Warsaw Concerto, page 50
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Norah had worried that her article would re-ignite the media firestorm around her friend.
Miranda’s response had been that it was better ‘to control, if that was possible, the media agenda than to sit on one’s hands in fear behind drawn blinds waiting for the knock on one’s door.’ And besides: ‘I have nothing to be afraid, or ashamed of!’
Oddly, the White House and the GOP retribution machine had by and large, allowed Miranda’s Story to go unremarked, unchallenged. It was almost as if Nixon’s people were finally wising up: nobody got prizes for beating up on a defenceless woman!
Of course, the silence on Capitol Hill might just have been because all the President’s men realised that they needed to keep their powder dry for the revelations coming their way later in the week.
Tomorrow’s front page was about the pitched battle the White House had been waging – albeit mostly behind the scenes – with Special Prosecutor Earl Warren over the release, or rather, the non-release, of the ‘White House Tapes’.
At first, the Administration had denied that they existed.
Then the story was that they had been lost, or destroyed in error, or that the tape machines had turned out to be faulty and the tapes in ‘the archive’ were blank, of just ‘noise’.
Later, Judge Burger had been offered partially redacted – for national security reasons - transcripts of several tapes.
Actually, all the tapes from the first half of 1965 – five-and-a-half months’ worth commencing two days after Richard Nixon’s inauguration – had been, unknown to the President’s inner circle, diligently ‘archived’ by a White House intern who, quite innocently, in conversation with one of the attorneys working for Earl Burger, proudly explained as much, seemingly thinking her interlocutor would be impressed by how well organised things were at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
The poor kid, Mary Lou Kavanagh had since been dragged in front of a Grand Jury, threatened with prosecution by the FBI on the spurious grounds that she had broken her contract of employment and betrayed ‘confidences’, and systematically harried by the GOP’s friends in the media.
Even its friends now acknowledged that blaming the messenger was a particular trait of the Nixon Administration; as were the persistent rumours that people close to the President were constantly having to take him aside and say: ‘I’m sorry, sir…but you can not do that, it is illegal…’
In any event, it was yesterday’s scathing exposé – authored by Carl Bernstein - of the Attorney General’s questionable ethical standards throughout his legal career, and an excoriating blow by blow account of the ‘scam’ New York Municipal Bond Issue, implicating the supposedly ‘snow white’ Nelson Rockefeller in clear and obvious financial gerrymandering, which had prompted Martha Mitchell’s extraordinary outburst.
That, and the rumoured trailing of that morning’s instalment investigating the connections of the Warwick Hotel ‘Plumbers’ directly accusing Director J. Edgar Hoover of initiating and then covering up, the whole exercise. An endeavour in which a certain John Mitchell had been involved from the moment he joined the Department of Justice as Nicholas Katzenbach’s deputy early in the Nixon Administration. Basically, the accusation was that Mitchell had been placed at the DOJ specifically to work behind Katzenbach’s back to ‘manage the activities of Special Prosecutor Warren E. Burger’ and to ‘inappropriately’ keep Richard Nixon appraised as to exactly how close the investigation was getting to the Oval Office!
The Department of Justice was supposed to work for the American people; not the White House, and especially, not as the personal tool of the man in the Oval Office.
If Congress had been on the ball, or even paying attention, the separation of powers envisaged by the founding fathers, ought to have prevented such a situation arising in the first place. But then that assumed the guardians of the sanctity of the Constitution had…spines.
Which was just plain naïve.
The implication of Bernstein’s piece was, that at the height of the war in the Midwest, Mitchell and the President had been more preoccupied with keeping Judge Burger off the scent than prosecuting the fight against the Kingdom of the End of Days…
Outside the relative calm of Ben Bradlee’s office the newsroom – the normal staff heavily reinforced that week to man the phones – was a battle zone as the Administration and the rest of DC responded to Bernstein’s story.
Ben Bradlee had never imagined in his wildest dreams that tomorrow’s follow-up – more of the same about several of the Administration’s leading insiders – was going to be spiked by the angry revelations of the wife of one of the principle conspirators.
Both John and Martha Mitchell had been prominent members of the Committee to Elect the President in 1964 – commonly referred to in the media as ‘Nixon for President’ - a body hastily thrown together because of Nixon’s relatively late, opportunistic decision to run after the California Primary, which had been notably unfussy, even by the louche standards of Presidential races, in the way it raised funds.
