The Attorney General viewed his friend thoughtfully, knowing that their friendship was on the line.
Then he said the second thing he was going to regret having said that grey afternoon on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, even though he fully understood how easily his words might come back to haunt him in future years.
“You’re either with us or against us, Ben.”
“Then I’m against you. Count me out of the cover up, Bobby.”
Chapter 40
The office of the White House Appointments Secretary — Kenny O’Donnell, the President’s de facto Chief of Staff — was crowded when the United States Deputy Attorney General arrived. Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach had been in a 310th Bomb Group B-25 shot down over the Mediterranean in February 1943, one of the many men whose support work had made possible the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III at Sagan in February 1944; so he immediately recognised the unmistakable stench of panic in the air.
Kenny O’Donnell was shouting at somebody on the phone, stalking behind his desk, two steps this way, two back trailing a cable to the black telephone base on his cluttered desk. Junior staffers and interns milled, chattering breathlessly. Every man’s tie was at half mast, several female secretaries and typists seemed to be jostling in the melee with either papers or fresh cups of black coffee in their hands. It was readily apparent that nobody was in control of anything in particular and given that this was the most important building in the Western World, that was a little frightening.
Out in the corridor leading down to the Oval Office ambassadors sat or gathered in pairs or small groups like worried brokers watching a Stock market crash, men in uniform came and went and in the background teleprinters and typewriters clattered ceaselessly. Not for the first time in its history the old mansion thrown up while John Adams — the 2nd President of the United States was in office — was demonstrably not the ideal command centre for the Government of the most powerful nation in Christendom. The White House had been rebuilt and modernised in Harry Truman’s day but the underground complex beneath it and in its grounds planned in Dwight Eisenhower’s days was as yet uncompleted, and its communications with the outside world woefully inadequate in the dangerous age of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Katzenbach was horrified to discover journalists roaming freely, and not one, but two television crews trailing thick, unwieldy cables and manoeuvring big, clumsy cameras more or less where they pleased. He pushed his way through the press of bodies towards Kenny O’Donnell’s desk.
The other man saw him coming, smiled a relieved smile, said something dismissive to whoever he was talking to and hung up.
The White House Chief of Staff’s face was florid and haggard at the same time; he was clearly at the end of his tether and the presence of a friend, any friend, right now was welcomed in the same spirit a drowning man would snatch at an upturned life raft.
“The President is in conference with Director Hoover, Director Rowley and Director Blake,” Kenny O’Donnell explained breathlessly. “Bobby’s in with them, so is Bob McNamara.”
Katzenbach had come looking for the White House Chief of Staff only after he had been refused entry to the Oval Office. At least he now knew why he had been turned away.
Fifty-five year old James Joseph Rowley was the fourteenth Director of the Secret Service. Lieutenant-General Gordon Aylesworth Blake was the fifty-three year old fourteenth Director of the National Security Agency. J. Edgar Hoover was, as everybody in DC knew, a son of a bitch throwback to a World that no longer existed. It seemed that the President really was going to launch a campaign against ‘the enemy within’.
Katzenbach did not know Rowley very well. The Director of the Secret Service was a Bronx-born New Yorker of Irish extraction who had started his career in the FBI and transferred to the Secret Service in 1938 when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
Gordon Blake was an Iowan who had won a Silver Star for gallantry in the face of the enemy when, on 7th December 1941, he had been base operations officer at Hickham Field, Pearl Harbour. As if to prove the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’, in 1945, the veteran of that ‘day of infamy’ in 1941 had been a member of the one hundred and fifty man advanced force sent to Japan to prepare for the initial airlift of the US army of occupation.
Both Rowley and Blake were viewed by Administration insiders as safe pairs of hands, and their presence at this evening’s conference on the Oval Office was presumably, a warning to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that if he thought he was going to have a free hand rifling through the Administration’s and the Pentagon’s dirty linen, he needed to go away and have a serious rethink. Bobby and McNamara would be the Administration’s point men on this thing threatening that if and when the FBI started leaking its side of the investigation, Federal Marshalls and Pentagon Special Investigators would be calling at the homes and offices of J. Edgar Hoover’s senior confederates. It seemed that the gloves were off in every way.
Inevitably, some agencies and organisations had stepped out of line but the main body of the press and most of the networks had held their fire thus far; the temporary truce with the media ended at midnight and after that, well, all Hell was likely to break loose.
“The Vice-President has been on the Hill all day,” Kenny O’Donnell told his friend. “Handing out ‘the treatment’ like it’s going out of fashion!”
Nicholas Katzenbach could picture that. Lyndon Baines Johnson had been the acknowledged master of Capitol Hill until he lost out to Jack Kennedy as the Democrats’ nomination for the 1960 Presidential election. It was still a mystery why he had accepted the Vice-Presidential slot on the Kennedy ticket. LBJ had been the most powerful man in the country after Eisenhower for several years; why accept a dead end sinecure? As for being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, well, that was no consolation given that Jack Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected — Theodore Roosevelt had been a few months younger when he became President, but that was only because the incumbent, William McKinley had been assassinated — to the Presidency. For most of the last three years LBJ had been a politely tolerated interloper, excluded from the inner circle of the Administration.
Kenny O’Donnell drew Katzenbach into a corner.
“LBJ is talking to Chief Justice Warren and House Leaders about a commission of some kind into the causes and the conduct of the Cuban Missiles War,” he confided in a hoarse whisper.
Katzenbach did a double take, suspecting he had misheard. He had believed his recommendation to the President to set up precisely this kind of commission had been quietly shelved. Suddenly, it had been the White House’s idea all along!
O’Donnell did not notice his friend’s momentary disorientation.
“We can’t just let things drift,” he went on. “We have to do something, announce something that says to the American people that we’re in command of events. The President has been thinking about this for a long time. He is prepared to be the first witness to the commission. Assuming Earl Warren runs with the ball and wants to play it that way, obviously?”
The United States Deputy Attorney General nodded silently, his mind racing. He was a little guilty that he was angry his idea had been sequestered by the President without so much as a by your leave. That was just politics, he reminded himself. Just politics. It happened all the time at every level of the game.