Chapter 39
Nicholas de Belleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach had ridden out to Andrews Field from the temporary Department of Justice Building within the Washington Navy Yard complex with his nominal boss, the United States Attorney General. The department’s move to Philadelphia — Justice, alongside the Departments of the Interior and the Treasury were in the first tranche of relocations — had already started and everything was chaos back in ‘the office’, so the circuitous drive out to Prince George’s County was a good opportunity to ‘keep in touch’.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy still limped clumsily from the leg wound he had incurred in the shooting at the White House in which British Prime Minister Edward Heath had been assassinated; otherwise, he felt a new man. The Battle of Washington had been a cathartic experience, a revelation of a kind to those in the Administration of a religious or spiritual bent, and he had emerged from a personal slough of despond with new energy and a new belief in what must be done. Now and then it irked him a little that the man who had proposed — perhaps, mandated — exactly what must be done was his former bête noire Lyndon Baines Johnson but when all was said and done, he recognized that the former ringmaster of Capitol Hill was right. The time for half-measures was gone; either they stumbled to an inevitable fall in the coming November’s Presidential elections or they, the Administration, got its collective thumb out of its arse and did what it knew to be the right thing.
To Bobby Kennedy’s mind the strangest thing was that what made it all the more palatable was that LBJ’s analysis of ‘the right thing to do’, was actually not a million miles away from what he and Jack had really wanted to do all along but had lacked the courage and frankly, the moral fibre, to do before the October War. Nonetheless, many senior insiders had railed against the President’s volte-face; with many muttering that ‘nobody had voted for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket to bring in socialism by the back door’.
When the hard core ‘Southern Democratic’ wing of the Party woke up, smelled the coffee and belatedly realized how radically the Administration’s civil rights and social policy had stepped to the left, and that Jack had — as near as dammit — embraced the new internationalism of his recently appointed Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright, there would be Hell to pay.
It said everything about his new mood that so far as the President’s younger brother was concerned that day could not come soon enough.
Nick Katzenbach was less preoccupied with the fights to come and rather more engaged with the mechanics of the removal of the battered rump of the Department of Justice to its new home in Philadelphia. While he had reverted to his former role as United States Deputy Attorney General at the beginning of the week, in reality he remained the de facto Attorney General with full powers to act in Bobby’s name. The arrangement suited both men; Katzenbach was a lawyer and manager, the President’s brother was a man of the people and together they had enthusiastically signed up — philosophically if not literally, in blood — to what White House insiders were already calling ‘the way ahead’.
Whatever happened Bobby Kennedy was not going to be spending much time behind his desk at the Department of Justice between now and whatever happened in November. In fact Katzenbach tacitly assumed that Jack Kennedy would run — although there would be no announcement for several weeks yet — for a second term and that Bobby would be his campaign manager, although nobody in the Administration believed he could actually win. For that matter nobody really knew what was in the President’s mind.
In fact, Katzenbach’s assumption that he would run in November was based simply on his hunch that his old friend felt duty bound to ‘face the people’ to account for his decisions on the night of the October War. People too readily forgot that the former playboy rich kid who had barnstormed and partied his way to the White House was, at one level, a cripplingly moral man who would never make his peace with what he had had to do that night. The Warren Commission might destroy the Administration within hours of its first sitting sometime in the spring; or Jack Kennedy might survive until the General Election in November. For better or worse either way the American people would have the last word on the fate of their President and no man was more at peace with that than Jack Kennedy. However, in the meantime the Administration would govern and even if it was a hopeless dream, embark upon the great project which ought to have dominated its every breath since January 1961 but which somehow, it had mislaid in all the background noise over the Bay of Pigs, the infighting over policy in South East Asia, peacekeeping between India and China in the months leading up to the Cuban Missiles War, smoothing over differences with the European allies, the Berlin Wall crisis, the tragic comedy of errors in its dealings with the Soviets over Cuba, and a visceral fear of doing anything which risked exacerbating the simmering racial tensions in the American deep south.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Washington when the main thrust of the Administration’s policy had to be on the rebuilding of the fabric of government and the security of the homeland; it seemed a little quixotic to be launching a campaign to transform the whole social and political geography of a country still reeling from the grievous wounds suffered in the October War.
And of course, it was quixotic but then if the moment for change was not now, then when?
Ever the pragmatist Nick Katzenbach drew enormous comfort from the knowledge that the Administration, having realized that it was in a deep hole, had finally stopped digging.
“I expected the British to play hard ball,” he observed as the limousine, one of the new Chrysler Presidential armoured cars, and its escorting convoy swept down empty streets. Two-thirds of the population of DC had been evacuated or had decamped in the weeks since the rebellion. Large areas, whole neighbourhoods were gutted, wrecked and while most of the main thoroughfares had been cleared by the Corps of Engineers, Washington was a ghost town patrolled by Marines, National Guardsmen and heavily armed MPs. There was still looting in the ruins, low-level rioting randomly erupted and new fires were set most nights somewhere in the city. Much of the surrounding countryside was a lawless place patrolled by vigilantes. General Shoup, the Military Governor of the District of Columbia and the designated twenty-five mile ‘corridor’ around it, was systematically bringing districts back under control but his priority was the security of what remained of the ‘Federal Estate’, the safety of government and other ‘vital’ services, hospitals, transportation links and infrastructure, feeding the survivors and ‘cleansing’ the city of the last ‘hold out’ rebels. That senior Administration members could still only move about DC in armoured limousines with machine-gun toting escorts — over a month after the main fighting had ended — spoke eloquently to the chaos which persisted and the fundamental soundness of the decision to transfer the Federal Government to Philadelphia.
Bobby Kennedy was sitting with his back to the driver. He nodded thoughtfully towards Katzenbach directly opposite him in the right hand back seat. Each man had a senior staffer at his elbow, neither of whom had said a word thus far during the journey.
“Fulbright called it right,” he conceded. He and the new Secretary of State were antipathetic characters and it did not help that in the run up to the Cuban Missiles War, he and Fulbright’s predecessor, Dean Rusk, had been the men trying to defuse the situation — ultimately unsuccessfully — with the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Everybody said that if Fulbright had been running those talks that there might not even have been a Cuban Missiles Crisis. Nick Katzenbach had told Bobby Kennedy that was ‘nonsense’; his elder brother had used much stronger language. Nevertheless, Bobby knew that the question would never, ever go away. “He said the Brits just wanted to go back to the way they thought things stood the day before the war. He was right.”