Notwithstanding two months of bedlam, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was proud of what his people had achieved in Philadelphia. Despite being obstructed and harried at every turn by Congress and the Senate, and having to rely on contractors infinitely more interested in putting their hand in the till than relocating the nation’s capital, he now oversaw a skeletal functioning continental bureaucracy and, assuming that sooner or later it took its collective finger out of its collective butt, a House of Representatives successfully transported to and replanted in Pennsylvania. That all this had happened in the wake of a failed coup d’état, at a time when the Administration was attempting to stop the country tearing itself to pieces, while simultaneously beginning to re-mobilize its sleeping military might against the dark forces which had turned the capital into a battlefield in December, spoke to everything that was best in the United States of America. Moreover, for the first time since he had signed on to the Kennedy Presidential ticket in 1960, it signalled the arrival of the Vice-President as a fully paid up integral member of the Administration’s inner circle.
Now as he awaited the arrival of the President’s cavalcade in the imperial splendour of the hall of the former Giraud Corn Exchange Trust building less than a quarter-of-a-mile from City Hall, the new home of the House of Representatives, he found himself reflecting on how close the United States had come to World War IV in December.
The threat of an unwanted and frankly, nightmarish, war with the British had crept up on the Administration. Never had the phrase ‘the enemy within’ been more true; Red Dawn had infiltrated the Pentagon and the State Department, souring relations with America’s oldest, most loyal ally, making clandestine pacts with Franco in Spain and the fascists in Italy, and successfully subverting patriotic US soldiers, sailors and airmen to do the unthinkable: to launch surprise attacks on Royal Navy ships at sea and bombing raids on British bases in the Mediterranean. LBJ shivered with dread every time he thought about how close they had come to a real shooting war with the British.
B-52s had bombed the base of the British Mediterranean Fleet at Malta!
If it had been the other way around with RAF V-Bombers attacking and crippling the US Navy’s command and control centre at Norfolk, Virginia the way those four Strategic Air Command B-52s had blinded the British Mediterranean Fleet, blocked anchorages and docks with broken ships and killed and maimed hundreds of highly-trained service personnel and innocent Maltese civilians; the Minutemen would have been flying before anybody stopped to ask what was actually going on.
It hardly bore thinking about…
Congress had still not wised up; over a hundred ‘representatives’ had signed a motion demanding the extradition to the United States of Captain Simon Horatio Collingwood, the commanding officer of the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought ‘to account for his aggressive actions resulting in the loss with all hands of the USS Scorpion’. The poison had seeped so deep into the psyche of a sizable section of the country’s ruling class that it was going to be very hard to stop the poison spreading.
J. Edgar Hoover had bent his ear again that morning. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been in Seventh Heaven ever since the Battle of Washington.
The old faggot saw enemies everywhere. ‘Congress is full of commie-stooges and fifth columnists,’ he claimed. LBJ doubted it. On the other hand if the Director of the FBI had told him that Congress was full of self-serving, self-righteous pricks so accustomed to having their snouts in the trough that they no longer knew whether it was day or night, he might have agreed with him. Witch hunts did not interest the Vice-President but he recognised that men like Hoover were invaluable in times such as these.
A Secret Serviceman’s radio crackled.
“One minute, sir.”
The Vice-President nodded, and continued to look around the former headquarters of the Giraud Corn Exchange Trust, requisitioned six weeks ago from its bankrupt owners to be the Philadelphia ‘White House’. Its proximity to the relocated House of Representatives apart, the building recommended itself for its interim role in many ways. It was truly grand, obviously ‘presidential’, it was built like a fortress and had a huge vault — a likely bomb shelter in this troubled age — and plenty of rooms within it, and its adjoining thirty-one storey office block to accommodate not just the Presidential Staff but the new Philadelphia offices of both the State and the Treasury Departments.
There had been alternative sites mooted for the Philadelphia ‘White House’; but LBJ had stopped looking once he stepped into the empty Giraud Corn Exchange Trust building, a rotunda designed by the Architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome. Furness had constructed the exterior structural fabric of the great edifice with nine thousand tons of Georgia marble; and the interior with Carerra marble quarried in Italy. A relief of Stephen Giraud, the bank’s founder was carved above the colonnaded entrance, and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where the LBJ and his Secret Service detail awaited the arrival of the President. Behind him the desks of the clerks and tellers were long gone, officials now worked behind temporary head-high screens either side of the roped off route to the circular staircase down to the vaults. Marines hefting automatic rifles stood guard at every door leading off the rotunda and at the head and the foot of every staircase. In the vicinity of the building streets had been shut and mobile road blocks — M-60 Patton main battle tanks — positioned to deter and prevent attacks by car or truck bombs.
Jack Kennedy strode into the airy grandeur of the rotunda and warmly shook his Vice-President’s hand. The younger man was tanned from his recent travels, radiating unusual good health and vitality. His smile was guardedly confident and determination glinted in his knowing green-grey eyes.
“Welcome back, Mr President.”
“Good to see you again, Mr Vice-President.”
The two men marched towards the steps down to the vaults where a secure situation room had been set up in the last fortnight. The old grills and alarms had been removed, a filtered air conditioning system installed. Next month heavier blast doors would be fitted, the old-fashioned spiral staircase replaced by something more functional and a modern elevator would replace the existing museum piece.
“Bobby and John McCone got here ten minutes ago,” the Vice-President told the younger man as their footsteps rang on the polished marble floor. The rotunda had a cathedral stillness despite the dozens of staffers working in their partitioned ‘spaces’ and the clatter of distant typewriters.
“What’s this I hear about a subpoena being served on General LeMay?” Jack Kennedy demanded as the men began to descend below ground.
“The House is setting up a Joint Committee to oversee the Bill of Impeachment but they’ll be squabbling over who gets to sit on it, and the Committee’s rights and prerogatives for a couple of weeks yet. In the meantime, they’ve decided to go after LeMay ahead of the first session of the Warren Commission. It’s complicated. The House Minority Leader wants to be seen to be doing something so he’s trying to get a piece of Earl Warren’s action.” LBJ grunted his disgust. “The trouble is the Armed Forces Committee is suspended pending your assumption of its responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief in time of war. You wouldn’t credit how royally pissed off those old boys on the Committee are now they don’t have the free run of bases and military facilities. Right now nobody in uniform gives a shit what any of them thinks so they’re having to fly club like everybody else, they don’t get to be seen in fancy restaurants with the guys in uniform picking up the tabs and the big defence contractors cut them out of the loop the day you signed the Executive Order. The Administration holds the Armed Forces budget; why kiss butts in the House?”