by James Philip
“What is it, Mr Macleod?”
“With respect, Mr Speaker. The House has not been recalled in emergency session. It is my understanding that it is for the House to determine if and when it sits again. It is a thing understood to all members present that the Government has come to this place for one reason, and one reason alone. The matter we are here to debate is one of paramount national concern. The date for this session of the House of Commons was promulgated several weeks ago and we all know why we are here. I say to you respectfully; pray permit the members of this House to get on with it, Mr Speaker!”
Sir Harry Hylton-Foster had proved to be a popular, and in the main, a respected Speaker but when he was first appointed the manner of his appointment had caused a deal of unnecessary bad feeling between the two main parties. The reason for this was that at that time Sir Harry still held the post of Solicitor General for England and Wales and therefore, by definition, could not be and was not the full-time ‘Speaker’ of the House of Commons. Plainly, one could not be a Government Minister and the Speaker at the same time; the roles were mutually incompatible. A Government Minister owed his allegiance to his political master, the Prime Minister. The Speaker of the House of Commons was exactly that, the man who spoke for the whole Commons. What had made it worse was that Harold MacMillan had not troubled to discuss Sir Harry’s appointment, as tradition and common courtesy demanded, with the then Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell.
“Am I to deduce from the authority with which you speak,” the frail man in the ceremonial garb inquired, “that you are to be restored to your former office of Leader of the House, Mr Macleod?”
The Minister of Information had not expected the question. He glanced over his shoulder at Margaret Thatcher who assented with an immediate curt nod.
“Yes, Mr Speaker,” he confirmed dryly. “It would seem so.”
“Well, in that case is the Leader of the House ready to deliver his statement as to the business of this place this day?”
Iain Macleod found the grace to smile as he composed his thoughts.
He puffed out his chest and eyed the restless ranks of the unholy alliance hoping against hope that this was its moment to trip up the unstoppable phenomenon that was Margaret Thatcher. He could see it in their eyes that they knew this was their moment; and that if they failed today then power would be beyond their grasp for perhaps a decade.
Iain Macleod cleared his throat.
“It is this Government’s desire to obtain an unequivocal mandate from this House to restore fully ‘normal politics’ to the United Kingdom not later than the autumn of 1965; to vigorously prosecute the war against our enemies in the Eastern Mediterranean and safeguard our people wherever they may be in the World; furthermore, it is this Government’s purpose to commence the generation-long crusade of the reconstruction of our bombed cities. In the present absence of ‘normal politics’ it is the Government’s policy to submit this day to a vote of confidence in this place.”
Chapter 23
Thursday 27th February 1964
Giraud Corn Exchange Building, Broad Street, Philadelphia
In the last United States War Plan Book before the October War Philadelphia was not identified as a ‘viable site for a relocated governmental infrastructure’ because it was assumed that the fifth largest city in the Union would have – probably – been a priority Soviet target. However, in the way of these things contingency planners continually observe real events and modify their plans accordingly over time. After Armageddon Philadelphia became a much more ‘viable’ option if or when the ‘governmental infrastructure’ needed to be ‘relocated’ in future. Unfortunately, the planning process had only just re-commenced by the time of the Battle of Washington; and bald statements of ‘high-level first principles’ were very little use in unravelling the chaos intrinsic in the attempting to create an entirely new Federal administrative hub on top of the much smaller scaffold of Pennsylvania’s State, and Philadelphia City’s existing governmental machinery.
Notwithstanding two months of bedlam, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was proud of what his people had achieved in Philadelphia. Despite being obstructed and harried at every turn by Congress and the Senate, and having to rely on contractors infinitely more interested in putting their hand in the till than relocating the nation’s capital, he now oversaw a skeletal functioning continental bureaucracy and, assuming that sooner or later it took its collective finger out of its collective butt, a House of Representatives successfully transported to and replanted in Pennsylvania. That all this had happened in the wake of a failed coup d’état, at a time when the Administration was attempting to stop the country tearing itself to pieces, while simultaneously beginning to re-mobilize its sleeping military might against the dark forces which had turned the capital into a battlefield in December, spoke to everything that was best in the United States of America. Moreover, for the first time since he had signed on to the Kennedy Presidential ticket in 1960, it signalled the arrival of the Vice-President as a fully paid up integral member of the Administration’s inner circle.
Now as he awaited the arrival of the President’s cavalcade in the imperial splendour of the hall of the former Giraud Corn Exchange Trust building less than a quarter-of-a-mile from City Hall, the new home of the House of Representatives, he found himself reflecting on how close the United States had come to World War IV in December.
The threat of an unwanted and frankly, nightmarish, war with the British had crept up on the Administration. Never had the phrase ‘the enemy within’ been more true; Red Dawn had infiltrated the Pentagon and the State Department, souring relations with America’s oldest, most loyal ally, making clandestine pacts with Franco in Spain and the fascists in Italy, and successfully subverting patriotic US soldiers, sailors and airmen to do the unthinkable: to launch surprise attacks on Royal Navy ships at sea and bombing raids on British bases in the Mediterranean. LBJ shivered with dread every time he thought about how close they had come to a real shooting war with the British.
