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

by James Philip

  The chaotic theatricality of the ‘rally’ slowly, surely drew her in.

  What was going on in the Deep South was bad...

  America had lost its way...

  The nation was house divided...

  There was no ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’ twist to what each speaker who stepped up to the battery of microphones down in the well of the auditorium said to the murmuring, buzzing crowd in the packed hall that evening.

  Caroline felt a little as if she had walked into a charismatic religious assembly. Several of the men – there was only one woman on the stage party – spoke like evangelists of the rights of Man, of how lucky Californians were to live in an island of relative good order and peace, in which the racial tensions present in ‘so many other sad places’ were if not absent, then at least ‘contained’.

  She thought it was all rather self-congratulatory and complacent.

  California had been uniquely lucky. Untouched by the war and economically booming back in late 1962 it had been better placed than practically any other state in the Union to ride out the post-war shocks. The entire American south west had escaped the bombs and the fallout, and behind the great wall of the Rockies and the Sierra Madre Californians had soon recognized that they were living in a very different country to that inhabited by many northerners and easterners.

  Over an hour into the rally; with the audience becoming a little restive in the increasingly smoky auditorium and wearying of the roll call of well-intentioned, mainly middle-aged men – local luminaries and academics in the main – each spouting more or less the same rhetoric, the single woman on the platform rose to her feet.

  Caroline was aware of the hush around her.

  Everybody seemed to know who the young woman was and she did not.

  She was blond and willowy in a calf-length flowery frock, her hair, falling almost but not quite across her shoulders. She was as tall – taller in fact – than several of the men around her and oddly, seraphically at ease with every eye in the Wheeler Auditorium fixed upon her. Her composure was not the superficial, manufactured presence of a movie star at a glitzy premier, or the slick glad-handing command of a professional politician. No, it was something that defied instant encapsulation, as if she had not yet begun to come to terms with it herself.

  “My name is Miranda Sullivan,” the young woman declared with a self-deprecating diffidence that effortlessly charmed the unwary. “I am,” she corrected herself, “was the first secretary of the California Civil Rights Forum. I consider myself honored and privileged to be the friend and co-worker of Mr Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP. Many of you will know that following an automobile crash Terry is still in hospital. He sends his apologies for not being able to make this rally tonight...”

  Caroline flinched at the vehemence of the sudden outburst of clapping and cheering that threatened to raise the rafters high above her head.

  “Many of you will also know,” Miranda continued, resting her pale hands on the rostrum as she looked around the auditorium, “that I resigned my post at the CCRF after the death of my boyfriend Dwayne John in the Bedford Pine Park atrocity. Like you I believe it is a national disgrace that the FBI and the law enforcement agencies of the Federal Government has still not brought the evil and misguided men responsible for that crime to justice...”

  There was a stamping of feet, a crescendo of angry condemnation.

  Miranda raised her hands to quiet the crowd.

  “But that is not why I am here tonight...”

  She waited as if she perfectly, intuitively understood how the mood of the gathering would rise and fall, like waves in a Pacific storm breaking on the rocky coast of the Golden Gate.

  “The man I loved is dead. He died standing between Doctor Martin Luther King – the greatest living American of our time – and the cowardly assassin’s bullets...”

  People were on their feet around Caroline.

  Nathan took her hand and they stood up.

  “But we are not here,” Miranda continued, “to talk about what is past. We cannot change the past. The dead are dead, lost to us other than in our memories and our dreams. We are here tonight to talk about and to look to the future. A better future for us, our brothers and sisters of color, and our children and their children’s children...”

  The whole building was rocking with the foot stamping.

  Miranda Sullivan waited patiently.

  “Terry Francois has asked me to assist in his work in the Bay Area in the coming days but at the end of the month I will be boarding a plane for Philadelphia to march with Dr King...”

  The tumult took even longer to subside now.

  “I know that those of you who cannot come to Philadelphia will also be marching with Dr King in spirit...”

  Caroline had watched football crowds reduced to a state of ecstatic communal intoxication by the nervous exhaustion and elation of the occasion. She had never imagined an American audience could be so helpless in any speaker’s hands.

  “If I may I will leave you with a parting thought. A question framed by Dr King as he lay desperately ill in hospital in Atlanta in February.” Miranda paused, her gaze sweeping around the auditorium. “Having saved so many of his children from the apocalypse of October nineteen sixty-two what right thinking man can any longer deny the hand of a merciful God in human affairs?”

  She waited, looking around the auditorium.

  “I leave you the words of Dr King,” she went on, her voice that of a humble supplicant. “Forgive those who have trespassed against me. Do not surrender to the darkness of vengefulness but walk with me down the brightly lit road that the Lord has prepared for us all...”

  Chapter 31

  Saturday 20th June 1964

  LBJ Ranch, Stonewall, Texas

  Claude Betancourt had known that the Vice President would view his visit with the understandable caution of a man putting his hand into a lucky dip who has just heard the angry rattle of a western diamondback rattlesnake. That was why he had asked Gretchen to make the first – necessarily oblique – ‘peace feeler’ towards the wily Texan, and gone to such extraordinary lengths to convince everybody in Philadelphia that he was spending the weekend at McDermott’s Open recuperating from a mild case of heat stroke.

