by James Philip
In the meantime, what I really need now is some Company hack telling me what I already know!
It was not Walter Brenckmann, or Ronald Reagan who was getting on his nerves; it was the White House’s Chief of Investigations. They had brought Howard Hunt in to clean up the mess, not constantly walk around pointing out all the fresh turds he had found, and taking pride in letting everybody know what important SOBs he and his guys were!
Haldeman brought the conversation full circle.
“A lot of people are getting on the Presidents nerves, Howard.”
“Bobby Kennedy was in California last week.”
The White House Chief of Staff stopped himself asking: “How do you know that?” He already knew the answer.
He groaned.
“Shit… Tell me you guys aren’t still tapping Gretchen Brenckmann’s phones?”
Howard Hunt snorted, shrugged.
“We never tapped anybody’s lines. That was the FBI and Angleton’s people. Remember?”
Haldeman rolled his eyes, wanting to put his head in his hands.
Hunt jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the back of the aircraft where the President had his sleeping quarters.
“Look, Bob. If the President gives me an order, I follow it, okay.” The White House Chief of Investigations frowned, shaking his head. “This is a numbers game, right? If the Kennedys stand aside, McGovern and Brenckmann duke it out on the floor of the convention. McGovern wins, most likely. But if the Irish Mafia don’t just stand aside, and they get behind the Ambassador…”
Haldeman’s impatience briefly chased away the edges of his weariness.
“Okay, so it’s too close to call and if Walter Brenckmann wants it, really wants it, I mean, he might win. We win both ways; the democrats rip their own throats out.”
Hunt was still shaking his head.
He was remembering all the times Langley had miscalculated in South America; when people like him had had to go in and ‘put right’ the elections and coups which had ‘gone wrong’, because all those college boy analysts in DC had been incapable of thinking other than in arrow-straight lines.
Following his win over George McGovern in the California Primary, Ambassador Brenckmann had made a speech at Berkeley which had sucked in every peacenik, deadbeat, unpatriotic loser (Democrat) in the Bay Area which had so infuriated the President, that he had conducted an impromptu verbal pistol-whipping of his senior staffers for ‘letting that sanctimonious traitor have a free stage!’
Walter Brenckmann had cut an unlikely, staid, albeit dapper figure on that stage at Berkeley, with local San Francisco Democrat big-wigs rubbing shoulders with long-haired student leaders, women in kaftans, the leadership of the Bay Area NAACP and the figurehead of the California Women’s Action Committee (CWAC), Miranda Sullivan.
Such an alliance was like a red rag to the President.
Even more troubling, within the crowd, men and women and kids wearing Brenckmann for President and Vote McGovern stickers had happily mingled, united in delight that George Wallace and his pet, frothing at the mouth General, had been driven back onto the plantations of the Deep South, presumably from whence their slave owning spiritual forebearers had come.
George McGovern had not been there, of course. He and his wife had left for a break in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Rumour had it that he had left a lot of his ‘people’ in California but nobody knew if these were defectors, spies or simply folk taking a well-earned breather from campaigning.
Walter Brenckmann had asked for his supporters to pray for the Americans in harm’s way in the Western Pacific. Then he had asked the obvious question.
‘I thought that it was the Soviets we went to war with back in 1962? When did the Russians stop being our existential political, military and economic enemies? Now suddenly, we are guarding the seas of the Russian Far East to supposedly deter Chinese aggression. Why? It was the Soviets who bombed the Chinese in October 1962; not us. We had no fight with the mainland Chinese in 1962; why in the name of all that is right, do we have a fight with them now? Because they helped the North Koreans humiliate the Nixon Administration? Don’t those people in the White House realise that the world is not how it was on 27th October 1962? That it is changed forever? The only things that ought to be, and to me, remain immutable, are the ideals and the standards of humanity that this country should and must represent. When did we cease to be the arsenal of democracy and the land of the free? Not, my friends on the morning after the October War; but on the day Richard Milhous Nixon was inaugurated!’
The President had watched it on TV.
Haldeman was not the only one in the room who had been worried the Commander-in-Chief was about to have a seizure, or perhaps, a psychotic incident as ‘the Ambassador’ had forensically catalogued the blunders, and the crimes – well, some of them, it was a very, very long list – of the Nixon White House to his increasingly ecstatic audience.
‘You know, back in the bad old days before the October War, most Americans believed that their President, whatever his faults or foibles, was on their side. That he respected the rule of law, that he could be trusted to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, and was more interested in defending the American people than his own partisan interests. It saddens me that by his deeds, or rather, by his mis-deeds, Richard Nixon has shown himself to be a throwback to earlier times when Presidents used their tenure in the White House to aggrandise themselves and to settle old political and personal scores. Although, in saying that, I seriously doubt if any President before Richard Nixon has so egregiously ridden a cart and horse through the time-honoured Constitutional rights of his fellow Americans. He says ‘stick with me, America is safe in my hands’ but I say to you, no American is safe in that man’s hands. He spies on you, he flouts the Constitution under which you live and now he is sending your sons abroad to risk their lives in a new war which none of you want, and we – as a nation - do not need to fight! I tell you, in all sincerity, the time has come for us all to decide that we won’t get fooled again!’
