by James Philip
“But I thought...”
Miranda had thought Sam was dead. The Limonville Brothers Strummers Band was playing Chilliwack the night of the war. Everybody for miles around had been killed...
“You know Sam?” Walter asked, making polite conversation.
“Yes, sort of,” Miranda began to explain, her face flushing pinkly. “Well, vaguely, we lost touch before the war. I knew he was up around Seattle way the night of the war and...”
“Bellingham,” Walter supplied amiably.
“Bellingham?”
“Yes, it is a heck of a story. Sam fell out with the other musicians he was working with and ended up in Bellingham that night of the war. From what my Ma said the last time she wrote that’s where Sam met his,” the man frowned, it was not at all clear what the status of Sam’s latest girlfriend was, “girlfriend,” he said eventually.
“Girlfriend?” Miranda echoed stupidly because her mind was temporarily a deafening cacophony of yelling voices.
“Jodie, Janie, no, Judy, I think her name was. Yes, definitely Judy. Ma told me Sam had written to her to tell Ma and Pa he was still alive sometime back in the summer. Oh, and more recently to let them know he’d got his girlfriend pregnant and they were going to be grandparents...”
Miranda knew she was staring at the naval officer with her lower jaw virtually resting on her perfectly formed breasts. However, even though she knew she was gawping at him like a fish out of water she could not help herself.
Miranda would have completely gone to pieces right then had not there been movement at the door and a red-eyed, blotchy-faced Darlene Lefebure been led sniffling into the room. Having honestly believed that things could not conceivably get any worse, within the space of a few utterly disorientating seconds she now realised her mistake. Even when she had been on drugs she had not realised that God had such a cruel sense of humour!
Miranda stopped gawping like an idiot at Walter Brenckmann and stared disbelievingly at the young woman flanked by the two G-men.
This is not happening to me!
The last time Miranda Sullivan and Darlene Lefebure had seen each other – in fact the only time they had ever seen each other – they had both been off their heads. They had also been horizontal in a state of wanton undress on the same large, red-sheeted circular bed on the first floor of the big old house in the Haight District of San Francisco owned by Johnny Seiffert, and at different times that night they had both had very rough sex with Darlene’s black boyfriend. The last time Miranda had seen Darlene she was running out of the house in tears and Miranda herself had just been violently sick, mostly in her then much longer hair and over her feet.
That had been on the night of the war.
Thirteen months later both women were so changed in appearance from that night that they ought not to have instantly recognised each other; and yet in the way of these things they knew each other instantly.
Darlene Lefebure had shed her girlish puppy fat, trimmed down to a busty leanness, her complexion was unspotted, her hair was muddy brown, cut to dance on her shoulders and she was wearing a plan cream frock which pinched in to her much narrowed waist. The clumsy pretty girl of over a year ago had blossomed into womanhood.
For her part Miranda had abandoned the long blond siren’s hair, was dressed in a natty trouser suit, abandoned the rings and bangles on her fingers and wrists, and ceased to be the person she had been that dreadful night in Johnny Seiffert’s house on Haight Street.
The two young women stared at each other.
Each in their own way was too stunned to speak for some seconds.
Miranda recovered first.
“I think the room is a little crowded,” she said, not recognising her own voice. “If Lieutenant Brenckmann and I could speak to Miss Lefebure alone please?”
Chapter 18
Friday 29th November 1963
Department of Justice Building
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC
The United States Attorney General had a copy of that morning’s Washington Post on his desk when Nicholas Katzenbach walked into his office. The two men had had their differences, they were temperamentally unalike in many respects and in any true meritocracy their respective positions and status in the Administration might easily have been reversed. However, both men were practical political animals who understood that they lived in a World in which fairness and natural justice had not, and never would be a given of the human condition. It helped that on a personal level – when they were not locking horns about Department of Justice or other ‘political’ issues - they had always got on well; and that although they were hardly close friends they were allies theoretically committed to similar agendas. Most important, they realised that they needed each other.
“I didn’t know you had a thing for brunettes, Nick?” Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy chuckled as he waved for his right hand man to take a chair opposite him in front of his desk. Outside the rain beat against the windows, as if to reflect the darkening mood of the capital city. Things had been getting out of hand for some time and there was a general feeling that the moment when any one individual member of the Administration could do anything about it had long passed. Political bravura prevented a Cabinet member coming out and saying it in public; but hardly anybody at the top table retained a good feeling about the way the country, and its deteriorating relations with what was left of the World was headed. Over everything there hung a darkling cloud, as if there was a general consensus that it was only a matter of time before something dreadful overtook America.
These infrequent private meetings between the two men were rare opportunities for them to relax, to let down their guard and to stop pretending that the Government of the Unites States was actually in control of events.
“Director Hoover didn’t waste any time,” the United States Deputy Attorney General guffawed. “I warned my wife that this was coming but I still feel a little bit guilty putting Claude Betancourt’s girl through this shit.”
“We need to keep the old faggot away from Jack at the moment,” the younger Kennedy brother shrugged.
