by James Philip
That was the other thing he could not afford to do…
Live in the past!
Or think that the world owed him a single damned thing just because he had once done something insanely reckless that had cost the lives of over half his people…
“It’ll be all right, boss,” Jack Griffin muttered.
Peter realised he had been brooding.
That would never do.
He chuckled lowly.
“Did I ever tell you about Napoleon’s corporal, Jack?”
The other man frowned askance.
“Napoleon wasn’t always a great general,” Peter explained, grinning. “When he was a young artillery officer, he made mistakes like everybody always does when they don’t know any better. That experience taught him the most important lesson he ever learned. So, in later years, he always made sure he had a corporal nearby, because he knew that the worst thing that he could possibly do would be to give an order that any corporal, in any army in any age, knew could not, or would not be obeyed.”
Jack Griffin’s face creased in wicked mirth.
Peter ran a hand through his fair hair.
“Captain Penberthy told me that one night. That was before the war when I was standing one of my first middle watches on Talavera. It was one of those still summer nights in the Channel when the water is deceptively glassy and you think, wrongly, that you can see all the way to the horizon in every direction. I often think it was him standing behind my shoulder, that stopped me trying to jump off the bridge as we ran in towards those big Russian ships.”
His friend thought about this.
“Naw, Dermot O’Reilly would have stuck out a leg and tripped you up if you’d tried to abandon ship before we got those fish away!”
Peter Christopher laughed a spontaneous belly laugh.
He sobered momentarily, and thought about the bearded, stoic Canadian who had stood beside him throughout those dreadful hours…
More like minutes, thinking about it.
“I guess he would have,” he conceded.
There was a distant look in Jack Griffin’s eyes.
“God, that was fun,” he breathed. “Don’t you think?”
Fun was not exactly the word that had ever come to Peter’s mind when he recollected that day; nonetheless, he saw where his friend was coming from.
“Yeah,” he concurred. “Fun…”
When they were alone the two men had long ago dropped the formalities concurrent with their differing ranks. To Peter the rough diamond Chief Petty Officer was the man who had fought with him ain all of Talavera’s battle, saved his wife’s life twice, literally by throwing is body between her and an assassin; to Jack, the dashing poster boy of the post-October War Navy was the man who had given him a chance to atone, to belong on board Talavera, respected and supported him through thick and thin ever since; he loved the man. And dammit, his Captain and Lady Marija and their kids were family to him and Mary, and young Harry. They were two friends who would die, one for the other, if that was what it came to. It was unspoken; a thing understood between brothers-in-arms.
So, when they were absolutely sure they were alone, and that nobody could over hear them, the English, and the Navy formalities which otherwise governed their lives seemed redundant.
“I used to wonder if that was it,” Jack went on, quietly, almost ashamed to be confessing his sins, “that,” he shrugged, “that what happened that day would be it. The big moment of my life, that I’d never again be so alive. Feel the rush I got that day. I was wrong. I didn’t know Mary then, a few months back holding young Harry for the first time, well, that kind of trumps everything, I suppose. But I don’t need to tell you that…”
“No,” Peter agreed, aware that his vision was misting. “Life is good, Jack.” He made a conscious effort to change the mood. He pointed up at the great steel curve of the Liverpool’s bilge above their heads. “And now Her Majesty’s Government have seen fit to give us some really heavy metal to play with!”
Chapter 61
Wednesday 9th October, 1968
Offices of Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann, Washington DC
“Well, at least the Navy’s done something right at last!” Gretchen declared, making one of her Christ come to cleanse the Temple entrances, sweeping imperiously past her husband, her fingertips touching his raised hand, before circling the table in Bill Sallis’s conference room and flopping down beside Ted Sorenson, who had been deep in conversation with Dan.
“Hello Gretchen,” Sorenson smiled, wryly. “I’m very well too, how are you this fine fall morning?”
“It’s true, then?” Her husband checked.
She nodded emphatically.
“Junior’s being sent back to sea. The Secretary of the Navy handed him a letter of commendation and his personnel jacket has been ‘appropriately updated’, whatever that means in the Navy. They’ve also nailed on his third ring. He’ll be leaving in about a week.”
Ted Sorenson felt himself to be a little out of the loop.
“The Administration went after Junior when the Ambassador stayed in the race after New Hampshire,” Gretchen explained. “Twice!”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard,” the older man nodded, unable to get his head around how his friends’ marriage could – self-evidently - work so well with a third party pretty much ever-present.
Gretchen, he had discovered, was nowhere near as scary as people imagined; and Dan, well, you could not wish for a more regular guy. The couple liked Sorensen and the better he got to know them, the more he had got to like them in the last few weeks.
Today’s encounter was part social, part business.
Notwithstanding the election was still over a month away, Larry O’Brien had already pencilled Ted Sorenson in for a special advisor post – of the kind that meant he was on the ‘access the Commander-in-Chief’ when he wanted kind - in the Brenckmann White House; but Gretchen wanted a piece of the man JFK used to call his ‘intellectual blood bank’, too. And Gretchen, being Gretchen, had got her bid in first.
