by James Philip
That meeting with the FBI had been awful.
‘Might we clarify the nature of your former relationship with a Mister John Arnold Seiffert. The gentleman would be forty-nine years of age. Height about five feet eight inches. Hair color brown. Eyes green. His profession is listed by the IRS as theatrical agent and promoter?”
It had taken this single mildly spoken, apologetic opening inquiry to bring Stanley Mosk raging to Miranda’s defense before she could utter a single word.
He had prepared a waiver stating that she was co-operating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in good faith under the express condition that no formal record would be kept of the interview. Furthermore, nothing she said would be considered as having been said under oath; and that anything she said which might later give rise to any inquiry that might at some future date have any bearing on any criminal investigation would be deemed inadmissible in any court in California. Actually, the waiver had been four pages long and she had not begun to understand the half of what it contained.
The FBI men had signed without demur.
And she had spilled the beans on John Arnold ‘Johnny’ Seiffert.
Miranda sighed again.
She had confessed to her part in getting Sam Brenckmann exiled to Washington State at the time of the October War. She had confirmed that Dwayne and Sam had never met even though they had both worked for Johnny in the fall of 1962 as session musicians.
“Sam’s in a lot of trouble and the FBI think Johnny has something to do with it,” Miranda informed her companion, her thoughts returning to the present with a jolt.
“Trouble?”
“There was a fire at The Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard while he was on stage. People got killed. They say the club owner shot a couple of bikers – killed one - and that Sam was an accessory. He’s been in jail in San Bernardino County the last month. I know I haven’t seen him or talked to him since September sixty-two but I still feel like it’s all my fault.”
“That ain’t right,” the man objected gently. “Sam Brenckmann’s a big boy. He could have refused to go up to Washington State with those rednecks Johnny set him up with. You and Sam had a bust up. That doesn’t make what’s happened your fault. And there ain’t no way you should feel guilty about what happens to Johnny. That guy’s earned whatever he’s got coming to him!”
Miranda cheered up a little, forced a smile.
“Why, Mister John,” she exclaimed half-heartedly in her best southern imitation drawl, “that hardly sounds like Christian charity!”
The big man vented a bellow of laughter.
“Why, Miss Miranda,” he retorted, “the Lord is merciful but he is just also!”
“You just made that up?”
Dwayne nodded contritely.
“I surely did,” he confessed.
Miranda shuffled a little closer to the man on the wall.
“Would you think I was being pushy or forward,” she inquired, needing not to talk, “if we could not talk for a while and I asked you to put your arm around my shoulder, Dwayne?”
It felt good to be protected, safe from all ill.
Miranda shut her eyes and rested her head on the big man’s rock solid, strangely pillow soft shoulder.
Chapter 39
Thursday 17th January 1964
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
Nicholas de Belleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach had ridden out to Andrews Field from the temporary Department of Justice Building within the Washington Navy Yard complex with his nominal boss, the United States Attorney General. The department’s move to Philadelphia – Justice, alongside the Departments of the Interior and the Treasury were in the first tranche of relocations – had already started and everything was chaos back in ‘the office’, so the circuitous drive out to Prince George’s County was a good opportunity to ‘keep in touch’.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy still limped clumsily from the leg wound he had incurred in the shooting at the White House in which British Prime Minister Edward Heath had been assassinated; otherwise, he felt a new man. The Battle of Washington had been a cathartic experience, a revelation of a kind to those in the Administration of a religious or spiritual bent, and he had emerged from a personal slough of despond with new energy and a new belief in what must be done. Now and then it irked him a little that the man who had proposed – perhaps, mandated – exactly what must be done was his former bête noire Lyndon Baines Johnson but when all was said and done, he recognized that the former ringmaster of Capitol Hill was right. The time for half-measures was gone; either they stumbled to an inevitable fall in the coming November’s Presidential elections or they, the Administration, got its collective thumb out of its arse and did what it knew to be the right thing.
To Bobby Kennedy’s mind the strangest thing was that what made it all the more palatable was that LBJ’s analysis of ‘the right thing to do’, was actually not a million miles away from what he and Jack had really wanted to do all along but had lacked the courage and frankly, the moral fibre, to do before the October War. Nonetheless, many senior insiders had railed against the President’s volte-face; with many muttering that ‘nobody had voted for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket to bring in socialism by the back door’.
When the hard core ‘Southern Democratic’ wing of the Party woke up, smelled the coffee and belatedly realized how radically the Administration’s civil rights and social policy had stepped to the left, and that Jack had – as near as dammit – embraced the new internationalism of his recently appointed Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright, there would be Hell to pay.
It said everything about his new mood that so far as the President’s younger brother was concerned that day could not come soon enough.
