by James Philip
If the Kennedy family’s affairs were complicated, they were nothing as compared to the Betancourts’ problems. At least nobody had ever had to worry about the question of the succession. Now that his mother, Rose – afflicted in the last two winters by near-fatal encounters with the influenza outbreaks that plagued the East Coast – was a housebound invalid back in Boston, disconnected from the management of the clan’s fortune, the brothers had, more or less, divided the spoils between themselves and, with Claude Betancourt’s deft behind the scenes assistance, come to final accommodations with the creditors, and other litigants who had come out of the woodwork after their father’s death. His family had had the old man sitting in front of him now to tidy up the mess; who was going to do the same job for the Betancourt clan when, inevitably, its patriarch was no longer around?
There was no equivalent figure standing ready to ‘clean up the mess’. Everybody tacitly assumed that one of the sons of the old man’s first marriage would pick up the baton but the internal machinations of the Betancourts were, in their own, quieter way, just as convoluted, and positively Byzantine as those of Jack Kennedy’s own family while his father had lived. That was the way the old monster had wanted it and he suspected, the way the man he had grown up knowing as ‘Uncle Claude’ had always operated within his own fiefdom.
Everybody was looking forward to the dogfight when Claude passed on: mainly because the sons were individually, and collectively, a real bunch of tools.
Forty-eight-year old James Maxwell ‘Jay’ Betancourt was a Boston banker, an arrogant, rather narcissistic man who styled himself as some latter-day merchant adventurer.
Forty-four-year-old Martin Washington ‘Marty’ Betancourt was a playboy who had dabbled, now and then, in Democrat politics but was mostly preoccupied with running a string of mistresses. His Manhattan apartment, in the Rockefeller Center had been destroyed in the New Year’s Eve bombing at the start of the Civil War; but he had been ‘out of town’ partying with two showgirls at the time.
Thomas Jefferson ‘Jeff’ Betancourt, had been an artillery captain in the Army – and at the time viewed as the black sheep of the brood – when he was killed in action in Korea in 1951.
Thirty-four-year-old Tobias Longstaff ‘Toby’ Harrison, the bastard issue of a rare miscalculated indiscretion – Claude’s only acknowledged illegitimate offspring, according to legend – had gone off the rails before the October War; these days he bummed around Los Angeles pretending to be a wannabee movie producer.
And those ‘sons’ were only the icing on the cake!
There were other sons, and daughters, not to mention a couple of particularly grasping ex-wives, and there was an actual wife – seemingly happily married wife - and her children from a former marriage, each with a claim to, and a hand already deep within the giant money jar.
Claude had hived off a part of his fortune creating the Betancourt Foundation, itself an umbrella organisation running a score of charitable trusts. Not for him the sort of philanthropy which ploughed millions into fine art, the opera, or any of the things the rich and privileged could afford anyway, if they really wanted to support them. No, the Betancourt Foundation’s focus was on education. Rumour had it, that it had been the old man who had persuaded Nelson Rockefeller to pour largesse into promoting the female colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and to match the Betancourt Foundation’s target to bring thousands of French and British teenagers to America to complete their war-interrupted college education.
Of course, the real imponderable was how, and where Gretchen fitted into the old man’s schemes.
On paper, she was way down the line of succession, albeit the one Betancourt sibling with a well-established public profile. She had done herself a lot of short-term damage defending the scumbag leaders of the coup in Washington in December 1963, since rehabilitated her reputation working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), representing Miranda Sullivan despite constant harassment from the FBI, her work for women’s causes in general, and her staunch support for the husband, Dan Brenckmann – the Ambassador’s second son – who, as Chief Justice Earl Warren’s clerk was responsible for drafting the long-awaited Joint Congressional Report into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War. Moreover, Gretchen’s regular appearances on networked TV and radio, and the witty, sometimes excoriating pieces she wrote – probably edited by Dan - for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, on subjects ranging from motherhood, to which law the President had just broken were apparently, among the first things those publications’ readers turned to every Tuesday!
Yes, that woman was a force of nature…
“Does Gretchen know about this meeting, Claude?” JFK asked, thinking he might understand what was going on.
The old man’s face brightened involuntarily.
He shook his head.
“My, oh my. Goodness, no.”
“Okay,” the younger man mused, unsure if he was putting the pieces of the jigsaw together in the right order. “But she’s got to know the polling looks bad for her guy in New Hampshire?”
Sadness, regret flickered in Claude Betancourt’s rheumy eyes.
And the former President knew he had joined up at least some of the pieces correctly.
“Why don’t you just talk to her about this?” He asked, already knowing the answer.
“Gretchen’s in a bad place,” the worried father shrugged, “but Gretchen is Gretchen, she’s no quitter. She’d never forgive me if I tried to let her down gently.”
“So, what’s the deal, Claude?”
The old man half-smiled.
“I want Bobby to walk away after the Massachusetts primary and unequivocally endorse Ambassador Brenckmann.”
“What’s in it for Bobby?”
“Nothing.”
Jack Kennedy’s eyes widened fractionally.
“That’s not going to be an easy sell, Claude!”
“Granted. But that’s not all, Mister President.”
