Warsaw Concerto, page 41
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Until the first movies of the Tempelhof parade and the Red Army ‘reconquering Checkpoint Charlie’ surfaced, the US Administration had been happy to kick the poisoned chalice of new ‘foreign adventures’ into the long grass. The British had bitten off more than they could chew long before the Gulf War of 1964, now they were probably – notwithstanding Dobrynin tended to distrust the more hysterical reports he received about the inevitable breakdown of the United Kingdom’s military-industrial complex – close to breaking point. The Americans must know that, too. And yet thus far the White House had refused to discuss the possibility of sending US GIs to Europe. Officially, that was a horse that had bolted and the stable gate was triple-locked.
Well, thanks to those bloody movies – God in Heaven there was a rumour going around DC that the full-length, feature version of the film from which the propaganda pieces had been culled, which was currently showing in cinemas in the Soviet Union, was actually called ‘Warsaw Concerto’ – Congress, the liberal press, Walter Kronkite and his friends on TV, were asking Nixon not if but when, he proposed to send the Marines to France to guard the Rhine!
Very nearly overnight, the whole dynamic had altered.
WHY AREN’T OUR BOYS IN BERLIN?
That was the sort of headline which appeared on daily newspapers across the North American continent on each and every, otherwise quiet news day.
Cynics claimed that Nixon was not going to listen to British pleas for help until after the forthcoming United Nations get together on the West Coast. The White House wanted that Thatcher woman to renege on her country’s Hong Kong Treaty promises to the Chinese, if he announced he was sending troops to Europe now, what reason would she have to sell out the People’s Republic?
Perhaps, the British would betray the Chinese. Perhaps, not. Warsaw Concerto might have been specifically designed to marginalise all such considerations.
Things had changed so fast in the last month that it was common to hear junior and mid-ranking Nixon Administration staffers dismissing every new revelation about the Warwick Hotel Scandal as quote: ‘More Commie-inspired muck-raking,’ or to accuse the questioner of ‘playing the Sverdlovsk Kremlin’s dirty little game!’
Of course, Anatoly Dobrynin had more sense than to actually say any of this to Vasili Kuznetsov, whom he tacitly assumed wholly shared his assessment. Neither of them had got where they were – and avoided getting themselves and their families put up against a wall and shot – by telling their masters the unadorned truth, let alone opening their hearts to them. Significantly, while he was in Washington, the older diplomat had been instructed to ‘accompany’ Dobrynin if, and when, he had contacts with US officials.
Dobrynin did not take this personally, or in any way to heart. It was not that the members of the Troika did not trust their Ambassador: they mistrusted everybody.
Inevitably, Kuznetsov’s arrival in Washington had prompted this latest summons to the Main State Building. President Nixon had spoken to the White House press corps last night, deflecting the outrage of the American media by heaping scorn on the ‘renewed Soviet obsession with reviving Cold War tensions.’
Dobrynin’s fear today, was that Henry Cabot Lodge, the US Secretary of State was going to tell him a lot of the things Kuznetsov had so recently confirmed. The problem was that he did not believe, for a single minute, that Kuznetsov himself knew the half of what those idiots in Sverdlovsk were up to!
The Soviet Ambassador’s mood was eerily reminiscent of that when the Cuban Missiles Crisis suddenly erupted in mid-October 1962 and he, the man on the spot, had been completely in the dark about…everything. It still tortured him that if only the Red Navy and the people around Khrushchev in the Kremlin had had their wits about them, he, Bobby Kennedy and Dean Rusk might still have patched up something short of war…
If he ever got the dignity of a grave stone, he hoped that was what they were going to write on it. More likely, his grave would never be marked, his passing noted as a very minor footnote to history: ‘The poor fellow was called back to Russia and he was never heard, or seen again…’
What with one thing and another it was a miracle that so few members of the Soviet diplomatic corps had defected since the Cuban Missiles War; not that this made much difference because the people back home automatically assumed that anybody who had survived abroad this long must be a traitor.
Nevertheless, appearances had to be maintained.
At least the US Government had had the decency to put him under house arrest after the October War, if they had not done that - albeit a little apologetically, he, his wife Irina and daughter Yelena had been treated with no little courtesy and consideration, basically wanting for nothing in their secluded Connecticut retreat – the people back home would have called him back to the USSR long ago.
Khrushchev had sent him to Washington in the first place not because he was an ‘America expert’, which he was, leastways in comparison with his peers in the Foreign Ministry, but because he was a big man with a presence to match, and a reputation for steely ruthlessness. When he cut up rough people tended to want to get out of the room in a hurry. The trouble was that the Motherland had never had any need for a Marxist-Leninist John Wayne character in DC. What use was an incarnation of a bad-tempered Russian bear when the other side had a bear trap capable of biting one’s head off?
Dobryinin’s reasonableness, his caution, the relationships he had cultivated with members of the Kennedy, Johnson and now the Nixon Administrations, each was another mark against his name in Troika’s black book.
He had made small talk as the borrowed Lincoln – that was another humiliation, having to ask the Americans to provide vehicles for the Embassy car pool – cruised down C Street, approaching its destination.
