Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Neither of them said anything for about a minute.

  “We really are screwed, aren’t we?” Andrei concluded, philosophically.

  Contrarily, this seemed to vex his companion.

  “What is it with you KGB clowns?” She demanded. “Sometimes, I swear it’s like they must have surgically excised every positive thought in your heads! Yeah, maybe we are screwed. I don’t know. But I don’t plan on just sitting around waiting to get vaporised!”

  “But you just said…”

  “We installed a whole lot of new stuff back in July. I haven’t a clue what some of it does. And I won’t know whether it gives me more command and control over the aircraft’s payload until they wire up the warhead, and that Kh-20 is sitting under the belly of the Amerikanskaya Mechta.”

  Sensing the man’s reaction, she wasted no time elbowing him, hard, in the ribs.

  “Don’t go getting your hopes up!”

  She turned to go back inside.

  The man remained unmoving, gazing into the darkness.

  “I’m frightened and I’m feeling lonely,” she complained. “This is when I need you to make me feel safe and…appreciated.”

  “Oh, right…”

  Andrei’s thoughts were still far away.

  Contemplating one’s fiery death does that to a man.

  Olga grabbed his hand.

  “Now would be a good time!”

  Chapter 58

  The Senate, Washington DC

  Thursday 26th September, 1968

  After Curtis LeMay had refused to take Richard Nixon’s call on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, all the President’s men had known it was over.

  Then, at noon Eastern Standard Time, Curtis LeMay had joined Walter Brenckmann and his vice presidential running mate, Larry O’Brien, and appeared before the massed cameras of the networks at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel as the General had hammered the final nail into the coffin of Richard Milhous Nixon’s political career.

  Let me thank everybody who has inquired about my health. I am fine, I was very lucky on Saturday. My thoughts, my sympathies go out to all those who were less fortunate, and to the relations and friends of those who were killed and injured.

  Around the TV in the Oval Office the President and his inner circle had watched, not so much in horror – they were inured to soaking up one sickening body blow after another – but dull, despairing resignation.

  I plan to keep this short and sweet. The death of Governor Wallace, ends for me, my attempt to seek elected office in the 1968 race. I hereby stand down and endorse, without reservation a true, patriotic American who is, in my opinion, the only man who can get this country out of the mess President Nixon has got it into. In my conversations with Ambassador Brenckmann I did not ask for, and was not offered, any inducement or promise to persuade me to drop my candidacy, or in respect of my future employment in the service of our great nation. My endorsement of the Brenckmann for President Campaign is therefore, unconditional.

  Curtis LeMay had turned to look at Walter Brenckmann.

  In December 1963, Ambassador Brenckmann and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the South Lawn of the White House at the height of the Battle for Washington. I know that he is a man who will not let you down when the going gets rough; and that he will fight for what is right to his dying breath. When he makes you, the American people a promise, you know that he will keep it. Vote Democrat. Vote Brenckmann. God bless America!

  That morning, the GOP’s majority leaders in both Houses of Congress had made it known to the White House that, in the event Nixon was re-elected – which was looking shrinkingly improbable – they would support Democrat calls for his impeachment.

  There was, only one way out.

  But because politicians and reality are frequently strangers, there were those around the President who still honestly believed that there were still four options.

  Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had been appalled – or perhaps, incredulous, those in the room at the time could not tell which - when the Chief Executive had put the options before him.

  One, we go forward as we are, as planned to the General Election. And almost certainly lose.

  The Democrats have already threatened to put a President in jail; it was only a short step thereafter to lock up his Vice President, too.

  Rockefeller had angrily disclaimed any involvement in your – Nixon’s crimes – but he was an intelligent man and realised he had always been skating on thin ice.

  Two, the President resigns immediately and everybody who has ever had anything to do with the Administration finds themselves hounded through the courts for the rest of their, likely impoverished and variously miserable lives.

  Three, both Nixon and Rockefeller resign and the Speaker of the House discharges the responsibilities of the Chief Executive until the inauguration of the new man in January.

  Two and three were as bad as each other.

  Fortunately, there was another option.

  Four, the President resigns, the Vice President is sworn in and win or lose, prior to Inauguration Day next January, issues a slew of pardons, effectively giving those facing indictments, including the President, and all those who had already been swept up by the justice system, get out of jail free cards.

  Inevitably, the down side of option four was that Nelson Rockefeller’s chances of fighting off the Democrat challenge, already slim, in a little less than six weeks’ time would inevitably be drowned in a national firestorm of angst over who, exactly, got to be pardoned. Supposedly, the upside was that they got their people out of prison and everybody else got away with everything short of murder.

  Except Nelson Rockefeller, of course but then he was far too decent a man, and cognisant of posterity to look after himself in a situation like this. And besides, he honestly did not think he had done anything wrong.

