Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday 22nd May, 1968

  The White House, Washington DC

  The British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, was trying to decide – one way or the other - whether what he smelled was panic or something subtler, that flying in the face of reality, stank of gratuitously misplaced satisfaction and, bizarrely, relief because for once, the media was not talking about Operation Chaos that morning, or the next indictments of Cabinet members and Administration insiders for obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI or running a criminal disinformation campaign against the President’s political opponents.

  Today, at least, Operation Chaos had finally been banished – albeit probably for only a day or two - from the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, and from its routine slot in the first three minutes of any networked TV news broadcast.

  Nonetheless, last week’s keenly anticipated publication of Norah Ephron’s and Carl Bernstein’s Scandal: Miranda Sullivan, Martin Luther King and all the President’s Men, which had shot straight to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, and was currently being serialised in the Washington Post, which had been the number one story on all the news channels over the weekend, would soon be again – tomorrow or the day after – headline news.

  Henderson had avidly read the book from cover to cover, more or less in a single sitting, as had his wife, Mary. Although they had both been significantly better informed about the Warwick Hotel Scandal and its toll on its victims than most Americans. The dwindling number of people who had been prepared to give the Nixon White House the benefit of the doubt, his Prime Minister included, would now be even more hard-pressed to stick to their guns.

  It was incendiary stuff!

  Presciently, the Foreign Secretary had told him the day after he took over from Peter Christopher that: ‘Nixon will be a disaster for the American people and the reputation and standing of the United States in the wider world…so, be ready to hold your nose, Nicko.’

  Problematically, Anglo-American relations had already retreated some way short of the zenith of cordiality achieved in 1966. Nicko sometimes felt guilty, a little responsible for that but as his wife was wont to remind him: ‘We’re not Peter and Marija, darling!’

  Nicko’s lord and master, Tom Harding-Grayson, whom the Ambassador regarded with no little admiration as a marvellously accomplished schemer, who suffered nothing by comparison with historical figures like Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s incomparable fixer, or any of the Medici plotters, had said all along that Richard Nixon had made his peace with the wrong enemies and that sooner, rather than later he was going to regret it.

  ‘The Soviets only came to the table,’ he had explained, ‘because ultimately, they had no other choice. They were already securely contained in their box, and a judicious investment of boots on the ground in Western Europe would have stymied the blighters at very little cost for a generation. The people in Chongqing are the real problem. China will be the great, immensely populous military and economic powerhouse of the next fifty to a hundred years and frankly, there’s nothing we can do to stop them eventually assimilating the whole of South East Asia into their sphere of influence. The British Empire couldn’t hold Malaya against a couple of divisions of Japanese soldiers riding bicycles! How on earth do the Yanks think they can hold back the ‘Red Menace’ in the jungles of Asia. They could send a million GIs into those jungles, swamps and deltas and never see any of them again!”

  The Foreign Secretary had been positively excoriating about the Nixon Administration’s loudly-trumpeted policy of ‘naval policing and deterrence’ in the Western Pacific.

  ‘China is a land power. And how the devil does one blockade, intimidate or deter a giant continental land power with a few bloody ships!’

  Nicko knew it was a topic which had had the Foreign Secretary tearing at what remained of his hair.

  ‘And why on earth would Chiang Kai-shek, the stumbling block to developing, let alone reaching a pragmatic China Policy, give an inch when he knows that the United States, goodness knows why, views him as an immovable bulwark holding back the tide of Marxist-Leninism? When the bloody man is simply a corrupt, tyrannical throwback standing between America and the development of a rational Far East policy!”

  Both Nicko and his chief had observed that: ‘It is not as if Chiang did a very good job halting the march of Marxist-Leninism on the mainland!’

  What with one thing and another, Nicko’s tenure in Washington had been a somewhat bumpy ride; although, nothing to match the travails Peter and Marija had had to ride out, of course but then, those had been different times.

  In his dealings with the new Secretary of State, Bill Rogers, it did not help that the Prime Minister had taken the opportunity presented by Henry Cabot Lodge’s sudden departure, to start banging on again about the bloody Falkland Islands. The Lady had hardly given the poor fellow a chance to get his feet under the table at Foggy Bottom!

  Which was a pity, because from what Nicko had gleaned about fifty-four-year-old William Pierce Rogers, it seemed that if he was approached properly, he was almost certainly a man he and his principals in Oxford, could do business with.

  A native of Norfolk, in upper New York State, Rogers’s mother had died when he was young. A graduate of Colgate University, he had been an editor of the Cornell Law Quarterly. Cornell was where he had met his wife. Thereafter, he had passed the New York bar test in 1937 and been making a career for himself in the District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey’s office when the Second War started. His war service had been in the Navy, on board the USS Intrepid in the Pacific, and when he came home, he had quickly made his name as a Committee Counsel in the Senate, which was where he had first got to know Richard Nixon. Appointed US Deputy Attorney General by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, between 1957 and 1961 he had served as Attorney General, a period during which he and then Vice President Nixon, had not so much covered up, as papered over Eisenhower’s two periods of illness.

