“The moment when a nation seems to be at its most divided is the time its leaders must seek to unite it most,” the Attorney General murmured. It was a mantra that he and his brother were proselytising across the continent while other members of the Administration, and the newly constituted Joint Chiefs of Staff under Curtis LeMay’s gung ho chairmanship, were striving to restore a functioning Government machine and to undo the massive self-inflicted structural damage wrought by the ‘war dividend’ cuts to the military. The depth of the looming crisis — irrespective of the real or imagined threat posed by Red Dawn which would hopefully turn out to be another intelligence myth — was underlined by the fact that the New York Stock Exchange which had crashed spectacularly during the Battle of Washington, and had still to recover fifty percent of its pre-insurrection value. Practically every American bank was as technically bankrupt as the Government, the entire financial system underpinning the still huge and miraculously, still intact North American industrial and economic behemoth was currently being funded on a wing and a prayer and millions of unpayable I Owe Yous. The social, political, economic, banking and military crisis was so acute that all it would take to bring down the whole stack of cards was another surprise, another tiny unexpected knock.
In the next few days the House of Representatives would reconvene in Philadelphia. If either Congress or the Senate rejected or reneged on the treaty with the British all bets would be off. If LBJ couldn’t cut a deal — and nobody else in the Administration could cut Congressional deals like the wily Texan — what then?
Bobby Kennedy and the Vice-President had disliked and mistrusted each other. It had been a visceral, personal thing. The Attorney General detested the older man and Lyndon Baines Johnson held the younger sibling of the President in contempt. The only thing that had until recent weeks united them was their mutual detestation. Bobby hadn’t wanted LBJ on the Presidential ticket in 1960; and at the time of the October War he was sounding out alternative candidates to join Jack on the 1964 ticket. Although his brother hadn’t encouraged him in this neither had he asked him to desist.
Before the October War, Jack had made a point of being punctiliously correct and polite with the Vice-President. He was invariably collegiate and occasionally deferential to him in meetings with other Cabinet members. After the October War Jack had kept a distance between them; the breakdown in relations with the British and the Battle of Washington had changed everything. To discover that he was no longer the President’s only ‘special advisor’ had come as a perversely welcome shock to the younger brother, a weight lifting off his shoulders. In the last few weeks he’d thrown himself into his work with a new lightness of spirit. He’d even managed to exchange a few genuinely civil and well meant words with LBJ, who’d contrived to respond in a grudgingly similar vein.
“Somebody took a pot shot at the President when he was in Dallas yesterday,” Bobby informed the Governor of Georgia, who started in alarm. “Well several shots, we think,” the Attorney General went on, as if an assassination attempt on the life of a President of the United States of America was a routine affair calling for little comment. “Some nut job in an office block housing a book depository with an M-16. The Marines and the Secret Service hosed the whole top floor of the building with automatic fire. They found this little guy in Army fatigues bleeding to death on the floor when they stormed place. He died before they got him to hospital so we don’t know his story yet. Hoover’s people are on to it.”
“You wonder what’s happened to this country sometimes,” Samuel Vandiver grunted.
“Only one bullet actually hit the President’s car,” Bobby Kennedy confided, still preoccupied with the crowd pressing ever-closer around the Governor’s limousine. “It pinged right off the armour. I hate it when stuff like that happens when Jackie is with the President.”
Every night the newscasts carried film of the President and his glamorous wife in another city, the President charismatically delivering a beguiling, inspiring, humbly beseeching keynote speech and Jackie, well, Jackie just being Jackie. The nation’s perfect first family was trying to connect with, and to be seen with, as many Americans as possible as the Presidential caravan criss-crossed the continent preaching family values, and the inculcation of a renewed sense of national togetherness and manifest destiny. There had been an insurrection, the opening shots of what might have been a second and unimaginably awful Civil War in Washington DC before Christmas, but Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the last people in Christendom to hide away in a bunker when their country needed them. Symbolism is everything in public life. While his brother re-imagined the reality of the Presidency; Bobby was travelling the land re-building old, and exploring new alliances which might yet bolster the Republic against some of the setbacks to come.
The limousine ground to a halt and a phalanx of Marines eased back the pressing crowds between it and the entrance to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The door opened on the Attorney General’s side of the car and he clambered out into the warm sunshine of the Southern morning. He straightened, shot his cuffs, and smiling confidently approached the man who, more than any other embodied to Bobby Kennedy, the future of a new and lasting post-war American domestic settlement. From this point onward no US Administration could ignore the constituency for which this man spoke and whom he represented with such peerless eloquence and dignity. In his dreams Jack Kennedy’s little brother saw the day — perhaps not so many years hence — when this man would stride the World stage. He’d never believed a black man could be President of the United States of America; but meeting this man and exchanging the first mutual exploratory tendrils of what he hoped would be a lifelong friendship, he’d realised the arrant folly of the idiotic prejudices drummed into him all his life.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Junior stepped forward into the sunlight and extended his hand in welcome to the younger brother of the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 16
The flight from Malta had been delayed by ninety minutes at RAF Luqa by stormy weather and thunderstorms. The afternoon was moving towards a premature, overcast dusk by the time the Comet 4 in British Overseas Airways Corporation livery slapped down onto the wet tarmac of Brize Norton’s extended main runway. There was another delay while the jetliner had to taxi to its appointed hardstand and the disembarkation steps were positioned. There was a further short hold up as the BBC outside film unit, which had been caught on the hop by the rescheduled landing — nobody had told the technicians that the flight was about to land — had to scramble to get into position to record the Fighting Admiral’s arrival in England.
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations trotted sure-footedly down to the tarmac followed by his absurdly youthful-looking flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, who was burdened with a bulging attaché case.