“I should think this whole island is a paradise for kids,” the big former Redcap chuckled as he carefully jammed the crowbar into the door jam. The padlock looked new and formidable so he had determined to have the door off its fragile, rusty hinges rather than try to break the lock.
Satisfied he’d worked the lever far enough into the space beneath the upper of hinge, Jim Siddall took a deep breath, and applied pressure. At first there was a groaning of dry wood, then a splintering.
And a soft metallic click.
And then the Nissen hut exploded.
Chapter 9
James William Fulbright, the fifty-eight year old Missouri-born Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations had been appointed as the late Dean Rusk’s replacement as Secretary of State on Christmas Eve 1963. He was an impressive man physically, intellectually and politically, a man of conviction and surprisingly, contrary views. Many people believed that if President Kennedy had had the nerve to install him at the State Department in the spring of 1961; things would have turned out differently when the Soviets tried to base ICBMs on Cuba. However, that was hindsight and Fulbright wasn’t a man who lived in the past. Which was the main reason he had summoned Walter Brenckmann and cordially requested the new British Ambassador, Lord Franks, to an ‘at home’ weekend with him at Naval Support Facility Thurmond, more popularly known to the man in the street as ‘Camp David’.
Camp David had been the official country bolthole of Presidents of the United States of America since 1942. Situated some sixty miles north west of Washington DC in the Catoctin Mountains, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had called it the USS Shangri-La — allegedly because the base was run by the Navy and it put him in mind of the mythical Himalayan paradise described by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’ — but it was Dwight Eisenhower had set the name ‘Camp David’ in stone during his Presidency in the 1950s. Protected with missionary zeal by the Marine Corps, Camp David was the one place in America where the new Secretary of State knew for a fact that he had an even chance of conducting a private conversation with the two men whom he believed might — at this moment — have the fate of the World in their hands.
Fulbright understood why Jack Kennedy hadn’t nominated him as Secretary of State back in the fall of 1960 in the heady days after his photo-finish election race with Richard Nixon. Nixon had actually carried three more states than Kennedy and only lost the popular vote by a little over one hundred thousand of over sixty-eight million cast. The race had been far too close for comfort and the new Administration wanted to avoid courting controversy.
Fulbright was a Southern Democrat and proud of it, and his unshakable commitment to multilaterism — no matter that it accorded with the President’s own personal internationalism — would have sat much more comfortably with the expressed foreign policy agenda of a Nixon Administration. Notwithstanding, Fulbright wasn’t a man inclined to waste time chewing over past slights, setbacks or mistakes. Now was his moment and he intended to seize it.
The new Secretary of State had been the junior United States Senator for Arkansas since January 1945, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1949, and its Chairman for the last four years. He was also a convinced segregationist — probably the clinching argument that had handed Dean Rusk his seat at the top table in 1961 — who was also, famously, the only member of the Senate to vote against a 1954 appropriation for Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, under the purview of which McCarthy unholy inquisition against alleged Un-American Activities was pursued. A former Rhodes scholar and attorney who had been admitted to the bar in Washington DC in 1934, he had gone into politics while he was lecturing in law at the University of Arkansas, first being elected to Congress in 1942. He was exactly the sort of independently minded and motivated political animal that was incomprehensible to many non-Americans. To an outsider his liberal multilaterism and opposition to right-wing anti-libertarian dogma, or any trammelling of civil liberties by the government sat diametrically opposed to — and apparently irreconcilable with — his trenchantly avowed segregationist position, and the gusto with which he had helped filibuster, for example, the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Only in America could a man have made his mark sponsoring a program — the Fulbright Program in 1946 — providing for educational grants in overseas countries to promote understanding between the United States and those countries; yet a few years later vehemently object to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case, whereby Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren had ruled that Kansas’s State-sanctioned segregation of public schools amounted to a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. Only in a country as big and as diverse as America could a man like William Fulbright have prospered, and eventually, albeit by default, the safe pair of hands into which his President had belatedly entrusted the nation’s self-evidently bankrupt foreign policy.
Outside several inches of fresh overnight snow carpeted the wooded slopes of the Catoctin Mountains as the ‘conference’ began. The Secretary of State was still trying to get a handle on Walter Brenckmann, the obscure US Navy captain who had tried to sound the alarm bell before the recent near-catastrophic breach in Anglo-American relations, whom Bobby Kennedy had — pretty much single-handedly — persuaded the President to appoint as the new Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral. Fulbright wasn’t one of those who resented, or saw the President’s younger brother as some kind of impediment to good governance. The Attorney General had emerged wiser from the recent farrago; and for the first time he could envisage the younger sibling as a genuine Presidential contender in say, ten years time. But that was for the future and the pressing problem was the here and the now.
Walter Brenckmann didn’t immediately stand out in a crowd. He was of average height, a year or two shy of Fulbright’s age and greying. His voice was confident, and he gave a man a long, contemplative stare, unblinking while he was in conversation. His wife was a little older, very grey, and slim without being wiry. Clearly she was one of those calm, pragmatic women who were behind most happy families and successful men. Walter Brenckmann had stipulated that if the President wanted him to go abroad again in the service of his country then it would be ‘as a team with my wife’. Basically, before the October War the Brenckmann’s had been planning to retire to Florida and if they couldn’t do that, they’d at least be together for what remained of their declining years.
Walter Brenckmann wasn’t just the guy who had warned the State Department that the ‘special relationship’ had fallen into disrepair and become a ticking time bomb; if he hadn’t tackled that mad woman in the Oval Office the President and half his Administration might have been killed. One way and another, the former Naval Attaché had a lot of credit in the bank. If he wanted his wife in on this ‘conference’, that was okay.
Oliver, as Lord Franks, the new British Ambassador insisted on being called had instantly established a rapport with the Massachusetts home-maker as they sat next to each other in comfortable chairs around the fire in the Main Lodge. For her part, Joanne Brenckmann was clearly charmed by the suave Englishman.
“I should start by thanking you,” Fulbright declared, bringing the informal session to order as he fixed Oliver Franks in his sights, “for the dossier of information regarding the state of former US Bases in the United Kingdom and the detailed inventory regarding the disposition of munitions and recoverable stores.”