by James Philip
Half-an-hour later Schwarzkopf, white faced with pain and sweating badly was in the basement of the State Capitol listening to the latest SITREP.
Harvey Grabowski, now promoted brevet Brigadier in command of the 32nd Infantry Division was unshaven, grey with exhaustion and yet perversely, cheerful.
“The eastern perimeter has been re-established,” he began, quickly moving on past the self-inflicted disaster which had killed so many of their friends and comrades only hours ago. “Events overnight probably advance plans to shorten our lines in that sector by pulling back to the Yahara River line. The timing of that is under advisement; we will continue to maintain our current defense posture at this time. If and when we draw in our horns will depend on how quickly to enemy responds to last night’s beating.”
Grabowski turned to Schwarzkopf.
“Little Bear,” he grinned. “I need you to talk to Captain Mundy.”
Carl Mundy was the hard-bitten Marine who had taken command of Schwarzkopf’s Company ‘A’ after he was wounded decamping from Sun Prairie. The Company had been reinforced by men from the 2nd Marines and held in reserve for ‘mobile operations’ within the Madison lines.
“We need to know where the enemy is and what he’s doing. Talk to Mundy about sending scouting parties east. I want to know what else the enemy has got left to throw at us from the Chicago-Waukesha- Milwaukee sector. More prisoners would be good, too. Send out the first raiding party tonight.”
“Yes, sir.” It stuck in Schwarzkopf’s craw not to be capable of taking part in the ‘fun’.
“The Air Force,” Grabowski continued, “plan to send in a ground control team to assess the viability of setting up an ‘air bridge’ to keep the garrison supplied and to evacuate the wounded. There will be pressure to fly out civilians but military priorities will prevail. I’ve no idea how practical any of this shit will be. We’re right on the edge, probably beyond the operating range of any chopper and we don’t have anywhere within the perimeter big enough to clear a landing strip. Still, the flyboys will come look see,” he grimaced, “and tell us what they can do!”
Schwarzkopf coughed.
“Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings, and the new Chinooks and Sea Knights would probably have the range, sir,” he offered thoughtfully, “operating from First Army’s front in Illinois or from bases close up to the Mississippi in Iowa.” He shrugged, added: “maybe.”
His commanding officer smiled wanly.
“I’ll believe it when I see it, Little Bear.” He stabbed his finger down onto the map east of the city. “Let me know what you and Mundy want to do by noon, please.”
He moved on decisively.
There were ten other officers gathered around the map table.
Harvey Grabowski looked into the eyes of his officers.
“What went wrong last night was nobody’s fault. We’re fighting a goddammed war here and bad things happen all the time when you’re at war. I don’t want anybody bad mouthing the Air Force. We lost a lot of good men last night but the enemy lost more. Last night’s bombing may just have stopped the enemy in his tracks. Either way, the enemy will know that what happened to him last night can happen to him again anytime, anywhere. Moreover, the next time the enemy attacks he’ll have to come at us over the ground those B-52s churned up. God help him if it rains between now and then!”
Chapter 41
Monday 29th June 1964
Berkeley, California
That morning Nathan had driven Caroline across the Oakland Bay Bridge to the University of California School of Medicine on Parnassus Ave, San Francisco, where she had arranged a meeting with the Acting Dean of the School of Psychiatry. Although she had told him she would make her own way back to Berkeley in the afternoon he had hung around. It had seemed the right thing to do and besides, she had been like a cat on a hot tin roof since they had woken up and well...
He was worried about her.
‘How’d it go?’ He had asked when, after about ninety minutes she had walked distractedly back to where he had parked up.
While he was waiting he had picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and basically, read it from cover to cover trying not to fret too much about Caroline’s interview.
‘So, so,” she had replied noncommittally as he opened the passenger door for her and she clambered into the cab of the beat up old Chevy.
Nathan had spent time making sure what was under the hood worked but he was a part-qualified electrical and mechanical engineer, not any kind of body shop grease monkey. He was going to have to find somebody else to hammer out the dents and re-spray the chassis and panels. It was on his list of things to do; just not very high up it.
‘I’ve got a second appointment at the VA Medical Center this afternoon. That’s out on Clement Street near the coast,’ she had hesitated, ‘beyond the Presidio. The School of Medicine has big contracts with the military,’ she had explained. ‘Obviously, I couldn’t disclose what I’d been doing lately. Not in so many words but I’ve been invited to apply for a post on the Medical Directorate of the California National Guard. It’s pretty much a done deal if I’m interested. The thing over at the VA Medical Center is not so much an interview as a chance to look over the department and meet some of the people working there...’
They had stopped at small diner off Fillmore for coffee and sandwiches then motored west across the city to the white-washed buildings on Clement Street that housed the Veterans Administration Medical Center. Again, Nathan had waited outside in the street, re-reading the latest bad-mouthing of the President.
The General Election might not be scheduled until November but it had already turned into a vicious, no holds barred bare-knuckle fight. Most of the commentators and every serious pundit predicted a three or four way race; Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat and a straight America Firster. Not that any of the potential candidates was espousing anything other than uncompromising isolationism masquerading under the newly remembered banner of states’ rights.