  Not that the weather down in Texas was any more conducive to clear, rational thinking than the heat wave currently engulfing the temporary capital. Morning temperatures had soared to the high nineties Fahrenheit and stubbornly stuck around a hundred degrees most afternoons the last week; at night the heat had hardly abated. Fortuitously, he had spent a small fortune ensuring the Cherry Hill mansion he had gifted to his ungrateful daughter and son-in-law was fully air-conditioned; so while others fled to the Jersey Coast or to their country hideaways to escape the enervating heat and stifling humidity of the city, nobody would have thought twice about the widely circulated news that ‘that Machiavellian old bastard Betancourt’ had retreated under Gretchen’s roof. Not many people knew that the newlyweds had already moved out; but the numerous armed guards around McDermott’s Open were amply sufficient to convince the Philadelphia press pack that he was in residence.

  “There will be a lot of trouble with my people in the South,” Lyndon Baines Johnson decided, clunking his tumble of Bourbon on the low table between the two men. A warm breeze blew across the veranda from the direction of the Pedernales River, invisible beyond the trees to the north. “Of course we should be behind the civil rights thing,” he went on, irritably, “but we have to give them old boys something even if they’re kicking our asses up and down the fucking Mississippi. That’s just politics! But those boys in New England think its personal!”

  Those boys happened to be the President of the United States and his little brother, the Attorney General and therein lay the problem.

  “Jeez,” LBJ complained. “Back before that goddammed Bedford Pine Park thing happened we had a handle on this shit. All of it! Jesus! We h
ad a plan for Chicago and we’d agreed among ourselves to give the Brits enough support for them to hold the line in Europe and the Mediterranean without us having to send GIs overseas. Honest to God, for a month or two I believed that Bill Fulbright was a fucking magician. That was a Hell of a deal he cut. We send some ships to the Mediterranean and the Brits fight all the shitty little wars that somebody has to fight if the whole fucking World isn’t going to go to shit! If we’d had the courage to run on that platform we’d have been twenty points ahead of Goldwater, or Rockefeller, or Cabot Lodge, or Nixon or whoever the Republicans put up against us by now. As for that bastard Wallace in Alabama, come November he’d have been what he’s always been, a one issue loser!”

  Claude Betancourt did not think that Jack Kennedy’s road back to the White House was ever going to be, or could ever have been, that straightforward but the Vice President’s judgment was essentially sound; back in February the Administration had somehow, against all odds, regained a semblance of control over events. At the time the Bedford Pine Park atrocity had seemed like a hump in the road, not an impassable roadblock guarded by M-60 tanks.

  Where it had all gone wrong was in the Administration’s paralysis in the aftermath of the invasion of Iran and Iraq by an apparently resurgent – demonstrably not annihilated – Soviet Union at the time of the Battle of Malta in early April; which, in turn had led to a disastrous clash of personalities within the Democratic hierarchy hamstringing the military’s plans to crush the Chicago rebellion in the spring. It was hard to imagine any two events short of a second global nuclear war which could have so comprehensively eradicated what little remained of the credibility of the Kennedy Administration.

  If the President had emerged a little more regularly from his Hyannis Port enclave or any of the other bunkers he lived in between his increasingly infrequent travels he might actually have heard, from the lips of real people, in what unimaginably low esteem he was now held by the majority of Americans. But of course, these days he only talked to people who agreed with him which was probably why he honestly believed he was being - in some shrewd way that was beyond the comprehension of most observers - politically adroit in publicly kicking the Brits when they were down after the Cape Cod Summit. His poll ratings had spiked a few points higher for about a week before falling like a stone.

  Nobody liked a bully who stomped on an apparently beaten foe.

  America First had become a poison which had fatally corroded the Administration from within. In embracing it so violently Jack Kennedy, having always previously attempted to claim the moral high ground, had got onto his knees into an unwinnable mud-wrestle with half-a-dozen no holds barred street fighters. Scenting the blood in the water the Republicans were belatedly showing signs of an unstoppable revival. The emergence of a likely Rockefeller-Nixon ticket – it was anybody’s guess whose name would actually be on the top of that ticket – had lifted the GOP’s morale at precisely the moment Democrat spirits were in near terminal decline.

  Jack Kennedy ought to have been articulating a new American dream, talking reconstruction and rebirth; instead he was locked in a death grip fighting for the dominion of the lowest, dirtiest ground in American politics.

  When a man like Jack Kennedy started talking himself out of doing the right thing it was hardly surprising that so many of the party faithful were looking to jump ship.

  Lyndon Johns raised his glass to his lips.

  “When the news gets out about the Moon Program,” he sniffed, “Alabama, Florida and Texas, and most likely California, New Mexico and Nevada will go south so fast those boys in Massachusetts won’t know they’ve lost their pants until they’re standing on Main Street with their dicks flapping in the wind!”

