by James Philip
“What was the question you wanted to put to the room?”
“Is it the Administration’s policy to eradicate all armed opposition, or is it the Administration’s purpose to accommodate former rebels within the Union, sir? I ask the question because if the answer is the former then nothing short of a bloodbath on the scale of a Chicagograd will achieve that end. Whereas, if the objective is simply to bring, in some meaningful way, ‘rebels’ back within the fold then the application of overwhelming lethal military force may be avoidable.”
“What have you got in mind, Dempsey?” Curtis LeMay demanded.
The older man looked around the table.
“With your permission, sirs,” he sighed, “I need to be in Illinois to answer that question.”
Chapter 59
Friday 31st January 1964
Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Building, Broad Street, Philadelphia
J. Edgar Hoover positively loathed the new accommodation allocated to his Headquarters Staff in the thirty-one storey tower adjacent to the old Giraud Corn Exchange Bank which the Vice-President had designated as the Philadelphia White House. He had already attempted to speak to Lyndon Baines Johnson to express his displeasure on three occasions, on each of which Johnson had cried off claiming prior engagements. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been so ‘insulted’ by the situation that he had asked his Deputy, Clyde Tolson to find ‘alternative secure and appropriate premises’ for the Bureau elsewhere in the city.
Thus far Tolson had made little progress in this regard but Hoover had not thought to chase or harry him; they had both been distracted by that distasteful business on the West Coast concerning ‘the Ambassador’s son’ and they were still basking in the success of a job well done that had – almost incidentally – resulted in scores of racketeering and organised crimes related arrests. In fact the mission to California had been so successful that the Attorney General, no less, had sent him a personal, respectful and solicitous note of appreciation the previous day commending the ‘swift, professional work of the Bureau’ and thanking him personally for finding time in his ‘extremely busy schedule’ to travel to the West Coast to ‘oversee the immaculately executed operation’.
Apart from the Vice-President’s infuriating attempt to have him locked away in this glass and steel monstrosity of a building in downtown Philadelphia – in which and from it would be impossible to conduct ‘private’ and ‘confidential’ business with his friends in the House of Representatives – J. Edgar Hoover’s outlook was remarkably rosy. Immediately after the Battle of Washington he had been afraid he was going to be fired, dismissed in disgrace and most likely, publicly pilloried by the Administration as it frantically scrabbled to cover up its own shortcomings. Unaccountably, he and the FBI had been granted a second chance and as oddly, the last few weeks had been among the most exhilarating of his whole career. He and Clyde Tolson had traversed the country rallying the troops, and mounted a string of old-fashioned, classic gang-busting raids. The whole of the FBI had become energised without him having to lift a finger; every agent suddenly had the light of battle in his eyes. The success of the ‘California visit’ had simply been the icing on the cake.
To be back in ‘the office’, especially this new, soulless contemporary suite of ‘executive rooms’ in Philadelphia was something of a letdown; and he and Clyde had commiserated with each other about it on the way into work that morning. The post Battle of Washington furore, or as they frequently said, the ‘fight back’ had reminded them of their gang busting hey days in the thirties. Hunting down and confronting mobsters, shoot outs with Thompson sub-machine guns, firestorms of newspaper and radio coverage...
Those had been the days!
But for the situation surrounding his ‘new’ Headquarters – made doubly galling because his people had been the ones who first identified the empty Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Building as a suitably prestigious location for the Bureau before the Vice-President’s real estate sharks had muscled in on the deal – the legendarily mean-spirited and curmudgeonly Director of the FBI’s disposition might have been positively sunny that morning.
However, as he looked out over the city from his relatively lofty perch on the nineteenth floor it rankled that he had been bested by the Vice-President and he still coveted the great rotunda below his feet. That building would have been the perfect new home for the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
The one-time headquarters of the Giraud Corn Exchange Trust – situated a few hundred yards from City Hall, which was soon to be inaugurated as the home of the relocated House of Representatives – was superbly grand, it was built like a fortress and it had a huge vault, a likely bomb shelter in this troubled age – and a surfeit of office space within it. Designed by the architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome; Furness had constructed the exterior structural fabric employing nine thousand tons of Georgia marble and the interior with Carerra marble quarried in Italy. A relief of Stephen Giraud, the bank’s founder was carved above the colonnaded entrance – a bust of J. Edgar Hoover’s own head would have fitted well in that space - and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where – in an ideal, fairer and much more just world – the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have deigned to greet dignitaries visiting his domain...
But it was not to be.
There was a knock at the door and he turned around as Clyde Tolson walked into the office with a sheaf of files under his left arm. His friend and right hand man was a little breathless and had obviously been suppressing a broad smile for some minutes.
“Do you recollect I said the boys reported that there was something fishy about the shooting in Berkeley on the first night of the fighting in Washington, Chief?” He prefaced rhetorically, permitting his suppressed good humour to vent via an unusually toothy grin.
“Berkeley, yes,” Hoover acknowledged, his normally staccato delivery always softened in the presence of his closest associate in both life and in his work.
