Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Thus, he was in a thoughtful frame of mind as he sat in back of the car driving north through the vineyards of the Napa Valley to what he hoped, would be the seminal moment of his career in politics.

  For good or bad…

  A little voice, whispering constantly in his head had always cautioned that being the darling of the liberal left and centre of the Democratic Party, although morally satisfying, might be a double-edged sword in the primaries, and probably, his Achilles heel in November. He and Richard Nixon were chalk and cheese long before it turned out that the President of the United States was a crook, who in any other age – when the House was not dominated by the GOP – would have been impeached by now. Inevitably, Nixon was going to wrap himself in the stars and stripes in the autumn; paint McGovern un-American, a commie-stooge and appeaser whose dreams of reviving ‘the Great Society’ project briefly enunciated by Lyndon Johnson in his brief time in the White House in 1964-65, would surely bankrupt the Union. And that had been before the threat of the escalating war in the Far East had come to dominate the political debate.

  McGovern’s advisors said he should have made the Brenckmann people come to him: after all, he was still well ahead in the delegate count for the National Democrat Convention planned to be held in Memphis in a little under three months’ time.

  His people were even unhappier about the rumour that today’s meeting had been brokered by Claude Betancourt, the Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, whom everybody knew was a ‘Brenckmann man’. Or was it the other way around, that the Ambassador was a ‘Betancourt man’, an obedient proxy?

  Personally, having met Walter Brenckmann several times, and watched with no little interest the admirable way he had deported himself on the public stage in England and since, on the Primary trail, McGovern gave that latter slur a lot less credence than most. For one, he and his rival had been at the sharp end of war; he as a B-24 pilot in Italy, Brenckmann as a Navy man in both the Second War and the first Korean conflict; whereas, Richard Nixon had joined the Office for Price Administration after Pearl Harbour and later been commended for his ‘meritorious and efficient performance of duty as Officer in Charge of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, a desk job.

  McGovern had assumed, although with no substantive evidential basis, that his fellow Democrat was as sceptical as he was about Nixon’s ‘achievements’ as Ike’s VP in the 1950s.

  As for Nixon’s conduct in office since January 1965: the man had been too busy spying on his political opponents to notice that the Kingdom of the End of Days was gearing up for war, and had spent the last three years covering up – not very well – the catalogue of egregious felonies and blunders committed by him or in his name, by friends and members of his crumbling Administration. Things had got so bad in the Oval Office, that the man had started another war just to distract attention away from his own manifest wrong doing and incompetence!

  Today’s ‘encounter’ had been brokered by Joanne Brenckmann and McGovern’s wife, and inseparable political amanuensis, Eleanor, in the course of a cordial, very business-like ten-minute telephone call earlier that week. Although the call had not completely come out of the blue, the directness of it had unnerved many of those around the McGoverns.

  While Eleanor had not worked tables or suchlike to help put her husband through college; she had had to abandon her college education after a year at Dakota Wesleyan University to go to work, and both women had given birth to a child in time of war when their husbands were far, far away on active service very definitely in harm’s way.

  The mother of five children, back in 1962, when George had fallen ill, Eleanor had gone out on the stump alone and won him his seat in the Senate. She was articulate, invariably the cleverest person in the room without being in any way superior about it, wrote her own speeches and some of her husband’s, and had a winning sense of humour that always came over well on TV and radio.

  Joanne Brenckmann had gone out of her way to compliment Eleanor on a speech she had heard her make at Sacramento three weeks ago. People often said such things, nice things; the difference was that it had been obvious to Eleanor McGovern that Ambassador Brenckmann’s wife had actually listened to the speech, agreed with its central thrust and evidently, thought more that a little about it in the interim.

  “Do you think it’s true what they’re saying about the Kennedy delegates?” Eleanor asked her husband, speaking that which they had elected not to voice until now.

  “Yes.”

  “DNC insiders again,” Eleanor McGovern murmured, enigmatically.

  Claude Betancourt was only the latest of the great magnets to hijack the Democrats; and as dictators went, he was a moderately benign tyrant, with none of the pedantic vindictiveness of his old boss, Jo Kennedy. Infighting within the Party had been brutal at times, especially since the Second War, with the votes cast in primaries frequently ignored, lost in the frenzy of horse-trading and the calling in of debts, political and monetary at successive National Conventions.

  “We always knew what we were up against,” her husband retorted, his thoughts distracted. “We’ll still win.”

  “On the Convention floor, at least,” Eleanor concurred, wishing she felt a little bit more confident about it. She half-confessed her doubts: “The DNC doesn’t want a dog fight on the floor; it wants an anointment, George.”

  McGovern shrugged.

  “We can’t have real democracy in the land of the free, can we?”

  Eleanor knew he did not mean it.

  “No, not while Nixon is in the White House,” she said, smiling thinly.