“The State Department Building is actually the old War Department Building completed in 1941,” he had explained. “It became the State Department Building after the military realised it was not big enough. Consequently, the original building was extended and modified in the period 1956 to 1960. Even now the Main State Building and its later ‘State Department Extension’, is still officially called the ‘War Department Building’.
Dobrynin did not bother telling Kuznetsov that the ‘War Department Building’ had been designed in the Stripped Classical style, incorporating a number of ‘Art Moderne’ elements; the architect had wanted it to look like it was inspired by something he had studied in France or Italy as a young man. Limestone-clad and steel-framed, the building was eight stories high, with two underground levels and to facilitate future expansion – the military had got something right – designed with an asymmetrical footprint. Other than the Pentagon the complex was the biggest office block in DC.
The Executive Offices were on the fifth floor on the eastern side of the old building, and as befitted rooms presented to impress foreign visitors, emissaries and ambassadors, everything was very grand.
Presently, Henry Cabot Lodge junior strolled into the long reception room to greet his two guests.
This part of the building had been badly damaged in the Battle of Washington three years before. Some floors were still mothballed, others undergoing repair and renovation. Over two hundred staffers had died in and around the complex in December 1963 - among them Secretary Dean Rusk, and Under-secretary George Ball – before a company of the 3rd Marines backed up with an ad hoc task force of Washington PD officers, had retaken the burning building the following day.
Dobrynin was a little surprised to discover that Cabot Lodge seemed to be in a good mood, not that he was ever anything less than punctiliously civil. However, today, he seemed…cheerful. Presumably, that had to have something to do with the presence of the man who had accompanied the Secretary of State out into the reception hall.
“You know Ambassador Brenckmann, Anatoly?” Cabot Lodge inquired rhetorically.
Dobrynin nodded to the still dapper, greying man of no more than average height over whom he towered, shook his hand and introduced Vasily Kuznetsov to the man many pundits were saying was a serious candidate for the Democrat ticket in next year’s Presidential Elections.
The Soviet Ambassador did not envy Walter Brenckmann. The Democrat ticket was worthless. He, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, had as much chance of being the next President of the United States as whoever the Democrats put up against Nixon, or Rockefeller, or for that matter, Mickey Mouse, if the Republicans decided to go with a cartoon character in next year’s race!
“Walter,” Cabot Lodge went on, has signed on for another year in England,” he guffawed.
Walter Brenckmann smiled ruefully.
“When my President speaks patriots listen,” he said thoughtfully, focusing hard on the two Russians. “I guess it must be the same for you two gentlemen. When somebody back home jerks your chain, you jump to it?”
It was not said to be wounding, merely to establish that there was at least a modicum of common ground. Whomsoever they served, they were men doing their duty.
“The President must be relieved to have somebody of your standing,” Dobrynin replied, as if, like a bear, testing the air for the scent of prey, “who is so close to the Angry Widow. My superiors worry that, well,” he half-shrugged, “that woman will do something crazy at any moment…”
This seemed to amuse the shorter man.
“Oh, Margaret could do that, Mister Ambassador,” Walter Brenckmann assured him. “Just so you know,” he went on, “don’t go getting carried away with thinking I’d lift a finger to stop her if I knew she’d made up her mind. Trust me, she’d only do something crazy if somebody was crazy enough to push her too far.”
“At the opening ceremony of the United Nations we will protest British imperial interventionism in the affairs of the proletariat of a neighbouring country…”
“Horse manure,” Walter Brenckmann observed, grinning.
Dobrynin smiled involuntarily, remembered himself and became appropriately grim-faced, looking to Cabot Lodge, who shrugged.
“We have such excellent relations with the British these days,” the Secretary of State went on, seemingly at a tangent, “that Walter and Joanne will be spending three or four months stateside in his last year in post in Oxford.”
The Soviet Ambassador raised an eyebrow.
So, the man might actually be running next year…
“We’ve been lucky,” Walter Brenckmann continued, well knowing that the civilities were starting to prey on their guests’ minds. “We only lost our youngest in the war. A thing like that makes you more aware of how important it is to protect the things that really matter.”
Dobrynin was starting to think about Cabot Lodge’s motives for having this man, of all men, waiting for him here, now, this day of all days. Brenckmann had worked for Claude Betancourt, old man Joe Kennedy’s go to discreet, behind the scenes legal fixer. One of his sons had married Betancourt’s favourite daughter, Gretchen. That same son was clerking for Chief Justice Earl Warren, the man leading the team drafting the provisional report of the Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War. Another son was in the Navy, allegedly a man marked out for High Command ten or fifteen years down the line. If that was not impressive, and it was, the man’s youngest son was a multi-millionaire musician who, with Bob Dylan and their travelling ensemble had become the voice, possibly the conscience of the nation during the Civil War, troubadour poets seemingly rarely unrepresented in the top five bestsellers on the Billboard charts.
Yes, even the son of old Bolsheviks tried to keep himself informed as to cultural developments in the so-called free world!