Nick Katzenbach was less preoccupied with the fights to come and rather more engaged with the mechanics of the removal of the battered rump of the Department of Justice to its new home in Philadelphia. While he had reverted to his former role as United States Deputy Attorney General at the beginning of the week, in reality he remained the de facto Attorney General with full powers to act in Bobby’s name. The arrangement suited both men; Katzenbach was a lawyer and manager, the President’s brother was a man of the people and together they had enthusiastically signed up – philosophically if not literally, in blood – to what White House insiders were already calling ‘the way ahead’.
Whatever happened Bobby Kennedy was not going to be spending much time behind his desk at the Department of Justice between now and whatever happened in November. In fact Katzenbach tacitly assumed that Jack Kennedy would run – although there would be no announcement for several weeks yet - for a second term and that Bobby would be his campaign manager, although nobody in the Administration believed he could actually win. For that matter nobody really knew what was in the President’s mind.
In fact, Katzenbach’s assumption that he would run in November was based simply on his hunch that his old friend felt duty bound to ‘face the people’ to account for his decisions on the night of the October War. People too readily forgot that the former playboy rich kid who had barnstormed and partied his way to the White House was, at one level, a cripplingly moral man who would never make his peace with what he had had to do that night. The Warren Commission might destroy the Administration within hours of its first sitting sometime in the spring; or Jack Kennedy might survive until the General Election in November. For better or worse either way the American people would have the last word on the fate of their President and no man was more at peace with that than Jack Kennedy. However, in the meantime the Administration would govern and even if it was a hopeless dream, embark upon the great project which ought to have dominated its every breath since January 1961 but which somehow, it had mislaid in all the background noise over the Bay of Pigs, the infighting over policy in South East Asia, peacekeeping between India and China in the months leading up to the Cuban Missiles War, smoothing over differences with the European allies, the B
erlin Wall crisis, the tragic comedy of errors in its dealings with the Soviets over Cuba, and a visceral fear of doing anything which risked exacerbating the simmering racial tensions in the American deep south.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Washington when the main thrust of the Administration’s policy had to be on the rebuilding of the fabric of government and the security of the homeland; it seemed a little quixotic to be launching a campaign to transform the whole social and political geography of a country still reeling from the grievous wounds suffered in the October War.
And of course, it was quixotic but then if the moment for change was not now, then when?
Ever the pragmatist Nick Katzenbach drew enormous comfort from the knowledge that the Administration, having realized that it was in a deep hole, had finally stopped digging.
“I expected the British to play hard ball,” he observed as the limousine, one of the new Chrysler Presidential armoured cars, and its escorting convoy swept down empty streets. Two-thirds of the population of DC had been evacuated or had decamped in the weeks since the rebellion. Large areas, whole neighbourhoods were gutted, wrecked and while most of the main thoroughfares had been cleared by the Corps of Engineers, Washington was a ghost town patrolled by Marines, National Guardsmen and heavily armed MPs. There was still looting in the ruins, low-level rioting randomly erupted and new fires were set most nights somewhere in the city. Much of the surrounding countryside was a lawless place patrolled by vigilantes. General Shoup, the Military Governor of the District of Columbia and the designated twenty-five mile ‘corridor’ around it, was systematically bringing districts back under control but his priority was the security of what remained of the ‘Federal Estate’, the safety of government and other ‘vital’ services, hospitals, transportation links and infrastructure, feeding the survivors and ‘cleansing’ the city of the last ‘hold out’ rebels. That senior Administration members could still only move about DC in armoured limousines with machine-gun toting escorts – over a month after the main fighting had ended – spoke eloquently to the chaos which persisted and the fundamental soundness of the decision to transfer the Federal Government to Philadelphia.
Bobby Kennedy was sitting with his back to the driver. He nodded thoughtfully towards Katzenbach directly opposite him in the right hand back seat. Each man had a senior staffer at his elbow, neither of whom had said a word thus far during the journey.
“Fulbright called it right,” he conceded. He and the new Secretary of State were antipathetic characters and it did not help that in the run up to the Cuban Missiles War, he and Fulbright’s predecessor, Dean Rusk, had been the men trying to defuse the situation – ultimately unsuccessfully – with the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Everybody said that if Fulbright had been running those talks that there might not even have been a Cuban Missiles Crisis. Nick Katzenbach had told Bobby Kennedy that was ‘nonsense’; his elder brother had used much stronger language. Nevertheless, Bobby knew that the question would never, ever go away. “He said the Brits just wanted to go back to the way they thought things stood the day before the war. He was right.”
The delegation led by Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Unity Administration had signed up to a bilateral treaty headed An Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Cooperation on the uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes. The treaty was a barely amended rehashing of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defense Agreement with a single additional clause ‘guaranteeing’ that neither side would deploy nuclear weapons without ‘meaningful consultation’ with the other.
“The Navy is still kicking up Hell over the Scorpion?” Katzenbach remarked.