  The couple had met at High School; started dating much later when they were at Dakota Wesleyan University and despite having initially planned not to marry until after the war was over, tied the knot in October 1943. Their first baby, Teresa, was born while George had been overseas, flying his B-24 – christened Dakota Queen in Eleanor’s honour. They were soul mates, political activists by temperament, united in purpose and each was the other’s rock, which allowed them to talk with undiluted frank honesty about practically everything.

  They understood at the outset that nobody gave George McGovern a prayer of unseating Richard Nixon in November. Just because the President was a disgrace to the high office that he held did not automatically mean that a Democrat, any Democrat, was going to kick him out of the White House in the fall of 1968. That was not how politics worked. The American people yearned for peace, security and for everybody to get an even break; but above all, they wanted to be safe and a large number of them, decent, god-fearing to the core, felt a lot like that awful man George Wallace about people who did not look like them. Prejudice, and history, was baked-in to the American political system and after what the country had been through since 1962, it had always been a moot point whether Main Street was ready to invest in an unashamedly liberal message of hope. Depressingly, if there was a lesson to be learned from the primaries, it was that it was far from clear that registered Democrats were convinced by the McGovern version of social and political renewal.

  So, neither husband or wife were under the mistaken illusion that they were the ones calling all the shots today.

  And there was another problem.

  In previous campaigns, Eleanor had worried her husband was too angry, too personally antagonistic towards her opponents. That angst had been largely absent thus far, flaring only now and then when he was talking about the President. His campaigns suffered when he got too angry and he loathed Richard Nixon and practically everything he stood for. Anger only took one so far in public debate. She remembered her husband’s first Senate race, against a GOP incumbent whom he viewed as a despicable old McCarthyite; later George had confessed: “It was my worst campaign. I lost my balance…”

  After that setback Jack Kennedy had appointed him Director of the Food for Peace Program, responsible for utilising US grain surpluses to address the needs of the under-privileged at home and the hungry abroad. History might ha
ve recorded that the project was one of the few real successes of the Kennedy Administration had not fate taken a different course in October 1962.

  For McGovern, it had transformed an obscure Dakotan former Congressman into an emergent world figure, a face recognised in capitals around the globe. In the Senate he had been a leading member of the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, and the beleaguered Democrats’ one stridently liberal spokesman.

  The McGoverns’ car and those of their senior staffers were met in front of the old hacienda in the trees by the Ambassador, his wife, and daughter-in-law. As was to be expected, it was Gretchen who did all the talking necessary to break the ice, while others from the Brenckmann campaign intercepted their counterparts, taking a relaxed lead from their principals.

  Inside the building, Robert Kennedy stepped out of the shadows to greet his old friends.

  That was when George McGovern knew his choices had narrowed to two, equally unsatisfactory alternatives: one, to fight on alone and likely tear the Democratic party to pieces on the floor of the convention hall; or two, to swallow some of his hopes and ambitions.

  The last few years had taken a toll on JFK’s forty-two-year-old younger brother. He was thinner, visibly a little hollowed out physically and psychologically, although he had not totally lost the Kennedy swagger, or his Yankee drawl.

  Gretchen Betancourt floated around the two couples and the former US Attorney General. A round table had been laid out on the patio behind the house, shaded at noon by tall cypresses, the warmth of the day moderated by a fluky breeze drifting down the valley. There were only five places laid at the table; and without explanation Gretchen made herself scarce.

  Walter Brenckmann raised a glass filled with orange juice.

  “To fellowship?” He suggested.

  There was fresh crusty bread, cold meats and salad, and opened bottles of Californian wine if anybody had that thirst.

  “This isn’t an ambush, Senator,” Walter remarked to George McGovern. “You and I, and Bobby, all want the same thing and broadly, subscribe to the same vision for our country. And,” he half-smiled, putting down his glass, “have every right to be as angry as Hell over the way President Nixon is running the show. I’ll be blunt, if I may. Trust me when I say I mean no disrespect to you, or to Bobby, but in my experience when you’re up against a crook you need a trial lawyer to bring him down. Richard Nixon ought to be on his knees trying to make a plea bargain with the American people; instead, he’s stirring up a war in the Western Pacific because the only thing he’s got going for him is that he won the last war he sleep-walked into. It looks to me as if he plans to buy the general election with the bodies of patriots.”

  The McGoverns exchanged looks.

  They said nothing, knowing there was more to come.

  “I plan,” Walter Brenckmann said, sadly, “to see that man go to jail for his crimes against the American people.”

  Chapter 29

  Friday 7th June, 1968

  KGB Central, Vladivostok, Primorsky Krai

  Over the left shoulder of the dour, unsmiling man who had demanded his enervating three-and-a-half day trek by road, rail and ferry, only to leave him cooling his heels for several days after his arrival in the drab, dusty port city, Major Andrei Kirov could just see the outline of the Triumphal Arch of Tsar Nicholas II in the middle distance.

