by James Philip
“I will never forget this,” Harrison said breathlessly as he stood tall.
“Nor should you, Albertis,” the Governor of Maryland observed dryly. He looked to Jack Kennedy who was rising much more painfully and stiffly to his feet than either of the two older men.
Harrison shook his President’s hand as if he was afraid of catching an infectious disease; Tawes paused to meet Jack Kennedy’s stare.
“Maryland stood by the Union in 1861 and it will continue to so do while I live, sir,” he promised sombrely.
It was only when the two Governors had departed that a nod from the President prompted General David Shoup to briefly hold center stage. The Commandant of the Marine Corps – as befitted the man who had gone ashore with the 2nd Marines at Tarawa – did not mix his words.
“Elements of the 101st Airborne and the 3rd Marines have secured key installations and command and control locations across Virginia. Admiral Gray, CINCLANT has been relieved of his command and orders have been issued ordering all major US Navy surface ships and the entire Polaris submarine fleet to return to base. All other submarines are to return forthwith to continental waters. US Air Force operations are subject to an indefinite suspension with the exception of units specifically authorized or tasked otherwise by General LeMay.”
Jack Kennedy had asked Shoup to clarify matters for the benefit Marvin Watson and the Acting United States Attorney General.
The President fixed his green grey eyes on Nick Katzenbach.
“The Vice-President and I have agreed a new modus vivendi going forward,” he explained. “We find ourselves living in a World we no longer understand in a nation which needs to be rebuilt. DC is effectively out of commission for the foreseeable future and Lyndon is exploring the possibility of transferring the Capitol to Philadelphia, or maybe New York. Under the new arrangement he gets to rebuild Washington and the other destroyed cities. He also gets to run the Moon Program.”
Nick Katzenbach understood almost everything.
Lyndon Baines Johnson had cut one of his famously hard-headed deals; he never reneged on a contract signed but he always demanded guarantees, a quid pro quo. For example, like the installation of his trusted advisor Marvin Watson at the very heart of the Administration to frustrate the meddling of the Kennedy loyalists.
Katzenbach did not understand why Johnson had commandeered the Moon Program; that was not so much a poisoned chalice it was a straightforward crock of shit!
“The Moon Program?” He asked thoughtfully, suspecting he was missing something important.
“We won the war; now we have to win the peace, Nick.”
The President’s sophistry went over Katzenbach’s head.
Bobby Kennedy stirred.
“Jack and Jackie will be hitting the road later this week. As soon as I’m back on my feet I’ll be out there, too.” He made eye contact with Marvin Watson. “LBJ has been in the air most of the last three days squaring things with the West Coast Governors, and touching base with the folks in Colorado, Arizona and Texas. His last call before he took off to come back to DC was to light a fire under Von Braun and his German rocket scientists down in Alabama. We’ve made a lot of mistakes in the last year. We need to remind everybody that we are the United States of America.”
That sounded easier said than done.
“That will take more than just going out on the stomp?” The Acting US Attorney General observed, not unkindly.
“I’ve offered State to Bill Fulbright,” Jack Kennedy informed him.
That was the moment Nick Katzenbach started to believe that talk of a new beginning was more than just rhetoric. The Vice-President must have grabbed the Administration by the throat and given it the LBJ treatment until it was begging for mercy! If the President had turned to James William Fulbright, the fifty-eight year old Missouri-born Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to replace murdered Dean Rusk as Secretary of State the ‘treatment’ must finally be working its magic.
Fulbright was an impressive man physically, intellectually and politically, a man of conviction and strongly held contrary views. Many people believed that if Jack Kennedy had had the nerve to install him at the State Department in the spring of 1961; things would have turned out differently when the Soviets tried to base ICBMs on Cuba. However, that was hindsight and Fulbright was a man who had no time for people who lived in the past.
Fulbright was also sufficiently seasoned in the ways of government to have fully understood, exactly why Jack Kennedy had not nominated him as Secretary of State back in the fall of 1960 in those heady days after his photo-finish election race with Richard Nixon. Nixon had actually carried three more states than Kennedy and only lost the popular vote by a little over one hundred thousand of over sixty-eight million cast. The race had been far too close for comfort and the new Administration had wanted to avoid courting the controversy his name would have brought down upon the head of the then President elect. No matter how sorely tempted Jack Kennedy had been to bring Fulbright on board, pragmatic political realities had dictated that the name that eventually came out of the hat was Dean Rusk.
Problematically, Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and his unshakable commitment to multilaterism – no matter that it accorded with the President’s own personal instinctive internationalism – would actually have sat more easily within the cogently expressed foreign policy agenda of a Nixon Administration.
But that was then and this was now.
