However, that prospect was the least of her worries.
The spring cease fire in Illinois brokered by Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, the sixty-one year old Washingtonian National Guard reservist who had single-handedly master-minded the suppression of the insurgency in the North West last year, had broken down within days of his sacking, at the behest of Mayor Richard Joseph Daley by the State Governor Otto Kerner. South Chicago, previously largely intact and ‘viable’ as the surviving half of the bomb-damaged Windy City, was now threatening to turn into a battlefield and what was left of the Kennedy family political powerbase was disappearing down the plug hole of history.
Meanwhile, spurred on by the sudden sacking of General Dempsey, their military guru, the Confederation of West Coast States — Washington, Oregon and California — had activated their previously suspended ‘Military Assistance Pact’ under which Federal intervention in their affairs was strictly circumvented. The three states, including California, the most populous in the Union, had — within the last week — threatened to withhold Federal taxes until such time as its ‘legitimate grievances’ were heard and acknowledged in Philadelphia.
Across the South there were daily reports of riots and disturbances. Birmingham Alabama and several towns and cities across Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana were under martial law. Tensions inflamed to breaking point by February’s atrocity in Atlanta when Doctor Martin Luther King had been badly wounded, and nine other members of his entourage killed or injured by a sniper’s bullets, had been ignited by George Wallace’s incendiary rabble rousing, Nelson Rockefeller’s apparent indifference, and the Administration’s failure to do anything at all about the invidious post-Civil War Jim Crow laws entrenching racial segregation across the former Confederate States. At Doctor King’s rally in Bedford-Pine Park in Atlanta in February over two hundred people had died, killed in the crush after the shooting had panicked the huge crowd of between seventy and eighty thousand people. The Bedford-Pine ‘Incident’ was now the rallying cry of a new and militant Southern Civil Rights movement which its leader, Martin Luther King, only recently sufficiently recovered from his wounds to appear again in public, was struggling to drag back towards its non-violent roots.
In a little over a week’s time King was scheduled to walk at the head of his people on the first day of the March on Philadelphia. The Afro-American Southern Civil Rights movement was coming to the nation’s temporary capital. Day by day the march would gather new members on its slow progress north, arriving in Philadelphia on 4th July, Independence Day. There was a general expectation that the March would end in dreadful violence long before then, that Martin Luther King would never live long enough to stand on the steps of City Hall, and share again with the American people his dream of a better, fairer more righteous future for all Americans in a land in which the colour of a man or woman’s skin, his religion, creed or ethnicity no longer governed how he or she was viewed by his fellow citizens.
If Martin Luther King died who would be left to speak for non violence?
What price peaceful civil disobedience in a society in which the voice of reason had been silenced?
What had happened to America?
People back home were reporting that ‘everything that could go wrong was going wrong’. It was election year so nobody in Congress, let alone the Presidential contenders cared about anything except getting elected. Wall Street was in turmoil, the Stock Exchange was heading south at a rate of knots and everybody was waiting with baited breath for the first big bank to go bust. Chicago was not the only Great Lakes city in ferment, upper New York State around Niagara and where the city of Buffalo had once stood was bandit country, likewise the badlands south of Boston, where the ruins of Quincy had been taken over by the dispossessed, homeless and the hopeless who had armed themselves by ransacking the ruined navy base and the wrecked warships in the docks.
The Administration’s policy towards the nation’s millions of refugees had become one of armed containment while it fought fires elsewhere as and when they flared, without any semblance of any plan or any over-arching ‘big idea’. The wreckage of Washington DC and its surrounding heavily militarised ‘martial law zone’ might have been a ghastly metaphor for the state of the whole Union.
In Philadelphia, a relatively tranquil island of political sectarian gerrymandering kept ‘peaceful’ by a massive Army, Navy and newly recruited paramilitary ‘Special Police Division’, the House of Representatives blithely carried on as if nothing was amiss. While members of Congress and the Senate bickered angrily over the terms of reference of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War; the Department of Justice was preoccupied — to the exclusion of virtually everything else — with preparations for the forthcoming trials of the leaders of the attempted coup d’état which had sparked the Battle of Washington last December.
“We were appalled to hear about the attack on the Christophers and the Hannays in Philadelphia,” Joanne Brenckmann said. “We all believed that Philadelphia was fairly safe, but to be attacked like that in broad daylight!”
“I met both Lady Marija and Rosa Hannay when I was on Malta,” Rachel confessed. She had given up obfuscating about those parts of her personal history that were less than secret. “And again the last time I was in America. They are both very resilient young women. I’m sure they have put the ‘incident’ behind them already.”
“I understand that you have visited the United States many times?” Walter Brenckmann prompted, feeling he ought to help out his wife. He had been a little lost in his thoughts. His eldest son was onboard the USS Kitty Hawk, part of Carrier Division Seven’s ill-thought through presence in the Arabian Sea. His second son, Daniel, was an assistant counsel to Earl Warren, at the very epicentre of the ongoing political firestorm. His youngest boy, Sam, was out in California with his new wife and baby daughter; if things went wrong troops could soon be marching into that state to restore the Federal writ; while here in England he and Joanne found themselves having to repeatedly defend the indefensible.
“Yes,” Rachel smiled wryly, mischief flickering in her placid eyes. “I have been to America several times.”
In what seemed now like another lifetime she had met and been involved with, intimately in several cases, several members of the current Administration and miscellaneous Congressmen and Senators. Dick White had sent her to Washington after the Suez Crisis for nearly a year; and sent her back again when JFK had beaten Nixon to the White House. Being in America in those days had been fun; without any of the normal dangers of her profession. Returning to old ground in a new role, as oneself, unprotected by an assumed persona was another matter. This time she would be surrounded by potential enemies, by powerful men who had reputations and positions to uphold, men who would not welcome being reminded that their secrets were not their own. But then that was exactly why the new Director General of National Security wanted her in Philadelphia; to remind men who ought to have known better that the past never, ever really goes away.
“Oh?” The Ambassador queried.
“I was not always a spy,” Rachel lied. “There are a lot of old acquaintances I intend to look up in the next few months.”