There was no shame in that. Vandiver was a man with whom the Administration could do business. Vandiver’s Governorship had been efficient, relatively ‘clean’ by Georgia standards and but for the war would have significantly improved the lot of many of the poorest Georgians.
How many other state governors of either Democratic or Republican persuasions could honestly claim that?
“That’s a stretch,” the Governor of Georgia remarked. “I find it very hard to see any good coming out of what happened back on October sixty-two.” Unlike his companion in the back seat of the limousine he was still intensely uncomfortable to be seen openly paying court to the most famous living Georgian.
It was not because he was any kind of racist — because he did not consider himself to be one, other than in the small things imbued in one from birth in the Deep South — but he was much more aware than the President’s younger brother that the crowds in the streets around the Ebenezer Baptist Church represented only one section, albeit a growing section, of the natural Democratic constituency that he represented. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was an unimaginably broad ‘church’ embracing Northern liberals and Southern white supremacists and every shade of politics in between. He was a practical man. The notoriety of the leader of the Southern Civil Rights movement and the great groundswell of support at his back was like a red rag to a bull to the powerful forces diametrically opposed to and, frightened of the rise of a whole section of society that they honestly believed was inferior, and ought to remain under their thumbs forever. The Kennedy Administration might not realize it but he would not, could not ignore the fact that every Governor across the South — Democrat or Republican — was sitting nervously on a powder keg. Sometimes lately he wondered if somebody had already lit the fuse.
Vandiver could not remember a time in his adult life when opinions had been more polarised, or when the Democratic Party machine in Georgia had been so fragmented.
“The economy of the great State of Georgia is still in recession,” Vandiver went on. “I’ve got military bases shut down all over the place, nowhere near enough police to keep the streets safe. Hell, it isn’t as if I can trust the National Guard to do much more than direct traffic. You’ll forgive me if I beg to differ with you, I hope, sir.”
“The moment when a nation seems to be at its most divided is the time its leaders must seek to unite it most,” the Attorney General murmured.
It was a mantra that he and his brother were proselytizing across the continent while other members of the Administration, and the newly constituted Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee under Curtis LeMay’s gung ho chairmanship, were striving to restore a nationwide functioning Government machine and to undo the massive self-inflicted structural damage wrought by last year’s ‘war dividend’ cuts.
The depth of the ongoing crisis — irrespective of the real or imagined threat posed by Red Dawn or whoever else had been behind the insurrection in Washington — was underlined by the fact that the New York Stock Exchange which had crashed spectacularly during the Battle of Washington had still to recover fifty percent of its pre-rebellion value. The reality of the situation was that practically every major American bank was as technically bankrupt. The Government, the entire financial system underpinning the still huge and miraculously, still relatively robust and intact North American industrial and economic behemoth was currently being funded on a wing and a prayer and millions of unpayable I Owe Yous. Within the Administration the fear remained that the social, political, economic, banking and military crisis was so acute that all it would take to bring down the whole precariously balanced stack of cards was another surprise, another tiny unexpected knock.
In the next few days the House of Representatives would formally reconvene in Philadelphia. If either Congress or the Senate rejected or reneged on the treaty with the British when it came before the House in mid-April — currently the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty was being implemented under Presidential Executive Order and was ‘untouchable’ by the House during the ninety day interregnum on Congressional interference mandated by that ‘order’ — all bets would be off. Given the mood of the House Congress and the Senate would almost certainly refuse to ratify the treaty when the time came.
There was also the matter of whether the House would seek to unpick the President’s Executive Order effectively rescinding and reversing the ‘peace dividend’ program and authorizing what amounted to full military and logistical support for ongoing British operations in the North Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. If LBJ was unable to cut a deal — and nobody else in the Administration could cut Congressional deals like the wily Texan — what then?
An even darker prospect was the likelihood House Republicans would move a motion of impeachment against the President because of the rebellion and the fact the country had very nearly blundered into a war with ‘the old country’. Oddly, no man in the Administration had been more sanguine about this than LBJ. Not so much because he might step into the Presidency as a consequence but because ‘right now we haven’t a snowflake’s chance in Hell of being re-elected in November and there is no conceivable way those donkeys in the House can get their act together to impeach any of us inside the next eighteen months!’
If the General Election in November went the way they all expected it to go the subject of ‘impeachment’ was the least of their worries!
Bobby Kennedy and the Vice-President had disliked and mistrusted each other since the late fifties. It had been a visceral, personal thing. The Attorney General had loathed the older man and Lyndon Baines Johnson had held the younger sibling of the President in contempt; the only thing that had until recent weeks united them was their mutual detestation. Bobby had not wanted LBJ on the Presidential ticket in 1960; and at the time of the October War he had been actively sounding out alternative candidates to join his brother on the 1964 ticket.
Before the October War, Jack had made a point of being punctiliously correct and polite with his Vice-President. Moreover, he was invariably collegiate and deferential to him in meetings with other Cabinet members. After the October War Jack had kept a distance between them; the breakdown in relations with the British and the Battle of Washington had changed the mood music overnight.
Strangely, discovering that he was no longer the President’s only trusted ‘special advisor’ had come as a welcome shock to the younger brother, a weight lifting off his shoulders. In the last few weeks he had thrown himself into his work with a new lightness of spirit. He had even managed to exchange a few genuinely civil and well meant words with LBJ, who had contrived to respond in a grudgingly similar vein. Bobby and LBJ would never been friends; but they had ceased to be enemies.
“Somebody took a pot shot at the President when he was in Dallas yesterday,” Bobby informed the Governor of Georgia, who started in alarm. “Well several shots, we think,” the Attorney General went on, as if an assassination attempt on the life of a President of the United States of America was a routine affair calling for little comment. “Some nut job in an office block housing a book depository with an M-16. The Marines and the Secret Service hosed the whole top floor of the building with automatic fire. They discovered this mousy little guy in Army fatigues bleeding to death on the floor when they stormed place. He was pretty badly shot up and died before they got him to hospital so we don’t know his story yet. Hoover’s people are onto it.”