Ben Bradlee had no idea where this was going.
“You can imagine,” the woman went on, “how miffed the Ambassador was to discover, a couple of days after the Philadelphia PD and the Pennsylvania National Guard had allowed two car bombs to be exploded outside the British Embassy, that Administration members had been holding secret talks with former Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and former Soviet Representative to the United Nations Zorin.”
Bradlee’s eyes must have been suddenly as wide as saucers.
“How… ”
“Trust me, I know. I also know that Admiral McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations is scheduled to fly out to India, ostensibly to discuss the transfer of half-a-dozen old Reserve Fleet ships to the Indian Navy, coincidentally at the same time the USS Kitty Hawk is due to pay a goodwill visit to Bombay.”
The Newsweek Bureau Chief’s head was spinning with possibilities and dark premonitions.
“The thing is, Ben,” Rachel continued levelly. She could have been discussing the price of fruit and vegetables. “The virulence of the Administration’s rhetoric and its repeatedly stated stance of non-involvement in the Persian Gulf sits a little uneasily with the behind the scenes maneuvering of Secretary of State Fulbright and various other luminaries close to the President. Honestly and truly, the docility of the great American press is beginning to feel like a conspiracy of silence back in England. Granted, it may be that we inadvertently find ourselves at cross-purposes, but,” she shrugged, “either way, it would be a dreadful pity if blood was to be shed because something was lost in translation.”
Rachel Piotrowska turned to go.
She hesitated a moment.
“Marion Mimi Beardsley,” she whispered.
Ben Bradlee frowned, recognizing the name for all the wrong reasons and thinking it wise not to reply.
Rachel sympathized with the Newsweek man.
“Marion Mimi Beardsley would be the nineteen year old intern that Jack Kennedy was fucking around the time of the Cuban Missiles thing.”
The man remained silent.
“That would have been around the time the President was also trying to talk China and India out of going to war; the Russians were basing missiles on Cuba and Dr Feelgood — presumably — was injecting JFK with his quack remedies, and,” Rachel smiled a sour, humorless smile, “all the while the golden boy was obsessed by Marion Mimi Beardsley. It was hardly surprising that he took his eye off ‘the ball’, don’t you think?”
Ben Bradlee watched Rachel walk away.
For the first time in his life he was starting to feel really dirty.
The woman had told him nothing he did not know.
He had known all along and he had done… nothing.
Chapter 18
The forty-one year old Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program had been born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Furth, Bavaria. German Jews, his family had fled Nazi persecution and arrived, via London, in New York in September 1938. He and his family had swiftly assimilated into the German Jewish immigrant milieu in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, and Heinz had become Henry. After high school he had enrolled as a part-time student at the City College of New York studying accountancy, his first day job being in a shaving brush works.
Drafted into the Army in 1943, aged twenty he had become a naturalized US citizen while undergoing basic training at Spartanburg, South Carolina at the beginning of what was to be an extraordinary three-year military career. Posted to the 84th Infantry Division his fluency in German, allied to the fact that wherever he went he was patently the cleverest man in the room, saw him attached to the Division’s intelligence section. Notwithstanding that he was still only a private soldier he distinguished himself during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. Later, due to the paucity of German speakers in 8th Division, he briefly found himself in control of the whole of the occupied, and largely wrecked, city of Krefeld, responsible for restoring civil administration; a task he accomplished in just over a week. Promoted to sergeant, Kissinger had headed a team sent to Hanover to track down former Gestapo officers and stay behind troublemakers. By June of 1945 he was appointed commandant of the Bensheim CIC–Counter Intelligence Corps — in the Bergstrasse District of Hesse responsible for de-Nazification. By 1946, discharged from the Army, Kissinger, still aged only twenty-three, was at Oberursel teaching at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King.
In retrospect his teenage flight from his native land, his forced transplantation into an alien and wholly different foreign culture in Manhattan, the Army, the war and his return to a Germany unrecognizable from his youth during which he had been required to shoulder the sort of burdens which would have crushed most young men, had thoroughly tempered Henry Kissinger in preparation for whatever lay ahead of him in an unknown and unknowable future.
In 1950 the former night school accountancy student at the City College of New York received his AB Degree summa cum laude in political science at Harvard. In 1951 and 1954 he received his MA and PhD while serving as a consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board; his doctoral dissertation — Peace, Legitimacy and Equilibrium — having been a study of the statesmanship of Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, more commonly known as Lord Castlereagh and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich; respectively the architect of the Congress of Vienna and the man who designed the diplomatic shape of Europe in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars.
A fellow of the faculty in Harvard’s prestigious Department of Government during the fifties, Kissinger had worked with and for, and directed or consulted on behalf of a raft of high profile think tanks, academic and governmental forums and committees; including the Centre for International Affairs, the National Security Council’s Operations Coordinating Board, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Rand Corporation. In 1957 he published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Prior to assuming the directorship of the Harvard Defense Studies program, he had worked for two years for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project.
Although he had supported Rockefeller’s nomination in 1960 only a fool made the mistake of thinking that Henry Kissinger, the man who was by a country mile the foremost Republican foreign policy thinker of the latter years of the — essentially, status quo — Eisenhower era, was in any way Nelson Rockefeller’s man.
Richard Nixon had known Kissinger for many years.
Superficially, Nixon had always been a Republican hawk, a man who paid lip service to many of the ‘rollback’ preferences of the right of the Party. He had been Vice President to the man who was, after George Washington, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, the greatest American soldier in history, a living legend, and it had been the Eisenhower Administration’s policy to resist further Marxist expansion wherever it threatened short of all out global war. Everybody had known that; and the Soviets had acted accordingly. But that was then and this was now, and Nixon saw all too clearly the dreadful pitfalls of failing to underpin ‘America First’ with a coherent, rational approach to foreign affairs consistent with the long-term geopolitical strategic interests of the United States.