  ‘We haven’t actually murdered anybody?’ Rockefeller had asked, grey-faced in the early hours of that morning.

  The discussions had been going on all night by then.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Bob Haldeman had snapped testily. His denial was somewhat undermined the next moment, because he had to look around the room to check that nobody was openly disagreeing with him.

  Rockefeller had eventually turned to Richard Nixon: ‘You should resign from office, Mister President. What happens after that is my responsibility.’

  Chief Justice Earl Warren had been less than ecstatic to be roused at seven o’clock that morning and asked to attend the White House at his earliest convenience.

  He had been even unhappier to be informed that the President had written to the Speaker of the House, and other Congressional leaders tendering his resignation with immediate effect due to ‘reasons of medical incapacity’ around the time he had been awakened.

  Citing Article Two, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution, Attorney General John Mitchell – looking a little dishevelled and panicky – had asked Warren to swear in the Vice President, as the thirty-eighth President of the United States.

  Much to the consternation of the Administration members milling about the corridors of the White House, the Chief Justice had demanded a little while to think about it.

  He had made calls to two other members of the Supreme Court, both renowned and respected constitutional attorneys in their youth and middle careers.

  There were precedents to be respected.

  The case of the assassination of William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President was germane; Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, the Vice President had stepped up to the plate and nobody had demurred. But that was in 1901.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died of natural causes in 1945, that was a better precedent. FDR had been the fourth President to die in office. McKinley had been the third occupant of the White House to be assassinated inside four decades, after Lincoln (1865) and James A. Garfield (1881). The problem was that no President had actually resigned!

  The whole ‘succession’ question was fraught an
d there was a very good reason for it: it was a grey area of the Constitution, over which the great legal minds of the Union had agonised, theorised and never really come to a judgement in the last one-hundred-and-eighty or so years, because there had never been the will in Congress to clarify Clause 6: In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

  The problem was ‘the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability’ et al; but in all those long intervening years it had not specified how this might be done.

  The founders of the Republic had, seemingly, given Congress a veto – never exercised and theoretical in concept and practice – over permitting the sitting Vice President to assume command of the ship of state.

  Or had they?

  Congress had had an opportunity to put in place procedures and a sound legal framework for regularising affairs as far back as 1841, when the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, had been the first Chief Executive to die while in office. Harrison’s remained the shortest term in office of any US President: inaugurated on 4th March, 1841, then as now, over one-hundred-and-twenty-seven years later, at sixty-eight years and twenty-three days of age the oldest man to ever take office, he had gone down with pneumonia and died on the 4th April.

  In the event, Vice President John Tyler had taken the bull by the horns, refusing to entertain the idea that he should be just the ‘Vice President Acting President’, employing the expedient of refusing to accept or consider any document addressed to the ‘Acting President’. Thereafter, he took the Presidential Oath and moved into the White House, presumably waiting for somebody to challenge him. Eventually, both Houses of Congress had passed a resolution confirming that Tyler was the Tenth President, thereby creating the so-called precedent of full succession, thereafter known as the Tyler Precedent under which all Administrations had operated ever since. Nobody had worried about it in the aftermath of the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley but in effect, blind eyes had been turned to the incapacitation of more than one Commander-in-Chief, notably Woodrow Wilson’s (who had suffered a stroke after the First War), or Dwight Eisenhower’s (heart attacks in the 1950s). In fact, at the time the severity of both Wilson’s incapacitation and Eisenhower’s illnesses had – probably illegally – been kept secret from the American people.

  The issue with the Tyler Precedent was that it was not, per se, strictly constitutional; which had not stopped Lyndon Johnson being sworn in after JFK had suffered what had seemed, at the time, to be a terminal seizure in July 1964. However, even then, nobody had actually resigned and although the last rites had been administered to the supposedly dying Commander-in-Chief, JFK had not subsequently formally resigned, or died. With the disasters of the war in the Persian Gulf reverberating around the globe, the priority had not been the strict observance of the letter of the law or the Constitution but to avoid a potentially disastrous vacuum of power in the US Government. Swearing in LBJ had been axiomatic and on that night four years ago, Earl Warren had just got on with the job.

  Nevertheless, in terms of pure jurisprudence, Earl Warren was painfully aware that when he had administered the oath of office to LBJ, he had been colluding in what was, by the letter of the law, a usurpation of the powers of the Presidency. True, it was an emergency but had he sworn in Lyndon Johnson as Vice President Acting President, he might have avoided the possibility of future generations of constitutional experts accusing him of inadvertently, or otherwise…treachery.

  This was different.

  Or was it?

  The President had resigned, claiming ill-health; he had already left Washington and created exactly that vacuum of power which terrified all right-thinking men.

  The Chief Justice had hesitated. To have sworn in a usurper once might be construed as an honest mistake; to do it a second time, well, any prosecutor will testify that ‘twice’ signifies the unambiguous emergence of an incriminating pattern of behaviour!

