by James Philip
In the next few days the House of Representatives would reconvene in Philadelphia. If either Congress or the Senate rejected or reneged on the treaty with the British all bets would be off. If LBJ could not cut a deal – and nobody else in the Administration could cut Congressional deals like the wily Texan – what then?
Bobby Kennedy and the Vice-President had disliked and mistrusted each other. It had been a visceral, personal thing. The Attorney General detested the older man and Lyndon Baines Johnson held the younger sibling of the President in contempt. The only thing that had until recent weeks united them was their mutual detestation. Bobby had not wanted LBJ on the Presidential ticket in 1960; and at the time of the October War he was sounding out alternative candidates to join Jack on the 1964 ticket. Although his brother had not encouraged him in this neither had he asked him to desist.
Before the October War, Jack had made a point of being punctiliously correct and polite with the Vice-President, and he was invariably collegiate and occasionally deferential to him in meetings with other Cabinet members. After the October War Jack had kept a distance between them; the breakdown in relations with the British and the Battle of Washington had changed everything. To discover that he was no longer the President’s only ‘special advisor’ had come as a perversely welcome shock to the younger brother, a weight lifting off his shoulders. In the last few weeks he had thrown himself into his work with a new lightness of spirit. He had even managed to exchange a few genuinely civil and well meant words with LBJ, who had contrived to respond in a grudgingly similar vein.
“Somebody took a pot shot at the President when he was in Dallas yesterday,” Bobby informed the Governor of Georgia, who started in alarm. “Well several shots, we think,” the Attorney General went on, as if an assassination attempt on the life of a President of the United States of America was a routine affair calling for little comment. “Some nut job in an office block housing a book depository with an M-16. The Marines and the Secret Service hosed the whole top floor of the building with automatic fire. They found this little guy in Army fatigues bleeding to death on the floor when they stormed place. He died before they got him to hospital so we don’t know his story yet. Hoover’s people are on to it.”
“You wonder what’s happened to this country sometimes,” Samuel Vandiver grunted.
“Only one bullet actually hit the President’s car,” Bobby Kennedy confided, still preoccupied with the crowd pressing ever-closer around the Governor’s limousine. “It pinged right off the armour. I hate it when stuff like that happens when Jackie is with the President.”
Every night the newscasts carried film of the President and his glamorous wife in another city, the President charismatically delivering a beguiling, inspiring, humbly beseeching keynote speech and Jackie, well, Jackie just being Jackie. The nation’s perfect first family was trying to connect with, and to be seen with, as many Americans as possible as the Presidential caravan criss-crossed the continent preaching family values, and the inculcation of a renewed sense of national togetherness and manifest destiny. There had been an insurrection, the opening shots of what might have been a second and unimaginably awful Civil War in Washington DC before Christmas, but Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the last people in Christendom to hide away in a bunker when their country needed them. Symbolism is everything in public life. While his brother re-imagined the reality of the Presidency; Bobby was travelling the land re-building old, and exploring new alliances which might yet bolster the Republic against some of the setbacks to come.
The limousine ground to a halt and a phalanx of Marines eased back the pressing crowds between it and the entrance to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The door opened on the Attorney General’s side of the car and he clambered out into the warm sunshine of the Southern morning. He straightened, shot his cuffs, and smiling confidently approached the man who, more than any other embodied to Bobby Kennedy, the future of a new and lasting post-war American domestic settlement. From this point onward no US Administration could ignore the constituency for which this man spoke and whom he represented with such peerless eloquence and dignity. In his dreams Jack Kennedy’s little brother saw the day – perhaps not so many years hence – when this man would stride the World stage. He had never believed a black man could be President of the United States of America; but meeting this man and exchanging the first mutual exploratory tendrils of what he hoped would be a lifelong friendship, he had realised the arrant folly of the idiotic prejudices drummed into him all his life.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Junior stepped forward into the sunlight and extended his hand in welcome to the younger brother of the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 16
Wednesday 22nd January 1964
RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England
The flight from Malta had been delayed by ninety minutes at RAF Luqa by stormy weather and thunderstorms. The afternoon was moving towards a premature, overcast dusk by the time the Comet 4 in British Overseas Airways Corporation livery slapped down onto the wet tarmac of Brize Norton’s extended main runway. There was another delay while the jetliner had to taxi to its appointed hardstand and the disembarkation steps were positioned. Then there was a further short hold up as the BBC outside film unit, which had been caught on the hop by the rescheduled landing – nobody had told the technicians that the flight was about to land - had to scramble to get into position to record the Fighting Admiral’s arrival in England.
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations trotted sure-footedly down to the tarmac followed by his absurdly youthful-looking flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, who was burdened with a bulging attaché case.
