What had been allowed to happen over the last few days beggared belief. US servicemen had been inveigled into mounting murderous unprovoked attacks on British bases, ships and submarines and very nearly started a shooting war with the World’s only other surviving nuclear superpower. There had been a coup d’état in the capital! Across the country there had been hundreds, possibly thousands of killings of government civilian and law enforcement personnel, and at least seven city mayors assassinated. Power lines and electrical switching stations had been sabotaged in at least a dozen states, likewise oil refineries in Louisiana and Texas had been set on fire, railroad trains de-railed, and attempts made — largely unsuccessfully — to bring down bridges as far apart as North Carolina and Mississippi. Disturbingly, there had been gun and petrol bomb attacks and campaigns of mob violence targeting synagogues up and down the East Coasts. Across the Mid-West minority fundamentalist Christian communities had suffered the same sort of persecution. It was as if the whole country had gone mad, everywhere reports were coming in speaking of unprecedented crime waves, organised civil disobedience and angry crowds moving on Federal buildings and besieging police stations.
Lyndon Johnson understood that at time such as these somebody in the Administration needed to keep a cool head. He had decided that he was that somebody. His colleagues might elect to talk up the bad news he was determined that the other, not so bad side of the news, should also be heard in the corridors of government.
Contrary to the alarmist narrative being peddled by the networks — and by some sections of the Administration — of widespread endemic anarchy and lawlessness apparently tearing the whole country apart; in many, perhaps the vast majority of places, nothing untoward had actually happened in the last few days. It was this that he told anybody who wanted to hear what he thought about the situation. And if he met somebody who did not want to hear this; he told them anyway.
However, beneath the Vice-President’s calm exterior a volcanic explosion was never far beneath the surface. There were simply no words adequate to the task of expressing Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about the absent J. Edgar Hoover and other men around the table — not to mention John McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had had his ‘talking to’ earlier — who had allowed the country to descend into madness without uttering a single, solitary documented word of warning about it in advance.
This was also the considered view of forty-one year old Acting United States Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach. His boss, Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, was still in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda Maryland. One of the bullets fired by the killer of British Prime Minister Edward Heath, Edna Zabriski, had removed a two-finger wide lump of flesh and muscle from his left calf and he was due to undergo a second operation that evening to ensure that someday — maybe a few months down the line — he might be able to walk again without pain.
There was a commotion in the corridor and the doors to the conference room were flung open to permit admittance of the small, bulky, hunched figure of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the man who had been his deputy for over thirty years, Clyde Tolson.
Katzenbach raised a thoughtful eyebrow.
Hoover feels so threatened that he needs his best man to back him up!
An additional chair was scraped across the floor to enable Tolson to sit at his master’s shoulder.
The Vice-President was about to say something caustic when Hoover looked up and in his scatter-gun rat-a-tat fashion — shooting words like bullets; a technique developed as a young man to counter a stammer — he said, with a clumsy almost pleading contrition: “I am sorry, Mister Vice-President.”
This so astonished his listeners that they hardly credited what he said next.
“I’m sorry. The Agency has failed the American people…”
The tears in the old man’s eyes were anything but Crocodilian.
Tolson coughed. Everybody in the rooms was so accustomed to his being the most silent of public silent partners that it was some moments before they realized that he planned to say something.
Sixty-two year old Clyde Anderson Tolson was an enigma to both the public and to Washington insiders. A Missourian hailing from Laredo he had moved to Washington DC in 1919, working first as a clerk and then as a confidential secretary in the offices of three successive Secretaries of War. During this time he had qualified to practice law at night school at George Washington University, graduating in 1927 and applying to join the FBI in 1928. He had been by J. Edgar Hoover’s side — quite literally, they drove to work together, vacationed together, and ate together — ever since. Promoted to assistant director as long ago as 1930, Tolson had been with Hoover in 1936 to arrest the back robber Alvin Karpis, and in the same year had been involved in a gun fight with the notorious gangster Harry Brunette. He and Hoover had thrown the dragnet over the Long Island spy ring in 1942; and for as long as anybody remembered Tolson had been FBI Associate Director responsible for discipline, budget and administration. Hoover and Tolson were both showing their age, Hoover particularly because he blacked his hair and some said, wore makeup to maintain a false air of youth and vitality, neither of which was present today.
“As many as three hundred special agents have been killed or injured in pre-meditated attacks,” Clyde Tolson said. “In a number of incidents members of their families and other innocent persons have been killed and injured. Several individuals, all men, have been apprehended by the Bureau and by other law enforcement agencies in connection with these crimes.”
Katzenbach listened, watching the reactions of the other men in the room.
Fifty-five year old James Joseph Rowley was the fourteenth Director of the Secret Service. Rowley was a Bronx-born New Yorker of Irish extraction who had started his career in the FBI and transferred to the Secret Service in 1938 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President.
Lieutenant-General Gordon Aylesworth Blake was the fifty-three year old fourth Director of the National Security Agency. Gordon Blake was an Iowan who had won a Silver Star for gallantry in the face of the enemy when, on 7th December 1941, he had been base operations officer at Hickham Field, Pearl Harbour. As if to prove the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’, in 1945, the veteran of that ‘day of infamy’ in 1941 had been a member of the one hundred and fifty man advanced force sent to Japan to prepare for the initial airlift of the US army of occupation.
Katzenbach knew Blake in passing and by reputation. He hardly knew Rowley. However, both Rowley and Blake had always been viewed by Administration insiders as safe pairs of hands trusted in exactly the way J. Edgar Hoover and to a lesser extent, Clyde Tolson were not.
The Director of the Secret Service, James Rowley reacted first.
“You aren’t the only government agency to have lost people the last few days.”
“No,” Gordon Aylesworth barked in irritable agreement.
The Vice-President was operating on a very short fuse.
For most of the last three years the man who had been the acknowledged ring master of the Capitol Hill circus until he lost out to Jack Kennedy as the Democrats’ nomination for the 1960 Presidential election, had been a sleeping partner in the Administration.