He reflected for a few seconds.
He asked himself if the California Civil Rights Forum was no more than a sop, a reluctant gesture from a beleaguered state administration. Governor Brown was a decent man, of that he had no doubt. But he was also a practical politician who knew that everything that was worth doing had its price. What exactly was the signal that Governor Brown was sending the NAACP and the rest of the civil rights movement by appointing a mere slip of a girl to be his office’s public face of the CCRF?
Therein lay the conundrum.
For all that Miranda Sullivan was just that — a slip of a girl — she was self-evidently shrewd and driven, not to mention brave, and self-evidently came with none of the normal white middle class hang ups about the color of a man or woman’s skin; which was still, sadly, a very rare thing in California. And of course one only had to take one look at the kid to know that she had inherited the naturally telegenic looks of her film star parents; if nothing else she would one heck of a poster girl for the CCRF!
“Yes,” he confirmed, coming to what he felt in his bones was a turning point in his Presidency of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, “starting all over again works just fine for me, Miss Sullivan.”
“Miranda,” the slip of a girl replied.
She looked around the faces of the NAACP members crushed together into the small, stuffy room.
“Unless anybody’s got any objections I think we should be as informal as possible in our dealings with each other. We are all in this together.” She smiled wryly. “In fact if we are not all in this together we might as well give up now!”
Chapter 25
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun since July 1960 the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center had not been informed of the purpose of the Vice-President’s visit — no more than a flying stopover — to Huntsville or why he specifically wanted to speak to him while the flagship of the presidential fleet of jetliners, SAM 26000 a specially customized long-range VC-137C Boeing 707, was on the ground being refuelled.
Wernher von Braun was not a man who cared for surprises like the phone call he had received less than an hour ago summoning him to the old Redstone Arsenal Air Base. For an aircraft the size of a Boeing 707 the runway parameters of the old Army Air Force test facility were marginal and the field was rarely used by large modern jet aircraft; so what was so important that Lyndon Johnson was detouring out here into the boondocks at such short notice?
The former Director of the Peenemunde Research Center and the chief designer of the V-2 rocket took some small comfort from knowing from his experience of his eighteen years in the United States, that whatever was going on was probably not going to involve a show trial and a summary execution. Although his American friends would never have suspected as much, it had taken him many, many years to put those sort of terrors out of mind in his dealings with his adoptive countrymen. Back in Hitler’s Germany a man’s life often hung suspended by a thread; one never knew when a gloved hand was likely to grip one’s shoulder, the denouncements would begin and the wrath or offended dignity of some Party or SS bigwig would sign a man’s death warrant.
The Americans had asked him why he had gone along with Hitler and Himmler. He had tried to explain but eventually he had ducked the questions. The victorious Western Allies into whose hands he had gone to great lengths to fall in the spring of 1945 simply did not understand the true nature of the evil that they had been fighting. They discovered the concentration camps, the slave workers reduced to human skeletons but still they did not really understand. Not going along with Hitler was a death sentence. Not going along meant one’s entire extended family would be sent to the camps, that one would be tortured, or hung by the neck from a rafter with piano wire.
Operation Paperclip, the American exercise to transport hundreds of Germany’s surviving top scientists and where possible, their families to the United States — effectively removing every man from the reach of the ongoing war crimes tribunals and the rigors of the de-Nazification program — had been for Wernher von Braun like being given back his life. Eventually, one hundred and twenty-seven of his team had been brought to America and contracted to the US Army; all but one of his technical directors at the Marshall Space Flight Center was an old hand from either Peenemunde or the latter V-2 development program at Blizna in what post-war became southern Poland. Nordhausen hung over most of their heads, even now; he tried not to think much about the V-2 assembly factory in the Harz Mountains where thousands of slave workers had been starved, beaten and worked to death in the final months of the European war. People still occasionally pointed the finger at him even if few actually had the courage or the inclination to speak of it; Nordhausen was an SS factory and even if he had known what was going on there he could have done very little about it. Other, that was, than to earn Heinrich Himmler’s personal displeasure and how many men in London or Washington or anywhere else in the civilised world could honestly claim that they would have risked antagonising the Head of the SS had they actually been in his situation. Besides, in those days he had been a patriotic German fighting to save his country!
However, on days like this the man who considered himself to be the World’s leading living rocket scientist — Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, his Soviet counterpart had in all likelihood perished in the October War — was beset with a raft of troubling, disconcerting insecurities which he had long ago learned to conceal from his public. In fact, an observer watching him now would interpret his expression and general demeanour as being those of a man who was convinced he had been called away from his work on what he believed to be a fool’s errand.
He watched the big jet approach.
Only the best Air Force pilots got within a hundred miles of any of the Presidential jets; they said that winning a seat at the controls of SAM 26000 was an American military pilot’s equivalent of going to Heaven and personally being welcomed at the Pearly Gates by a smiling St Peter.
The jetliner landed gently without the usual puff of smoke from the main undercarriage wheels and came to a halt some two hundred yards before the end of the runway without any squealing of brakes. Then the aircraft turned and taxied directly to its appointed hardstand.
Von Braun could hardly suppress a smile.
He had been working long enough with the best Air Force pilots, test pilots, hot shot top guns and guys who had demonstrated, time and again, the ‘right stuff’ to know that whoever was at the controls of SAM 26000 today had an overdose of that indefinable ‘right stuff’.
Von Braun marched up the steps to the forward port forward door of the aircraft as soon as it opened. A big man with an impressive physical presence, the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center puffed out his chest and girded his resolve to fight his corner.
He was a little surprised to be greeted by the Vice-President in person at the doorway.
“Good to see you again, Mister Director,” the tall Texan drawled, smiling that vaguely mischievous, knowing smile that tended to indicate he was either in a very good mood or that he was about to outflank an opponent.