed they had both got through the lines just before the first big attack several days ago, seemingly two innocent refugees. The woman had knifed an Army surgeon to death and the man had tried to grab an M-16 before they were restrained.

  “And the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind,” the woman spat.

  She had been quoting from the Bible off and on for several minutes.

  “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,” her boyfriend said smugly. “And blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”

  “That’s from the Book Revelation, right?” Queried the weary Divisional Intelligence Officer; his brow was furrowed with a nascent infuriation that bordered on despair.

  The woman’s name was Jessica.

  “None of this is our doing,” she declared. “God prophesied that the Devil would visit evil upon the World. ‘And the four angels who had been kept ready for this very hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of the world's people.’ God commands us to punish the ungodly,” she went on, her tone suggesting that what she was saying was so self-evidently reasonable and right that no sane person could possibly disagree with a single word of it.

  The man captured with her tried to explain to the misbegotten lost souls around him in the basement of the Capital Building.

  “The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur,” he elaborated. From his expression he could already picture his captors dissolving in cauldrons of the aforementioned ‘burning sulphur’.