Unfortunately, he and McNamara had a long, disputatious, and more than somewhat fractious history. During the Second World War Robert McNamara had been a relatively junior officer assigned to the Office of Statistical Control serving in India, China and the Marianas, coincidentally following Curtis LeMay from one command to the next, attempting to apply statistical analytical techniques to the operations of the Big Cigar’s bombers. To Old Iron Pants ‘statistical analytical techniques’ were what you applied to automobile production lines, not combat. LeMay and McNamara were antipathetic characters who had never really seen eye to eye; and not surprisingly the drastic ‘Peace Dividend’ cut backs in the Air Force budget had prompted an ever widening rift between the two men. When LeMay had found out that McNamara had once described him in an interview as being ‘extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal’ he had ignored the subsequent caveat, offered freely and generously by the Secretary of Defence that ‘he [LeMay] was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in the war’.
The two men had not spoken privately for several months.
But then neither had many of the members of the Administration been talking to each other either.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force raced cars in the desert like a madman because even if had he still been talking to the idiots in DC; it was extremely unlikely they would have been listening to anything Old Iron Pants said to them.
Chapter 15
Gretchen Betancourt’s first impression of the legendary Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that she was being introduced to an over-sized wrinkled toad dressed up in a morning suit. His slicked back black hair and peculiarly young-old physiognomy — was he wearing makeup? — would have been comical had not the man’s evil reputation preceded him into the plush conference room of the United States Deputy Attorney General.
“I understood that this was to be a private meeting, Mr Katzenbach,” J. Edgar Hoover, the sixty-eight year old Director of the FBI said. He spoke fast, with each of his words threatening to fall over the next. It was a technique he had adopted over half-a-century ago to master a juvenile stutter. Now he used it as a weapon.
“Miss Betancourt will note down any action points that we agree, Mr Director.”
“Miss Betancourt?” Hoover snapped, eyes narrowing.
Gretchen realised he was searching his memory for the name, making connections, formulating the investigations he would launch into her background; wondering if his agents might stumble across something useful against her father. Nicholas Katzenbach had told her not to speak; she was there to learn, and to distract ‘the old man’.
But not ‘in that way’ because ‘the Director’s peccadilloes are of another kind altogether.’
Gretchen’s boss had told her the meeting would be brief because J. Edgar Hoover would get up and storm out at the earliest possible opportunity.
Again ‘because that is the sort of man he is and he knows he can get away with it.’
Gretchen looked up from her shorthand pad, stopped scribbling for a moment. Her shorthand was diabolical but Katzenbach had told her to ‘just pretend’. So she was pretending to the best of her ability to be a genuine shorthand ‘whiz’. She met the piercing stare of the nation’s self-proclaimed greatest crime fighter. Inwardly, she flinched, unprepared for such cold reptilian hostility.
“About the case of Dwayne John?” Nicholas Katzenbach asked pleasantly.
J. Edgar Hoover blinked, looked to the US Deputy Attorney General.
“I am not available to be summoned by a junior Cabinet member at his or her convenience, Mr Katzenbach.”
“I’m sorry, Mr Director. When this ‘interview’ was scheduled I was at pains to make clear to your appointments secretary that we should meet at a mutually convenient time and place. I am sure we can dig out a transcript of the actual conversation if it would be helpful.”
The hairs on the back of Gretchen’s neck were standing up on end.
The two men in the room detested and resented each other with such a fierce intensity that she was terrified she was going to get sucked into the fire.
“The case of Dwayne John,” Nicholas Katzenbach continued politely, apparently with immense deference, “a twenty-three year old man from Jackson, Alabama, currently held without charge in San Francisco under the ‘authority’ of a certain Special Agent Michael Kevin Jameson. Forgive me, I was unaware that under Californian law an FBI agent had powers equivalent to that of a District Judge?”
“The man in question is wanted on an Alabama warrant for the abduction, rape and transportation across state boundaries of a minor,” J. Edgar Hoover replied, shooting words like nasal machine gun bullets.
“The young lady in question being a Miss Darlene Lefebure?”
“Just so!”
“The lady in question was twenty when she was expelled from her family home by her father,” Nicholas Katzenbach stated flatly. “There is no prima facie evidence that she was abducted, or that she has been ‘raped’ by anybody. Let alone Mr John.”
“There is compelling circumstantial and other evidence.”
“None of which anybody took into account prior to Mr John becoming a member of the congregation at the Ebenezer Street Baptist Chapel in Atlanta, Georgia?”
“Yes. That is my understanding.”
“The case file speaks of contacts with subversive and communistic elements?”
“Yes.”
“One of whom is alleged to be the President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a Mr Terry Francois, a prominent black lawyer in that city?”
“Yes. A trouble maker and communist agitator.”
Gretchen’s pencil scratched nonsense on her pad. She quickly flipped onto the next page.
“Um,” the United States Deputy Attorney General grunted. The large airy room seemed very empty with just three people in it, all three seated at one end of the long conference table. “I visited Washington State yesterday. At the request, I should say, of the White House. A question was raised as to how the situation in Bellingham could have arisen in the first place without the alarm first being raised in DC?” He raised a hand before the old man with the angry eyes could interrupt. “Or how it is that the Administration can be so well informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the activities of a young black man acting as a bona fide personal messenger for Dr King’s organisation in Atlanta; at the same time as the FBI has been unable to furnish virtually no information about the person, or persons behind the Bellingham situation?”
To Gretchen’s astonishment the toad-like old man in the morning suit sniffed dismissively, got to his feet, brushed himself down and walked out of the room. She looked to her boss who smiled a thin smile.
“Bellingham was in the fall out zone north of Seattle, wasn’t it?” She asked in a small voice.
He nodded. Bellingham was in a box marked ‘need to know’ and Gretchen Betancourt did not need to know what he knew about Bellingham.
“You’ll probably be followed for the next few days. Don’t be alarmed. That’s the way the old monster works. The FBI probably opened a file on you when you became a junior counsel in my office. Most likely because your father is Claude Betancourt. Director Hoover’s people can be very efficient when they want to be.”