“You should have told me the ‘big initiative’ was the ‘Moon thing’,” Nick Katzenbach observed dryly, sidestepping any discussion of why exactly he and his boss needed to keep J. Edgar Hoover and his jackals ‘away’ from the President.
He had been in on the secret that the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America suffered from, among other things, an incurable and potentially disabling disease, Addison’s, for some months. Moreover, by going along with the cover up he was knowingly committing several offences, Federal felony counts for which if found guilty, he would surely face long sentences of imprisonment. But then sometimes adhering to the strict letter of the law and doing the right thing were mutually incompatible; and thus far his conscience was clear.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had first been diagnosed with Addison’s disease in London in 1947, aged thirty, shortly after he was elected to represent the 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts. He had probably suffered from Addison’s all his life; and at the very least it had complicated and exacerbated the injuries he had suffered during his war service in the Pacific. The symptoms of the disease included any or all of – usually most of – the following: severe and sometimes incapacitating pains in the legs, back and abdomen, random attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, hypoglycaemia, fevers and at the extreme end of the spectrum, convulsions, psychosis and syncope.
Katzenbach had been told by Bobby Kennedy that his elder brother had suffered most of the symptoms at one time or another since assuming the Presidency, and during the last awful year several of them in combination leading to short periods of bed-bound incapacity. Before the October War the President had met foreign leaders and ambassadors while experiencing minor manifestations of Addison’s; including confusion, slurred speech brought on by low blood pressure and sudden terrible bouts of lethargy.
Within hours of his retu
rn from Houston to deliver the ‘Moon Speech’ Jack Kennedy had suffered a near total physical collapse.
Such was the dysfunctionality of the Administration that the Vice-President had not been informed that the President was hors de combat; White House insiders simply assumed that Lyndon Johnson would be ‘fully in the picture’ because LBJ was the ultimate Washington insider, and in the past it had proven well nigh impossible to keep secrets from the former ringmaster of Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, Katzenbach was of the view that the Vice-President ought to have been ‘formally’ notified of the President’s ‘indisposition’ long before now. He was old-fashioned enough to think that the United States Constitution was probably the only thing that stood between the Union and anarchy, and that any man who knowingly trammelled its provisions was courting disaster.
While Nick Katzenbach agreed in principle that the President had to be protected; nearly a week later the protection of the President was no longer, in his mind, the main issue.
The Presidency was not a Kennedy clan fiefdom and the one hundred and seventy-seven or seventy-eight million – that was a guess, only a full census would establish the full cost of the October War – surviving citizens of the United States of America deserved better than to be ruled by an absentee landlord. Back in 1776 the American people had risen in revolution against another absentee landlord, mad George III of England, and that was a lesson a man forgot at his peril.
“Do you want me to speak with Claude Betancourt?” Bobby Kennedy checked eager to keep the conversation well away from the one intractable ‘issue’ over which they might irrevocably fall out.
Katzenbach shook his head.
“Claude would only ask you twenty questions about why we’ve let Hoover get his claws into her.” Gretchen Betancourt’s father was a doyen of the New England Democrats, a big donor and even as he moved into his late sixties, a formidable operator behind the scenes in half-a-dozen East Coast states with a profoundly Machiavellian grasp of how to manipulate the real levers of political influence. Only a fool needlessly antagonised Claude Betancourt. “I warned Miss Betancourt that she should treat this as a test. I’m sure she’s got her own political ambitions and a brush with the downside of Capitol Hill at the outset of her career will stand her in good stead later.”
“Claude probably gets it,” the Attorney General agreed sagely. “Otherwise, the old man would have been burning up the lines between here and Connecticut by now.” He pushed the Washington Post away. “Who is this guy Daniel Brenckmann?”
“A friend of Gretchen’s from Yale. His father was on the Navy Reserve. He got sent to England in the spring. The son is trying to hold what’s left of his father’s legal practice together in Boston. He’s in Washington on business; my guess is one of Claude’s buddies threw him a bone. The way I hear it the kid’s father is one of Claude’s go to attorneys in Boston when he needs a little ‘plausible deniability’, so he’s probably had his eye on the younger Brenckmann for a while. You know how he likes to think he can spot a ‘coming man’ before anybody else! Anyhow, the old man obviously thinks the guy is a good influence on his daughter.”
Bobby Kennedy was about to change the subject.
There was a knock at the door and a secretary entered with a coffee tray.
The Attorney General waited until the two men were alone again. Raising his cup to his lips he abandoned the mild levity with which he had treated the machinations of the mendacious tyrant who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the ease with which the Washington Post and other DC papers had allowed themselves to be drawn into the old faggot’s web just so they could publish the picture of an attractive young brunette on their front pages.
“Bellingham?” He inquired.
Katzenbach became grim faced.
“If the Pentagon had got its finger out of its butt six months ago Bellingham wouldn’t be a bomb site now.”