“Welcome home, Sir Julian,” Margaret Thatcher said, so loudly she was afraid it might seem to those who would be watching the news footage at home on television – the BBC had started broadcasting scheduled television programs again ten days ago – or in cinemas, that she had blurted the welcome like a star struck schoolgirl meeting a movie star. But then that was what this man was; a film star in all but name. He was the man who had masterminded and forced through Operation Manna, and he was the man who had taken command in Malta in the middle of a devastating surprise air raid. The films and photographs of the tall, handsome Admiral surveying the wreckage and mingling personably with his men and Maltese civilians, added to the praetorian assurance in his voice when he addressed crowds, or spoke to reporters had set his reputation in stone. Nobody could have any doubt that this man was the rock upon which the British presence in the Mediterranean was anchored. She had asked herself if she could still be as infatuated with Julian Christopher as she had been when she had bidden him adieu at RAF Cheltenham in December. When she closed her eyes she still felt his lips half-touching her mouth. Now she knew. She was no less in the man’s thrall; if anything she was even more lost.
The Prime Minister was pleased to note that there were no visible traces of the injuries the sixty-three year old Vice-Admiral had sustained at Balmoral Castle in the week before his departure for Malta. He stood easily, unpained and his face was tanned. He looked lean and fit; and his eyes were thoughtful as he returned her gaze and shook her hand.
“It is good to be home, Prime Minister,” he returned dutifully. “Albeit only for a flying visit, more is the pity.” He half-turned. “May I introduce my flag lieutenant. This is Lieutenant Hannay.”
Margaret Thatcher shook the boy’s hand.
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce stepped up and took the Fighting Admiral’s hand next, patting his old friend on the arm.
“You are looking well, Julian,” he declared.
“You know how it is,” the returning hero smiled. “There’s nothing quite like active service to concentrate a man’s mind on the things that really matter.”
Margaret Thatcher tried not to blush too deeply when Julian Christopher glanced to her as he spoke.
The welcoming ceremony completed the participants were whisked out of the cold of the darkening afternoon into the warmth of the hastily re-configured barn-like Officers Mess. Margaret Thatcher had not trusted herself to speak to Julian Christopher in the car transporting the welcoming party back to civilization. She looked around the Spartan, whitewashed building in which a long trestle table around which a dozen hard chairs had been arranged and quirked a smile to nobody in particular.
“I wonder what Mr MacMillan would have made of today’s meeting in such an,” she shrugged, “unconventional locale?”
“It would have reminded him of the good old days when he was attached to General Eisenhower’s staff,” Sir Henry Tomlinson suggested.
“Sir Harold and President Eisenhower were a good team,” Margaret Thatcher declared, looking to her two American interlocutors.
William Fulbright had left his entourage kicking their heels in an adjoining Mess Hall. The British Premier had indicated she wanted to keep this thing sweet and simple. Sir Julian Christopher was flying back to Malta tonight and unless anybody had a problem with it, Sir Henry Tomlinson would act as the ‘conference secretary’.
“Good to meet you at last, Sir Julian,” the Secretary of State said guardedly to the tall British Admiral in whom his countrymen and women – he had not missed the Angry Widow’s untypical distraction now that she was in the great man’s proximity – placed so much faith. “The Navy people back home spit when they hear your name so you must be doing something right!”
The Fighting Admiral appraised the American for moment.
“That’s kind of you to say so, sir.” He was suddenly very serious. “Back in the Second War, I was proud to fight side by side with the United States Navy. If it comes to it, I will be again.”
There was something a little chilling in the steely resolve in the older man’s voice. With or without the US Navy he would be fighting again soon.
The new American Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral, Captain Walter Brenckmann, who had crossed the Atlantic with his Secretary of State stepped forward and introduced himself.
“I gather that your son transferred off the USS Scorpion shortly before she sailed on her last voyage, Mr Ambassador?” Julian Christopher asked immediately.
“Thank God!”
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean had heard good reports about Brenckmann. It did no harm to exploit their shared recent terrors.
“My son was onboard HMS Talavera when she was attacked off Cape Finisterre,” he told the other man. “Fortunately, he avoided serious injury. We both had lucky escapes, Captain Brenckmann.”
“Indeed we did, sir.”
Margaret Thatcher called the conference to order and the participants took their places around the table. Orderlies in RAF grey blue appeared out of nowhere bearing tea and coffee.
Nobody even thought of reaching for their cigarettes, pipes or tobacco pouches for it was already known, far and wide, that the Angry Widow detested smoking anywhere in her vicinity.
She fixed the two American guests in her sights.
“Secretary of State Fulbright and Ambassador Brenckmann,” she prefaced, time was pressing and the World was doing its level best to go to Hell in handcart in the meantime. “The purpose of this conference is to inform me so that I can properly brief a full meeting of the Cabinet of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom in Cheltenham tomorrow morning. Admiral Christopher has been summoned to this place to brief me on the most recent intelligence and developments in the Mediterranean. I have invited you to be present to better enable you to inform your own colleagues at home, and,” she was momentarily a little whimsical, “hopefully, to better understand us.”
The Secretary of State nodded.
