McGeorge Bundy looked twenty years older than his forty-four years; his hair was thinning and straw grey, his waxen pallor that of a man who had survived a life-threatening serious illness without ever really recovering from it. The Secretary of State had been shocked to see the decline in the much younger man. Bundy’s physical collapse was a cruel metaphor for the hopes and dreams of that Inauguration Day in 1961 when everything and anything had seemed possible. The notion of some kind of new Camelot had been so seductive that nobody had wanted to admit that real life was not like that. The last sixteen months had been the brutal vindication of that truth.
“Mac,” Fulbright nodded, shaking the younger man’s bony hand.
“Senator,” McGeorge Bundy smiled but it was a pained expression.
Jack Kennedy watched the two men thoughtfully. He had agonised over bringing Bundy in from the cold, LBJ and Bobby had been ambivalent, not least because when eventually, the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War got into its stride ‘Mac’ was inevitably going to be in its sights from day one. Thankfully, Mac’s participation in the briefings and discussions of the last twenty-four hours had allayed the worst of his fears. Inside the wrecked physical shell Mac’s mind was needle sharp; and being outside the ‘big game’ not knowing what was really going on had been slowly killing him. Now at least he had a reason to carrying on fighting.
Bundy was the second son of a wealthy Boston family intimately involved in Republican politics. Emerging from Yale he had spent Hitler’s war in US Army Intelligence; after that war he had co-authored Henry L. Stimson’s — FDR’s Secretary of War’s — autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War. Stimson had been a family friend for over two decades and in the way of such things, McGeorge Bundy’s early career had met very few obstacles. Which was not to say that his career would have been any less brilliant with or without Stimson’s influence; because Mac was that sort of guy. In 1949, aged only thirty, he had joined the Council on Foreign Relations — along with Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and the diplomat George Kennan — to study the Marshall Plan. In 1954 Bundy, aged just thirty-four, was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. Later when he became Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor many considered Bundy the most brilliant of the ‘best and the brightest’ men around the charismatic young President.
But all that was before the fall.
Coffee was poured and the men settled around the crackling, sizzling log fire. Fulbright wondered where Jackie and the kids were hiding; he had heard that the Secret Service had nightmares about the security of the Kennedy’s Hyannis Port compound and the President’s young children now lived at Camp David when their parents were on the stomp.
The Secretary of State did not think it was any coincidence that Bundy had returned to the Administration within days of the President’s declaration that he was running for re-election that autumn.
“The Egyptians and the Israelis will not sign up to a mutual defence pact,” he announced, “and that is the problem at the heart of all the other issues in the Middle East.”
“Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt in combination are militarily more significant than the State of Israel,” McGeorge Bundy countered. “Persia,” he quirked a grimace, “or Iran, whatever, is still effectively a quasi-British protectorate. I don’t understand why we aren’t looking towards putting Americans on the ground. Specifically, to guard the gulf oil industry?”
“Guard it from whom?” Fulbright inquired flatly.
“Local insurrection? The British are struggling to keep a grip of things in Oman and Yemen. Abadan could blow up in their faces at any time.”
The Secretary of State nodded.
“We have re-supplied several British garrisons in the region and will continue to do so but there is a problem. You know that, Mac.”
“The Arabs don’t want our GIs on the ground.”
“Quite. They don’t like the Brits hanging on either but they know the Brits aren’t strong enough to be more than an under-strength, glorified colonial police force. But for the October War the Brits would already be pulling out and the Arabs expect that to happen sooner rather than later, anyway. Egypt’s concerns, obviously, are of a different character and magnitude following the atrocity at Ismailia. But don’t imagine for a minute that President Nasser has suddenly had a change of heart about the British Imperial yoke; it is just that he is a realist. He has a regional threat — Israel — on his eastern borders, and now Red Dawn threatening, at the very least, free navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean not to mention randomly lobbing H-bombs in his direction. Given that Egypt was a Soviet client state before the October War you can understand the regime in Cairo feels a little,” he grimaced, “schizophrenic about recent developments.”
“We are guarantors of the State of Israel,” McGeorge Bundy rejoined, testing the older man’s logic.
There it was; the fracture point between the President’s two closest foreign policy advisors. Whereas Fulbright wanted a new, pragmatic Middle Eastern policy based on the geopolitical strategic vital interests of the United States; Bundy advocated an adulterated version of this approach which treated Israel as a ‘special case’. Similar fault lines would inevitably become evident elsewhere in the World. In South East Asia, for example, where despite the ‘peace dividend’ cutbacks to the military, the Administration was still Hell bent on propping up its proxies in South Vietnam and elsewhere. The ‘Saigon Problem’ had been put on the back burner after the Battle of Washington but Fulbright knew that sooner or later he and the President might easily be at loggerheads over it. However, the ‘Saigon Problem’, and others, palled into insignificance in the light of recent developments in the Mediterranean.
Fulbright tried hard not to frown at Bundy.
A vocal minority within the House impeachment lobby received substantial campaign and other political funding from Zionist and other pro-Israeli groups, supposedly based in the United States and therefore entitled by the strict letter of the law to lobby, who were afraid that the Administration was going to abandon Israel to the wolves if the going got too tough. He sympathised with Israeli concerns, if only because nobody understood as clearly as the Government in Tel Aviv that the long-term strategic interests of the United States in the Middle East, did not, and rationally, could not, lie with unconditionally supporting one small country surrounded by hostile neighbours bent on her destruction. The fact that Israel was the solitary fully-functioning democracy in the region won it brownie points with the Administration — a lot of brownie points — but it did not materially alter the geopolitical calculus. America’s primary interest in the region was oil. For better or worse the Arabs — and the Persians, of course — had the oil. That did not mean automatically betraying brave little Israel, but it did mean that it was a big mistake to take one’s eye off the main thing — the oil — and spend all one’s time and energy addressing the preoccupations of the Israeli Government at the cost of neglecting all the legitimate interests of all the other parties. This he had spent many fruitless hours in Tel Aviv trying to explain to the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, and the legendary elder statesman of the small republic, David Ben-Gurion.