by James Philip
“Now and then,” the Attorney General of the Unites States of America said distractedly as he smiled and nodded at the waving, cheerful throng pressing close to the Governor of Georgia’s limousine, “I find myself honestly believing that some good might yet come out of the war.”
Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the forty-five year old seventy-third Governor of Georgia did not reply immediately. Like many of his contemporary Southern Democrats his college education, his war service and exposure to influences and ideas from outside his insular Georgia caucus, Vandiver had for many years found himself espousing views and prejudices that he no longer personally regarded – if he ever had - as being articles of faith. He was no latter-day born again reformist and he had fought tooth and nail to preserve Georgia’s County Unit System of voting – a form of electoral college rather than one man one vote brand of democracy right up until the moment the United States Supreme Court had ruled it as unconstitutional; but a part of him had welcomed being forced to eventually start doing the right thing.
There was no shame in that. Vandiver was a man with whom the Administration could do business. Vandiver’s Governorship had been efficient, relatively ‘clean’ by Georgia standards and but for the war would have significantly improved the lot of many of the poorest Georgians.
How many other state governors of either Democratic or Republican persuasions could honestly claim that?
“That’s a stretch,” the Governor of Georgia remarked. “I find it very hard to see any good coming out of what happened back on October sixty-two.” Unlike his companion in the back seat of the limousine he was still intensely uncomfortable to be seen openly paying court to the most famous living Georgian.
It was not because he was any kind of racist – because he did not consider himself to be one, other than in the small things imbued in one from birth in the Deep South – but he was much more aware than the President’s younger brother that the crowds in the streets around the Ebenezer Baptist Church represented only one section, albeit a growing section, of the natural Democratic constituency that he represented. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was an unimaginably broad ‘church’ embracing Northern liberals and Southern white supremacists and every shade of politics in between. He was a practical man. The notoriety of the leader of the Southern Civil Rights movement and the great groundswell of support at his back was like a red rag to a bull to the powerful forces diametrically opposed to and, frightened of the rise of a whole section of society that they honestly believed was inferior, and ought to remain under their thumbs forever. The Kennedy Administration might not realize it but he would not, could not ignore the fact that every Governor across the South – Democrat or Republican – was sitting nervously on a powder keg. Sometimes lately he wondered if somebody had already lit the fuse.
Vandiver could not remember a time in his adult life when opinions had been more polarised, or when the Democratic Party machine in Georgia had been so fragmented.
“The economy of the great State of Georgia is still in recession,” Vandiver went on. “I’ve got military bases shut down all over the place, nowhere near enough police to keep the streets safe. Hell, it isn’t as if I can trust the National Guard to do much more than direct traffic. You’ll forgive me if I beg to differ with you, I hope, sir.”
“The moment when a nation seems to be at its most divided is the time its leaders must seek to unite it most,” the Attorney General murmured.
It was a mantra that he and his brother were proselytizing across the continent while other members of the Administration, and the newly constituted Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee under Curtis LeMay’s gung ho chairmanship, were striving to restore a nationwide functioning Government machine and to undo the massive self-inflicted structural damage wrought by last year’s ‘war dividend’ cuts.
The depth of the ongoing crisis – irrespective of the real or imagined threat posed by Red Dawn or whoever else had been behind the insurrection in Washington – was underlined by the fact that the New York Stock Exchange which had crashed spectacularly during the Battle of Washington had still to recover fifty percent of its pre-rebellion value. The reality of the situation was that practically every major American bank was as technically bankrupt. The Government, the entire financial system underpinning the still huge and miraculously, still relatively robust and intact North American industrial and economic behemoth was currently being funded on a wing and a prayer and millions of unpayable I Owe Yous. Within the Administration the fear remained that the social, political, economic, banking and military crisis was so acute that all it would take to bring down the whole precariously balanced stack of cards was another surprise, another tiny unexpected knock.
In the next few days the House of Representatives would formally reconvene in Philadelphia. If either Congress or the Senate rejected or reneged on the treaty with the British when it came before the House in mid-April – currently the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty was being implemented under Presidential Executive Order and was ‘untouchable’ by the House during the ninety day interregnum on Congressional interference mandated by that ‘order’ - all bets would be off. Given the mood of the House Congress and the Senate would almost certainly refuse to ratify the treaty when the time came.
There was also the matter of whether the House would seek to unpick the President’s Executive Order effectively rescinding and reversing the ‘peace dividend’ program and authorizing what amounted to full military and logistical support for ongoing British operations in the North Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. If LBJ was unable to cut a deal – and nobody else in the Administration could cut Congressional deals like the wily Texan – what then?
An even darker prospect was the likelihood House Republicans would move a motion of impeachment against the President because of the rebellion and the fact the country had very nearly blundered into a war with ‘the old country’. Oddly, no man in the Administration had been more sanguine about this than LBJ. Not so much because he might step into the Presidency as a consequence but because ‘right now we haven’t a snowflake’s chance in Hell of being re-elected in November and there is no conceivable way those donkeys in the House can get their act together to impeach any of us inside the next eighteen months!’
