Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  There seemed to be nothing on the TV except the war in the Pacific and demonstrations on the streets of cities all over the country. It was as if the bark of shotgun rounds fired in the air, the stink of tear gas and the thud of rubber bullets, the clash of riot shields and the chanting and the singing of the protesters had become the background tracks to all their lives.

  Julie’s heart sank when Bob Haldeman hurried forward literally as the car drew up at the White House. She saw her father’s shoulders sag, and that was before his Chief of Staff had said a word. These days, Bob did not need to open his mouth for one to know what he was thinking; and this, Julie knew, whatever it was, had to be more horribly bad news.

  “George Wallace has been shot in Montgommery, Mister President,” Haldeman said without preamble. “Three times, at very close range. Witnesses at the scene say he was dead before they put him in the ambulance. General LeMay was also shot, but we think that’s nothing serious. He went to the hospital with Governor Wallace. It is all over the networks already. They think it’s a Korean veteran, a guy called Franklin Pence, or Spence, or Spenser, they’re saying he got a psychiatric discharge from the Army. He may have been in an End of Dayer labour camp at some stage. He had an old Colt revolver, got off five rounds before an Alabama State Trooper shot him dead.”

  Julie had listened horrified.

  Her father’s Chief of Staff had run a hand over his cropped flat top crew cut, suddenly ashen and tired, sick to his soul and for the first time she could ever remember, defeated.

  “Several people in the crowd were shot also; we think by Montgommery PD officers or state troopers. We don’t have a head count but there are a couple of seriously wounded, and one possible fatality. It sounds like a real mess down there.”

  Bob Haldeman had accompanied the family group upstairs to the Executive Residence.

  “Cancel the rest of the day,” the President murmured.

  “That’s already in hand, sir,” Haldeman acknowledged.

  “Where’s the Vice President?”

  “He’s…”

  Julie watched her father making a weary, waving away gesture to forestall Haldeman’s reply, as he slumped into an armchair and exchanged a resigned look with her mother.

  Vice President Rockefeller and his wife, Happy, had been in England in the last few days, and were scheduled to visit the ruins of Paris, the temporary capital of the French Republic, Orleans, and Toulon in the coming days before returning to the United States next Friday.

  “Oxford, right,” Julie’s father muttered.

  “Do you want us to bring him home?” His Chief of Staff asked, rhetorically since he was only seeking confirmation of a decision he had probably already taken, and begun to implement.

  “Yes, yes…”

  Haldeman had left the room.

  “Dad?” Julie prompted, anxiously, not understanding what had changed but knowing, intuitively that her father’s, and consequently, her world had just, somehow, been turned upside down. “What does it mean?”

  Her mother had perched on the arm of another chair.

  She was uncharacteristically skittish, scarcely able to sit still for more than a few seconds before she rose again to her feet, and crossed her arms tightly about herself.

  The GOP Convention should have united the Party, and its majorities in both Houses on Capitol Hill behind Julie’s father; instead, it was almost as if that three-day fiesta in the Cow Palace, at San Francisco had actually been the dam holding back the flood waters which had, the day after it was over, over-topped it and now threatened to completely overwhelm it. They were like people helplessly looking up the valley, hearing the unseen flood waters rushing down towards them, wondering when the tsunami would engulf them.

  Only the Democrats in Congress, a small tribe of less than a hundred lonely voices in the wilderness had been whispering ‘impeachment’ at the beginning of August, now the cry had been taken up by all those pseudo-Republicans – Democrats in wolf’s clothing – who had never forgiven Julie’s father for out-manoeuvring their princely darling, Nelson Rockefeller, wise old Henry Cabot Lodge junior, and Barry Goldwater in the 1964 primaries.