B-52s had bombed the base of the British Mediterranean Fleet at Malta!
If it had been the other way around with RAF V-Bombers attacking and crippling the US Navy’s command and control centre at Norfolk, Virginia the way those four Strategic Air Command B-52s had blinded the British Mediterranean Fleet, blocked anchorages and docks with broken ships and killed and maimed hundreds of highly-trained service personnel and innocent Maltese civilians; the Minutemen would have been flying before anybody stopped to ask what was actually going on.
It hardly bore thinking about...
Congress had still not wised up; over a hundred ‘representatives’ had signed a motion demanding the extradition to the United States of Captain Simon Horatio Collingwood, the commanding officer of the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought ‘to account for his aggressive actions resulting in the loss with all hands of the USS Scorpion’. The poison had seeped so deep into the psyche of a sizable section of the country’s ruling class that it was going to be very hard to stop the poison spreading.
J. Edgar Hoover had bent his ear again that morning. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been in Seventh Heaven ever since the Battle of Washington.
The old faggot saw enemies everywhere. ‘Congress is full of commie-stooges and fifth columnists,’ he claimed. LBJ doubted it. On the other hand if the Director of the FBI had told him that Congress was full of self-serving, self-righteous pricks so accustomed to having their snouts in the trough that they no longer knew whether it was day or night, he might have agreed with him. Witch hunts did not interest the Vice-President but he recognised that men like Hoover were invaluable in times such as these.
A Secret Serviceman’s radio crackled.
“One minute, sir.”
The Vice-President nodded, and continued to look around the former headquarters of the Giraud Corn Exchange Trust, requisitioned six weeks ago from its bankrupt owners to be the Philadelphia ‘White Hous
e’. Its proximity to the relocated House of Representatives apart, the building recommended itself for its interim role in many ways. It was truly grand, , obviously ‘presidential’, it was built like a fortress and had a huge vault – a likely bomb shelter in this troubled age – and plenty of rooms within it, and its adjoining thirty-one storey office block to accommodate not just the Presidential Staff but the new Philadelphia offices of both the State and the Treasury Departments.
There had been alternative sites mooted for the Philadelphia ‘White House’; but LBJ had stopped looking once he stepped into the empty Giraud Corn Exchange Trust building, a rotunda designed by the Architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome. Furness had constructed the exterior structural fabric of the great edifice with 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, and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where the LBJ and his Secret Service detail awaited the arrival of the President. Behind him the desks of the clerks and tellers were long gone, officials now worked behind temporary head-high screens either side of the roped off route to the circular staircase down to the vaults. Marines hefting automatic rifles stood guard at every door leading off the rotunda and at the head and the foot of every staircase. In the vicinity of the building streets had been shut and mobile road blocks – M-60 Patton main battle tanks - positioned to deter and prevent attacks by car or truck bombs.
Jack Kennedy strode into the airy grandeur of the rotunda and warmly shook his Vice-President’s hand. The younger man was tanned from his recent travels, radiating unusual good health and vitality. His smile was guardedly confident and determination glinted in his knowing green-grey eyes.
“Welcome back, Mr President.”
“Good to see you again, Mr Vice-President.”
The two men marched towards the steps down to the vaults where a secure situation room had been set up in the last fortnight. The old grills and alarms had been removed, a filtered air conditioning system installed. Next month heavier blast doors would be fitted, the old-fashioned spiral staircase replaced by something more functional and a modern elevator would replace the existing museum piece.
“Bobby and John McCone got here ten minutes ago,” the Vice-President told the younger man as their footsteps rang on the polished marble floor. The rotunda had a cathedral stillness despite the dozens of staffers working in their partitioned ‘spaces’ and the clatter of distant typewriters.
“What’s this I hear about a subpoena being served on General LeMay?” Jack Kennedy demanded as the men began to descend below ground.
“The House is setting up a Joint Committee to oversee the Bill of Impeachment but they’ll be squabbling over who gets to sit on it, and the Committee’s rights and prerogatives for a couple of weeks yet. In the meantime, they’ve decided to go after LeMay ahead of the first session of the Warren Commission. It’s complicated. The House Minority Leader wants to be seen to be doing something so he’s trying to get a piece of Earl Warren’s action.” LBJ grunted his disgust. “The trouble is the Armed Forces Committee is suspended pending your assumption of its responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief in time of war. You wouldn’t credit how royally pissed off those old boys on the Committee are now they don’t have the free run of bases and military facilities. Right now nobody in uniform gives a shit what any of them thinks so they’re having to fly club like everybody else, they don’t get to be seen in fancy restaurants with the guys in uniform picking up the tabs and the big defence contractors cut them out of the loop the day you signed the Executive Order. The Administration holds the Armed Forces budget; why kiss butts in the House?”
The Attorney General and the Head of the Central Intelligence Agency rose to their feet when the two men swept into the brightly lit, steel-lined bunker. General Curtis LeMay, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations were already standing, deep in conversation by a whiteboard at the opposite end of the pristine new situation room. They straightened respectfully.
Jack Kennedy wasted no time. Drawing up a chair he waved for the others to sit down around the familiar table LBJ had had brought to Philadelphia from the warehouse storing the furniture removed from the White House while repairs were in progress.
