Kenneth Patrick ‘Kenny’ O’Donnell, the thirty-seven year old special assistant to the President and the White House Appointment’s Secretary — he disliked the title ‘Chief of Staff’ although de facto, that was what he was — had been with the Kennedys through every political campaign and battle Jack and Bobby had ever fought. He had been Bobby Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard, and a key member of the group of advisors, the so-called ‘Irish Mafia’, who had been behind the rise and rise of Jack Kennedy’s political star. In the late fifties he had become a DC insider, working as an assistant counsel to Bobby Kennedy, at that time Chief Counsel of the Senate Labour Rackets Committee. Kenny O’Donnell had never been the same after the night of the October War, he was prematurely aged, and like many of the Administration’s insiders lately he drank much more than it was wise for a man in the public eye to drink. Moreover, in the last year he had been hung out to dry far too often by both the Kennedy brothers, which meant his credit with the DC press pack was wearing thin at exactly the time he needed to take out a new and very large credibility loan. Today’s briefing might well turn out to be his swansong.
Kenny O’Donnell had just about held the line but the days when ‘holding the line’ was good enough were long gone.
Unfortunately, this was not universally appreciated at the White House.
Katzenbach heard raised feminine voices in the ante-room to his office. He looked up as the door burst open and Gretchen Betancourt marched in, closely followed by the Deputy Attorney General’s flustered secretary.
“I tried to stop her!” The other, older woman protested.
Katzenbach sighed. Involving Claude Betancourt’s daughter in an ill-conceived attempt to distract the Washington press corps from the rapidly worsening Greek tragedy at the White House had been, on reflection, a bad mistake. Once he had figured out what was going on old man Betancourt had not seen the funny side of the ruse, either, and from the expression on Gretchen Betancourt’s face the joke had grown old for her, too.
“Miss Betancourt and I need to have a private conversation,” he decided, knowing this was one confrontation he could not put off until tomorrow. He remained behind his desk, the young woman standing before him with her arms tightly folded across her bust.
Gretchen had dressed in black for this ‘meeting’.
She had been taken for a patsy and if what it took to restore her ‘honour’ and her ‘status’ in the Department of Justice, and in polite Washington Society, was the ceremonial presentation of the United States Deputy Attorney General’s head on a silver platter to the editor of the Washington Post, it would be a price well worth paying!
Or at least that was what she thought right up until she had got to be alone with Walter Brenckmann and discovered that although he was completely indifferent to her on a boy-girl level, in every other respect he was a natural friend, and possibly, in invaluable future ally. Until then Gretchen had been prepared to go along with actually being a ‘patsy’. Incredibly, she had actually been half-flattered to be of service for the greater good of the Administration. In retrospect she now realised that she had been an idiot. The Administration she was ‘helping’ — albeit in ways she did not entirely comprehend — was the Administration which had tried to blow up the World last year!
The US Deputy Attorney General was reading the young woman’s mind.
Nicholas Katzenbach was not and had never been a Lothario of any description, let alone a womanizer in the Kennedy brothers’ pre-war league. He was a family man, a careerist, a man to whom service and duty were the keystones of his personal identity. He had felt guilty using Gretchen Betancourt to take the heat off the White House, specifically to delay the evil moment when the DC press realised that although the lights were on in the Oval Office that the President of the United States was not actually taking calls. His boss, and friend, the United States Attorney General, and the Chief of Staff at the White House had decided that for the sake of the nation the people did not need to know that the President was hors de combat, and initially he had gone along with it. He had believed that if it was publicly known that the President was too ill to do his job, then bad things might happen, both to the Administration and the country. Nonetheless, he had genuinely felt guilty about putting Gretchen Betancourt through the wringer in the last few days. His problem now was that he was suddenly trying to negotiate a mutually satisfactory exit strategy from an untenable position with a woman scorned.
He held up a hand to forestall what the young woman was going to say.
“We will be civilised about this,” he said coolly. “Let’s put our cards on the table before we start making threats against each other.”
Gretchen was not convinced that was a good idea.
An hour ago she had had a horrible telephone conversation with Dan Brenckmann — the smart, good-looking man who had been the other fall guy in this farrago and basically, been her white knight from start to finish — who she had given the brush off and told to go home to Boston ‘before this thing gets any worse’. Dan had reacted with subdued, polite surprise but acquiesced because that was the sort of nice, punch-ball sort of kid he was and she had known he would react exactly that way before she picked up the phone to call him. If she was Dan Brenckmann she would never speak to herself again!
She frowned angrily, her lips compressed into a hard white line.
“If I was the complete bastard you take me for,” the United States Deputy Attorney General went on, “which incidentally, I am not, I would up the ante and spread more malicious gossip. But,” again he held up an open hand to forestall interruption, “if I did that I’d have trouble looking myself in the eye in the mirror in the morning. So, that’s not on the cards. However, clearly you cannot continue in your internship at Justice. That would simply add fuel to the flames, as it were. Which means that what we need to be discussing are other options. Ideally, options which, should our paths in government, industry or the courtroom cross again, will not in any way embitter either you, or I, Miss Betancourt.”
Gretchen frowned.
Oh, I didn’t expect that!
“What did you have in mind?” She demanded.
Katzenbach risked a miniscule sigh of relief.
“Without knowing something of your career plans,” he knew that Claude Betancourt’s little girl would have had a career plan mapped out virtually from earliest adolescence, “you have me at a disadvantage. Are you set on a conventional legal path?”
Gretchen shook her head.
“No, I only opted for the law because it opens doors to other things.”
The man nodded.
That figures!
He contemplated this tersely volunteered insight for several seconds.
“How do you feel about foreign travel?” He inquired, with apparently sincere curiosity.
“Travel?”
“The State Department has a slew of assistant counsel vacancies? Australia is going to be a big sphere of interest in the coming years?”
“Australia?” Gretchen queried, knocked out of her stride and wondering what she had been so angry about in the first place. “Why Australia?”
“Because before the October War the Australian, and to a lesser extent, the New Zealand and Indonesian governments were on a trajectory out of the sphere of influence of the old European colonial powers, the United Kingdom in the case of Australasia, and into our camp. In fact, the whole Far East was pretty much up for grabs,” he hesitated, “although South East Asia was beginning to look problematic, of course…”