by James Philip
Von Braun could hardly suppress a smile.
He had been working long enough with the best Air Force pilots, test pilots, hot shot top guns and guys who had demonstrated, time and again, the ‘right stuff’ to know that whoever was at the controls of SAM 26000 today had an overdose of that indefinable ‘right stuff’.
Von Braun marched up the steps to the forward port forward door of the aircraft as soon as it opened. A big man with an impressive physical presence, the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center puffed out his chest and girded his resolve to fight his corner.
He was a little surprised to be greeted by the Vice-President in person at the doorway.
“Good to see you again, Mister Director,” the tall Texan drawled, smiling that vaguely mischievous, knowing smile that tended to indicate he was either in a very good mood or that he was about to outflank an opponent.
“Likewise, Mr Vice-President.” Von Braun had tried hard to lose his German accent; in the end he had given up. However, his Germanic edges had rounded, his involuntary curtness lessened and his English acquired at times a strangely Southern lilt unless he was buried deep in complex technical or design issues. “I am sorry you don’t have time today to ‘do the tour’ of our facilities. I’m sure you would be impressed with the changes we’ve made since your last visit.”
“I’m sure I will be mightily impressed the next time I swing through Alabama,” Lyndon Baines Johnson guffawed. “But business before pleasure. Yesterday I was in Sacramento meeting with the West Coast Governors, this morning we stopped over at Houston to pick up your boss.”
It was not until he stepped inside the aircraft that the man standing at the Vice-President’s shoulder stepped out of the shadows.
“Good to see you again, Wernher,” smiled James E. Webb, the fifty-seven year old career Washington insider who had been appointed Administrator of NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – by President Kennedy in July 1961. In retrospect Kennedy’s nomination of a man who was the precise antithesis of a rocket scientist in the public imagination as the second head of NASA, had directly anticipated his Administration’s long term plan to put an American on the Moon.
NASA already had a man who was capable of designing a Moon rocket, von Braun; what it had lacked was a man with the unequivocal support of the incoming Administration and the wherewithal and connections in DC to fight NASA’s forthcoming battle for resources in Washington.
Von Braun took heart from his immediate chief’s cheerful, relaxed greeting but was not in any way misled into anything remotely resembling complacency. In deference to the Vice-President he did not digress to inquire after the wellbeing of Webb’s wife Patsey, or of his two teenage children Sarah and James (junior) aged respectively eighteen and sixteen.
Johnson led the two NASA men into the heart of the cabin where he invited them to join him around a small conference table; wordlessly, the trio settled in the comfortable chairs while staffers and flunkies brought coffee before retreating out of the immediate eye lines of the three.
James Webb spoke first.
A native of Tally Ho, North Carolina where his father had been superintendent of the Grantville County public schools, Webb had been commissioned into the Marine Corps as a pilot in the early 1930s before coming to Washington DC as secretary to Republican Senator Edward W. Pou of North Carolina between 1932 and 1934, and then as an assistant of O. Max Gardner, a former Governor of his State and a close personal friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Webb who had joined the Bar of the District of Columbia in 1936, was during the Second World War Webb the treasurer and vice-president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn – a key supplier of aerial radar and navigational equipment employing over thirty thousand people - precluding his release for military service until 1944. After the war he had returned to DC to work for his old boss, Max Gardner, now President Harry S. Truman’s Undersecretary of the Treasury, and subsequently been appointed Director of the Bureau of the Budget in the Office of the President of the United States, having been recommended for the post by both Gardner and his boss, Treasury Secretary John Snyder. This meant that until he moved on to the State Department in 1949, Webb was the man who prepared the President’s annual budget for presentation to Congress. Although Webb had resigned from the State Department in 1952 and returned to private industry, he had never lost contact with the levers of power in Washington, serving on government committees, including the bipartisan President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program in 1958 while still working for the Kerry-McGee Oil Corporation in Oklahoma. Nobody had been overly surprised when Webb’s name was first out of the hat when the incoming Kennedy Administration was looking for a man capable of giving NASA real clout in the corridors of the Capitol.
“Before the rebellion last week,” James Webb prefaced, “there was already a lot of idle speculation in the national press and on the TV and radio networks that the President’s stated intention to put an American on the Moon before the end of this decade, was,” the head of NASA paused, considering his options, “essentially aspirational rather than a hard statement of the Administration’s policy.”
Wernher von Braun’s heart sank.
“However, following consultations with Vice-President Johnson,” Webb looked to the nodding, severe-faced Texan who seemed content to let him do the talking at present, “NASA is to proceed on the basis of the most literal possible interpretation of the President’s publicly stated demand that the United States of America should send a man to the Moon and return him safely to Earth not later than December 31, 1969.”
Von Braun turned to Lyndon Johnson.
The two men exchanged long hard looks.
“I think the whole Moon Project is a dammed fool thing,” the Vice-President said eventually. “However, the President of the United States of America has spoken and if we are ever to be again what we once were, everybody must understand that when the American President speaks his words have substance and conviction. The World must trust that when an American President speaks he means what he says.”
