by James Philip
Unfortunately, he and McNamara had a long, disputatious, and more than somewhat fractious history. During the Second World War Robert McNamara had been a relatively junior officer assigned to the Office of Statistical Control serving in India, China and the Marianas, coincidentally following Curtis LeMay from one command to the next, attempting to apply statistical analytical techniques to the operations of the Big Cigar’s bombers. To Old Iron Pants ‘statistical analytical techniques’ were what you applied to automobile production lines, not combat. LeMay and McNamara were antipathetic characters who had never really seen eye to eye; and not surprisingly the drastic ‘Peace Dividend’ cut backs in the Air Force budget had prompted an ever widening rift between the two men. When LeMay had found out that McNamara had once described him in an interview as being ‘extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal’ he had ignored the subsequent caveat, offered freely and generously by the Secretary of Defence that ‘he [LeMay] was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in the war’.
The two men had not spoken privately for several months.
But then neither had many of the members of the Administration been talking to each other either.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force raced cars in the desert like a madman because even if had he still been talking to the idiots in DC; it was extremely unlikely they would have been listening to anything Old Iron Pants said to them.
Chapter 15
Tuesday 26th November 1963
Department of Justice Building
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC
Gretchen Betancourt’s first impression of the legendary Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that she was being introduced to an over-sized wrinkled toad dressed up in a morning suit. His slicked back black hair and peculiarly young-old physiognomy – was he wearing makeup? –would have been comical had not the man’s evil reputation preceded him into the plush conference room of the United States Deputy Attorney General.
“I understood that this was to be a private meeting, Mr Katzenbach,” J. Edgar Hoover, the sixty-eight year old Director of the FBI said. He spoke fast, with each of his words threatening to fall over the next. It was a technique he had adopted over half-a-century ago to master a juvenile stutter. Now he used it as a weapon.
“Miss Betancourt will note down any action points that we agree, Mr Director.”
“Miss Betancourt?” Hoover snapped, eyes narrowing.
Gretchen realised he was searching his memory for the name, making connections, formulating the investigations he would launch into her background; wondering if his agents might stumble across something useful against her father. Nicholas Katzenbach had told her not to speak; she was there to learn, and to distract ‘the old man’.
But not ‘in that way’ because ‘the Director’s peccadilloes are of another kind altogether.’
Gretchen’s boss had told her the meeting would be brief because J. Edgar Hoover would get up and storm out at the earliest possible opportunity.
Again ‘because that is the sort of man he is and he knows he can get away with it.’
Gretchen looked up from her shorthand pad, stopped scribbling for a moment. Her shorthand was diabolical but Katzenbach had told her to ‘just pretend’. So she was pretending to the best of her ability to be a genuine shorthand ‘whiz’. She met the piercing stare of the nation’s self-proclaimed greatest crime fighter. Inwardly, she flinched, unprepared for such cold reptilian hostility.
“About the case of Dwayne John?” Nicholas Katzenbach asked pleasantly.
J. Edgar Hoover blinked, looked to the US Deputy Attorney General.
“I am not available to be summoned by a junior Cabinet member at his or her convenience, Mr Katzenbach.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Director. When this ‘interview’ was scheduled I was at pains to make clear to your appointments secretary that we should meet at a mutually convenient time and place. I am sure we can dig out a transcript of the actual conversation if it would be helpful.”
The hairs on the back of Gretchen’s neck were standing up on end.
The two men in the room detested and resented each other with such a fierce intensity that she was terrified she was going to get sucked into the fire.
“The case of Dwayne John,” Nicholas Katzenbach continued politely, apparently with immense deference, “a twenty-three year old man from Jackson, Alabama, currently held without charge in San Francisco under the ‘authority’ of a certain Special Agent Michael Kevin Jameson. Forgive me, I was unaware that under Californian law an FBI agent had powers equivalent to that of a District Judge?”
“The man in question is wanted on an Alabama warrant for the abduction, rape and transportation across state boundaries of a minor,” J. Edgar Hoover replied, shooting words like nasal machine gun bullets.
“The young lady in question being a Miss Darlene Lefebure?”
“Just so!”
“The lady in question was twenty when she was expelled from her family home by her father,” Nicholas Katzenbach stated flatly. “There is no prima facie evidence that she was abducted, or that she has been ‘raped’ by anybody. Let alone Mr John.”
“There is compelling circumstantial and other evidence.”
“None of which anybody took into account prior to Mr John becoming a member of the congregation at the Ebenezer Street Baptist Chapel in Atlanta, Georgia?”
“Yes. That is my understanding.”
“The case file speaks of contacts with subversive and communistic elements?”
“Yes.”
“One of whom is alleged to be the President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a Mr Terry Francois, a prominent black lawyer in that city?”
“Yes. A trouble maker and communist agitator.”
Gretchen’s pencil scratched nonsense on her pad. She quickly flipped onto the next page.