“John,” the President demanded, fixing John Alexander McCone, the Republican industrialist he had brought in to the Administration to clean up the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, “tell me about this second U-2 we’ve lost?”
The question was asked flatly, without censure. The men in this room were beyond scoring points or assigning blame, leastways, not within their own circle. They had too many enemies in common for them not to be grimly united in their work.
“As you know, Mr President, setting up at Dhahran was always problematic,” the older man prefaced. The United States had pulled out of the base the year before the October War but the Saudi Government had permitted the hurried reactivation of the airfield after the nuclear strikes on its neighbour, Egypt. The hasty deployment of two U-2s to Dhahran had now ended, comprehensively, in disaster. “We badly needed aerial surveillance assets to cover the region and the runway at RAF Luqa was too short.” He shrugged. “I signed off on the transfer to Dhahran when it became clear that the Israelis weren’t going to give us unconditional access to the facilities we needed. Given that the security situation in Egypt post-Ismailia is uncertain and that President Nasser was unable to guarantee the safety of our people and equipment, Dhahran was the only realistic option.”
“Nobody’s blaming you, John,” Jack Kennedy assured him.
The Director of the CIA scowled.
John McCone was perfectly capable of blaming himself when he thought he had made a mistake and he was in no mood to dissemble.
“There may have been issues with the integrity of the fuel or some other maintenance issue with the U-2 we lost on Monday. U-2s are complicated pieces of equipment and I ordered the aircraft to commence operations before the full ground crews were in theatre.” John McCone sighed. “The aircraft we lost last night managed to get off a message that it was under attack. According to the mission profile the aircraft had completed a pass over Tbilisi and was heading up north over the Caucasus Mountains to give us coverage of the Chelyabinsk-Sverdlovsk region. The aircraft had already completed the main part of the mission, to overfly the Armenian border with Turkey. The northern leg was simply a post-action damage assessment exercise. There are big areas of the former USSR’s southern and eastern republics where we have either no post-war coverage, or very spotty coverage.”
Jack Kennedy had not known that until recently.
I ought to have known that! Shouldn’t I?
Curtis LeMay cleared his throat. Having heard the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency abase himself before his Commander-in-Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not to be outdone.
“We commenced a program of after-action reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union ten days after the October War,” he reported. “U-2 serviceability was low at that time so most of the work over the Western USSR was done by Martin B-57s. I suspended these flights around this time last year due to climatic conditions then prevailing over the central and eastern areas of the Soviet Union. My boys were coming back with pictures of clouds most missions and,” he shrugged, “I postponed further flights until the summer. By then the Air Force was busy delivering its part of the ‘Peace Dividend’. Post-action battle assessment is still on my ‘to do’ list, Mr President. I take full responsibility for the failure to get the job done sooner.”
Jack Kennedy waved this away. The American Government would have been decapitated, he would be dead by now, and the nation would be in an unimaginably parlous state if Curtis LeMay had not ridden to the rescue at the height of the Battle of Washington. Old Iron Pants h
ad a vault full of credit banked with his President.
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, General.” He looked back to the Director of the CIA. “Okay, John. The Russians may have rediscovered the capability to shoot down our spy planes. What does that tell us?”
With a sidelong glance the CIA man batted the question back to Curtis LeMay.
“It means they’ve got a state of the art functioning integrated air defence system up and running somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains,” Curtis LeMay stated with grudging respect. If he had had one of his famous cigars in his mouth he would have chewed it to shreds and spat out the pieces.
“We recognised all along that elements of the Soviet war machine,” John McCone said, unconcerned that the airman had stolen a little of his thunder, “possibly significant elements, might have survived the war. However, to find a sophisticated air defence element operational so close to the northern borders of Persia and Iraq, and very nearly adjacent to the Armenian frontier with Turkey where we know there has been recent heavy fighting – we assume between Red Dawn and Turkish forces – is hardly likely to be coincidental. On the other hand, if Baku and the Caucasian oil fields are intact then it makes a kind of sense to position, or to leave in place, any air defence systems that might have survived the war.”
The Vice-President frowned with concentration, raising a hand to indicate he wanted to speak. Something was troubling the Texan. Oil was dirty, smelly stuff that was best left in the ground unless you had something to do with it; so if somebody had plans for it that would be a thing worth fighting over.
“If the oil fields are still there?” Lyndon Johnson drawled. “What’s happening to the oil?” He looked around the table. “What does Bill Fulbright think about all this?”
Bobby Kennedy had been in a thoughtful reverie.
“Fulbright’s due in England about now.” The President’s younger brother was suddenly conscious of the changing mood of the room. The Secretary of State had been shuttling around the Mediterranean and the Middle East desperately trying to recruit allies, stitch back together old alliances and to repair relationships soured by neglect and mistrust since the October War. Fulbright’s schedule was insane. After returning to Virginia for a brief interlude at Camp David and a whistle stop round of arm-twisting in Philadelphia he had flown straight back to Europe to visit Malta, and was currently stopping over in England to consult with the British Foreign Secretary and to brief the Angry Widow.