  Vladivostok had been bracketed by missiles – likely launched by a Yankee Polaris submarine – in the war, and against the odds, survived more or less intact. With the benefit of hindsight, it was remarkable, hardly credible, that it and all the most tempting military-industrial targets in the Amur Valley, had largely escaped the rain of devastation which had reduced over fifty percent of the Motherland to a scorched, radioactive wasteland. It helped that Russians were a stoic people, as were the majority of the other tribes and clans of the USSR, few of whom had wondered overlong about the fickle fates which had decreed that one city would die, and another live.

  It had surprised Andrei how busy the port was. There were a couple of destroyers, a swarm of smaller Red Navy patrol and fast missile boats, and a veritable proliferation of scruffy merchantmen and fishing vessels. Many of the wharves were busy and the city itself, was crowded and as unlikely as it seemed, relatively prosperous. Most of people he encountered were well fed, and the police and Red Army presence on the streets was diminishingly negligible apart from around the docks. True, there were the obligatory queues at all the food shops; and nobody wore anything colourful but by the same token, the bars and dives down near the harbour were filled, although not that rowdy and from what he could divine, the people of the city were, if not dancing on the streets, then content.

  Normality, that was it.

  Nothing was more disorientating than the surreal sense of…normality which pervade the whole city.

  “Standards must not be allowed to slip,” Major General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov told the giant of a man who sat, pretty much at attention, in the seat before his desk in the second floor annexe of the old, much rebuild and extended, pre-war Police and KGB Headquarters in the Old City, surrounded by monuments to past ages.

  Since 1917 many of the ancient monuments had been pulled own, modified – usually artlessly - or surrounded by memorials and celebrations of the Revolution, and the victories of the Great Patriotic War; even so, the Tsarist ephemera that remained such an ingrained part of the USSR’s most eastern city, grated on the recently appointed First Secretary of the KGB in Siberia.

  Forty-four-year-old Kryuchkov had been recruited into the higher echelons of the KGB during the reorganisations of the year following the coup which saw Alexander Shelepin’s regime come to power. Kryuchkov’s patron, Yuri Andropov had spent that year weeding out ‘dead wood’, rebuilding the apparatus of state security to be a more malleable, flexible tool for his master, Shelepin. Kryuchkov had been an unknowing beneficiary of the upheavals, unexpectedly elevated to the inner circle of the so-called ‘Sverdlovsk Lubyanka’, and frequently called to report to the Supreme Soviet, and to the Troika in session – of which his own Chief, Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny was a permanent member, along with Admiral Gorshkov – in a supporting role to his departmental superior, Yuri Andropov.

  Kryuchkov, born in Volgograd the year before it was renamed from Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad, had joined the Communist Party in 1944, avoiding war service by working for the Komsomol – Communist Youth League – before studying law and becoming an ambitious cog in the state legal system. His first proper job was as an investigator, later he went into the Diplomatic Corps, a convenient choice of career for a man temperamentally suited to the spying game. During October 1962 he had been away from Moscow running an errand for the Central Committee of the Party in Sverdlovsk. No member of his close family had been that fortunate and he was still an embittered, very angry man about that.

  Andrei Kirov recognised the type a kilometre off.

  The best idea was to keep out of their way; unfortunately, when they happened to be your boss that became awkwardly problematic.

  “No, Comrade First Secretary,” he chimed obediently.

  “So, you think the reports about poor moral and openly expressed counter-revolutionary sentiments at Seryshevo are mistaken?”

  “No, sir,” Kirov replied. “The Air Force has neglected the base and transferred out a lot of the most experienced officers and enlisted people. The establishment of the base is now down to a handful of airworthy aircraft. In my opinion aircrews and ground personnel are frustrated and feel forgotten. In that atmosphere, despite the strong leadership of Comrade General Zakharov, a most able and loyal Party man who is greatly respected by those under his command, one would be astonished if there not a few Vodka-fuelled idiots trying to make trouble…”

  “That’s all this is? You’ve seen the reports. Zakharov is described as an ‘unruly subordinate’ who is not on top of administrative matters?”

  “I believe those are Red Air Force complaints, Comrade Fi
rst Secretary.” Kirov spread his hands wide. “Having met and worked with the man, I’m not really sure where those allegations come from. I was aware of them but frankly, I did not think it was our job to get mixed up in an internal Air Force feud.”

  “Um…”

  Andrei had noted that his new Chief had that irritating lawyer’s trait of never, ever being in a hurry; and never, ever, really saying what he actually meant until he had ambled around the bushes several times.

  “We come to your situation,” Kryuchkov said, sitting up and viewing the younger man with hard, inscrutable grey-green eyes. “You’re wasted out there in the middle of nowhere. Seryshevo won’t be, even nominally, a strategic bomber base much longer. The forthcoming agreement with the Americans will stipulate the removal of all the remaining long-range bombers from the Far East. In any event, what we actually need in this region are interceptor squadrons to stop the bloody Chinese trespassing on our airspace. Not those bloody dinosaurs, what are they called?”

  “Tupolev Tu-95s, Comrade First Secretary,” Kirov said helpfully.

  “And that’s another thing,” his chief frowned. “Is it true that the Red Air Force have refused to allow you to perform your political function during long-range bomber missions?”