“Bobby’s been talking to Hubert Humphrey,” Claude Betancourt said blandly. “And Eugene McCarthy, but I’m sure you’ve heard those rumors too.”
Johnson nodded.
He and the President’s younger brother had concluded a watchful short-lived rapprochement that spring; a rapprochement that the state of the polls had now extinguished although publicly Bobby still behaved as if nothing had changed.
“The last thing the ticket needs is a bleeding heart liberal,” he remarked sourly.
The odd thing about Lyndon Johnson’s career was that for all that he was a man nurtured by, and who had grown up in the bosom of the Southern Democrat citadel, he was anything but trapped in the past. Not that he was any kind of starry-eyed idealist. Had he not been a ruthlessly ambitious operator unfettered by ideological baggage, or any guiding philosophy, or deep-seated beliefs it would have been impossible for him to do business with a man like Claude Betancourt who was, by any standards, his natural enemy. Conversely, that Claude Betancourt understood Johnson so much better than anybody in the inner first circle of the Kennedy Administration was hardly surprising; for neither he or Johnson was a man who had ever let high-sounding principles get in the way of doing what needed to be done.
Which made it all the more bizarre that Jack Kennedy had decided to ‘do business’ with the Soviets without sub-contracting the deal out to the one man in the Administration — Lyndon Johnson — best qualified to play hardball with Dobrynin and Zorin. Letting Bobby anywhere near those negotiations was madness and while the President’s little brother — whose ruthlessness was of the superficial college boy frat society type liable to be too often compromised by what he and his brother construed to be ‘good intentions’ — was just plain dumb. J. William Fulbright was a safe pair of hands, granted; but what was he supposed to do when the Kennedy brothers were constantly trying to conduct international affairs in ways consistent with their infantile, blinkered sense of corporate moral probity?
Claude Betancourt had still not got to the bottom of what the President had actually promised British Prime Minister Thatcher at Hyannis Port. White House insiders were making bad jokes about how Jack Kennedy had ‘taken advantage’ of the naive little English housewife; but nothing the old man had heard about Margaret Thatcher from any of his sources in the CIA or from his people in England gave him any confidence that it was remotely possible that JFK had scored a significant coup at the Hyannis Port Summit. The British had gone home without making an embarrassing public fuss and that itself spoke volumes for what they thought the President had promised them. Moreover, everything he was hearing told him that the Brits had had vastly superior intelligence on the Russian post-October War recovery than any of the US armed services or intelligence agencies. In fact everything pointed towards Jack Kennedy in some way buying off the Brits, possibly with the as yet unspecified ‘Fulbright Plan’ or some other undisclosed assurances of aide or military support. The notion that the Administration planned to just let the Brits ‘hang’ in the Persian Gulf — a suggestion widely circulating in Philadelphia — was, to Claude Betancourt’s mind, too insane to contemplate.
Troublingly, if there was any truth in it, it changed everything.
That such lunacy was actually being discussed spoke volumes to the inherent un-electability of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November, even assuming he — against the odds — got re-nominated at Atlantic City in a couple of months time.
Lyndon Johnson was watching the old man closely.
“What’s on your mind, Claude?”
“What would you do now if you were the President?”
The Texan guffawed, looked away.
“You mean what would I do if I didn’t shoot myself first?” He retorted disgustedly. “It ain’t going to happen, anyway.” His expression was suddenly agate hard, his stare angrily intense. “I don’t trust the fucking Russians any further than I can spit. JFK was supposed to get the Brits under control at Cape Cod. I said throw them a fucking bone if you have to. Jeez… ”
Claude Betancourt felt icy fingers clutching his heart, throat.
“There ain’t going to be no fucking ‘Fulbright Plan’. God dammit! Those fucking schoolboys almost got us into a shooting war with the Brits in December! Now it’s all happening again!”
The Vice President clunked his tumbler down so hard on the table that some of its contents spilled.
He did not notice.
“Now we’re talking to the same bastards who killed ten million Americans because of Cuba!” The Texan tried and failed to rein in his angst. “I didn’t tell you this but JFK sent the top guy in the Navy to fucking Bombay to personally deliver ‘the President’s’ orders to the commander of Carrier Division Seven….”
Claude Betancourt was silent.
“As if that wasn’t bad enough,” the Vice President scoffed, exasperated, “now old Joe Kennedy’s attorney comes all the way down to Stonewall to ask me what I’d do if I was President!”
Chapter 29
Major General William Bradford Rosson listened to the comforting rumble of the Wright R-3350 radial engines of the two A-1 Douglas Skyraiders circling high above the besieged city. If the politicians had authorized the unrestricted use of air power — what little that was actually available to the newly cobbled together ‘Michigan-Illinois-Iowa-Minnesota Command’ — a month ago Milwaukee might not have fallen and Madison might not now be an island in the mid-stream of the nightmare.
The rebels had given up on taking Madison by frontal assault; instead, the enemy sniped at its perimeter, lobbed shells into the city while the greater part of the horde swept north up Interstate 90 and west along Route 18. The rebels had changed their tactics within hours of the arrival of the Skyraiders. Now the horde had dispersed and was moving in a great, scattered diaspora to the west offering few if any opportunities to attack concentrated groups of people or vehicles.
Ominously, war supplies looted from arsenals in Milwaukee and elsewhere along the western shore of Lake Michigan were beginning to appear in greater quantities in front of Madison. M-48 tanks, M113 APCs, and big Army trucks were trundling towards the State Capital. Around the city all the roads had been cut.
There was no good news.
Worse, the nature of the enemy was becoming daily less opaque.
Rosson re-focused on the two prisoners.
A man and a woman, kids really. Ragged, dirty, angry-eyed they had both got through the lines just before the first big attack several days ago, seemingly two innocent refugees. The woman had knifed an Army surgeon to death and the man had tried to grab an M-16 before they were restrained.
“And the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind,” the woman spat.
She had been quoting from the Bible off and on for several minutes.
“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,” her boyfriend said smugly. “And blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”
“That’s from the Book Revelation, right?” Queried the weary Divisional Intelligence Officer; his brow was furrowed with a nascent infuriation that bordered on despair.
The woman’s name was Jessica.
“None of this is our doing,” she declared. “God prophesied that the Devil would visit evil upon the World. ‘And the four angels who had been kept ready for this very hour and day and month and year were released to kill a third of the world's people.’ God commands us to punish the ungodly,” she went on, her tone suggesting that what she was saying was so self-evidently reasonable and right that no sane person could possibly disagree with a single word of it.