“How many?”
“Four. Three of which are usually at twenty-four hours or less, notice to operate. My office wasn’t notified that two of the aircraft had been transferred to northern Italy for operations in the European Theatre.”
The President didn’t believe — he didn’t want to believe — that the CIA had lost track of several of its most prized assets. He re-fixed his attention on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“So, what’s the story when the Brits hand over the gun camera movies to Pathe, RKO, NBC, ABC and the BBC, General?”
To his credit the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t flinch.
“I serve at the President’s pleasure, sir. After this meeting I will submit my resignation to you.”
Bobby Kennedy, sitting between an iron-faced Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, and an ashen, visibly shaken Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, fidgeted and eventually blurted: “Why hasn’t that maniac LeMay been arrested yet?”
Jack Kennedy looked to his younger brother. He sometimes envied Bobby his optimism; likewise, there were times he despaired of his lack of common sense. The only thing you never, ever did in the military was give an order you absolutely knew wasn’t going to be obeyed.
The President flicked a glance at General Wheeler.
“You tell the Attorney General, Mister Chairman,” he invited. In later years many biographers would cite JFK’s calmness in that crucial moment as a classic example of ‘grace under pressure’. Actually, his was the calm of a man who was without hope and who was patiently waiting for; either, something else to go wrong, or for something to ‘turn up’ and save him from the fine mess he was in. What others took as ‘grace under pressure’, was simply the outward manifestation of a man who’d discovered he was in a deep dark hole and had belatedly concluded that now would be as good a time as any to stop digging.
“My intelligence is that General Lemay is travelling with a large entourage,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff explained.
“So what?” Bobby Kennedy snapped irritably.
“General LeMay is ‘inspecting’ bases commanded by former subordinates and trusted associates, sir,” General Wheeler went on. “Since all the bases on his itinerary are SAC bases each has a substantial garrison and up to a hundred nuclear warheads in its bomb dump.”
“Oh, shit…”
Jack Kennedy drank his coffee.
Was LeMay crazy enough to go for a full scale military coup? The problem wasn’t so much mounting a coup as keeping the lid on the CIA malcontents and fifth columnists currently running amok in the Mediterranean, and of course, in the British Isles…
He stared at the big photograph directly in front of him on the table.
Somebody had scrawled a white notation Manoel Island FAB after action print 02/63/missionBZ2 across the bottom of the image. Thirty seconds after a three ton camera guided earthquake bomb had demolished the western side of the old fortifications, an experimental thermobaric fuel-air device had exploded on the left hand side of what looked like it might once have been a parade ground. Nobody above ground or inside HMS Phoenicia — the official Headquarters of the British Military Governor of the Maltese Archipelago — could possibly have survived that second bomb. It was murder pure and simple and the likely architect of this particular crime against humanity was presently conducting a victory tour around his mid-western fiefdoms.
“Okay,” the President said again, his voice developing a sudden cutting edge that snapped every eye up from the surface of the table to find his face. “Okay. At my request the Vice-President is consulting Chief Justice Earl Warren with a view to granting him an unfettered hand to investigate the causes, the conduct and the aftermath of the October War. If he accepts this great national task he will have unrestricted access to all documents and will be able to subpoena under penalty of criminal law any member of this Administration or any other person he deems it necessary to interview. His report, whenever he deems it complete, will be released in full to the American people, and thus to the wider World.”
“Mr, President,” Dean Rusk blurted, his customary urbanity shredded, “is that…”
“Wise? No. But it is the right thing to do, Dean.”
Robert McNamara was scratching his chin.
“There will be serious national security ramifications, Mister President.”
“I don’t care.” He turned to his brother. “Bobby, tell the networks I will be making a State of the Union Address from the Oval Office at eight o’clock tonight.” He half-smiled. “This day.”
Silence.
“That’s less than eleven hours from now, Jack. There’s no way they can set things up that fast…”
“Tell them if they aren’t ready they’ll miss the scoop of the year and have to read all about it in the Washington Times.”
The Attorney General hesitated for one, two, three seconds. Then he was on his feet running for the door already shouting to his aides waiting in the corridor outside the Situation Room to follow him.
“Mr President,” Robert McNamara asked, blinking through the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses with the air of a man who was vexed by the suspicion that that he might have just missed something important. “Have you thought this thing through? I found at Ford that it didn’t pay to be, well, impulsive, in moments of high tension…”
“Bob,” Jack Kennedy drawled, his anxiety draining from his body like water swirling down a storm drain after a sudden summer downpour, “I’ve been thinking about this ever since that night thirteen months ago. Maybe, the American people will skin us alive but at least we’ll have taken the first small step towards atoning for what we did.”
The Secretary of Defence was minded to pursue this unlikely thread of thought but he was interrupted by Dean Rusk, who’d recovered a little of his poise now that he knew their fates were sealed.
“LeMay’s people will hear about this the moment Bobby puts through the first calls to the networks, Mister President?”
General Earle Wheeler had just picked up the handset of the ready phone that was never far from his elbow. He met his President’s eye unwaveringly.
“There will be soldiers guarding the perimeter of the White House within half-an-hour, sir,” he said grimly. From his tone what he meant to say was ‘there will be soldiers, tanks, field artillery and every fit man, or woman, from the Pentagon who could bear arms guarding the perimeter of the White House in a lot less than half-an-hour!
The Head of the President’s Secret Service detachment had entered the Situation Room.
“I am advised that we have a situation, sir?”
Jack Kennedy chuckled.
He hoped he was wrong but it seemed to him that since Curtis Lemay was — by his own design — dragging around the boondocks half a continent away, it was unlikely he was ready to move yet. Of course, if he was wrong then he’d most likely be dead sooner rather than later. Oddly, he didn’t think for a minute that the man who’d launched Armageddon planned to drive up Pennsylvania Avenue standing on the top of a tank. The man wasn’t capable of thinking through the logic of his actions, any of them. No, he’d engineered — cack-handedly, obviously with a collection of misfits and old buddies — a different kind of coup. He’d set out to sow confusion, to create a second World crisis and waited to see how the chips fell confident that the American people would surely acclaim him their new Emperor. Douglas MacArthur had had a mind like LeMay’s — explaining why the two men had detested each other so fiercely — and had it not been for Harry Trueman’s intervention he’d have started a nuclear war, too.