by James Philip
Bobby Kennedy caught the mood.
“Ethel indicated that General Shoup’s men were to shoot me in the event I attempt to run before I can walk,” he confessed jokily. He slumped back into his cushions but not before he had winked conspiratorially at Nick Katzenbach.
“In that event it would be justifiable homicide,” he offered.
Jack Kennedy sipped his coffee.
“Several of our friends and colleagues, all good men who will be sorely missed have been lost to us in the last week,” he prefaced. “Following discussions with Vice-President Johnson, Secretary McNamara, Chief Justice Earl Warren, senior surviving members of Congress, and General Curtis LeMay, whom I have appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, steps are being taken to fill the gaps in our ranks and to ensure that our rapprochement with our old – our natural – Trans-Atlantic allies is, insofar as it is possible at this early stage, should be set in stone.”
The President nodded to David Shoup, the unyielding rock upon which the rebel assault on the Pentagon had faltered, broken and eventually been thrown back in confusion. The Commandant of the Marine Corps returned his Commander-in-Chief’s acknowledgement.
“You will be aware that I have appointed General Shoup Military Governor of the District of Columbia for a period of ninety days pending Congressional sanction. I have also invited General Shoup to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a permanent member with immediate effect.”
Previously Shoup and his predecessors had ‘guested’ on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee only at the invitation of its Chairman.
“With regard to the organisation of the high command of the American military,” the President continued, “the Chief of Naval Operations has resigned and I have appointed his deputy, Admiral McDonald to fill that position. General Westmoreland will continue in his current role as Special Military Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, however,” Jack Kennedy paused, not wanting his next caveat to be lost on his listeners, “Westy is clearly a coming man and I have warned Bob McNamara that I reserve the right to employ him elsewhere at need at short notice.”
The President’s expression became severe.
“The Vice-President, General LeMay and I have discussed how best to proceed with regard to those officers and units of the United States armed forces which failed to play their part in putting down the recent rebellion.” He looked to the Governors of Maryland and Virginia. “We take the view that those units which failed to obey orders can no longer be trusted; those units will therefore, be stood down, disarmed and disbanded with immediate effect. The officers and senior NCOs of those units will be arrested and their conduct investigated by the Department of Defense. Several National Guard Army and Air Force units in Maryland and Virginia will be subject to this exercise. I must request your unambiguous personal co-operation in this matter.”
Fifty-six year old Albertis Sydney Harrison was the first Governor of Virginia to be born in the twentieth century but this had not stopped him fighting, tooth and nail, against the de-segregation of his state’s education system. He was a ‘Byrd Democrat’; loyal to that Southern Democrat wing of the Party which was in the thrall of the senior Senator from Virginia, Harry F. Byrd, the former Governor whose ambition and formidable political machine had dominated Virginia politics for decades. ‘Byrd Democrats’ shared the title ‘democrats’ with the Kennedy faction of the Party but practically nothing else; it had not come as a huge shock that Virginia Army and Air Force National Guard units had ‘balked at the jump’ at the height of the Battle of Washington, and played little or no part in actively ‘putting down the rebellion’. In the end it had been units rushed from West Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey and from as far away as Ohio which, following pulverising air strikes by Curtis LeMay’s Skyraiders had decisively turned the tide.
Governor Harrison ought not to have been surprised that the Administration’s response to what amounted to Virginian ‘neutrality’ in the recent bloodshed was arbitrary. However, the ‘Byrd Democratic’ caucus of the Commonwealth of Virginia was not, and never had been, the most sensitive, or the most perceptive of political weather vanes and for this reason the President’s words touched a surprised, and very exposed raw nerve.
“I will not be threatened, sir,” Governor Harrison retorted, effecting a strain air of old-world grace as befitted a man who truly believed himself to be above the fray. He was after all a direct descendent of the Benjamin Harrison who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and to William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison, respectively the ninth and twenty-third Presidents of the Republic. He and his supporters in Virginia had never really had much time for Irish upstarts like the Kennedy boys. “If you threaten the Old Dominion,” Virginians had always taken perverse pride from being the first English colony in the New World, “I must warn you that you will be taking the first step down a very rocky road, sir!”
Bobby Kennedy roused himself.
“Why?” He asked impatiently.
Harrison looked at the President’s younger brother with haughty, positively aristocratic disdain, his lips a thin white line.
The wounded United States Attorney General frowned.
“Why?” He repeated. “What are you going to do, Governor?” This he asked acidly. “Secede?”
The Virginian opened his mouth to protest but the younger man had not finished.
“I recollect that the Commonwealth of Virginia tried that a hundred and two years ago, Governor Harrison. That didn’t work out too well for the ‘Old Dominion’ then. You don’t honestly think seceding will work out any better this time round? Do you?”
Chapter 27
Monday 16th December 1963
California Institute for Men, Chino, San Bernardino, California
Tabatha Christa Brenckmann was tired and fractious the first time her father laid eyes on her. He would have taken her in his arms in a flash if his hands had not been chained to the table at which two lumbering, sweating oafs in grimy prison guard uniforms had sat him in the humid, dirty visiting hall. His table was one of twenty and the squalling of babies and the ceaseless clamour of insensible, incomprehensible chatter had been wearing him down until he set eyes on his daughter.
