by James Philip
Joanne suspected Gretchen was waiting for 5th November; until then she was keeping her powder dry. That her middle son had married an heiress ought to have been the weirdest aspect of the last six years; as it was, it hardly registered when compared to the ‘Presidency thing’.
Joanne had honestly believed that ‘the Presidency thing’ was just going to be a gesture of protest, a way to help other, ‘real politicians’ take on the Nixon Administration, and not been at all surprised when the whole exercise looked as if it had run off the rails at the first stop, in New Hampshire.
Last year, she and Walter had both been deeply offended, wounded by the way the President had treated them. Actually, thinking about it, they had had issues with the way both JFK and LBJ had treated them; so, by the time Richard Nixon started spying on them they had been well-primed to explode and in retrospect, that had coloured their judgement. However, once Walter said he was going to do something, he did it. So, once he had announced he was running there was no turning back, even though for several months afterwards they had never gone near the campaign trail. That, of course, was what had undermined them so badly early in the primaries, especially in New Hampshire where George McGovern was always going to win hands down.
Gretchen stepping aside had been for the best: it had allowed Larry O’Brien to come in with a free hand. While her husband needed strong, fearless voices around him Joanne knew he thought far too highly of his daughter-in-law, to get into the sort of brutal campaign trail fights that they ought to have had before New Hampshire.
It would be wrong to say Walter was going to be an accidental President, the last man standing on 5th November; she had always believed that he was the man to beat Nixon. Just not in the way things had turned out. The assumption had been that he would forensically dissect Nixon in debate; that had never happened and in hindsight, the President would never have let it happen. Right up to the moment he ran for the hills, everybody had assumed that Nixon would stick it out to the bitter end. But then nobody had counted on him starting a war the United States could not hope to win, in which US arms suffered humiliating defeats and jaw-droppingly disastrous casualties, in the Western Pacific.
Another thing which had come straight out of left field was the tenacity of Judge Earl Burger, the Special Prosecutor that Richard Nixon had appointed, would be a one-man wrecking ball. Might the President have hung on a little longer if George Wallace had not been gunned down in Montgommery? That would have to be a question for the historians. The house of cards might have spontaneously collapsed anyway...
Behind his mask of equanimity, Joanne’s husband was spitting mad: DC was rife with rumours that Nixon had done some kind of deal with Nelson Rockefeller, and that it was only a matter of time before the first pardons emerged from the Oval Office.
That however, was the DC-centric, little picture.
The big picture was that the Democrats, beaten so badly in 1964 that the Party had seemed likely to implode, having taken another savage mauling in the 1966 mid-terms had been in despair until that spring, when the first green buds of recovery had begun to be hinted at in the polls. Now, it was entirely plausible that Congress might turn Democrat blue and the GOP’s stranglehold on the Senate be reduced to the slimmest of wafer-thin majorities. As for the Presidency; the bookies had stopped taking bets on that!
True, the Nixon-Rockefeller vote had stopped plummeting like a stone hurled into the Grand Canyon – the former Governor of New York had put forward a decent, presidential persona – but the rate of descent of that metaphorical rock had only slowed because it had fallen so far that it was now bouncing down the lower slopes of the canyon, no longer falling through empty space.
Curtis LeMay’s endorsement had probably swung the last of the lower South states and if Gallup was to be believed, Nelson Rockefeller (remember Richard Nixon was still on the ballot in all fifty states) was losing his – Nixon’s - home state of California by five or six clear points. The popular vote was splitting approximately sixty-forty nationwide, and to Larry O’Brien’s consternation, she and Walter had dialled back on their travels and the exhausting glad-handing. Ridiculously, Walter was a little worried he was going to win too easily, too big. He had needed to be the man most likely to take down a crooked President; now he needed to be the man who brought America back together, to lead it forward in common purpose.
Upstairs, the phone was ringing.
Joanne sighed, and turned towards the stairs.