Fulbright had been the junior United States Senator for Arkansas since January 1945, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1949, and its sure-footed Chairman for the last four years. He remained a convinced segregationist; probably the clinching disqualification that had handed Dean Rusk his seat at the top table in 1961. Yet famously, he had been the only member of the Senate to vote against a 1954 appropriation for Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, under the purview of which McCarthy’s unholy inquisition against alleged Un-American Activities was pursued; a witch hunt that Fulbright had always viewed with a scepticism bordering on open contempt. To an outsider his liberal multilaterism and his opposition to right-wing anti-libertarian dogma, or any trammelling of civil liberties by the government sat diametrically opposed to – and apparently irreconcilable with - his trenchantly avowed segregationist position, and the gusto with which he had helped filibuster, for example, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Only in America could a man have made his mark sponsoring a program - the Fulbright Program in 1946 - providing for educational grants in overseas countries to promote understanding between the United States and those countries; while a few years later vehemently object to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case, whereby Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren had ruled that Kansas’s State-sanctioned segregation of public schools amounted to a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. Only in a country as big and as diverse as America could a man like William Fulbright have prospered, and eventually, albeit by default, become the safe pair of hands into which his President had belatedly looked to entrust the nation’s transparently bankrupt foreign policy.
“I had a long talk with Fulbright yesterday,” the President confided. “He’s worried about the Middle East. We’re shipping less than half the oil we were before the war and as you know the price of crude went through the floor in the spring. The Saudi ruling class feel like the money tap has been turned off and it’s making them ‘political’. Sooner or later they are going to want to be compensated for their current economic and social woes with some sort of financial ‘regional adjustment’.” Jack Kennedy grimaced. “Fulbright says the advice he’s getting is that we ought to be buying more Saudi oil, increasing our strategic reserve from ninety days to one hundred and eighty. We get total energy security and the Kingdom gets a cash injection to buy off its hotheads!”
Nick Katzenbach was no Princeton economist but he suspected that this kind of quick fix
solution would further depress the global oil market and that would inevitably cause even bigger problems further down the line.
“Fulbright says we won’t do that,” he was reassured. “The days when the Administration took advice from the Wall Street Banks that own Standard Oil stock are gone and they aren’t coming back any time soon!” The President paused to look down into the embers of the fire spluttering to death in the hearth by his left knee. “Besides, Fulbright’s first priority is mending fences with the British. He’s going to get straight on with that before I make a public announcement about him taking over from Dean Rusk.”
Nick Katzenbach realized his President had fixed his stare on his face.
“On the subject of the British,” he sighed, “what the heck do we do about that mad woman Edna Zabriski?”
Chapter 29
Wednesday 18th December 1963
Special Isolation Facility No. 2, CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Fifty-one year old Edna Maria Zabriski had not known what to expect – or for that matter thought about it very much - after she attempted to assassinate the President of the United States of America. In the event once the people who had jumped on her in the Oval Office had wrestled the gun out of her hand she had actually been handled, all things considered relatively gently, although the hand cuffs and ankle chains had chaffed somewhat in the subsequent hours before she arrived here.
Wherever here was.
Two female doctors had conducted a long and rather invasive medical examination soon after her arrival here. Having made it abundantly clear that her feelings on the subject were immaterial they had taken copious notes and hair and blood samples, clipped her finger nails very nearly to the quick and collected all the chippings – that was most curious – and asked her any number of rather embarrassing questions about her previous medical history. They had peered down her throat, probed her private parts for an inordinately long time with, well, she did not really know with what manner of implements; but the whole thing had been most unpleasant and humiliating, and by the time it was finished she was sore in ways she had not been for many, many years.
Each day – although there was no night or day in this place, so it might actually be happening several times a day because she had no way of telling the difference - they ordered her to strip naked, searched her, asked her politely to bend over and shone lights on her nether orifices as they examined and fingered the same. It was like living in a proctologist’s consulting room except the people here were less fastidious about warming up their hands first. Once this ritual had been observed her old clothes – a white baggy jump suit sort of thing which felt like it was made out of paper or crinkly cotton – and a pair of cream woolly socks, were taken away and new pairs of each brought in. She was told to get dressed and a few minutes later she would be taken out of the cell and walked half-a-dozen steps down a corridor which would not have been out of place in an episode of Dr Kildare – thinking about that nice man Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the series always gave her a tickle of guilty pleasure – where she was asked to sit in a hard chair on one side of a small table in a room with wall to wall mirrors at her back and to her front. Today two female guards stood sentinel behind her.
Within five minutes that day’s interrogator walked into the room.
“Would you leave us please,” he suggested to the two guards who wordlessly obeyed.
“Good morning, Mrs Zabriski.”
“Good morning to you,” Edna Zabriski responded and every day, until today, that was where the exchange had terminated. While she saw no reason to be gratuitously rude to her captors she saw no reason whatsoever to co-operate with them in any way. Her case was an open and shut one. She had wanted to kill the President for his crimes. She had failed but she had killed a man – the British leader – who was directly responsible for the sharp stab of grief and loss which had driven her to actually fulfil her personal pact with the Devil. And besides, she understood that whatever she said her captors would execute her in the end.
