by James Philip
Sir Henry Tomlinson opened his mouth to speak, shut it.
There was a knock at the door and a youthful subaltern marched into the Common Room. He handed the Cabinet Secretary a note, turned and departed.
“Secretary of State Fulbright and Ambassador Brenckmann have arrived safely at Brize Norton, Prime Minister.”
“Good.” That afternoon RAF Brize Norton was destined to be the meeting place of two Worlds, the symbolic counterpoint to the grand peace ceremony of that icy day in Washington last week. However, whereas in Washington the talk had been diplomatic, focused in the main on generalities, today’s encounter was about the practicalities of the new alliance in a World half-shattered. Things were beginning to look ominous in the Mediterranean, hence the flying visit to England by the Commander-in-Chief. She and the man everybody now called the ‘Fighting Admiral’ had spoken by telephone eight times since he had proposed marriage; the matter had not been raised again by either of them. The assassination of Edward Heath in the White House and her unexpected assumption of the Premiership had changed everything except her feelings for the tall, handsome much older – by the best part of a quarter-of-a-century – man who had, without having to try, swept her off her feet in the handful of days she had known him before he had been sent to Malta. They had met, survived the Balmoral atrocity during which he had saved her life, by throwing himself on top of her a split second before a five hundred pound iron bomb had skipped across lawn in front of the Castle and hurtled through the picture window in front of which they had been standing, flirting one with the other in the previous minutes. The poor man had been fearfully knocked about and badly concussed; she had held his hand that night as he tossed and turned in a feverish sleep, repeatedly calling out the name not of his late wife, but of a woman called ‘Aysha’. One day she planned to quiz him about ‘Aysha’. In anything like normal circumstances she would already have quizzed him about the mysterious woman who had so preoccupied his dreams that night after the attack on Balmoral Castle. In any other circumstances things would be so different.
Margaret Thatcher realised that she was staring into space.
That would never do!
“Good,” she repeated. Turning to her Foreign Secretary as she reached down to pick up her handbag from beside the leg of her chair, she asked: “What is Dick White up to, Tom?”
The unthreatening interrogative jolted Tom Harding-Grayson.
“Er,” he tried very hard not to betray his misgivings; without great success. The woman had a way of slicing through a man’s defences before he knew he was even under attack. Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had flown out to Lisbon within hours of Special Air Mission 26000, the specially modified VC-137 Boeing jetliner normally only used by the President of the United States, returning the Prime Minister’s party to the United Kingdom, landing at Prestwick in Scotland. Loaning the aircraft had been a nice touch by the Americans and Jack Kennedy’s generosity had gone down well with the Angry Widow. The Foreign Secretary forced himself to focus on the lady’s beguiling question. “Dick felt that the nearer he was to the, er, ‘action’ the better, Prime Minister.”
“The Head of MI6’s place is in England advising me,” Margaret Thatcher declared, “not gallivanting around the World like a character in one of Mr Fleming’s scurrilous paperbacks.”
“I’ll have a word with him.”
The first time Margaret Thatcher had been briefed about Red Dawn, the Prime Minister had taken it with a pinch of salt. A very, very large pinch of salt. In the intervening weeks Red Dawn had first been a fortuitous bogeyman whose existence allowed diplomacy scope to hold back the dogs of war, and then, with a dark inevitability it had become a monster stalking and threatening the fragile peace between the old trans-Atlantic allies.
Was it really possible that the ogre of Red Dawn that loomed over the Balkans, the Aegean and Asia Minor could have risen so soon from the ashes of the Soviet Union?
She had read the summary transcript of KGB Colonel Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s three debriefing sessions several times. The first interrogation had been conducted by Dick White in person, the second and third by ‘old Russia hands’ sent to Portugal by the Head of the SIS to pick holes in the defector’s narrative. According to Dick White, Rykov had scared the living daylights out of the ‘old salts’ he had sent to Lisbon to discredit if they could, the former KGB man’s warnings of a new, imminent and possibly unwinnable war.
Arkady Rykov talked about a ‘generation war’, of a terrible genie that once let out of its confinement could strike anywhere at any time. Margaret Thatcher did not know what to believe about Red Dawn; for all she knew it was a myth. The American authorities had been interrogating insurgents – or terrorists, traitors, or madmen depending upon one’s taste – captured after the Battle of Washington for several weeks now and nobody had mentioned ‘Red Dawn’ by name. When this was put to Arkady Rykov he was alleged to have smiled and said: ‘Krasnaya Zarya’ is not an organisation, it is a state of mind. I was an officer of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and before that the Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, but after Hungary in 1956 in my own mind I was an avenging angel. Judge a thing not by its name but by its deeds.’
Margaret Thatcher had toyed with the idea of bringing the Russian to England. She would have liked to have met him; Dick White had counselled against it and besides, he had urgent work for him elsewhere.
Krasnaya Zarya.
It sounded almost poetic.