Von Braun knew that there had to be a huge caveat so he waited patiently to learn what it was.
“Forget about tests and trials for six months from this date,” Johnson directed. “The American people won’t understand NASA burning public money like it was confetti at a time like this. Forget launches and fireworks but in six months time deliver to me NASA’s plans for a Moon rocket specifying what you need to do before you can build it and how much it is going to cost in real dollars.”
“NASA,” James Webb informed von Braun, “is now attached to the Office of the Vice-President.”
“As,” Lyndon Baines Johnson added, with soft-spoken relish, “is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Capitol Reconstruction Office and the Committee for the Continuance of Government,” he quirked a wry smile, “neither of which exist yet but sometime in the next couple of weeks will hit the ground running.”
Von Braun was so preoccupied absorbing this that his expression evidently became a little perplexed.
“This country is in a bad place, Mister Director,” Johnson told him rhetorically, “but if I have anything to do with it that is going to change. Whatever past reservation I have entertained about the ‘Moon Project’ I share the President’s conviction that America needs something to restore its belief in itself. We will go to the Moon this decade, gentlemen!”
Chapter 26
Monday 16th December 1963
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
From the chill in the winter air in Washington Nick Katzenbach had expected the first early snows to be lying on the ground at Naval Support Facility Thurmont when he stepped down from the US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King which had brought him, three senior Department of Justice officials and thirty-nine year old Texan William Marvin Watson, whom the rumour mill suggested was about to be anointed the new White House Appointments Secretary.
&nb
sp; ‘You’re a long way from home,’ Katzenbach had observed wryly when he had encountered Watson in the VIP lounge at Andrews Air Force Base.
The former head of the Texas Democrats who had never been anything other than a staunch ‘Johnson man’ had smiled wanly.
‘We’re all a long way from home these days, Nick,” the other man had replied, far too shrewd an operator to be drawn further and besides, the moment the two men had laid eyes on each other that afternoon they had both joined up the dots. Kenneth Patrick ‘Kenny’ O’Donnell, White House Appointments Secretary – the de facto Chief of Staff to the President – had sustained minor shrapnel injuries during the siege of the White House but later suffered what seemed like a near total nervous breakdown. Notwithstanding that Kenny had been at the end of his tether long before the Battle of Washington; bringing in a Johnson man like Watson as his replacement would have been unthinkable just a week ago.
‘Ever been to Camp David before?’ This Katzenbach had inquired as the helicopters rotors began to quicken ahead of the relatively short hop to northern Maryland. Camp David was situated only slightly less than seventy miles north-north-east of the White House; even from across the other side of DC it was only a thirty to forty minute flight up to the Catoctins.
Watson had grimaced.
‘No, I’ve never been invited before.’
Not so much a wind of change but a firestorm was blowing through John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s badly mauled Administration. In part this was a virtue born of necessity but it also reflected a spirit of angry defiance, revealing an underlying steeliness in the character and personality of the Chief Executive which very few of his closest confidantes had suspected him capable. A steeliness and a positively stunning grasp of the things that pragmatically, had to be done to preserve both the Administration and the Union in the aftermath of the Battle of Washington and the scattered – nonetheless dreadful - outbreaks of violence across the rest of the country. The random atrocities continued, day by day even though the rebellion in Washington had been brutally stamped out by forces loyal to the flag.
In Washington it was now known that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his Deputy, George Ball had been killed at the Main State Building. Rusk had been gunned down seconds before a huge truck bomb had shattered the C Street NW facade of the State Department. Ball had also probably died in that explosion although his bullet-riddled body had later been recovered from the wreckage. C. Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury had been gunned down outside his home; and Postmaster General John A. Gronouski had been badly injured – apparently an inadvertent victim of a wayward A-4 Skyraider strike – while attempting to hide in an office block close to Newsweek’s Washington Bureau. Among other casualties, Under Secretary of the Navy, Paul Burgess Fay, had been killed in the fighting at the Pentagon. Across Washington what survived of the governmental, military and political infrastructure a terrible game of ‘wait and see who turns up’ was being played out to establish who had and who had not survived the bloodletting.
Bloodletting was the only word for what had happened.
The latest estimates indicated that some three to four thousand people had been directly involved in the ‘rebellion’. People were calling it an ‘insurgency’, and attempted ‘coup d’état’ but ‘rebellion’ was as good a word as any to describe the unparalleled national disaster of the Battle of Washington.
Millions of Americans had perished on the night of the October War; but nothing had so dishonoured and corrupted the sense of one nation united against its travails, as the hideous disfigurement wrought upon the idea of America by the ‘rebels’ during forty-eight hours of mayhem on the streets of the District of Columbia. Even now there were enclaves of zealots and fanatics who refused to surrender; holed up in Arlington National Cemetery desecrating the memory of America’s hallowed fallen, and in office blocks and hotels, and down deep in the tunnels of the Metro. The bastards even had an FM radio station broadcasting a mixture of pseudo-Christian ultra-fundamentalist bile that would have sat well on any Grand Inquisitor’s lips, and what sounded like quasi-religious white supremacist racist claptrap.
Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation conceded that it was significant that although people of color had been involved in widespread rioting in the city on the second and third day of the ‘rebellion’, there had only been a handful non-whites among the nine hundred and seven-four – many had only surrendered because they were too badly wounded to carry on fighting - suspected ‘rebels’ thus far detained as of sundown yesterday.
The United States of American had been brought to its knees by an unholy alliance of Klansmen, backwoodsmen, religious nuts and psychopaths brought together in common cause by the agonies of the October War, the imbecilic treatment of the military after that war – at least a third of the ‘rebel’ prisoners still wore their old dog tags – and a criminal failure of leadership by the Administration of which Nick Katzenbach had once been proud to serve.
The President greeted Katzenbach and Marvin Watson on the steps of his cabin. Propped up in a chair with his heavily bandaged right leg elevated on a carefully arranged pile of soft cushions, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy waved at the newcomers as they came in out of the cold.
“Forgive me for not getting up,” he apologised, quirking a boyish grin.
Katzenbach and Watson were the last two men to arrive for the hurriedly called ‘fireside conference’. Already present was General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps and presently the Military Governor of the District of Columbia; Albertis Sydney Harrison, the Governor of Virginia, and John Millard Tawes the Governor of Maryland.
“I am pleased to be able to announce that Marvin has accepted the position of Acting White House Appointments Secretary,” Jack Kennedy announced, introducing Watson as the supporting cast took their seats in armchairs around a spitting, guttering hearth. As always the President was solicitous of a newcomer’s unease in the company of virtual strangers. Although both Harrison and Tawes were Democrats like him there was a yawning chasm between aristocratic East Coast old Democrats like them and the brash young pretenders in Texas. Moreover, the Democratic Party was and had always been a ridiculously broad church, accommodating Oil Lobby Texans, die-hard segregationists like Harrison and liberal-minded conservative like Tawes who had already recognized that the Southern Civil Rights Movement was in the long term, unstoppable.
The civilities concluded and the pots of coffee refilled, the cabin cleared and the main players awaited their President’s pleasure.
Nick Katzenbach, who had known both Kennedy brothers for many years and considered himself an insider and a family friend, guessed that this was more than a straightforward ‘meeting’, and that his President’s purpose in calling the gathering was not simply to ensure that everybody in the room was ‘on the same page’. As if to confirm his suspicion Jack Kennedy gave himself a little longer to gather his thoughts and to taste the moods of the other men in the room.
He smiled that mischievous, deprecating smile which had charmed America back in 1960 in exactly the same way that Richard Nixon’s leer had not in Marvin Watson’s direction.
“FDR called this place the USS Shangri-La,” he chuckled. “That was in 1942. Most of what you see around us,” he waved a semi-regal arm, “is built on the footprint of a camp built by the Works Progress Administration in the thirties as a camp for federal employees. It occurs to me that in our current situation we can learn a thing or two from all those New Deal agencies FDR set up in another time of trial?”
The men around the President nodded warily.
“FDR and Winston Churchill met here in 1943,” he went on. “Nobody seems to know if it was actually in this building but this apparently, was Roosevelt’s cabin.” He shrugged. “So who knows? Dwight Eisenhower came here at about this time of the year to convalesce in 1955 after he had had a heart attack earlier in the fall.” Again, there was a suggestion of self-deprecation in his tone. “It is comforting
to remember, now and then, that not all my predecessors were men of iron.”
Before the October War the President and the First Lady had often brought their children to Camp David to escape the watching eyes at the Kennedy family’s Hyannis Port compound, to ride and to enjoy the quietness of the mountains. In those days other senior members of the Administration had regularly retreated to Camp David, it had become the playground of White House insiders.
Nick Katzenbach watched how the President’s new Appointments Secretary, Marvin Watson, was adapting to his introduction to the inner circle of the Administration. Calmly, almost coolly, he decided but then no man who had been as close to Lyndon Baines Johnson for as many years as Watson – he had watched LBJ’s back during a raft of elections and been his most loyal ‘independent’ advisor throughout – was going to be in any way unprepared for his debut in the major leagues.
“Gentlemen,” Jack Kennedy said, turning to business. He glanced to his younger brother who looked exactly like any man in the early stages of recovering from a serious gunshot wound requiring two recent surgeries had every right to look; pale, a little gaunt and subdued from the effect of the powerful anti-inflammatory and pain-killing drugs coursing through his body. “Bobby is here because while he’s recovering from his ‘little flesh wound’ Ethel is convinced that only the Marine Corps can make him obey his doctor’s orders!”
All the men in the room cracked broad, sympathetic smiles and guffawed spontaneously. Jackie Kennedy might always put her sister-in-law in the shade but Ethel Kennedy was one of those women who honestly and truly did not overly care about it. However, the fact that she ‘cared’ about her husband was legendary; and likewise despite his periodic philandering her loyalty to him was unwavering. The men in the cabin had no trouble believing – not for a single minute – that Ethel had been on the phone to President and laid down the law demanding that he guarantee that her husband rest.