Fulbright was a no less impressive man physically than he was intellectually but Johnson understood why Jack Kennedy had not put Fulbright’s name forward for the State Department in 1961 — on the face of it Fulbright’s publicly stated ‘internationalism’ would have sat more happily in a Nixon Administration — but he was not alone in thinking that if Fulbright had been at the helm of American foreign policy in the two years before the Cuban Missiles imbroglio, things might not have turned out so badly in October 1962.
“You and I need to talk before the generals get here,” Fulbright declared sternly. “I know the Peace Dividend cuts have been halted and that the President plans to reinstate our former military clout but in the meantime we have to pull in our horns.” He shrugged in apology. “Hell, Lyndon, I know the last thing you need is an old dog like me lecturing you on what you already know…”
The Vice-President chuckled.
“It’s kind of academic, anyway,” he retorted dryly. “LeMay and the others know what’s coming but it’ll rest a lot easier with them if we can throw them a bone or two they aren’t expecting.”
Some thirty minutes later the main players were seated around an oval table beneath the high, airy rafters of the old hall. An open fire burned in a hearth at one end of the building, electric heaters had been installed to keep the ambient temperature somewhere in the high fifties Fahrenheit. All aides and junior staffers had been summarily dismissed from the conference and nobody was taking notes; because this was not the sort of ‘forum’ anybody wanted to be reading about in somebody else’s memoires ten, fifteen, or twenty or more years time.
The Secretary of State sat to the Vice-President’s right hand, General Curtis LeMay, since the Battle of Washington the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee to his left. Seated clockwise around the table was Admiral David Lamar McDonald the Chief of Naval Operations, General David Monroe Shoup, the Commandant of the Marine Corps and currently also the Military Governor of the District of Columbia, General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson the acting Chief of Staff of the Army, three star General William Childs Westmoreland the Personal Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara (who would have attended the meeting with Westmoreland had he not been snowed in at Andrews Air Force Base), and Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, Commander-in-Chief of the Washington State National Guard currently on attachment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.
“Bill,” the Vice President nodded. “You have the floor.”
Fulbright looked around the table, making eye contacts. He knew Curtis LeMay, not well, but he knew him well enough to be confident that he had the measure of the senior military officer in the room. At least in the sense that he knew what to expect of ‘old iron pants’. Of the others, only Westmoreland had made any effort to meet with and or, offered to brief him, or to put himself at the new Secretary of State’s disposal while he ‘worked’ himself into his ‘role at the State Department’. McDonald, the Navy man was supposed to be a ‘breath of fresh air’ in comparison to his predecessor, Admiral Anderson; after the October War Anderson and his political boss, McNamara had hardly exchanged a civil word. ‘Johnny’ Johnson was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, supposedly an able and ‘safe’ pair of hands, his predecessor having been killed by a sniper at the height of the Battle of Washington. David Shoup had gone ashore with the 2nd Marines at Tarawa. By far the most interesting participant in today’s proceedings was the grey-haired, grey moustached man in freshly pressed combat fatigues conspicuously lacking insignia of rank or unit, sitting next to the Secretary of State.
Dempsey was the man who had quashed the ‘Bellingham’ situation and developed the plan now being enacted in his home state and in neighbouring Oregon, to ‘regain the ground stolen by the scum of the earth on behalf of the decent people of those states’. Basically, Dempsey had begun to wage a low level counter-insurgency against the criminals and crazies, religious nuts and miscellaneous survivalists and backwoodsmen who had seized control of large forested and mountainous areas of all three West Coast states since the October War. Significantly, the example of the ruthless suppression of the Bellingham enclave had already brought dozens of previously defiant towns and locales back under the writ of the state authorities with barely a bullet fired in anger.
It was Dempsey who had set up and run Camp Benedict Arnold through which every suspected rebel prisoner captured in the District of Columbia during and in the weeks since the Battle of Washington had passed. There had been a rising groundswell of protest from among the liberal intelligentsia and religious groups about the brutality of the methods he had employed at Camp Benedict Arnold, where his people had isolated as many as seventy surviving members of the leadership cadre of what many of the rebels called the ‘Southern Resistance’.
J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had cavilled over this label; Hoover was still convinced the rebellion had been a communist-inspired — so-called Red Dawn — plot and to be fair the FBI had actually turned up a lot of hard evidence of the involvement of red-sympathisers, sometimes in collaboration with organised crime, racist and other extreme fringe political groupings running amok elsewhere in the Union at the height of the rebellion in Washington DC.
After the shock of the Battle of Washington and the ‘treatment’ the Vice-President had handed out to the FBI — for its failure to see the coup d’état coming — the veteran Director of the Bureau had been on his best behaviour lately. However, everybody in the room knew that sooner rather than later the old monster would return to type; how many Leopards have ever changed their spots?
Fulbright cleared his throat.
“The burden of today’s conference is to do with domestic security,” he prefaced. “The safety of the homeland. Not really my domain. The Vice-President asked me to be present because many of the decisions we make at home will have profound implications for our ongoing policy abroad in the wider World. I should also say that I am fully apprised of, and completely at one with the President’s redrawn foreign policy priorities.”
He paused to let his audience digest this.
“At my recommendation the President has authorized the reduction of our forces in South East Asia to a ‘trip wire’ presence. We will hope to deter North Vietnamese aggression against its southern neighbour with the threat of air power based in Japan and on the Marianas. In the event this policy fails we will not, repeat not deploy further boots on the ground in that country. The troops earmarked to support the Saigon government will be immediately available for deployment in North America. Moreover, forces currently deployed in Alaska, Iceland, and on border patrol duties in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas will be released from those duties. I have also recommended to the President that it is imperative that we offer out British allies whatever Naval, Air, Land and Intelligence support in the Mediterranean that is practical to the limit of our current resources. I confirm that beyond this ‘limited’ commitment to our British allies, the Administration has adopted a strategy of military disengagement and non-involvement elsewhere in the World outside the Americas. At this time the United States is not in a position to act as the ‘policeman of the World’. We will support the British in the Mediterranean and we will continue to treat the whole of the America’s as our legitimate sphere of influence. Any material extension of our support for the British, or any perception that we are prepared to send GIs to foreign places to fight somebody else’s wars in untenable at this time. The American people simply would not tolerate it and the Administration believes its altered foreign policy objectives reflect this. That is not to say that diplomatically the US will bury its head in the sand. We retain great influence in the World and the State Department will continue to maximise that influence where possible in support of our widespread commercial, industrial and mineral interests in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. I am also aware that a number of major American companies are looking to win re-construction contracts and salvage rights in Western Europe. The State Department takes the view that our strategic undertakings to the British, albeit falling short of former NATO ‘absolute’ security guarantees will, in the mid to ling-term obviate any obstacles to our big corporations getting heavily involved in the first tranche of salvage operations and in receiving preferential treatment under the proposed ‘lend lease’ and funding arrangements under discussion between our Treasury Department and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.” He glanced around. “Are there any questions, gentlemen?”