  Rogers was a small ‘c’ conservative Republican, a patriotic family man who as Attorney General had intervened – earning praise from Martin Luther King – in support of the integration of the schooling of children of black military personnel in Alabama in 1959. Active in GOP business in New York, he had dropped out of the public eye after 1961, and been a little surprised to be called back ‘off the bench’ to public service a few weeks ago.

  Nicko Henderson suspected that Bill Rogers shared his predecessor, Henry Cabot Lodge’s sympathy with the United Kingdom’s position vis-à-vis South Georgia and the miscellaneous Antarctic territories; but most people in the Americas also had at least a smidgen of sympathy for the Argentine case over the ownership of the Falklands Archipelago. Pertinently, he was well aware that even in his own embassy, few of his colleagues were actually convinced that Britain had anything like a cast-iron legal-diplomatic case in respect of those ‘bloody islands.’ Moreover, the new man at the State Department, a career attorney, would know that better than most.

  So, if the South Atlantic Question had not already soured the atmosphere – which it had – the time and energy, not to mention intellectual capital, wasted on the subject, had tended to obfuscate the other, critical US-British foreign policy divergence.

  If the White House was irritated by Oxford’s refusal to let the ‘South Atlantic Question’ rest; it was as nothing to the frustration in England about the dog’s breakfast of Richard Nixon’s Western Pacific policy.

  It did not help that the Administration, having adopted a policy of omertà in respect of US Navy operations in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan, still seemed to expect, as if by divine right, its Commonwealth allies – who had conscientiously pursued a non-confrontational strategy with the People’s Republic since ratifying the Hong Kong and Macao Treaty, which had successfully quietened the diplomatic climate in and around those colonial hotspots, virtually halted the Communist insurgency in Malaya and reduced tensions across Indonesia –
to quote: ‘back us up’.

  This was a thing neither the United Kingdom, or their primary regional Commonwealth ally, Australia, was in any position to do even had they been so minded, which they were not, to breach their solemnly undertaken treaty obligations to the Chinese.

  Nicko presumed that this was why, for the umpteenth time, he had been asked – well, peremptorily summoned, truth be known – to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that morning.

  Walking into the Oval Office that morning, the British Ambassador was reminded of that time as a boy he had been brought up before the Head of School, at Stowe. At this remove, so much water having passed beneath the bridge, and all that, he honestly could not recollect if his childhood transgression had been real or imagined; today, he was struck by the tell-tale signs that he was about to be on the receiving end of a less than civil wigging.

  C’est la vie…

  Philosophically, he guessed, on the slim evidence of what little he had heard about recent events in the Far East, worse things evidently happened at sea.

  The President shook his hand perfunctorily, frowning hard.

  Richard Nixon looked very tired, a little ashen a thing only partially concealed by the make-up his staffers made sure he was wearing whenever he was seen in public.

  He looked very tired, near-exhausted and naked, slow-burning suspicion filled his rheumy eyes.

  “I trust the First Lady and the girls are in fine fettle, Mister President?”

  “Yes, yes…”

  Nicko got the message.

  There was to be no small talk that day.

  “We have an ongoing situation in the Taiwan Strait,” Richard Nixon growled, settling back behind his desk and gesturing for the Englishman to take one of the vacant chairs.

  There was a short interregnum as another man entered the room.

  Fifty-eight-year-old Gordon Gray, the man unexpectedly called back into the Administration following Henry Kissinger’s resignation as United States National Security Advisor over a year ago, shook Henderson’s hand as the other man rose to greet him.

  “A situation, Mister President?” Nicko Henderson inquired affably. He was a tall, stooped man with a taste for familiar, worn jackets that hung off his coat-hanger shoulders with an unlikely tousle of boyish dark hair often lolling over his brow, he cut a scholarly, quietly rueful figure to whom it was very, very difficult to take exception. “Bill Rogers was a little vague about the situation on the ground in the East,” he hesitated, “or rather, at sea…”

  Nicko wondered where the Secretary of State was, having expected to meet him at the White House before being shown into the President’s lair.

  “The fucking Communists attacked our ships in international waters, Ambassador!”

  Henderson, having gathered that much from the TV and newspaper headlines, nodded thoughtfully.

  “Oh, dear. I’m dreadfully sorry to hear that. Hopefully, casualties are light?”

  Richard Nixon glared at Henderson.

  Gordon Gray cleared his throat.

  “We believe that at least three, possibly four anti-ship missiles were fired at the USS Goodrich and the USS Berkeley as they transited the Taiwan Strait on Monday. We have not established if they were launched from the land or the sea.”

  Henderson inclined his head, listening intently.

  “Missiles, Gordon?” He queried.

  “Yes, we now believe that during the Sino-Soviet rapprochement of the late 1950s the Communists received deliveries of a large number of P-15 Termit systems. At launch these weapons weigh about five-thousand-pounds, of which a thousand is a high-explosive hollow charge. The NATO designation for the weapon is SS-N-2 STYX, we don’t know what the Chinese call it. The thing is like a Second War flying bomb, except capable of level flight close to the speed of sound with an inertial guidance system enhanced by active radar homing. It typically acquires its target at a range of about six miles. It flies low, skimming the waves, and is therefore extremely hard to detect with current shipborne radars, particularly in bad weather. It may have an effective range of up to fifty miles.”

