Thus far members of the House of Representatives and the Administration had only been subjected to an increasingly vitriolic, sinister litany of verbal and written threats without there having been an actual fatality. There had been botched assassination attempts, shots had been fired at both the White House and the Capitol Building without injuring anybody. Within the Washington elite there was an unsettling recognition that ‘they had all been lucky so far’. In any event, the United States Deputy Attorney General was going nowhere in a hurry tonight until the Secret Service had organised his security.
Katzenbach’s whistle-stop journey to the North-West had done little to allay his growing fears for the cohesion of the Union. The disconnection between what was going on Washington State and the positively surreal way in which the denizens of the capital city viewed the reality beyond their immediately environs, was horribly dangerous. Although the President and his closest advisors — among whose number he did not presently count himself — might not know or care to recognise what was going on in the rest of the country, he hoped that somebody, somewhere in the vicinity of the White House had a grip of the situation; but he did not know this to be a fact and that scared him. Likewise, the attitude of the military seemed unduly complacent. None of the Chiefs of Staff had raised his head above the parapet over the ‘Bellingham issue’, each preferring to focus on managing the process of disarmament in his own service inherent in the Administration’s ungodly rush to cash in the ‘peace dividend’.
Nicholas Katzenbach did not personally cavil about the general concept of a ‘peace dividend’, quite the contrary, he believed that ‘cashing in’ on the peace was an essential investment in the future wealth, economic, technical and industrial development of the nation, and the obvious way to free up scarce Federal funds to address the most pressing social, welfare and inequality issues facing America. However, he had never supported attempting to ‘cash in’ that peace dividend overnight; a transparently crude and blatantly ‘political’ move ahead of next year’s Presidential election. As such it was not just a very bad mistake, it was unethical politically and frankly, just plain dumb.
Which was more or less what Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defence had told the President ‘in Cabinet’ back in February. At the time Katzenbach had been astonished McNamara had not resigned. A less cerebral and less loyal man than Bob would certainly have resigned; most likely he had only stayed on because he could not think of anybody else more capable than himself of limiting the damage.
The trouble was that the way the ‘Peace Dividend’ had been initiated; by the Treasury Department simply turning off the ‘money tap’ to the Pentagon was always going to be an unmitigated disaster. Bob McNamara was a business guru; he must have seen it coming but the Washington DC departmental bureaucracies, locked away inside the DC bubble had gone about translating Presidential edicts into action with the subtle aplomb of blacksmiths mending precision Swiss watches with hammers.
Right now the entire apparatus of Government was working overtime to first, make the mandated cuts to the Armed Forces of the Republic, and second, to get its sweaty hands on every single dollar allegedly ‘saved’ by the ill-thought out, criminally rushed ‘cuts’. As Bob McNamara had — apocryphally — told his Treasury counterpart in a score of Capitol Hill off the record briefings ‘no sane man would try to run a candy store this way’. From where Katzenbach sat it seemed to him that the Administration was tearing itself to pieces trying to reconcile a raft of wholly irreconcilable and incompatible policies at a time of extreme ongoing crisis; at exactly the same time it was dismantling the victorious military machine which had actually won the Cuban Missiles War.
That, of course, was the problem. One camp honestly believed that the October War marked a departure from the path the United States had been on since the end of the Japanese War in 1945. That camp was convinced that it was time for a fresh start.
Another camp maintained that real life was not that simple. That there was no such thing as a clean slate in domestic or international affairs; and that before it mothballed a single ship or aircraft or disbanded a single infantry platoon the Administration ought to have sat down, taken a very deep breath and reviewed all — not just the politically seductive — options and decided where America’s real long-term geopolitical interests lay in the changed World. This camp subscribed to the view that even to think about cashing in a ‘peace dividend’ so soon after the war was dangerously, if not criminally premature.
Nicholas Katzenbach sat squarely within this second camp. Possibly a majority of the Cabinet also sat in that camp; unfortunately, the President and Katzenbach’s boss at the Department of Justice, did not.
The Administration had been drifting — some said it had been in free fall — for much of the last year. The execution of the peace dividend had been comprehensively botched and every pre-war, pre-existing stress and contradiction within American society had been allowed to fester. If it had not been before, the body politic was poisoned and what had happened in Bellingham might just turn out to be a chilling small scale prequel to the fate of the Union.
Such were the matters upon which United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had been brooding on the flight back to Washington from McChord Air Force Base.
“I’m Gretchen Betancourt,” the attractive brunette said, barring Katzenbach’s way in the reception lounge of the VIP Centre.
The Deputy Attorney General blinked at the young woman and flicked a disinterested glance at the dapper, tired young man at her shoulder. Somebody had passed him a note about one of his junior counsels wanting five minutes of his time as soon as he got back to Washington. He checked his watch: 5:25 AM. His stay in Olympia and his discussions with the three West Coast Governors had, of necessity, somewhat overshot his staff’s unrealistic scheduling.
“Who is your friend, Miss Betancourt?”
“I’m Dan Brenckmann, sir,” The man in the dark coat said, shaking the Katzenbach’s hand. “I’m here in the capacity of Gretchen’s chaperone. Things are a bit rough hereabouts for a woman on her own.”
Gretchen visibly blanched at this.
“Dan’s a member of the Massachusetts bar, sir,” she said, impatient to get past the civilities. “There are three files you need to see before your appointment with Director Hoover tomorrow,” she corrected her error, “sorry, this afternoon, sir.”
“You can tell me about it on the way back to DC.” He eyed Gretchen’s chaperone. “Brenckmann? I recollect encountering a Walter Brenckmann at a pre-trial hearing in Boston a few years back? Navy man?”
“That would be my Pa, sir. He was sent to England a while back. As liaison with the British Royal Navy, or some such.”