by James Philip
Much as she prided herself on being a modern woman; Gretchen prided herself even more on being a very old-fashioned modern woman.
Gretchen gathered the files on her desk into a neat heap.
She reached for the phone.
“This is Miss Betancourt. Can you find me five minutes in the Deputy Attorney General’s diary as soon as possible please?”
The woman at the other end of the line asked if it was ‘important’.
“Yes, it is.”
The woman at the other end of the line tested this assertion.
“Mr Katzenbach is out of DC at this time. You could meet him off his flight when it touches down at Andrews Air Force Base this evening at around midnight, Miss Betancourt?”
In other words ‘you might think that you need to talk to the United States Deputy Attorney General urgently but I don’t!’
Gretchen did not take offence; she understood that the woman at the other end of the line had her own priorities and that top of her list of priorities was making sure junior departmental counsels did not waste her boss’s time. Most times offering a diary spot in the middle of the night several miles from the centre of DC would have been a sure fire way of putting off the pushiest of underlings.
Gretchen Betancourt was not in the least put off.
She had actually expected to be offered a diary slot sometime next month. The opportunity to speak to her boss as soon as tonight was like waving a red rag at a bull. And besides, what she had just learned from the FBI files on her desk would not wait.
“That will be fine. I’ll go out to Andrews Field tonight.”
Chapter 8
Monday 25th November 1963
State Capitol Building, Olympia, Washington
United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach knew exactly what he was doing in Washington State; he just did not know why he was being asked to do it. This was a situation he had got used to in the last thirteen months as his professional relationship with the President’s younger brother, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, had steadily deteriorated. His boss seemed to regard the role of the Attorney General as being one of acting like some kind of occasional national District Attorney who was constantly running for re-election; Katzenbach happened to think that the man who was responsible for the Justice Department, and therefore, for upholding the respect for, and the good administration of, the law of the land ought to be in his office in Washington once in a while. He also thought that Bobby Kennedy was far too preoccupied with some mythical, vaguely imagined great post-war American future in which men of all creeds and colours would live in perfect harmony than he was with the grimly mundane present. Most of all Nick Katzenbach was royally ticked off always being the one who had to tell Governors and State Legislatures that Washington DC – mostly Bobby Kennedy – had decided not to support this or that initiative, or entirely legitimate emergency adaptation to the reality of governance in the post October War United States of America.
It was a bad day when the US Attorney General started turning a blind eye to State’s Rights. Katzenbach had nearly resigned his post a month ago. The Vice-President had talked him out of it; Lyndon Baines Johnson had looked him in the eye and persuaded him it was his duty not to jump off the sinking ship.
‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’ LBJ had growled as he quirked a wan smile. ‘If ever there was the time for that sort of talk this is it. Things might look bad now but how bad would it have been if we had lost the goddammed war?’
Duty was a thing that ran in Nick Katzenbach’s veins; duty and service was the hallmark of his family. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Trenton he was the son of father who had been an Attorney General of New Jersey and a mother who was the first female President of the New Jersey State Board of Education. His Uncle had been a Mayor of Trenton and a Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Although proud of his German descent and raised a devout Episcopalian; at the time of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 when he was still a junior at Princeton he had immediately volunteered for war service. Trained as an air navigator his 310th Bomb Group B-25 Mitchell bomber had been shot down in February 1943, condemning him to two years as a prisoner of war in camps in Italy and Germany where he had eventually ended up in the giant POW complex known as Stalag Luft III - near the town of Sagan in Southern Silesia – of ‘great escape’ fame from which seventy-six allied airmen had escaped in 1944.
At Yale after the war he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal, and between 1947 and 1949 a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College in Oxford, England. Admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1950 he had arrived in his present lofty position via a succession of ever more high profile appointments. From 1950 he was an associate in the firm of Katzenbach, Gildea and Rudner, he had been an advisor to the General Counsel to the United States Air Force for two years, a member of the faculty of the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, an associate professor of law at Yale for four years until 1956, and professor of law at the University of Chicago before joining the Justice Department in 1961. Since June 1962 he had been United States Deputy Attorney General.