The normal telephone was barred to incoming calls, so it was the confidential phone that was ringing.
The ringing stopped; she heard a man pick up.
That would be one of the ‘inside’ Secret Servicemen.
It was Gretchen calling.
She had been held up and would be thirty minutes late for their lunch appointment; which meant their campaigning schedule that afternoon would also be set back by a corresponding delay.
The networks had been warned that the next First Lady and her daughter-in-law would be out and about downtown, making themselves available for brief interviews and TV friendly film snippets that afternoon.
Joanne did not like people comparing her to Eleanor Roosevelt, a heroine of her younger days; any more than she cared for some commentators likening her husband to Harry Truman. She was no more Eleanor Roosevelt, than Walter was Harry Truman, they had both been consummate insiders and she and her husband would never be that!
Gretchen was asking if she minded snacking on sandwiches before they went out again?
“No, my dear.”
Joanne and her husband, who was flying in from two days campaigning in Michigan and Ohio, and visiting Camp Little Bear in Wisconsin, were dining with the Mayor of Boston that evening.
Against the odds, thirty-nine-year-old Kevin Hagan White, still in his first year in City Hall – the Mayor of a port city with a vibrant, diverse ethnic and racial population – had energetically set about implementing the desegregation of the city’s schooling, and introducing, shock horror, African-Americans and others who would not, and could not identify themselves as being of white Anglo-Saxon stock, onto his staff, this at a time when he was attempting, a thing never really entertained by his predecessors, to start to root out corruption in the city’s administration. Men like Kevin White were going to need all the help the next President could give him.
Gretchen said that Boston, like many of the big East Coast cities was America in microcosm: every European tradition was represented, some more overtly than others, perhaps the Boston-Irish were the biggest group but there was a Greek community, a Jewish community, groups whose ancestors haled from Germany and Scandinavia, there was a Little Italy, Sicilians and there was the mob. All this apart from the growing black section of the population. Each group had its own perspectives, priorities, demands and gripes with City Hall, and the discrimination seemingly built-in to the system might have been designed to deny everybody a fair break.
Worse, although the city ought to have been a gateway to the world it would never be that, so long as its waterfront carried on falling into dereliction, and the cargo ships which had been Boston’s life blood for nearly two hundred years went elsewhere. It was a city of contrasts: the mansions of the rich stood within a few hundred yards of near ghettos, banks thrived downtown, nearby Cambridge was booming as MIT expanded and the student caucus – now hugely expanded - driven away in 1963 and 1964, thronged through its gates, while the piers and wharves of the docks were often empty, stevedores and longshoremen laid off, and most nights the slop houses were full of Boston’s homeless.
Perhaps, Boston was not in every respect America in microcosm but it gave a sense of the great challenges awaiting the next occupant of the West Wing of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in the next four years.
Chapter 66
Sunday 20th October, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Life was cheap in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Konstantin Konovalev had die
d in hospital at around the time the Amerikanskaya Mechta was landing back at Seryshevo, and there had never been any question of a formal investigation into the shooting of Junior Lieutenant Karl Osipov.
It was not unusual for Red Air Force personnel to suffer psychotic incidents. On the ground a man, or less frequently, a woman could be restrained, medicated and allowed to sleep it off. In the air, on board an aircraft carrying ‘special munitions’, if a crewman ‘went crazy’, a thing in Osipov’s case witnessed by three people, and attempted to initiate the unauthorised deployment of nuclear weapons, whoever shot him dead was deemed to be a hero, not a villain.
Major General Zakharov had recommended the base’s Political Officer for a medal, or failing that, a Red Air Force commendation for bravery.
Of the two, Konovalev was mourned for a day. He had been a quiet, lonely man with whom it was hard to take offence, and on occasion, the sort of drinking companion who one could rely on to get one back to one’s billet intact.