“Um,” the United States Deputy Attorney General grunted. The large airy room seemed very empty with just three people in it, all three seated at one end of the long conference table. “I visited Washington State yesterday. At the request, I should say, of the White House. A question was raised as to how the situation in Bellingham could have arisen in the first place without the alarm first being raised in DC?” He raised a hand before the old man with the angry eyes could interrupt. “Or how it is that the Administration can be so well informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the activities of a young black man acting as a bona fide personal messenger for Dr King’s organisation in Atlanta; at the same time as the FBI has been unable to furnish virtually no information about the person, or persons behind the Bellingham situation?”
To Gretchen’s astonishment the toad-like old man in the morning suit sniffed dismissively, got to his feet, brushed himself down and walked out of the room. She looked to her boss who smiled a thin smile.
“Bellingham was in the fall out zone north of Seattle, wasn’t it?” She asked in a small voice.
He nodded. Bellingham was in a box marked ‘need to know’ and Gretchen Betancourt did not need to know what he knew about Bellingham.
“You’ll probably be followed for the next few days. Don’t be alarmed. That’s the way the old monster works. The FBI probably opened a file on you when you became a junior counsel in my office. Most likely because your father is Claude Betancourt. Director Hoover’s people can be very efficient when they want to be.”
Gretchen had collected her wits.
“What just happened, sir?”
“I deliberately offended Director Hoover. Mr Hoover will want to take some kind of petty revenge on me for whatever slight he imagines I have just caused him. Because he has a very dirty mind – dirty and nasty, I might add – he will now order his people to uncover evidence that you and I are inappropriately involved with each other. He doesn’t have anything he can use against me, you see. That sort of thing worries a man
like Hoover. Things might get a little rocky for you in the next few days. Think of it as a test of whether or not you really want a career in DC. One piece of advice,” he added, ruefully, “you might want to warn that fellow you were with last night to watch out for himself.”
Dan Brenckmann was staying at the Colonial Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. After Gretchen had written a note for the Deputy Attorney General about the recent meeting with the Director of the FBI, she placed a call to the front desk of the hotel and left a message for Dan to call her that evening at the apartment she, or rather, her father was renting for her on Cathedral Avenue.
Why didn’t I give him my apartment number last night?
Dan rang her at around eight that evening, an hour or so after she had got in.
“Hi, Gretchen,” he said brightly. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, it is nothing really. Would you like to meet up for a drink?”
“Yes. When did you have in mind?”
“About an hour from now. I’ll get a cab to your hotel.”
“Okay...”
The bar of the Colonial Hotel seemed empty apart from a middle aged woman with a ferocious perm dreamily playing slow tunes on a miniature grand piano in one corner. The bar’s emptiness was a little illusory, for as Gretchen’s eye’s acclimatised to the gloomy mood lighting she realised there were several people, couples and men talking business around the edges of the big room which funnelled towards a small, old-fashioned bar with mirrors at the back of the building.
Dan waved and came to greet her.
He did not attempt to peck her cheek, her expression was too forbidding.
“What is it?” He inquired.
“I met J. Edgar Hoover today and my boss says the old monster will get his agents to dig up dirt about me. You know, evidence that I’m having an affair with Mr Katzenbach, or something...”
“You’re not?”
“Of course not!”
“I didn’t think you were.” This Dan said hurriedly, a little taken aback by the spontaneous vehemence of the woman.
“I’m not having an affair with anybody!” Gretchen hissed angrily. This genuinely surprised her companion which infuriated her even more. “Oh! I knew this was a bad idea!”
“Having a drink with an old chum from Yale?”
“No! Thinking I’d feel better if I talked to somebody about it!”
Dan ordered a whiskey for himself and a Bloody Mary for Gretchen.
“Well, now that you are here you might as well tell me about it,” he suggested. “Whatever it is?”
“My boss says they will probably come after you too,” she confessed guiltily.
“That’s okay. I have no skeletons in my cupboard.”
“I’m sorry, Dan. It’s all my fault that you are involved in this.”
Dan forced a smile to veil how concerned he was to see his friend – whatever else Gretchen was she was a friend – so unnaturally perturbed.
“I’m sure I’ll survive,” he assured her.
“My boss said I should look at this as if it was a test.” She shrugged. “You know, to see if I’ve got what it takes to make a go of things in DC.”
“Coping with being harassed by the FBI is a pre-requisite of making a go of things in this town?”
“So it would seem.”
“My, my,” Dan mused out aloud, “it is a funny old World, isn’t it?”
Chapter 16
Wednesday 27th November 1963
Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
The big old house had been built – actually, half-built – by a silent movie star in the late 1920s who had drunk himself to death when, so the story went, people fell about laughing on the set whenever he auditioned for a ‘talking’ part. They said he was one of those big, deep-chested guys who had a high pitched girl’s voice. Anyway, the house had been left derelict, empty, save for the snakes and the rats, for several years. The real estate magnet who had acquired it for a song as part of a job lot of falling down buildings and vacant plots of land in 1938 had used it and its outhouses for his offices and to accommodate his workers in the Canyon; then Second War had kick started a new California land grab and the rest, as they say, is history. Much of the house’s singular character and all its quirks including its name, ‘Gretsky’s’, resulted from the period of three years when it was the long-departed real estate tycoon’s bridgehead in the Hollywood Hills.