If the General Election in November went the way they all expected it to go the subject of ‘impeachment’ was the least of their worries!
Bobby Kennedy and the Vice-President had disliked and mistrusted each other since the late fifties. It had been a visceral, personal thing. The Attorney General had loathed the older man and Lyndon Baines Johnson had held the younger sibling of the President in contempt; the only thing that had until recent weeks united them was their mutual detestation. Bobby had not wanted LBJ on the Presidential ticket in 1960; and at the time of the October War he had been actively sounding out alternative candidates to join his brother on the 1964 ticket.
Before the October War, Jack had made a point of being punctiliously correct and polite with his Vice-President. Moreover, he was invariably collegiate and deferential to him in meetings with other Cabinet members. After the October War Jack had kept a distance between them; the breakdown in relations with the British and the Battle of Washington had changed the mood music overnight.
Strangely, discovering that he was no longer the President’s only trusted ‘special advisor’ had come as a welcome shock to the younger brother, a weight lifting off his shoulders. In the last few weeks he had thrown himself into his work with a new lightness of spirit. He had even managed to exchange a few genuinely civil and well meant words with LBJ, who had contrived to respond in a grudgingly similar vein. Bobby and LBJ would never been friends; but they had ceased to be enemies.
“Somebody took a pot shot at the President when he was in Dallas yesterday,” Bobby informed the Governor of Georgia, who started in alarm. “Well several shots, we think,” the Attorney General went on, as if an assassination attempt on the life of a President of the Unit
ed States of America was a routine affair calling for little comment. “Some nut job in an office block housing a book depository with an M-16. The Marines and the Secret Service hosed the whole top floor of the building with automatic fire. They discovered this mousy little guy in Army fatigues bleeding to death on the floor when they stormed place. He was pretty badly shot up and died before they got him to hospital so we don’t know his story yet. Hoover’s people are onto it.”
“You wonder what’s happened to this country sometimes,” Samuel Vandiver grunted.
“They’re telling me that only one bullet actually hit the President’s car,” Bobby Kennedy confided, preoccupied with the crowd pressing ever-closer around the Governor’s limousine. “It pinged right off the armour. I hate it when stuff like that happens when Jackie is with the President.”
Every night the newscasts carried film of the President and his glamorous wife in another city, the President charismatically delivering a beguiling, inspiring, humbly beseeching keynote speech and Jackie, well, Jackie just being Jackie. The nation’s perfect first family was trying to reconnect with, and to be seen with, as many Americans as possible as the Presidential caravan criss-crossed the continent preaching family values, the inculcation of a renewed sense of national togetherness and a restatement of manifest destiny. There had been an insurrection, the opening shots of what might have been a second and unimaginably awful Civil War in Washington DC before Christmas, but Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the last people in Christendom to hide away in a bunker when their country needed them. Symbolism is everything in public life. While his brother re-imagined the reality of the Presidency; Bobby was travelling the land re-building old, and exploring new alliances which might yet be the Republic’s only long-term defense against the setbacks to come.
The limousine ground to a halt and a phalanx of Marines – flown down to Georgia ahead of the Attorney General as part of his, and Jack’s augmented ‘security task forces’ in the wake of the December rebellion - eased back the pressing crowds between the car and the entrance to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The door opened on the Attorney General’s side and he clambered out into the warm sunshine of the Southern morning. He straightened, shot his cuffs, and smiling confidently approached the man who, more than any other embodied to Bobby Kennedy the promise of a new and lasting post-war American domestic settlement. From this point onward no US Administration could ignore the constituency for which this man spoke and whom he represented with such peerless eloquence and dignity.
In his dreams Jack Kennedy’s little brother saw the day – perhaps not so many years hence – when this man would stride the World stage. He had never believed a black man could be President of the United States of America; but meeting this man and exchanging the first mutually exploratory tendrils of what he hoped would be a lifelong friendship, he had recognized the arrant folly of the idiotic prejudices drummed into him all his life.
The Reverend Martin Luther King junior stepped forward into the sunlight and extended his hand in welcome to the younger brother of the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 50
Wednesday 22nd January 1964
City Hall, Los Angeles, California
The District Attorney of Los Angeles County had never – not once – in his long and distinguished judicial career felt so uneasy, or as threatened as he did that morning at a few minutes before eleven o’clock as he walked up the steps of City Hall.