No physical contact.
That seemed to be the only rule but it was applied with immense determination by the guards who patrolled the rooms wielding dark night sticks, all of which had had lumps chewed out of them; presumably from frequent employment over a period of many years. Everything in the prison was old, neglected, in need of care, attention, patching up or renewal. What with one thing and another the California Correctional System was clearly not at the top of Governor Brown’s list of priorities.
In fact it probably was not on any of the ‘action this decade’ lists in the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento.
NO PHYSICAL CONTACT.
That was unnecessarily cruel even in an overcrowded concentration camp like the California Institute for Men. No concentration camp was unfair, at least a guy got two, sometimes three half-way square meals a day in this dump. Assuming somebody did not put a knife in his ribs or brain him with a brick for not having the right expression on his face when he was unknowingly walking past a psychopath, Sam could be relatively confident that he was not about to starve to death in the ‘CIM’.
Judy sniffed back her tears; and tried desperately hard to be brave.
“Tabatha Christa,” she blurted. “I lied to them about us being married. Being married makes things simpler...”
“Tabatha,” Sam Brenckmann muttered, gazing distractedly to his daughter and up to his lover’s face, lost in his wonder.
“Tabatha with an ‘a’ not an ‘i’,” Judy explained, knowing she was gabbling. “Sabrina said it should be with an ‘i’ but I said I’d seen you write it with an ‘a’ in the lyrics of Tabatha’s Gone...”
Sam parents had been so surprised by his kid sister’s safe and healthy birth that, normally regular people, the
y had lost the plot when Tabatha had been born and they had been required to register her birth.
“Ma and Pa were so relieved that Tabatha was okay after all the things the doctors had said when Ma got pregnant that they spelled Tabatha wrong on all the hospital forms,” Sam told Judy, “and by the time they found out they’d spelled it wrong it was too late. Anyways, they decided they liked Tabatha with an ‘a’ better than with an ‘i’.”
Judy was cradling their daughter in her arms, holding her a little above the level of the table. The table was bolted to the floor, as were the chairs in which she and Sam sat. The chairs were made for six foot tall felons, not more daintily built new mothers struggling to introduce their babies to their fathers for the first time.
“Christa?” Sam asked.
“It was my aunt’s middle name. I always liked it.”
Judy’s aunt had lived in Chilliwack, British Columbia; Chilliwack and a large oval swathe of the Fraser Valley had ceased to exist on the night of the October War.
“Oh.”
“They wouldn’t let Sabrina or Vincent Meredith in.”
“Bummer.” Sam’s expression was momentarily quizzical. “Who is Vincent?”
“He’s your attorney. Sabrina hired him.”
“Oh, right.”
“The cops said you were shot, sweetheart?”
“Buckshot. I was as sore as Hell for a couple of days but as you can see I can sit down again now, babe.”
Judy rocked her daughter; realising with a start that her baby had quietened and was myopically peering around her. She stared at the cuffs on Sam’s wrists and the retaining ring which meant he could not more his hands more than an inch in any direction. Sam’s right cheek was puffy, his eye darkened.
“I’ll be okay,” he insisted the moment he sensed what she was thinking. “I’m a tough guy, remember.”
Judy tried to force a smile.
If Sam Brenckmann had not been a tough guy they would both surely have died last winter in the nightmare of the refugee camps of British Columbia and the holding cages of Tacoma.
“They said I had twenty minutes,” Judy apologised like it was her fault. “What actually happened at The Troubadour last week, Sam?”
Sam hesitated.
“It’s all a bit blurry,” he confessed by way of a preface to his account. “I was on stage and suddenly the whole place was in flames. I didn’t hang about. I just got out of there. It was like being back in that camp in Tacoma, I suppose. I just did what I had to do to get out of there. I probably stomped all over people.” He felt bad about that but what was he supposed to do? Burn to death? Suffocate in the smoke letting other people get out first? “Out in the parking lot people were falling over and puking up their guts. Me, too, I suppose. Then two guys, bikers, came out of nowhere. They were looking mean, swinging chains. Doug Weston let them have both barrels before I knew what was going on. That’s when I got hit with half-a-dozen lumps of buckshot.”
Judy frowned. That was not the way the cops had told it to Sabrina or to Vincent Meredith.
“One of the bikers was bleeding real bad,” Sam continued. “I tried to apply pressure to the worst wound,” he shrugged, “I stuffed by jacket into it but the cops weren’t interested in helping the poor guy when they arrived. The only thing they wanted to do was jump on me and Doug like that was what they planned to do all along.”
Judy chewed her lower lip.
“Tabatha Christa,” the man smiled.
“We didn’t really talk about names,” Judy said defensively.
“Tabatha Christa is just fine,” Sam said hurriedly, feeling their time together fast ebbing away.
“Good, I was worried....”
Sam ached to reach out and touch Judy.
“We’ll do the marriage thing when I get out of here,” he offered.
“We don’t have to.”
Sam fixed his eyes on his baby daughter and then sought Judy’s troubled eyes.