Walter Brenckmann said nothing. William Fulbright was not any kind of anglophile it was just that he was an American who understood, instinctively, that the United States was stronger and safer embracing rather than estranging friends old and new. The man was a Southern Democrat to the core, a segregationist who had signed the Southern Manifesto, so he was not ever going to be in the camp of the so-called ‘bleeding heart’ liberals on any issue. However, in everything he had ever said about foreign relations he was a stony cold realist. There was realpolitik and there was cheap talk; there was nothing in between for a man like Fulbright. He had warned the Kennedy Administration in 1961 that the Bay of Pigs Invasion would be a disaster; supported the President’s tough stand over Berlin and against the building of the wall between East and West Germany, he had vigorously promoted the role of the United Nations and NATO since their inception; and vociferously mourned the disintegration of both in the months since the October War. To Fulbright, the renewal of the old alliance with Britain was the first unmistakable sign that sanity was returning to international affairs.
“I would like to think that the Administration that I have recently become a member of,” the man who was still the sitting junior Senator for Arkansas and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs said, “would treat a visiting minister and ambassador from Britain with the same courtesy and trust with which Walter and I have been treated in the last few days, Prime Minister. If I have anything to do with it in future such courtesies will become the default mode of our mutual dealings.”
“Well said, Bill!” Murmured the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas ‘Tom’ Harding-Grayson.
Margaret Thatcher looked to the C-in-C Mediterranean.
“Lieutenant Hannay,” the tall man prefaced, suddenly very brisk and businesslike, “has brought the latest U-2 photographs with him for you to scrutinise at your leisure, Prime Minister. I have also received partial reports relating to information coming out of the Aegean and the Greek Islands, mainly from refugees fleeing to Cyprus and Malta.”
“Shall I put up the map, sir,” Julian Christopher’s flag lieutenant asked.
Alan Hannay looked around and picked the nearest wall.
A minute later a large coloured physical map of the Eastern Mediterranean from Malta to Haifa was tacked at eye height next to the table. Everybody gathered around it.
Julian Christopher accepted the slim pointer his flag lieutenant handed him. The young man stood back, outside the circle waiting to be summoned at need.
“A couple of general points before I get to the meat of the matter,” the handsome C-in-C Mediterranean prefaced. He was looking at the two American guests. “My official title includes what has, up until now been an ‘honorific’ element. I am C-in-C of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations. There have actually been over a hundred Australian and New Zealand officers and men attached to units, mainly in Malta and Cyprus for some months. Such secondments are typical of the way the Army operates. Shortly, these men will be joined by cadres of air force technicians and intelligence analysts from Australasia and Canada, and logistics personnel and other non-combatants, doctors, nurses and signals staffers from several other Commonwealth countries, and South Africa - which of course, formally left the Commonwealth the year before the war - who will be deployed across the theatre of operations as necessary to back up and support the existing British forces. In due course, I expect at least one submarine, and hopefully, a frigate or destroyer to be taken over and wholly manned by Commonwealth personnel. I also believe that South Africa and Southern Rhodesia will shortly be shipping infantry companies into theatre, initially to train beside my forces and eventually, to be integrated into existing front line units, initially at Aden and at Abadan. I say this because no matter how it might seem from ‘across the other side of the pond’, as it were, the United Kingdom does not stand alone. While it is true that our present weakness on the ground in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East stems from the destruction of a substantial element of our ground forces in Germany in the October War, and the commitments we subsequently made to our Commonwealth friends to guarantee their security, we are not alone
and at need, we are confident that our friends will stand by us in the trying days to come.”
William Fulbright’s face creased into a wan smile.
Everything he had heard about the ‘Fighting Admiral’ was true. We might lose a battle or two; but we will never surrender. America had Curtis LeMay; the Brits had this suave, eloquent Admiral. LeMay and Christopher were utterly different kinds of men; yet in most key respects they were exactly the same kind of men.
“I hear you, Sir Julian,” the Secretary of State chuckled, looking the other man straight in the eye and holding unblinking eye contact for long seconds.
The naval officer nodded and launched into his planned briefing.
“First, nobody knows what is really going on in the Black Sea, Anatolia, Istanbul, Greece or the Balkans. What we do know is that something is going on and that whatever it is, it doesn’t look peaceful.”
His pointer dropped into the middle of the Black Sea.
“Intelligence on how many Soviet naval units were destroyed at the various Black Sea Fleet bases was scratchy – well, non-existent for some months after the October war – and remains so. Our assumption was that the majority of surface units had probably been destroyed but that some part of the submarine fleet might have survived. However,” the tip of the pointed fell on Istanbul. “We now know that several major surface units must have survived the destruction of Sevastopol. It would be reasonable to assume that given the rising international tensions in the days before the war elements of the Black Sea Fleet might have been dispersed to navigable inlets around Sevastopol, or perhaps, been dispersed out to sea. A recent mission by an RAF Canberra based at Akrotiri overflew the Sea of Marmara and made a single pass over Istanbul. Analysis of the film shot during this pass identified at least four large warships in the Golden Horn anchorage. There may have been other units present but one of the ships was making a lot of smoke and the Canberra’s crew detected sophisticated radar emissions north of the city and aborted their mission.”