Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had listened to the statements of policy and the reports of the Chiefs of Staff of the Air Force, the Army, the Navy and of the Marine Corps with quiet interest. Around this table Curtis LeMay, now elevated to the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee still spoke for the Air Force, General Harold ‘Johnny’ Johnson for the Army, Admiral McDonald for the Navy and General David Shoup for the Marines, and Dempsey as a jumped up National Guardsman whose substantive rank in the US Army Reserve was that of a lowly lieutenant-colonel, had adopted the approach of only speaking when he was spoken to up until now.
“Chicago,” Lyndon Johnson grunted. “Something has to be done about Chicago.”
Suddenly everybody was looking at Dempsey as if he was the answer to their prayers. The greying veteran tank commander had spent the last few days looking at the aerial photographs, reading the situation reports and talking to officers and men who had spent time on the front line in the shattered Windy City.
He was tempted to tell his exalted audience that he was having a little trouble believing that they could have completely mishandled the situation quite so badly. He would have but for the caveat that most of the senior officers who had served on the line in Chicago reported that they had had their hands tied behind their back by ‘the President’s people in South Chicago’.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said instead. “It is my assumption that I am here because of Bellingham, the operations my people back on the West Coast are conducting against enclaves in the countryside and the work you asked me to undertake at Camp Benedict Arnold?”
Nobody interrupted him.
“Respectfully, none of that has any bearing on the situation as it exists in Chicago,” he explained. “Bellingham style tactics would turn what’s left of Chicago into the Stalingrad of the Great Lakes. The employment of military force — probably military force of an order several times that which has already been applied to the, er, problem — is a given in any viable solution but all the plans I have seen would, frankly, result in a Chicagograd disaster in which tens or scores of thousands of non-combatants would be killed.”
“What would you do if you were in charge, Dempsey?” Curtis LeMay demanded brusquely.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know?” Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup queried, a little surprised.
Dempsey turned to him.
“In my opinion the late General Taylor’s plan involving a partial blockage of areas of the city, attempts to negotiate local cease fires and surrenders and relatively small scale offensive actions at need, was a rational and proportionate response to the situation as it pertained in the late summer of last year, sir. However, I believe — as I am sure General Taylor would agree was he here today in this room — that the time for that plan has now passed. The situation on the ground has changed for the worse and a lot of people will have died in the winter weather the last couple of months.”
General Maxwell Taylor and several of his most senior staffers had died in an air crash coming back from a tour of inspection of US Forces in South Korea, Japan and Hawaii in October. But for the qualified support of the former commander of the 101st Airborne Division and veteran of the Normandy Invasion, the Kennedy Administration could never have gone ahead with the ‘peace dividend’ cuts; for no other man could have held the disparate, disgusted US Defense establishment in check in the face of such intolerable provocation. Every man around this table had been shocked and a little lost when the news of Taylor’s disappearance over the Pacific had filtered through the grapevine. It was only when Curtis LeMay, a very different man but of equally formidable presence had emerged from the chaos of the Battle of Washington as the only man the President could appoint to the vacant Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, that the much reduced and badly shaken US military machine had begun to re-find its mission.
General Johnny Johnson, the latest distinguished officer to attempt to fill Maxwell Taylor’s shoes as Chief of Staff of the US Army placed his hands on the table before him.
“You served with General Taylor in the Ardennes, they tell me,” he smiled thinly.
“I had that honour, sir,” Dempsey replied stiffly. “General Patton assigned me to the HQ of 101st Airborne for several weeks prior to the German offensive. I was wounded several days into the Battle of the Bulge operating in support of elements of the 101st near Bastogne.”
This produced a thoughtful quietness around the table.
“When I said I don’t know what to do about the situation in Chicago,” Dempsey remarked, his tone mirroring the briefly contemplative mood of the senior officers around him. “That is not to say that I don’t have anything to say about the matter. Specifically, I have one observation about the current tactical situation in Illinois in general, and a question that I would like to pose to the room.”
The Vice-President fulminated, but nodded for him to continue.
“The winter weather has effectively closed down operations in both the city of Chicago and in the surrounding areas of Illinois currently not under Federal control. Given the resources available to us and the impracticality of mounting major operations at this time we actually have a window in which to review our plans.”
“What was the question you wanted to put to the room?”
“Is it the Administration’s policy to eradicate all armed opposition, or is it the Administration’s purpose to accommodate former rebels within the Union, sir? I ask the question because if the answer is the former then nothing short of a bloodbath on the scale of a Chicagograd will achieve that end. Whereas, if the objective is simply to bring, in some meaningful way, ‘rebels’ back within the fold then the application of overwhelming lethal military force may be avoidable.”
“What have you got in mind, Dempsey?” Curtis LeMay demanded.
The older man looked around the table.
“With your permission, sirs,” he sighed, “I need to be in Illinois to answer that question.”
Chapter 59
J. Edgar Hoover positively loathed the new accommodation allocated to his Headquarters Staff in the thirty-one storey tower adjacent to the old Giraud Corn Exchange Bank which the Vice-President had designated as the Philadelphia White House. He had already attempted to speak to Lyndon Baines Johnson to express his displeasure on three occasions, on each of which Johnson had cried off claiming prior engagements. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been so ‘insulted’ by the situation that he had asked his Deputy, Clyde Tolson to find ‘alternative secure and appropriate premises’ for the Bureau elsewhere in the city.
Thus far Tolson had made little progress in this regard but Hoover had not thought to chase or harry him; they had both been distracted by that distasteful business on the West Coast concerning ‘the Ambassador’s son’ and they were still basking in the success of a job well done that had — almost incidentally — resulted in scores of racketeering and organised crimes related arrests. In fact the mission to California had been so successful that the Attorney General, no less, had sent him a personal, respectful and solicitous note of appreciation the previous day commending the ‘swift, professional work of the Bureau’ and thanking him personally for finding time in his ‘extremely busy schedule’ to travel to the West Coast to ‘oversee the immaculately executed operation’.