The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3)

by James Philip

  Claude Betancourt was reassured somewhat by the conditionality implicit in the first part of the President’s statement, but deeply worried by his blasé attitude to putting what was left of the US Navy into what most likely, was going to be harm’s way. The implication of what Jack Kennedy had said was at some point, possibly after the first Democratic Primaries in March, certainly by the end of April if the numbers from the primaries were looking bad, he reserved the option of cutting the British adrift.

  The old man sought clarification.

  “What are we talking about, Jack?” He queried, like an uncle checking if his nephew had just taken out a bad loan. “Sending in the Navy if there’s a crisis, or what?”

  “Re-establishing bases in the United Kingdom if possible and elsewhere in Europe, maybe. Making the right noises, up to and including re-affirming NATO-type mutual security guarantees in respect of the North Atlantic area, the Mediterranean if necessary but drawing a line,” the President concluded, uncomfortably, ‘about there.”

  The old man thought that sounded a little woolly. However, he was reassured that for the moment the Administration was obviously in no mood to go overboard with the British.

  “How are you with this, Bill?” He put to the Secretary of State.

  William Fulbright shrugged.

  “Within reason, we support our allies as best we can. We need to rebuild not just at home but overseas, too. The British are our main overseas ally but they are not our only foreign ally. Nobody’s talking about making guarantees about anything that happens beyond the old NATO boundaries. I’m happy with that or I wouldn’t have taken the job at State.”

  Claude Betancourt decided he had already had pushed hard enough at the half-closed door. However, he remained deeply suspicious of the ill-advised hostages to fortune the Administration had placed squared in the hands of the British. How would they – the British in general and that crazy Thatcher woman in particular react if something untoward happened in a part of the World not specifically covered by the former ‘NATO area’?

  If and when that day came the British would have every reason to feel betrayed. And then what would they do?

  He glanced to the Vice President and judged that from the sour expression on the Texan’s face he had worked through the possibilities with a fine toothcomb, presumably concluding that risking a total – most likely generational rift with the old country – was worth the candle. The priority was to paper over the fracture lines in what the British used to call the ‘special relationship’. That had to be done now; the future would have to look after itself. Besides, the international threat calculus was negligible and as the President had remarked prior to Claude Betancourt’s arrival, the Navy still had ‘just enough big grey ships’ to move around the international chess board to make it look as if the Administration was as good as its word.

  Grudgingly, Claude Betancourt conceded that Jack Kennedy and his advisors had probably got the balance right in the fraught negotiations with Margaret Thatcher. The British were back onside and the United States had regained access to the ‘unsinkable floating aircraft carrier’ off the shores of Western Europe. In a few months American industry would be re-colonizing the old country, Wall Street would be financing the rebuilding of the bombed cities. In a year or two the British would be so beholden to East Coast moneymen and the US Treasury that they would have no choice but to go along with whatever final settlement the Administration – or more likely the one that swept JFK into the dustbin of history – wanted to inflict on the ‘old country’.

  He was being paranoid.

  There was not going to be another big war, international communism had been squelched for a century and the chips with which Jack Kennedy had bought Margaret Thatcher’s support for the terms of the new rapprochement would never be cashed in.

  He moved on, relaxing a little.

  “So, everything’s moving to Philadelphia?” He asked, smiling a little sardonically.

  Lyndon Johnson nodded.

  “Bob McNamara will stay in DC to ‘manage’ the first stages of the reconstruction program. The Corps of Engineers will be overseeing phase one. General Shoup remains as Military Governor of the District of Columbia at this time. He and Bob don’t always see eye to eye but Bob needs a tough guy like Shoup to get things moving.”

  “Lyndon will be one hundred percent in charge of the relocation to Philadelphia. With a free hand to do whatever is necessary,” the President interjected decisively.

  Claude Betancourt was astonished that the lines of responsibility had been drawn so unambiguously. The Kennedy Administration’s pre-October War agenda had been hamstrung by muddled thinking and vacillation confused by sporadic major initiatives; post-war it had seemed trapped in a cycle of fire-fighting, incapable of getting ahead of events. Now it was as if the trauma of the Battle of Washington had broken the circle of despair and shocked the main players into action.

  Curtis LeMay was conducting a purge of the command and control system of the United States military untrammelled by political interference. Bob McNamara was ‘managing’ the rebuilding of DC and planning a radical reorganisation of the armed forces. The President and the Attorney General were on the stomp trying to rebuild the Party base and directly confronting the burgeoning states’ right movement. The Warren Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War was taking shape and would hold its opening session sometime in the spring. Lyndon Johnson was again the ringmaster of the House of Representatives; responsible for the movement of Congress, the Senate and the principal organs of the Federal Government to Philadelphia, and also, the Moon Program.

  Claude Betancourt did not understand that but knew better than to get carried away with the idea that the Moon Program was in any way ephemeral either to the re-ordered direction of the Administration, or to the Vice President’s perspective on his own future career. Jack Kennedy had sneaked past Richard Nixon in 1960 because he seemed to be a new man for a new age. It helped that he had the looks of a careworn Greek god and a natural born charisma that money could not buy but basically, once he was in the White House he had continued many of his predecessor’s policies. The only difference was that Dwight Eisenhower had operated in a calmer, more measured way and avoided some of the blunders which had eventually led in late October 1962 to global thermonuclear war. The Moon Program?