Everybody assumed JFK would run again but nobody knew if he would win his party’s nomination; it was that kind of Presidential race. There were rumors that Vice President Johnson had suffered a heart attack, that Hubert Humphrey or Minnesotan Eugene McCarthy would vie for a place on the Democrat ticket. Here in California there was a vocal lobby that supported Governor Pat Brown for President.
The Republicans were as conflicted and confused as the Democrats. Henry Cabot Lodge junior and Nelson Rockefeller had been in a two horse race in the spring; now the waters were muddier ever week. Barry Goldwater, the strident Arizonan senator had worried at the two standard bearer’s ankles with the angry tenacity of a fox terrier and right up until the result of the California Primary was declared he had been in pole position. Enter Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s faithful, albeit rather dull and somewhat oily Vice President for most of the 1950s, who had very nearly carried his home state’s contest. It seemed that Nixon was attempting to shed his former skin to enable him to insinuate himself between his rivals as a lone voice of reason.
The Southern Democrats already had their man; George Wallace the pugnacious Governor of Alabama, arch segregationist and bigot but dearly beloved of the Jim Crow wing of the President’s own Party.
Strom Thurmond, the senator from South Carolina, was something of a Republican in a Democrat’s fleece. He was one of those old unreconstructed Southern Democrats who seemed to think that the only way to preserve segregation was to reawaken the same states’ rights nightmare that had led to the Civil War. Thurmond was as yet – unofficially - undeclared as a fourth horseman of the American electoral apocalypse which beckoned on November 8th.
JFK or even Richard Nixon were known quantities, as for the others... Heck, from what Nathan had read and had heard bandied about, most of the others were the sort of characters a wise man would not bet paper money on to find his own ass in the dark without half-a-dozen flunkies holding a torch for him!
To be fair to the Chronicl
e it carried gossip and hearsay most days about one or other of the Presidential hopefuls. However, today’s dig at JFK was extraordinarily below the belt.
Doctor Max Jacobsen, aged sixty-three, the German born psycho-physician who boasts a client list that has included over the years Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Zero Mostel, Eddie Fisher, Yul Brynner, Cecil B. DeMille, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller and President Kennedy, stands accused of being nothing more than a quack drug dealer to the rich and the powerful.
The story about what the President’s father had done to his daughter Rose Marie – allegedly having the poor woman lobotomized in 1941 on the grounds that she might become an embarrassment to him and own political ambitions – had been pretty low. Likewise the tittle-tattle about Jack Kennedy’s womanizing, the show girls and the movie stars he had allegedly seduced and dumped.
The good doctor is known variously as ‘Miracle Max’ and ‘Doctor Feelgood’ because of his liberal prescribing of large doses of amphetamines, opiates and other mind-bending drugs. Jacobson, who operates out of an exclusive Upper East Side clinic in Manhattan frequently injects his clients with a so-called ‘miracle tissue regeneration’ concoction. Sources close to President Kennedy before the Cuban Missiles Crisis have revealed that these MTR ‘shots’ are ‘reckless combinations’ of large doses of amphetamines, human placenta, animal hormones untested on humans, anabolic steroids, powerful painkillers, and miscellaneous enzymes and vitamins.
The thing that was different about this slander was that it was suggesting; one, that the President was a very sick man, and two; that he had been under the influence of drugs at crucial points in his Presidency.
Sources close to the Administration confirm that President Kennedy was first treated by Doctor Feelgood in New York in September 1960, shortly before the famous Presidential Debates which probably won JFK the race. Although it was not publicized at the time Max Jacobsen was a member of the President’s staff at the failed Vienna summit of 1961, at which President Kennedy was reportedly ‘out of sorts’ and consequently out-maneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev. Our sources confirm that prior to and during that summit Jacobsen had ‘treated’ the President to alleviate severe back pain...”
Nathan had never blamed his President for the Cuban Missiles War.
The Soviets would have killed a hundred million Americans if JFK had faltered, or given so much as an inch over Cuba.
Except now as he read the Chronicle and his mind began to work through the underlying – horribly persuasive - rationale of the poison on its pages, a canker of doubt had settled in his head. It was hardly any kind of apotheosis, just the recognition that the narrative which he had accepted for most of the last twenty months might, possibly be flawed.
White House sources also confirm that Doctor Jacobsen visited the White House over thirty times between January 1961 and May 1962. The Chronicle’s readers have a right to know if President Kennedy was ‘high’ on the day of the Cuban Missiles War...
Caro – she was ‘Caro’ to him and him alone already - had been in a sanguine mood when she returned to the Chevy that afternoon.
Back in Berkeley they had stopped at a corner shop three blocks down from the house on Hearst Avenue and for the first time half-filled the refrigerator and partially stocked at least one shelf of the larder cupboard.
“The Chronicle says the President might have been on drugs at the time of the war,” Nathan said as they were washing up after a slow, lazy dinner in the small parlor.
“If I had to make the sort of decisions a President has to make I’d make damned sure I was on drugs all the time,” the woman had retorted.
The man had expected her to be outraged.
“You don’t think he ought to have...”
“Been teetotal, abstemious and celibate every minute of every day?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so...”