  The fingers of the President’s right hand were thrumming the table.

  “One hit the Berkeley,” Richard Nixon said angrily, grinding his teeth. “Full on, near the stern. It must have set off the ship’s aft five-inch magazine or her Tartar missiles. The ship went down within minutes.”

  “That’s dreadful,” Henderson sympathised.

  “The Goodrich was hit too,” Gray added grimly. “She’s a 1945 hull, a different build to Berkeley’s class, a tougher nut. She’s still afloat, the USS Little Rock and her escorts sortied from Taipei and has her under tow. Fortunately, the sea conditions in the area have moderated overnight.”

  The British Ambassador nodded, saying nothing more, knowing that every word he said now would be a hostage to fortune.

  “We’ve only picked up forty or so survivors from the Berkeley; over three hundred men are missing. The Goodrich has over forty dead and missing and another thirty seriously injured.”

  The President vented an angry sigh.

  “We’re going after those bastards,” he said. “We’ll teach them a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry!”

  Nicko Henderson did not think that sounded like it was very good news.

  For anybody…

  “We’ve got the Independence and the Shangri La north of Taiwan and the Enterprise in the South China Sea. Between them they’ve got over two-hundred-and-fifty aircraft. They’ll start hitting possible launch sites, ports, command and control, military bases and coastal transportation infrastructure in the next few hours. We’re going to set Fujian province on fire!”

  It was all Henderson could do not to ask: “Is that wise, sir?”

  Obviously, it was not – wise, that is - and there were times when even diplomats averred from stating the patently obvious.

  “One of the Enterprise’s F-4’s shot down a couple of MiGs over the Strait around the time of the attack on our ships,” Gordon Gray added, a little belatedly.

  “Where exactly?” Henderson inquired, as if it was a matter of no consequence.

  “They were on a threatening vector and refused to change course, Ambassador.”

  No, that was not the question I asked…

  “The Chinese have overstepped the mark,” the President declared. “Are you with us or against us, Ambassador?”

  Nicko Henderson did his best to side-step the crassness of the question. The Commonwealth’s treaty obligations, thus far honoured in both the spirit and the letter by the Chongqing regime of Supreme Leader Lin Biao, the man who had filled the vacuum left by the death of Mao in the Soviet bombing of Peking, had facilitated a gradual drawdown of military assets by the United Kingdom and Australia from Hong Kong, and the consolidation of the security situation in the Southern Malaya-Singapore sector, Brunei on Borneo, and in Papua New Guinea. In total, there had been a sixty percent reduction in force levels across the whole theatre of operations, some seven-five thousand personnel in total having been withdrawn. In line with treaty undertakings, the Royal Navy’s presence in Hong Kong had been reduced to a handful of minesweepers and patrol boats, and the Royal Air Force establishment slimmed down to a single transport squadron and miscellaneous helicopters.

  The United Kingdom simply did not have the wherewithal to reinstate its former martial presence in the region, nor the will and this had been repeatedly explained to the Administration.

  At Singapore, a mixed flotilla of destroyers and frigates remained at Sembawang with its dry docks and fleet maintenance facilities, supported by a garrison of two thousand men and a force of about twenty fast jets stationed on the island. The Australians had a ready-made and pre-provisioned base at Port Moresby. That, apart from elements of two Royal Marine Commandos – perhaps, seven hundred men - operating in the jungles of Brunei, Australian ground forces had returned home and those British soldiers, sailors and airmen who had been withdrawn from the region, if they we
re not already back in the United Kingdom had been redeployed around the fringes of Arabia, at Aden and in the Persian Gulf, or to the Mediterranean or France.

  Her Majesty’s Government was in no position, even had it wanted to, to risk antagonising the People’s Republic of China.

  Once again, it was apparent that none of these ‘facts on the ground’ had made the least impression on President Nixon, or his men. Nicko concluded that this was the likely explanation for Bill Rogers absence from this interview.

  The poor fellow had already got fed up attempting to acquaint his Commander-in-Chief with reality.

  The President banged the table.

  “We may need Hong Kong and Singapore, particularly the ports, for our fighting ships…”

  Richard Nixon’s voice trailed off.

  Nicko Henderson had not realised that his expression must have betrayed how aghast he was, at the notion that the President seriously expected Her Majesty’s Government to collaborate with him in an insane escalation of what might easily explode into a full-scale regional war in the Far East and South East Asia.

  He resisted the urge to hold his head in his hands.

  He always got warning if the Prime Minister planned to speak directly to the White House, a thing which happened rarely these days because it was well known that Richard Nixon reacted badly to being hectored. Mrs Thatcher, to be fair to her, was, by her lights usually just trying to encourage him to do the right thing; itself, something of an oxymoron in this White House.

  Nicko tried not to look at a complete loss while he struggled manfully to rationalise what was going on.

  Was it really the case that the President of the United States was talking to him because he was either: afraid to drawn down the Prime Minister’s scorn upon himself, and possibly her ire; or because he needed to let his staff see that he was giving a foreigner – anybody would do - a hard time?