The original building was still uncompleted, its eastern end terminating in a slab-sided wooden wall. Fortuitously, this was the side of the house invisible from the road otherwise passersby would think that a giant shark had bitten off one end of the structure. Clustered around the abbreviated mansion – even what remained of the original design was very, very big with fifteen rooms and a thirty feet long, now dry, oval swimming pool on a terrace hanging precipitously over a twenty feet drop to the bush and scrub below – were the ‘barracks’, big solid timber ‘long houses’ partitioned into smaller ‘living areas’ joined together with a crazy tangle of plumbing, and overhead electricity and telephone cables. Weeds and vines constantly tried to envelope these outhouses; in the summer the trees and vegetation kept the sun off the roofs for several hours each day and in the fall and winter sheltered the ramshackle cluster of dwellings from the dry wind off the mountains.
Judy Dorfmann had fallen in love with Gretsky’s the moment that she and Sam Brenckmann had trudged up the hill from distant Mulholland Drive that dusty spring afternoon at the end of their ‘travels’. Of course, at the time they had not known that their travels had ‘ended’; just that for the moment they could go no farther until they had rested up and regained a little strength and optimism.
‘Sam, baby!’ A wiry wild-haired woman in her late forties had screeched and thrown herself into Judy’s partner’s weary arms. ‘We all thought you we dead!’
That was the first time Judy met Sabrina Henschal. ‘Sabrina’ was not her real name; Susan Cora Henschal had come to Laurel Canyon in 1956 blowing every cent of the money her recently deceased father had left her on Gretsky’s. After three marriages she had ‘given up on men, well husbands, leastways’ and needed a place to live, paint and to party. Gretsky’s had been open house to like minded spirits ever since.
Initially, Judy had wondered what she had walked into as Sabrina, a striking woman who had spent too much time in the California sun and lived life faster than most, had clung to Sam like she was never going to let him go ever again.
It transpired that Sam had moved on from being a ‘fuck mate’ to the status of a ‘favourite son’ sometime in the summer before the war; although this had not been immediately apparent for some minutes that first afternoon. Sabrina had eventually stopped hugging and kissing the tall, exhausted much younger man – he had been exactly, give or take a few days, half her age the last time she had seen him - and turned her amused, wide-eyed and hugely curious attention onto Judy.
Judy had been far too exhausted to take offence at being studied, in those first few seconds, rather like an exhibit in a zoological park.
‘You,” she decided, ‘I like!’ Sabrina had exclaimed even before she and Judy had exchanged a single word.
Since that day in late February the two women had become true sisters. Back then Gretsky’s was a falling down shambles, nobody took responsibility for anything, and many of the rooms in the big house and most of the out buildings were neglected and uninhabitable. Things were slowly getting better now Judy was the official ‘house mother’; and Sabrina had been transported into the next best thing to seventh heaven, finally able at last to concentrate entirely on her ‘art’, her painting and pottery, and on bedding the exotic and often bewildered young men, and sometimes women, who briefly swooped through her orbit.
The ‘free love’ thing, Sam had confided a little sheepishly, once he and Judy had settled in the long back bedroom on the first floor of the big half-house, ‘gets old after a while’, as evinced by the fact that Sabrina pre
sently shared Gretsky’s with three other ‘settled’ couples; Judy and Sam, Paul and Rosa, and Lorreta and Suzi, and an otherwise transient collection of visitors and guests, including musicians passing through and other freewheeling artists like Sabrina. There was always music in Gretsky’s, guitars mainly but also flutes and recorders. One day a stand up piano had been left overnight in the courtyard around which the outhouses backed onto the main building. Paul and Rosa had two small kids, a boy and a girl both under five years old. Suzi had a six year old son. Judy pinched herself now and then because it was all too idyllic, too good to be true. The World might be horribly messed up but the last few months had been the happiest of her life; living in a friendly commune beneath the California sun with a man she loved and adored, surrounded by new friends and the baby...
Of course, that first night had been truly weird.
‘It’s too early in the season for there to be many snakes,’ Sabrina had explained matter-of-factly, “but make sure you know where you are putting your feet around the outhouses and the scrub. The place is a bit overgrown this year. I’ve been meaning to do something about it but,’ the older woman had shrugged her bony shoulders and grinned broadly, ‘Sam will look after you.’
That first night they had spread blankets on bare boards and slept through most of the next day...
The sunshine was pouring into the living room that morning.
“Oh, there you are!” Sabrina declared, flopping melodramatically onto the threadbare sofa beside her friend. Today she had her hair drawn back into a severe pigtail flecked with orange and green paint. She was wearing one of the massively over-sized men’s shirts – and very little else – that she favoured when she was working in her studio. The older woman leant over towards Judy and rested the palm of her right hand on her friend’s swollen belly.