His troubles with his immediate boss had first come to a head that summer when he had been sent down to Tuscaloosa to confront the most Southern of Democratic Governors, George Wallace. Bobby Kennedy made a lot of sympathetic noises about the Civil Rights movement; yet was always waiting for the ‘right moment’ and or, the ‘best time’ to act. Katzenbach’s part in the infamous Tuscaloosa ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Door’ incident was immortalised in TV, film and still pictures which had been broadcast across the nation and blazed from a hundred newspaper front pages. Governor George Wallace, a pugnacious segregationist with little love and no respect for effete northern liberals – a group which included the entire Kennedy Administration in his book – had melodramatically ‘stood’ in front of the door of the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama barring the enrolment of two black students. His stunt might have worked had not Katzenbach, backed by Federal Marshalls and members of the Alabama National Guard confronted Wallace.
It was over a month since Katzenbach had sent a paper to both Kennedy brothers demanding that something had to be done to ‘counter and combat the proliferation of wild and dangerous conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances leading up to the recent Cuban Missiles War’. His suggestion was to establish a Joint Standing Committee comprising members of both Congress and the Senate chaired by somebody of unimpeachable integrity who would ‘command the widest possible respect in the country’. To obviate any suspicion that the Administration was attempting to ‘cover up’ material facts relevant to the work of such ‘a Commission’ the President would issue clear instructions in his role as Commander-in-Chief that all witnesses called by the Commission would automatically be granted immunity from prosecution or legal redress, providing they gave their evidence truthfully under oath. He had further proposed that the remit of the Committee should be to examine the ‘causes and conduct of the war and to definitively document the same’. It was his contention that at the outset the President should make a commitment that the ‘findings of the Commission would be published in full at the earliest time’. He had floated several names of men who might be suitable to chair the Commission; at the head of that list, and by far the strongest candidate, was Earl Warren, a former Attorney General of California and Governor of that State, who was currently serving as the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States.
He and his boss, the President’s younger brother, had still not discussed ‘the paper’, and now Katzenbach had been despatched on what had seemed like a wild goose chase to Washington State at the last moment to supposedly ‘stop Al Rosellini doing something dumb’.
Bobby Kennedy had admitted he was afraid ‘the situation’ in Washington State could turn into a ‘second Civil War’; Katzenbach had refrained from asking him about the ongoing ‘situations’ around Chicago, or inquiring when ‘wild west lawlessness’ in
other bomb-damaged areas ceased to be a law and order issue and became an ‘insurgency’. It was a conversation they had had several times during the long hot summer of riots and widespread violent disorder across the North American continent. The nascent Civil Rights agenda had, in the Deputy Attorney General’s opinion been mistakenly put on the back burner when it was painfully obvious that addressing it head on was an essential part of the solution to the broader post-war societal malaise afflicting the nation.
There was a helicopter waiting for Katzenbach and his small party at McChord Air Force Base as the chartered Pan Am Boeing 707 came to a halt on the rain lashed tarmac. The United States Deputy Attorney General tried not to flinch as the rain drove into his face when he emerged from the jetliner. The rain was no more radioactive than it had been before the war – give or take an incremental increase in the general background radiation level on a par with that caused by unrestricted atmospheric testing in the seventeen years before the October War, or so some scientists claimed – but some days the rain just felt wrong. Katzenbach knew he was being irrational; but the sensation of unease lingered. Perhaps, parents were intrinsically less rational about these things. He had children approaching early adolescence and often he asked himself what sort of World he and his contemporaries were bequeathing future generations.
The conference began the moment Katzenbach walked into Governor Rosellini’s meeting room in the Washington State Capitol Building. Hands were shaken warmly, and excessively civil and respectful greetings exchanged. And then the supernumeraries were asked to leave and the gloves came off with a vengeance.
