by James Philip
“OPEN FIRE!” Schwarzkopf bellowed. “FIRE AT WILL!”
Chapter 36
Wednesday 24th June 1964
Wharton Forest, New Jersey
The Wharton Forest was the largest remnant of the Pine Barrens which once spread across most of southern New Jersey. It lay on sandy, acidic, nutrient impoverished soils which had discouraged widespread clearances and cultivation of the area by successive waves of settlers. North of Hammerton and straggling across three counties – Burlington, Camden and Atlantic - less than forty miles from Philadelphia the western boundary of the one hundred and eighty square mile forest had been wilderness before the October War. In the intervening twenty months refugees, the dispossessed, the forgotten of society, and the disaffected and the ‘city-scared’ had formed dozens of encampments, communes, and small ‘cabin communities’ inside the Wharton Forest and the nearby woodlands, Lebanon and the Bass River Forest.
A stranger wandering in the forests of New Jersey might as easily stumble upon a dangerous biker hideout, a survivalist sect or a pacifist Christian communion camped out or in freshly built log cabins. There were fugitives, deserters, runaway children in the woods living feral, and many, many men and women who had sworn never to set foot in a big city again.
In summer the forest buzzed with insects, birdsong filled the branches and the close-packed pines regulated the heat of the day and the cool of the night. In the shade the hottest day was bearable, in the shelter of the woods the coldest night often balmy. In winter the unpaved roads and tracks turned to ice rinks, or muddy swamps.
The forest was the watershed of the Mullica River which drained the whole Pine Barrens into the Atlantic at Great Bay. The Mullica and the other streams in the forest had been fished out long ago, and few crops would grow in the unfriendly earth so practically everything required to sustain normal life had to be brought in from outside. Gangs from the forests roved the settlements on the Jersey side of the Delaware River, and roamed up and down the coast. Most of the inhabitants of the forest lived decent, working lives. Many communities sent workers into Philadelphia, Camden or Atlantic City to find work during the week, others depended on the charity of churches and civic welfare programs elsewhere in the New Jersey and the surrounding states. There was a FEMA office – several ugly prefabricated buildings and warehouses – in Shamong Township on the western edge of the forest, and now and then traders ventured further off the beaten track. By and large law enforcement kept out of the forest.
The forest was a world apart from Philadelphia, Camden and Atlantic City each within less than an hour’s drive from its heart.
Dwight Christie had parked his stolen beaten up Chrysler off Atsion Road – more a dusty, rutted single track dirt track than a road – as far into the trees as he could drive, made a cursory effort to hide the car from anybody who was not really looking for it, and had set off on foot for his destination late yesterday afternoon. He had wrapped himself in a blanket and stayed awake most of the night. He had a lifelong phobia of snakes and had not slept out at night since he was a kid. The forest was nothing like his Ma and Pa’s back yard; every noise shouted danger, the trees creaked and swayed, seemed to breathe softly even when at rest and the branches rustled endlessly...
Many, many times during the night he had asked himself if he was signing his death warrant. This morning he was wishing he had brought more than a few biscuits and a couple of bottles of Coke with him. He had never been an outdoors sort of guy; most of his life he had hated the great outdoors and gone to great lengths to avoid it. It was no consolation – his rumbling stomach aside – that if today went badly he was not going to have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.
He was stiff and sore and his right hand felt broken. Hitting somebody with a closed fist was never a good idea and he had had to hit Billy Murdoch a lot of times before he went down. Faint wraiths of mist hung close to the forest floor as full light began to flood through the gaps in the trees and he stumbled onto the shore of the lake.
Not completely lost...
Although that was not to say this was not entirely the wrong lake...
This is dumb!
What sort of a plan was it to aimlessly mooch around in the fucking woods until you walked into your worst nightmare?
He went to the water’s edge, stooped and splashed frigid water on his face. After a moment he submerged his aching hand in the water. An ice pack would have been better but out here in the middle of nowhere he was going to have to wait for winter to get his hand iced.
He had done some bad, and some very stupid things for the cause down the years; but this malarkey just about took the biscuit!
Getting away from Agent Murdoch had been harder than he reckoned in one way, easier in another. It had never occurred to him that Murdoch would actually have been on his own; or rather, the FBI would periodically leave just one minder on duty. Still, even special agents had to go to the John from time to time. He felt bad about letting down Gretchen. Sure, she had just been doing her job but the way she had given it back to that bastard Tolson, well, that was a thing to behold...
Christie was a city boy. He could hardly tell one sound from another in the woods unless it shouted in his ear. In a cityscape he was intuitively streetwise; that was his kind of jungle. Out here in the country he was practically deaf and blind, a real babe in the woods.
“You don’t want to be making any kind of sudden moves, Mister!”
The thickly accented Bronx baritone came from directly behind the former G-man.
Christie left his damaged hand in the water, his fingers feeling around for something solid, a rock or stone. He groaned inwardly when all he succeeded in doing was stirring up the mud.
“Can I stand up?” He asked.
“Real slow. Don’t turn around until I tell you.”
Christie heard a gun cocking, the bolt of a rifle or carbine clicking home.
