The phone rang with brutal suddenness.
“Sorry to call you at this time of day, Oliver,” growled the familiar voice of the United States Secretary of State.
“Please don’t apologise, Bill,” the British Ambassador replied evenly, as if he was greeting an old friend at a quiet, private reception. “I am at your disposal. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“My people woke me up thirty minutes ago,” the other man explained tersely. “Somebody started the rumour mill running last night about the situation in the Mediterranean. The guys on the duty desk at the State Department just logged it to begin with and then my liaison officer at Defence reported there was some kind of communication breakdown with Malta.”
Oliver Franks said nothing.
He and Missourian James William Fulbright had been born just fifty-two days apart and the two men shared a great deal more in common than simply the year of their birth. They were unlikely kindred spirits, if not in their politics but in their uncannily shared appreciation of the ‘big global picture’. Of all the men closest to the President only three had really impressed Oliver Franks — Lyndon Johnson, the Vice-President; Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence; and Fulbright — and of the three Fulbright had instantly struck him as being the most impressive.
Fulbright, who was still — by dint of Congressional dithering and obfuscation — officially the 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 a formidable man physically, intellectually and politically, a man of conviction and surprisingly contrary views. In retrospect many people now 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 very differently when the Soviets attempted to base medium range ballistic missiles on Cuba. The reason why Jack Kennedy had not appointed Fulbright secretary of State at the outset of his Administration was because he was an unrepentant Southern Democrat and that at the time his unshakable commitment to multilaterism — regardless that it accorded perfectly with the President’s own personal but publicly understated internationalism — would actually have sat much more comfortably with the expressed foreign policy agenda of an administration run by JFK’s rival in 1960 for the Presidency, Richard Nixon. Such were the contradictions inherent in the American way of doing politics.
The Secretary of State had been the junior United States Senator for Arkansas for nearly two decades, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from as long ago as 1949, and the committee’s Chairman for the last four years while remaining a convinced segregationist. It had been this that was probably the clinching argument that had handed Dean Rusk his seat at the top table back in 1961. Yet famously Fulbright had been had been 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’s ongoing unholy inquisition against alleged Un-American Activities was pursued in the 1950s. A former Rhodes Scholar and attorney who had been admitted to the bar in Washington DC as long ago as 1934, he had gone into politics while he was lecturing in law at the University of Arkansas, first being elected to Congress in 1942.
To Oliver Frank’s mind, keenly tuned to the nuances and the convoluted ways and means of the American political system, Bill Fulbright was exactly the sort of independently minded and almost quasi-religiously motivated political animal whose success was utterly incomprehensible to most non-Americans. To an outsider his liberal multilaterism and opposition to right-wing anti-libertarian dogma, or to any trammelling of civil liberties by the government seemed to sit diametrically opposed to — and apparently irreconcilable with — his trenchantly avowed racist 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; and 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 America could a man like William Fulbright have prospered, and eventually, become the safe pair of hands into which his President had belatedly entrusted the nation’s bankrupt foreign policy.
“I’ve heard nothing as yet,” Oliver Franks reported honestly. He and Fulbright might not share a common agenda but he considered the Secretary of State a friend and between friends, even ‘diplomatic’ friends, honestly was often the best policy.
“Okay, this is the thing,” the Secretary of State prefaced, getting down to business. From his tone it was evident that he did not believe he was actually having to say what he was about to say. “The US Navy stationed four modern warships at Malta under the command of Rear-Admiral Detweiller. Four guided missile destroyers at Malta to cover the archipelago in the absence of your ships on the Cyprus operation, Oliver,” Bill Fulbright explained. “Our ships have better communications equipment than your guys on land. They were also there to fill in gaps in Malta’s air defence early warning system. Defence is in contact with those ships and they aren’t at Malta or anywhere near it.”
“Oh.” The British Ambassador knew very little about the disposition of forces in the Mediterranean; but he did know that every available ship and aircraft had been assigned to the task force charged with ejecting the barbaric Red Dawn horde from the island of Cyprus over a thousand miles east of Malta. He quickly joined up the dots and saw the perils of the picture thus revealed. There was a communication breakdown with Malta. The ships stationed at Malta to protect the island were elsewhere. Who exactly was guarding the most strategically important island in the Mediterranean? “Er, you spoke of the rumour mill grinding, Bill?”
“The New York Times is running a front page story headlined ‘The Brits Go It Alone’ claiming some kind of major bust up between your C-in-C and Admiral Detweiller,” Fulbright said angrily.
Oliver Franks was momentarily too stunned to speak.
“The story is that the British Government is planning to appoint Admiral Luce as Supreme Commander Mediterranean of all Allied Forces.”
“That’s nonsense, Bill,” the British Ambassador stuttered. He took a deep breath to restore his badly shaken equilibrium. “Madness in fact. I know that our talks with your Defence Department have thus far been inconclusive on the subject of the future structure of the high command in the theatre; but it is inconceivable that the Prime Minister would unilaterally circumvent or seek to anticipate the outcome of those discussions. As you well know, senior members of Mrs Thatcher’s inner circle are reconciled to the post eventually being filled by an American officer. Albeit,” he felt duty bound to add, “accepting that this will create difficulties back at home unless or until there are US troops on the ground in the Mediterranean.”