A hand was gently shaking his shoulder.
Elsewhere in the room he heard muted voices.
“What the fuck did that quack give the President last night?”
Very few people knew that John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been diagnosed as suffering from Addison’s disease in London in 1947, aged thirty, just after he’d entered Congress. The symptoms of the affliction included severe and often incapacitating pains in the legs, back and abdomen, random attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, hypoglycaemia, fevers and at the extreme end of the spectrum, convulsions, psychosis and syncope. Fortunately, he’d never suffered this latter symptom in public. Not even the great American media — who’d happily turned a blind eye to his womanizing — would have let a President get away with losing consciousness in the full glare of its cameras. However, he’d suffered most of the other symptoms at one time or another since assuming the Presidency, sometimes several of them in combination. More than once during dealings with foreign leaders and ambassadors he’d experienced relatively minor manifestation of Addison’s; confusion, slurred speech brought on by low blood pressure and sudden terrible bouts of lethargy that seemed to fall on him without warning. It was only after he’d entered the White House that hypothyroidism, another rare endocrine disease, had been identified.
Jack Kennedy had always been the sickliest of the Kennedy brothers but that had never really mattered until his elder sibling, Joe, had been killed in a flying accident in England in August 1944. Joseph Kennedy (junior) had always been his father’s anointed political flag bearer, rather than the fragile, reckless playboy second son…
“Jack, can you hear me?”
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the President’s thirty-nine year old younger brother, sounded increasingly alarmed. Notwithstanding the seven-and-a-half years difference in their ages, their divergent temperaments and the fact that many men in ‘Bobby’ Kennedy’s position would have chaffed to have lived for so long in his brother’s shadow; the siblings were the heart and sinew of what was left of the fractured Administration that had swept into the White House three years before with such great hopes. Back in the spring of 1961 the World had seemed to be full of possibilities; now there was just the foul taste of ashes in their mouths…
“The Vice-President is on his way to DC.”
They’d had to let LBJ in on the secret — leastways, part of it — about the President’s health after the Vienna Summit in 1961. Not that Lyndon Baines Johnson hadn’t already scented blood in the water years ago. He’d been Senate Majority Leader before he’d run against JFK for the Democratic Presidential ticket in 1960, and the wily Texan had made his career on Capitol Hill from knowing other men’s dirtiest secrets. The only thing neither Kennedy brother understood was why LBJ hadn’t turned on them. Yet.
Jack Kennedy groaned and rolled onto an unsteady elbow.
Future historians would blame the ‘Moon Speech’ on the cocktail of painkillers, steroids, amphetamines and God alone knew what else they’d pumped into his failing body. They’d say he’d been high when he unleashed Armageddon, and subsequently morbidly depressed and psychotic as he’d stumbled from one blunder to the next in the last thirteen terrible months. America had had a policy for winning a nuclear war; no idea whatsoever how to deal with the aftermath. He’d thought he was saving the World for democracy; it turned out he had been personally responsible for auguring in a new, radioactively dark age. And then he’d let himself be convinced that America needed, above all, a unifying crusade against the Universe!
He’d considered suicide but that would be a betrayal too far and the Catholicism of his upbringing denied him that merciful release.
“Who else is coming over?” The President asked, his voice a hoarse, dry rasp pitched so low that only his brother caught his words. Bobby had been at his shoulder guarding his back throughout the last decade. In the Administration he held the post of Attorney General but everybody knew that his primary role at the White House was as the President’s principal special advisor. Last year Bobby had almost done a deal with the Soviets; he probably would have done a deal if that fucking maniac submarine captain hadn’t unilaterally started World War III. Once that first shot had been fired — regardless of the missiles subsequently fired out of Cuba at the US mainland — they’d all understood that the genie was out of the bottle. The side that launched first bought the best ticket in the lottery; a chance to survive. His had been a modern day judgement of Paris and he’d given the order to hit the Soviets with everything… “Who?” He repeated, waiting for the nausea to abate.
“Dean, Bob, McCone, General Wheeler…”
“Oh, fuck. What’s happened?”
David ‘Dean’ Rusk was Secretary of State. Dean was the sort of ubiquitously able man who was, for some reason, the guy you went to when your first choice cried off. Born in Cherokee County, Georgia, in 1909, he was a former Rhodes Scholar who’d joined the State Department after the 1945 war. He was the man who’d suggested dividing United States and Soviet spheres of influence in Korea along the line of the 38th parallel. By 1949 he was a Deputy Under Secretary of State and by the following year the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. A Rockefeller Foundation trustee from 1950 to 1961, he’d succeeded Chester L Barnard as President of the Foundation as long ago as 1952. Dean Rusk was exactly the kind of safe pair of hands America needed in a time of crisis. He was also exactly the kind of man who’d never rush to the President’s sick bed unless the sky was about to fall in upon the beleaguered Administration.
‘Bob’ was forty-seven year old Robert Strange McNamara, the eighth US Secretary of Defence. Born in California, McNamara had been one of the Whiz Kids who’d rebuilt the Ford Motor Company after 1945, briefly serving as Ford’s President before taking over at the Pentagon with a remit — if not a blank cheque — to modernize and rationalise the nation’s military might. If Dean Rusk wasn’t a man known for rushing across Washington in the middle of the night, off the cuff ‘fire fighting’ was absolutely not the style of the urbane and never less than brilliant Secretary of Defence.
Like McNamara, John Alexander McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was another Californian. Born in 1902 he’d graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, beginning his career in Los Angeles at the Llewellyn Iron Works. He’d been executive Vice-President of the Consolidated Steel Corporation; and founded Bechtel-McCone. He was a prominent and very wealthy industrialist whose natural political affiliations had always been with the Republican Party. In 1946, Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office implied that McCone was a war profiteer; nevertheless, he had gone on to be a key advisor to successive post-war Administrations, and in 1958 he was appointed Head of the Atomic Energy Commission. To Washington outsiders he’d not been an obvious choice to replace Allen Dulles — who’d been sacked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 — but the last thing Jack Kennedy had wanted at CIA Headquarters at Langley was another spymaster like Dulles in the hot seat.