Gretchen thought this was beginning to sound like the script of a bad radio show detailing the exploits of a particularly inept G-man. Unfortunately, since this was consistent with the level at which she had witnessed the Federal government routinely conducting is affairs it all made a perverse kind of sense.
She glanced to Bill Sallis.
The older man sighed, waiting for Katzenbach to go further.
“Director Hoover believes that the men responsible for the attempt to assassinate Dr King and other leading members of the Southern Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, have been involved in a number of brutal killings and the attempt to kill the President in Dallas. Director Hoover is of the view that these men, if they are not apprehended, will almost certainly go on to target other leading figures; for example, candidates running for the Presidency, or prominent members of civil or military society. In normal times there would be no consideration of granting the immunities under discussion. However,” Katzenbach spread his hands, “these are hardly normal times.”
Gretchen realized she was missing something important.
“This is all very interesting, Mr Katzenbach,” she queried, “but why are you telling me this?”
The Deputy Attorney General picked up his coffee cup, took a sip.
“The man whose expertise and knowledge of the primary suspects the FBI wishes t tap into,” he explained, “has made very particular demands with regard to what he construes to be a ‘cast iron’ guarantee of immunity.”
“Oh.” No, she still did not know where this was heading.
“Normally, I or the Attorney General would sign off on this,” Katzenbach said, telling her what she already knew, “documents would be posted and court orders issued. The deal would be cut and dried. Unfortunately, the man we are dealing with does not trust the Federal Government to keep its word. He wants his own attorney. Moreover, he wants an attorney who is so high profile that quote, ‘not even the Kennedys can silence him, or her’. End quote.”
“The President or the Attorney General wouldn’t suborn an officer of the court,” Gretchen objected before she had thought about it.
Actually, they might the way things were going in the Midwest, down in the South and all those miles away in the Middle East, and nobody knew how the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City at the end of August was going to turn out. Things were looking so bad for the President that he might not be even on the ticket come November…
Neither of the men in the room spoke.
Gretchen shrugged, narrowed her eyes a fraction.
“Okay. We’re talking about a guy who is a little paranoid, I suppose.”
Bill Sallis cleared his throat.
“The Department of Justice takes the view that a person of your standing, Gretchen,” he said, as if he was making a casual observation about the coffee in the cup in his hand, “who has already metaphorically, dare one say, fearlessly, put her head above the parapet and is so much in the public eye, might be exactly the sort of attorney that our man might accept as being unimpeachably cast iron.”
Gretchen was not often lost for words.
Dan had remarked upon this more than once, fondly obviously; that was one of the reasons she had married him. That and the fact she had belatedly realized she had loved him ever since the night of the October War.
“A penny for your thoughts, my dear,” Bill Sallis inquired gently.
Gretchen did not ask if her father had sanctioned the Department of Justice’s approach; that went without saying.
“Just so I understand what we’re talking about,” she checked because this was not a thing she could easily row back on later. “You want me to represent a really bad man to convince him to help J. Edgar Hoover catch at least two other even more evil men before they kill again? But nobody will ever know about this unless the Federal Government reneges on its word?”
“Yes, that’s about the size of it,” Nicholas Katzenbach agreed, breathing a sigh of relief.
Gretchen viewed him thoughtfully.
“You’re telling me that I have to trust the Administration?”
“Basically, yes.”
“This would be the Administration that has just told the British that they’re on their own in the Middle East?”
“That’s State Department business. We don’t operate like that in Justice.”
The weirdest thing was that Gretchen knew she was not going to make a decision about the proposition until she had talked it through with Dan.
“Okay,” she smiled. “Let me think about it.”
Chapter 16
If fifty-one year old Richard Milhous Nixon was in any way intimidated or irritated by his host’s choice of venue for their meeting he was at pains not to show it. In fact given that he was known to be a serious, less than gregarious man whose temperament still bore the marks of his Quaker birth, a casual observer might have drawn the conclusion that he was in a positively sunny mood that morning.
It was said that on a clear day from his eerie high in the eight hundred and fifty feet tall seventy-storey centerpiece of the Rockefeller Centre, the man Nixon had beaten to the Republican Presidential nomination in 1960, could see over thirty-five miles in every direction. The great Art Deco skyscraper had been completed two years after the one hundred and two-storey Empire State Building, the tallest building of a complex of nineteen structures erected on a twenty-two acre site between 48th and 51st Streets by the father of the man who was now the Governor of New York State. The Rockefeller Center was then, and remained to this day the largest private construction project in history.
If Richard Nixon had been in Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller’s shoes he would have made the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza his campaign headquarters, too; more pertinently, he would not have agreed to this meeting in this place at such short notice if last week’s California Primary had not thrown the race for the Republican nomination into such abject chaos.
The great and the good of the Party had approached Nixon last year looking for a candidate whom they could anoint just before President Kennedy’s infamous ‘Moon Speech’ in Houston. At the time nobody had seriously considered the possibility that Jack Kennedy would run for a second term and a Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey ticket, no matter which man went for the Presidency had been polling better than any viable Republican alternative. The Party had been looking to Nixon, with the tacit support of one of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller or John Cabot Lodge, to run a ‘long campaign’ to ‘wear down’ the likely Democrat contenders before any of them had a chance to get out onto the stump. Nixon had rejected those approaches; and it had turned out to be one of the wisest decisions of his whole political career.
The three leading candidates had thus far cancelled each other out: sixty-one year old Henry Cabot Lodge junior appealed to a past that no longer existed; fifty-five year old Arizonan Senator Barry Goldwater’s strident call to slash the Federal Government’s interference in states’ rights and to ‘free the markets and American industry’ amounted to waving some kind of mythical magic wand to cure all the country’s ills and rang horribly hollow in the post-Cuban Missiles War, post-Battle of Washington world; while Nelson Rockefeller, whom many hard-liners regarded as no more than a ‘conservative Democrat’, was beginning to look as if he was going to stumble just short of the finishing line… again.