“I have been informed that other than exchanging brief salutations that you have refused to communicate with any of the officers with whom you have spoken while you have been in custody here at Langley.”
Langley?
Virginia?
That was only a few miles from the White House!
Edna Zabriski found herself studying the young officer sitting across the table. He had entered the room carrying a slim Manila folder which he had placed unopened on the table between them.
“I am Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann junior of the United States Navy,” the young man explained respectfully. “My father was the officer who first tackled you to the floor in the Oval Office. The last shot you fired caused him a concussion and deafness in his left ear for some days.”
The woman intuitively opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself at the very last moment.
“He’s fully recovered now,” Walter Brenckmann assured Edna Zabriski. The CIA had spent the last two days drumming into him how this thing had to be done. The fact of who he was might provide a ‘get in’, a way to break down the woman’s blanket resistance. The President had ruled out using drugs on her – truth serums and all that ‘malarkey’, he had decreed, tend to have bad side effects – and read the Agency the riot act when it came to employing rough stuff. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing to middle-aged women!’ Consequently, alternative strategies had had to be developed on, as it were, the hoof.
It so happened that the former Torpedo Officer and Assistant Ballistic Missile Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600), was the first reserve called off the bench.
“No, really,” he added, forcing a tight-lipped smile. “Pa’s a tough old bird. He isn’t the sort of guy to hold a grudge. In any other circumstance he would have been mortified to have had to climb all over you that way. That’s no way to treat a lady. He specifically asked me to ascertain that you weren’t hurt and are being looked after properly?”
Edna Zabriski’s lips moved, forming words that never escaped her mouth.
Timing is everything!
That was what the CIA men had emphasised time and time again.
Don’t get suckered in too early.
‘She must want to speak to you so badly it hurts!’
Walter Brenckmann patted the file on the table.
“Pa’s at home in Cambridge with my Ma now,” he said. “They tell me your husband was in Seattle on the night of the war?”
No reply but then he had not expected one.
It was still too early.
“My kid brother was in Bellingham that night. We all thought he was dead for five months but then he turned up in California.”
Edna Zabriski wanted to talk to the unthreatening, handsome young officer who positively oozed respect and sympathy. They had all been through bad times; nobody was unscathed.
“My kid sister was in Buffalo.” Walter Brenckmann did not need to act despair and loss, it very nearly choked him. “Her name was Tabatha. She was eighteen years old.”
In the last week the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency had crawled over Edna Zabriski’s life in painstaking forensic detail. Investigators had spoken to anybody who had ever known her, to members of her extended family, every link, contact right down to what TV programs she liked, her musical tastes and her preferred breakfast cereal had been identified and analysed.
Edna Zabriski née Sayers was an ordinary girl from an ordinary blue-collar background. Born in St Louis she had worked as a secretary in her home town before her marriage Franklin Nathaniel ‘Frank’ Zabriski the only son of second generation Pomeranian immigrants. Her husband was an automotive engineer who had joined the Army Air Force in 1940. Frank Zabriski had left the Air Force in 1960 and gone to work as a contractor for Boeing in Seattle where he, like tens of thousands of others, had been consumed in the Seattle firestorm. At the time of his death h
e had filed divorce papers having by then lived apart from his wife for over two years. He had been planning to remarry – a widow some years his junior whom he had met in Seattle and with whom he was residing as man and wife – at the time of the October War. It seemed that Frank and Edna’s marriage, punctuated by frequent removals from one base to another, had not been a bed of roses. Edna had suffered at least two miscarriages before giving birth to her only son – Nathaniel Tobias Zabriski – in 1938, and suffered severe post-natal depression after that birth. Army Air Force and later Air Force Welfare Departments had taken Nathan into care on several occasions before his tenth birthday; eventually he had been fostered up to the age of fifteen by Edna’s married sister, Ida and her husband. During the 1950s Edna had not accompanied her husband on any of his overseas postings to Germany, Italy, or to Japan and had spent four separate periods in various forms of residential psychiatric care.
The Secret Service file prepared on her when she applied to work at the White House contained references to her mental illness in the 1940s, and listed ‘minor gynaecological issues’ that Edna Zabriski had experienced in recent years but had singularly failed to flag up any recent ‘psychological history’. It had not yet been established if this was a matter of bad filing, omission or prima facie treachery.
Since January that year Edna had been living with her sister Ida and her husband - a middle ranking official in the Office of the United States Attorney General – in Georgetown. Her sister and brother-in-law claimed they had had no inkling of what she had planned; apparently, Edna had found Jesus again after the night of the October War. Their only explanation for subsequent events was that she must have ‘flipped when she heard her son Nathan had been killed by the Brits in the Mediterranean’.
Walter Brenckmann sighed.
“I’d give anything to have my kid sister back, Mrs Zabriski.”
The woman was crying.