Dobrynin suspected that if Walter Brenckmann actually ran for President, his wife would be as big an asset as any of the children or their connections. The United States had had Jackie Kennedy; when perhaps, it had needed a reincarnation of Eleanor Roosevelt. Joanne Brenckmann might just strike a chord with middle America, a woman with the common touch, a national aunt or grandmother, spry, witty, compassionate, a woman of the people which Jackie was never, ever going to be…
“What about you, Mister Ambassador?” Walter Brenckmann asked, his directness catching Dobrynin off guard.
What have you lost?
“I have lost many friends, and the future I once looked forward to for my daughter.”
Walter Brenckmann was eying Vasili Kuznetsov.
“What about you, Comrade?”
The older man pursed his lips, said nothing. Dobrynin might have been seduced by these people; he was not going to make the same mistake.
Both Russians were now asking themselves why the Secretary of State had engineered this encounter with Walter Brenckmann. Their confusion deepened when the man grunted, turned to Henry Cabot Lodge, shook the Secretary of State’s hand and explained: ‘I promised to take my wife out to lunch, gentlemen.’
And departed.
Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Rush and a female interpreter were waiting for Cabot Lodge and his two Soviet guests in the Secretary of State’s airy, newly re-commissioned conference room.
Fifty-six-year-old Rush had first met President Nixon when the Commander-in-Chief had been a student at Duke University, where Rush had taught law. The two men had been friends since as long ago as 1937, the only surprise was that Nixon had not brought the older man into his Administration until that previous spring and then, at State, not to replace John Mitchell – whom everybody agreed was a liability – at Justice.
Until ‘Warsaw Concerto’ began to hit the headlines the DC rumour mill, now that the war in the Midwest was over and the dust was beginning, literally, to settle, mightily re-invigorated, was agog with speculation that Mitchell, or even Director Hoover might be thrown under the bus to kill off the re-emerging scandals of the Administration’s first, pre-Civil War, year in office.
The Washington Post had just re-stoked the flames with a story, mainly re-stating the Administration’s links, via Ronald Ziegler, the youthful White House Press Secretary, to the ‘plumbers’ who had already been charged although not yet prosecuted, with bugging Doctor Martin Luther King junior and his mistress, Miranda – the daughter of old-time movie stars and wealthy California property developers, Ben and Margaret Sullivan – at the Warwick Hotel. New reports of rogue FBI ‘contractors’, of ‘dissidents’ within the Bureau and a raft of stories about ‘dirty tricks’ managed by, and involving staffers ‘close to the President’ in the period of the General Election in 1964, and throughout 1965 directed against the President’s detractors, leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement, and unspecified White House ‘enemies’ had also surfaced and not even the fact that the recent midterm elections had given the Republicans control of both Houses of Congress, had really helped to damp down the emergence of fresh allegations of malfeasance.
But for Warsaw Concerto the gathering vultures might already be picking over the bones of the Nixon Administration. Having watched those vultures circling the White House with a mixture of incredulity, and well, amusement, it had been hard, virtually impossible, to convey the significance of the outrageous sniping at the President and his men to his audience back home. In the USSR such unpatriotic, revisionist behaviour was criminal and treated accordingly; here in America it was…par for the course. A great public entertainment.
The Washington Post was not alone in demanding sacrificial offerings. Attorney General John Mitchell was just one of several cabinet members and senior White House staffers in its, and other papers’ sights and far from backing the President, it was likely that the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives would shamelessly employ the old and new scandals, be they true or false, to leverage the incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to get the GOP’s domestic agenda - as opposed to the President’s - front and centre of the next two years business in Congress.
Pork-belly politics always trumped principle…
“The reason I wanted to talk to you today,” Henry Cabot Lodge prefaced, once everybody had sat down, “is to give you advance warning of certain matters which will be the forefront of President Nixon’s forthcoming address to the nation.”
The two Russians were stoically impassive.
“The President hopes for a meaningful rapprochement,” the Secretary of State declared. “However, in the absence of a mutual willingness to seek such a rapprochement, and in the light of recent developments in Europe, it may be that our relations may need to be re-configured along pre-October 1962 lines. Better a cold war than a hot one, gentlemen.”
Chapter 36
Thursday 12th January 1967
Luke Air Force Base, Maricopa County, Arizona
Dressed in a grey two-piece suit, his chest seeming oddly uncluttered with medal ribbons, sixty-year-old General Curtis LeMay (retired), still cut a bullishly military figure as he stepped down from the makeshift stage in front of the old control tower.
He was the man who had built Strategic Air Command into the mighty sword that had won the October War in less than a day. He was the man who had flown into Washington DC and landed on the lawn of the embattled White House at the height of the battle for the capital in December 1963. He was the man who had – by sheer force of will and personality - probably save the city and Union three years ago. He was the man who had picked up the poisoned chalice of the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the man who had overseen and survived the disasters of 1964 because basically, there was only one Curtis LeMay. Now, he was the man who had emerged, prophet-like from his self-imposed semi-purdah during the Civil War last fall, presumably to lead the children of America out of exile back into the Land of the Free…
Or that, at least, was the tongue-in-cheek consensus of the East Coast media and DC insiders, who were always, rightly, more than a little chary of would-be messiahs.
