But that had not happened; not least because the British had retained control of the Abadan oil fields and refinery complex in Iran, and despite the closure of the Suez Canal to its ships after the October War the UKIEA had succeeded in maintaining an — albeit much reduced from pre-war levels — conveyor belt of tankers between the Persian Gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope all the way back to the British Isles. With the availability of more tankers once Operation Manna had brought dozens of British registered tankers home, sooner or later the oil from Abadan would become the currency with which the UKIEA started to repay its debts to its Commonwealth allies. By the spring the United Kingdom would still be in a very bad place but it might not be quite the starving, fuel-starved desperate economic and humanitarian basket case that everybody in the Administrations seemed to think it had been the last thirteen months
Westmoreland was not alone in thinking that the Kennedy Administration’s ongoing post-war inertia, complacency and plain wrong-headedness was worse than infantile. To his mind it was naive and potentially very dangerous. Not only had the Administration failed to mend bridges with the British, or at a very minimum, tied their former allies back into a working military and economic alliance, but the Administration had singularly failed to begin the reconstruction of America’s bombed cities, and by inaction critically weakened the grip of the Federal Government in many areas of the country. Apart from in Central and Southern America where it already had numerous pre-war economically and militarily obedient clients, the Administration had systematically undermined and in some places, comprehensively torpedoed US relations with most if not all its pre-war global allies. Moreover, like all vicious circles, the situation was getting worse fast.
Westmoreland frowned at his boss.
McNamara arched a curious eyebrow.
“You’re giving me that look again, Westy,” he observed glumly.
Westmoreland almost choked on what he said next.
“Do the people in the White House understand that millions of people are going to starve in the British Isles this winter if those Operation Manna convoys don’t get through, Mr Secretary?”
Robert McNamara did not respond.
Westmoreland continued: “I apologise if you find my next question offensive, sir. But what exactly do you and other senior Cabinet members think the Royal Navy will do if the Enterprise Battle Group interferes with the free passage of those convoys?”
“That won’t happen.”
Westmoreland tried not to roll his eyes in exasperation.
“Mr Secretary,” he said softly, “isn’t that what we all believed before the Cuban Missiles Crisis turned into World War III?”
Chapter 24
The Mayor of San Francisco held the telephone to his head for a moment after Governor Brown put down the handset at the other end of the connection in Sacramento. Publicly, the two men were political adversaries; privately, in the last year the Republican city mayor and the Democrat state governor had worked hand in glove, two men with a common purpose who shared exactly the same fundamental common values. Thirteen months ago the conversation he had just had with Pat Brown would never have happened, in fact he probably would not have taken the call and if he had, the exchange would have been short and not particularly sweet. But that was then and this was now. The West Coast States either worked together or eventually, it was likely they might fall together. Republican and Democrat governors and mayors, elected officers at every level, and most federally elected congressmen and senators in California, Oregon and Washington State had formed a united front to protect their people.
Fifty-five year old George Christopher, the thirty-fourth Mayor of San Francisco heaved himself to his feet and went to the door to the ante room of his Mayoral Office.
“When Miss Miranda Sullivan arrives from the Governor’s Office you can show her straight in,” he directed, his voice a little distracted. Stepping back into his office he moved to the window and gazed out onto the sunlit plaza several floors beneath his feet. City Hall was a great Beaux-Arts building whose proportions matched those of many state capitols. Erected between 1913 and 1915 to replace the previous City Hall, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, on a completely new and much larger site two blocks away from where its forerunner had stood, the cupola of San Francisco City Hall was forty-two feet higher than that of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. From a vantage point high in City Hall a man could be forgiven for thinking that he was the master, if not perhaps of everything he beheld, but of a substantial part of the vista before him. However, the man who had been Mayor of the greatest city on the West Coast since 1956 had never, ever, made that mistake.
Born George Christophes in Greece, the future Mayor of San Francisco’s parents had brought him to America in 1910 at the age of two. He had grown up in the South Market Street area of the city, Greektown. Raised in a hard school he had become his family’s breadwinner at the age of fourteen when his father died. Later he had resumed his interrupted education, studying for a degree in accounting at the Golden Gate College, and eventually he had prospered, albeit it modestly. A practical man used to long hours and hard work, attentive to detail and aware that nothing that was worth doing was easy, he had first stood — unsuccessfully — for Mayor in 1951. Elected in 1955 he had been a man on a mission. By then George Christophes had become George Christopher as befitted a man who — although he never forgot his Greek-American roots — viewed the American Dream not through romantic rose-tinted lenses but from the perspective of a life characterised by solid, practical achievement. In the mid-fifties the city had badly needed a good bookkeeper and that was what it had got in the shape of its new Mayor, an expert bean counter with the organisational and emotional intelligence essential to improve the lot of the ordinary man and woman on the streets of the great port.
It was Christopher’s Administration that was responsible for bringing the New York Giants baseball team to the city in 1958 — where they rebranded as the San Francisco Giants — and in finding the funding to build Candlestick Park on derelict land at Candlestick Point. Under his mayoralty large districts of the city, including neighbourhoods neglected since the 1930s had been redeveloped, and slums eliminated, often in the face of determined opposition from vested interest groups and communities defending appalling living standards in the name of the preservation of ‘cultural integrity’. On the Bay shoreline the Embarcadero Center and the Golden Gateway projects had necessitated the removal of the historic wholesale market to Alemany. Urban renewal in the Japantown and Fillmore districts, the building of the new Hall of Justice and the new Ferry Building had also been intensely controversial decisions but in Christopher’s vision for the city, each was a vital long-term investment in the future of San Francisco.
Perversely, nothing had so discredited him with one highly vocal section of his constituency than the recent demolition of the Fox Theatre on Market Street and Polk Street. Just after the October War the owners had offered the building to the city for a ‘bargain’ million dollars. He had rejected the ‘offer’ out of hand. At a time when George Christopher was preoccupied with funding the building and rebuilding of schools and firehouses, and struggling to buttress the city’s finances against the strains imposed by accommodating a sudden influx of refugees pouring into the city with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, even if he had had a spare million bucks he would not have wasted it on an old movie house that had not paid its way in years.