“Mr Katzenbach is out of DC at this time. You could meet him off his flight when it touches down at Andrews Air Force Base this evening at around midnight, Miss Betancourt?”
In other words ‘you might think that you need to talk to the United States Deputy Attorney General urgently but I don’t!’
Gretchen did not take offence; she understood that the woman at the other end of the line had her own priorities and that top of her list of priorities was making sure junior departmental counsels did not waste her boss’s time. Most times offering a diary spot in the middle of the night several miles from the centre of DC would have been a sure fire way of putting off the pushiest of underlings.
Gretchen Betancourt was not in the least put off.
She had actually expected to be offered a diary slot sometime next month. The opportunity to speak to her boss as soon as tonight was like waving a red rag at a bull. And besides, what she had just learned from the FBI files on her desk would not wait.
“That will be fine. I’ll go out to Andrews Field tonight.”
Chapter 8
United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach knew exactly what he was doing in Washington State; he just did not know why he was being asked to do it. This was a situation he had got used to in the last thirteen months as his professional relationship with the President’s younger brother, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, had steadily deteriorated. His boss seemed to regard the role of the Attorney General as being one of acting like some kind of occasional national District Attorney who was constantly running for re-election; Katzenbach happened to think that the man who was responsible for the Justice Department, and therefore, for upholding the respect for, and the good administration of, the law of the land ought to be in his office in Washington once in a while. He also thought that Bobby Kennedy was far too preoccupied with some mythical, vaguely imagined great post-war American future in which men of all creeds and colours would live in perfect harmony than he was with the grimly mundane present. Most of all Nick Katzenbach was royally ticked off always being the one who had to tell Governors and State Legislatures that Washington DC — mostly Bobby Kennedy — had decided not to support this or that initiative, or entirely legitimate emergency adaptation to the reality of governance in the post October War United States of America.
It was a bad day when the US Attorney General started turning a blind eye to State’s Rights. Katzenbach had nearly resigned his post a month ago. The Vice-President had talked him out of it; Lyndon Baines Johnson had looked him in the eye and persuaded him it was his duty not to jump off the sinking ship.
‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’ LBJ had growled as he quirked a wan smile. ‘If ever there was the time for that sort of talk this is it. Things might look bad now but how bad would it have been if we had lost the goddammed war?’
Duty was a thing that ran in Nick Katzenbach’s veins; duty and service was the hallmark of his family. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Trenton he was the son of father who had been an Attorney General of New Jersey and a mother who was the first female President of the New Jersey State Board of Education. His Uncle had been a Mayor of Trenton and a Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Although proud of his German descent and raised a devout Episcopalian; at the time of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 when he was still a junior at Princeton he had immediately volunteered for war service. Trained as an air navigator his 310th Bomb Group B-25 Mitchell bomber had been shot down in February 1943, condemning him to two years as a prisoner of war in camps in Italy and Germany where he had eventually ended up in the giant POW complex known as Stalag Luft III — near the town of Sagan in Southern Silesia — of ‘great escape’ fame from which seventy-six allied airmen had escaped in 1944.
At Yale after the war he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal, and between 1947 and 1949 a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College in Oxford, England. Admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1950 he had arrived in his present lofty position via a succession of ever more high profile appointments. From 1950 he was an associate in the firm of Katzenbach, Gildea and Rudner, he had been an advisor to the General Counsel to the United States Air Force for two years, a member of the faculty of the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, an associate professor of law at Yale for four years until 1956, and professor of law at the University of Chicago before joining the Justice Department in 1961. Since June 1962 he had been United States Deputy Attorney General.
His troubles with his immediate boss had first come to a head that summer when he had been sent down to Tuscaloosa to confront the most Southern of Democratic Governors, George Wallace. Bobby Kennedy made a lot of sympathetic noises about the Civil Rights movement; yet was always waiting for the ‘right moment’ and or, the ‘best time’ to act. Katzenbach’s part in the infamous Tuscaloosa ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Door’ incident was immortalised in TV, film and still pictures which had been broadcast across the nation and blazed from a hundred newspaper front pages. Governor George Wallace, a pugnacious segregationist with little love and no respect for effete northern liberals — a group which included the entire Kennedy Administration in his book — had melodramatically ‘stood’ in front of the door of the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama barring the enrolment of two black students. His stunt might have worked had not Katzenbach, backed by Federal Marshalls and members of the Alabama National Guard confronted Wallace.
It was over a month since Katzenbach had sent a paper to both Kennedy brothers demanding that something had to be done to ‘counter and combat the proliferation of wild and dangerous conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances leading up to the recent Cuban Missiles War’. His suggestion was to establish a Joint Standing Committee comprising members of both Congress and the Senate chaired by somebody of unimpeachable integrity who would ‘command the widest possible respect in the country’. To obviate any suspicion that the Administration was attempting to ‘cover up’ material facts relevant to the work of such ‘a Commission’ the President would issue clear instructions in his role as Commander-in-Chief that all witnesses called by the Commission would automatically be granted immunity from prosecution or legal redress, providing they gave their evidence truthfully under oath. He had further proposed that the remit of the Committee should be to examine the ‘causes and conduct of the war and to definitively document the same’. It was his contention that at the outset the President should make a commitment that the ‘findings of the Commission would be published in full at the earliest time’. He had floated several names of men who might be suitable to chair the Commission; at the head of that list, and by far the strongest candidate, was Earl Warren, a former Attorney General of California and Governor of that State, who was currently serving as the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States.
He and his boss, the President’s younger brother, had still not discussed ‘the paper’, and now Katzenbach had been despatched on what had seemed like a wild goose chase to Washington State at the last moment to supposedly ‘stop Al Rosellini doing something dumb’.
Bobby Kennedy had admitted he was afraid ‘the situation’ in Washington State could turn into a ‘second Civil War’; Katzenbach had refrained from asking him about the ongoing ‘situations’ around Chicago, or inquiring when ‘wild west lawlessness’ in other bomb-damaged areas ceased to be a law and order issue and became an ‘insurgency’. It was a conversation they had had several times during the long hot summer of riots and widespread violent disorder across the North American continent. The nascent Civil Rights agenda had, in the Deputy Attorney General’s opinion been mistakenly put on the back burner when it was painfully obvious that addressing it head on was an essential part of the solution to the broader post-war societal malaise afflicting the nation.