  Old political grudges never faded, never died. They thought her father had cheated them; actually, he had just played the game better and besides, none of them could have beaten LBJ! However, now they and their supporters were having their revenge: Cabot Lodge had refused to back her father on the floor of the Cow Palace, Barry Goldwater had resolutely remained outside the convention centre, courting whomsoever wanted to speak to him. Henry Cabot Lodge appealed to a past that no longer existed; Arizonan Senator Barry Goldwater’s perennially strident call to slash the Federal Government’s interference in states’ rights, and to ‘free the markets and American industry’ had amounted to waving some kind of mythical magic wand to cure all the country’s ills and rang horribly hollow in the real world. Meanwhile, Nelson Rockefeller’s attempt to remain above the fray had just made things worse; he was her father’s Vice President, he at least ought to be loyal!

  Julie thought it was terribly sad that Governor Wallace had been attacked, and hoped he would live. True, he was a horrible man but that did not mean she wished him any ill; that was not the way her parents had brought her up. What she did not understand was why the news seemed to have completely knocked the steam out of her father and mother and now that she thought about it, seemed to have caste an even darker shroud of gloom and despondency over everybody at the White House.

  Yesterday, The New York Times had published a cruel editorial comparing the White House to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in the last days of the Second War, with the Red Army closing in all around it.

  ‘Increasingly, its anxious defenders look nervously to the outside, wondering when the final assault will come and one by one, they will be dragged off to face their accusers in court, thereafter to be assigned to the Gulag of the Federal penitentiary system…’

  It had never been like that in her father’s White House!

  That said, she was rarely in the Oval Office and naturally, there must be times when great matters of state were being discussed, when voices were raised, tempers flared and harsh words were spoken but what kind of bunker had windows looking out over the Rose Garden? And her father’s men were not Nazis, they were patriotic Americans who only wanted the best for their country!

  Except, looking at her father and mother now, and having seen the hopelessness in Bob Haldeman’s face, Julie suddenly feared that the end might indeed be nigh. Perhaps, the barbarians had been at the gate all along?

  “If,” she began, the question forming in her mind as her lips moved, “Governor Wallace is out of the campaign in November, surely that just means that you will be able to campaign more easily in the South, Daddy?”

  Richard Nixon raised a forced half-smile.

  “No,” he shook his head. “That’s not good ground for me; at best I might split the electoral college down there with Ambassador Brenckmann but either way he picks up votes he would never have got if George Wallace was standing in his way. Looking at the polls now, and we’re still over seven weeks away from the 5th November, election day, everything is going his way, not mine. He’s got his party behind him; I have the whole GOP on my back. If the Ambassador loses, he gets to retire to the Florida Keys; if I lose, I probably spend the next ten years trying to stay out of jail. George Wallace was my human shield; now my enemies have me in their sights.”

  “We don’t know that yet, sir,” Haldeman objected, without conviction. “But you should speak to the Lieutenant Governor down there in Montgommery…”

  Chapter 55

  Saturday 21st September, 1968

  Capitol Building, Montgommery, Alabama

  Back in 1861, the Senate Chamber of the Alabama Capitol Building had been where the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States had been drafted, the outcome of the Montgommery Convention on 4th February of that year. In that fateful spring Montgommery, not
Richmond in Virginia, had been the first capital of the Confederacy; and the Lower South was still proud that Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as President on the steps of the Capitol Building on 18th February 1861.

  However, it was unlikely that any adopted Alabaman before him had ever felt so besieged in that moment as thirty-nine-year-old Albert Preston Brewer, the twenty-first Lieutenant Governor, and now the acting, forty-sixth Governor of the state.

  Brewer was actually a native of Bethel Springs, Tennessee, and a graduate of the University of Alabama, who had served in the Alabama House of Representatives for a dozen years between 1954 and 1966, during which time he had become that august body’s youngest ever Speaker – at just thirty-four - before successfully running for the Lieutenant Governorship in 1966. He might have taken a shot at the Governorship had not George Wallace contrived to overthrow the State’s 1901 constitution, prohibiting a sitting governor from standing for consecutive terms; and anyway, he had been a Wallace ally – if not a Wallace man – up until then.

