The inner circle of the War Cabinet had listened in silence until this juncture.
“Do we know who this Warren man is, Tom?” Margaret Thatcher asked the Foreign Secretary. Her political antennae told her that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was going to dissemble shamelessly about how the old World had been brought down by some kind of highly implausible, and equally unsubstantiated — and for that matter, impossible to meaningfully authenticate — coalescence of malignant forces inimical to American democracy. Before he finished he was probably going to invoke ‘apple pie’ like his mother had made him when he was a toddler at her knee. The notion that Rose Kennedy would make anybody, let alone her own spawn ‘apple pie’ or any other pastry was as absurd as the concept of attempting to explain away the most terrible war in human history as some kind of Machiavellian conspiracy. Even if there had been a conspiracy it had been JFK’s job to root it out before, not after he unleashed the dogs of thermonuclear war. And while she was thinking about it, it would have been nice if Joe Kennedy’s wastrel, playboy second son had consulted his allies in anticipation of, rather than during the all out first strike!
The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Edward Heath, spread his hands, giving Tom Harding-Grayson — until last week the Permanent Secretary to the late Sir Alec Douglas-Home — who now found himself guiding what passed for the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration’s foreign policy in the post-war era, leave to answer the Angry Widow’s question.
James Callaghan, the Secretary of State for Defence, and the de facto Deputy Prime Minister sighed: “If we could listen again when the blasted man starts talking about what he’s going to do about the mess his conspirators have allegedly made. But that probably won’t be for a while.”
Nobody in the room was an avid fan of conspiracy theories. Most successful people in politics understood that conspiracies never worked and when one was caught in the act of conspiring, as one always was, one always looked very bad. Especially, with the voters.
“Chief Justice Earl Warren is sixty-two years of age,” the Foreign Secretary declaimed. “A lifelong Republican he ran for the Great Old Party’s Vice-Presidential nomination in 1948. He’s the only man to have successfully run for Governor of California three times, before which he was the Attorney General of that State. He became the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States in 1953. Despite the fact that he is a Republican he is socially liberal; he’s against segregation by dint of race and colour in the public school system and is known to support the Civil Rights agenda that was espoused by various members of the Kennedy Administration, notably the President and his brother Bobby, prior to the October War. Despite the parlous state of the rule of law in some areas of the United States, especially those which suffered nuclear strikes during the war, he is a vehement opponent of the suspension of civil liberties in virtually all circumstances. He is known to have taken the White House to task for its casual attitude to declaring states of emergencies, and has publicly deplored occasions when the National Guard and Federal Armed Forces have been called in to contain what he considers to be legitimate and constitutionally-justified protests against the widespread suppression of individual and civil liberties, and inalienable human rights.”
The three politicians in the room stared at Tom Harding-Grayson, a mixture of surprise and mild astonishment in their faces. The question had been asked; he’d instantly pulled a marvellously concise and eloquent profile of Chief Justice Earl Warren out of his hat like a magician conjuring a white dove into existence.
The fifth member of the select gathering, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Henry Tomlinson smiled owlishly. The new Foreign Secretary was his oldest friend in Government and — this was a thing he could vouch for in confident verisimilitude — possibly the best informed and intelligent man in his extraordinarily wide acquaintance.
“A sound man, then?” The Prime Minister observed, half-smiling.
“If the President thinks we’re going to fall for this nonsense he’s got another thing coming!” Margaret Thatcher declared.
“Forgive me, Margaret,” Tom Harding-Grayson countered mildly.
The Home Secretary had honestly believed she’d learned a thing or two about crisis management in the last year; until that was, the last fortnight. The hardest thing wasn’t keeping so many balls in the air at once; it was focusing on the one that mattered at all times. She’d been completely taken off her guard by the Prime Minister’s reminder — to the members of the newly formed War Cabinet — that what they did in the present was critical to what they did in the future. It seemed so obvious but it was so easy to forget. Whatever they did now had to be with one eye on that future. It was an object lesson in strategic rather than tactical thinking, a window into the mind of a man with a vision. Idly, she wondered if this was what it was like being close to a man like Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt at the height of the Second World War. Yes, we limp from one crisis to the next but one day, if we stick to our work, a better World awaits us tomorrow…
Margaret Thatcher forced herself to focus on the Foreign Secretary.
“That may not be the important thing,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued, suspecting that the highly-intelligent, thirty-eight year old mother of two was going though one of those problematic phases that most politicians went through when they first attained real power and influence in government. He’d seen the same thing a score of times in his career; and in the case of the Angry Widow he was untypically confident that she’d soon come to terms with her changed realities. The Prime Minister had given her a glimpse of a vision without for a moment understanding what he’d done; without understanding he might conceivably have sparked something extraordinary. The Foreign Secretary met Margaret Thatcher’s gaze. “Whatever we think about it, the Americans appear to have stumbled upon a new narrative. A new legend. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this might yet, even at this eleventh hour, give them, and us, a way out of the impasse that we both find ourselves in.”
“They gave Franco and his henchmen free reign to attack Gibraltar; they bombed Malta and killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent people, Tom!”
“Yes,” the Foreign Secretary agreed, not yielding ground for he’d realised — even if other senior figures in the Government hadn’t in recent months — that the Angry Widow trampled over people who didn’t have the conviction or the guts to stand up to her. “And their agents in Ireland were almost certainly behind what happened at Balmoral. And let us not forget the aggressive posturing of the United States Navy in the Western Approaches. Or the apparent, albeit clownishly inept machinations of a certain Loudon Baines Westheimer II, to rabble rouse malcontents within the, er, previous, now dissolved Cabinet. But that’s not the point, Margaret. While the White House was entrenched behind the battle lines of ‘it was us or them’ and were determined to hold the line that it was the Soviets’ fault and that we ought to have in some way supported their stance more effectively than, apparently, by their lights, we did,” he manufactured an impish grin, “other than to confess their sins and ask for absolution, Kennedy’s people had nowhere to go without surrendering the high moral ground. Now they’ve got an escape route and if they have the wit to see it, a way to honourably step back from the brink with us that they never had with the Soviets.”