We won’t get fooled again…
That was the promise which had touched a raw, exposed nerve and for most of the last thirty-six hours the President had been living in his own personal bubble of rage.
We won’t get fooled again.
At the end of Ambassador Brenckmann’s speech a tall, shaggy-haired man in blue jeans and a leather jacket with a guitar slung over his shoulder had walked onto the stage and hugged the candidate.
He had stepped up to the barrage of microphones and proclaimed: ‘This is for the most honest man I’ve ever met in my whole life. My dad!’
And proceeded to perform his musical brother in arms’, Bob Dylan’s, multi-million-selling chart topping song The Times-They-Are-A-Changing.
The whole show had ended with Sam Brenckmann flanked by his father and mother, arm in arm sucking up the rapturous, never-ending applause.
We won’t get fooled again!
Richard Nixon would, probably, kill for adulation like that.
The bizarre thing was, that according to the GOP’s latest private polling, it did not matter whether Richard Nixon ran against McGovern or Brenckmann in November because he would win at a canter, taking around two-thirds of the Electoral College and around fifty percent of the national popular vote. Neither of the leading Democrats had had a realistic shot at the White House, not least because George Wallace was threatening to steal upwards of fifty to sixty of the three-hundred-and-twenty-eight votes of the electoral college in the old Lower South. As recently as last month there had actually been one poll, granted an outlier, which opened up the possibility of McGovern coming in third in the general election behind a Wallace-LeMay ticket.
And yet, there was no denying that Walter Brenckmann was starting to mine a deep-seated seam of discontent. Worryingly, previously GOP-owned California which, due to the large post-October 1962 population shifts, and the re-arrangement of the allocated electoral col
lege votes nationwide, and now offered fifty-eight votes to November’s winner, was beginning to trend towards Nixon-McGovern or Brenckmann poll margins approaching the sort of parity that, for the first time, were within the accepted parameters of ‘statistical error’. Obviously, that might just be a short-term consequence of the Democrat candidates’ high profile in recent campaigning. The well-oiled, amply financed Nixon-Rockefeller machine had not yet fully swung into action but, even so, with that comedian Ronald Reagan doing his best to seek attention within the state, those latest polling numbers were to say the least, a little unsettling. Although, of themselves, hardly sufficient to explain the latest of the President’s tantrums.
The message was that Richard Nixon was no longer the sure fire bet for re-election he had been just a couple of months ago. Naturally, men like Howard Hunt were starting to have troubling second thoughts about some of the things that they had done in his President’s name in the last three years.
While Hunt had occasionally viewed the 1st Amendment, professionally, as something of an irritant it was clearly beyond inappropriate for the Commander-in-Chief to blast and impugn the patriotism of a man – like Ambassador Brenckmann, who was a decorated four-ring Captain in the US Navy Reserve - who had, facts are facts whatever Richard Nixon wanted to believe, been a hero in two of America’s wars while the present incumbent of the Oval Office, had briefly been a ‘supply officer’ some distance behind the front in 1944. And as for labelling a man a ‘traitor’ for simply having the temerity to articulate a different perspective on US foreign policy than that held by the Administration, was just plain dumb.
We won’t get fooled again…
Like many long-time creatures of the CIA, Hunt was perfectly happy with the status quo, Republican by inclination rather than ideological commitment. He had served under Democrat and GOP Chief Executives, and apart from the undeniable fact that JFK had been different, and the bastard had given his career a bad knock after the Bay of Pigs screw-up, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and LBJ had all been singing from similar anti-communist songbooks. At the outset he had assumed Nixon was just going to pick up that playbook, and, as all post-Second War Presidents had before him, improvise a little at the start of his first term – just to see what he could get away with - before settling down, getting real, going back to basics: and rolling out the normal subvert, starve, actively denigrate and ultimately overthrow routine against – democratically elected or not – leaders and regimes that the Administration did not like.
That was fine if one was talking about people a President did not like overseas; at home, that sort of policy needed to operate with a certain sleight of hand, and a sensitivity to the scruples of the people on the Hill. Instead, the Administration could hardly have shot itself in the foot – well, both feet – more comprehensively if it had blundered around with a pump action shotgun on the floor of Congress!
In retrospect, the problem was that none of the grown-ups at Langley, or around J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and certainly not within the Administration, had fully appreciated exactly how giddy Nixon and his gang of marketing men, and know it all two-bit West Coast attorneys, many of whom despised the DC milieu, would get when they discovered the scale of Operation Chaos and worked out, very early on, that they might just be able to get away with pulling off the same sort of stunts – on a much bigger scale – that previous White Houses had successfully played on Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina, and in all that pre-October War messing about with the internal politics of European allies and opponents alike, at home in the United States.
The Democrats were at a historic nadir; why not make sure they stayed well and truly under the heel of the GOP? Nobody would ever know and even if somebody found out what was really going on, most Americans would never penetrate the fog of secrecy. Likewise, if the President’s enemies in the press or on TV put their heads above the parapet, the CIA or the FBI would cut them off at the knees.