Gretchen and Dan were literally, on a flying visit to the capital, having departed their home in Cambridge before dawn, flown to DC – a thing you could do if you had your own Learjet – and planned to be back home tonight in time to tuck up their kids in bed.
Other than enabling her to flit around North America at will, Gretchen’s sudden acquisition of riches which would have had a Pharaoh’s eyes popping out in envy, neither she or Dan had, so far as Sorenson could tell, shown the least interest in changing their former lifestyle.
‘Look, I lived a privileged life before Daddy left me everything,’ she had pointed out to several chat show hosts. ‘I know that; that’s why I want to pay back by serving the people of Boston. Right now, I don’t actually control all the money I inherited; that’s good because I need time to figure out how to spend it to do the most good for the most people. No, whatever happens, I won’t be handing out free money. That doesn’t help anybody because when the money is gone, it is gone. No, the big question for me is how to invest it in projects that will go on giving and giving, and helping and helping as many people as possible for as long as possible.”
The Learjet had been a nice surprise but it was expensive to run and it was going to have to go; just not yet…
“Anyway,” she smiled, viewing the two men. “I hope you boys have been playing nicely?”
Both men put up their hands in surrender.
Gretchen scowled unconvincingly at her husband, suspecting he had put Sorenson up to this little piece of theatre.
“How did your meeting with the House Minority Leader go, sweetheart?” Dan inquired, sobering affairs.
The other man in the room felt, momentarily, a little uneasy. Setting politics aside, he had been around real power and understood its inherent dangers, and its unfathomable dilemmas. Dan Brenckmann was obviously a genuine all-round good guy but he did not know him well enough to know if he was anywhere near as innately
politically savvy as his force of nature, heiress wife; and Sorenson did not, whatever happened, want to get caught in the middle of something.
Dan seemed to realise his question might have put Sorensen, and Gretchen in an awkward position. He grimaced, raised a hand.
“Ted’s on the team, honey,” Gretchen said immediately, without a scintilla of equivocation. She turned to Sorenson: “And when your Mom and Dad are in the White House, he’ll be on the inside.”
She did not have to add: “And we won’t be.”
Her father-in-law had made it an article of faith that there would be no nepotism, no hint of family favouritism in his White House; and that when she and Dan got to visit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they were going to have to leave political agendas at the door. That was going to be a breeze for Junior, he had his Navy career, and as for Sam and Judy, they were too busy trying to keep up with their own lives. However, both Gretchen and Dan were already DC insiders, she would soon be the Congresswoman for the 4th District of Massachusetts, and he was the guy who had drafted the Warren Report on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War. Oh, and he was married to the richest woman in America, probably.
“The Ambassador hasn’t officially offered me a job in the White House,” Ted Sorenson reminded his companions.
Companions…
No, they were friends, albeit more of the political kind at present but in time he guessed they would be a lot closer than that. They all wanted the same things, saw the same possibilities for their country and it was hard to imagine that there could be a better basis for a lasting collaboration, and friendship.
Gretchen gave him a schoolmistressy look.
“But he will, Ted,” she said, “you just haven’t decided what job title you want, right?”
The man shrugged.
People who did not stand up to Gretchen Betancourt-Brenckmann got run over; standing in the middle of the road when she was coming down the highway was a blunder countless people – mostly men - were going to make in the coming years!
“No, that’s not it,” he smiled modestly. “If it happens, I will be honoured to serve in any capacity the President decides is appropriate.”
Gretchen thought about this, then nodded.
“It’s weird, isn’t it,” Dan observed, gently self-effacing, “how we’re all taking it for granted that there’s going to be a seismic shift in the political landscape on 5th November?”
The others knew his point was rhetorical, merely an observation.
“The General Election is four weeks, twenty-eight days away,” he went on, “and yet we all think we know what is going to happen. Dad is right when he talks about the evils of complacency; Margaret Thatcher thought she was going to lose back in March 1965; but she won big, really big, bigger even than the polls are talking about over here for Dad. Voters don’t always tell the pollsters the truth. Nobody thought Trueman had a prayer back in 1948, or that the American people were ready to elect a Catholic President in 1960. If the election had been a couple of weeks’ later in 1964, who knows, LBJ might have overtaken Nixon on the rails?”
“But it wasn’t, and he didn’t,” his wife reminded him indulgently. “But you’re right, we need to be real about all this. The polls say we’ll take back Congress, maybe. The Senate could easily still be sixty-forty GOP after the election; if that happens, we won’t have a chance of doing anything about it until the mid-terms of 1970.”
Both men in the room nodded imperceptible agreement.
“That’s the way the House Minority Leader sees it, too,” Gretchen confided.
The primary reason she and Dan had flown to DC was so that she could have a face-to-face meeting with fifty-four-year-old Thomas Hale Boggs, the Democrats’ leader in Congress.