  Where did that fit into LBJ’s plan?

  The only reason that there had been a Moon Program in the first place was because the Soviets had set their sights on the Moon; but there was no Soviet Union anymore and no Russian space program. Ergo, there was no space race. So why the new rush to go to the Moon? What profit was there in it? The whole ghastly enterprise was going to cost billions of dollars the country did not have; and if there was nobody to beat to the Moon how could one go on pretending that it was any kind of race? Unless of course, the wily old operator that he was, Lyndon Johnson had determined that he needed a high profile outrider for an agenda that was so out of left field that if it was presented to them in the wrong way the Democratic Party and the American people would reject it out of hand?

  It was only then that Claude Betancourt realized the real reason for his summons to the inner court of what survived of Camelot.

  The Administration wanted to tell him a real secret; a secret it that Jack Kennedy had decided that he needed to hear from his lips.

  The old man sighed.

  Kids!

  They would be trying to teach him to steal candy from babies next!

  Chapter 38

  Sunday 12th January 1964

  Third Baptist Church, San Francisco, California

  It was the first time Miranda Sullivan had been to church for about three years and it was a thoroughly disorientating experience. An experience made no less bewildering by the fact that she had never, ever imagined she would find herself in a communion so emotionally – ecstatically for many worshippers – wrapped up and dedicated to their Lord. Initially, she h
ad been intimidated, later fascinated and by the end spiritually wrung out.

  Having been brought up as an occasional Episcopalian in a household where religion was an optional buffet rather than an al la carte menu, she had never gone along with the supreme being thing. However, that was not to say that she was in any way agnostic. It made perfect sense to her that the chaos of the physical world around her would benefit from some kind of guiding hand; and sometimes it was comforting to contemplate that there might actually be something, or someone watching over her. Ancient civilizations had posited the concept of the ‘Earth Mother’, eastern esoteric belief systems spoke of ‘karma’, and of philosophical mantras that talked to balance, yin and yang, fire and water. What child could look up into a starry night and not wonder if he or she was really alone in the vastness of the Universe? Notwithstanding she did not actually believe in the God of the Old Testament, or Jesus, the second coming of the Messiah or in the Kingdom of Heaven.

  To her own surprise the least disorientating thing about the long, noisy, fervent, essentially musical experience – ‘service’ was too small a word to describe what she had just lived through – was not that she had been surrounded by black faces or even that she had been so warmly welcomed, feted almost, but that she emerged from the Third Baptist Church changed. Not in any huge way; because that was how she was hard-wired and there had been no unmistakable moment of Damascene conversion. No, it was simply that in some indefinable way she had opened her eyes to another way of thinking and of looking at the world around her.

  In the last few weeks she had totally immersed herself in the work of the California Civil Rights Forum. In the process she had become a little divorced from the rest of the staff in the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento, spending much of her time, trips down to Los Angeles and San Diego excepted, in San Francisco and Oakland. She had initially planned to be on the road most days but Terry Francois, the wise attorney who was President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – the NAACP – had counselled her to avoid spreading herself too thinly. Especially, this early in the ‘program’. The thing was to build solid foundations so as to be able to construct future structures on firm ground. Basically, Rome was not built in a day.

  ‘Lincoln proclaimed the end of slavery a hundred years ago but look how far we have come?’ He had observed sagely. ‘Patience. We must be patient. The history of the civil rights movement tells us that nothing comes quickly or easily.’

  Miranda had found herself the center of attention outside the church and was glad when eventually, Dwayne John touched her arm and guided her onto a less congested area of sidewalk.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The big man smiled quizzically.

  “For what?”

  “For allowing me to share that...”

  Even in the Fillmore District a black man and white woman attracted curious and now and then, hostile looks, especially when the black man was a towering handsome man in his twenties with the build and demeanour of a heavyweight in training, and the woman was blond, willowy and had inherited the god-given good looks of her movie star parents.

  Those looks, insofar as the couple noticed them at all, troubled neither the man nor the woman for they were intuitively relaxed in each other’s company and content in their slowly developing friendship. So much so that neither of them really thought about – nor would give any significance to if they did –their first drug-blurred encounter on the night of the October War. On that dark day they had been disturbed mid-coitus by Johnny Seiffert, the owner of the house on Haight Street in which they had been having sex. Well, fucking really because the people that they had become since that night no longer associated what they had been doing on Johnny Seiffert’s red-sheeted ‘love altar’, with anything remotely to do with having mutually pleasurable consensual sex, and a million miles away from anything which might be called ‘making love’. In any event they had ended up looking down the barrel of Johnny’s Navy Colt half-dressed on the streets of San Francisco in the middle of a nuclear war. All in all, their impromptu ‘first date’ on the evening of 27th October 1962 had not gone very well! That was then and this was now, fifteen-and-a-half months later. Dwayne had been born again; while Miranda, with a lot of help from her Aunt Molly and Uncle Harvey, had got her shit together and they were no longer recognisably the same people they had been at the end of October 1962.