“The Chief of Naval Operations says the Scorpion was torpedoed by one of the Enterprise’s S-2 Trackers,” the Attorney General retorted scornfully. “People at the Navy Department are leaking the story that the British sub, the Dreadnought had been stalking the Enterprise Battle Group and that some idiot onboard the carrier briefed the crews of the Trackers to assume an ‘aggressive operational posture’, whatever that means!”
Nick Katzenbach had heard several versions of the story.
The Chief of Naval Operations at the time of the October War, and later at the time of the ‘Scorpion Incident’, Admiral George Whelan Anderson had resigned at the end of December and been replaced by his deputy, fifty-seven year old David Lamar McDonald. Georgia-born McDonald was a breath of fresh air after the haughty, distant Anderson who had spent much of 1963 defending the US Navy from the accusation that its conduct in harrying a Soviet submarine in international waters in the hours before the October War had been what had lit the blue touch paper. McDonald was approachable, did not think that all politicians came from a different planet and had little or no time for the ‘idiots at Norfolk’ – specifically, the much purged high command of the US Atlantic Fleet – who had very nearly provoked a shooting war with the Royal Navy in the days before the Battle of Washington.
McDonald had told the President that the Scorpion had been ‘downed’ by ‘friendly fire’ in circumstances that would be investigated in full when the Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Scorpion had sat. The Chief of Naval Operations anticipated several courts-martial would follow the outcome of that ‘Board’. Unfortunately, in between now and those courts-martial proceedings the full panoply of Navy Department infighting was going to have to play out around the Board of Inquiry; to attempt to short-circuit US Navy ‘due process’ would, in the CNO’s opinion, be damagingly divisive within the service. For the good of the service the ‘fools at Atlantic Fleet’ who were responsible for the sinking of the Scorpion had to have their day before the Board of Inquiry, justice had to be seen to be done even though shooting them down in flames would be the work of but two or three – painful – days if they persisted in their lies and obfuscations in front of the ‘Board’.
The Scorpion was already a cause celebre; there was nothing anybody could do about that. Congress wanted to kick it around the floor of the new House in Philadelphia before the Navy got its turn to run with it. This being the case the Vice-President planned to kick it into the long grass, hoping that in a few months time the affair would have lost much of its ‘sting’.
‘The Navy,’ the CNO had confided to Katzenbach a couple of days ago, ‘is still full of men who honestly believe the Atlantic Fleet people at Norfolk have been scapegoated by the Administration. We’re talking about the same clique who still feel tender about accusations that they provoked the Beale incident; frankly, they’re terrified that they’re going to be the fall guys when Chief Justice Warren starts his hearings in the ‘Causes’ of the October War. This nonsense about the Scorpion is a smokescreen.’
McDonald had been disgusted by the notion that fellow officers could dishonour the dead of the Scorpion in such a disgraceful fashion.
The ‘Scorpion Disaster’ was a problem for another day.
Bobby Kennedy’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“What do we do with that crazy Zabriski woman, Nick?”
Edna Maria Zabriski had confessed – among other things - to attempting to murder the President of the United States of America. She had succeeded in murdering the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and injuring the US Attorney General – as testified to by the ongoing painful tweaking of his leg - and winged a Secret Service man.
“The President was worried that the Brits would want her executed,” Katzenbach shrugged. “Apparently, Mrs Thatcher told him it was none of their, the Brits’, that is, business. American justice must take its course. Fulbright spoke to the new Ambassador, Lord Franks. He said the same thing. The trouble is that the shrinks at Langley can’t agree between themselves if she’s crazy.”
Both men groaned as they thought ahead to the prospect of Edna Zabriski having her day in court. A judge was going to have to decide if she was fit to stand trial. The media circus that would surroun
d that event was a nightmare.
“The guy I feel sorry for is Edna Zabriski’s son,” Katzenbach continued. “He survives the October War and then he gets ordered to bomb the Brits at Malta. He honestly believes the Brits have already nuked American cities; then he gets shot down and most of his buddies get killed and finds out he was a patsy. How bad is that?”
“What’s the Air Force doing with the guys the British pulled out of the sea?”
Nick Katzenbach half-smiled.
“LeMay promoted him major and posted him to the staff at SAC Headquarters in Nebraska.”
Bobby Kennedy’s eyes widened.
“Old Iron Pants always stands by ‘his boys’, Bobby,” he was informed ruefully.
The President’s brother recollected that Katzenbach had been a navigator in the Army Air Force during Hitler’s war. His B-25 Mitchell medium bomber had been shot down over the Mediterranean in February 1943 and he had spent the rest of that war in German prison camps; he was hugely better qualified to judge what Nathan Zabriski had been through. Bobby Kennedy had served in the US Navy Reserve in the last year of that war as a Seaman Apprentice but seen no action, a thing that he had always regretted especially after he learned of the death of his eldest brother Joe. He still envied men like Nick Katzenbach who had participated in the preparations for the ‘great escape’ from Stalag Luft III, and his brother Jack, an all-American PT-boat hero of the Pacific War.