Miranda was aware that several of her fellow staffers were looking at the Vice-President with their mouths hanging open in disbelief.
‘Words are cheap,’ Lyndon Johnson continued. He had a knack of making random eye contacts which convinced everybody within his hearing that he was talking to them personally. ‘I don’t expect anybody in California to take my word for anything. From this day forward the Administration expects to be judged by what it does, not what it says. Heck, I know as well as all of you that if there was a General Election tomorrow the Democratic Party would get so badly beaten up that this time next year nobody except a few political historians would even remember there had ever been such a party as ‘the Democrats’. That’s where we are now. Rock bottom. Rock bottom politically, and after the Battle of Washington, rock bottom as a country. It is up to us all to do something about that!’
Later Miranda rationalised her reaction to the Vice-President’s call to arms by accepting that her first real, ‘touching’ acquaintance with a genuinely ‘great man’ had made her a little ‘giddy’. For the first time in her life she had shaken the hand of, and stood within the aura of a man who was unlike any other human being she had ever, or was probably, ever likely to meet. Lyndon Johnson radiated calm, measured power. If somebody had thrust an M-16 into Miranda’s hands in the minutes after she had been introduced to Johnson she would have gladly marched off to war without a second thought.
She had been too energised to do anything but go back to her desk, drink coffee and read the reports which had piled up since Friday.
Before the October War she suspected that the Office of the Governor had been a sleepy, mainly dark place at weekend; since the war the office never slept.
A knock at her open door caught her unawares and made her start with alarm. She looked up.
The middle-aged man in the doorway was wearing the ill-fitting uniform of a member of the State Capitol’s security detail. National Guardsmen patrolled the surrounding streets and barred the doors to the huge building, within its walls the pre-war ‘guardians’ survived.
“There’s a black guy down in the main lobby saying he wants to speak to you, Miss Sullivan,” the man complained.
“Does he have a name?”
“John. Mister John.”
Miranda nodded, her calm facade masking her suddenly churning emotions. She pushed aside her papers and got to her feet.
“You want me to throw the guy out?” The man asked hopefully.
“Mister John works with Mister Francois,” she explained pleasantly, secretly itching to slap the bigoted security man’s face because she understood that nothing short of a slap in the face would actually get his attention, “the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP — that’s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — an organisation which the Governor has personally invited to join the California Civil Rights Forum.”
This drew a completely blank look.
“Of which,” she added, sweeping regally out into the first floor corridor and heading towards the central atrium, “I am the Secretary designate!”
“Oh.”
Miranda was striding purposeful towards the stairs leaving the man breathlessly stumbling in her wake.
Dwayne John was a handsome, towering man with the frame and substance of a heavyweight boxer just a month or two out of the gym. He rose ponderously to his feet as he heard Miranda’s feet ringing on the stone flagstones. Like most state capitols California’s was built to outlast the ages, an expression in marble, stone and alabaster every bit as totemic as the castles Medieval kings and queens had planted across Europe and the Holy Land in centuries past.
“I did not expect you to call today, Mister John?” Miranda queried, with a lot less gravitas than she had planned. Dwayne John was a born again Christian and a devout servant of Dr Martin Luther King, to whom Sunday was God’s day.
“I prayed this morning with my brothers and sisters in San Francisco,” the man assured her. “Dr King says a man respects the Sabbath if he does God’s work all day long every day.”
“Yes,” Miranda muttered. “Perhaps, we might go to the refectory. I’m sure you’d like a coffee. Have you eaten this afternoon?”
The big man smiled.
“Coffee would be good,” he confessed.
It helped that they were meeting in public.
When she had represented the Governor’s Office in State Attorney General Stanley Mosk’s high profile exercise to free Dwayne John from unlawful FBI custody — in what now seemed like an age of innocence before the madness of the last week — she had thought that was that. Terry Francois, the dignified and really quite remarkable man who was President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP had taken Dwayne under his wing; and Miranda had tacitly assumed that in due course Dwayne would go back to Atlanta and continue his work for Dr King’s organisation.
The new California Civil Rights Forum was apparently the brainchild of Attorney General Mosk and Governor Brown’s chief of staff, both men possibly having had their elbows jogged by Terry Francois. She had only learned on Friday that Dwayne John was to be the NAACP’s Liaison and Communications Officer, and that the Office of the Governor of California had put her name forward as the CCRF’s first Secretary and Public Relations Officer.
“I never got the chance to thank you for all you did for me,” the black man said as he fell into step with his host. “For me and for Darlene both, that is.”
Miranda did not trust herself to look at the man.
“Have you spoken to Darlene yet?”
“No.”
“She’s going to be staying with my Aunt and Uncle for the foreseeable future in San Francisco.”
“I know. I walked by their place a couple of times last week before a cop rousted me,” a resigned guffaw. “He reckoned I was casing the joint!”
Miranda tried not to see the funny side of it.
“Well, you were in a manner of speaking. You were getting together the courage to face Darlene again, I mean?”
The hulking man at her side chuckled with low, rumbling pleasure for a moment. He had been looking curiously at his grandiose surroundings.
“Every time I go into a government building back home there are signs all over the place. NO BLACKS. WHITES ONLY.”
“That’s not the way of things in California,” she retorted, a little offended.
“Ain’t it,” he queried, gently, “isn’t it what’s in a person’s head that matters; not what he writes on the walls?”
Chapter 19
Acting Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, Washington State Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defense Commissioner, and Commander of the Washington State National Guard did not know why he had been asked to fly east other than that the ‘request’ — the invitation had been couched in the most diplomatic of military language and addressed to his boss, Governor Al Rosellini — for his ‘presence’ originated directly from General Curtis LeMay, the new Chairman Designate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.
“General LeMay is briefing the President,” General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson, the Acting Chief of Staff of the United States Army explained, shaking the sixty-one year old Hanford born Washingtonian’s hand. “He will join us as soon as possible.” Johnson looked to the other man in the small underground briefing room. “Have you met General Shoup?”