“The Southern Resistance Militias?” Martin Luther King asked, his brow furrowing.
“The majority of the prisoners taken after the Battle of Washington describe themselves as either ‘members of the resistance’, or ‘God’s militiamen’, or ‘Sons of the South’, or ‘Avengers of the South’. The rebels are a polyglot group of almost exclusively white men drawn from the States of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. Some black men were rounded up in the immediate aftermath of the battle but their involvement in the attempted coup d’état seems to have been of a criminal or an accidental nature, specifically, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many of the rebels hold violently fundamentalist Christian convictions that would not sit well on either your shoulders or mine. Their God is neither a God of love or toleration, their conception of mercy is essentially medieval and incidental to their alleged ‘faith’. Many of these people come from rural backwaters, and a proportion of them claim to have lost loved ones or distant relations in the October War. At this time the Justice Department is making preliminary preparations for the first trials of members of the leadership cadre of the ‘Southern Resistance Militias’. No decision has yet been made as to where these trials will be held, and no firm dates set. At the moment Bobby is looking to schedule the first hearings for some time in April or May.”
“Show trials?” The other man queried.
“No. Absolutely not. These people will be accorded each and every one of the constitutional rights that they were so keen to deny to their fellow citizens.” Jack Kennedy realized that his guest was testing him and had not intended to touch the raw nerve he had involuntarily exposed. “Certain battlefield interrogation methods were of necessity employed in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Washington, but you have my personal assurance that thereafter the constitutional rights of all prisoners have been scrupulously respected.”
Even in faraway Atlanta dark rumours had circulated about the torturing and summary execution of ‘rebels’ at a place called Camp Benedict Arnold outside Washington near to the Civil War battlefield of Manassas.
“Historians will look at our age and judge us as if we had perfect twenty-twenty oversight and understanding of each and every one of the great matters of our day,” Jack Kennedy continued, his tone turning reflective. “Yet even while we speak our British allies are trying to contain — and to understand, which is even harder — an apparently widespread terroristic insurgency that has spread like wildfire across the steppes of Anatolia, overflowed across the Aegean and is threatening to drive them out of Cyprus. At the very time our British friends find themselves over-stretched and beleaguered in the Mediterranean, by events which may eventually threaten our own interests in the Middle East, we find ourselves — by our own hand — weakened and hamstrung. Tomorrow Secretary of State Fulbright flies to the United Kingdom at the beginning of a ten-day period of what he is calling ‘shuttle diplomacy’ to attempt to strengthen old regional alliances in the Mediterranean and hopefully form new ones in North Africa. I plan to follow him to Portugal,” he shrugged, “to cement a new alliance with that country and its leader, Prime Minister Salazar, and then to fly wherever America might find, and rediscover, friends in the old world.”
Martin Luther King was fascinated, tingling with a guilty excitement.
“Forgive me,” his President drawled, betraying momentarily the depth of his underlying weariness, “but prior to your arrival I was informed that the British are so worried about the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, that they are in the process of mounting an operation to remove nearly forty nuclear weapons from a pre-October War storage facility near Limassol, Cyprus.”
“Don’t we have any ships or aircraft or GIs in the area, Mr President?”
“We pulled out of the Mediterranean last year. There are mothballed bases in the Saudi Arabian peninsula and we maintain friendly contacts with Israel — theoretically several of their air bases are available to our aircraft in an emergency — but otherwise we disengaged from that theatre of operations when the Sixth Fleet was disbanded last summer. We have a number of aircraft and a few Marines in Italy and bases in Spain, all of which are presently locked down while investigations continue into the events of early December.”
“The attacks on British ships?”
“Yes,” the President confirmed tersely. “That, the bombing of Malta and the involvement of traitors within the State Department and the CIA in encouraging the Spanish to believe that we the United States stood behind General Franco’s regime in a proxy war fought on our behalf against the British.”
The implications of this made the hairs on the back of Martin Luther King’s neck stand on end as if he was positioned in the center of a powerful electrical field.
“So,” Jack Kennedy went on, his manner increasingly like that of a man trudging determinedly across an ever muddier ploughed field, “for one reason or another we find ourselves militarily enfeebled at the very time that unsuspected, and frankly, unimagined internal and external threats to the Republic are emerging. This at the same time it has become imperative to remove the Federal Government from Washington DC to Philadelphia. As if this itself was not a nightmare, and it is, the House of Representatives is out for the Administration’s blood, it is election year, and our only militarily robust ally — the United Kingdom — is preoccupied with feeding its people largely because Congress blocked the Administration’s attempts to send aid last year, and is almost certainly strategically over-stretched in the Eastern Mediterranean; an area which is a virtual intelligence black spot at this time. As we speak the US Atlantic Fleet is mobilising every available ship and submarine to sail for the Mediterranean; that’s how concerned the Administration and the Chiefs of Staff are about what might be going on over there!”
Jack Kennedy’s quietly persistent vehemence hung in the air between the two men.
“Oh, and I might be impeached at any time,” he added, grinning boyishly as if this was the least of his worries. “But that’s not the thing. Last year the Administration prevented you bringing the Southern Civil Rights Movement to Washington. In so doing the Administration knocked the wind out of the sails of your movement; and subsequently riots and civil disorder across the South last summer and fall happened anyway. I should have stood my ground; you should have marched on Washington.”