“You wonder what’s happened to this country sometimes,” Samuel Vandiver grunted.
“They’re telling me that only one bullet actually hit the President’s car,” Bobby Kennedy confided, preoccupied with the crowd pressing ever-closer around the Governor’s limousine. “It pinged right off the armour. I hate it when stuff like that happens when Jackie is with the President.”
Every night the newscasts carried film of the President and his glamorous wife in another city, the President charismatically delivering a beguiling, inspiring, humbly beseeching keynote speech and Jackie, well, Jackie just being Jackie. The nation’s perfect first family was trying to reconnect with, and to be seen with, as many Americans as possible as the Presidential caravan criss-crossed the continent preaching family values, the inculcation of a renewed sense of national togetherness and a restatement of manifest destiny. There had been an insurrection, the opening shots of what might have been a second and unimaginably awful Civil War in Washington DC before Christmas, but Jack and Jackie Kennedy were the last people in Christendom to hide away in a bunker when their country needed them. Symbolism is everything in public life. While his brother re-imagined the reality of the Presidency; Bobby was travelling the land re-building old, and exploring new alliances which might yet be the Republic’s only long-term defense against the setbacks to come.
The limousine ground to a halt and a phalanx of Marines — flown down to Georgia ahead of the Attorney General as part of his, and Jack’s augmented ‘security task forces’ in the wake of the December rebellion — eased back the pressing crowds between the car and the entrance to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The door opened on the Attorney General’s side and he clambered out into the warm sunshine of the Southern morning. He straightened, shot his cuffs, and smiling confidently approached the man who, more than any other embodied to Bobby Kennedy the promise of a new and lasting post-war American domestic settlement. From this point onward no US Administration could ignore the constituency for which this man spoke and whom he represented with such peerless eloquence and dignity.
In his dreams Jack Kennedy’s little brother saw the day — perhaps not so many years hence — when this man would stride the World stage. He had never believed a black man could be President of the United States of America; but meeting this man and exchanging the first mutually exploratory tendrils of what he hoped would be a lifelong friendship, he had recognized the arrant folly of the idiotic prejudices drummed into him all his life.
The Reverend Martin Luther King junior stepped forward into the sunlight and extended his hand in welcome to the younger brother of the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 50
The District Attorney of Los Angeles County had never — not once — in his long and distinguished judicial career felt so uneasy, or as threatened as he did that morning at a few minutes before eleven o’clock as he walked up the steps of City Hall.
Sixty-one year old William B. McKesson had been appointed to his current office by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on 4th December 1956. He had been selected somewhat against his own expectations ahead of several well qualified and frankly, better known and higher profile candidates and his had been a contentious appointment. Memories in City Hall were long and in his experience, by and large, unforgiving. Back in 1956 McKesson had been a respected Los Angeles Superior Court judge; it had been unnerving to find himself in direct competition for the District Attorney post with Municipal Court Judge Evelle J. Younger, Los Angeles Bar Association President William Gray and attorney A. Andrew Hauk (both men that everybody knew viewed the DA’s office as prized stepping stones in most likely brilliant future careers), Baldo Kristovich, a highly able Deputy County Counsel, and Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker. Having unexpectedly emerged from such a ‘pack’ of contenders McKesson had inevitably adopted a no risks, strictly by the book, let’s not rock the boat attitude to the discharge of his duties in the intervening years because he was acutely aware of, and sensitive to, any and all whispers of criticism of his performance.
His sudden summons to appear before the Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had come out of the blue. Notwithstanding that the ‘summons’ was unprecedented and that the ‘Commission’ itself was the fulcrum around which endless controversy and factional back-biting had swirled before and since the October War, McKesson was suddenly entertaining troubling visions of yet again being dragged into the political arena; possibly in same distasteful way Governor Brown had drawn him into a spat with the FBI over supposedly ‘anti-communist’ files held by the California National Guard two years ago. That affair had smacked of politicking with the law and although he had attempted to behave with perfect impartiality he had had his fingers badly burned.
Mud — no matter how randomly thrown — sticks.
Although the nine member Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had been set up to deal with the threat of nuclear war; in reality it had always been more concerned with disasters of a type that Los Angeles County actually had a realistic expectation of being able to do something about; earthquakes, flooding, landslides and fires.
In any event by the time of the October War very little had been done to prepare for a nuclear war. Other, that is, than the drawing up and costing of plans for a massive program to construct nuclear fallout shelters. This project came with a price tag of $404 in 1961 dollars and almost immediately bitter internecine infighting had commenced; this was hardly surprising since most of the bickering surrounded real and imagined conflicts of interest among members of the Commission itself. Thus, eleven months before the October War the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had unanimously ordered a review of the fallout shelters program. It went without saying that at the time of the war Los Angeles County’s plans to cope with the aftermath of a nuclear war were at best sketchy, and at worst, negligible, and that ever since the war the Los Angeles County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission had been trying very hard to cover its collective arse.
In the words of one Los Angeles Times editorial ‘it appears to me that the only reason a public official is likely to be called before the Commission is to have his, or her, public reputation besmirched by other public officials who have signally failed to adequately discharge their own civic duties…’
Given that the members attending today’s meeting of the Commission would probably include Mayor Sam Yorty, Los Angeles City Civil Defense Director Joseph M. Quinn, and Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker, McKesson was expecting an exceptionally rough ride as he hurried inside the great, cathedral like edifice of City Hall.
At the front desk McKesson was expecting to be escorted by one of the uniformed ushers to a first floor meeting room.
“Please follow me to the Mayor’s Office, sir.”
This was the first of several surprises in the next few minutes and the District Attorney of Los Angeles County was already reeling a little by the time he was invited to take one of the chairs in Mayor Sam Yorty’s palatial chambers.
“I understood the Commission was in session, Mr Mayor?”
The Mayor of Los Angeles shook his head. Other than Yorty, there were three men in the room only one of whom McKesson had met prior to that day; Police Chief William Parker.