Gretchen had been attempting to get past the Vice President’s paternally severe mask. Her father had said that was a waste of time; the man was a born poker player. She sighed, put down her coffee cup and gestured at the room around her.
“Do you know why this town is called ‘Kensington’, sir?”
This piqued Johnson’s curiosity.
“No. But you’re going to tell me, anyway?”
“Yes, sir,” Gretchen smiled. “This was all farmland until the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built across Montgomery County. Nearby here the railroad crossed the Rockville-Bladensburg Road and in time a small community called Knowles Station grew up around it. I don’t have to tell you, Mister Vice President that in the summer DC gets hot and humid, and back in the 1880s and 1890s unhealthy, too. To cut a long story short a DC realtor and developer called, of all things, Brainard Warner, who had fallen in love with London a few years before started buying up land around Knowles Station. He dreamed of creating a so-called ‘Victorian Community’ as a summer haven for well to do Washingtonians, and in the course of his marketing drive he persuaded the local town council to rename the whole town ‘Kensington’ after his favorite place in London.”
Johnson said nothing.
Back in the House he had become famous for cowing opponents by employing the ‘Johnson treatment’. He would out-stare a man, or stand over him, looming threateningly until he got his way.
“Sometimes,” Gretchen said, “we can become so caught up in the,” she hesitated, ‘passions and issues of the moment that we forget our past friendships and where our future best interests lie.”
Johnson nodded but remained silent.
His conscious mind understood that he was listening to Claude Betancourt’s messenger. And yet something also told him that the attractive brunette less than half his age sitting before him as if she owned the room was coloring that message with her own subtle, shrewd nuances.
The kid was a player.
A real player!
Gretchen had three elder male Betancourt siblings, and a much younger sister from her father’s various marriages. The sons were attorneys and bankers, each as anonymous in New England society as any child of the Betancourt lineage could possibly be; and suddenly Johnson realized why the father had ‘bet the ranch’ on his eldest daughter.
“On the night of the war,” Gretchen explained, apparently drifting off at an irrelevant tangent, “all the assumptions and plans I had made about the life I was going to live went out of the door,” she went on. “I was afraid but I was angry, also. Livid, actually. I’m still afraid and I’m still a little angry, and a couple of months ago we all discovered that we hadn’t won the war after all. Back in April we learned that Chicago, Buffalo, Seattle, Galveston and South Boston had been destroyed for nothing. One can only imagine how our friends in England feel about all this. We got away with one fifth, or perhaps one-sixth of the casualties the British suffered that night.”
The thing that Johnson was finding fascinating was that the young woman was not talking to him as a supplicant but as an equal; he was the Vice President of the United States of America but she knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he was the one who was in trouble, that he was the one who needed her and without being pushy or in any way crass about it, she was telling him that he badly needed to listen to what she was about to say to him. A third party looking on would have seen none of this but then unless you had skin in the game it was impossible to really explain what was going on to an outsider.
“And now,” Gretchen continued pleasantly, “the Administration is well on its way to endorsing the Fulbright Doctrine.”
The Vice President’s eyes narrowed a fraction; otherwise he was inscrutable. The nation’s foreign policy — such as it was — had been low on the priority list of the Administration in the aftermath of the October War. Dean Rusk, J. William Fulbright’s predecessor had been in retrospect a broken man and an unholy coalition of vested interests comprising the FBI, the CIA, the fragmented apparatus of Federal Disaster Management, Wall Street, the oil industry and a plethora of competing military factions in the Pentagon had largely succeeded in hijacking key elements of the Administration’s post-war ‘diplomacy’. The result had been the FUBAR — one of Curtis LeMay’s favorite acronyms standing for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair — apology for a ‘foreign policy’ which thus far succeeded in alienating Australasia, India and the British Commonwealth, convinced the Canadians that they were living in a house next to a hundred foot tall psychotic mad axe man, inflamed South American neo-fascists to seize power in Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina, led the Spanish to think they could besiege Gibraltar with impunity and very nearly resulted in a shooting war with the United Kingdom back in December.
In January the ‘problem’ with the British had been patched up by the temporary reinstatement of the 1958 US-UK Defense Treaty. Unfortunately, as Bill Fulbright had pointed out at the time there had never been a snow flake’s chance in Hades of getting that pact ratified by Congress and shortly before the Administration formally ‘reneged’ on the January agreement all Hell had actually broken out in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East at exactly the moment the US had neither the military resources, nor the political appetite for new ‘foreign adventures’. And of course, it was election year and there was a recognition that sending GIs to the Persian Gulf would wipe out the Democratic Party and JFK’s re-election campaign so absolutely that in ten years time nobody would even remember that there had ever been such a thing as ‘the Democrats’.
Bill Fulbright was continually telling anybody who would listen that ‘good intentions and high morals should never have been permitted to mix with the development of a great nation’s foreign policy in the first place’. He hated it but he had been around long enough to know that you played the game with the cards you were dealt, not the ones you would have picked from the pack if you were a crooked dealer.
“Forgive me if I’ve misunderstood the general thrust of, or the thinking underlying the Fulbright Doctrine,” Gretchen offered coyly.
The Vice President realized he had allowed his thoughts to wander.
He snapped back into the here and now.
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you’d be better discussing these matters with the Secretary of State, Mrs Brenckmann.”
Gretchen brushed this aside like a master swordsman contemptuously parrying the inept swipe of a novice’s cutlass.
“The last time I visited the State Department it did not end very well,” she reminded the man. “Part of the building fell on top of me, I got shot and poor Under Secretary Ball died.”
Johnson smiled; he could not help himself smiling.
“Secretary Fulbright’s thinking,” Gretchen said as if she was thinking aloud and hoping Johnson would put her right on one or two areas of detail upon which she was a little fuzzy. “Is that with the re-emergence of the Soviet Union as a viable major World power there is a very real prospect of a second global nuclear war.”
The Vice President nodded.
“A thing,” his visitor declared, “that must never be allowed to happen again.”
“Yes,” the Texan concurred.
“Logically,” Gretchen rejoined, “it follows that the Administration is prepared to go to almost any lengths to secure a peace treaty with the Russians.”
Johnson considered the proposition.
He hesitated just long enough to communicate to Claude Betancourt’s envoy that the Fulbright Doctrine was not the completely ‘done deal’ in his mind that it was to the rest of the President’s inner circle.