In practically any other country these men would have taken up arms against their Government by now. But not these men, not now or probably ever, because that was not the American way and each and every one of the men around Westmoreland took their oath of allegiance as an article of sacred faith. Even if the President of the United States of America was an idiot, he was still their Commander-in-Chief, his word was still law and it was their duty to obey him or to die in so doing. The really worrying thing was that none of the officers around Westmoreland seemed to be in any mood to ask the obvious question.
Westmoreland sighed.
“The waters through which the Operation Manna convoys are about to pass seem somewhat congested to my landsman’s eye, sir?”
“What is your point, Westy?” The Chief of Naval Operations grunted. The half-hearted attempt at familiarity singularly failed to lighten the mood.
“I fully understand that to maintain top level combat readiness the Enterprise Battle Group has to exercise under the most realistic conditions possible,” Westmoreland queried, feeling like he was pushing a car with square wheels up a steep hill. Asking the driver to release the hand brake was not going to help. “But the Brits are not party to our ‘exercise’ schedules, sir?”
“The Enterprise is operating in international waters,” Anderson replied, as if this was the last word on the subject.
Westmoreland did not follow up. Most of the warships on the ‘Plot’ seemed to be British, deployed the length of the Atlantic north to south to cover the Operation Manna ‘stream’ of vessels. The groups of merchant ships only closed up into convoys for mutual protection and assistance as they passed north of the Azores, each covered by a battle group of escorts based around a single, relatively small British carrier. The British flagship, the Ark Royal — the biggest of their carriers but still only half the size of the Enterprise — was currently operating in the Bay of Biscay.
The Army man was caught unawares when the Chief of Naval Operations unexpectedly elaborated on his previous remark.
“The British have been aggressively reinforcing the approaching Operation Manna escort screen for the last week or so, General. There are also indications that the Enterprise has been targeted by the Brit’s nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought during this period. In addition, our aircraft are regularly painted by British gunnery and air defence radar systems. It is our judgement that the Brits fully understand that our ships and aircraft mean them no harm and have no intention whatsoever of obstruction the free navigation of their supply convoys.”
“Sorry, sir? Aggressively reinforced?” Westmoreland asked, desperately trying not to sound as nonplussed — pole-axed more like — as he actually was by the CNO’s unbelievably complacent observation.
“They’ve sent everything they’ve got to sea except their most modern diesel-electric submarines which presumably they are holding back as some kind of strategic reserve, or force of last resort.” Admiral Anderson forced a smile. “Obviously, they’re making some kind of political gesture for the sake of their own people.”
“I see, sir.”
The next time Westmoreland spoke to the Secretary of Defence he would urgently suggest that he had a word with his counterpart, Dean Rusk at the State Department. Somebody ought to be talking to the British Ambassador about this stuff. For a moment his frustration re-surfaced.
“So, when the Secretary asks me about the articles in the Post I should tell him it is all just a public relations stunt by the Brits?”
The Navy did not care what an Army man told the Secretary of Defence.
Glad to disentangle himself from a ‘briefing’ Westmoreland escaped to his room in Secretary McNamara’s complex of offices on the top floor of the Pentagon. At his desk he did not pause to enjoy the view of the Potomac, grey and cold beneath a clear, benign wintery sky. Instead, he picked up a phone. About a minute later he was speaking to Ben Bradlee, the Washington Bureau Chief for Newsweek. It stood to reason that if the Washington Post had hot news coming out of England then Bradlee would not be far behind.
Ben Bradlee was a committed Kennedy man, a personal friend of the President — a fellow Harvard graduate — whose first wife had been related to Jacqueline Bouvier by marriage. Bradlee had toured with both Kennedy and Nixon during the 1960 Presidential campaign and had since settled in DC. Bradlee was one of several opinion makers and ‘well informed’ outsiders whose acquaintance Westmoreland had cautiously courted in recent months; working on the principle that he could be of little service to the Secretary of Defence if he was operating outside the DC ‘bubble’ inhabited by men like Bradlee.
When he took the call Ben Bradlee clearly guessed what Westmoreland wanted to talk about; but so like any good newsman he took the conversation in another direction so that he could approach it from his preferred angle of attack rather than that of his caller. The rules of the game were straightforward; the Secretary of Defence’s ‘special military advisor’ was ringing him so he got to call the shots.
“I was expecting to hear from the admirals by now,” he observed wryly. “Not a three-star general.”
That was when Lieutenant-General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland realised that something bad was going to happen and that he did not begin to know how or why. He just knew something very, very bad was going to happen and that there was probably nothing he could do about it.
“What do you know that I don’t, Ben?”
“I know that there’s a news blackout on the Jackson Braithwaite shooting in Oakland. The last time the Pentagon clammed up this tight was when Maxwell Taylor’s plane went missing.”
Westmoreland thought carefully before he spoke next.
The murder of the man in command of half the Navy’s operational Polaris submarines was obviously very bad news; however, he had not been aware of a general news embargo on the incident. And why was Bradlee linking Braithwaite’s death with that of Maxwell Taylor?
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been flying back from a routine tour of inspection in the Eastern Pacific when his plane had disappeared somewhere between Honolulu and the West Coast. The shock of his loss still seemed painfully fresh, immediate, even two months after the event. Curtis LeMay had his top security and technical people on the case but there was little that could be done without a crash site or wreckage to examine, other than to crawl over the maintenance logs of Maxwell’s Air Force Douglas DC-8, the service records, medical and psyche evaluations of the jetliner’s crew, the weather on the scheduled route and the myriad of crazy conspiracy theories the mystery had already spawned. In the mean time the whole affair left a queasy, uncomfortable sensation in the pit of the stomach of every right thinking American.
Maxwell Taylor had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with his immortal 101st Airborne Division, he had been the first post Second World War Superintendent of West Point, vigorously defended the Army against Eisenhower’s cutbacks — which in the light of recent experience seemed both modest and prudent — in the late 1950s and been the one military man who had enjoyed the unquestioning respect, friendship and close personal trust of both the Kennedy brothers. His death had come like a kick in the guts both to the Army and to the inner circle of the Kennedy White House. While Maxwell Taylor had been at the helm the cataclysm had seemed somehow manageable. If he could live with the ‘peace dividend’ then so could the rest of the Army. Moreover, as a quid pro quo for his acquiescence to the shrinking of the US military machine, the Administration had endorsed his plans to restore the Federal writ in the badlands around the blasted cities. First there would be blockades, methodical investments, and then there would be warning airstrikes, periods of negotiations and only as a last resort, full scale assaults like the one which had resulted in the bloodbath at Bellingham. With Maxwell Taylor gone there was nobody left with the personal authority or charisma to carry forward any kind of grand plan, nor with the necessary political will or chutzpah to reincarnate the ‘Taylor Plan’. While Maxwell Taylor had been at the Pentagon there had been purpose, now there was only drift…