by James Philip
Al Rosellini guffawed sadly.
A lot of people had been pissing in the wind lately.
“Nobody’s flying anywhere these days,” Bill Allen continued. “Leastways, not enough civilians are flying for any of the airlines to buy any more seven-oh-sevens. Pan Am, United and the other big carriers have already parked half their fleets. With no Air Force orders likely for the next couple of years Boeing is in a fix, Al.” He shook his head, and added confidentially: “You know I had to halt development of the new seven-two-seven a month ago?”
The Governor of Washington had not heard that.
“We had to let the whole team go. There will be a few jobs left at the two plants in Seattle,” Bill Allen promised. “I don’t think we’d have got funding for that if General LeMay hadn’t door-stepped the Treasury Secretary and given the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs the treatment. The Air Force found three million bucks to mothball the production lines for eighteen months. Hopefully, when the procurement freeze ends we’ll be in a position to bid for new airframes, but,” his shoulders sagged, “we’re still going to have to let ninety-five percent of our people go.”
“When do you have to start laying off people, Bill?”
“Already started, Al. I know it’s Christmas soon but if we don’t let people go now we’ll be broke come the spring. One Helluva peace dividend!”
It was symptomatic of the slow disintegration of the Union and the increasingly sclerotic grip of the Federal Government that Al Rosellini had had to hear confirmation of the bad news from the President of the Boeing Company, rather than a representative of either the Department of Defence or another senior Cabinet member. Half wrecked during the night of the October War Seattle’s survival as a viable civil and economic entity – forget reconstruction or rebirth – had depended on the twin foundations of the great Boeing plants and the giant US Navy base at Bremerton on the opposite shore of Puget Sound. Without those two powerhouses pumping guaranteed revenues into the city and the state, there was nothing but shifting sand to build on. Boeing was closing down; Bremerton was slated to become the biggest ship graveyard on the planet, the home of the mothballed ships of the once invincible US Pacific Fleet. Bremerton would go down in US naval history as the place where the great carriers came to die. The USS Forrestal, USS Ranger, USS Constellation, USS Saratoga, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the USS Midway were already laid up in mothballs, rotting alongside the battlewagons USS New Jersey and USS Missouri, and the last three remaining Essex class carriers from the 1945 war. The vast naval dockyards that only months ago had teemed with skilled Washingtonians were virtually empty, the men and their families rapidly dispersing to the four corners of the nation. All of this decline and the rushed de-militarization of the state’s economy had been delivered by decree from Washington DC. Washington State was a faraway place of which the men in the White House knew little and cared for not at all, and nobody in the American North-West was going to forget it in a hurry.
“Did I hear the Air Force was shutting down McChord?” Bill Allen inquired, trying not to choke with despair.
“Yeah. LeMay wants to mothball the base and keep the Air Defence Centre on line but the bean counters in DC don’t think there’s anything we need to defend ourselves against anymore. The Treasury’s argument is that the Air Force put it to the Soviets so hard they put SAC out of work!”
Bill Allen had refused the bourbon he had been offered, preferring to stick to strong black coffee. He put down his cup.
“I wonder about that sometimes,” he remarked. “The Soviets fired an awful lot of missiles at us and our friends in Europe. They sent over a lot of bombers too. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder how hard we really hit them.”
There was a knock at the door of the Governor’s office.
Major General Colin Dempsey walked in, stiff-legged and wearing the same ashen shroud of exhaustion as the two men who rose to greet him. Bill Allen had met the commanding officer of the Washington Combined Army and Air Force National Guard, and the State’s Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner at regular intervals during the last year. The two men had worked closely together to ensure that the Boeing plants restarted and continued in production after the war.
“I’d be curious to hear your thoughts,” Bill Allen declared, “on whether the Soviets were as completely defeated as our mutual friends in Washington DC believe, General Dempsey?”