Of the two men Tolson was the younger, by five years, and the taller men; and his was the calmer temperament and the more meticulous mind. He was a man who preferred to stand back out of the photo line; he had enjoyed his share of the fame in the shoot outs of the thirties but cared little for the constant limelight that shone on his close friend and boss of well over thirty years. He was a practical man, never happier than when he was immersed in the minutiae of administering the great, complex workings of the nation’s one great Federal law enforcement organisation. However, if he was being honest with himself, in retrospect he realized he had been in a little bit of rut in recent years and the excitement of the last six weeks had shaken him out of the doldrums.
“Four agents gunned down,” Tolson reminded his friend, so enthused by the news he had brought to Hoover that the words tripped from his lips before he reminded himself that the Director was hardly likely to need to be reminded of the murder, or the circumstances of those murders, of four of their agents.
“There was a problem with the identification of one of the bodies?” J. Edgar Hoover queried as the two men naturally gravitated to comfortable chairs in front of the Director’s massive, uncluttered desk in the window. Any other man visiting Hoover would have been required to stand before that desk and recite his report from memory.
Clyde Tolson rifled the topmost case file.
“Christie, Dwight.”
“There was some mess up with the fingerprint report?”
“We now know the reason for the mismatch was that the man identified at the scene as Agent Christie could not have been Christie, Chief.”
Hoover scowled, said nothing.
“The fingerprints don’t match. And the dead man in Berkeley had had his appendix removed!”
“Why didn’t the people in California pick up on this before now?”
“Things were a mess out there, Chief,” Tolson obser
ved, “and then we pulled everybody off what they were doing to focus on the Los Angeles operation.”
J. Edgar Hoover was still scowling. Normally his friend would not make allowances for oversights and the negligent conduct of his duties by any agent. It was symptomatic of the strange times in which they lived that he could not presently find it in his heart to take Tolson, albeit mildly, to task for his sentimentality.
“But even so,” his boss retorted as an afterthought.
“I will review the actions of our people in the normal way when things have quietened down, Chief,” he was assured. Clyde Tolson was FBI Associate Director responsible for the oversight of discipline within the Bureau and he took his duties very, very seriously.
“I know, I know.” Hoover’s curiosity about the other files his friend had brought to him was growing apace. “But Agent Christie’s gun was recovered from the scene?”
“Yes. Fragments of a round fired from his gun were discovered in the wall of one of the downstairs rooms, and, we think, from the unidentified body. The technical boys can’t be sure because they have been unable to reconstruct large enough pieces of either round. Both rounds were either hollow-point or soft-headed, or maybe scored, the way hunters sometimes tamper with their bullets. Both rounds disintegrated on impact with their target. But,” Tolson added, his tone that of a man about to pull a rabbit from a hat at a party, “several of the substantially intact rounds recovered at the scene were found not to match any of the guns of the dead agents. So,” he sucked in a gulp of air, “the labs started looking for matches and hey presto, the gun that fired at least four of the rounds in the Berkeley shootings was used in three separate killings between February and September last year.”
“Where?” Hoover spat.
“One in Sacramento on February 9th, one in Glendale on June 20th, and one in San Diego on September 3rd. Sacramento and Glendale look like mob hits, single male victims with known organised crime links. San Diego was a guy and his wife playing golf. The victim was in real estate, no known mob links, no criminal record.” Tolson closed the first file on his lap. “Our people realized there was a problem with the ID of the fourth body three days ago and the technical guys have been turning over Agent Christie’s apartment in San Francisco ever since. They haven’t found prints matching the unidentified dead man in Berkeley, but,” he grinned like a kid who has just hooked a catfish, “they’ve turned up something even better, Chief!”
“What, Clyde?” Hoover could hardly contain himself now.
“You remember those shootings and rapes on military bases last fall? And those suicides that the Army and the Air Force wouldn’t let us onto Department of Defense property to investigate?”
The Director of the FBI was still angry about that. He was a man who never forgot a slight and made a point of holding grudges for all time. Attorney General Kennedy and his Deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach had failed to give his requests for intervention the priority he had judged necessary. He had known the Department of Defense was hiding something from him!
“The lab has matched prints taken at Christie’s apartment with those discovered on the car of Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gunther, he was head of security at Ent Air Force Base on the night of the Cuban Missiles War. He supposedly committed suicide.”
“Remind me of the particulars, Clyde.”
“One night he drove out into the hills, put his service pistol – a Remington-Rand forty-five calibre piece – in his mouth and blew out his brains, Chief. There was no suicide note and there had been no previous indication that he suffered from depression. It was his youngest boy’s birthday in a week or so, he was happily married and coming up to retirement. His wife said they were planning to go down to Sonora. Gunther had trouble with old war wounds – Guadalcanal, I think – and the wife said it would do him good to feel the sun on his face every morning.”
Tolson paused for breath.
