Where the town of Quincy, in which she had planned to commence her brilliant legal career had stood there was nothing. The town and its seventy thousand inhabitants no longer existed, although the street plan was visible in places, everything else was flattened and scorched. In the naval dockyards on the Weymouth Fore River several big grey warships had sunk, their superstructures scorched and malformed in their flooded docks and alongside fire-blackened wharves. It was as if a giant blow torch had been applied to the land for miles around. Weymouth in the south west, Braintree to the south, and Milton to the west were all shattered ghost towns. The blasted, burned zone reached north along the coast towards the heart of Boston, the southern suburbs as far north as Brookline were scourged by the flames. Blinking survivors — thousands were blinded or left with irreparable retinal damage — poked pathetically around the periphery of the ‘dead zones’. Somewhere in the devastation her family home in the hills behind Quincy where she had grown up had been consumed by the fifty million degree fireball of the warhead which had overshot its target, Boston, by just enough miles to kill tens rather than hundreds of thousands of Americans. On the other side of Boston, at Cambridge situated virtually up against the fence of the more or less intact Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus, Dan Brenckmann’s mother and father had sat out the war in their basement. The Brenckmann’s house had lost all its windows, some slates off its roof, and a falling tree had totalled Dan Brenckmann’s Ma’s station wagon, otherwise they had emerged unhurt in the morning. Not so Dan’s kid sister, Tabatha. She had been in Buffalo…
There was a knock at the office door.
“Can I come in, Gretchen?” Barry Samsom asked with unabashed trepidation. “My chief told me I need to have sight of the files those G-men brought over this morning.”
Gretchen was a little irritated that the pathetic little man had disturbed her train of thought.
“I’ll be finished with them by one o’clock.” She scowled. “I can’t allow you to take them out of this room.”
“Oh, I know the FBI is a bit one-eyed over these things but…”
“The files were signed over to me, Barry,” Gretchen retorted primly. “If I leave the room they must be locked in my desk and the door to the office locked.”
“I know,” the man protested. “But we’re the ones who are supposed to be in charge of the FBI, Gretchen. Not vice versa.”
“Do you want to explain that to Director Hoover, or shall I?”
The man stamped out of the office muttering under his breath without bothering to shut the door behind him. Briefly, Gretchen contemplated drafting a formal complaint; she had after all just been invited to break departmental rules and treated with gratuitous disrespect by a male colleague. No, she decided, the little runt was not worth it. Besides, the Barry Samsoms of this World were no threat to her. She shut her office door she went back to the window.
Her father was a dear man even though as he got older he was tending to be overly loquacious and opinionated and very stuck in his ways, even for an old lawyer. He loved to quote from the classics — Homer and Hippocrates, for he would much rather have been a scholar of antiquity than a ‘dealer in the minutiae of modern times’ as a ludicrously expensive litigator and Democrat Party fixer par excellence — and he constantly bombarded his family with ancient saws and pithily amended or adapted ancient and modern literary aphorisms.
‘Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult,’ he might quote from Hippocrates, and then, with a twinkle in his eye add, ‘and how often the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry…’
Gretchen could not help but wonder what her father would make of the material in the files on her desk.
It seemed to her — forgetting her moral qualms, just on a purely intellectual level — that the Kennedy Administration’s stance on civil rights was an object lesson in the essential dysfunctionality within the Washington DC bubble. On the one hand Gretchen worked for a government that was tentatively reaching out its hand in friendship to that part of the Civil Rights movement most closely aligned to Dr Martin Luther King junior; while at the same time reconciling itself with relying on the ongoing support of the positively anti-diluvium, segregationist rump of the old Southern Democratic wing of its own party in Congress. Worse, it seemed reconciled with one wing of the government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation — an organisation supposedly subordinate to, and therefore answerable to the Department of Justice — actively and systematically undermining and suborning everything the Kennedy Administration had been trying to achieve in the South. Director J. Edgar Hoover — or as the younger generation in the Department of Justice whispered, when referring to the supposedly legendary crime fighter, ‘that old faggot’ — seemed hopelessly locked into a 1920s mindset, and his boss, United States Attorney General Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the President’s brother, seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
What with one thing and another for all its small ‘c’ conservatism in the aftermath of the October War, Gretchen’s generation would never again trust the ‘men at the top’ to keep them safe from all evil. The war had changed the psyche of the whole nation, no more so than within that part of the population which had lost the most; the youth of America for whom the American Dream had turned into a mildly radioactive myth that night thirteen months ago. The days when the President, great industrialists, or men like J. Edgar Hoover could get away with ‘trust me, I know what I am doing’ were over. Things would never be the same again even if the Director of the FBI did not know it yet.
Gretchen had met Bobby Kennedy several times that fall. The Attorney General had looked her up and down like a lump of meat the first couple of times; in precisely the way her own boss, Deputy United States Attorney General Katzenbach had not. They said the President was a changed man since the war. They said he was unmanned by the cataclysm; that the runaway libido of former times not so much curbed but banished by the prophylactic existential experience of the war. His younger brother, seven years JFK’s junior, and possibly less burdened by his personal culpability in that night’s work, had apparently, begun to recover his former appetites and tentatively resumed his former philandering. From what she had heard he was naturally less predatory than his elder sibling and only periodically rapacious.
It was academic, anyway. Gretchen had absolutely no intention of sleeping with a man so intimately implicated in last year’s debacle. The Kennedy brothers might have done what they did for the best possible reasons. They might have had no choice; but a girl had to draw the line somewhere and sleeping with men who had killed so many millions of innocent people was where she drew her personal line, regardless of whether or not it was going to blight her future career because she knew, deep down, that if she surrendered her carefully guarded virginity to the wrong man she would never be clean again afterwards.
Much as she prided herself on being a modern woman; Gretchen prided herself even more on being a very old-fashioned modern woman.
Gretchen gathered the files on her desk into a neat heap.
She reached for the phone.
“This is Miss Betancourt. Can you find me five minutes in the Deputy Attorney General’s diary as soon as possible please?”
The woman at the other end of the line asked if it was ‘important’.
“Yes, it is.”
The woman at the other end of the line tested this assertion.