Every day in every way the World becomes stranger.
Chapter 30
The President of the United States of America hadn’t felt this good for years. The gruelling schedule of non-stop flights, speeches, meet and greet sessions, and packed and chaotic press conferences wherever SAM 26000 touched ground had reminded him that he wasn’t powerless, that he could still make a difference. In retrospect his personal renaissance had begun that day in Washington he’d met Margaret Thatcher the first time. Her people were in a much worse place than most Americans; she was the one who would have been on the losing end of any war between their nations, and yet she had been the one who talked about the future and what governments existed to do for their peoples. The woman had been both pragmatic and charismatic; and subsequently he had gone straight out on the stump to reconnect with the American people.
He’d been shaken up to hear about the assassination attempt in Cheltenham, appalled when he learned that the Prime Minister’s bodyguards hadn’t been allowed to use their weapons.
It was as if the woman had a death wish!
The details were still a little hazy and the British weren’t saying much until they’d had a chance to interrogate the shooter.
“Okay,” Jack Kennedy drawled, leaning back in the hard chair, balancing his coffee on his right knee. With the members of the Administration criss-crossing the continent and operating out of temporary offices in DC, Norfolk, San Francisco, New York and here in Philadelphia meetings involving senior members tended to be kitchen cabinets. Again, this suited the President just fine. Things could be discussed properly, people didn’t get to extemporize on areas they weren’t responsible for and there was a lot less in-fighting. “So I don’t get to be impeached this year?”
Lyndon Baines Johnson snorted a laugh.
“I don’t know about this year. Maybe not this week,” he retorted like a bear with a sore head. “I swear if I had a gun I’d use it on these guys!”
“When we talked yesterday we still didn’t know where we are with the reactivation program?” Jack Kennedy prompted.
“Up a creek without a paddle,” the Vice-President groaned. “Bobby’s people at Justice say it is legal to make plans but not to actually implement them!”
The President mulled this for a few seconds. It wasn’t a new problem; the majority of US Presidents through history had had similar problems with the House of Representatives. His problems were, for example, nothing compared to the strife Lincoln had in his day. While he wanted to prepare his nation for a war he believed was imminent; Congress wasn’t convinced that war was imminent, didn’t trust him to make the call in the first place, and lastly, really didn’t want to pay for it unless or until the myriad of pork-barrel sectional and factional vested interests in the two Houses had been satiated several times over. The normally sclerotic sinews of the Republic were further choked, in this instance, by a pathological disinclination among a minority of representatives and senators to ever again risk getting involved in foreign ‘adventures’.
“And I thought I was the Commander-in-Chief!” Jack Kennedy snorted.
General Curtis LeMay, still the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because Congress hadn’t yet scheduled confirmation hearings, shook his head with disgust.
“You are the Commander-in-Chief, Mister President.”
William Fulbright allowed himself a guffaw. “Oh, if only the US constitution was that concise, General!”
Curtis LeMay hadn’t had that many run ins with the new Secretary of State. Fulbright remained — again because the House of Representatives couldn’t get its collective arse in gear — Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and for the last two decades the Air Force General had been in the business of planning and making war on ‘foreigners’, not having ‘relations’ with them. That said, Fulbright was an impressive guy, not a glorified office manager like his predecessor, Dean Rusk.
“You’d know more about that than me, Mister Secretary.”
“Congress legislates, the Executive dispenses, and the Senate holds the ring between the two,” Fulbright grimaced. “That’s the balance of power designed by the authors of the Constitution.”
Curtis LeMay was a man who’d fervently believed all his life that that one lawyer in a room was way too many.
“The Brits have got a situation developing in the Eastern Mediterranean and we’re sitting over here with our thumbs up our arses, Mister Secretary,” the man who had won the October War in three hours said testily.
“Quite, General,” William Fulbright retorted, never a man who cared to be reminded of the patently obvious. He sought the President’s eye. “It seems to me,” he decided, “that we have two choices. Either we renege on our undertakings to the United Kingdom, or we embark on a constitutional experiment.”
“Specifically, Bill?” Jack Kennedy asked, sipping his coffee. His coffee hadn’t tasted the same since Edna Zabriski — one of his White House secretaries — had assassinated the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath in the Oval Office after the Battle of Washington. Say what you want about her but that woman had made a damned fine cup of coffee!
“General LeMay assures me that the high command of our military has been purged of elements not wholly empathetic to the Administration?”
“Godammed right,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff grunted.
“We’re not under attack, Bill,” Jack Kennedy remarked flatly.
“What was the Battle of Washington if it wasn’t an attack on the USA?” Fulbright inquired sternly. “Let me remind you that we’ve just re-initialled a copy of the 1958 US-UK Military Mutual Assistance Treaty which, strictly speaking, never lapsed. That Treaty was ratified by the House and nobody disputes that. Under that Treaty we didn’t just guarantee technical assistance, we reaffirmed our commitment to the defence of the United Kingdom…”
“But not of Malta or Cyprus in an environment where US troops had been expelled from one, and our diplomatic presence at the other terminated,” the fifth member of the cabal — Robert Francis ‘Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General — who had flown into in Philadelphia a little less than an hour ago, offered unhappily. Since the Battle of Washington the President’s younger brother had visibly ceased to be his elder sibling’s most ‘special adviser’ and become instead, the next most high-profile proselytizer of the Administration’s radical change of direction. The Administration had not just decided to rebuild its fractured relationship with its oldest overseas ally; it had determined it was going to re-make its contract with the American people. All the peoples of America; white, black, Hispanic, European, native, Floridian, Midwestern, Southern, Californian, all and every American regardless of his or her political, religious or ethnological identities. It was only now after several weeks on the road that Bobby Kennedy was beginning to get a feel for the magnitude of the task, and the weight of history bearing down on his and his brother’s shoulders. A little of that heavy burden was reflected in his eyes. “We can’t ignore that.”