Admiral McDonald waited until his guests had settled in the admiral’s day cabin in the comfortable chairs arranged around the big table he had had brought in from City Hall, then he moved to the briefing board at the forward end of the compartment.
“In the event of an alarm sounding,” earlier that morning the Alert Status of the US military had been downgraded from DEFCON TWO to DEFCON THREE but that was more because of the inherent dangers of indefinitely maintaining the higher level of readiness, than any lessoning of the perceived international tensions or the actual risk of attack, “the Secret Service will lead all persons in this compartment below to a secure area within the most heavily armoured part of the ship. The area I have identified for this purpose is shielded by six inches of cemented steel deck armour and up to sixteen inches of side armour. In the event the ship is holed and sinks to the bottom of the Delaware River,” he added, affecting a fleeting smile, “rest assured that the ship will settle on the bottom and the designated ‘safe area’ will remain several feet above water.”
Jack Kennedy chuckled.
“That’s very reassuring, Admiral.”
“We are currently at a reduced state of alert; DEFCON THREE,” McDonald went on. Cabinet members and senior military officers knew this but not all of their aides and assistants. “This is a lower state of alert than that immediately subsequent to the initial nuclear strikes in the Mediterranean. However, B-52s are airborne at this time and they are still flying to their fail safe points; and three of our Polaris missile boats commanded by officers for whose loyalty I can personally vouch, have put to sea in the last forty-eight hours.”
The President waited for the low whisper of voices to subside, looking around the compartment with a sober eye. Two key men were absent; The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Curtis LeMay, and murdered Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department, the immensely able and sagacious fifty-eight year old Missourian James William ‘Bill’ Fulbright, who was currently engaged on a madcap round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. Bill Fulbright — who was still technically the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future if the House’s foot-dragging and obfuscation continued — viewed Red Dawn’s stunningly badly executed nuclear strikes of three days ago as a ‘once in a generation opportunity to knock heads together in the region’. Jack Kennedy had given him a free hand to ‘do whatever has to be done’ to exploit the situation. The way things were going they were unlikely to get too many lucky breaks like the ones Cairo and Malta had had last Friday.
God, had all that happened only three days ago!
Jack Kennedy looked to his Chief of Naval Operations. David McDonald had offered him his resignation forty-eight hours ago.
‘I knew we were sending the Enterprise and the Long Beach into harm’s way, sir. The reality is that there will be people in Congress demanding somebody’s head on a platter.’
‘You were obeying my direct orders, Admiral,’ his Commander-in-Chief had reminded him, ending further discussion. ‘A lot of people who ought to know better haven’t got used to the idea that we are at war. In war bad things happen. When they do we mourn the dead and we move on.’
Now on a grey morning closeted in the steel cocoon of a dinosaur from another, simpler age, the President of the United States of America paused a moment to make eye contacts around the table.
Lyndon Baines Johnson sat sombrely at his right hand, his Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara at his left. Bob McNamara had brought along his ‘point man’ with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, forty-nine year old three-star army General William Childs Westmoreland. Westmoreland’s was a name already being bandied around as a future candidate as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, ‘Westy’ as he was known to insiders in the Army and the Defence Department, had a reputation as a ‘corporation executive in uniform’, making him exactly the sort of man that the former President of the Ford Motor Company, Bob McNamara, needed at his side in his fiendishly complex ongoing mission to unpick the chaos left by the Battle of Washington, and to reorganise and to place on a sound long-term footing the presently much diminished military might of the nation. The other members of the ‘conference group’ had come aboard the USS Iowa without fanfare, ferried across the Delaware in Navy launches from the New Jersey side of the river well out of sight of the media pack corralled on the Pennsylvania shore.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the President’s younger brother who held the post of Attorney General in the Administration had shed several years off his careworn good looks in recent weeks. He had suffered a minor gunshot wound in the tragic assassination of British Prime Minister Edward Heath in the Oval Office at the end of the Battle of Washington; recovered fast and been, with his elder brother, the barnstorming, proselytizing, unapologetic face and voice of the Administration in the weeks since. While the President had wowed the crowds — essentially he had been on the campaign trail — Bobby had mixed ‘campaigning’ with reconnecting with Middle America and the downtrodden, dispossessed whom both brothers now regarded as the key elements of their natural constituency. Until the last couple of months Bobby and Lyndon Johnson had been at odds, mistrusting and misunderstanding each other at every turn. Latterly, Bobby had realised that beneath the tall Texan’s frowning disdain for ‘gesture politics’ and his career reputation for ‘playing hardball, fixing and dealing in DC’, that LBJ and he shared a broadly similar vision of a better, fairer, more equitable and fundamentally juster society. However, before they created that better new World they both recognised that they had to preserve the one they were living in first.
Some of the faces around the table were hardly known to the President. Not so that of fifty-three year old Virginian, Henry Hammill Fowler, since the assassination of his predecessor, C. Douglas Dillon on the first day of the Battle of Washington, promoted from Under Secretary for the Treasury to oversee the financial reconstruction that Jack Kennedy now realised he ought to have authorised immediately after the October War. Fowler was another man ideally qualified to discharge his new responsibilities. A lawyer by training, in the 1945 war he had been counsel to the Office of Production Management and to the War Production Board, during the Korean War he had returned to government with the National Production Authority, serving initially as Director of the Office of Defence Mobilization and later drafted onto the National Security Council. A lifelong Democrat he had left government during the Eisenhower years but not retired from public service; serving on the Commission on Money and Credit between 1958 and 1961, working for the Democratic Advisory Council, and sitting on the Brookings Institute’s National Committee on Government Finance before joining the Administration in 1962. Henry Fowler was closer to LBJ than either of the Kennedy brothers, gifted with a distinctly southern charm and politically, conservative without ever having fully embraced the traditional segregationist ‘Southern Democratic’ agenda.