Wasn’t that the first lesson of the Warwick Hotel operation?
The Reverend King had been discredited, neutralised for over year, and the Civil Rights Movement had threatened to splinter in the first months after the inauguration.
That was mission accomplished, wasn’t it?
In any event, the strategy had always been to blame the whole thing on LBJ. The actual bugging had happened on his watch, and was itself a predictable and logical consequence of operations tacitly and in some cases, implicitly authorised by JFK.
Why wouldn’t the incoming Administration take advantage of the climate of surveillance initiated by Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson?
However, in retrospect even Langley insiders like Howard Hunt had been a little surprised with the enthusiasm with which the new President had embraced the possibilities of the embryo surveillance state. From day one the Administration had been up to its neck in, and demanding ever more dirt on its opponents, and miscellaneous White House-nominated ‘enemies of the state’ from Angleton’s people. Back at Langley they joked, unfunnily, about ‘the big change in January 1965’. Within weeks of Richard Nixon’s inauguration in Philadelphia, the Agency had been ordered to switch resources from overseas operations, to beef up Operation Chaos, on account of the fact that just like back in the good old McCarthy un-American Activities days, it transpired that all the real enemies were in America, in the new Administration’s play book.
“My reading of what the President said is that he expects us to do something about Brenckmann,” Howard Hunt remarked.
On first acquaintance with the President’s inner circle, Howard Hunt had been struck by the way it operated, exactly like the coterie around the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, at Langley. Everything was expressed in vague generalities, people were loath to commit anything to paper, and often later denied they had said this, or that, or put forward one or other opinion, when a scheme looked like it was coming off the rails.
“He was just venting, Howard,” Bob Haldeman yawned.
Hunt sighed, folded his hands on his lap and gave the White House Chief of Staff a disappointed look.
“You mean,” he retorted, “like you and the others were just venting when you talked about ‘getting rid’ of James Jesus Angleton last year, Bob?”
Haldeman suddenly jerked awake.
“Nobody at the White House had anything to do with that!”
Howard Hunt shrugged.
“No? The way I remember it there was a heck of a lot of ‘who will rid me of this turbulent prick’ talk coming out of the Oval Office at the time? And I don’t remember anybody being very cut up about it when the news came in that the bastard had had his brains blown out?”
“The guy was a liability. CIA know that, we know that. End of story.”
Hunt shrugged, spread his hands wide.
Personally, he had no problem conducting non-violent black bag operations on behalf of, or sometimes within, the Administration on American soil; if nothing else, the Civil War in the Midwest had proved there were still plenty of ‘enemies within’ and if anybody doubted it, they only had to watch the televised proceedings of the Midwest War Crimes Tribunal broadcast live coast to coast every week day.
Where Hunt drew the line was being ordered to commission ‘wet work’ on US soil against US citizens; he had not joined the Agency, or the Administration, to murder his countrymen. The trials going on in Minnesota were proof positive that there was a competent justice system – granted, despite of, not because of Attorney General John Mitchell – which was self-evidently up to the job of being judge and jury in the homeland.
He sniffed, glanced away into the clouds now far below the ascending jetliner. In the distance he saw the glint of the wings of one of the supersonic interceptors which always escorted Air Force Once.
“Anyway, the stunts with Ambassador Brenckmann’s son were bad mistakes,” he said, trawling again through choppy waters. “It was petty and it pissed off the Brits. And in case you were wondering; I’m
not the only guy on the team whose been waiting to hear who gets to be fired over that, Bob. Screwing with the CNO wasn’t clever, either. So, don’t be surprised if one day soon, everybody finds out that the Navy was never happy with our China policy in the first place…
“We don’t talk about this stuff,” Haldeman grunted. “If the Navy had had its way, it would have called that lush McCain out of retirement. At least we can trust Tom Hinman to stay on message in public. Can you imagine what it would be like having to deal with old ‘Mister Sea Power’ fighting John McCain?”
Hunt was not a man known for his quick empathy or ready sense of humour.
He frowned.
“Yeah, well, maybe if Admiral McCain had still been around, we wouldn’t have gone out of our way to stir up a hornet nest in the Taiwan Strait before we had a couple more infantry divisions on the ground in the region, or better still, an Amphibious Expeditionary Force locked, loaded and ready to go at Pearl Harbour!”
He almost added: “As the Chiefs of Staff recommended.”
Nobody in the Nixon Administration reacted positively to being reminded of all the good military advice they had ignored – invariably with indifference or contemptuous disdain – in the past.
“The Navy was ordered to deter Communist aggression,” Haldeman snapped, losing his temper.
Howard Hunt went back to gazing out of the window.
He shook his head.
The Democrats had a point.
We won’t get fooled again…
“Yeah, that worked well, didn’t it,” he commented almost but not quite under his breath.
Chapter 31
Saturday 8th June, 1968
Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, California
“There are people out there who still think George McGovern has the delegates, even though we’re clean out of primaries,” Larry O’Brien pointed out as the threesome gazed out across the balcony to the palms gently swaying in the warm Santa Anna wind blowing off the mountains.