Sixty-one year old William B. McKesson had been appointed to his current office by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on 4th December 1956. He had been selected somewhat against his own expectations ahead of several well qualified and frankly, better known and higher profile candidates and his had been a contentious appointment. Memories in City Hall were long and in his experience, by and large, unforgiving. Back in 1956 McKesson had been a respected Los Angeles Superior Court judge; it had been unnerving to find himself in direct competition for the District Attorney post with Municipal Court Judge Evelle J. Younger, Los Angeles Bar Association President William Gray and attorney A. Andrew Hauk (both men that everybody knew viewed the DA’s office as prized stepping stones in most likely brilliant future careers), Baldo Kristovich, a highly able Deputy County Counsel, and Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker. Having unexpectedly emerged from such a ‘pack’ of contenders McKesson had inevitably adopted a no risks, strictly by the book, let’s not rock the boat attitude to the discharge of his duties in the intervening years because he was acutely aware of, and sensitive to, any and all whispers of criticism of his performance.
His sudden summons to appear before the Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had come out of the blue. Notwithstanding that the ‘summons’ was unprecedented and that the ‘Commission’ itself was the fulcrum around which endless controversy and factional back-biting had swirled before and since the October War, McKesson was suddenly entertaining troubling visions of yet again being dragged into the political arena; possibly in same distasteful way Governor Brown had drawn him into a spat with the FBI over supposedly ‘anti-communist’ files held by the California National Guard two years ago. That affair had smacked of politicking with the law and although he had attempted to behave with perfect impartiality he had had his fingers badly burned.
Mud – no matter how randomly thrown - sticks.
Although the nine member Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had been set up to deal with the threat of nuclear war; in reality it had always been more concerned with disasters of a type that Los Angeles County actually had a realistic expectation of being able to do something about; earthquakes, flooding, landslides and fires.
In any event by the time of the October War very little had been done to prepare for a nuclear war. Other, that is, than the drawing up and costing of plans for a massive program to construct nuclear fallout shelters. This project came with a price tag of $404 in 1961 dollars and almost immediately bitter internecine infighting had commenced; this was hardly surprising since most of the bickering surrounded real and imagined conflicts of interest among members of the Commission itself. Thus, eleven months before the October War the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had unanimously ordered a review of the fallout shelters program. It went without saying that at the time of the war Los Angeles County’s plans to cope with the aftermath of a nuclear war were at best sketchy, and at worst, negligible, and that ever since the war the Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had been trying very hard to cover its collective arse.
In the words of one Los Angeles Times editorial ‘it appears to me that the only reason a public official is likely to be called before the Commission is to have his, or her, public reputation besmirched by other public officials who have signally failed to adequately discharge their own civic duties...’
Given that the members attending today’s meeting of the Commission would probably include Mayor Sam Yorty, Los Angeles City Civil Defense Director Joseph M. Quinn, and Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker, McKesson was expecting an exceptionally rough ride as he hurried inside the great, cathedral like edifice of City Hall.
At the front desk McKesson was expecting to be escorted by one of the uniformed ushers to a first floor meeting room.
“Please follow me to the Mayor’s Office, sir.”
This was the first of several surprises in the next few minutes and the District Attorney of Los Angeles County was already reeling a little by the time he was invited to take one of the chairs in Mayor Sam Yorty’s palatial chambers.
“I understood the Commission was in session, Mr Mayor?”
The Mayor of Los Angeles shook his head. Other than Yorty, there were three men in the room only one of whom McKesson had met prior to that day; Police Chief William Parker.
“This is Associate Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Mr Clyde Tolson,” Yorty had introduced the older of the strangers. “And this is Senior State De
partment Attorney Mr Franklin Lovell.”
Clyde Tolson had given McKesson a long, slow look as if he was trying to decide if the Los Angeles County District Attorney was carrying a concealed weapon before shaking his hand. He had not spoken, simply nodded brief acknowledgement.
“Call me Frank,” smiled the State Department man, his gaze boasting none of the guarded suspicion of Tolson. But then he had not been J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man for the last three decades.
The Mayor had quickly asserted a firm grip over proceedings.
Nebraskan born fifty-four year old Samuel William Yorty, the thirty-seventh Mayor of Los Angeles was, in modern times, perhaps the most colorful of the men to have held that position. Less than three years into his mayoralty ‘Mayor Sam’ had already earned a series of sobriquets from friends and foes; to some he was Travelin’ Sam, or Shoot from the hip Sam, to others he was Suitcase Sam, or just plain Mad Sam Yorty. The man himself positively revelled in the turbulence he left in his wake. It was typical of his contrariness that he – as a Democrat – had endorsed Richard Nixon (a Republican) in the 1960 Presidential Race. Before running for Mayor he had lost his seat in Congress, failed to get elected for the Senate and had a no holds barred run in with the House Un-American Activities Committee; having aggressively advocated the public ownership of key public utilities and supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Yorty had gone into the Army Air Corps during the Pacific War, serving in Intelligence. Having opposed Jack Kennedy in 1960 he had got himself elected to City Hall in 1961 despite the opposition of his own local Democratic Party machine and his Republican opponent, Norris Poulsen in one of the bitterest mayoral campaigns in recent history. At one stage Poulsen had claimed that Yorty was backed by the mob!