Chapter 54
The sleepy community of Fort Washington, a small satellite of greater Philadelphia situated some miles to the north east of the city center would inevitably, one day be swallowed up by the expanding urban sprawl of its giant neighbour. However, for the present it sat separate from the city in leafy, wooded hills that were slowly acquiring a coating of fresh snow as the cavalcade of limousines and staff cars with their small, fluttering flags and banners wound through the twisting country roads to the old meeting house which had been requisitioned and ‘secured’ the previous day.
The Federal Government might have officially commenced its re-location en masse to Philadelphia over a fortnight ago but right now, chaos ruled in downtown Philly and nobody in their right mind would attempt to claim that anywhere other than City Hall was remotely ‘secure’ or ‘safe’.
The Navy Department was leading the charge to Philadelphia, it was already ensconced on the Camden side of the Delaware River opposite the docks, the State and Justice Departments were hot on the Navy’s heels moving into the new ‘Philadelphia White House’ — an imposing structure modelled on the Pantheon in Rome attached to a thirty-one floor tower block a few hundred yards from City Hall, the designated temporary home of the House of Representatives — but today’s business was best conducted as far as possible from the ‘madding crowds’.
The Vice-President of the United States of America was deep in his thoughts as he viewed the wintery Pennsylvania countryside sliding by the window of his armoured limousine. One part of his mind was back in Maryland wondering how the ‘summit’ with Martin Luther King was progressing; but the weight of his deliberation was focused on the coming conference. He and Jack Kennedy had made a pact and in many ways, today was the first significant test of whether that pact was actually worth a mess of beans.
The conundrum was very simple.
Either he spoke for the President or he did not.
One of his aides had given him a short talk about the history of ‘Fort Washington’; it was always useful to have small talk available to break the ice when one was welcoming folks to a shindig.
This part of Pennsylvania had been settled by German immigrants in the early years of the 18th century. A man called Philip Engard had purchased a hundred acres of land on what subsequently became Susquehanna Road and Fort Washington Avenue, and the settlement’s founding name had been Engardtown for about fifty years. Fort Washington was an accident of the Revolutionary War. George Washington and the Continental Army had retreated to and camped at Engardtown in October 1777 after the Battle of Germantown, lingering awhile to regroup before skirmishing anew with the British Army of occupation in Philadelphia under the command of General William Howe in the first week of December at White Marsh. Falling back again, this time briefly, into his hurriedly fortified emplacements at Engardtown, Washington had drawn breath and then marched his army to Valley Forge. Apparently much of the modern settlement of Fort Washington sat within the boundaries of those Revolutionary War earthworks. History had left the town unmolested another eighteen decades before in July 1956, it was the location of the worst ever railway smash in the United States; two North Pennsylvania Railroad trains colliding near the old Sandy Run station resulting in the death of over a hundred people, many of whom were children from the Kensington area of Philadelphia travelling to Sheaff’s Wood for a Sunday school picnic.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was in an unusually reflective mood as he mulled questions of history and the consequences that inevitably ensued. But for the October War his thoughts would have been directed solely at the New Hampshire Primary scheduled for early March. 1964 was a Presidential Election year but thus far nobody had declared, and LBJ had no idea if come March Jack Kennedy’s name would even be on the New Hampshire ballot.
History was a funny thing; always so much simpler and less messy when viewed from afar. Real life was never straightforward, there was never only the one best, let alone a self-evidently obvious course to follow. The reality of getting things done in a World in which practical politics was everything was that compromise, fudge and complication blurred what academics called ‘the big picture’. Lately, he ruminated a lot about the night of the October War.
The Cuban Missiles Crisis had surprised the Administration but it had hardly been a bolt from the blue. Nor had it suddenly got ‘hot’. At the time the first photographs of missiles and missile launchers on Cuba had landed on the President’s desk. the Administration’s main focus had been on preventing the two most populous countries on the planet — China and India — going to war over Tibet. Moreover, all that summer and fall they had been preoccupied with the incendiary condition of many of the southern states. Things were worst in Mississippi but Alabama and Georgia were not far behind; a great swathe of the American south had seemed to be on the verge of an uprising, the outbreak of widespread communal violence seemed inevitable and the Administration was, by that point, sickeningly aware of the limits of its power to do anything to stop that violence if it once took hold. Right up until those spy plane photographs of missiles on Cuba had arrived in the White House the Administration had been more worried about what was going on in Oxford, Mississippi than it had been in Berlin or Havana.
When analysts had briefed the President and senior cabinet member about the range and likely payloads of the missiles in the U-2 pictures from Cuba, Bobby Kennedy had passed a weary hand across his brow and dryly inquired: ‘Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?’
Notwithstanding, posterity would condemn the Administration out of hand but on that day in late October 1962 and all through that long, terrible night they had been groping their way through a geopolitical and military landscape fogged with the smoke of battle, shocked and frightened men trying to do what they honestly believed was the right thing.
Jack Kennedy had not sought his counsel before he unleashed the firestorm; and to this day he did not know what he would have said to his Commander-in-Chief had the question been asked…
That was then, this was now.
The rising clamour for state’s rights had been temporarily stilled by the December uprising; a narrow window of opportunity had opened and he was the man who was in charge of the heavy lifting that was necessary to shore up the Union against further shocks.
J. William Fulbright, Dean Rusk’s successor at the State Department had arrived at the meeting hall shortly ahead of the Vice President’s cavalcade. He and the Vice-President shook hands.
“Winter in New England,” the tall Texan grinned at his old sparring partner. Fifty-eight year old Missouri born Fulbright had been the junior senator for Arkansas since January 1945. In the days when Johnson had been the ringmaster of the US Senate, Fulbright had been the Chairman of two key Committees in the House; between 1955 and 1959 Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, and since 1959 Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was still, officially, Chairman of that latter committee because ‘the House’ had yet to extract its collective thumb from its collective arse to elect a new Chairman. “Now that’s a thing for two old Southern Democrats like us, Bill!”