  Earl Warren had insisted on receiving a letter from Richard Nixon’s US Navy doctor detailing why the President was medically unfit to discharge his duties, and only when this letter was securely in his hands – in fact, in his inside jacket pocket – had he sworn the new man into office.

  ‘I Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States. And will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So, help me, God!’

  And the deed was done.

  By the time the Thirty-Eighth President of the Republic was striding, as if to the manner born into the Chamber of the US Senate at a little before one o’clock Eastern Standard Time that afternoon; Richard Nixon, his wife and youngest daughter, SAM 26000 had already landed in California.

  TV footage of the ex-President and his family at Andrews Field, boarding the aircraft for the last time, would be made available to the networks at the end of the new Commander-in-Chief’s address to the House and the nation.

  Before Nelson Rockefeller started speaking Marines would be on the streets of the capital, and convoys of National Guardsmen parking along Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The United States was about to plunge into untested constitutional waters. The people around the new President had no idea how the American people were going to react in the coming hours and days.

  By now, the House majority and minority leaders had been briefed – albeit in a screaming hurry – and messengers were racing to deliver single-page summaries of what was about to be promulgated nationwide from Capitol Hill.

  Everything had happened so fast that the media – TV, radio and printed – was desperately scrambling to catch up.

  And that might have been specifically designed to be the perfect recipe for…panic.

  Nelson Rockefeller had always exuded the coiffured charm and assurance – it helped when one was wearing a five thousand dollar suit – of a born patrician, namely a gentlemanly reasonableness and quiet sense of purpose.

  This was his day.

  Destiny was calling, and yet there was nothing triumphant in his demeanour as he walked, unhurriedly to the rostrum to address the packed Senate Chamber.

  He looked around, smiled tight-lipped to where his wife, Happy, sat – looking a little bewildered, which was not at all like her – beside the clerks. The new First Lady seemed as surprised by the turn of events in the last twenty-four hours as everybody else in that august meeting place.

  “I think that the American people deserve an explanation,” Rockefeller declared. “Today, I will be brief, and to the point. It will be for future historians to paint the broader context of the crisis that our great country faces.”

  Silence, there was an awful silence.

  It would be the same in living rooms, and bars and wherever Americans were watching this broadcast from coast to coast.

  “Yesterday evening at around nine o’clock I was asked to return to Washington DC. On arrival at the White House I was informed that the President’s health had ‘collapsed’ and that although his life was in no imminent danger, neither he, nor his doctors deemed him fit to discharge, at that time, or that he would be again in the foreseeable days and weeks, the duties incumbent upon his high position. To this end the President had already signed a document relinquishing all powers granted to him by the American People and these two Houses of Congress; it being his wish to spend whatever time he may have left to him in the privacy of his home surrounded by his family.”

  Nelson Rockefeller spoke in a calm, level monotone; an uncharacteristic bloodlessness in his delivery,
unable to shake off an underlying, draining weariness as if, despite his upright, and for him, chin-jutting determination, the whole weight of the world was pressing down on his broad shoulders.

  “Ladies, and gentlemen,” he sighed, “as I speak there are US Air Force Looking Glass command and control aircraft in the air, Strategic Air Command B-52s flying strategic, thermonuclear fail safe patrols, several hundred Minutemen ICBMs waiting in their silos in the Dakotas, Nebraska and elsewhere, and several Polaris ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep beneath the surface of the world’s oceans.” He paused, squinting momentarily into the temporary TV lights. “We have airmen, sailors and ground troops in harm’s way in the Far East. Following the murder of Governor George Wallace there are riots on the streets of Southern cities. These two Houses of Congress are at this time, scrutinising, line by line, the clauses of the Valletta Accords with the former Soviet Union; a cornerstone of future global peace and our recovery as the planet’s greatest trading nation. We have responsibilities to our allies, and to our own people, every man, woman and child, heedless of their creeds or the colour of their skin. We are one nation before God, and,” he gathered himself, “with reluctance and no little humility, I determined that it was my duty to accept, unreservedly, the high office vested in me earlier today.”

  There was a low muttering in the Senate.

  There was a lot to absorb and besides, very little of what the Thirty-Eighth President of the United States had said had yet begun to sink in.

  The predominant reaction was one of shock.

  Or, was it disbelief?

  “At this time my priority is the stability of the Government, and the uninterrupted continuance of its functioning, ensuring its responsibilities to the American people are carried out.”

  He paused, looked around the chamber for half-a-dozen seconds, glanced to his wife and smiled tight-lipped.

  “This is not an occasion when your President ought to speak of politics; I shall not. However, there are practical considerations which, if I may, I will speak to now, if only to anticipate the questions forming on millions of lips across our great country.”