For Bismarck read the USS Enterprise; for the Hood and the Prince of Wales read Ark Royal and Victorious.
HMS Dreadnought might already be gone.
The darkness was descending upon them all.
Chapter 40
“Premier Heath,” Bobby Kennedy began, clasping Edward Heath’s hand, “I must ask for your understanding in these times.” He released his grip and met the Englishman’s stare with his own, somewhat boyish, intensity. The Attorney General had the natural charm and the winning smile of all of the Kennedy brothers. “The present situation is a thing beyond the experience of any one of us here today; I think we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt, perhaps?”
Standing at the Attorney General’s shoulder Walter Brenckmann thought the President’s brother had got his opening remarks about right. As he’d told countless divorcing clients the main thing was ‘to stop digging before the hole gets too deep to climb out of’. While he wasn’t entirely convinced the President and the Vice-President had got their heads around the intrinsic wisdom of this concept; at least Bobby Kennedy was running with the ball.
The former Boston lawyer said nothing.
He and the Attorney General were alone in an annexe to the Base Commander’s office with the British Prime Minister, his Foreign Secretary, the owlish Tom Harding-Grayson, and the restless, suspicious-eyed Minister of Information, Iain Macleod. Edward Heath was the tallest man in the room, although a little thinner in person than the pictures of the well-built man in his pre-war CIA dossier.
The five men weren’t standing on ceremony; there simply weren’t enough chairs in the room.
Tom Harding-Grayson touched Edward Heath’s arm.
“If I may, Prime Minister,” he suggested. In the years before the October War his brilliant career, and subsequently his marriage and some small part of his sanity, had foundered on the rocks of a British foreign policy which he was convinced was based on a fallacy. Specifically, the fallacy of the so-call special relationship with America. The specialness of that unwritten compact was always a mischievous thing liable to the capricious whims of the senior party. It had begun as a personal tryst between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, staggered on through the Second World War, and faltered when the United States went it alone with the development of nuclear weapons after 1945. With onset of the Cold War, the crisis over Berlin in 1948 and the start of the Korean War in 1950, the specialness of the bonds between the old country and its mighty former colonies was refurbished, only to be very nearly completely derailed by the Suez debacle of late 1956. The 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement marked a rapprochement based on the personal chemistry between Dwight Eisenhower and Harold MacMillan, rather than any recognition of the vital national interests of the old and waning global superpower, and the new Romans. The special relationship that emerged from the Eisenhower-MacMillan Axis was a fragile thing, not so much a grand alliance as a papering over of the cracks spreading across the geopolitical map of the changing World order. When all was said and done a special relationship that was totally reliant on the close personal relationships between the then President, Dwight Eisenhower and his old wartime friend, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, and several senior Royal Navy and US Navy admirals, was a profoundly insubstantial scaffold upon which to build an impregnable castle keep. Tom Harding-Grayson’s career had disintegrated when eventually, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan and his complacent — and in some cases inbred and doltish confederates — had wearied of being constantly told the truth. Emperors rarely take kindly to be reminded that they forgot to dress that morning. The special relationship was a chimera. Its specialness was entirely dependent on the perception of his nation’s vital strategic needs by the incumbent — at any given moment — of the White House. Inevitably, when the status quo of the Eisenhower years dissolved into the dazzling hopes of the Kennedy Administration the special relationship came to mean one thing in Washington, and another in London. Therein, lay the seeds of disaster. The Foreign Secretary sighed: “I think the time has come to speak frankly with our friends.”
Edward Heath nodded, and stepped aside.
Bobby Kennedy viewed the dapper, wiry man in his fifties with interest, struck by the grace with which the Prime Minister had deferred to his Foreign Minister.
“Unlike the majority of my colleagues in the Foreign Office I always recognised that in the heat of the moment that an American President wouldn’t hesitate to sell us down the river. However, please don’t think I say that in a censorious or a pejorative way. In your brother’s position, I might have done exactly what he did.”
“Jack did what…”
“I’m sure he did what he thought was the right thing for all the right reasons, Mr Kennedy,” Tom Harding-Grayson conceded. “However, if civilisation is to flourish in the World in the future, everybody needs to stop moralising and face up to the new realities. The United States must decide if it is to be the grain basket of the World and the arsenal of democracy as it was in the Second World War, or if it is to worship the idol of some kind of global Pax Americana.”
“We have more pressing concerns at the present,” Bobby Kennedy said tersely.
“Ah, yes. Red Dawn. I suspect that most of the ‘rebels’ in your country have never heard of Red Dawn and would decry it, and its objectives if they had. Oh, I don’t doubt members of the Red Dawn movement will have had a hand in recent events, but what’s going on out there on the streets of your capital, Mr Attorney General isn’t wholly, or mainly the work of Red Dawn. What’s going on out there is rather more to do with the forces you unleashed in October last year and your Administration’s wilful failure to address the aftermath. Red Dawn might have been the guiding hand behind the attacks on Balmoral, our ships off Spain and the sneak attack on Malta,” Tom Harding-Grayson’s voice had acquired a hard, cutting edge, “but those atrocities were carried out with and by the connivance of patriotic American citizens who honestly believed they were carrying out the orders of their President.”
“There is no evidence…”
“We brought copies of the gun camera film from Malta, Mr Attorney General. What else do you want? Pieces of the 100th Bomb Group B-52 that crashed on the island of Gozo?”
Bobby Kennedy held up his hands.
“Since we’re being frank with each other,” he retorted, “as friends may sometimes be, one with the other,” he added, slowing himself down before he was drawn into saying something rash. “The United States will make good on all those promises of assistance to the United Kingdom currently deferred by Congressional order. We can discuss what this means in detail in due course but suffice to say the President will issue executive orders to ensure that food, fuel, medical and other strategic industrial commodities will be made available to the United Kingdom commencing at the earliest possible date.” The Attorney General looked around the circle of faces trying to gauge the mood of the members of the British delegation. “I realise that the most important thing in any friendship is trust, and that trust between our two nations is a thing that will have to be re-established between us. Please believe me when I say that it is this country’s most fervent wish to live in peace with the perilously small family of democratic nations that remain on this planet.”