“Not yet, sir,” one of his interns, the tall, pretty blond daughter of his old friend the B-movie actor, Ben Sullivan, informed him brightly. The kid — she was just twenty-three — had only been working in his office in Sacramento a month but already she was an indispensible member of Pat Brown’s travelling entourage.
The wires had been humming last night.
The President was going to make a major announcement at William Marsh Rice University in Houston. The Party needed to be up to speed, on message.
These days the people in DC lived on another planet!
A television had been set up in a first floor room.
The Governor was pleasantly surprised to be offered a cup of fresh coffee as he took his seat.
Walking through the old hotel he had been struck by the notion that the parlous condition of the Hotel del Coronado was an unkind, but rather apt metaphor for the state of the Union; its former glory sorely tarnished by complacency, neglect and miss-management.
The dark screen of the television in the middle of the room brightened and the camera closed up on the handsome, somewhat careworn features of John Fitzgerald Kennedy standing at a lectern. Behind him several ranks of seats were packed with freshly scrubbed, appropriately awed young people, each bright-eyed and optimistic, each hanging on their President’s every word as if he had just come down from the mountain bearing tablets of stone upon which the sublime collected wisdom of the gods was chiselled.
“My fellow Americans,” the President began. His was a relaxed, purposeful voice; a melodic, striking voice that reached out into homes and resonated about hearths, attempting to speak to the hopes and fears of every generation. It was a voice that divided and yet retained the power to beguile, the most familiar voice in the world, hated and despised, positively loathed — if the polls were to be believed — by more Americans than any other President in living memory. “My fellow Americans,” the President of the United States of America said again, “and to this great nation’s friends, wherever they may be, near and far,” the voice was stilled for an instant for dramatic effect, “may God be with you in this time of trial.”
The Governor of California accepted the cup of coffee the tall blond girl pressed into his hands. The young woman gave him a tight-lipped smile and stepped back into the ranks of his travelling staff. The kid kept on making good impressions; she did not attempt to make anything of her parents’ long association and friendship with Pat Brown, she just got on with and did everything she was asked to do, and more.
Going ahead to reconnoitre and organise this event had been her first ‘out of Sacramento’ solo project; Larry Lawrence’s people had complained about her ‘nit-picking’ and accused her of ‘pissing off people at the hotel’ which meant she had been doing her job. Larry Lawrence and his prospective backers got a public endorsement from the Governor; what they did not get and what they were never going to get was to look like they owned any part of Pat Brown’s Administration. Miranda Sullivan had got that without anybody having to tell her first. For a kid her age that was impressive. What was even more impressive was that the Governor could tell by the aroma of fresh roasted ground beans that the kid had made damned sure somebody had made his coffee exactly the way he liked it.
“We have lived through the fire,” the President declared. “We have emerged from the valley of the shadow of death...”
Pat Brown decided that he would concentrate on enjoying his coffee, suspecting that there was going to be little or no joy in listening to what Jack Kennedy was likely to say. New initiatives, new announcements or whatever, the President clearly intended to rehash the old narrative yet again before he got to the punch line. If Ted Sorenson was still writing his speeches he would never have let his old friend make the same old mistake, time and time again…
“Already we are rebuilding our cities in memory of our immortal dead. Already our factories are running again at full capacity. Already our brave soldiers and sailors and airmen are carrying aid and succour to our loyal allies.” The pitch of the voice fell, as if he was speaking personally to every member of the audience in the big hall at Rice University. “I know there are people in this great American continent who say that ‘we have problems of our own’. They say ‘we are as yet too damaged to be able to spare our scarce food, our scarce fuels, our precious manufactured goods, and that we should not risk our irreplaceable soldiers and sailors and airmen in harm’s way’. And I hear you. I hear you all. But I say to you that we cannot stand by and do nothing because that is not the American way. Would you stand by idly while your neighbour’s house burned to the ground? Would you do nothing to prevent his child starving to death? Would you have your local sheriff do nothing while outlaws loot and rape at will? I tell you that it is our Christian duty to carry American values, American good sense, and American charity into the lands of our so sorely injured friends and allies.”
Pat Brown was not alone among senior Democrats in thinking that running guns and grain to fascist dictatorships in South America and trying to destabilize former European colonies in the Carribean by liberally handing out weapons to anybody who claimed to be anti-communist, was the same as delivering ‘American charity into the lands of our so sorely injured friends and allies.’ Actually, he thought it was just plain dumb and stirring up trouble for the future, especially when the people who really needed American help were its real friends in Europe, whom the Administration seemed determined to treat as lepers.
The Governor risked a look around the room at the faces of his staffers knowing that the self-justifying, self-exculpatory well trodden narrative that the Administration had tried so hard to sell to the American people was wearing wafer thin even within the dwindling ranks of the Party faithful with its constant retelling. The people in Washington did not seem to understand that constant repetition only allowed one’s enemies to gnaw at the carcass of whatever the real truth of the events of that day in late October last year was, or more importantly, was not. The reasons why mattered little to the refugees and dispossessed from the wrecked cities, or to a country locked — after a brief post-war false boom when everybody spent money suspecting that within months their savings would be worthless — into a cycle of economic stagnation and decline. Thirteen months ago America had been the intellectual, industrial and economic powerhouse of the World. That was then, this was now. The booming, rebuilt post-1945 European economies which had sucked in American industrial and commercial wares no longer existed, and elsewhere previously friendly governments had recoiled in horror at the devastation across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Now the still largely intact US industrial behemoth, robbed of its wealthiest overseas clients and with most of its big banks effectively bankrupted by the obliteration of its overseas clientele, was grubbing along the bottom of a recession that threatened in many parts of the country to become a new Great Depression.
“Today, I speak to you from Houston,” the Commander-in-Chief called, pausing to brush what might have been a tear from his eye, “from the great wounded state of Texas…”
There was a break while his audience — or perhaps, his technicians — filled the airways with rapturous applause.