“Yes, sir.” It stuck in Schwarzkopf’s craw not to be capable of taking part in the ‘fun’.
“The Air Force,” Grabowski continued, “plan to send in a ground control team to assess the viability of setting up an ‘air bridge’ to keep the garrison supplied and to evacuate the wounded. There will be pressure to fly out civilians but military priorities will prevail. I’ve no idea how practical any of this shit will be. We’re right on the edge, probably beyond the operating range of any chopper and we don’t have anywhere within the perimeter big enough to clear a landing strip. Still, the flyboys will come look see,” he grimaced, “and tell us what they can do!”
Schwarzkopf coughed.
“Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings, and the new Chinooks and Sea Knights would probably have the range, sir,” he offered thoughtfully, “operating from First Army’s front in Illinois or from bases close up to the Mississippi in Iowa.” He shrugged, added: “maybe.”
His commanding officer smiled wanly.
“I’ll believe it when I see it, Little Bear.” He stabbed his finger down onto the map east of the city. “Let me know what you and Mundy want to do by noon, please.”
He moved on decisively.
There were ten other officers gathered around the map table.
Harvey Grabowski looked into the eyes of his officers.
“What went wrong last night was nobody’s fault. We’re fighting a goddammed war here and bad things happen all the time when you’re at war. I don’t want anybody bad mouthing the Air Force. We lost a lot of good men last night but the enemy lost more. Last night’s bombing may just have stopped the enemy in his tracks. Either way, the enemy will know that what happened to him last night can happen to him again anytime, anywhere. Moreover, the next time the enemy attacks he’ll have to come at us over the ground those B-52s churned up. God help him if it rains between now and then!”
Chapter 41
That morning Nathan had driven Caroline across the Oakland Bay Bridge to the University of California School of Medicine on Parnassus Ave, San Francisco, where she had arranged a meeting with the Acting Dean of the School of Psychiatry. Although she had told him she would make her own way back to Berkeley in the afternoon he had hung around. It had seemed the right thing to do and besides, she had been like a cat on a hot tin roof since they had woken up and well…
He was worried about her.
‘How’d it go?’ He had asked when, after about ninety minutes she had walked distractedly back to where he had parked up.
While he was waiting he had picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and basically, read it from cover to cover trying not to fret too much about Caroline’s interview.
‘So, so,” she had replied noncommittally as he opened the passenger door for her and she clambered into the cab of the beat up old Chevy.
Nathan had spent time making sure what was under the hood worked but he was a part-qualified electrical and mechanical engineer, not any kind of body shop grease monkey. He was going to have to find somebody else to hammer out the dents and re-spray the chassis and panels. It was on his list of things to do; just not very high up it.
‘I’ve got a second appointment at the VA Medical Center this afternoon. That’s out on Clement Street near the coast,’ she had hesitated, ‘beyond the Presidio. The School of Medicine has big contracts with the military,’ she had explained. ‘Obviously, I couldn’t disclose what I’d been doing lately. Not in so many words but I’ve been invited to apply for a post on the Medical Directorate of the California National Guard. It’s pretty much a done deal if I’m interested. The thing over at the VA Medical Center is not so much an interview as a chance to look over the department and meet some of the people working there… ’
They had stopped at small diner off Fillmore for coffee and sandwiches then motored west across the city to the white-washed buildings on Clement Street that housed the Veterans Administration Medical Center. Again, Nathan had waited outside in the street, re-reading the latest bad-mouthing of the President.
The General Election might not be scheduled until November but it had already turned into a vicious, no holds barred bare-knuckle fight. Most of the commentators and every serious pundit predicted a three or four way race; Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat and a straight America Firster. Not that any of the potential candidates was espousing anything other than uncompromising isolationism masquerading under the newly remembered banner of states’ rights.
Everybody assumed JFK would run again but nobody knew if he would win his party’s nomination; it was that kind of Presidential race. There were rumors that Vice President Johnson had suffered a heart attack, that Hubert Humphrey or Minnesotan Eugene McCarthy would vie for a place on the Democrat ticket. Here in California there was a vocal lobby that supported Governor Pat Brown for President.
The Republicans were as conflicted and confused as the Democrats. Henry Cabot Lodge junior and Nelson Rockefeller had been in a two horse race in the spring; now the waters were muddier ever week. Barry Goldwater, the strident Arizonan senator had worried at the two standard bearer’s ankles with the angry tenacity of a fox terrier and right up until the result of the California Primary was declared he had been in pole position. Enter Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s faithful, albeit rather dull and somewhat oily Vice President for most of the 1950s, who had very nearly carried his home state’s contest. It seemed that Nixon was attempting to shed his former skin to enable him to insinuate himself between his rivals as a lone voice of reason.
The Southern Democrats already had their man; George Wallace the pugnacious Governor of Alabama, arch segregationist and bigot but dearly beloved of the Jim Crow wing of the President’s own Party.
Strom Thurmond, the senator from South Carolina, was something of a Republican in a Democrat’s fleece. He was one of those old unreconstructed Southern Democrats who seemed to think that the only way to preserve segregation was to reawaken the same states’ rights nightmare that had led to the Civil War. Thurmond was as yet — unofficially — undeclared as a fourth horseman of the American electoral apocalypse which beckoned on November 8th.
JFK or even Richard Nixon were known quantities, as for the others… Heck, from what Nathan had read and had heard bandied about, most of the others were the sort of characters a wise man would not bet paper money on to find his own ass in the dark without half-a-dozen flunkies holding a torch for him!
To be fair to the Chronicle it carried gossip and hearsay most days about one or other of the Presidential hopefuls. However, today’s dig at JFK was extraordinarily below the belt.
Doctor Max Jacobsen, aged sixty-three, the German born psycho-physician who boasts a client list that has included over the years Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Zero Mostel, Eddie Fisher, Yul Brynner, Cecil B. DeMille, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller and President Kennedy, stands accused of being nothing more than a quack drug dealer to the rich and the powerful.
The story about what the President’s father had done to his daughter Rose Marie — allegedly having the poor woman lobotomized in 1941 on the grounds that she might become an embarrassment to him and own political ambitions — had been pretty low. Likewise the tittle-tattle about Jack Kennedy’s womanizing, the show girls and the movie stars he had allegedly seduced and dumped.
The good doctor is known variously as ‘Miracle Max’ and ‘Doctor Feelgood’ because of his liberal prescribing of large doses of amphetamines, opiates and other mind-bending drugs. Jacobson, who operates out of an exclusive Upper East Side clinic in Manhattan frequently injects his clients with a so-called ‘miracle tissue regeneration’ concoction. Sources close to President Kennedy before the Cuban Missiles Crisis have revealed that these MTR ‘shots’ are ‘reckless combinations’ of large doses of amphetamines, human placenta, animal hormones untested on humans, anabolic steroids, powerful painkillers, and miscellaneous enzymes and vitamins.