“I think we do,” he murmured almost inaudibly in the background mush of voices and babies caterwauling.
When the warders called time about five minutes later and ignored all protests about how long everybody was ‘supposed’ to have; Judy was swept out of the hall in the slow, grumbling crush of bodies.
She was reunited with Sabrina and Vincent Meredith in the darkness.
“How is he?” Sabrina demanded bouncing up and down with uncontainable existential angst.
“Sam is Sam,” Judy sniffed, philosophically. “He looks a bit scarecrow and somebody gave him a black eye. He says he’s still sore from getting shot at The Troubadour but sitting down is okay now.”
“Did you tell him what the Police said happened at The Troubadour?” Vincent Meredith prompted as he began to shepherd the two women back to where he had parked his Lincoln. His eyes darted all the time, wary of any sign of danger.
“No,” Judy admitted. She recounted what Sam had said to her which was nothing like the LAPD’s story.
The attorney listened.
“Okay, at least we know what we’re dealing with now.”
“The Police lied about what happened!” Sabrina hissed angrily.
“They often do,” the man conceded as if it was nothing of any consequence. “Things work better for them if they make up the evidence as they go along; it saves people like Reggie O’Connell having to use his brain.”
“I told Sam that Doug Weston was being held at Irvine,” Judy remembered.
“Whatever you think about Chino,” the lawyer assured the tearful new mother, “this place is five times better than Irvine.”
Judy struggled to imagine a worse place than the one she had just been inside.
“Sam was cool about Tabatha Christa,” she confided to Sabrina as the women settled in the back seat of Vincent Meredith’s Lincoln.
After they had been driving several minutes the older woman patted Meredith’s shoulder.
“What now, Vincent?”
“Nothing. The DA’s Office has a thirty day backlog. Sam won’t get taken before a grand jury for at least another three or four weeks. In the meantime I’ll dig around. Just try not to worry too much.”
Judy was singularly unimpressed by that particular piece of advice. Nevertheless, she raised her head and with her jaw proudly jutting she recounted the odd little anecdote that Sam had obviously prepared in advance to cheer her up.
“Sam says they made a film at Chino in 1955. ‘Unchained’. He only knows about it because the song from the film ‘Unchained Melody’ was nominated for an Oscar for the Best Song the year ‘Love is a Many-Splendored Thing’ won. He followed that sort of thing when he was a kid. He said that back in 1936 the man who wrote ‘Unchained Melody’ offered a version of it to Bing Crosby but he wasn’t interested. Some guy called Hy Zaret actually wrote the final version of the lyrics. He said it was one of those songs where one of the words in the title doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the song itself. Although it was the theme song of a movie called ‘Unchained’ and the song is ‘Unchained Melody’ the word ‘unchained’ isn’t actually in the song.”
Sabrina understood her friend was trying to be brave.
“What was the movie about?”
“It’s about a man in prison who dreams of escaping to be reunited with his lover who he hasn’t seen for a long time. He can’t make up his mind if he wants to escape or to serve his time. Oh, and one of the heroes is a Warden who wants to rehabilitate all the prisoners but that didn’t sound very plausible to me. Sam was only really interested in the song.”
“I don’t remember that song,” Sabrina apologised.
“That’s okay,” her friend grimaced. “We’ll find somebody who does.”
Chapter 28
Monday 16th December 1963
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
When John Millard Tawes was elected 54th Governor of Maryland in 1959 he became the first Marylander to be elected successively to the posts of State Treasure
r, Comptroller and then Governor. Now sixty-nine years of age he cut an unremarkable, balding bookishly bespectacled figure. Unlike his counterpart in Virginia he was a pragmatic man preoccupied with the art of the possible, rather than wasting his time and energy clinging to the traditions of a world that no longer existed. He was no kind of new Kennedy Democrat and he had little or no time for the Irish Mafia which had coalesced around the late Joe Kennedy’s two eldest surviving sons; but he did recognise that their way was the future and that Virginia was still firmly stuck in the past.
“Virginia will receive no succour from Maryland,” he said softly. “Maryland State Air and Army National Guard formations are levied and maintained at the pleasure of the Commander-in-Chief.”
Albertis Sydney Harrison, Governor of Virginia bristled.
The President coughed.
“General LeMay stands ready to deploy all the forces at his disposal to ensure that my orders are carried out to the letter, Governor Harrison. This is not a matter I asked you to travel to Camp David to discuss. In requesting your presence at this place I am doing you the courtesy of personally telling you what has been decided. That is all. Given the events of recent days this is a time when all patriots should stand to the flag. When you and Governor Tawes return to your State Capitols this evening you will be escorted by officers who will put into effect the Executive Order I have drafted covering the measures deemed necessary by the Joint Chiefs to ensure that in the wake of the ‘rebellion’ that I, as the Commander-in-Chief can have the utmost confidence in the chain of command.”
Jack Kennedy sat back steepling his fingers under his chin.
“Governor Harrison, Governor Tawes,” he half-smiled, “that will be all. You will both wish to be on your way back to your respective states as soon as possible.”
The door to the room opened and two Marines stepped inside, snapping to attention.