The much depleted House — eleven Congressmen and six Senators had been killed in Washington, a score hospitalised and several absent in protest because they objected to the reconstitution of ‘the House’ in Philadelphia — had stabbed the Administration in the back.
The President was on his way back to Philadelphia.
General Curtis LeMay, the rambunctious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on his way back to Philadelphia.
The problem was that every drifter and grafter in the North-East was on his or her way to Philadelphia to share in the Government largesse which was steadily, surely coming to dominate every aspect of life in the city. It was one thing for the President to signal the end of pork-barrel politics nationally; another entirely to lay so much as a finger on the rights and prerogatives of the good men and true who populated the House of Representatives.
The Vice-President of the United States of America waved down his visitors, he didn’t have the time for the normal civilities.
“Are you guys out of your tiny fucking minds?” He demanded of the assembled Majority and Minority leaders of the Democratic and the Republican Parties of both the Senate and the Congress.
“Mister Vice-President,” the Democrat Majority leader of Congress began. He didn’t get another chance to speak for some minutes.
“Who the fuck do you think saved your miserable fucking arses last month?” Lyndon Baines Johnson roared. The tall Texan’s anger was in no way theatrical; his rage was white hot and if he’d had a gun he’d have shot somebody by now. He had expected belly-aching, he’d expected to have to buy off some of the harder cases particularly in the Senate; what he hadn’t expected was a gutless restatement of old vested interests as if the Battle of Washington had never happened. “Haven’t you arseholes listened to a single fucking word the President and me have been saying to you since the fucking war?”
No, they hadn’t.
“Jesus Christ!” The Vice-President fumed, towering over the old has-beens and party place men who passed — in these sad times — for the political leadership of the two once great pillars upon which American democracy ought still to be able to rely. “Two months ago parts of our military, aided and abetted by people in practically every goddam organ of Government were plotting to get us into a war with the British. Six weeks ago there was a full scale insurrection, a coup d’état in Washington DC! Now you guys are fucking around like turkeys the week before Thanksgiving!”
At midnight tonight all work reactivating and restoring the United States of America’s military might to its pre-October 1962 condition and status was illegal. The Navy Yards across the Delaware in Camden, New Jersey were already shutting down; funding was frozen, everything was being infected by a new and deadly paralysis. Even if the madness could be undone nobody would trust the Administration again until God alone knew how much scarce treasure had been wasted.
The Vice-President had no illusions about the honour or the motivations of the men before in him the grand, wood-panelled reception room on the first floor of City Hall. Sometimes he thought the House of Representatives was populated entirely with lawyers and small-time mobsters. Yes, there were some notable figures in both Houses but they were a minority and they didn’t invariably rise to the top, often they were held down and ignored by the plethora of resentful ‘little men’ around them. As he glared at the angry, flushed faces of the ‘legislators and lawmakers’ in the room he felt only contempt. Southern Democrats and Northern Republican money-lenders; bleeding heart East Coast liberals and West Coast attorneys, Mid-West isolationists and Deep South good old boys! All it wanted was for Wyatt Earp and Sitting Bull to chase each other around a fucking Wild West Circus and the whole charade of the American dream would be manifested in glorious Technicolor!
“This country is under attack,” Lyndon Baines Johnson growled. “But nothing, I repeat nothing, so endangers the American way of life and the freedoms we all cherish so dearly as the wilful neglect of its duty by the alleged the representatives of the People!”
He had briefed this same caucus of ‘leaders’ at regular intervals in the last three weeks. He’d taken the risk of passing on confidential information supplied by the British, and his trust had been betrayed; he’d read about it the next morning in the Philadelphia Herald, listened to his words playing back over public radio and on the fucking Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC a day later. And now the bastards had deflated the expanding bubble of the re-mobilization of the American military so effectively that even if they revoked last night’s vote in the next few hours — which they weren’t going to do because it was beneath their fucking dignity regardless of the consequences for the nation — it would take several weeks, perhaps a month to put everything back on track. Probably, it would take a lot longer. And every one of the bastards knew it!
It seemed that the leadership in both Houses had, with hitherto undemonstrated calculated mendacity, united around a consensus that until such time as the Warren Commission’s first formal evidence session was scheduled — ideally the date would be carved into the living rock — that the Administration’s ‘war plans’ should be subjected to ‘extraordinary scrutiny’. There was also the small unresolved matter of the loss of the USS Scorpion, which nine out of ten Americans still erroneously believed was the result of a sneak attack by the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought. The Senate had moved a motion demanding a Joint Committee of Investigation into the sinking of the USS Scorpion’ at which it intended to subpoena the British Ambassador and the commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought to testify ‘under oath’. Small considerations such as the sanctity of diplomatic immunity, and the fact that there was no law in the land under which a serving officer of an allied power could be obliged to swear any kind of oath before a Congressional Committee were judged by the ‘leaders of the House’ to be ephemeral, details to be addressed at another time.
The Warren Commission into the Causes and Consequences of the Cuban Missiles War had been the Administration’s great initiative to set the record straight. The Battle of Washington had delayed its planned public set piece inauguration but preparatory work was well in hand. A secretariat had been recruited and Chief Justice Earl Warren, its universally respected Chairman, had already discussed with Administration members, and several of the men present that morning in City Hall, exactly how he planned to conduct his work.
The Vice-President had allowed himself to be gulled into a false sense of security on the ‘Warren Commission Front’; right up until the moment the ‘leaders of the House’ had stabbed him in the back.
Et tu Brute?
Until last night he’d regarded several of the men in the room as personal and political friends. Up until last night he’d been unwilling to fully sign up to the President’s plan to appeal over the heads of Congress directly to the American people even though his — and to a lesser extent, Bobby Kennedy’s separate tour of the Deep South — seemed to be playing much better with the man in the street than he’d hoped it would in his wildest, most outrageously optimistic dreams. The pictures of the two Kennedy brothers praying with the Reverend Martin Luther King at that church — what was it called? The Ebenezer something or other, in Atlanta and afterwards leading that march — in which they’d said there had been a million people must have been like Sherman’s march to the sea all over again to the Southern Democrats in Congress. The little prick who’d shot at the President in Dallas had done the Administration another huge favour, sparking a wave of outrage that further swelled Jack Kennedy’s poll ratings. God in heaven, JFK was like some resurrected Pied Piper! When he’d breezed into Chicago the networks had covered the visit as if he was the prodigal returning. If only he’d got out and about on the stomp in the months after the October War; things might have been so different.