The old soldier took off his forage cap. He routinely dressed in the same combat fatigues as his men and rarely wore visible badges of rank. Although he required his men to carry side arms while in uniform, he rarely followed his own edict. Outwardly the most punctiliously military of men, he enjoyed a bantering, familial trust with his subordinates, the majority of whom would run through brick walls if he asked them to so do.
Dempsey was a stickler for the line of command; now he looked to his Commander-in-Chief for leave to answer the Boeing man’s question.
Al Rosellini nodded for his friend to carry on.
“The story coming out of the Department of Defence is that we hit eighty-seven percent of the targets we attacked, sir,” Dempsey declared, stone-faced.
Bill Allen grinned wanly.
“That wasn’t what I asked you, General?”
“I have no better after action intelligence than the people at the Pentagon,” he replied. “But from my experience war is a very messy business. I’d be astonished if we hit seventy percent of the targets that we actually knew about and subsequently attacked. If I was running a staff college exercise on the likely post-war scenario my starting assumption would be that if we thought we had hit ninety percent of our targets, that only fifty percent of those targets would actually have been completely destroyed. Thirteen months ago we might have got lucky and hit sixty percent of the targets we had discovered and accurately identified before the war. There would inevitably have been a whole mess of targets we didn’t know about and therefore, we never attacked. At the end of the day whether we won as big as the Administration thinks we did depends on how good our pre-war intelligence was, how effectively we targeted those enemy assets that we correctly identified and located in advance, and the underlying resilience of the Soviet military-industrial complex. During the forty-five war the Soviets showed immense stoicism and resilience under intolerable conditions. Any prudent after action analysis should have started from the assumption that they would perform likewise during and after the October War. Frankly, we ought to have launched a second strike against the Soviets; we did not. Therefore, it follows that there must be large uncertainties as to what Soviet war-fighting capabilities, and economic and human resources actually survived the war.”
The old soldier let his meanings sink in.
“In answer to your original question,” he grimaced, “honest to God I have no idea how big we won the war. However, given the way things are going with this ‘peace dividend’ nonsense, if General LeMay’s bombers and missiles missed thirty to forty percent of the Soviet’s war fighting capability last year,” he sighed, “then all bets are off if we have to fight another war any time soon.”
Chapter 29
Wednesday 4th December 1963
Mission Police Station
1240 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Harvey Fleischer had been a little ambivalent about the wisdom of being drawn into his goddaughter’s scheme. For one he was not, and never had been, overly exercised about the Civil Rights Movement, although contrarily, he was a firm believer in everybody getting a fair shake in life, be they black, white or green. For another, picking a fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation was never a good idea, leastways, not for an old Jewish lawyer who was doing okay, thank you. Thirdly, he was afraid Miranda was setting herself up for a fall - that she had moved out of her league - and he did not think he could bear to see her knocked down again the way she had been the morning after the night of the October War.
Another consideration was that Miranda
’s mother and father, his good friends and business partners, Ben and Margaret Sullivan would probably blame him if this all went wrong. Although this last worry he could happily put aside; because Ben and Margaret would almost certainly forgive him eventually.
He was immensely glad that at least if things did go wrong Miranda had plenty of backup. What could possibly go wrong when he was standing beside the Attorney General of California, his old friend Stanley Mosk?
Several of the San Francisco PD’s finest were already holding back the photographers and a small but growing number of placard waving NAACP protestors when the two cars had drawn up outside the Mission Police Station. The Police had only moved into the station in 1950 but the building already looked small, old and rather neglected.
Stanley Mosk had clambered from of Harvey Fleischer’s Lincoln and puffed out his chest. A fog had filled the Bay most of that day but here on Valencia Street the air was relatively clear, and weak sunshine bathed the scene.
“Good!” He decided, glancing around at Miranda Sullivan and Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, approaching on the sidewalk.
