by James Philip
And now some bastard from DC was worried about Sam embarrassing his new boss!
However, Judy in her angst had missed the main thing.
Sabrina had not.
She protectively wrapped her arms around her friend’s ever slimmer waist – Judy had practically stopped eating, she was so uptight most of the time that the thought of solid food made her feel sick – turned her friend around and hugged her tight.
“It’s not what you know it’s who you know,” she whispered in Judy’s ear. “And this guy’s boss knows the President.”
“Quite,” Frank Lovell smiled, catching the gist of this. “It would be entirely inappropriate for anybody from out of state to attempt to meddle in the Californian judicial system but where there is a will, there is usually a way. About now Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be serving a warrant on Captain Reginald O’Connell of the Los Angeles Police citing involvement in racketeering. The warrant will require that officer to make available his accounts, to make a full disclosure of his financial affairs, and enable FBI men to search his office at Van Nuys Police Station and begin to interview other police witnesses.” The State Department attorney smiled a rueful smile. “This is by way of something of a shot across Captain O’Connell’s bows. Hopefully, it may make him reflect on some of the bad decisions he has made recently. If not, well,” the State Department man shrugged, “in the wake of recent events Mister Hoover, the Director of the FBI, has been extremely keen to support, and to be seen to be supporting, the Administration...”
Judy stared at the man; she just stared.
Did he just say what I think I heard him say?
“Regrettably, we are not in a position to arrest Captain O’Donnell at this time. As I say, that may not be necessary. The thing is that about now he will begin to be aware that the net is closing around him. As will his partners in crime. The best possible solution would be for the Los Angeles Police Department to start doing things to take its head out of the noose. For example, to consider dropping the prospective charges against Mr Brenckmann and Mr Weston.”
Sabrina’s lips were moving but no sound was emerging. The idea that she lived in a country in which J. Edgar Hoover was – today at least – on their side was simply irreconcilable with her life experience up until then. She had sort of understood what was going on when her President triggered Armageddon on account of a few rockets on an island in the Caribbean; in comparison this was utterly incomprehensible. In the world in which she had lived her forty-eight years the FBI and its legendary Director did not lift a finger in defense of the rights and liberties of Americans like her and her friends; and the President was full of shit like ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ which was exactly what a girl would expect from a spoilt rich kid from Massachusetts!
“The way it works is like this,” Vincent Meredith explained. This morning he looked his age; in much the same way Sabrina had been feeling hers lately. As attorneys went he was a man who had been around the block not once but several times. Lawyering had never really paid his bills or his alimony – not according to either of his two ex-wives – so over the years he had turned his hand to ‘investigations’ and other quasi-legal, ethically borderline work facilitating the requirements of his large and varied, but never terribly well healed, client base. He had been following, watching and avoiding corrupt LA cops, low life attorneys who made him look like St Francis of Assisi, marvelling at the convoluted machinations of the County District Attorney’s Office and local hoodlums and mobsters ever since he came back from the war in 1946. Two purple hearts – one from the first day of the landings on Betio, the other from standing too close to a Jap grenade on Iwo Jima had kept him from getting drafted for Korea – but once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fidelis; always faithful. Margery, his first wife whom he regretted losing in all the ways he did not and would never miss Juanita, his second, used to call him the ‘patron saint of lost causes’. Margery came from an old southern family and her folks had always known a burnt out Marine Corps Captain who had qualified for the California Bar in 1940 and never made a go of it, was exactly the wrong guy for their little angel.
He collected his thoughts.
“We don’t have any other angle to break Sam, or Doug Weston out of jail. We’re operating under a State of Emergency so we can’t even get the guys in front of a Grand Jury, and even if we could it wouldn’t do any good. The cops have got their stories straight. We know it’s a frame up, any lawyer who takes a look at it knows it’s a frame up but if this thing goes to trial Doug Weston gets to sit on death row and if he’s very lucky, Sam gets five to thirty years in San Quentin. That’s why I haven’t wasted much effort lawyering on this one. The cops and their guys at the County DA’s Office have got this one in their pockets. Or rather, they did have until Sam got himself some serious connections.”
Judy was less baffled, and a little perversely in the rapidly shifting circumstances, much more angry now.
“I said I didn’t want to worry Sam’s folks!” She reminded Vincent, her face creased with disappointment and alarm.
The man shrugged and grinned apologetically.
He looked to Sabrina and back to the tearful younger woman.
“You ladies didn’t hire me to sit on my hands. Besides, nobody’s said a word to Captain Brenckmann or his wife. Not so far as I know, leastways.”
“Oh,” Judy felt really silly now. Not to mention mean.
Frank Lovell, the svelte man from the State Department coughed.
“When the Commandant of the Marine Corps’s note was passed on to the Protocol Secretary at State,” he explained, mistakenly thinking this would clarify matters to everybody’s satisfaction as opposed to impossibly muddying the waters, “it was flagged for ‘immediate action’.”
Vincent Meredith winced, realising that he had no option but to come clean with his clients. That was never bad news even for a lawyer who actually had their best interests close to his heart.
