To insiders like Nick Katzenbach it was a mystery why Lyndon Baines Johnson had accepted the Vice-Presidential slot on the Kennedy ticket. LBJ had been one of the most powerful men in the country— arguably the most powerful man — after Dwight Eisenhower for several years; why accept a dead end sinecure? As for being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, Jack Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected — Theodore Roosevelt had been a few months younger when he became President, but that was only because the incumbent, William McKinley had been assassinated — to the Presidency.
“Enough!” Johnson rasped lowly. “If anybody around this table knows of a single example in the history of the modern world when a country has been as completely caught sitting on the john with its pants down around its ankles you need to tell me now!”
The Acting US Attorney General sat back in his chair with the Vice-President’s words ringing in his ears and surveyed the room with hooded eyes, his fingers unconsciously making a pyramid just beneath his chin. The total failure of the entire United States intelligence community was negligent. It was probably also criminal. In either event it was inexcusable and he did not understand why the three directors; Rowley, Blake and Hoover had not been fired yet. Or rather, he understood it but he did not believe it and it made him as angry as Hell.
The problem — when was it not the problem? — was J. Edgar Hoover. So long as the disloyal, conniving old monster remained Director of the FBI; Rowley, Blake and the rest of the alleged intelligence and security apparatus could not be discarded because they were the only ones who really had any control over Hoover. The thinking was that while the other old stagers were around Hoover knew he could not risk pulling too many of his dirtiest party tricks without completely undermining his own position. It was the curse of having a living legend at the heart of the machinery of government; even when that legend’s substance was twenty years out of date and in retrospect had not actually been that substantial in its heyday. Half the world had gone up in smoke thirteen months ago so what was the President afraid of? Most of Jack Kennedy’s own people thought he was the biggest mass killer in history; what did he think J. Edgar Hoover could possibly do or say that would make him look any worse?
It was achingly predictable that having made his apologies J. Edgar Hoover now attempted to seize the moral high ground.
“If the Agency had not been obstructed in the pursuance of its…”
The Director of the FBI got no further because no matter how afraid of him and his ‘files’ the Kennedy family might be, LBJ was fearless. The Texan glowered at the small, seemingly stunted — Hoover started to curl up into a ball whenever the going got too tough — figure of the sixty-eight year old ‘gangbuster’.
“Your Agency, Mister Director,” the Vice-President said coldly, “has spent most of the last year pursuing people of color engaged on work for Doctor Martin Luther King. If you had dedicated half the resources you have wasted attempting to obstruct Dr King’s legitimate pastoral work in the wider colored community and elsewhere in the South, it is not inconceivable to me that the FBI might have noticed that an ungodly alliance of religious fanatics, backwoodsmen and criminal freeloaders — presumably corralled into line by this communist ‘Red Dawn’ doomsday organization the British warned us about — was preparing an armed insurrection against the lawfully constituted government of the Unites States of America!”
The Vice-President was famous for the ‘treatment’ he gave people who were giving him trouble. That treatment was unsubtle and unambiguous. He would stand toe to toe with his opponent and stare him out and if that failed, edge menacingly closer until he was literally head to head with his unfortunate victim.
Johnson never backed off.
He was starting to lean towards the Director of the FBI.
“There will be,” he promised solemnly, “a reckoning for the crimes committed against the American people, gentlemen.”
Chapter 17
Twenty-five year old Gregory Sullivan was by his own admission the least driven, least ambitious and most easy going of the four Sullivan siblings. He was also the least physically pre-possessing of the four offspring of parents who had been gilded icons of the silver screen in the years before and after his birth. He was, for example, the shortest of the four children, albeit only by an inch or so at five feet nine inches when stood next to his sister, Miranda. Until he was about twenty and Miranda had been about eighteen the two youngest Sullivan Siblings had been close, very much in the shade of their immediate elder sibling, David — the family’s prospective ‘rocket scientist’ who had been head hunted by the Lockheed Corporation in his last year at Caltech — and Ben Junior, the spitting image of Pa and a straight up and down guy who was already an associate at a swanky LA law firm with major offices in New York and Boston. However, in many ways Gregory was perfectly content to be the ‘other Sullivan boy’. Although he regularly fended off his parents’ well-meaning subsidies and offers to pull strings on his behalf, it was nice to know that if he ever fell on his face he had rich, and interested relations with his best interests at heart; otherwise he lived modestly on his teaching salary, topping it up from time to time by running adult evening classes and occasionally providing private tutoring sessions. Basically, he loved what he was doing and he was more worried about being happy than getting on in the world!
That morning when he parked his dented old Dodge pickup on the street two lots down from Uncle Harvey and Aunt Molly’s old wood-frame Nob Hill town house, he whistled cheerfully as he bowed his head against the moist, misty wind blowing in through the Golden Gate as he jogged up the steps to the imposing oak front door.
Gregory and his siblings had lived most summers with the Fleischers and in truth there were times even now when he felt that Aunt Molly was his real mother. It had been the same for Miranda, too; which probably explained why his sister had never returned to Los Angeles after whatever had happened to her up in the Bay Area around the time of the October War.
Odd the way the phrase ‘the October War’ had almost immediately come into common usage all over the United States within weeks of the shooting stopping…
Gregory had majored in History, English Literature and Geography at high school. His teaching degree was in American History and Literature and deep within his soul he hankered to write the great post ‘October War’ novel. He never would, of course because, well, he planned to be far too busy enjoying his life in between now and the next time those idiots in Washington decided it would be a good idea to blow up the world again to sit down and write the ‘great post October War novel’.
He pulled his coat close against the damp chill of the day. There was fog in the Bay this morning; Alcatraz was hidden in the murk and nobody would see the Polaris submarines based at Alameda coming and going on their deadly missions…
“Hello?”
Gregory Sullivan realized he had been day dreaming; that was another thing his high-achieving elder brothers did not do. Miranda was a little dreamy as a kid but that had been knocked out of her in the last few years and he thought that was sad. If he had any regrets in life it was that he and his sister had drifted apart and thus far, his sporadic attempts to again be her best friend had by and large, run onto the rocks. Miranda worked for the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento these days; she was operating in a different league to her High School teacher next biggest brother and busy, busy, busy all the time.