Caroline wiped her hands on a cloth and turned to face him.
“You are a very sweet man, Nathan Zabriski,” she smiled. “Even after all the things you’ve gone through you’re still the sweetest man I’ve met in my whole,” she shook her head ruefully, “quite long life.”
Nathan looked into her eyes, grey blue and wise, pools of sanity in his disordered reality.
He held her close, planted kisses in her hair.
Knew that for the first time in his life he was not alone...
Chapter 42
Tuesday 30th June 1964
Walnut Street, Philadelphia
Lady Bird Johnson viewed the other woman with transparent mistrust. The other woman’s name had not been Rachel Piotrowska the last time they had met in 1961. Back in those days she had been Hannah Ziegler, a mysterious socialite who had partied – and slept around - with the DC elite. She had arrived from nowhere, and vanished as fast. None of the wives had liked her, sensing threat, danger while their husbands had hung around the woman like a bad smell. Now – if the political wives grapevine was to be believed - the same woman was dressing down, trawling the Philadelphia streets calling in old favors, reminding ‘old friends’ that she was exactly the spy that they had always hoped she was not. The Vice President’s wife was a little surprised how many of her fellow ‘political wives’ had warned her about ‘Miss Piotrowska’ since she had got back to Philly. They obviously had a lot more to worry about than she had!
The only thing Lady Bird Johnson knew for sure was that this woman had no hold on her husband. For all his faults Lyndon was no philanderer. He never had been and he never would be because he was just not that kind of man.
“Thank you for allowing me to visit your charming home,” the younger woman smiled. To her host her accent sounded positively ‘Russian’.
Rachel Piotrowska had turned up in the street behind the plush apartment building in a Buick with two minders, and had been hurriedly ushered into the building via the rear fire escape by the Vice President’s Secret Service detail. The British Ambassador had sent a wire overnight inquiring, very politely, if the Vice President’s health and schedule ‘might accommodate a discreet good will call’ by a member of his staff.
Lady Bird’s husband touched her arm.
“Ms Piotrowska is a long way from home, Bird,” he said gruffly. She had been called ‘Bird’ as a girl and she had hated it; but when the name rolled off her husband’s lips it had always had a reassuring, pleasing ring.
The Vice President’s outward mask of insouciance was becoming a little strained. Orchestrating the various comings and goings at the LBJ Ranch had been a doddle in comparison with the management of the stream of visitors to the Vice Presidential residence in Philadelphia. While Johnson had no problem with the World in general knowing he was being actively courted – much like a prodigal returned – by the Southern Conservative Alliance in the shape of his former mentor Richard Russell – the one time Governor of Georgia and since 1959 the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services - and by miscellaneous disaffected middle-ranking members of a visibly dysfunctional Administration; visitations by the likes of Claude Betancourt, and now Rachel Piotrowska, the public face of the British Secret Service in America were fraught with peril.
Jack Kennedy could afford to turn a blind eye to LBJ’s fraternization with diehard Southern Democrats and by any number of double-dealing sub-Cabinet level malcontents so long as the Vice President went on rebuffing the approaches of the papers and the TV networks and kept a low public profile. However, the fiction of his indisposition – widely reported as his having suffered a minor heart attack – would not withstand the merest whisper of his having secretly met Rachel Piotrowska. The press pack had been on the woman’s heels ever since she suddenly appeared at the British Embassy last month. That she had since proven to be the most elusive of quarries had simply maddened the appetite of the media.
Lady Bird Johnson, The Vice President and the Head of Station of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the US stood in the lobby.
The blinds were drawn, the heat a little oppressive but Lyndon Johnson wanted nobody eavesdropping on this conversation.
“They say the Embassy up in Wister Park is almost deserted?” The Vice President inquired.
“The Ambassador sent our California Delegation under Sir Peter Christopher’s leadership west,” the woman replied dryly, “and a number of inessential and supernumerary staff and family members to Canada after the unfortunate attack on the Embassy earlier in the month. I gather that, at your instigation, Peter Christopher’s Party was royally greeted and entertained in the fortnight they spent as guests of the National Aerospace Administration in Alabama before they set off on the last leg of their journey to California.”
Johnson accepted the compliment at face value.
Making a fuss of the ‘Christopher Party’ – had gone down a storm with the networks and in the press despite the general background of virulently anti-British bullshit – had indeed been his doing. The British consular mission to the West Coast Confederation states, headed by the hero of the Battle of Malta and his Maltese wife had been welcomed like movie stars wherever they went; it was like the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson all over again except without any taint of dishonor and infidelity. LBJ had been sorely tempted to invite ‘the Christophers’ down to Stonewall but that would have burned his boats prematurely with the White House. Instead he had told Wernher von Braun to ‘pull out all the stops’ at Huntsville, suspecting that in the years to come the US was going to need every friend it could get in the old world.
“There are still over forty people at the Embassy,” Rachel explained. “The Ambassador is most keen to ensure that business as normal continues. Lord Franks is most insistent about that. I think some of the things that have been going on in this city,” she waved a dismissive hand, “must be breaking his heart. Not that he’d let it show. Not for a single minute.”