  The billions of dollars associated with NASA, the Air Force and a dozen prestigious universities– Manna from Heaven promised for many years to come – had been all that was tying the fragmenting Southern Democratic homelands to the Administration. Much of the renewed military spending was concentrated in the north, huge swaths of the strife-torn old Deep South already felt forgotten and neglected, despised by the Philadelphia elite.

  Claude Betancourt held his peace.

  “Do your people have any idea what’s going to happen when the rest of the country finds out how bad things are in the Midwest?” The Vice President asked him bluntly.

  The older man was impassive.

  “Or,” LBJ grunted sarcastically, “what will happen when the price of gas doesn’t just keep going up every week but the pumps start running dry?”

  Claude Betancourt did not think the pumps were going to run dry any time soon. The United States had built up massive strategic crude oil reserves in the last year, and over half the surviving big refineries in the World were on American soil. But in eighteen months, perhaps a couple of years time if the Red Army closed the Persian Gulf? Well, that was another kettle of fish...

  As for the escalating price of gas at the pump...

  Heck, rising prices were simply a reflection of the fact that in the present weakened state of the Federal Government the big oil companies knew they could virtually get away with murder. JFK was fighting for his political – and probably, his temporal life also – and the last thing he was about to do was go to war with the all-powerful, mendacious and utterly ruthless cartel that former Administrations and the madness of the October War had immovably entrenched. The so-called Seven Sisters might have emerged reduced in number from World War III but the cartel still controlled – albeit nominally - eighty percent of the World’s oil reserves and trade; and the men who ran Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of California (SoCal), Standard Oil of New Jersey (ESSO), Standard Oil of New York (Mobil), and Texaco, had already given up on John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  What use was a President who would not, or could not defend the vast oilfields of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), which was one hundred percent owned by four of the five surviving ‘Sisters’. It was an even sadder state of affairs when a government’s writ, by virtue of military incompetence and administrative enfeeblement no longer ran across every state in the union; and when that same government proved self-evidently incapable or just plain unwilling to protect the key assets of major American companies abroad the situation became intolerable.

  The Seven Sisters had prospered in the post-World War II American Empire. The chaotic retreat from that short-lived empire, most notably in Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the writing off of practically all their Western European ‘property’, had not yet been – nor was likely to be any time soon - materially offset by new ventures and ‘opportunities’ which had opened up in South America, Canada, and Asia. In fact, the Kennedy Administration’s casual alienation of Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and latterly the Spanish and Portuguese was beginning to have a range of painfully limiting, and most unwelcome impacts on the post-war balance sheets of practically all of the surviving ‘Sisters’. Much to the consternation of a Wall Street establishment built on the rock of the US oil industry.

  “It is my understanding that the President,” Claude Betancourt sighed, “entertains robust plans to impose a peace on the warring parties in the Persian Gulf.”

  “Curtis LeMay told those boys he needed two bomb groups of B-52s, and two hundred thousand troops on the ground,” Lyndon Johnson scoffed derisively. “What we’ve got is the Kitty Hawk and half-a-dozen ships. We might as well be pissing in the wind. If anything goes wrong – anything at all - we’re liable to get ourselves into a shooting war with the Brits, the Russians and God knows who else seven thousand fucking miles from home!”

  This approximately matched Claude Betancourt’s own analysis of the situation.

  “My sources say that we had nothing to do with the coup against Nasser?” He checked, thinking aloud.

  “CIA thinks it was the Russians. Or the Brits. Probably the Russians,” the Vice President decided. “Nasser was preparing to send two armored divisions to the Gulf. The R
ussians wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  Having gone off at a tangent Claude Betancourt came directly back to the heart of the matter.

  “There are two scenarios,” he suggested. “Either the President carries a divided party at the Atlantic City convention in August and goes forward critically wounded into a general Election campaign he cannot possibly win. Or he stands down before the convention and leaves the field open for a safe pair of hands to pick up the pieces ahead of the convention.”

  Johnson viewed his visitor with hard, thoughtful eyes which betrayed no whisper of any of the emotions roiling behind them.

  He had advised his President to throw the British a bone at Hyannis Port; a big, preferably juicy bone. JFK, his inner circle having convinced him that if he took a ‘strong line’ that Prime Minister Thatcher would probably be ousted from power by a cabal in England much more willing to do the Administration’s bidding, had ignored his advice.

  The President had made a disastrous miscalculation.

  Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister and under her leadership the British had – if such a thing was possible – significantly hardened their line on the War in South Atlantic with the Argentine (still supposedly a key US regional ally), and done what they could to reinforce their forces in the Persian Gulf.

  The woman had told JFK that she had drawn a line in the sand; her line was Abadan Island, Jack Kennedy’s was on the beach in front of his father’s house at Hyannis Port. If and when that lady got used to the idea that she had been betrayed – again – she was going to kick back like her life depended on it and then there would be all Hell to pay.