“If you’ve come all the way from Washington to slap our wrists and to tell us we’ve been naughty boys,” Albert Rosellini declared bluntly, “forget it. The only way we still know the Administration exists in this state is because the IRS keeps sending letters to people who’ve been dead a year!”
Katzenbach forced a grimace as the players settled around the big oval table in the middle of the room, overhead the ceiling arched imperiously from marble-faced columns half-sunk into the cathedral thick masonry walls. A metaphor involving cathedrals was as apt in connection with this state capitol building as with the majority of such buildings across America; such buildings had been conceived and executed by the fathers of the Republic as great temples of freedom, monuments to an unreasoning, blind faith in democracy and a future that had seemed to them so full of limitless promise...
The United States Deputy Attorney General looked to Governor Brown of California. Pat Brown and Al Rosellini were broad, bespectacled men, Party stalwarts and gifted administrators who in former times had been bedrocks of the West Coast Democratic Party. They were men who attracted no undue attention in a crowd and whose steely, level stares were the outward signatures of minds calculating odds like poker players in High Noon. Both men were stony cold realists who understood exactly how the system worked and were, with no small justification, close to despairing of the Federal Government.
Texas born forty-one year old Mark Odom Hatfield, the Republican twenty-ninth Governor of Oregon, cut a slightly aloof, patrician figure sitting between his fellow West Coast Governors. Of the three, Hatfield remained something of an unknown quantity to the Deputy Attorney General. However, everything Katzenbach knew about Hatfield was impressive, not least because the man – who was of his own World War II generation – had made such a success of his life and chosen careers without any of the benefits which Katzenbach readily admitted that he had enjoyed.
Hatfield’s father had disappeared from the scene when he was a young boy and he had been raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. The family had moved to Salem, Oregon in the 1920s where his mother, Dovie, had taught junior high school. Hatfield had served in the Navy – as a landing craft officer at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa - in the 1945 war, afterwards attending Willamette University and graduating from Stanford before returning to Oregon as a professor of political science at Willamette. As long ago as 1953 he had introduced legislation in the Oregon House of Representatives banning discrimination on the basis of race or colour in public accommodation. He had become Governor of Oregon in 1959 at his first attempt, and nobody who had met him had any problem understanding why.
“You have every right to concern yourself about the possibility of a State facing insurrection resorting to extra-judicial remedies, Mr Katzenbach,” the Governor of Oregon observed. “What I think we have here is a misunderstanding – in DC, that is - of the nature and the dimensions of the problems we are beginning to face here on the West Coast.”
Katzenbach cleared his throat, glancing thoughtfully at the fifth man in the room. This last man was grey, weary but oddly distinguished in his crumpled infantry battledress. The old soldier was watching him with heavy-lidded eyes, sizing him up.
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had won a Congressional Medal of Honour in the Ardennes leading the spearhead of Patton’s armoured breakthrough to relieve Bastogne. He had been invalided back home with the sort of wounds that normally ruled the rest of a mortal man’s life. Nevertheless, Dempsey had inveigled his way onto the Operations Staff for the planned 1946 invasion of the Japanese Home Islands and had been on his way out to the Far East when the Nagasaki bomb ended the war. Now the old warrior was fighting another kind of war. What was it Douglas MacArthur once said?
‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away...’
MacArthur got a lot of things wrong; perhaps he had never met Colin Dempsey.
“My boys,” the first general officer in the American Army to lead troops into battle on American soil since the end of the Indian Wars sighed, “went in hard and mean at Bellingham because if they hadn’t we might not have been having this ‘conversation’ today, Mr Katzenbach.”
Albert Rosellini grunted.
“There was a fucking Soviet submarine in Bellingham harbour!”
The US Deputy Attorney General had been told that this was ‘hogwash’ by an aide.