Okay, there were two of them.
If they were the wrong guys he was dead; and even if they were the right guys he was probably dead too. He straightened very, very slowly making absolutely certain that his hands were in full view all the time.
“Turn around.”
Isaac Cheney, seemingly taller and rangier than he recollected from six months ago stood at the edge of the tree line with a hunting rifle in his hands. The kid’s eyes were vacant, his jaw working as he tried to make sense of finding Christie here.
Christie did not know the other man.
Both his captors were dressed for the woods; wearing heavy boots, and camouflaged Army-style fatigues.
“You know this schmuck, Isaac?” Asked the second man who was holding a Colt forty-five pointed at Christie’s belly.
“Yeah, he’s a friend of Pa’s.”
The man with the Colt raised an eyebrow. He was Christie’s age except he was hard, fit and his crew cut suggested he was ex-military.
“I’m Dwight Christie,” the former G-man explained amiably. “After Galen and Isaac went up to Atlanta in February I got the Cheney women out of Texas City before the FBI raided the family compound.”
This impressed Isaac Cheney a lot more than it did his older companion.
“We ain’t heard nothing from Mikey or the others since...”
“Mikey didn’t make,” Christie interjected flatly finding it hard to sound as sorry about the death of Galen Cheney’s son as he suspected he needed to be in this company. “The Feds shot him. He held them off while I got the women away.”
The gun in Isaac Cheney’s hands was pointing to the ground. There were tears forming in his eyes, his shoulders were slumped. Michael had always watched over and defended him; the two had been inseparable all their lives until they had fallen out the day before they parted that the last time.
The other man was studying Christie.
“You look beat up, man?”
“I had a little trouble on the way here.”
“Turn around again.”
Christie let the other man pat him down.
“He’s clean. Isaac, you go ahead, I’ll follow behind this guy.”
Once the three men were in the trees the questions began.
“How’d you find us?”
“I didn’t. I was waiting for you to find me.”
“Wise guy, eh! How come it took you so long to show up?”
“Somebody had to keep the women safe from the Feds!”
“That sounds like a real man’s job?”
Dwight Christie halted, turned around.
“Yeah, well, if Galen hadn’t fucked up the Atlanta deal he’d have been around and I wouldn’t have had to take care of his family when I ought to have been working for the resistance!”
Chapter 37
Thursday 25th June 1964
LBJ Ranch, Stonewall, Texas
In the last three days it seemed as if practically everybody who was anybody in the Southern Democratic caucus in Congress and the Senate had dutifully trooped up the steps to be greeted, briefly entertained and dispatched back to whence he had come by the Vice President.
The previous night he and Lady Bird had dined with John Connally, the 39th Governor of Texas. Connally and LBJ went back a long way. They had known each other since before the Second War and after the two men returned home from their service – both were Navy men, Connally having been on the fleet carriers Essex and Bennington in some of the most vicious battle of the Pacific War – the future Governor of the Lone Star State had joined Johnson, then a Congressman, in Washington as an aide. It was Connally who had led the Johnson faction at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles; Connally who had alienated so many of JFK’s supporters by publicly questioned whether ‘their man’ was fit enough to serve a full Presidential term. Back then nobody had really understood how ill Jack Kennedy was or how reliant he was on drugs to keep going, and in any event the Kennedys already had the nomination in their pockets. When LBJ had been offered the Vice Presidential ticket to bring the Southern Democratic wing of the Party onboard, part of the deal had been a cabinet post for his old friend in JFK’s first Administration.
Connally had served as Secretary of the Navy for eleven months in 1961 before he resigned to run in the Texas Gubernatorial race of 1962. The two old friends had talked of many things, not least Claude Betancourt’s machinations and the scheduled meeting today with the one man who might just, if he was very lucky, enable Johnson to wriggle and squirm off the horns of a dilemma which would otherwise fracture the northern and southern cabals of the Party if, by some chance, he was its candidate for President of the United States in November.
The first thing the latest visitor noted about the Johnson family home in Texas when he got out of the Vice Presidential limousine was that he had just stepped into turmoil. The circus was pulling down the big top, caging the animals and packing its caravans ahead of moving on.
The Vice President was loading up the wagons and heading back to Philadelphia. There were Secret Service officers everywhere, there were suitcases and travelling trunks stacked on the porch, and most of the windows of the ranch were heavily draped as the staff began to place the small complex into mothballs.
The car, a gleaming Cadillac had collected Thurgood Marshall from the tarmac of Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in the north eastern suburbs of Austin minutes after his Continental Airways flight had touched down from San Francisco. Fifty-five year old Marshall was a thick set, sometimes severe-looking man who had been the executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund since 1940. He had been the man who decided which cases the NAACP fought before the Supreme Court and had become the best known, and certainly the most famous black litigator in the history of the United States. It was Marshall who had won the decision handed down by the Supreme Court in May 1954 – by a unanimous verdict - that desegregated public schools when he fought the Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka case for the NAACP.
