After the events of the previous month nobody in the Administration was under any illusion that anybody anywhere was safe in the messed up brave new post-October War World. There were still those who claimed — perhaps, they even believed it — that the war had been some kind of catastrophically disguised blessing in disguise. The argument went something like: if the war had happened in say, ten years time, both sides would have accumulated such huge thermonuclear arsenals that the whole World would have been consumed by the atomic fires. From which others concluded: at least this way the greater proportion of humanity had lived through the holocaust. Jack Kennedy didn’t subscribe to that school of thought. He had done what he had thought was right that evening in late October fourteen months ago. He would live with the guilt and pain of it for the rest of his life and surely be damned to eternal perdition in the afterlife, if such a thing really existed. Among other things his belief in a loving, merciful God had died that night in October 1962 when the ICBMs flew and Curtis LeMay’s B-52s had burnt and blasted their way across the Soviet hinterlands. But that was then and this was now; and against all rational expectations the World was a no less frightening place. A month ago there had almost been another war. Yes, another war that the USA would have surely won; but at what price? What was victory worth if afterwards one was utterly friendless?
Not that Jack Kennedy was going to fall into the trap of thinking Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the Premier of the newly formed Unity Administration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was ever going to be his best friend, let alone soul mate in the crusade to build a new World out of the ashes of the old that was the fond dream of so many Americans.
The President of the United States of America nodded respectfully to the attractive thirty-eight year old widowed mother of twins, whom most of her own people proudly called the ‘Angry Widow’, as he cautiously got to his feet and approached the lectern on the raised dais facing directly down the length of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The last three days had been sorely trying.
The Angry Widow was the hardest-nosed negotiator he’d ever sat across a table from; persuading Edgar J Hoover — whom he detested, the feeling was mutual — to compel his agents to wear tuxedos and top hats would have been easier than attempting to make the new British Prime Minister see sense. Every reasonable, closely argued proposition would be greeted with a blue-eyed, steely stare and then she’d inform her interlocutor, often stridently, and invariably at great length, exactly why it was a really bad idea and she wasn’t going to have anything to do with it any time soon. Then, just when Jack Kennedy, or his younger brother Bobby, or Bob McNamara, or James William Fulbright, the new Secretary of State was on the verge of bursting a blood vessel the woman would smile a dazzlingly seraphic smile, her chilly azure eyes would twinkle, and she’d default to a position which was broadly consistent with: ‘now, shall we discuss how we can bridge our differences rather than continue at cross purposes?’
Surrounding the VIPs on the exposed steps of the battle-scarred Capitol Building, British and American Marines fingered the trigger guards of their automatic weapons. Everywhere Margaret Thatcher and her entourage went hard-faced members of the Special Boat Squadron the elite Special Forces cadre of the Royal Marines went ahead, securing the ground. Royal Marines stood sentinel outside conference room doors and had formed an impenetrable cordon around the British compound at Andrews Air Force Base. The Angry Widow’s personal Royal Marine bodyguard, some eighty strong were uniformly indifferent to the offence they caused to the Secret Service or the specially selected Presidential Guard drawn from the ranks of the 2nd Marine Division. After the assassination of Prime Minister Edward Heath in the Oval Office in December, the British would never again trust anybody else to watch over the safety of their leaders.
Jack Kennedy stepped to the dais. He tried to ignore the bitter wind plucking at his coat. The cold was trying to burrow into the marrow of his bones and this was one of those occasions when the President of the United States of America simply could not allow himself to show the slightest sign of weakness, either of physique or of spirit.
His younger brother Bobby, the Attorney General, said that there were over half-a-million people on Pennsylvania Avenue.
They’d strung speakers all the way down to the 7th Street intersection just so everybody who had come out in the winter weather could actually hear what he said. Sometimes words really mattered; and this was the first day of a new age. The World’s two remaining nuclear superpowers had become disconnected, strangers one to the other and as a result they’d almost stepped over the edge. They had been within hours of falling into a bottomless black abyss. Today, while there was much to rue, there was a great deal more to celebrate. For today at least Red Dawn and the clear and present danger it might still present to the two remaining bastions of global democracy could be set to one side. Today was a day for hope.
“My fellow Americans,” Jack Kennedy began, his voice trembling a little. He looked — with a theatrical flourish for the benefit of the TV cameras which were broadcasting the ceremony live across the whole North American continent — over his shoulder towards the British delegation, “our newfound friends,” a solemn hesitation, “our rediscovered friends, and to all those in the World who might seek to do us ill,” he went on, his tone filling with authority, “today we begin in earnest the long journey towards building a World fit for our children to inherit.”
Margaret Thatcher had found it hard to be as angry after she had met President Kennedy as she had been with him before that first, face to face encounter. It wasn’t just the man’s charm — which could be of the overwhelming kind — or the way he had a knack of looking one in the eye and inclining his head that convinced one that you and only you were in that moment the absolute centre of his universe. No, it was subtler than that. Before that first meeting it had never occurred to her that fourteen months after the cataclysm, John Fitzgerald Kennedy still agonised with his conscience over the decisions he’d made that October day in 1962. She had discovered that day that the one person in the World who would never forgive him for the decisions he’d taken in October 1962, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He had done what he thought was right; but that was no consolation. Moreover, meeting General Curtis LeMay, whom she had previously held every bit as culpable for the disaster as his President, had subtly undermined the raft of other assumptions underpinning her anger. In the same way the President hadn’t been quite the man she’d believed him to be the legendary Air Force General had turned out to be, self-evidently, a much more complicated beast.
The Angry Widow sat unmoving as the President launched into his rallying cry for two peoples, the cold pinching her face. Her closest associates had been against her travelling to America; after all, the original agreement had been that the President would come to England. She’d coyly reminded them of Harold MacMillan’s famous remark when asked what were the biggest problems in politics: he’d answered, ‘events, dear boy. Events!’ America needed its President in Washington right now and despite her emotional disinclination to offer the man who was still the leader of the Free World undue succour, a weak and divided America possibly sliding towards civil war, was the last thing any British Prime Minister wanted or needed. Thus, Margaret Thatcher had determined that she would go to America and if it was necessary, do her utmost to inject a little steel into the spine of her ‘allies’.