Stanley Mosk, the Attorney General of California, was the son of a Hungarian father and a German mother, born into a family of Reform Jews in San Antonio, Texas. He had come a long way in his fifty-one years. Twenty years ago he had been the youngest Superior Court judge in the state, now he was well into his second term as the state’s Attorney General, the first man of Jewish descent to hold a state wide elected executive office in the history of California. A committed Democrat, a close friend and despite everything, still an unabashed and vocal supporter of the President of the United States of America, unlike his old friend Harvey Fleischer, Stanley Mosk was and had always been, extremely exercised over the Civil Rights of every man, woman and child in California. He had not just presided over a series of high profile cases, including one in which he had forced the Professional Golfers’ Association of America to rewrite its regulations discriminating against golfers from ethnic and racial minorities; he had also created the California Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division alongside new Consumer Rights, Constitutional Rights, and Anti-Trust Divisions.
“Well, Mr Francois,” Stanley Mosk said to the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, “let’s be about our business!”
The most senior man at the Mission Police Station, a sweating, flustered lieutenant who would rather have been anywhere but where he actually was, had glanced at the court order Terry Francois had pressed into his moist palms and promptly, abdicated his problem to the senior of the two FBI Special Agents on the premises.
“Special Agent Horowitz, your honour,” this man, who was neither sweating or flustered, had introduced himself as he eyed up the Attorney General of California and his companions in the hot, humid and very crowded lobby which accommodated the front desk of the station. “Mr John is being held under a Federal warrant...”
Stanley Mosk was silent.
Terry Francois looked the FBI man in the eye.
“You hold in your hands a Superior Court order requiring the immediate cessation of the unconstitutional incarceration of Mr Dwayne John into the custody of the Attorney General of California, Agent Horowitz.”
It was over within minutes.
Dwayne John, a handsome towering man, blinked at the photographers as he stood between Terry Francois and Stanley Mosk, looming a full head above both men. He kept sneaking a glance in Miranda’s direction, recognising and not recognising her and as yet too bewildered for the moment to know what to make of his sudden freedom.
“Do I know you, ma’am?” The tall young black man asked Miranda shortly after they were driven away from the scrum outside the Mission Police Station by Harvey Fleischer in his Lincoln.
“We can talk about that when we get to where we are going, Mr John,” Miranda retorted tartly, regretting her incivility instantly.
“Right,” the man muttered. “What exactly just happened back there?”
“All in good time, son,” Harvey Fleischer told him from behind the wheel of the Lincoln.
“I’m free to go, right?”
“Sure you are. But we’ll put a little distance between you and the FBI before we cut you loose.”
Miranda stared out of the window; disengaging briefly from the rollercoaster ride of the last few days. She had not realised what she was involved in until Terry Francois had explained it to her.
‘The FBI stopped fighting crime a long time ago, Miss Sullivan.’
The President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP had taken pity on her, writing her apparent naivety off to a lamentable gap in her education for which he in no way held her personally responsible.
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of FBI agents who do their best to fight crime, it’s just that fighting crime is not what the FBI does most places. Not since the war. The last year or so the FBI has been looking for Reds, moles, fifth columnists, traitors and turncoats. I used to think it was because fighting organised crime, the Mafia and such like, was too difficult. But that isn’t it. I think it has more to do with Mr Hoover and the people around him just not liking blacks, spicks and anybody who doesn’t look like them or think like them. The FBI is out to get the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. There is no place for a secret police force in our constitution but that doesn’t stop the FBI spreading lies and falsifying evidence against the leaders of the movement. Fortunately Mr Hoover doesn’t have hundreds of thousands of agents, so he can’t watch everybody all the time. Dr King and his advisors know that. That’s why they’ve got good young people like Mr John travelling all over the country pretending to be ‘couriers’ and ‘secret agents’ for the movement. Mr Hoover has set his dogs on us, so we’ve given his dogs hundreds of completely harmless hares to chase. The FBI is so busy chasing young black men and women around America an army of Soviet spies could, as we speak, be setting up their tents on the lawn of the White House and J. Edgar Hoover would never know!’