Two of the bullets Andrei Kirov had fired had passed through Osipov’s torso and caused damage – only minor - to the fabric of the Tu-95. Repairs had been completed within hours of the bombers return to base.
‘You had no choice,’ Olga Petrovna had told Andrei.
He knew that.
It was not as if it was the first time that he had killed a fellow Russian in cold blood. He had shot a deserter in Basra, that was before the exodus to the north. Later, in Baghdad, he had shot a man to forestall a rout. He would never have been posted to a major air base if his masters had not had confidence he was made of the right stuff; capable of squeezing the trigger for the greater good of the KGB, the Party and the Motherland, in that order.
“Neither Konovalev or Osipov will be replaced,” Dmitry Akimov prefaced, kicking off the crew briefing for the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s return to operations.
The aircraft commander was a naturally dour character, a man of few words at the best of times and as the day approached that their ill-starred plot was inevitably uncovered, he had become positively terse in his dealings with other members of his crew. Particularly, the individuals who had been in on the blunder from the outset, or subsequently been fully brought inside the need to know circle.
With the two lost crewmen, that left only Pavel Onishken, the bomber’s gunner, in hopefully blissful ignorance of the axe hanging over all their heads.
Akimov, Olga and Andrei Kirov had discussed reporting – to KGB Central in Vladivostok, and 37th Air Army Headquarters in Komsomolsk, that Vladimir Zakharov had ‘attempted’ to blackmail and intimidate members of the crew into Operation Judgement Day. And decided, there lingering desire to carry on living a little longer outweighed any of the other, somewhat tenuous recommendations of the idea.
For one, interrogators would quickly identify the inconsistencies in each crew members story. For another, they had no idea if Zakharov had his own people inside the security apparat of the 37th Air Army, or even, within KGB Central.
It was too late to play the honest Party Member gambit.
The one thing they all knew for certain was that Vladimir Zakharov had them exactly where he wanted them, under his thumb. If they gave him the impression they were backsliding, attempting to sabotage Operation Judgement Day, they would be dead within hours.
Or if they were very, very unlucky, be in a KGB dungeon looking forward to spending the rest of their short, brutish lives in a prison camp in the Arctic.
Pavel Onishken, like the other male members of the crew barely exchanged a word with Andrei, effectively shunning the KGB man other than when their duty obliged them to speak to him in the air. For the other men this was an act; but the gunner plainly loathed his guts, and was probably waiting for the day he inadvertently wandered in front of his autocannons…
Oops, sorry.
I was testing the guns…
It had been decided to leave Pavel Onishken out of things, completely if possible. The plot was too twisted, the motivations in play too mangled by the grief and the angst they all carried from the last few years.
“Somebody told me that bloody rocket needs to be returned to the workshop every few days,” Onishken offered at the briefing.
Dmitry Akimov looked to Olga.
“Weapons Specialist?” He asked.
“The maintenance cycle is logged in hours in the air, Pavel,” she explained patiently. “The designers always assumed that each Tu-95K would have two Radugas allocated to it, so that one could always be ready, or ideally, loaded and ready to go. In terms of operational air hours, we’re about half-way to the current Kh-20s next engine overhaul. That involves draining the tanks, drawing off all the hydraulic fluids and removing all the inspection panels to visibly inspect the Lyulka power plant and its mountings externally. The maintenance cycle after this one mandates removing the engine and basically, checking every moving part. I’m not looking forward to that!”
Marco Pevkur was nodding agreement.
“That won’t be fun,” he agreed. “We had to start cannibalising the other missile just to get this one working again.”
Everybody anticipated Pavel Onishken to let the subject drop.
Actually, he snorted disgustedly.
“Fuck it, this used to be a great fucking country! Why the fuck did we let this happen to us?”
He was looking at Andrei Kirov, as if all the ills of the Motherland were his fault.