It was another dry, stifling southern Texas summer day. The air tasted of dust and the wind rustling the leaves of the nearby trees planted to give the main house shelter from the blazing sun was hot, which made the charming cool elegance of the Vice President’s wife amidst the chaos of ‘moving day’ all the more impressive.
“Lyndon had to take a call from Philadelphia,” she smiled as she stepped down from the steps in front of the house.
Marshall had heard that the Vice President and his old friend John Connally had been ‘in conference’ the previous day, confirming him in the opinion that now was the time to remind LBJ, cordially but firmly, of the Administration’s obligation to his people. His people were every bit as American as Johnson’s white Southern Democrat power base.
Thurgood Marshall inquired as to the Vice President’s health.
“Lyndon is fully recovered,” he as assured.
The first time Marshall had visited the ranch LBJ had told him the homestead had had to be raised off the ground because of snakes in the summer and floods in the winter. One never really knew if and when Johnson was pulling one’s leg; because in everything but his down home, innate pragmatism the Vice President could be, and frequently was an enigma even to those who knew him best.
Claudia Alta ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson had met her husband when he was working as an aide to Congressman Richard Kleberg, the representative of the 14th District of Texas. Backed by a modest inheritance she had entertained hopes of a career in journalism but right from the start she had been drawn to Lyndon Johnson like a moth ‘to a flame’. Her future husband had proposed to her on their first ‘proper’ date but she had held out for another ten weeks before accepting his proposal. They had married in November 1934 in San Antonio. People said Lyndon would never have made anything of himself without her – and her money – but they were wrong about that, just as they were wrong about so many of the things they said about her husband.
It was true that she had bankrolled his campaign for Congress. That had been her decision; from the outset LBJ had been scrupulous in insisting that whatever she did with ‘her inheritance’ was her affair. Moving to Washington DC in 1938 had been a wrench, even more so after Lyndon had joined the Navy in 1942 leaving her to run his Congressional Office in his absence. However, that was the thing, they were inseparable partners in life’s great endeavor and she had always known that she had married a great man. Albeit a great man who sometimes had an uncanny knack of willfully upsetting people. But even in this she and Lyndon were ideally matched; he was a force of nature, she was one of life’s born arbitrators and mediators. One night in Houston she had driven after a young reporter who had been on the wrong end of LBJ’s famous ‘treatment’, inviting him back to the Johnson home.
‘That’s just the way Lyndon is,’ she had explained.
After LBJ had had blazing rows and apparently irreconcilable partings from friends and foes alike Lady Bird would pick up the phone and invite the ‘new enemy’ to dine at their Washington home, or to stay over at the Ranch or take steps to unreservedly, unambiguously apologize for her husband’s angry words via the political wives grapevine.
It helped that she was not just a political wife.
As long ago as 1943 she had purchased KTBC, a radio station in Austin. As President of the LBJ Holding Company she had built up the business over the years, made lucrative deals with the CBS radio network and expanded into Television in the early 1950s. Eventually, KTBC Radio had become the CBS affiliated KTBC-TV/7 organization in possession of – by no small measure courtesy of Lyndon’s influence as Senate Majority Leader over the Federal Communications Commission – a license granting it a monopoly over all VHF TV frequencies in the area. Utilizing this franchise had made the Johnsons millionaires in the years before the October War. People sniped at them but that was only jealously. In this World nobody gave you anything; everything had to be earned and over the years the Johnsons honestly believed they had paid their dues.
“Come straight inside and let me pour you a long col
d drink, Thurgood,” the nation’s second lady smiled after planting a passing, pecking kiss on her visitor’s right cheek and seizing his left hand proprietarily. “The phone rang as your car was coming up to the house. Now isn’t that just typical!” She complained philosophically, for she was the most dutiful of political wives.
“It’s good to see you, counselor!” Lyndon Johnson boomed, visibly shrugging off a cloak of exasperation as he stomped into the airy reception room next to his study as Marshall and Lady Bird exchanged pleasantries about each other’s respective spouses. Marshall’s first wife had died in 1955, having since remarried he had two young sons aged seven and five. “How was California?”
Although the Vice President tended to be the tallest man in any room he did not tower over Marshall, himself a big man in every respect. The two men sized each other up; as they always did even though they had known from the beginning that they were men who had been born to ‘do business’. While there was nothing remotely ‘color blind’ in Johnson’s politics or his career, he came from the Southern Democrat caucus of his Party and had never been ashamed, or felt any compunction to apologize for it. The truth was that he and the man who had been the NAACP’s guiding legal hand and brain for the best part of a quarter of a century had recognized something of themselves in the other from the outset.
Johnson was the son of a Texas dirt farmer who had had to fight tooth and nail for everything he had got in life, achieved everything that he had achieved by the sweat of his own brow.
Baltimore born Thurgood Marshall was the son of a railroad porter and the great-grandson of a slave born in what was now the Congo. Marshall was dignified, his words considered, weighty and his character formed and tempered by a career battling on behalf of the weak and the oppressed against the rich and the powerful.
Johnson was silently brooding or manic, forever seeking a path through the morass of party politicking, vested interest and the plain stupidity of the Washington – now Philadelphia – ruling elite.