The men in the cabin had been drinking coffee.
A tumbler with a generous measure of brandy was put by the newcomer’s hand as he settled in a comfortable chair right next to the fire.
Claude Betancourt knew that these men needed him more than he needed them and he was not about to let the moment go unremarked, or ungamed.
“I talked to Earl Warren’s people the other day,” he remarked. “They say they won’t be in any kind of position to get started for a while yet.” He sniffed, picked up his Brandy. “Earl’s got trouble finding people he can trust to fill the key posts in his Commission. I said he ought to bring in people from outside DC. Younger guys and gals,” he smiled, “with no political ties.”
In fact he had already put Daniel Brenckmann’s name forward to fill one of the vacant assistant attorney posts on the Warren Commission. The kid did not know about that yet.
The old man fixed his President with a steely, not unsympathetic scrutiny.
“You understand that Earl Warren could finish you in a day, Jack?”
The younger man nodded. He had only ever known Claude Betancourt as a stern ‘uncle figure’, the guy his father turned to get him out of trouble as he had partied through his reckless youth, and begun his political education in Massachusetts on his return from the Pacific War. He trusted the old man like he was family because in all the ways that mattered, he was family.
“If that happens I will take the fall.”
Claude Betancourt ruminated a moment, wondering if that was the real reason why old Joe Kennedy’s second son had gone along with Nick Katzenbach’s crazy idea for a public inquest into the Cuban Missiles War disaster. Katzenbach was one of the men who had emerged from the Battle of Washington with a heap of credits. Before the rebellion he had been edging towards the periphery of the Administration, ever closer to the exit door, now like Bob McNamara at Defense, Lyndon Johnson and new men like Fulbright, Katzenbach was right next to the President. Recovering from his injuries Bobby Kennedy was restored as US Attorney General but that was just window dressing — the Kennedy boys were back on the road, campaigning in effect — and sooner or later Katzenbach would take over at Justice.
“Don’t be in any rush to look to a fall,” the old man smiled. “Earl Warren won’t launch the ship until he’s good and ready.”
“I won’t try to dodge the bullet, Claude.”
Claude Betancourt believed him. That was very moral, very honourable in one way; dumb in most of the ways that mattered.
“Have we squared things with the Brits?” He asked, adroitly changing the subject.
Prime Minister Thatcher and her entourage had been in Washington for the last few days and the word was that the talking had been, well, brutal. Claude Betancourt half-suspected the other three men in the cabin had sought this interview to grab a respite. The President and Jackie had entertained Margaret Thatcher here at Camp David last night and nobody would say how that had gone which was probably not good news.
“Yes,” Jack Kennedy guffawed, shaking his head. “The Angry Widow doesn’t take any prisoners. She’s as mad as a cat in a sack that we allowed things to go quote ‘so far down the road’ that we almost ended up shooting at each other. Curtis LeMay almost ‘shit a brick’, or that was what he said afterwards, when the Brits told him about their war plans.”
Claude Betancourt raised an eyebrow.
“They’d have bombed our oil fields in Saudi Arabia, waged unrestricted submarine warfare on our shipping in the North Atlantic and if we had attacked the ‘home islands’ they’d have launched their entire V-Bomber Force against targets in New England!”
“They said that?”
“Yes. Part of the deal is full disclosure of current military capabilities and war plans so we can keep our forces separate until such time as we have agreed new and robust standard operating procedures.”
“You know the Party won’t support a reversion to a NATO-type status quo,” the old man warned. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was defunct, the Administration having effectively abandoned its European NATO allies to their fate on the night of the October War. Canada had remained — albeit sulkily — onboard what was left of the alliance, otherwise there was no NATO, nor realistically could there ever be again. This troubled Claude Betancourt, especially when he heard loose talk about the Administration offering the British ‘NATO-type’ security guarantees, renewed intelligence and technology exchanges, and some kind of modern ‘lend-lease’ deal covering an apparently open-ended aide program.
“The Party needs to get real, Claude,” Lyndon Johnson growled.
Claude Betancourt would defer to the tall Texan on any purely political matter. However, in this case the problem was not purely political. The American people — if there was such a thing these days — wanted nothing to do with further foreign entanglements. The country was looking inward and its gaze would not easily be turned outward again.
“We need not to go to war again,” he countered. “That’s not the same thing. Democrats and Republicans stopped fighting each other months ago; whichever side of the House you sit the real problem at the next election is going to be state’s rights and secessionist candidates who don’t give a shit about what’s going on in the outside world.”
J. William Fulbright scowled.
“That’s cynical, Claude.”
“No, that’s just calling a spade a spade, Bill. If we are serious about wanting there to still be a Democratic Party after the elections in November we need to retrench. The mood in the country is ‘America First’ and whether we like it or not that’s the way we have to go. If that’s not what the British want to hear; too bad. If Jack has to string this Thatcher woman along until she works out that we’re never, ever going to go back to the way things were before the war that’s what he’s going to have to do! Hell, what do we need with NATO? The Brits are our only major military rivals and the last thing they want to do is pick a fight with us?”
The atmosphere in the cabin was uneasy; each man thinking variously dark thoughts.
“Look, Bill,” the older man went on, “I can’t speak to the way your people in Arkansas look at the rest of the world,” he snorted, “if the guy in the street in Little Rock thinks about the outside world at all, but over here in the East most people are scared of what lies the other side of the Atlantic and what could still lie on the other side of the Arctic. Jack and Bobby may well be able to re-connect with the Party base but that’s not going to banish all fear and it certainly isn’t going to keep the House of Representatives in line. I get it that there are things you have to say to the British to keep them sweet; but the four of us in this room know damned well that we’re not about to send GIs back to Western Europe or anyplace else to back up the Brits. The worst thing we could do now is allow ourselves to be suckered in to a position where we have to explain to the American people why we’ve got ourselves involved in somebody else’s foreign war. That,” he observed, looking to the President, “is exactly what is liable to happen if, for example, we send the Navy back to the Mediterranean.”
Jack Kennedy ruminated on this before a frown began to spread across his handsome face. He had hoped he was not ever going to have this conversation with a man that he had to listen to. He had hoped that the old man would be content to let the demarcation lines between what was, and what was not the altered policy of the Administration towards the United Kingdom remained comfortably blurred. But no, typically, he had cut straight to the heart of the matter.