“Okay…”
“With the sad passing of Representative Donahue last fall, the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts is up for grabs in November.”
Now the younger man’s eyes were narrowing.
He said nothing.
“Your father might have been President in 1944 or 1948, fate decreed otherwise. So, he invested all his hopes first in your brother Joe junior, and when he was killed in action in 1944, he transferred all his hopes, his dreams onto your shoulders. He never wavered, even when it transpired that you were afflicted with Addison’s Syndrome. Ironically, in the end, you made it to the White House, not because of your father, rather, in many ways, in spite of him. Incidentally, that was probably how Nixon got to run you so close in 1960 but that’s another matter…”
“Gretchen,” Jack Kennedy thought out aloud, not letting himself be distracted from the main thing.
The 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts stretched from Brookline, his birthplace, in Boston out to Fitchburg in Worcester County; it was one of several city and country Congressional seats. Although the 4th District was by no means a Kennedy family shoe-in, that deep into the clan’s heartland, if the brothers spoke with the same voice, it would go a long way to gifting the Democrat ticket to their nominee.
“Do you really reckon Ambassador Brenckmann will fire her if things go badly in New Hampshire?”
“If he’s the man I think he is,” Claude Betancourt grimaced, “and I’ve known him for over thirty years, he’ll do it because it has to be done and because,” a weary hesitation, “it will be a kindness.”
The younger man considered this unhurriedly.
“Bobby won’t like this, any of it.”
“Bobby ought to be helping Ted hang onto his seat in the Senate; not pissing in the wind at a time when he has to know those primaries out west will kill him, come the summer. Or do you want to see George McGovern and that
clown Wallace destroy what’s left of the Democrat Party this fall?”
The words stung.
They were meant to sting.
Claude Betancourt caught his breath, allowed his thoughts to re-crystalize.
“So, no. That’s not all. I also want you to talk Larry O’Brien into coming on board the Brenckmann for President Campaign.”
Jack Kennedy’s brow furrowed.
Larry O’Brien was the arch DC insider who had masterminded his successful campaign in 1960.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to magic up the tooth fairy too, Claude?”
The old man shrugged, grinned that mellow, sympathetic grimace he had always used to placate and ameliorate the former President’s father’s tirades, or to deflect just plain bad ideas. The fact of the matter was that he had learned a long time ago, that the trick in any negotiation was to ask for the world on the basis that now and then, it was a ploy that worked. None of this was personal, it was just business and he had no idea if his friend, and for once in their long and close association, client, Walter Brenckmann would thank him for what he was doing today. Political capital once spent was, as they say, doubly spent, and likely gone for good.
“You know Larry thinks he can rehabilitate Bobby?” JFK mused; his question entirely rhetorical. “Not this time around, maybe for the 1972 race?”
The older man remained silent, waiting patiently.
“What’s in it for Larry?” The younger man posed, knowing the folly of dissembling with the old fox he had allowed into his Hyannis Port den.
Claude Betancourt inclined his head a little to one side, viewing Jack Kennedy with an odd solemnity.
“George McGovern is going to win big in New Hampshire, and unless something is done about it, elsewhere big enough to take the Convention in August. In fact, he could have the ticket in his pocked in June if he wins California; then Wallace and probably Curtis LeMay will go independent, to try to steal the old South in the General Election. But with your tacit support, with Larry O’Brien pulling the strings, and Bobby’s and Ted’s delegates in the bag at the National Convention, Ambassador Brenckmann might, with a fair wind, offer the Party a middle-American, main street alternative. And trust me, if he’s the guy who gets to debate Nixon face-to-face on prime-time TV, he’ll tear that tricky two-timing bastard to shreds. McGovern doesn’t have the killer instinct to do that; even if he knew how. I respect George, he’s a good man, one of the best. He just isn’t the guy to take down a gangster like Nixon. You know it, I know it, and so does Larry because he’ll have already had this conversation with you and your brothers, Mister President.”
Back in 1960 Main Street America had assumed the two eldest, charismatic Kennedy brothers were the well-spring of JFK’s run for the White House, financed by the family’s outrageous wealth. DC insiders, political pundits and the whole DNC had known better; the real ringmaster had always been Lawrence Francis ‘Larry’ O'Brien Jr., now fifty-years-old but back in 1959 when he put his shoulder to the campaign wheel, the ball of fire forty-one-year old DC fixer par excellence, who had single-handedly masterminded the founding, and the subsequent conduct of the Kennedy for President Campaign.
There had never been a time in Larry O’Brien’s life when he had not been a Democrat true believer, although prosaically, he would tell interlocutors that his activism really only began when he was eleven as a volunteer in the failed Presidential campaign of Al Smith, the Governor of New York, at the time a ‘wet’ – he was against Prohibition – and like Jack Kennedy, thirty-two years later, a Catholic, who was, predictably, steamrollered by Herbert Hoover in 1928. Conventional wisdom in 1959 had still been that America was not ready to install a Catholic at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; but Larry O’Brien and what became known as the ‘Irish mafia’, had proven otherwise in 1960.
