The forces he needed now had been frittered away reinforcing National Guard units in the South, preserving law and order in the northern cities; casually thrown away like chips in a high stakes poker game so that the President could buy a ticket to stay in the Democratic primaries.
The nation had been short-changed.
He took a final breath.
“Call everybody back into the room please.”
Chapter 11
The President’s decision to cancel the next four day’s campaign events had caught his immediate entourage completely by surprise; his unplanned retreat that evening to Cape Cod had thrown the whole Administration into chaos.
That morning the true scale of the unfolding military, civil and humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Midwest had begun to break in the national press; but the President had not known that was going to happen when he had summarily aborted that week’s campaigning.
The Press had seemed more interested in Curtis LeMay’s planned ‘racing break’ in Arizona than in anything that was going on in Washington DC. During his hours touring the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Shoup — ahead of his return to the ‘Chicago Front’ — and his carefully choreographed whistle stop perambulations around the massive building sites of the monumental new capital soon to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes of the old, the President had seemed noticeably lack luster, a little hunched and tired. Even when he had stood in the Oval Office of the scaffolding-encased White House there had been no real spark, little trace of the legendary public insouciance. Although for the most part his expression had been suitably somber, as befitted a man visiting places where so many good men and women had died; he had been sadly, visibly detached as if the whole experience of returning to Washington had somehow overwhelmed him.
The news that Margaret Thatcher’s government had survived and the calamitous intelligence that that the majority of the State Department’s ‘transatlantic’ friends in the British Parliament — rather than seamlessly assuming the reins of power — were about to be exiled from Oxford and sent back to their country seats, had hardly registered with the President.
By the time Jack Kennedy got back to Hyannis Port he was in a state of near physical and mental collapse, a thing he had ordered should not be communicated to Jackie and the kids at Camp David.
After the Battle of Washington he had thought he had seen a way forward; but then the Russians had invaded Iran and in that moment he had seen the terrible error of his ways. Fate was mocking him. He had tried to steer a path through the gathering darkness but ended up stumbling blindly into new, unimagined dark places. It was as if all the lies had finally caught up with him. Events had exposed his Achilles Heel, a defective moral compass that could swing no further out of alignment without irrevocably spinning out of control. He was leading his country towards disaster and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Worse, he was ill again and his strength was failing.
God had granted him six months of health and vitality, even a few days without excruciating pain and debilitating nausea. He had recovered his libido, discovered there were still a few women in the western World who wanted a mass murderer between their legs. However, those fleeting days of grace were at an end.
Women had once fawned on him, given themselves to him with a laugh or a giggle, often awestruck, dazzled by the JFK magic. He cringed now when he recollected the evening he had told the late British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan that he got a headache if he went a day without sex. The old man had smiled what now seemed like a horribly hollow smile.
Jack Kennedy had first been diagnosed as suffering from Addison’s disease in London in 1947, aged thirty, shortly after he was elected Congressman for the 11th District of Massachusetts. The symptoms of the condition included severe and often incapacitating pains in the legs, back and abdomen, random attacks of vomiting and diarrhea, bouts of hypoglycemia, fevers and at the extreme end of the spectrum, convulsions, psychosis and episodes of syncope. He had suffered each and every one the classic symptoms at one time or another since winning the Presidency, and frequently many of them combination at the same time. Frequently, during meetings with foreign leaders and ambassadors he had experienced relatively minor manifestations of Addison’s; confusion, slurred speech brought on by low blood pressure and the sudden onset of lethargy. His problems had been compounded when, subsequent to entering the White House hypothyroidism, another rare endocrine disease, had been identified.
Jack Kennedy had always been the sickliest of the Kennedy brothers but that had not mattered until his elder sibling, Joe, had been killed in a flying accident in England in August 1944. Joseph Kennedy (junior) had always been his father’s anointed political flag bearer, not the fragile, reckless playboy second son…
“Jack, did you hear what I just said?”
The President blinked out of his melancholy introspection and met the gaze of his thirty-nine year old brother.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy had worked tirelessly to get his re-election campaign back on the road. No man had flown more miles or worn out his voice more frequently in the last few months. It was easier for him; he had never lost his faith, partly, his brother suspected because in his heart he knew that he had done everything that could humanly have been done to avert the October War; whereas for his brother — the Commander-in-Chief — there would always be an insidious canker of doubt. History might one day conclude that a madman in a submarine had lit the final touch paper to the most dreadful war in history; or that the real blame lay with the lunatic who had flushed those Cuban-based ICBMs that hit Galveston and Florida but Jack Kennedy knew that he was the one who — for whatever reason, right or wrong — had actually commanded the final, all out nuclear attack on the military forces, bases and cities of the Soviet Union.
The Cuban Missiles War had come out of nowhere as he had always feared the real crisis of his presidency might. He had learned the limits of his power early in his time in the White House with the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. Afterwards, he had respectfully approached his predecessor — the man who he still considered to be the greatest living American — Dwight Eisenhower, and sought his advice.
The old man had sat in the Oval Office and without censure, with the cool understanding of a man who had been responsible for wielding the great weight of US military power in war and peace, and asked Kennedy ‘were you sure you had all the right people in the room before you authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion?’
Eisenhower had treated the interview as a paternal exercise, immensely careful not to tread on his successor’s toes or in any way point up his relative inexperience. That was the day Kennedy realized why Eisenhower had been America’s greatest World War II general, and exactly how he had navigated his country out of the Korean conflict and through two peaceful terms in the White House despite the turmoil in South East Asia, the Suez imbroglio and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising; while all the time steadily building up the US’s defenses and promoting the onward march of global economic expansion. Ike had left office with a country united, ready to step confidently into the future…