Red Dawn might be a paper tiger, an invention of the mind of an embittered defector. Today she would hear what the man in whom she placed a nameless faith – Julian Christopher - thought about the reality of Krasnaya Zarya. If what was happening in the Mediterranean was simply the inevitable long-term post-war disintegration of the old order into violent chaos that was bad enough; the steps she had already sanctioned, reinforcing the fleet and the local garrisons might be sufficient to hold the line long enough for Kennedy Administration to get its house in order. If it was the case that the northern shores of the great inland sea dissolved into anarchy that was bad; but it was not necessarily fatal to the United Kingdom’s vital strategic interests in the region. With the weight of American military and industrial muscle at its back the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the British Army might hold the line indefinitely. However, if Red Dawn was the monster described by Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, she honestly questioned whether anything short of another thermonuclear war would hold the wolf from the door.
Presently, it was time to leave for RAF Brize Norton.
Not to be outdone by their North American competitors the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby had modified a pair of Silver Shadows with armoured panels and bullet proof windows for the use of senior UAUK officials. The cars had been waiting for the Prime Minister when she arrived in Oxford that morning.
Margaret Thatcher, the Cabinet Secretary and the Foreign Secretary patted the luxurious, deeply padded seats and looked around the inside of their Silver Shadow like overgrown children inspecting an exciting new toy as the convoy set off for Brize Norton. Ferret armoured cars cleared the way ahead and brought up the rear. A Royal Marine Commando with an automatic rifle sat in the front passenger seat and overhead, a Westland Wessex helicopter hovered with machine gunners quartering the surrounding countryside pacing the vehicles on the ground.
The last time Margaret Thatcher had laid eyes on Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher he had presented a somewhat sorry sight. His face was heavily bruised, he was stiff and horribly sore with cracked ribs and he had had unhealed burns on his arm. He had had no time to rest or recuperate on Malta, although hopefully, being away from the northern winter would have restored the colour in his cheeks.
Goodness, here I am on the way to perhaps the most important meeting of my life and all I can think about is the twinkle in Julian Christopher’s blue-grey eyes!
It was a funny old World sometimes...
Chap
ter 15
Wednesday 22nd January 1964
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia
Even though it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning a large crowd thronged Auburn Avenue and only a police presence three ranks deep stopped the ever growing tide of humanity blocking the intersection with Jackson Street. Outside in the road a cordon of state troopers and Secret Service men guarded the hastily constructed wooden stage next to the front entrance to the Church. ABC and NBC had parked broadcast trucks across the street; technicians were struggling to run cables up to the unwieldy cameras bolted to the roofs of each vehicle. National Guardsmen milled around the back of the building, mostly out of view of the gathering crush of humanity in Auburn Avenue. Anybody with a line of sight down any of the long, straight highways leading to - more likely, passing through - this small corner of Atlanta would have seen an amazing thing, endless processions of people, white as well as black, converging on the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy the younger brother of the President and since 20th January 1961 the Attorney General of the United States of America was under no illusion that the thousands filing down towards Auburn Avenue had come to see him. As his heavily protected cavalcade of bullet proof limousines crawled down Jackson Street to the intersection with Auburn Avenue he had the oddest sense that the future was rushing towards him. America was changing and sooner or later the American people were going to wake up to a different country. Sooner or later that change might have happened anyway but the October War had pressed the ‘fast-forward’ button, brought things to a head years before they might otherwise have become the over-riding domestic issues confronting not just the present Administration, but whichever came after it. Here in Atlanta a century after William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had passed through it on its ‘March to the Sea’ through Georgia, only a fool or a charlatan or a diehard Klan bigot could still believe that the hundred year old post-Civil War settlement which, even now, disenfranchised and disadvantaged men, women and children simply because of the colour of their skin, was anything other than fundamentally wrong. Here in Atlanta and elsewhere in the South, whites and blacks alike had realised that their futures were inexplicably intertwined, that the old ways which had so recently killed so many of their fellow Americans, were unsustainable in the new age. Bobby Kennedy did not hear many people saying it out loud, not yet, but one day they would shout it out in their thousands and millions and when they did, he planned on being there to hear the thunder of righteous voices.
The Attorney General’s apotheosis had come upon him late. He had grown up in the hothouse of northern Democratic Party politics, suspicious of and forever mindful that Southern Democrats weren’t like him. Yet it had not been until he and Jack had been on the election trail and of necessity courted exactly that southern constituency that the reality of life in the Deep South nearly a hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the Union and the end of the Civil War, had really stuck in his craw. This was his fifth visit to Atlanta since the October War and nothing in politics had given him more pride and satisfaction than his association and developing friendship with the extraordinary man to whom the massive crowd had come to look to for hope.
Something remarkable had happened – and was happening – all across the Deep South. Yes, religious and racial bigotry, segregation and countless injustices remained ingrained, entrenched within the fabric of the South but increasingly, the Civil Rights movement was being embraced by poor whites who shared the privations of the large part of the coloured community, and by middle class whites who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbours. For every diehard red neck bigot there were tens of pragmatic souls who – rocked by the near disaster of the October War which had robbed them of the certainties of their former lives – had privately seen the light. All men were equal in the sight of God; and all men were the same flesh and bone beneath the skin.