“The Chiefs of Staff would have kicked up merry hell if we’d asked them to move into Washington State,” Bobby Kennedy reminded his deputy. Both men understood that what he was really saying was that there was no way the Administration could have kept the fact that Bellingham, and several other middle sized towns in the north and west of the country were effectively beyond the writ of the United States Government if the problem had been publicly foisted onto the Pentagon. The decision had been taken at Cabinet level to cover up the whole Bellingham thing; and thus far other similar ‘problems’ had likewise been dealt with by an official version of omertà, silence. The US Army was already a fixture on the streets of Chicago, two divisions were effectively containing large enclaves west and north of the Windy City, patrolling uneasy ceasefire lines, constantly on call to damp down unrest within the less heavily damaged southern suburbs as industry was relocated south and transferred to other undamaged Great Lakes cities. Peace dividend or no peace dividend, three-quarters of all active units of the US Army was presently deployed in what – in any other part of the World – the Administration would acknowledge to be law and order, or ‘peace keeping’ missions. The White House had quietly communicated to the West Coast Governors that they had a more or less free hand, safe in the belief that the Bellingham ‘problem’ had seemed ‘contained and containable’ by virtue of geography and the pattern of destruction caused by the October War.
The Canadians had sealed their border with tanks and several battalions of mechanised infantry, and inland large areas of the bombed Fraser Valley were still dead zones, impassable to wheeled vehicles. East of Bellingham the Cascade Mountains shut the town off from the rest of Washington State, to the south the ruins of Seattle lay across the only good roads. The endless barren sea of rubble was an obstacle every bit as formidable as the Berlin Wall had been before the war. With relatively few troops and a minimum of hardware – a few tanks and artillery pieces – ‘containment’ had seemed the least evil option. Bellingham had never even featured on the US Army’s priority list.
The Attorney General frowned and with a sigh asked: “Why don’t you say it, Nick? You think I should have gone up there to try to talk some sense into Al Rosellini and this Dempsey guy he’s got running his own private army?”
Nick Katzenbach’s eyes lit up with impatience.
“Yes, I do. Cabinet members ought to be getting out to the frontline states more...”
“I get out of DC every time I can,” Bobby Kennedy objected mildly.
“Yes, and we both agree that reinforcing and strengthening the Civil Rights movement is the right thing to do. But that’s a separate issue. Of course we have to invest in an ongoing dialogue with the leaders of the NAACP and the other groups. Not talking with Dr King and his associates is not an option. However, talking to Dr King doesn’t help us keep a lid on the anarchy up around the Great Lakes and in places like Bellingham. The longer we leave these places to,” the United States Deputy Attorney General threw up his hands in unmitigated exasperation, “fester, the more the general post-war social and moral malaise spreads across the undamaged parts of the country.” He groaned. “Washington, Oregon and California have now basically formed a mutual support pact. Nothing formal, nothing carved in stone but Californian money is propping up Washington and Oregon, and Californian fruit and vegetables fed Washington last spring and will again this winter. The M48s that spearheaded the assault on Bellingham were straight out of California State Army National Guard stockades, the Marine Corps Skyraiders went up north because the Marine Corps units based in California badly need to keep Governor Brown sweet. That sort of thing is going to start happening elsewhere sooner or later. What if Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi decide that they can deal with their ‘local’ difficulties without the dead hand of Federal oversight? What if Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana decide that they’ve had enough of Washington meddling in their affairs? What if they come to the conclusion that they can do a better job of restoring law and order in Chicago that those ‘idiots in DC who screwed up in the first place’? Hell, Bob
by! The last time half-a-dozen states decided they could make a better job of governance than the people in DC we had a four-year long civil war!”
The President’s younger brother let his deputy ventilate his existential angst without interruption. He knew Nick Katzenbach well enough to know that this was not the prelude to any kind of sudden, new rift. Nick just needed to get things off his chest; it was a sign of his undiminished loyalty to the Administration that he was unloading on his boss, not directly to the Chief White House Correspondent of the Washington Post.
“Has anybody thought,” Katzenbach continued, “about what’s going to happen when Curtis LeMay – love him or hate him – retires next year or the year after? That man has the Air Force in the palm of his hand but whoever comes after him, that’s going to be a whole other ball game, Bobby. And what if LeMay gets into bed with the Republicans and runs for the Senate? Or worse, takes a tilt at the Republican Presidential ticket a few years down the line?”
The Attorney General absorbed this. Nick Katzenbach was not telling him anything he had not already thought about and lost countless hours of sleep over. He came to a decision. Much as he hated to have to do it Bobby Kennedy realised it was time for him to put his cards on the table.
“Jack may not stand for re-election next year,” he announced softly.
The Deputy Attorney General did not need to pause for reflection.
“Because of his health?”
“That and other things.”
“Does LBJ know?”
Bobby Kennedy shook his head.
“No.” Lyndon Baines Johnson had become the invisible man of the Administration. He was around a lot but Cabinet members largely ignored his presence. If the former master of the Senate had not been so valuable keeping the lid on a fractious and increasingly rebellious House of Representatives, he would have been completely sidelined many months ago.
“We both know that LBJ will already know about the President’s illness.” Katzenbach hated what he was about to say. “I’m having a lot of trouble with the fact he has not been ‘formally’ notified of the President’s ‘condition’, Bobby.”