LBJ could not stop himself asking: ‘The Swedish Additive?’
He had instantly wished he could take back the question the moment it left his lips but like an armour-piercing round launched at supersonic velocity from the barrel of one of the Iowa’s big guns he had no way of stopping it short of its explosive landing many, many miles away.
‘Highly secret, sir,’ Captain Schmidt retorted. ‘I can assure you that the old girl can store up to twelve hundred sixteen inch rounds and we’re not going to wear out any of our barrels if we have to use them all.’
Lyndon Baines Johnson had breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
Regardless of the machinations of the House of Representatives across the Delaware River at City Hall, the Administration’s fortunes were on a seemingly unassailable upward trajectory. All over America men — and a significant number of women — were receiving their re-enlistment papers, the shipyards, aircraft factories and a thousand other defence contractors were recruiting again. Army and Air Force Bases were re-opening, units reforming. The reactivation of the USS Iowa was like a beacon lit to signal the reawakening of the nation. That very morning the New York Stock Exchange had finally broken through its pre-Battle of Washington level.
Before being driven down to the dock to board the Iowa ahead of her departure from the Naval Inactive Maintenance Facility for her trip up river, Johnson had breakfasted with Lord Franks, the urbane, unflappable British Ambassador.
The British build up for the expedition — Operation Grantham — to liberate Northern Cyprus from the now entrenched remnants of the Red Dawn invasion force was going ahead, albeit a little behind schedule. The ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland had necessitated the transfer of another two battalions of mechanised infantry to the province. Troop levels in the six counties of Ulster now exceeded twenty-five thousand, of which some eighteen thousand were trained infantrymen of exactly the type desperately need for the Cyprus operation, and to reinforce British outposts elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Not least around the periphery of the Arabian Peninsula where the Sultan of Oman, and several other neighbouring local potentates were crying out for troops to prop up their tottering regimes.
Oliver, Lord Franks, had been exasperated to learn that Irish-American allegedly ‘charitable’ and ‘humanitarian’ groups and societies in Chicago, Boston and New York were still sending financial support under the cover of a high-profile ‘Irish Aid’ program to the impoverished Government of the Irish Republic. The British believed that only a tiny proportion of the largesse of American donors was finding its way to the ‘impoverished citizens of the twenty-six counties of the Irish Republic’. The situation was intolerable, he complained. But for the maintenance of sea and air communications with Eire from Britain — at no small cost in vital resources to the rest of the United Kingdom — and the Thatcher Administration’s willingness to permit food, medicines and other essential ‘peaceful’ traffic to be transhipped from the United States via English and Scottish ports and airports, the Irish Republic would be on its knees, and people would probably be starving in the streets of the capital, Dublin. And yet the current Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil leader Seán Lemass, who before the October War had seemed to be a man with a genuine desire to heal at least some of the old wounds and develop closer relations with the outside World, was apparently powerless to control the more extreme Republican and Nationalist elements in his own party and throughout Southern Ireland. Elements of a revitalised Irish Republican Army were waging an increasingly overt war against the British and Loyalist — the latter represented by the Ulster Unionist Party — cause in the North from bases in the Republic. Lord Franks had cautioned that if the current situation deteriorated to the point at which the territorial integrity of Ulster was threatened, Prime Minister Thatcher would come under ‘extreme and sustained pressure from many sides’ to authorise the use of deadly force against the IRA’s bases across the border. In that eventuality, the nightmare prospect of British ground troops invading the South would become inevitable.
Given that the Angry Widow had just delivered a crushing blow to her political opponents in the United Kingdom, Oliver Franks had warned the Vice-President: ‘It would be as well to remind the President that my Prime Minister’s over-riding concern is for the security of her own people. If it is a choice between alienating a section of the President’s natural constituency and doing her duty by the people of the United Kingdom and the six counties of Northern Ireland, she will not be amenable to calls for moderation.’
The Vice-President had tried to put the discordant note to the back of his mind. The Kennedy brothers — the whole Kennedy clan for that matter — still had a partial blind spot when it came to Ireland. The British had not minced their words with Jack and Bobby, the trouble was that Bobby in particular, was so out of touch with reality when it came to the ‘Irish Question’ that he had suggested at a dinner — less than a week ago — held in honour of the British Ambassador, sending a US ‘peace-keeping force’ to Ulster. Lord Franks had been so astonished he had almost choked on his steak.
LBJ hated hostages to fortune.
Chapter 28
Margaret Thatcher interpreted the sunny morning as an unequivocal endorsement of her decision to fly to Malta. Not even a very unpleasant meeting with the American Ambassador — a man whom she liked and in many ways admired — Captain Walter Brenckmann on the subject of Irish-American ‘meddling and rabble-rousing in Ulster’ had substantially dented her good humour. She planned to forget about Ireland for the next three days. She and the twins were flying to Malta to attend the wedding of the Commander-in-Chief’s son to — from everything she had heard — a most remarkable young Maltese woman.
“Jim,” she sighed, throwing a patiently exasperated glance at the big, lugubrious man seated beside her in the back of the first of the two armoured Rolls-Royces in the heavily guarded convoy snaking across the English countryside. “I am not going to change my mind. I shall only be gone for seventy-two hours and as you well know, I have complete confidence in your ability to deal with whatever comes up in my absence.”
James Callaghan, the Leader of what little was left of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition — the Labour and Co-operative Party had splintered into three major and several smaller non-aligned factions after the resounding defeat of the no confidence motion — was in no mood to share the Prime Minister’s optimism or confidence. In fact, he did not really understand what she had to be so pleased about! If the Labour Party had been holed below the waterline and sunk; the dismissive way in which the Angry Widow had seen off the third of her own Party that had rallied behind Enoch Powell, had been just as fatally destructive to the long term unity of the Conservatives.
His own problems were, of course, the most acute. Anthony Crossland, the Minister of Labour in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, and a likely opponent of Michael Foot for the leadership of the newly mooted Independent Labour Party, had resigned from the Government, and the National Executive Committee of the rump of the old Labour Party and had tabled a motion demanding his resignation from the Government as a condition of its backing for him as Party Leader.