Gretchen, knowing the Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Louisiana, and therefore, of New Orleans, superficially an out-and-out Southern Democrat of the old school, was not her most avid fan, and had wanted to at least attempt, to make her peace with Boggs.
“I think,” she added, her expression reflecting her mixed impressions of that morning’s interview, which had not gone entirely the way she had expected, “that we can work together.”
Ted Sorenson could not stop himself arching an eyebrow.
Gretchen caught the reaction.
“He’s in a tight fight to hold on down there in New Orleans; he needs to hold his coalition together and that means not alienating George Wallace’s people.”
The GOP had been working hard to undermine Boggs’s ‘Southern Democrat’ credentials, and he had only kept in the race at all, by cosying up to Wallace, and by attacking the Brenckmann for President campaign.
Gretchen and the veteran Democrat had had a lot to talk about that morning!
Dan and their much expanded in recent weeks, Staff, had done their level best to prepare Gretchen for the encounter.
Praemonitus, praemunitus…
Forewarned is forearmed.
‘Hale’ Boggs was a Mississippian; educated at Tulane University he had degrees in journalism and the law and had first represented the 2nd Congressional District of Louisiana in 1941, elected in only his twenty-seventh year but brought straight back down to earth two years later, when the District rejected him in the 1942 election. After that, he had gone into the US Navy, before post-Second War, standing for and winning back his old Congressional District in 1946. He was now defending his seat in Congress for the tenth consecutive time and what he really, really did not want, was a public fight with old Claude Betancourt’s little girl.
In Hale Boggs’s part of the world there were a lot of people who viewed the latest ‘Northern’ attempt to hijack the party of the Old South with grave suspicion. While many were prepared to give Walter Brenckmann the benefit of the doubt – he was the antithesis of a Democrat insider, viewed by some as a GOP-Democrat, a man if not of the right then the centre-right of American politics – any association with the Betancourt name was poison.
Boggs long-time Republican opponent in New Orleans, David C. Treen, a one-time states’ rights campaigner and since 1962, an increasingly dangerous Republican detractor was, it seemed, pulling out all the stops to bring Boggs down. The man was throwing everything at him, even reviving two decade-old accusations that because he had once been a member of the American Student Union, he was a Communist. Which, of course, was absurd, given Boggs’s proven adherence to the holy tenets of the Southern Democrat tradition. In 1954, the man had been one of the ninety-nine ‘Dixiecrats’ who had signed the so-called Declaration of Constitutional Principles opposing racial integration, in the wake of the famous Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown versus Bord of Education of Topeka, in which it was deemed that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ Then there was the ‘Boggs Act’, the 1952 legislation mandating that the penalty for a first conviction for the possession of marijuana should be two to ten years with a fine of up to twenty thousand dollars!
In any event, right now the man was fighting for his political life, it was a dirty fight, a no holds barred back to the wall arm wrestle for the dregs of the late George Wallace’s legacy.
As if that was not bad enough, and it was not good, the GOP had had him in its sights ever since he was appointed to sit on the Joint Congressional Committee on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War. Unjustly – but then the truth never got in the way of a good slogan – he had been characterised as a Kennedy Administration lacky. In New Orleans, some of his oldest supporters had deserted him for working with – sitting around the same committee table as the arch de-segregationist, Chief Justice Earl Warren – the man whose court had betrayed the South in 1954 over the ‘Brown case’.
“He needs General LeMay to stand beside him on a public platform,” Gretchen announced. “And in TV and radio adverts, ideally but that’s a problem because his donation base has dried up since the assassination in Montgommery.”
Again, Sorenson raised an
eyebrow.
He read between the lines.
Whatever his reservations, Boggs must have seen Gretchen as a money fairy but even so, he could not visualise the old hack actually going cap in hand to her.
“Hale Boggs asked you for that?”
Gretchen shook her head, half-smiling.
“No, he’d rather poke out his right eye with a steak knife than ask me for anything, Ted.”
“Okay…”
“But a business deal is a different proposition. I said I wanted to be nominated to sit on the House Judiciary Committee, and,” Gretchen shrugged, trying not to grin like a Cheshire cat, “that I was unhappy with the way the DNC had been failing to support ‘honest Democrats’ in the South. And, that something ought to be done about that. Better late than never, and all that.”
Ted Sorenson looked to Dan, who was struggling to maintain a straight face.
“Representative Boggs was pleasantly surprised to learn that the DNC was in the process of sending people,” Gretchen said innocently, “to Louisiana to help out a friend in need. We agreed that General LeMay was not going to be visiting New Orleans any time soon; but that I was confident that Congressman Boggs’s campaign was not going to run out of money between now and the 5th November.”
“Okay,” Ted Sorensen was trying to picture the expression on Hale Boggs’s face as Gretchen had been winding him around her little finger. “Does Ambassador Brenckmann know about all this?”
It was Dan who answered, his tone pragmatic and for the first time in Ted Sorenson’s acquaintance with him, different, unexpectedly hard-edged.
“My Dad wants to win in the North, the East, the West and the South, Ted. He means it when he says all those Wallace people are Americans, too.”