  Several members of the communion had invited the couple back to their homes for a meal; Miranda was not ready for that and she suspected that Dwayne was grateful she had politely claimed a ‘prior engagement’, citing her Aunt and Uncle and alluding to ‘catching up with my brother Gregory’.

  Actually, catching up with Gregory had turned out to be an unexpectedly fraught business around Christmas time. Turning up unannounced at her brother’s apartment in Sausalito – a top floor garret as opposed to something she would describe as ‘an apartment’ – Darlene Lefebure had answered the door, hair askew and positively glowing in the way that one often does after great sex.

  Miranda’s Aunt Molly had explained that Darlene was staying away a few days with a girlfriend in Oakland when she had called at her Aunt and Uncle’s old house on Nob Hill. She had been mightily relieved that Darlene was not around because on their previous meetings she and Darlene had brought out the absolute worst in each other. Darlene had been convinced Miranda had stolen Dwayne from her and subsequently poisoned his mind against her; and Dwayne had not helped the situation by avoiding any kind of encounter with his former girlfriend. This still irritated Miranda a little even though she knew it was undiluted shame – probably misplaced – on his part that kept him away from Darlene.

  Finding Darlene at Gregory’s apartment that morning had neatly resolved one matter and promptly opened another can of worms. While the ‘Darlene question’ remained unaddressed there was no question of Miranda and Dwayne’s ‘friendship’ morphing into something else. In an odd sort of way that was ideal for each of them; they were both sorting out their lives and at the threshold of building new careers. Dwayne was no longer a failed session musician – he had an awesome baritone voice – or just a courier running the gauntlet of the recently dismantled nationwide FBI picket on behalf of Dr King’s organisation in Atlanta. These days he was Dr King’s representative with the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and his ‘voice’ a fixture on the California Civil Rights Forum with a direct line into the Office of the Governor in Sacramento. Likewise, Miranda having plumbed the depths – by the night of the October War she was a drugged up groupie living with a man twice her age who did not remember her name half the time – had with her Aunt and Uncle’s help got herself clean, gone back to college, and worked as an intern in Uncle Harvey’s law practice before joining the Governor’s staff. Not only was she on the payroll of the Office of the Governor of California, she had met the Vice President and been given the job of setting up and facilitating the California Civil Rights Forum. A lot of people in Miranda and Dwayne’s position would have been pretty dammed smug about their rehabilitation; but that simply was not them. They were on a journey and they both understood that they had only just started out.

  That afternoon the fog burned off and the breeze blowing in through the Golden Gate slackened to a whisper. The couple walked a while and then jumped onto a crowded trolley down to the bay where they sat on a wall and stared out at Alcatraz Island.

  The old prison out in San Francisco Bay had been scheduled for closure last year but there were rumours that Alcatraz had been turned into a secret military base, or a special prison for the worst of the worst, or even some kind of scientific ‘testing station’. Nobody was allowed to sail within one hundred yards of the island and small patrol boats mounting fifty-calibre machine guns policed the cold iron grey waters which swept around its rocky shores. Supply launches plied between Alameda and Alcatraz every day, morning and afternoon and at night the lighthouse lam
ps burned as brightly as before. Alcatraz had always been a name that evoked myths and legends and nothing had changed.

  “You’re still worrying about the Feds asking you to set up Johnny?” The big man asked, unable to tiptoe around the subject any longer.

  Miranda sighed.

  She had told Dwayne about ‘the situation’ she had been put in by the two FBI special agents had called at the Capitol Building in Sacramento a week ago. It transpired that the FBI had wanted to ‘interview’ her for some days but that her boss, Governor Brown’s Chief-of-Staff had refused point blank to co-operate without involving the office of the California State Attorney General Stanley Mosk, an old friend of her Uncle Harvey. It had been a peculiar interview; the two FBI men on their very best behaviour with Stanley Mosk sitting beside Miranda like an overly protective and very hungry guard dog.

  Miranda had only known Mosk slightly before her Uncle, Harvey Fleischer, had co-opted him into prising Dwayne from the FBI’s hands in December but since the CCRF was mooted his office had followed her progress with huge interest and she had spoken to him on several occasions. In retrospect she ought to have realized that he would be all over the project and that his enthusiastic support would have been a big – possibly the key - enabling factor in the Governor’s decision to give it his unqualified imprimatur.

  The fifty-one year old Texan-born son of a family of Reform Jews Stanley Mosk was in his second term as the state’s Attorney General had had proven, time and again, that he was extremely exercised about the civil rights of every man, woman and child in California regardless of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity or religion. Stanley Mosk was the man who taken the Professional Golfers’ Association of America to court to force that apparently untouchable bastion of white middle class privilege to rewrite its regulations discriminating against golfers from ethnic and racial minorities. He was also the man who had founded the California Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, the legal resources and muscle of which now underpinned practically all the activities of the CCRF.