The thing that was different about this slander was that it was suggesting; one, that the President was a very sick man, and two; that he had been under the influence of drugs at crucial points in his Presidency.
Sources close to the Administration confirm that President Kennedy was first treated by Doctor Feelgood in New York in September 1960, shortly before the famous Presidential Debates which probably won JFK the race. Although it was not publicized at the time Max Jacobsen was a member of the President’s staff at the failed Vienna summit of 1961, at which President Kennedy was reportedly ‘out of sorts’ and consequently out-maneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev. Our sources confirm that prior to and during that summit Jacobsen had ‘treated’ the President to alleviate severe back pain… ”
Nathan had never blamed his President for the Cuban Missiles War.
The Soviets would have killed a hundred million Americans if JFK had faltered, or given so much as an inch over Cuba.
Except now as he read the Chronicle and his mind began to work through the underlying — horribly persuasive — rationale of the poison on its pages, a canker of doubt had settled in his head. It was hardly any kind of apotheosis, just the recognition that the narrative which he had accepted for most of the last twenty months might, possibly be flawed.
White House sources also confirm that Doctor Jacobsen visited the White House over thirty times between January 1961 and May 1962. The Chronicle’s readers have a right to know if President Kennedy was ‘high’ on the day of the Cuban Missiles War…
Caro — she was ‘Caro’ to him and him alone already — had been in a sanguine mood when she returned to the Chevy that afternoon.
Back in Berkeley they had stopped at a corner shop three blocks down from the house on Hearst Avenue and for the first time half-filled the refrigerator and partially stocked at least one shelf of the larder cupboard.
“The Chronicle says the President might have been on drugs at the time of the war,” Nathan said as they were washing up after a slow, lazy dinner in the small parlor.
“If I had to make the sort of decisions a President has to make I’d make damned sure I was on drugs all the time,” the woman had retorted.
The man had expected her to be outraged.
“You don’t think he ought to have… ”
“Been teetotal, abstemious and celibate every minute of every day?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so… ”
Caroline wiped her hands on a cloth and turned to face him.
“You are a very sweet man, Nathan Zabriski,” she smiled. “Even after all the things you’ve gone through you’re still the sweetest man I’ve met in my whole,” she shook her head ruefully, “quite long life.”
Nathan looked into her eyes, grey blue and wise, pools of sanity in his disordered reality.
He held her close, planted kisses in her hair.
Knew that for the first time in his life he was not alone…
Chapter 42
Lady Bird Johnson viewed the other woman with transparent mistrust. The other woman’s name had not been Rachel Piotrowska the last time they had met in 1961. Back in those days she had been Hannah Ziegler, a mysterious socialite who had partied — and slept around — with the DC elite. She had arrived from nowhere, and vanished as fast. None of the wives had liked her, sensing threat, danger while their husbands had hung around the woman like a bad smell. Now — if the political wives grapevine was to be believed — the same woman was dressing down, trawling the Philadelphia streets calling in old favors, reminding ‘old friends’ that she was exactly the spy that they had always hoped she was not. The Vice President’s wife was a little surprised how many of her fellow ‘political wives’ had warned her about ‘Miss Piotrowska’ since she had got back to Philly. They obviously had a lot more to worry about than she had!
The only thing Lady Bird Johnson knew for sure was that this woman had no hold on her husband. For all his faults Lyndon was no philanderer. He never had been and he never would be because he was just not that kind of man.
“Thank you for allowing me to visit your charming home,” the younger woman smiled. To her host her accent sounded positively ‘Russian’.
Rachel Piotrowska had turned up in the street behind the plush apartment building in a Buick with two minders, and had been hurriedly ushered into the building via the rear fire escape by the Vice President’s Secret Service detail. The British Ambassador had sent a wire overnight inquiring, very politely, if the Vice President’s health and schedule ‘might accommodate a discreet good will call’ by a member of his staff.
Lady Bird’s husband touched her arm.
“Ms Piotrowska is a long way from home, Bird,” he said gruffly. She had been called ‘Bird’ as a girl and she had hated it; but when the name rolled off her husband’s lips it had always had a reassuring, pleasing ring.
The Vice President’s outward mask of insouciance was becoming a little strained. Orchestrating the various comings and goings at the LBJ Ranch had been a doddle in comparison with the management of the stream of visitors to the Vice Presidential residence in Philadelphia. While Johnson had no problem with the World in general knowing he was being actively courted — much like a prodigal returned — by the Southern Conservative Alliance in the shape of his former mentor Richard Russell — the one time Governor of Georgia and since 1959 the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services — and by miscellaneous disaffected middle-ranking members of a visibly dysfunctional Administration; visitations by the likes of Claude Betancourt, and now Rachel Piotrowska, the public face of the British Secret Service in America were fraught with peril.
Jack Kennedy could afford to turn a blind eye to LBJ’s fraternization with diehard Southern Democrats and by any number of double-dealing sub-Cabinet level malcontents so long as the Vice President went on rebuffing the approaches of the papers and the TV networks and kept a low public profile. However, the fiction of his indisposition — widely reported as his having suffered a minor heart attack — would not withstand the merest whisper of his having secretly met Rachel Piotrowska. The press pack had been on the woman’s heels ever since she suddenly appeared at the British Embassy last month. That she had since proven to be the most elusive of quarries had simply maddened the appetite of the media.
Lady Bird Johnson, The Vice President and the Head of Station of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the US stood in the lobby. The blinds were drawn, the heat a little oppressive but Lyndon Johnson wanted nobody eavesdropping on this conversation.
“They say the Embassy up in Wister Park is almost deserted?” The Vice President inquired.
“The Ambassador sent our California Delegation under Sir Peter Christopher’s leadership west,” the woman replied dryly, “and a number of inessential and supernumerary staff and family members to Canada after the unfortunate attack on the Embassy earlier in the month. I gather that, at your instigation, Peter Christopher’s Party was royally greeted and entertained in the fortnight they spent as guests of the National Aerospace Administration in Alabama before they set off on the last leg of their journey to California.”