  In retrospect, the two men had already been on divergent paths long before their final split. Although earlier in his career in public office Brewer had gone along with segregation, he had never been a race-baiter like Wallace; abjured racist rhetoric and seen the inherent justice in the Voters Rights Bill, not least because unlike the Governor he had seen the wisdom of building a long-term relationship with the educated, middle and blue-collar black communities of the northern part of the state, as part of a trend towards the gradual liberalisation of Alabaman politics; an attempt to rebuild bridges burned a century ago.

  That said, while George Wallace had the state under his thumb, his cronies were constantly working to undermine the newly acquired rights of blacks and in the southern half of Alabama to be a negro or a person of colour, was to be disenfranchised, a second or third class citizens to whom any glimpse of the American dream was denied.

  Brewer had never subscribed to George Wallace’s opinion that: ‘There's not a dime's worth of difference’ between the Democrats and the Republicans, nor did he think that JFK, Lyndon Johnson or Chief Justice Earl Warren were ‘vultures’ picking over the ruins of the South, or betrayers of the US Constitution. In fact, Brewer had increasingly felt himself disconnected from Wallace’s intemperate language, and pig-headed adherence to policies and ideas promoted by rightist Dixiecrats like Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, in the last few years. Wallace and those rednecks were still fighting as if the ideological schism of the 1860s had never been lost in 1865, campaigning with the confidence and self-righteousness of men who blithely assumed that because no Republican Governor had ever been elected in an old deep, ‘lower south’ of the Confederacy State, none would ever sit in a southern capitol building; unaware, blind to the reality that in November, that last emotive barrier was likely to be breached: certainly in Florida, or Arkansas, and possibly in Virginia if not that year, then certainly within a decade.

  America was changing whether the diehards recognised it or not; there had been vast population shifts, the national demographic had altered more in the last six years than it had in the previous quarter-of-a-century with older people twice as vulnerable, it seemed, to the persistent war plagues or just plain, exhausted by the succession of catastrophes which had befallen their country.

  Now, Albert Brewer was sitting in his office in the Capitol Building listening to the voice of the President of the United States, with the telephone glued to his ear, battling, unavailingly to retain his wavering grasp upon reality.

  Richard Nixon had no such problem; he had lost all communications with reality long before he picked up the phone to Montgommery.

  “Mister President,” Brewer interrupted, suddenly weary beyond measure. “There is nothing anybody can do to ‘keep a lid on’ this thing. The news is already out there. Governor Wallace was declared dead on arrival at Jackson Hospital, and I have already been sworn in as Governor by the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Alabama.”

  Brewer was aware that the Nixon Administration had been complicit behind the scenes in the US Senate getting the Alabama State Constitution amended, thereby allowing George Wallace to contest a consecutive term – or as many as he wanted – in office two years ago. He had never truly appreciated the logic of that, not until the last few months when Nixon, a Republican incumbent, was transparently eying the states Wallace might deny a would-be Democrat in the forthcoming General Election.

  “I know, I know,” the President retorted, his words suddenly clipped and angry. “But General LeMay is still in the race. Does he have Alabama behind him?”

  Albert Brewer had no idea why the President was asking him.

  The latest he had heard, Curtis LeMay had gone straight from the emergency room at Jackson Hospital – where he had had his chest wound sutured - to the airport and jumped on a flight to Arizona; presumably, going home to get back to racing fast cars which everybody said, was the only thing that really rang his bell these days. He had looked out of place, out of sorts, disconnected on the election trail, drifting off message all the time and a little offended by the chaos that was the unavoidable central element of any career in politics.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Maybe, Thurmond will run with him in November?”

  Where did that come from?

  “You’d have to discuss that with Senator Thurmond, sir.”