“I bet the fucking Yanks are still sending out their famous fail-safe missions, half-way across the Arctic and the Pacific, so they can bomb the shit out of us any time they want. What are we doing, sitting on our fucking hands? Look at this place,” he spat angrily, gesturing around them. “This used to be the Red Air Force’s equivalent of one of those fucking SAC bases in Nebraska or Dakota. Now look at it. There’s just us left. One fucking Kh-20, which we don’t even know will work – sorry, no disrespect Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna, if you can’t make the fucking thing work nobody can – and we can’t fly anywhere without a fucking Political Officer on board!”
The gunner glared daggers at Andrei Kirov; who shrugged this off with a crooked grimace of what in other circumstances might have been chagrin.
“I’m not quite useless, Comrade Gunner. I speak English, the language of our once and future enemies. Whenever we are beyond the region where our jamming stations blot out the majority of Yankee and British so-called World Service broadcasts, I can at least tell you all what the capitalists claim is really going on elsewhere on the planet!”
The others laughed.
Not Pavel Onishken.
“What is going on, Comrade Commissar?” He asked. “Or is that a secret, too?”
Andrei Kirov guessed that he and Olga, and possibly Tatyana Zhukov, were not the only ones who had avoided the Gunner’s stare, unwilling or unable to make and hold eye contact.
“The Chinese and the Yankees have stopped kicking the shit out of each other,” the KGB man said levelly. “They are like two heavyweight boxers, circling each other, throwing speculative jabs every now and again. Honestly, I don’t think the Yanks have the guts for a real slogging war with the Chinese. Elsewhere, there is peace, of a sort so far as I can tell. Chairman Shelepin has surrendered most of what used to be Poland and the Baltic States, and all of the Democratic Republic of Germany, the East which so many of our people died to liberate back in 1945, in exchange for peace with the Americans in Europe. Apart from a few dirty little guerrilla wars in the Balkans and Anatolia, the Red Army is back in barracks. What’s left of it. That’s why, out here, bases like Seryshevo are being run down, closed or turned from bomber to fighter stations. And the reason why, the epoch of great birds of prey like the Amerikanskaya Mechta is over. For now.”
This monologue had knocked the wind, and the awkwardness out of Pavel Onishken’s sails.
“Is that shit true?” He queried, glancing towards Olga.
She nodded, took a deep breath.
“Comrade General Zakharov is fi
ghting a losing battle, Pavel. We’re all that’s left of the old guard; that’s why he keeps us flying. That’s why he ordered a Raduga to be re-assembled. That’s why he wants us, and at least one of the other Tu-95s flying our own deterrent patrols, the way the Americans do, the way the Americans never stopped doing.”
Andrei Kirov was so impressed he almost believed her.
Chapter 67
Monday 21st October, 1968
USS Saratoga (CV-60), 40 miles East of Honolulu, Hawaii
Having imagined that his carrier flight deck career was over, Commander John McCain had been very pleasantly surprised to learn that he was going to be one of the ‘old hands’ assigned to the team working up the carriers stopping off at Pearl Harbour on the way to the Far East.
The Navy was running out of experienced naval aviators of every stripe – pilots, navigators, back seat weapons guys, technicians – and the squadrons off the carriers being rotated back to Pearl Harbour or stateside for repairs, overhauls or modernisations were unloading their Air Groups, recycling them onto the fresh ships heading the other way. It was a hell of a way to run a goddam war but it was an ill wind that did not blow somebody, somewhere some good.
To cut a long story short, no sooner had he got back to Honolulu from Australia, he had been pulled off a stateside flight to Los Angeles and press-ganged – not exactly against his will – to command Fighter Squadron VF-74. Nobody had seemed that bothered that although he was slated for full conversion to type, at the time he had never sat in the cockpit of a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, the aircraft with which the squadron he now commanded had been equipped since 1962. He had guessed familiarisation to type would take several weeks; not four days and the most intense thirty hours of flight time he had had in his entire Navy career.
‘This is wartime. The normal protocols don’t apply.’