“You see, the thing is I was with General Shoup at Tarawa,” he murmured sheepishly. “We were lifted off the beach on the same boat. We were both shot up pretty good at the time. He asked me my name and how I’d got ‘winged’. Anyway, cutting to the chase, I was on his staff the rest of the war. Right up to Iwo Jima when I got ‘winged’ again. This is the first time I ever asked the hard-nosed old SOB for a favour. I didn’t even know if he’d want to remember me.” He grinned apologetically at the man from the State Department. “But apparently, he does.”
Chapter 37
Sunday 12th January 1964
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
John Fitzgerald Kennedy greeted the old man at the door to the cabin as if he was welcoming a long lost prodigal favourite uncle back into the fold. If Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt was in any way surprised or even remotely impressed to find both the Vice President and the Secretary of State waiting in the reception line to add their smiling salutations to the President’s, he betrayed no sign of it.
“How goes Gretchen’s recovery?” Jack Kennedy inquired solicitously.
“Slower than she’d like,” Claude Betancourt admitted. “Slower than we’d all like. They think she’ll walk again but they keep talking about ‘nerve damage’. Still we know she’s on the mend because, just like a woman she’s starting to get worried about the scars and such nonsense!”
“She’s in my prayers, Claude.”
The two other men in the cabin echoed this with quiet gusto.
“Come on in and sit down,” Jack Kennedy invited the last great mover and shaker of his father’s generation. The President’s father, Joseph senior had suffered a stroke in December 1961which had paralyzed him down his right side. Worse, the stroke had left him with aphasia, a language disorder which made it hard for him to speak. Although the old man had been starting to respond to therapy and to make his first, halting, steps with the aid of a cane at the time of th
e October War, the murderous influenza which had swept through New England in the winter after the war had carried him away like tens of thousands of others; leaving the family the almost impossible task of ‘quietly’ resolving the old rascal’s affairs. If it had not been for Claude Betancourt countless half-forgotten scandals and feuds would have resurfaced; for his had been the shrewd, sagacious hand at the wheel steering the Kennedy dynasty through horribly treacherous financial and political waters in the last year. The President’s father had never taken his eldest surviving son aside and told him that Claude was the only man who knew where ‘all the bodies were buried’; he had not had to tell him because, everybody close to the family already knew it to be the case. Since the old man’s death no man had done the Kennedy family truer service than today’s honoured guest at the Presidential retreat.
Claude Betancourt understood why he had been invited to Camp David. He remained inextricably entwined, enmeshed within the Party machine, intimately attuned to its mood and the tides which ebbed and flowed within the broader New England caucus. He might no longer be the President’s father’s enforcer but he remained Kennedy family’s behind the scenes powerbroker and the Party’s most reliable bellwether this side of the Mississippi.
The men in the room needed to know if they still carried what was left of the Party ‘base’ with them. It was one thing for the President to have spent most of the last three weeks on the stomp – two to three events per day – from coast to coast and from the north to the south of the continental United States; but had it changed anything?
The polls suggested Jack Kennedy had halted the slide; the jury was still out on whether he was actually winning back hearts and minds which meant that today was about subtler things than poll numbers and the political punditry of Party outsiders.
The men in the cabin had been drinking coffee.
A tumbler with a generous measure of brandy was put by the newcomer’s hand as he settled in a comfortable chair right next to the fire.
Claude Betancourt knew that these men needed him more than he needed them and he was not about to let the moment go unremarked, or ungamed.
“I talked to Earl Warren’s people the other day,” he remarked. “They say they won’t be in any kind of position to get started for a while yet.” He sniffed, picked up his Brandy. “Earl’s got trouble finding people he can trust to fill the key posts in his Commission. I said he ought to bring in people from outside DC. Younger guys and gals,” he smiled, “with no political ties.”
In fact he had already put Daniel Brenckmann’s name forward to fill one of the vacant assistant attorney posts on the Warren Commission. The kid did not know about that yet.
The old man fixed his President with a steely, not unsympathetic scrutiny.
“You understand that Earl Warren could finish you in a day, Jack?”
The younger man nodded. He had only ever known Claude Betancourt as a stern ‘uncle figure’, the guy his father turned to get him out of trouble as he had partied through his reckless youth, and begun his political education in Massachusetts on his return from the Pacific War. He trusted the old man like he was family because in all the ways that mattered, he was family.
“If that happens I will take the fall.”
Claude Betancourt ruminated a moment, wondering if that was the real reason why old Joe Kennedy’s second son had gone along with Nick Katzenbach’s crazy idea for a public inquest into the Cuban Missiles War disaster. Katzenbach was one of the men who had emerged from the Battle of Washington with a heap of credits. Before the rebellion he had been edging towards the periphery of the Administration, ever closer to the exit door, now like Bob McNamara at Defense, Lyndon Johnson and new men like Fulbright, Katzenbach was right next to the President. Recovering from his injuries Bobby Kennedy was restored as US Attorney General but that was just window dressing – the Kennedy boys were back on the road, campaigning in effect – and sooner or later Katzenbach would take over at Justice.