  Right then, Albert Brewer was preoccupied with keeping the peace on the streets of Montgommery. He needed the President to authorise the deployment of the National Guard to stamp down hard on the vigilante – mostly Klan-led – gangs roaming the State’s capital looking for blacks to harass, rape or lynch, in revenge for the death of their strong man. Notwithstanding, the whole of America had, or would soon see the footage of George Wallace being gunned down by a white man; all sorts of crazy rumours about a ‘black uprising’ and a conspiracy master-minded by the Afro-American Civil Rights Movement, was behind the assassination were already circulating.

  The idea that it had all been the work of a single deranged white guy was far too straightforward to the racists and bigots out on the streets tonight.

  “Wallace has kids?” Richard Nixon asked.

  “Four, sir.” The dead Governor’s wife, Lurleen, had died of cancer – pre-diagnosed before the October war but kept secret from her by her doctors and her husband and therefore not treated until it was too late some years later – in January 1967, having planned, if the State Constitution had not been overturned, to run in her husband’s stead in the 1966 race for the Governorship.

  The poor woman – whom Brewer had always regarded as a serious player in State politics in her own right – had first been diagnosed with cancer in April 1961. George Wallace had, supposedly to protect her, insisted that she should not be told, and so it had not been until 1965, after suffering abnormal bleeding, that uterine cancer was confirmed. By then, despite radiotherapy and several surgeries including a hysterectomy, it was too late. Needless to say, Wallace had tried to cover up the true story; but as always happens, one of his staffers with whom he had, apparently discussed his wife’s prognosis, as long ago as 1962, had broken cover and thereafter, the whispers had come from everywhere. In the setting of an ancient Byzantine court, the whole tragic saga would have had about it the stench of a conspiracy; but in twentieth century Alabama, doctors could still claim that it was customary to speak to the husband, not the wife about her symptoms, and for the husband to claim that he was only trying to protect ‘the little woman.’ Even in cases where that husband’s ‘protection’ led to the death of his wife long, long before her time.

  Axiomatically, in Alabama, Governors like George Wallace would have signed a black man’s death warrant for a lot less.

  Moreover, without a second thought.

  “We have to do something,” the President decided abruptly.

  Albert Brewer frowned at the handset.

  Now that he was the Governor of Alabama – and
would be until at least the spring of 1971 – he planned to do a lot of things, the majority of which would have George Wallace spinning in his grave.

  The State’s passive resistance to desegregation was going to stop on Monday morning; any state employee who wanted to object, or go slow, or who imagined he or she had a right of peaceful civil obedience in this respect would be out of work in a hurry.

  Next week he would be out and about in black neighbourhoods, not hiding away in the mansions and country clubs George Wallace and his cronies had frequented.

  “I am already doing what can be done the Governor of Alabama, sir.”

  Why don’t you try to remember that you are supposed to be the President of the United States of America, sir?

  Chapter 56

  Monday 23rd September, 1968

  Brookline, Boston

  To the majority of Americans, the former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, and the long-time commander of Strategic Air Command, sixty-one-year-old Curtis Emerson LeMay was a fearless, fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of the enemy. He was Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who had been Bombs Away LeMay, in the Second War the gung ho commander of one of the first B24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or simply the Big Cigar to his airmen, and the man whose Twentieth Air Force had firebombed the Japanese Home Islands to defeat in 1945; and in late October 1962, he was the man whose bombers and missile-silo crews had won the war to end all wars in a night.

  However, Walter Brenckmann knew that this was not the whole story: LeMay, like any man was the sum of his many parts and hugely varied life experiences.

  Within days of the October War, Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara had reminded LeMay of his earlier prognostications that, in some circumstances a pre-emptive nuclear war was ‘winnable’. Unfortunately, he and McNamara had a long, disputatious, and more than somewhat fractious history that went back to the Second World War, when the current President of the Ford Motor Company had been a relatively junior staff officer assigned to the Office of Statistical Control serving in India, China and the Marianas, responsible for dogging Curtis LeMay’s steps from one command to the next, attempting to apply statistical analytical techniques to the operations of the Big Cigar’s bombers.