“Now and then,” the Attorney General of the Unites States of America said distractedly as he smiled and nodded at the waving, cheerful throng pressing close to the Governor of Georgia’s limousine, “I find myself honestly believing that some good might yet come out of the war.”
Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the forty-five year old seventy-third Governor of Georgia did not reply immediately. But for the war and the dislocation in its aftermath he would have had to run for re-election last fall. Not that the local Democratic hierarchy would have rowed in behind him; he had made too many enemies cleaning up the mess – mostly good old-fashioned graft that had gotten out of hand - he had inherited from his predecessor, Marvin Griffin. He had been Griffin’s Lieutenant-Governor and was therefore tarnished by association. This had not made his job any easier and he had made a lot of enemies among Georgia’s Democratic Party aristocracy, many of whom regarded themselves as the guardians of the ‘proud’ tradition of their plantation-owning ancestors. Georgia democrats had never forgotten that it was the Abe Lincoln’s Republican Union that had raped the South; it was the same nineteenth century mindset that allowed otherwise well-educated, rational men to refer to the Civil War as the ‘War of Succession’, or the “War for State’s Rights’.
Like the President’s younger brother Vandiver had trained as a lawyer before entering politics. Elected Mayor of Lavonia in Franklyn County in 1946 soon after he left the United States Army Air Corps he had become the State Adjutant-General in 1948, been elected Lieutenant-Governor in 1954 and successfully run for the Governorship in 1958 when it was still de rigor for a Southern Democrat in Georgia to be a conviction segregationist. Not that Vandiver had ever had a problem with that. Back in 1958 he had pledged to defend segregation in the State education system; his campaign motto had been ‘No, not one!’ declaring that under his administration not one black child would attend a white school. Notwithstanding this promise, Vandiver had meekly complied with a decision in a US District Court ordering the admission of the first two black students to the University of Georgia. Afterwards, he had persuaded the Georgia State Assembly to repeal a law banning the funding of integrated schools and set up a commission to plan for wider school desegregation.
Like many contemporary Southern Democrats his college education, war service and exposure to influences and ideas from outside his immediate Georgia caucus, Vandiver had for many years found himself espousing views and prejudices that he no longer personally regarded – if he ever had - as being articles of faith. He was no latter-day born again reformist and he had fought tooth and nail to preserve Georgia’s County Unit System of voting – a form of electoral college rather than one man one vote democracy – right up until the moment the United States Supreme Court had ruled it as unconstitutional; but a part of him had secretly welcomed being forced to eventually start doing the right thing.
There was no shame in that; Bobby Kennedy had decided that Vandiver, despite his faults, was a man with whom he and the Administration could do business. Vandiver’s Governorship had been efficient, relatively ‘clean’ by Georgia standards and but for the war would have improved the lot of many of the poorest Georgians.
How many other state governors of either Democratic or Republican persuasions could honestly claim that?
“That’s a stretch,” the Governor of Georgia remarked. “I find it very hard to see any good coming out of what happened back on October sixty-two.” Unlike his companion in the back seat of the limousine he was still intensely uncomfortable to be seen paying court to the most famous living Georgian. It was not because he was a racist – because he did not consider himself to be one, other than in the small things imbued in one from birth in the Deep South – but he was much more aware than the President’s younger brother that the crowds in the streets around the Ebenezer Baptist Church represented only a section, albeit a significant section, of the natural Democratic constituency that he represented. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was an unimaginably broad ‘church’ embracing Northern liberals and Southern white supre
macists and every shade of politics in between. First and foremost he was a practical man. If he alienated too many people on the right he honestly did not know if that left him enough votes on the left to one, win the Democratic nomination for the next gubernatorial race; and two, win the actual General Election. He could not remember a time in his adult life when opinions had been more polarised, or when the Democratic Party machine in Georgia had been so fragmented. “The economy of the great State of Georgia is still in recession,” he went on. “I’ve got military bases shutting down all over the place, nowhere near enough police to keep the streets safe. Hell, it isn’t as if I can trust the National Guard to do much more than direct traffic. You’ll forgive me if I beg to differ with you, I hope, sir.”
“The moment when a nation seems to be at its most divided is the time its leaders must seek to unite it most,” the Attorney General murmured. It was a mantra that he and his brother were proselytising across the continent while other members of the Administration, and the newly constituted Joint Chiefs of Staff under Curtis LeMay’s gung ho chairmanship, were striving to restore a functioning Government machine and to undo the massive self-inflicted structural damage wrought by the ‘war dividend’ cuts to the military. The depth of the looming crisis – irrespective of the real or imagined threat posed by Red Dawn which would hopefully turn out to be another intelligence myth – was underlined by the fact that the New York Stock Exchange which had crashed spectacularly during the Battle of Washington, had still to recover fifty percent of its pre-insurrection value. Practically every American bank was as technically bankrupt as the Government, the entire financial system underpinning the still huge and miraculously, relatively intact North American industrial and economic behemoth was currently being funded on a wing and a prayer and millions of unpayable I Owe Yous. The social, political, economic, banking and military crisis was so acute that all it would take to bring down the whole stack of cards was another surprise, another tiny unexpected knock.