“I am informed that the Navy is investigating that sighting...”
“It was long gone before the Navy got its thumb out of its arse,” Major General Dempsey said flatly. “Besides, the Navy has mothballed so many ships lately it probably hasn’t got enough patrol boats to secure Puget Sound, let alone the coast further north. We found Soviet infantry weapons on some of the bodies down on the Bellingham waterfront. Two of my M48s were taken out by Soviet RPG-7 rockets at close range in the street fighting. We recovered one of the launchers intact.”
The Pentagon had complacently dismissed the reported sighting of a ‘possible’ hostile submarine out of hand and attached ‘no significance to the apparent discovery of Soviet type infantry weapons in the ruins’. However, the Army had provided a small cadre of advisors to ‘put a little backbone into the National Guard formations’, and the Navy had provided a Squadron of Marine Corps A-1 Skyraiders for the ‘police operation’ in and around Bellingham, otherwise, the Pentagon had done its best to quietly wash its hands of the whole sordid affair.
“The Federal Government,” Dempsey went on, “made a very bad mistake not snuffing out the original ‘no go’ areas at the outset. Now, potentially, we’re going to have to burn out every single one if we are serious about ever being one nation again.”
Katzenbach said nothing.
The old soldier’s eyes bored into his face.
“So far as Bellingham is concerned,” he sighed, “the insurgents, bastards, whatever you want to call them, killed the last of the surviving civilians, all women, over a month ago as soon as they realised we had them hemmed in. Too many useless mouths to feed. They herded them out into the fields and woods outside the town and shot them. All the children and men were dead by then. I reckon it was a merciful release for the women who’d survived the last year in Bellingham.” Colin Dempsey forced a humourless smiled. “My boys didn’t take that many prisoners, Mr Katzenbach. I had a couple of the ‘officers’ we captured brought here. Perhaps, you’d like to talk to
them before you go back to DC?”
Chapter 9
Monday 25th November 1963
SUBRON Fifteen Command Compound, Alameda, California
Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite was an unremarkable looking man who bore an uncanny resemblance to former President Harry S. Truman. He was compactly built, slightly below average height and his deeply ingrained habits of organised, careful movement and thought were ideally suited to the Submarine Service which had been his home ever since he graduated near the top of his class at Annapolis in 1935. Braithwaite had been on an old S class boat at Pearl Harbour in December 1941; by 1943 he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander and given his own command. The end of the 1945 war had found his boat on patrol in the Tokyo Bay. For most of the last two decades he had been one of Hyman Rickover’s – the father of the United States Navy’s nuclear undersea fleet – right hand men, and six months ago he had been appointed flag officer Commander-in-Chief of Submarine Squadron Fifteen. In Navy talk COMSUBRON Fifteen.
Rear Admiral Braithwaite looked thoughtfully over the top of his rimless reading glasses at the young officer standing stiffly to attention before his desk.
“Stand easy, son,” Braithwaite directed. The thing that struck everybody who had ever met COMSUBRON Fifteen was the calm economy with which he deported himself. He never raised his voice, he never waved his arms, he rarely smiled and yet the men under his command instinctively trusted him. The older man closed the Manila file on his blotter and gave Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann his full and undivided attention. He knew that the young officer’s father was a liaison officer in England, a pretty thankless job the way things had panned out after the October War. He knew that Brenckmann’s kid sister had been killed in the war, and that his younger brother, a lawyer, had just been appointed to the Massachusetts bar; and that he had a second brother who seemed to have gone off the radar years ago. He also knew that Brenckmann’s mother was very active in post-war local self-help groups in Cambridge, and that both she and Walter Brenckmann senior had been registered Democrats before the war although neither had been politically ‘energized’ in the years prior to, or since last year’s ‘hostilities’. Braithwaite disliked the addition of a ‘political’ sub-section to the service dockets of the officers and the senior non-commissioned men under his command but these were bad times.