LeMay shut his eyes, shook his head.
“Bringle already has orders requiring him to use whatever force he deems appropriate to separate the warring parties in the region, sir,” the former bomber supremo reminded his President. “I told you at the time that those orders were promulgated that we were making a bad mistake. Now you’re asking me to send,” he corrected himself, “ordering me to prepare to send B-52s into action not against the Soviets but potentially, the Brits?”
“Yes,” Jack Kennedy said dully. “We cannot let the Soviets over run the oilfields of the southern Gulf. That is a given, General. Nevertheless, the Administration’s policy is that, notwithstanding we are confronted by Soviet aggression in the region, that our vital short, medium and long-term strategic interests are best served by doing whatever it takes to avert a second nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Avoiding another nuclear war trumps all other considerations. Yes, like you I entertain the most severe moral qualms about this; but no, I am not prepared to compromise. We will not allow the British to drag us into another World War.”
LeMay looked to Fulbright, said nothing.
“I need to know if I can I rely on you to alert the 319th Bomb Wing, General?” Jack Kennedy asked.
The ranking military officer in the United States hesitated.
It did not matter that he thought what he was being ordered to do was just plain…wrong.
He had taken the oath.
The President was his Commander-in-Chief.
It would take at least fifteen days — assuming the full cooperation of the Soviet authorities — to put the necessary facilities in place in Russia to enable the first six 319th Bomb Group B-52s to operate over Iraq.
The way things were looking in the Persian Gulf that would probably be too late to make much difference. His best intelligence was that the Red Army would be on the northern shores of the Gulf and that Abadan Island would be invested by then.
Separating the warring parties might by then to be academic; with the Soviets victorious on land and the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force driven back to their Saudi Arabian bases.
LeMay suspected that this was the scenario the President and his Secretary of State actually envisaged playing out in the coming weeks, and that the commitment to deploy the 319th Bomb Group was window dressing for the benefit of the Russians.
The trouble was that wishful thinking was a very, very bad way to conduct foreign policy, and a potentially catastrophic way to plan military action.
When LeMay spoke it was with a heavy heart.
“Yes, sir,” he grunted. “The 319th will be alerted for operations in the Middle East as soon as I leave this place.”
Chapter 45
The heavily defended convoy carrying Dr Martin Luther King, the leading members of the Civil Rights Movement, their family members and their friends and ‘guest’ marchers halted in the grounds around the southern bend of the US Marine Corps Memorial Circuit on the western bank of the Potomac. Although it was still only mid-morning it was a glorious, hot, cloudless day and the ranks of Marines, Army Rangers, National Guardsmen and policemen were already sweating.
A phalanx of pressmen and photographers surged forward.
Camera’s fired like a volley of musketry.
Miranda Sullivan stepped down from her bus and surveyed the faded greenery of the park around her. Today the March passed the nation’s most hallowed ground, the cemetery where the dead of its wars were buried in the parkland of what had once been Robert E. Lee’s mansion.
With the entrance to the Arlington National Cemetery the marchers would turn to the east to cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac, crossing from Virginia into the District of Columbia. On the eastern bank of the river the great throng, perhaps as many as fifty or sixty thousand people presently choking the parks and roads bordering the Potomac side of Arlington, would stream around both flanks of the Lincoln Memorial, down both sides of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, past the World War II Memorial and the great obelisk in memory of George Washington to take possession of the recently re-opened National Mall all the way up to the steps of the scaffolding-shrouded US Capitol Building.
Most commentators predicted that one in every two Washingtonians who had ‘stuck it out’ since the fighting in December, or who had since returned to the city — now the site of the biggest single reconstruction project on the planet — would join the crowds in and around the Capitol.
Miranda viewed the sweating soldiers and policemen thoughtfully.
There had been isolated incidents, attacks on groups of marchers, shots fired and over a hundred people injured in the March thus far; but to everybody’s astonishment no deaths, and no violence on the scale of anything routinely seen in Mississippi, Alabama and elsewhere in the South most weekends. But on this penultimate ‘marching day’ the caravanserai of the Civil Rights Movement had come to Washington and in two days time Dr King would lead his people up Broad Street South to City Hall in Philadelphia.
Today was the first of the two ‘big’ marches.
“Well, Miss Sullivan,” Ivan Allen, the Mayor of Atlanta remarked after turning to offer his wife a helping hand down from the bus, “we seem to have a another fine day for marching!”
Miranda nodded.
“I’m sure Dr King is right when he says a greater power is looking after us all,” she suggested, more in hope than conviction.
Over on the Arlington bank of the Potomac there were few signs of the fighting which had destroyed half the city a little less than seven months ago. However, across the river savage battles had raged around the Lincoln Memorial and on both sides of the National Mall, the great buildings of the Smithsonian had been systematically looted by the rebels — the government claimed by ‘criminal gangs’ — and later gutted by fire as the Marines had had to go room by room flushing out fanatical ‘stay behind’ suicide squads. The December fighting had spread into the streets and blocks beyond the museums of the Mall, and although a valiant defense by a combined National Guard and Washington PD force had kept the rebels out of the US Capital Bazooka rounds and petrol bombs had started fires which had at one stage threatened to consume the northern wing of the great structure.
Louise Allen, the Mayor of Atlanta’s wife, had done her best to engage Miranda in conversation on the trip down from Baltimore that morning. The ‘VIP marchers’ had been put up in Army and Navy bases overnight in between the last three ‘march days’.
Miranda had been unusually tongue-tied, too wrapped up in her own thrall of remembrance to be her normal, loquacious self.
She quirked a hesitant smile at Ivan Allen.
“I wish I had your faith, sir,” she apologized. “I think the war has split us — well, people of my generation — into two camps; those with and those without faith. There’s no room for anything in between anymore.”
The Mayor of Atlanta smiled.
“There are many kinds of faith, Miss Sullivan,” he rejoined gently. “You and I are here because we have faith in the rightness of our cause, because we believe in something higher than our own personal interest. We believe that we can be better individually, and as a people. And,” he guffawed softly, “we both believe in Dr King.”