Miranda had recoiled at the stinging contempt with which Terry Francois had delivered his indictment of the FBI and its legendary director. However, the more she thought about what he had said the deeper her unease became. Was it possible that the FBI could be so monolithic, so blinkered that it remained the tool of a man whose mindset was stuck in a 1930s and 1940s bear trap, obsessed with defending a status quo that had more to do with his own racist and ideological prejudices and preoccupations than the safety of citizens on the street?
Perhaps, the way the FBI was behaving – like a law unto itself – was no more than a crudely expressed metaphor for the fault lines opening up across the whole country?
Miranda had only been working in the Governor’s Office for a few weeks; already she glimpsed the way many of her colleagues, including many close to the Governor, secretly saw the future. A big, wealthy, self-sufficient state like California, undamaged by the October War, and sheltered from the rest of the United States by the Rockies, the Sierra Madre and the deserts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah could easily survive alone. California cut adrift from the Union would be one of the five most powerful economic and potentially, military, countries in the World. A ‘confederation’ with either or both of Oregon and Washington State was a subject of both academic and increasingly, real political debate, albeit that the word ‘confederation’ was always spoken very, very quietly. Inevitably, other states far enough away from Washington DC and the ‘East Coast money men’, which were still whole enough to be viable alone must also be beginning to think the impossible. States’ Rights was a live issue on university and college campuses across California; and while Pat Brown would never renege on the Democrats – assuming the party still existed as a national force by the time the next Gubernatorial election came around in October or November 1966 – nobody doubted he would face a strong and possibly unstoppable States’ Rights candidate. Things that had see
med impossible, absurd, ridiculous only months ago now seemed possible, even likely. In a city in which nobody wanted to talk about the next big earthquake – which might happen any day - the prospect of sudden violent seismic aberrations in the political geology of the previously unquestioned century-old postbellum settlement seemed inevitable.
In retrospect Miranda recognised that she had never paused to think – deeply or otherwise – about much in particular before the night of the October War. That night had been the low point of her life; a demarcation between the recklessness and fecklessness of her youth and the damaged, scarred woman who had emerged, butterfly-like from her bruised and bloodied chrysalis. Before that night she had been searching for experiences, for ways of getting off her head, for ways of not being like everybody else. Ever since that night she had wanted desperately to belong, to believe in something greater than herself, to be somebody. She had gone back to college, shunned male company, allowed her Aunt and Uncle to ‘look after her’ and she had even made a half-hearted effort to reconnect with her parents. That had not worked out as well as it might but at least she was back on strained speaking terms with her mother and she was her father’s ‘little princess’ again.
In the week after the war she had been convinced the World would end; convinced that they would all live out what remained of their doomed, sad lives waiting for the radioactive cloud to poison the air and the soil, and for life to slowly, surely disappear from the face of the Earth. A lot of people had felt that way and honestly believed they were living at the end of time.
On the Beach syndrome...
But life had gone on as normal; there was no mass ‘die off’ in the states to the north or the east, just endless depressing, distressing reports on the TV and in the papers of the devastation in Seattle and Chicago, the obliteration of Buffalo and a score of other places, many she had never heard of, mostly around the Great Lakes and in the Mid-West. She had learned later that plumes of fallout had blown across great swathes of the United States - not California – but that in most places it had been possible to avoid the worst effects of the radiation blooms by simply staying inside, hunkering down until after a week to a fortnight, the all clear sounded. They said background radiation levels were several times higher than before the war; it depended who one listened to as to how much higher the levels really were and if it really mattered. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons since the 1945 war had already increased the background levels of the isotopes of Strontium-90, Caesium-137 and Iodine-131 to levels - up to tens of times their pre-Hiroshima levels - known to be harmful, especially to children. Bizarrely, the question was sometimes asked in San Francisco: ‘Had the war really made things that much worse?’