After the Second War O’Brien had cut his teeth as the Democrats’ Director of Campaigns in Massachusetts, run JFK’s successful Senatorial race and been the natural choice to step up to the plate when his man ran for the Presidency. O’Brien was a new kind of campaign manager; a superb organiser and strategist, a DC player who knew everything about everybody with a tireless eye for detail, who believed that campaigns had to function successfully at every level.
It was well known that he had, thus far, only ‘advised’ George McGovern; the general assumption being that he was so disaffected with the new ‘Betancourt’ faction on the DNC, that he planned to stand back and let the ‘no hopers’ slug it out between themselves this time around. And besides, it was not as if he was a man who had not made enemies – a lot of them – in his role in recruiting the sub-cabinet and middle-ranking roles in the Kennedy Administration in 1961, when he had also been saddled with the thorny position of the new President’s Special Assistant for Congressional Relations.
In filling the scores of mid-ranking posts in the Administration he had been the man who made the decisions, and who delivered the good and the bad news, to a small army of ambitious place men in the Kennedy White House; and people in DC have very, very long memories. Not least among his detractors’ grudges was his vocal and behind the scenes support for JFK’s broadening of the House’s Standing Committee on Rules which had had the result of, temporarily at least, until the Cuban Missiles disaster intervened, of making it harder for sectarian party interests to dominate the conduct of business on the Hill. A very busy man, O’Brien had also overseen the nationwide Gubernatorial, Senate and Congressional races in 1962 which had limped hurtfully, patchily across the continent in the immediate aftermath of the October War.
O’Brien had refused to work for Lyndon Johnson during his short tenure in the Philadelphia White House, further alienating the anti-Kennedy, anti-Catholic wings of the Party. Since then he had been a lobbyist, a shadowy presence in Philadelphia and DC, something of a ‘man in waiting’, strangely disengaged with the decimated Democrats in Washington.
“What’s in it for Larry?” Claude Betancourt echoed, a little amused.
JFK nodded seraphically, genuinely curious to discover what was in the mind of the man his father had, more than once, describe as his very own ‘Dark Prince’.
“Apart from taking down Nixon,” observed his guest, “you mean?”
Again, the former President nodded.
“Walter Brenckmann is a hell of an attorney,” Claude Betancourt sighed. “Not the flashy kind, you understand. He was always the guy who knocked heads together in private; the guy who made everybody realise where their best interests lay. Your father appreciated that; although most of the time I was the one who got all the kudos. Right now, this country needs a great healer, a mediator, not a radical like George McGovern. It certainly doesn’t need another four years of scandal and cover-up. None of us will be safe if Nixon gets back in; especially, if the GOP keeps control of both Houses.”
“So, what?” Jack Kennedy pressed, not attempting to hide his cynicism. “You expect me to ask Larry to sign up with your guy for the good of the American people?”
It was Claude Betancourt’s turn to view the younger man with a vaguely disappointed smile.
“No,” he said.
JFK waited.
“Walter will offer Larry the Vice President slot on the ticket,” the old man promised. “Right there on the convention floor when he makes his acceptance speech.”
Chapter 5
Thursday 22nd February, 1968
USS Enterprise (CVN-65), 60 miles NNW of San Diego
Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States emerged from Marine One onto the windy, sun-bathed deck of the huge aircraft carrier to be greeted by the newly-appointed Chief of Naval Operations, fifty-six-year-old Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer.
The carrier’s band had struck up Hail to the Chief and perhaps a third of its five thousand plus man crew, on parade beneath the ship’s futuristic, box-like island bridge had come to attention as the Commander-in-Chief emerged from the white-topped, green-liveried Sikorsky VH-3 Sea King.
About a mile away to the east the Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) surged majestically through the haze, brushing aside the Pacific chop. Off the Enterprise’s port quarter as she cruised north at an effortless twenty-three knots, the eight-thousand-ton nuclear-powered guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge (DLGN-25) held station, her twin Terrier surface-to-air missile rails locked and loaded.
Approaching the task force on the flight from San Diego, it had seemed to the President as if the Enterprise was surrounded by long-low, dashing frigates and destroyers, protectively patrolling at every point, all around the horizon.
The President accepted and returned the CNO’s crisp salute and shook Moorer’s hand, a broad smile playing on his face. The two men had last met in Washington DC a week ago, after which the Navy man had flown to the American North West to inspect the last of the reactivated super carriers, the USS Constellation (CV-64), and spent a day on board the New Jersey’s recommissioned sister USS Missouri (BB-64) as she ran trials off Puget Sound, before flying south for whirlwind tours of the Mare Island yards and the Polaris submarine base at Almeda in the Bay Area, and yesterday, hitched a ride in the back seat of a McDonnell F-4 Phantom II of US Navy Fighter Squadron 111 (VF-111), a unit disembarked from the USS Midway (CV-41) when she decommissioned for a major overhaul last fall.
Moorer’s immediate predecessor, Admiral James Russell, had inherited the job of restoring not only the US Navy’s fighting power but its moral belief in itself and its mission; a task he had quietly worked away at – mostly without fanfare – with grim, indefatigable purpose throughout the war in the Midwest, doing his best to ignore the endless politico-legal shenanigans in DC.