This was not the time to be standing on one’s dignity or pride.
Briefly, his weariness and disillusion lifted.
JFK might conceivably have rediscovered his vital spark.
Chapter 41
Joanne Brenckmann was in a sunny mood. She and her two eldest ‘boys’ had been painting all day and an hour ago Dan had got off the phone after a long, and from what she had contrived to overhear, friendly conversation with Gretchen Betancourt. Gretchen, of course, had done most of the talking; that was a woman’s right. And anyway, Dan plainly liked the sound of Gretchen’s voice because after yesterday’s sulk he was back to his normal, affable, easy-going self.
Joanne had asked her if she wanted him to go with her to church that morning but nowadays she only attended services on high days and festivals. Tabatha’s passing had stripped away the last of her old faith, now when she went to church it was to socialise, or to enjoy the quiet rituals of Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas, or simply to sing. Sometimes she loved to sing. She had not been able to face repainting her dead daughter’s bedroom, not alone. She planned to let out two of the kids’ old rooms to students at the nearby campus, becoming a ‘house mother’ under the auspices of a newly advertised MIT scheme. Many of the courses at the Institute were badly under-subscribed and colleges everywhere were struggling to fill places. A lot of kids no longer saw the point of a college education in a World that seemed to be falling apart.
“Gretchen is meeting Under Secretary Ball at the Main State Building tomorrow afternoon,” Dan explained, brightly. “She apologised for going back to Washington at such short notice.”
Joanne and her middle son were sitting in the lounge drinking coffee, resting on their laurels after the long day of painting in the upstairs bedrooms. Walter junior joined them, bringing his own coffee.
“Gretchen said you put her right on some things, Junior?” Dan asked rhetorically.
His older brother shrugged.
“I didn’t really put her right on anything,” he said defensively. “She’s a bright cookie. What with all the hullabaloo lately I think she just needed a little space to figure things out for herself.”
Out of politeness and good old-fashioned good manners Dan had asked Gretchen if she wanted to talk to Walter.
‘No, we’ve said everything we need to say to each other!’ She had reported, without apparent rancour.
“Gretchen says she is planning to come back to Boston once she finds out if ‘State’ is the thing for her.” Dan frowned, not unhappily. “She sounded weird, actually. As if she’d made up her mind about stuff.”
Joanne seized the moment.
“Tomorrow, boys,” she declared, “we shall paint Tabatha’s room.”
The men looked at each other.
“If you’re sure about it, Ma,” Walter murmured.
“There are two cans of lilac paint in the basement,” his mother continued before she faltered and the tears returned. It was hopeless, suddenly the pain and grief welled up in her and she was as distraught and helpless as she had been this time last year. “Tabatha’s gone…”
It was Dan who hurried after her into the kitchen and Walter who trailed in some time later.
Dan hugged his mother.
Chapter 42
Sixty-one year old Californian John Alexander McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had not been an obvious choice to replace Allen Dulles — who had been sacked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 — but Jack Kennedy had not needed another adventurer like Dulles in the hot seat at Langley. To the contrary, he had brought in McCone precisely because he was completely unlike his predecessor.
McCone had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, later working at the Llewellyn Iron Works. He was a former executive Vice-President of the Consolidated Steel Corporation; and had founded Bechtel-McCone. It had not mattered to Jack Kennedy that McCone was a wealthy industrialist whose natural political affiliations had always been with the Republican Party, or that he had a history not uncommon among great American entrepreneurs of the Second World War generation. As long ago as 1946, Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office had implied that McCone was a war profiteer; notwithstanding, he had been a key advisor to successive post-war Administrations, and in 1958 appointed Head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
John McCone’s credibility within the Administration had survived, and in some ways been enhanced by his attempt to talk Jack Kennedy out of launching the first strike against the Soviets the previous year.
That morning McCone walked with a heavy, despondent tread to his office door and called quietly to his secretary.
“Get them to bring my car around. We’ll head across to DC in fifteen minutes.”
It had taken two days but now at last, John McCone felt he had a handle on what had actually happened in the Mediterranean at the end of last week; and more worrying, what might still be going on in the North Atlantic in the stormy Western Approaches to the British Isles.
Each and every one of the Administration’s mistakes was coming home to roost that grey Virginia Monday morning. There was no good news; only news that was not quite as bad as all the other news. Basically, the CIA’s most senior analysts could not agree among themselves why the United Kingdom had not already launched attacks on American naval, air and ground forces in the Atlantic, Spain and Italy. Other than declaring a maritime and air exclusion zone around the British Isles, specifically warning the United States not to interfere with the free passage of shipping and declaring US diplomatic staff in England persona non grata, the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration under the premiership of Edward Heath, had made absolutely no overtly aggressive move against American forces or interests. Given the extraordinary level of the provocation suffered by the British, this was truly inexplicable…
It was a mess!
The Spanish fascists had thought — God alone knew why — that they were engaged in a full-scale, albeit proxy war, for and on behalf of the United States against the British. Over two hundred British sailors had been killed or wounded in the mining of the carrier HMS Albion and the sinking of the destroyer HMS Cassandra in Algeciras Bay, and Gibraltar was presently besieged, under intermittent artillery bombardment from the Spanish mainland.
Off Cape Finisterre two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Talavera and HMS Devonshire had been attacked by US Air Force A-4s and left in a sinking condition in the middle of a North Atlantic winter storm. Again, casualties were assessed in the hundreds, if the ships sank — which they may already have done — another seven or eight hundred men might have died.
The British Fleet operating off the Straits of Gibraltar had lost more ships to attacks by the Spanish Air Force, with the Spanish claiming to have sunk several destroyers and supply ships and to have ‘crippled’ the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. The consensus at Langley was that the Spanish were inflating their claims; but even so…
And as for what had been done to Malta!