“I know you hate this place,” his wife said without warning.
“No, well, not exactly… ”
“You hate it, sweetheart,” Gretchen decided. “Admit it.”
The man shrugged helplessly.
“You father’s been very good to me,” he countered, ‘it’s not so much that I hate this place. I mean, it’s what most people dream of, but I don’t feel it’s our home. We haven’t done anything to earn this,” he waved airily. “Perhaps, one day we will. But… ”
Gretchen smiled.
“What?” Dan asked. He had pulled on his pants and half-buttoned his shirt. The morning was far enough advanced for one or other of the house ‘staff’ to have moved ‘above stairs’, and he did not want to risk encountering one of them in his skivvies when he went back down to the kitchen to fetch his wife fresh coffee.
“I told Daddy that I wanted to live here when I was fourteen years old,” Gretchen confided, a mischievous twinkle sparkling in her grey blue eyes.
“Oh, I… ”
“Why do men always take me so seriously?”
Dan knew the answer to that one.
“Because you’re amazing, honey!”
Gretchen lowered her eyes, opened her arms inviting him to rejoin her on the bed. Her husband needed no second invitation and presently they were close in each other’s arms.
“Daddy thinks the President is getting bad advice from the State Department about the Russian situation,” she whispered in Dan’s ear. “Fulbright’s people are afraid JFK will blow up the World again if they don’t finesse things first.”
The papers were full of stories about how SAC had ‘screwed the pouch’ in the October War and ‘missed all the big guns in the Kremlin’. The CIA was a laughing stock and for most of the last couple of months and TV, radio and newspaper commentators had been asking, not unreasonably in the circumstances, how ‘half the Red Army’ had survived the ‘war to end all wars’. For the mass of men and women on the street whose confidence in the vaunted US military machine had been shaken to the core by events in the Mediterranean, and the news of the invasion of Iran and Iraq the mood was gloomy; ever more America First.
However, perhaps the most corrosive thing was that increasingly, US citizens were growing accustomed to seeing their GIs on the streets of their hometowns, or fighting pitched battles with rebels and insurgents in Illinois, or in upstate New York, or carrying out house to house raids in downtown Boston or Houston every night on TV. Across the whole of the Deep South neighborhoods burned and clouds of tear gas wafted down rubble-strewn streets; and every fresh outbreak of violence, rioting, every shooting and every Civil Rights or Klan rally was broadcast on every channel. Worse, all this was happening against a political background in which competing sects within the House of Representatives were waging an unrelenting legislative guerrilla war against the Kennedy Administration, and an economic backdrop in which the great American commercial and industrial colossus was visibly lurching into exactly the sort of recession the savage — now partially reversed — Peace Dividend cutbacks of last year had been designed to avert.
It did not matter that the Union was nowhere near as on its knees as the jeremiads claimed, or that away from the flashpoints in the Deep South, and away from the bomb-damaged cities and that outside the Midwestern cauldron of Chicago life went on in an atmosphere of relative normality.
In some places it was still possible to pretend that there had been no Cuban Missiles War and that nothing had really changed. California was booming, Oregon was an island of tranquility, the whole American South West was relatively peaceful; Boston apart New England was calm and in the main, prosperous.
What had changed was something that had been previously ingrained in the American psyche; one sensed it every day and everywhere one went. The ‘can do, must do’ spirit of years gone by was neutered and people were instinctively defensive, insular, unwilling or unable to look beyond their own personal, local horizons. Insofar as anybody in the United States had ever been his or her brother’s or sister’s keeper, that day had passed; nothing, absolutely nothing was so guaranteed to alienate and frighten seven or eight of every ten voters as the suggestion that their President would ever again bet the nation’s survival on the spin of a thermonuclear coin. Whatever the underlying geopolitical imperatives most Americans had no idea why the US Navy was ‘propping up’ the British Empire in the Mediterranean; so far as most Americans were concerned the Russians could have every single drop of Middle Eastern oil if that was what it took to make peace, any kind of peace with the evil commie bastards.
“JFK doesn’t need to blow up the World again,” Dan thought out aloud. “We just need to back up the Brits in the Persian Gulf and eventually the Russians will come to their senses and back off… ”
“What if they don’t? Back off, I mean?”
“We have to rescue the Brits, I suppose. Like we did at Malta… ”
“And then what? We fight the Russians in Iraq or Iran? And anywhere else they want to take a shot at us?”
Dan hesitated. Gretchen was testing him, exploring the ground ahead of her next argument with somebody — other than her husband — who did not think the sun shone from one or other of her womanly orifices. This he knew and hugged her closer, wishing he never had to let her go again.
“What’s the alternative?” He prompted. “Okay, so the Soviets still have boots on the ground and a few hundred tanks. So what? We gave them a Hell of a beating and we’ve still got a Curtis LeMay’s B-52 wings and a whole bunch of brand new ICBMs in hardened silos in the Midwest. Don’t forget all our Polaris boats, either.”
Gretchen considered this.
“What if President isn’t prepared to use any of those missiles or aircraft or submarines again unless the Russians attack us first? I mean, attack us in such a big way here in the US that he’s got absolutely no choice but to shoot back? What if every time he thinks about October 27th sixty-two it completely freaks him out? What if Jack Kennedy doesn’t want any more blood on his hands, Dan?”
“We can’t let down the Brits.”
“We did before.”
Now Dan was confused.
“How did we do that?”
He had heard the crazy rumors. Heck, he was one of the junior counsels to Commission investigating the ‘Causes and Conduct’ of the October War! He had heard more crazy things in the last couple of months than he had heard in his whole life, and or read in comic books as a kid! He spent his working day, every ten to twelve hour slog processing documentation and taking witness depositions ahead of the — repeatedly delayed — first sitting of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s first public evidential session. Everybody had their own pet theory about practically everything to do with the war. As for the wild stories that were doing the rounds about stuff that happened in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the lead up to the Battle of Washington in December last year well, that was a hole other kettle of fish! He did not have any idea where to start deciphering any of that particular witch’s brew! Some of those tall tales were so dark they were positively Machiavellian!
“We never let down the Brits,” he objected, wondering even as the words escaped his lips if he really believed that any more.
“Didn’t we? What if it was true that we hit the Russians without telling the Brits?”