“That the only thing which unites Nasser’s so-called Arab League is a mutual hatred of Israel,” he said, recollecting his most recent conversation with his peripatetic Secretary of State. “Nobody in ‘the league’ trusts anybody else; the Saudi’s think that their neighbours are looking for an excuse to march in and steal their oil, none of the smaller Gulf States want to upset the Saudis or us or the British but they all wish we’d all just go away, and Oman and Yemen are too preoccupied with their own civil wars to worry about anything else.”
The British understood all of this and they actually had small numbers of fully acclimatized troops — no more than a dozen under-strength infantry battalions across the whole region — in Aden and elsewhere attempting to keep the warring factions at arm’s length. The only way America could paper over the existing fracture lines and build any kind of united front in the region was to buy the allegiance of the parties. Even in the short term that was not going to address the Arab-Israeli problem. More pertinently, neither he nor Margaret Thatcher currently had the deployable military assets available to guarantee the security of any — forget all — of the ruling elites in the Middle East; ignoring the question of whether spending precious and very limited military treasure in the sands of Arabia was actually a good thing in the first place.
Bill Fulbright had summed the whole debate up in half-a-dozen words: ‘We don’t actually need the oil anymore!’
Jack Kennedy clasped his hands over his stomach and looked around the room.
“Okay. I’m about to be impeached; in Bill Fulbright’s absence General LeMay has been subpoenaed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, presumably in an attempt to upstage the opening sessions of the Warren Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War; our closest and most reliable overseas ally, Margaret Thatcher may not be the British Prime Minister this time tomorrow; and somebody in the former Soviet Union has unexpectedly remembered how to shoot down our spy planes.” He paused in his assessment of the current situation. “The USS Enterprise is on her way home so badly damaged she might have to be scrapped; and the USS Independence is still tied up at Gibraltar with catapult ‘trouble’. Closer to home Congress is perfectly willing to fund aide and arms shipments to the Irish Republic on allegedly ‘humanitarian’ grounds despite having been informed, privately and publicly by Director McCone that every dollar they send to the Republic of Ireland is fuelling the civil war in Northern Ireland and tying down troops the British desperately need in the Mediterranean.”
He had mentioned this last complaint with only mildly scathing disbelief because nothing that Congress did these days could surprise him.
“Gentlemen, has anybody got any good news for me?”
Chapter 24
The rain slashed down from a leaden sky as Senator William Fulbright, Secretary of State of the United States of America hurried down the steps to the wet tarmac, and shook the British Foreign Secretary’s hand. The two men abbreviated the normal civilities and soon dropped into the back of the waiting Rolls-Royce.
“What was the weather like in Malta, Bill?” Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson inquired as the downpour hammered the car’s windows with fresh violence. The Secretary of State’s Boeing 707 had had to orbit the airfield for nearly an hour before a break in the storm had allowed it to land.
“Warmer!” The fifty-eight year old Arkansan guffawed. If anybody had told him eighteen months ago how easily he would relax with, and how completely he would let down his guard in the company of a British Foreign Secretary he would have laughed out aloud. Now it seemed like the most natural thing in the World. Of course, it helped that the British Foreign Secretary in question was Tom Harding-Grayson. Dean Rusk’s people at the State Department had regarded the slightly built scholarly Englishman as a closet socialist and anti-American agitator. Nobody in the State Department had shed tears when he had been sidelined as Harold MacMillan and Dwight Eisenhower rebuilt the ‘special relationship’ splintered during the Suez Crisis. The State Department had never cared for Anthony Eden, MacMillan’s predecessor. Eden had never forgotten how long it had taken the United States to get blood on its hands in the 1945 war; nor how shamelessly America had claimed the laurels at its end. The doomed British, French and Israeli conspiracy to seize back the Suez Canal from Gamal Abdul Nasser’s grasp in 1956 had worked out well for the State Department. True, the Soviets had used the American distraction over the Suez Crisis to put down the Hungarian uprising, but Eisenhower was never going to go to war with the Soviet Union over a country about which he and the American people knew next to nothing. No, Suez had worked out just fine for the State Department; Britain’s declining military clout and her total dependence on American dollars after her humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, had signalled the accelerated disintegration of the British Empire and confirmed the United Kingdom’s status, in many eyes across the Atlantic, as a client rather than a partner of the United States in World affairs. Unseating Anthony Eden had been the icing on the cake; and MacMillan, Eisenhower’s old World War II buddy had wasted no time plunging the knife into his Party leader’s back. “But,” Fulbright added, “I’m Southern Democrat, so what would I know?”
Tom Harding-Grayson chuckled.
“How did your ‘briefing’ with the Fighting Admiral go, Bill?” The Secretary of State had visited Malta specifically to ‘get better acquainted’ with the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean.
“Your guy doesn’t take any prisoners,” the American replied cheerfully. “But that’s good. Until I met Curtis LeMay I wasn’t used to senior military men giving me straight answers to straight questions.”
“Admiral Christopher understood he had been dealt a weak hand when he accepted the post.”
The Secretary of State hesitated.
“Sir Julian arranged for me to have a brief private meeting with Captain Collingwood,” the American continued.
“Ah,” the Foreign Secretary had asked Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord, if he could engineer this very interview. However, he thought it best not to mention this to the Secretary of State. “How went it?”
“Is it right that HMS Dreadnought didn’t fire a single torpedo on her first war patrol?”
“I believe so.”
“Captain Collingwood said it was his opinion that the captain of the Scorpion manoeuvred so as to make it impossible for the anti-submarine aircraft in the area to attack the Dreadnought without endangering his own ship?”
Tom Harding-Grayson remained silent.
“I’ve had members of the House and senior US Navy officers queuing up to swear on their mother’s graves that Collingwood murdered all those men on the Scorpion, Tom.”
“I’m sure a properly convened and conducted Board of Inquiry will establish the facts, Bill.”
“If only!” The American groaned. “Captain Collingwood offered to travel to the States to give evidence under oath. That was after I told him he had be lynched as soon as he got off the plane,” Fulbright breathed a long, reflective breath. “Do you know what he told me?”