“Don’t be in any rush to look to a fall,” the old man smiled. “Earl Warren won’t launch the ship until he’s good and ready.”
“I won’t try to dodge the bullet, Claude.”
Claude Betancourt believed him. That was very moral, very honourable in one way; dumb in most of the ways that mattered.
“Have we squared things with the Brits?” He asked, adroitly changing the subject.
Prime Minister Thatcher and her entourage had been in Washington for the last few days and the word was that the talking had been, well, brutal. Claude Betancourt half-suspected the other three men in the cabin had sought this interview to grab a respite. The President and Jackie had entertained Margaret Thatcher here at Camp David last night and nobody would say how that had gone which was probably not good news.
“Yes,” Jack Kennedy guffawed, shaking his head. “The Angry Widow doesn’t take any prisoners. She’s as mad as a cat in a sack that we allowed things to go quote ‘so far down the road’ that we almost ended up shooting at each other. Curtis LeMay almost ‘shit a brick’, or that was what he said afterwards, when the Brits told him about their war plans.”
Claude Betancourt raised an eyebrow.
“They’d have bombed our oil fields in Saudi Arabia, waged unrestricted submarine warfare on our shipping in the North Atlantic and if we had attacked the ‘home islands’ they’d have launched their entire V-Bomber Force against targets in New England!”
“They said that?”
“Yes. Part of the deal is full disclosure of current military capabilities and war plans so we can keep our forces separate until such time as we have agreed new and robust standard operating procedures.”
“You know the Party won’t support a reversion to a NATO-type status quo,” the old man warned. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was defunct, the Administration having effectively abandoned its European NATO allies to their fate on the night of the October War. Canada had remained – albeit sulkily – onboard what was left of the alliance, otherwise there was no NATO, nor realistically could there ever be again. This troubled Claude Betancourt, especially when he heard loose talk about the Administration offering the British ‘NATO-type’ security guarantees, renewed intelligence and technology exchanges, and some kind of modern ‘lend-lease’ deal covering an apparently open-ended aide program.
“The Party needs to get real, Claude,” Lyndon Johnson growled.
Claude Betancourt would defer to the tall Texan on any purely political matter. However, in this case the problem was not purely political. The American people – if there was such a thing these days – wanted nothing to do with further foreign entanglements. The country was looking inward and its gaze would not easily be turned outward again.
“We need not to go to war again,” he countered. “That’s not the same thing. Democrats and Republicans stopped fighting each other months ago; whichever side of the House you sit the real problem at the next election is going to be state’s rights and secessionist candidates who don’t give a shit about what’s going on in the outside world.”
J. William Fulbright scowled.
“That’s cynical, Claude.”
“No, that’s just calling a spade a spade, Bill. If we are serious about wanting there to still be a Democratic Party after the elections in November we need to retrench. The mood in the country is ‘America First’ and whether we like it or not that’s the way we have to go. If that’s not what the British want to hear; too bad. If Jack has to string this Thatcher woman along until she works out that we’re never, ever going to go back to the way things were before the war that’s what he’s going to have to do! Hell, what do we need with NATO? The Brits are our only major military rivals and the last thing they want to do is pick a fight with us?”
The atmosphere in the cabin was uneasy; each man thinking variously dark thoughts.
“Look, Bill,” the older man went on, “I can’t speak to the way your people in Arkansas look at the rest of the world,” he
snorted, “if the guy in the street in Little Rock thinks about the outside world at all, but over here in the East most people are scared of what lies the other side of the Atlantic and what could still lie on the other side of the Arctic. Jack and Bobby may well be able to re-connect with the Party base but that’s not going to banish all fear and it certainly isn’t going to keep the House of Representatives in line. I get it that there are things you have to say to the British to keep them sweet; but the four of us in this room know damned well that we’re not about to send GIs back to Western Europe or anyplace else to back up the Brits. The worst thing we could do now is allow ourselves to be suckered in to a position where we have to explain to the American people why we’ve got ourselves involved in somebody else’s foreign war. That,” he observed, looking to the President, “is exactly what is liable to happen if, for example, we send the Navy back to the Mediterranean.”
Jack Kennedy ruminated on this before a frown began to spread across his handsome face. He had hoped he was not ever going to have this conversation with a man that he had to listen to. He had hoped that the old man would be content to let the demarcation lines between what was, and what was not the altered policy of the Administration towards the United Kingdom remained comfortably blurred. But no, typically, he had cut straight to the heart of the matter.
“I have no intention of reneging on undertakings I have given to Prime Minister Thatcher, Claude,” he sighed. “The price of business as usual is a bi-lateral return to the old NATO status quo vis-à-vis selective former military and strategic arrangements.” There was very real sadness, and no small tincture of regret in his voice when he added: “This is not the time to be discussing the limits to those undertakings we have seen fit to make to secure the peace. Within those ‘limits’ we will offer such assistant to our ‘allies’ as is consistent with the national security interests of the United States. However, at this time and in the weeks and months to come if the price of friendship, or damn it, if the price of just peaceful co-existence with the British is sending the Navy to the Mediterranean, whatever it eventually cost us, it will be worth it!”