“It gets better, Chief. The prints from Christie’s apartment and Colonel Gunther’s car match with those found at the scene of a homicide and rape in Colorado Springs. A really twisted one. A man called Carl Drinkwater – he was some kind of computer whiz at NORAD and his wife Martha. Their kids, too. The husband was killed with a single headshot, we don’t know if that was before or after his wife was raped and strangled, or the two kids died. A boy and a girl, the oldest not yet four; blunt force trauma to the skull. Martha Drinkwater was approximately three months pregnant when she was murdered. The lab recovered a deformed .44 calibre Magnum round from a hardwood structural support. Analysis is ongoing to establish if this bullet was fired from the same gun that was used in as many as five other killings since last fall.”
J. Edgar Hoover’s scowl had morphed into an evil grimace.
His friend would not have briefed him thus and saved the best for last unless it was a real show stopper.
“Do we have a match for these prints, Clyde?”
“Cheney,” Tolson smiled. “John Herbert, AKA Galen Cheney!”
Chapter 60
Saturday 1st February 1964
Oak Hill, Wethersfield, Connecticut
The Betancourt family’s summer ‘weekend’ retreat – as befitted a country hideaway where senior Democrats all the way back to FDR’s time had secretly met in conclave to foment forthcoming plots and coups - was a large, much modernised old six bedroom colonial style house dating from the middle of the nineteenth century.
Dan Brenckmann’s only previous visit to his boss’s hideaway in the rolling hills and forests of Connecticut had been on the night of the October War; the night his kid sister Tabatha had been consumed by the thermonuclear firestorm over Buffalo. Just thinking about that night chilled his soul. It had been several days before he had learned his parents had survived the bomb that destroyed Quincy, and many weeks before his submariner elder brother Walter junior had returned from patrol and checked in with Ma and Pa. It went without saying that his kid brother Sam had gone missing for several months, only resurfacing again in the spring. However, on that dreadful late October night in 1962 he had suddenly been confronted with the possibility that not just Tabatha but his parents and both his brothers might have been swept away in the maelstrom. It had been the worst night of this life redeemed only by the fact that he had been with Gretchen.
Dan switched off the engine of his company Lincoln – only a 1960 model because he was the new boy at Betancourt and Sallis, Attorneys at Law, of Boston, Massachusetts – and clambered stiffly to his feet in the cool, overcast late New England morning. It had rained heavily on the way up, worked the Lincoln’s wipers almost to destruction until miraculously, possibly serendipitously, the deluge had lifted as he turned off Interstate 91 to follow the twisting back roads up into the hills.
The first time he had come to Wethersfield Mrs Nordstrom, for over three decades the Betancourt’s housekeeper had viewed Dan as if he was something which might, conceivably, have just crawled out from beneath a slimy stone. Kathleen Nordstrom was a large, fierce looking matronly woman of indeterminate later middle years whose stern visage was amply sufficient to turn a strong man’s knees to jelly.
Understandably, when that unbending visage suddenly dissolved into a broad, maternal smile whose authenticity was vouchsafed by the twinkle in her grey-green eyes Dan was positively, well, disconcerted...
Kathleen Nordstrom bustled down the steps.
“Miss Gretchen told us your good news yesterday, Mr Brenckmann,” she declared proudly.
Dan blushed, glanced to his feet.
Everything had happened at once in the last week.
His father’s letter - he had not had a chance to properly say goodbye to Ma and Pa before they flew to England as his country’s ‘ambassadorial couple’ – had been waiting for him on his return to Boston.
‘I should have discussed all this with you, son,’ the letter had begun. ‘But you have been busy in DC and Philadelphia, and Claude,’ Claude was Claude Betancourt, Gretchen’s father, ‘and I had to make
arrangements in a hurry. Cutting to the chase; I have sold my law practice to Betancourt and Sallis. The deal creates a small trust fund for you and your brothers which ought to pay you a modest stipend over the years; and you will with immediate effect – assuming you are amenable – be made a full Associate of Betancourt and Sallis. To be honest, given that you are slated to be a counsel to the Warren Commission and between you and me that could go on for years, I took the view that trying to keep the Boston practice alive was going to be an unreasonably tough call...’
His father had previously confided that when he came back from England he and Ma planned to retire, probably to the Florida Keys or maybe the West Coast, and that he did not want to ‘burden’ him with trying to keep Walter Brenckmann and Son Associates afloat when ‘clearly’ his career had taken ‘a new and exciting direction’.
‘One last thing. I freely confess that I asked Claude Betancourt to take you under his wing when the Navy sent me to England last year. I did not ask him, or expect him, to give you any special preferment. Whatever assistance Claude has given you is because he sees great promise in you as a man and as an attorney. Claude has been a good friend to me over the years but he is not a sentimental man. It was with enormous pride when I learned that he sees in you exactly the same fine qualities that your mother and I have always seen in you. Regardless of your situation with Gretchen – which I think is as big a mystery to Claude as it is to your mother and I – you have a big opportunity with Betancourt and Sallis and it is my, humble hope, that you grasp it with both hands.’
Dan grinned lopsidedly.
“I’m still trying to get used to my good fortune, Mrs Nordstrom.”
“Gretchen is up and about,” the housekeeper informed him. “She’s running around in that chair getting under our feet! She’s been on the telephone all morning. There were two newspaper men here yesterday. She is supposed to be taking things easy! Resting!”