Before the surprise Soviet attack on Malta and the Red Army’s move into Iran and Iraq, the Kennedy Administration had looked as if it was in control; that somebody at the top had finally got a grip again. Since then it was blindingly obvious that it was being swept along by events. Criminally, it had failed to lock the British — whom any idiot in the State Department ought to have realized was the US’s one sure bulwark against renewed Soviet expansionism — into a generation-long alliance. The way the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty had been allowed to lapse and the muddled-headed ever shifting policy towards the Middle East was a recipe for God alone knew what future disasters…
“Good to see you again, Mr Vice President,” Henry Kissinger half-smiled, shaking Richard Nixon’s hand.
Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger and Nixon were standing at windows commanding the magnificent view north towards Central Park, and across the East River to Astoria, Jackson Heights and the length of Long Island where, many miles away the horizon dissolved into the haze.
Nixon turned back to Nelson Rockefeller.
The billionaire grandson of the founder of Standard Oil was a handsome, much more telegenic but profoundly less driven man than himself, a man to whom lavish philanthropy and a love of the arts was probably as important to him as anything he honestly believed he might achieve in politics, but who nevertheless felt that it was his duty to pursue high office. He was the living embodiment of the great American tradition of Andrew Carnegie and countless others, it was not enough just to be wealthy; God had smiled on him and he owed it to his fellow man to repay that trust. He had served in the Administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eisenhower, albeit in second level non cabinet posts, done his time in government in preparation for greater things. Thus, Nelson Rockefeller was at once a giant of the world of commerce, the arts, and could not but also bestride the stage of politics, presently as Governor of New York State and, in his own eyes, as a worthy contender for the Presidency in November.
“Henry,” Rockefeller said portentously, “takes the view that sooner or later the Administration’s Mediterranean-Middle East policy will, quite literally, blow up in Jack Kennedy’s face. If Henry will forgive me for paraphrasing his thoughts on this and related matters,” the mogul glanced apologetically to the inscrutable academic, “the next President of the United States will probably be the man with the most credible plan to ‘clean up the mess’.”
Richard Nixon thought the calculus was rather more complicated than that; even as things stood Jack Kennedy was going to leave his successor — only the Democrats still thought a candidate called Kennedy was electable to any public office in the US, which was a Hell of a compliment to the party machine old Joe Kennedy had created, and that Claude Betancourt had somehow reinvigorated in recent months — a country on the verge of anarchy. If things got much worse there might not actually be a Union left by November!
Nixon moved to stand at the window, staring out across the most astounding cityscape in Christendom. Overseeing the avenues of skyscrapers, with the great city stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, a man could not help but be enthralled, infused with the latent might and majesty of New York. The city was emblematic of what the nation should be, invincible, irrepressible, undefeated and yet America was tearing itself apart. He understood why so many people had been seduced by the idea of ‘America First’; it was the easy answer even if it was a failed nineteenth century solution to a twentieth century crisis.
America First was intuitively what most Americans wanted; a self-flagellating ordinance that mortgaged the futures of all their children.
There were plenty of nearby chairs; none of the men made a move to sit down. Instead, the Governor of New York and Henry Kissinger joined Nixon at the window, each man staring into the void between them and street level thinking their own thoughts.
US politics was about oil.
Oil, coal and steel, Wall Street and so much else; but in the end everything came back to oil because without oil there was no American economic behemoth, and there would be no more American dreams. Maybe one day somebody would make nuclear power portable enough and clean enough to drive the modern world; until that day came everything the three men saw before them was built on oil. Latin American and Indonesian oil which would have flowed all around the World before the October War, Texan and Californian fields previously priced out of the market by cheap Saudi crude had easily filled the pre-war ‘production gap’; the country was awash with fuel, its refineries ready to cook off and export their production to overseas markets that no longer existed. The looming ‘energy deficits’ that economists had forecast with greater and greater alarm throughout the fifties had gone away; for now anyway although the doom mongers talked about a reprieve of eighteen months, possibly two years, dismissing the Administrations projections of a ‘ten year energy sufficiency window’ as the ramblings of mad men.
What happened in the Persian Gulf mattered to every American.
“The Administration has boxed itself in,” Henry Kissinger said weightily. “Secretary of State Fulbright is operating with his hands tied behind his back. There is only so much he can say to reassure our friends and allies in the Middle East when his interlocutors know that President Kennedy has vetoed the deployment of ground forces in the region. The recent failed coup in Cairo has effectively knocked the Egyptians out of the equation; in other circumstances the Israelis would seek to take advantage of the Nasser Regime’s vulnerability.”
He shrugged, went on, addressing his remarks to the cityscape the other side of the window.
“The British have shrewdly created a structural ambiguity in Western relations throughout the Arab world. Presently, it is unclear to whom they have made guarantees. Conversely, they have made an unconditional military commitment to defend their concessions in Iran at Abadan, and to maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf. At the same time the British have avoided further diluting their forces in the Mediterranean. While we,” he sighed, “have left the largest naval force available to us, the Sixth Fleet, hostage to events in that sea, while at the same time deploying significantly more than fifty percent of the war-fighting capability of the Seventh Fleet away from the Pacific, where we also have vital interests to the Indian Ocean where, at this time we have none. Or rather, no vital interests that we are publicly, or as I understand the situation, diplomatically, willing to defend. Sending the USS Kitty Hawk and her escorting fleet into waters so close to a war zone, that is, the Persian Gulf, without a clear mandate and mission is incredibly dangerous, gentlemen. No good will come of it even if by some outrageous stroke of good fortune nobody makes a mistake and the whole thing does not result in a disaster.”
Nelson Rockefeller turned his back to the view.
“What do we think Jack Kennedy and Bill Fulbright have got in mind?” He asked bluntly.
Kissinger shrugged.
“That depends on if we believe the Administration is actually talking to the Russians, Governor.”
Richard Nixon brushed aside this verbal parry.
“I disagree,” he declared, his voice more sanguine than he felt.
Neither of his companions spoke.
“I’ve got no problem with talking to the Russians,” Nixon explained. “Ike would never to have stopped talking to Ambassador Dobrynin in the first place. Locking him away in the country like that was a mistake.”