“You can only play with the cards you get dealt,” the Texan conceded, his oddly contemplative tone betraying the fact that he was beginning to ask himself where this increasingly surreal conversation was headed. He was viewing the younger man with narrow-eyed suspicion, confident that he understood John Fitzgerald Kennedy better, at some levels, than even his brother. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was — and at the same time — was not, exactly the man most people took him for. Anybody who took him for a rich kid who’d bought the Presidency with his wit, charm and movie star good looks missed the point. While it was true he was a rich kid, a one-time playboy and a serial womaniser; he was also an oddly talismanic, charismatic leader who might conceivably, be the only man who could rescue America from its modern day slough of despond. LBJ had grown up in a harder political school than scion of the ‘old bootlegger’ — old Joe Kennedy had never been that but he’d had so many enemies on Capitol Hill that the lie would probably persist while he lived and far beyond — and in the process developed a thick steely carapace that made him virtually impervious to all knocks. Not that he hadn’t very nearly shit in his pants half-a-dozen times while the Soviet ICBMs — thankfully only a handful — had fallen on and around the cities of the north-west and the Great Lakes and the strikes had crept towards the north east. He’d flown over, walked in the ruins of several of those shattered places in the last year and even a hard-hearted old dog like LBJ shivered every time he thought about what he’d seen. Notwithstanding, he’d been the one man who’d kept his eye on the ball in the days after the October War. He’d been the man who’d led the ‘it was us or them’ campaign, while the ‘Whizz Kids’ were still wandering around DC with thousand yard stares or hunkered down in their departmental bunkers. The Vice-President sighed. “And you will run again next year, Mister President.”
Jack Kennedy sucked in his breath.
He’d anticipated that there was a sixty-forty chance of the wily Texan calling his bluff. Neither man broke the lengthening silence, each man daring the other to pierce the quietness. Jack Kennedy, knowing this was a game he couldn’t win allowed himself, eventually, to yield a small victory to his Vice-President.
“The American people deserve a great national cause, Lyndon,” he said at last.
“Yes,” agreed the older man flatly. LBJ had no pretence at being any kind of intellectual giant, in fact he despised many of the characteristics of men who claimed or behaved as if they were the great minds of the age. For all the fanfare about the ‘new generation’ JFK had brought into his Administration he’d never been seduced by any of that crap about a new Camelot, or some reincarnated round table whose members were the ‘best and the brightest’ of their era. What did the Kennedy Cabinet amount to? McNamara was a car dealer; albeit after Henry Ford one of the most successful car dealers in history. John McCone, who’d inherited Allen Dulles’s nest of vipers at the CIA, was a shameless Republican war-profiteer. Dean Rusk was at the State Department because JFK hadn’t had the cajonas to bring in the guy he’d really wanted, James William Fulbright. Unlike many of the other members of a Cabinet made up of allegedly the ‘best and the brightest’, fifty-eight year old Southern Democrat Fulbright — currently representing Arkansas in the Senate, was a real force to be reckoned with. Unlike the Kennedy brothers who’d come relatively late to their professions of liberalism, Fulbright had consistently and very publicly opposed McCarthyism and the Byzantine machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Like so many members of the Administration Dean Rusk was a reliable go-to guy, but he was neither the ‘best’ nor the ‘brightest’. Rusk had sleepwalked with everybody else into World War III; it was hard to imagine Fulbright, a fervent multilateralist and a passionate believer in the United Nations, meekly sitting on his hands while the DEFCON numbers climbed towards the outbreak of nuclear war. “Yes,” the Vice-President went on, “but the Moon isn’t the right ‘great national cause’, Mister President.”
Jack Kennedy’s expression was momentarily quizzical; like that of a student who’d been listening to a professorial dissertation with half an ear until suddenly, without warning and out of a clear blue sky, revelation had jabbed him hard in the ribs.
“And,” he began before he could stop himself, “what would be the ‘right’ great national cause,” he posed, “in your opinion, Mister Vice-President?”
LBJ snorted.
“Putting that arsehole LeMay up against a wall and shooting him would be a good start!”
No matter how much General Curtis LeMay had it coming to him neither man knew the Republican Party would ever forgive them if they shot the ‘hero’ of the Cuban Missiles War who’d sooner or later find his way onto their Presidential ticket. There was already loose talk on the Hill about the maniac running with Richard Nixon as early as next year, although, again, neither man thought Nixon would be that dumb. Poison was poison; whatever its colour.
“Apart from getting even with LeMay?” The President prompted.
“We should look to our own people. To our own constituency, Mister President. If we have to go to war with the Brits so be it.” LBJ shrugged. “If we have to, that is. And I mean ‘if we have to’ because if we end up fighting another war we later discover that we didn’t have to fight, and we ought never to have fought, I’m gone, Mister President. This country is sick enough as it is with the fucking Air Force and Allen Dulles’s ‘stay behinds’ at Langley screwing around like they’ve been the last few months.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was oddly shocked.
“No even LeMay’s people would go so far as a coup,” he objected.
The older man’s brow creased with anger.
“Jeez!” He muttered in exasperation. “Didn’t your daddy’s mistakes teach you kids anything about politics?”
Much later Jack Kennedy realised this ought to have stung him a lot harder than it actually did at the time. He’d revered and for most of his life, feared his father. Joseph Patrick ‘Joe’ Kennedy had been born into a well-connected Boston family in 1888. Still in his twenties, during World War I he’d been an assistant general manager of one of Bethlehem Steel’s Boston yards where he’d met the then Assistant Secretary to the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was later to become the thirty-second President of the United States. In the 1920s Joe Kennedy made a huge fortune in stocks and commodities, profits he invested in property and business acquisitions the length and breadth of the country. Later he became wealthier still refinancing and ruthlessly reorganising several Hollywood studios; merging his interests into the Radio-Keith-Orpheum — better known as just ‘RKO’ — studios. Joe Kennedy’s breathtaking career seemed to know no bounds. When Federal Prohibition finally ended in 1933 he’d headed directly to Scotland in the company of the son of his old friend, now President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to buy up the American distribution rights for Scotch whisky. Overnight Kennedy became the North American agent for Dewar’s Scotch and Gordon’s Gin. By ruthlessly buying up a string of spirits importation contracts he became the first great mogul of post-Prohibition America, and not surprisingly, one of the richest men in the world at exactly the time his country was in the middle of the Great Depression. But Joe Kennedy never forgot politics because to him life, business and politics were all the same thing. In the 1930s he owned the largest office block in America, and therefore the World; Chicago’s Merchandise Mart which in time became the castle keep from which he built a formidable political base in league with the Irish-American political establishment of what, at the time, was probably the greatest industrial and commercial city in Christendom. That such a wheeling, dealing, billionaire freebooter like Joe Kennedy could, at the height of the Great Depression, be appointed Head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission by his old friend, FDR, said as much about the realities of Democratic politics as about the ethics and mores of the age. American power politics had ever been thus. Appointed Ambassador to London in 1938, Joe Kennedy had been the obvious shoe-in for the Democratic ticket when FDR’s second term ended in 1940; but then the war had happened, FDR had decided it was his destiny to steer his nation into calmer waters, and Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Senior, no friend of Great Britain, its ruling class or of anything to do with its Empire had in November 1940,in the third month of the London Blitz, declared: ‘The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time… As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that Britain is fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us.’