“Do you want me to speak with Claude Betancourt?” Bobby Kennedy checked eager to keep the conversation well away from the one intractable ‘issue’ over which they might irrevocably fall out.
Katzenbach shook his head.
“Claude would only ask you twenty questions about why we’ve let Hoover get his claws into her.” Gretchen Betancourt’s father was a doyen of the New England Democrats, a big donor and even as he moved into his late sixties, a formidable operator behind the scenes in half-a-dozen East Coast states with a profoundly Machiavellian grasp of how to manipulate the real levers of political influence. Only a fool needlessly antagonised Claude Betancourt. “I warned Miss Betancourt that she should treat this as a test. I’m sure she’s got her own political ambitions and a brush with the downside of Capitol Hill at the outset of her career will stand her in good stead later.”
“Claude probably gets it,” the Attorney General agreed sagely. “Otherwise, the old man would have been burning up the lines between here and Connecticut by now.” He pushed the Washington Post away. “Who is this guy Daniel Brenckmann?”
“A friend of Gretchen’s from Yale. His father was on the Navy Reserve. He got sent to England in the spring. The son is trying to hold what’s left of his father’s legal practice together in Boston. He’s in Washington on business; my guess is one of Claude’s buddies threw him a bone. The way I hear it the kid’s father is one of Claude’s go to attorneys in Boston when he needs a little ‘plausible deniability’, so he’s probably had his eye on the younger Brenckmann for a while. You know how he likes to think he can spot a ‘coming man’ before anybody else! Anyhow, the old man obviously thinks the guy is a good influence on his daughter.”
Bobby Kennedy was about to change the subject.
There was a knock at the door and a secretary entered with a coffee tray.
The Attorney General waited until the two men were alone again. Raising his cup to his lips he abandoned the mild levity with which he had treated the machinations of the mendacious tyrant who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the ease with which the Washington Post and other DC papers had allowed themselves to be drawn into the old faggot’s web just so they could publish the picture of an attractive young brunette on their front pages.
“Bellingham?” He inquired.
Katzenbach became grim faced.
“If the Pentagon had got its finger out of its butt six months ago Bellingham wouldn’t be a bomb site now.”
“The Chiefs of Staff would have kicked up merry hell if we’d asked them to move into Washington State,” Bobby Kennedy reminded his deputy. Both men understood that what he was really saying was that there was no way the Administration could have kept the fact that Bellingham, and several other middle sized towns in the north and west of the country were effectively beyond the writ of the United States Government if the problem had been publicly foisted onto the Pentagon. The decision had been taken at Cabinet level to cover up the whole Bellingham thing; and thus far other similar ‘problems’ had likewise been dealt with by an official version of omertà, silence. The US Army was already a fixture on the streets of Chicago, two divisions were effectively containing large enclaves west and north of the Windy City, patrolling uneasy ceasefire lines, constantly on call to damp down unrest within the less heavily damaged southern suburbs as industry was relocated south and transferred to other undamaged Great Lakes cities. Peace dividend or no peace dividend, three-quarters of all active units of the US Army was presently deployed in what — in any other part of the World — the Administration would acknowledge to be law and order, or ‘peace keeping’ missions. The White House had quietly communicated to the West Coast Governors that they had a more or less free hand, safe in the belief that the Bellingham ‘problem’ had seemed ‘contained and containable’ by virtue of geography and the pattern of destruction caused by the October War.
The Canadians had sealed their border with tanks and several battalions of mechanised infantry, and inland large areas of the bombed Fraser Valley were still dead zones, impassable to wheeled vehicles. East of Bellingham the Cascade Mountains shut the town off from the rest of Washington State, to the south the ruins of Seattle lay across the only good roads. The endless barren sea of rubble was an obstacle every bit as formidable as the Berlin Wall had been before the war. With relatively few troops and a minimum of hardware — a few tanks and artillery pieces — ‘containment’ had seemed the least evil option. Bellingham had never even featured on the US Army’s priority list.
The Attorney General frowned and with a sigh asked: “Why don’t you say it, Nick? You think I should have gone up there to try to talk some sense into Al Rosellini and this Dempsey guy he’s got running his own private army?”
Nick Katzenbach’s eyes lit up with impatience.
“Yes, I do. Cabinet members ought to be getting out to the frontline states more…”
“I get out of DC every time I can,” Bobby Kennedy objected mildly.
“Yes, and we both agree that reinforcing and strengthening the Civil Rights movement is the right thing to do. But that’s a separate issue. Of course we have to invest in an ongoing dialogue with the leaders of the NAACP and the other groups. Not talking with Dr King and his associates is not an option. However, talking to Dr King doesn’t help us keep a lid on the anarchy up around the Great Lakes and in places like Bellingham. The longer we leave these places to,” the United States Deputy Attorney General threw up his hands in unmitigated exasperation, “fester, the more the general post-war social and moral malaise spreads across the undamaged parts of the country.” He groaned. “Washington, Oregon and California have now basically formed a mutual support pact. Nothing formal, nothing carved in stone but Californian money is propping up Washington and Oregon, and Californian fruit and vegetables fed Washington last spring and will again this winter. The M48s that spearheaded the assault on Bellingham were straight out of California State Army National Guard stockades, the Marine Corps Skyraiders went up north because the Marine Corps units based in California badly need to keep Governor Brown sweet. That sort of thing is going to start happening elsewhere sooner or later. What if Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi decide that they can deal with their ‘local’ difficulties without the dead hand of Federal oversight? What if Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana decide that they’ve had enough of Washington meddling in their affairs? What if they come to the conclusion that they can do a better job of restoring law and order in Chicago that those ‘idiots in DC who screwed up in the first place’? Hell, Bobby! The last time half-a-dozen states decided they could make a better job of governance than the people in DC we had a four-year long civil war!”
The President’s younger brother let his deputy ventilate his existential angst without interruption. He knew Nick Katzenbach well enough to know that this was not the prelude to any kind of sudden, new rift. Nick just needed to get things off his chest; it was a sign of his undiminished loyalty to the Administration that he was unloading on his boss, not directly to the Chief White House Correspondent of the Washington Post.
“Has anybody thought,” Katzenbach continued, “about what’s going to happen when Curtis LeMay — love him or hate him — retires next year or the year after? That man has the Air Force in the palm of his hand but whoever comes after him, that’s going to be a whole other ball game, Bobby. And what if LeMay gets into bed with the Republicans and runs for the Senate? Or worse, takes a tilt at the Republican Presidential ticket a few years down the line?”