In the last year a lot of people had just up and left, afraid to live in a big city. Lately, the big cutbacks in the armed forces were beginning to hit a lot of families in Boston, especially some older folk who relied on now frozen military pensions for all their income as prices for basic foodstuffs and commodities crept up. Inflation had been bad just after the war but it was still running at ten to fifteen percent. Wherever one drove in Boston there were abandoned houses, back lots returning to nature, the playgrounds for kids and squatters, increasingly desecrated with graffiti. Personally, she believed it was criminal to just give in the way so many people who ought to have known better had given in since the war.
Joanne made as if to grab her son’s unwieldy kit bag.
He put his hand on her arm.
“It’s heavy, Ma,” he said diplomatically.
Joanne relented and held the door as Junior dragged in his worldly belongings. The big metal trunk only usually came home to Cambridge if her first born was headed off to a new posting. She held onto that thought, without dreaming for a moment of voicing it.
Gretchen Betancourt had moved into the kitchen door and was viewing the homecoming with curious, very thoughtful eyes.
Joanne tried not to smile.
She recollected exactly how taken the young woman had been with Junior the first time they had met, at one of her father’s ‘at homes’ in the hills behind Quincy. That old mansion was gone now, of course, like so much other Massachusetts history, taken by the cataclysm. Gretchen had gone distinctly, unmistakably doe-eyed the moment she was introduced to Junior.
The poor kid had probably been bewildered when her son was completely indifferent — albeit in a charming, gently empathetic way — to her obvious signals of interest.
“Gretchen is hiding out with us for a few days,” Joanne explained.
“Hi,” the other woman said stepping into the lobby. Her brown eyes were wide with pleasure; it was very obvious that she could hardly wait to become reacquainted with Joanne’s dashing naval officer son.
Joanne sighed.
Gretchen was a clever girl. Hopefully, Junior would let her down gently when she worked out that she was completely wasting her time.
Chapter 23
That morning found forty-seven year old Robert Strange ‘Bob’ McNamara, the eighth US Secretary of Defence in a melancholy and more than normally troubled state of mind. Mostly, this was because of what he was learning, little by little, about the bloodbath at Bellingham. If as was likely retaking Bellingham was a sign of what was to come in restoring the Federal Government’s writ across the Great Lakes states and elsewhere in the west, it was now clear that the job could not, should not, and never should have been left in the hands of a state governor. Sitting in his palatial office in the biggest building in the World at the very nexus of what remained of American military might, he was convinced that the President had made a terrible mistake in not permitting him to intervene in the North-West earlier, and in not making the restitution of the rule of law in that sad state an object lesson in National versus State power politics.
Californian born, McNamara had been one of the Whiz Kids who had rebuilt the Ford Motor Company after 1945, serving as Ford’s President before taking over at the Pentagon in 1961 with a remit — if not a blank cheque — to modernize and rationalise the nation’s military machine. Bespectacled, with a banker’s urbanity and a mind that seized on big problems with analytical precision and pragmatic dexterity, he was as universally admired as he was distrusted. He was undoubtedly the most brilliant man ever to have been appointed Secretary of Defence; and the American military establishment had never come to terms with it.
Nobody needed to tell Bob McNamara that the most frightening aspect of the Bellingham affair was that it unequivocally highlighted the limits of the Kennedy Administration’s power. He had warned from the outset that there ‘was no real war dividend’ to be spent, or misspent to appease a mutinous House of Representatives, or a Democratic Party in open rebellion against the so-called ‘Kennedy faction’, or to in some way compensate the American people for the nightmare that many millions of them were still living through in the areas around the dead zones that used to be thriving cities, towns and suburbs. To attempt to stave off the folly of the proposed ‘peace dividend’ he had proposed two closely argued and rigorously researched options for a post-war US Military; one, a scaled down model in which the principle task of the armed forces was one of global peacekeeping, and two; a greatly reduced ‘homeland’ defence organisation that capable of defending the North American continent. Both options had involved deep structural cuts and eventually, envisaged military budgets reducing over several years — five to ten years — to approximately sixty percent of the 1961 dollar spend. However, ignoring his stridently expressed objections the Administration had decided to enact his second option not in five to ten years, but in five to ten months. The result had been chaos; precisely as he had predicted. Big quick cuts could only be made by slashing indiscriminately at the front line strength of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, while leaving the bloated command, control, logistical, and procurement structures largely intact creating — in business terms — a huge managerial and back office overhead riddled with and hamstrung by multiple redundancies and replications of function and authority overseeing a rapidly shrinking real front line military capability. Tens of billions of dollars worth of hardware had been mothballed or scrapped, fleets, squadrons and divisions had been disbanded, flooding the North American labour market with new skilled workers whose sudden availability had caused fifteen percent fall in blue collar wages in just the last four months.
All this at a time when inflation was rising and the loss of so many military pay cheques had reduced the Government’s income from tax by over twelve percent, at the same time Federal outgoings to cover new military pensions, tens of thousands of statutory end of service awards and gratuities, and the concomitant hike in new ‘special’ Veterans Association expenditure to a level some eleven times higher than the last complete budget year before the war threatened the viability of the entire 1963-64 Federal Budget. All of which, and more, McNamara had predicted but nobody in the White House had listened.
Moreover, notional ‘peace dividend’ savings had already been removed from the forthcoming defence budget and redirected to Federal Emergency Management and Relief Budgets held by and controlled by several other government departments, including Interior, Labour and in a special Treasury ‘fallback contingency reserve’. The effect of these ‘technical forward accounting adjustments’ left huge holes in even the reduced Pentagon budget for 1964-65. In effect as of 1st April 1964 he had no idea — within tens of billions of dollars — how much money he had to play with and therefore, no idea what ‘defences’ the United States of America would, or could afford after that date. It was chaos!