In the Presidential limousine Jack Kennedy had quipped to his Vice-President that ‘maybe we don’t get to be impeached this year’. As recently as December, the prospect of impeachment and the opportunity to lay down his burdens had seemed like a blessing in disguise. However, on this coldly crisp grey Philadelphia morning the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was daring to believe that he did not just have a fair wind in his sails, but a raging gale. He had not felt this exhilarated since he could not remember when; maybe back in the Pacific at the wheel of his beloved PT107 with the throttles wide open? Or perhaps, on Inauguration Day in back in 1961? Mornings like this were what he had expected the Presidency to be like every morning.
The barrage of shouted questions bounced off the smiling, debonair man whom Middle America and the poor and the dispossessed alike so desperately wanted to take anew to their hearts.
He raised his arms to quieten the deafening babble.
“While I am your President,” he declared, knowing he did not have to raise his voice because he was standing on the pre-prepared mark within feet of the two big, high gain microphones the Navy had set up for this very moment. “This great country will never again drop its military guard. The first responsibility of your President is to protect the American people. That was why on the night of the Cuban Missiles War I refused to leave my post, above ground, in the Oval Office of the White House. The American people had no real opportunity to find shelter that night; I as your President decided that I would rather die like a man than cower in a bunker.” He paused, but not long enough for the murmur of voices to become a crescendo. “My friends, we have lived through dark times and face new enemies. Our British friends and allies — our British friends and allies who have fought shoulder to shoulder with America in three World Wars, Korea and now in the Mediterranean — in the last half-century, have fought the good fight against a new and terrible enemy and suffered grievously in defence of freedom and democracy. American ships have been attacked, and hundreds of American seamen have been killed and maimed — never forget that many, many more would have died but for the heroic actions of the escorting Royal Navy vessels — and for better or worse we are now in the fight. In war nothing is certain. Nothing. But that is no reason for shirking our manifest destiny in this new post-October War epoch. While I am your President no sinew will be spared in the defence of America, or of our allies or in the fight to preserve all that is good and decent in the World.” He quirked a smile. “God bless America!”
The President turned and walked purposefully towards the long gangway inclining upwards at a shallow angle to the amidships main deck of the USS Wisconsin, where a large welcoming party was awaiting his arrival with patient expectation.
At the head of the gangway Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara was flanked by the tall blond fifty-seven year old Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David McDonald.
McDonald was one of those senior military officers who had a knack of instilling confidence in his political masters without ever being overt about it. The man breathed competence and authority. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1928, and served on the battleships Mississippi and the Colorado before training as a naval aviator in the early 1930s. Afterwards his career had progressed with smooth inevitability. Before the Second World War he had been a flight instructor at Pensacola, commanded the US Navy’s Operational Training Command, during the war he had served as the Executive Officer of the carrier Essex in the Pacific, and been appointed Assistant Chief of Staff of Operations for the US Pacific Fleet. After the war he had commanded the USS Coral Sea, then one of America’s three largest fleet carriers. Before the Cuban Missiles War he had been Commander-in-Chief of the Sixth Fleet based in Naples. He was also the youngest four-star admiral in the Navy.
Jack Kennedy preceded his Vice-President up the gangway and shook Robert McNamara’s hand warmly. Most days he still felt a little guilty leaving the former President of the Ford Motor Company to clean up the mess in Washington, while he and most of the other member of the Administration occupied themselves touring the country, or had decamped to Philadelphia. McNamara had not uttered a single word of complaint; he had just got on with the job of starting to plan the reconstruction of the capital and the reorganisation of America’s fractured military-industrial complex focussing specifically and urgently on its grievously damaged command and control system.
“It is good to see you again face to face, Bob,” Jack Kennedy grimaced. “Did I hear it right that LeMay is snowed in at Seattle?”
If Robert McNamara was the magician overseeing the rebuilding of the departmental structures destroyed in the Battle of Washington and repairing the technical underpinning of the nation’s defences; General Curtis LeMay, the rambunctious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the man who had saved the day at the height of the vicious fighting for control of the capital in December. In retrospect it was now incontrovertible that it had it not been for Curtis LeMay’s unshakable loyalty to his flag, his country, the Administration and personally — to a man he had no reason to either like or respect — to the person of the President of the United States of America, that had turned the tide and doomed the rebellion to failure. LeMay had been working around the clock ever since to ensure that he and his fellow Chiefs of Staff had command of all of the United States Military’s assets. Spurred on by the dreadful revelation that it had been four of his B-52s which had killed all those people on Malta back at the beginning of December — not to mention eradicating in the process practically every modern electronic communications system on the Maltese Archipelago and killing most of the irreplaceable British and Commonwealth specialists vital to the effective command and deployment of ships, aircraft and men in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations — LeMay was ruthlessly purging all ‘untrustworthy’ elements from the US Air Force, Navy and Army. Having raged through the senior staffs like a super-charged witch finder general, removing dozens of senior field officers whose complacency and negligence had contributed to the ‘Malta Atrocity’, and the ‘sneak attack on those Brit destroyers off Cape Finisterre’, he had set about tackling the ‘fucking idiots’ who had authorised ‘the attack on the Royal Navy nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought in fucking international waters’, and turned his guns on the numerous State National Guard units who had stood down — instead of rallying to the flag — during the Battle for Washington and subsequently attempted to obstruct his efforts to restore the rule of law within the military.
“The Big Cigar won’t be happy to miss this pow-wow!” The Secretary of Defence observed with impish aridity. The Battle for Washington had sparked a steely resolve in the bespectacled, mild-mannered man who had been a statistician dogging Curtis LeMay’s steps throughout the latter stages of the 1945 war, and post-World War II one of the ‘whiz kids’ who had turned around the ailing fortunes of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. He had come to Washington in 1961 as the Administration’s efficiency guru charged with reorganising the sprawling military empire created by the Second World War. That empire had spread its tentacles like pernicious hogweed into every corner of the US economy. By the time of the October War he had barely scratched the surface of the beast, and after it he had acquiesced with the massive ‘peace dividend’ cuts which had, in a matter of months, hobbled and hamstrung the nation’s World-wide military ‘reach’. The bloody insurrection — an attempted Red Dawn sponsored coup d’état was a better description — in December mounted by a terrifying coalition of America’s lunatic right-wing fringe, the disposed, disaffected and despairing had come perilously close to wiping out the Administration and its ability to govern. Cometh the moment, cometh the man. This was Bob McNamara’s ‘moment’. In the last two months he had been like a man reborn.