Martha, an outspoken, ‘loud-mouthed’ according to her many detractors, socialite whom people assumed had her quieter, somewhat unremarkable husband, on a very short leash, had been a prominent member of the CEP, a larger than life figure within the GOP, an institution not blessed exactly with an outstanding cast of personalities capable of catching the imagination of the public. That she rarely appeared on a TV or a radio show, or emerged from a conversation with a journalist without in some way voicing an inadvertent hostage to fortune was legendary. However, it was unusual even for Martha Mitchell to treat directly with the enemy: especially not wishy-washy, limp-wristed, effete liberal, left-wing un-American traitors like Ben Bradlee and other misguided editors of similarly inclined, equally scurrilous publications.
In short, up until now the Attorney General’s wife had not been considered a complete idiot.
But that was about to change.
“She told me I was a useless faggot,” Ben Bradlee smiled. “I won’t repeat what she said about Carl and Norah. A gentleman never repeats that sort of filth in front of a lady.”
Kay Graham’s patience was wearing thin.
“Ben!”
“Martha Mitchell said that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were hanging ‘John’ out to dry. That they’d been quote: ‘in on this thing from the beginning.’ She said that: ‘John hadn’t known a thing about any of that stuff in New York’ until the President brought him into the Administration. She said: ‘John’s first conversation with Nixon after he got to Justice, this was back in February sixty-five, was that he needed to keep the lid on the Warwick Hotel stuff.’ Nixon didn’t want Katzenbach appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate it and he was as angry as Hell when Burger was appointed. That was months before any of us started asking questions about Hoover and the FBI’s possible links to Nixon’s people, or to the CEP during the sixty-four race.”
Kay Graham stared at her friend.
Bradlee smiled, touched his chin with his right index finger.
It was about then that the Publisher of The Washington Post realised her mouth was hanging open, slack with astonishment.
Ben Bradlee smiled and uncharacteristically saturnine smile.
“Haldeman told Mitchell to starve Warren Burger’s office of funds the week after the war kicked off in Wisconsin. At first Burger played it like a ‘good Indian’, according to Martha, but he ‘turned up new dirt’ and he kicked back last fall. Mitchell suspended Burger’s funding last week without notifying Congress. Martha made an unflattering remark about that not making any difference because they’d quote: ‘need to do an x-ray to find the GOP Majority Leader’s back bone!’
Kay Graham was breathless.
“But all this was off the record, right?”
Ben Bradlee grinned broadly, momentarily baring his teeth with predatory smugness.
“No. Martha only remembered to say that at the end.”
“Seriously?”
“The only part of the conversation that was ‘off the record’ was when she said: ‘Oh, shit!’, and hung up.”
Chapter 45
Thursday 19th January 1967
Supreme Allied Headquarters, Sevres, France
That the Free French had elected, despite the obvious problems it presented, to set up their headquarters in the half-wrecked leafy suburb of Sevres, spoke more to a native stubbornness than good military sense. On that fateful night in late October 1962, two megaton-range warheads had bracketed Paris to the north and the south east, and a smaller bomb – possibly only a sub-Hiroshima-sized device - had obliterated much of the centre of the city. Last summer the ruins of the metropolis had ‘greened’, everywhere nature had begun to reclaim the deserted, rubble-strewn boulevards. Lately, the Seine, swollen by the monsoon rains of the recent great storms, had broken its banks in many places, inundating several sparsely re-populated districts meaning that Sevres was virtually cut off from the north and the east.
In a more rational age General Alain de Boissieu would have transferred his Headquarters closer to Orly Airport, with its road connections to the south and the west, and its recently restored telecommunications facilities. That was not to say that Sevres, with its patched-up old-world mansions and at this season of the year, gaunt tree-line byways, did not still evoke memories of a former age in which Great Britain and France had encouraged each other to believe that they were still the imperial powers of yore.
Back in 1956 the old allies, and even older enemies, had agreed the Protocol of Sevres, a plot to seize back the Suez Canal from Gamel Abdel Nasser. That little ‘wheeze’ had very nearly brought down the British Government, ended the premiership of Anthony Eden and, had anybody in Whitehall been paying attention, conclusively given the lie to Britannia’s non-existent ‘special relationship’ with Washington.
History, so much history: none of which really mattered a bean nowadays. At any rate, that was the view of Major General Frank St John Waters, VC, now that he was finally installed at the ‘sharp end of things again!’
He was inordinately please about that.
Although not so keen about his uncomfortably starched brand-new uniform which definitely needed a little wearing in. However, this was just a trifling inconvenience. Granted there were a lot of people at Sevres who viewed him with no little suspicion, that was to be expected. Importantly, the people who mattered seemed, generally speaking, to be very pleased to see him. None less so than the Supreme Commander himself.
Not only did Alain de Boissieu no longer have to deal directly with ‘the Lady’, he now had a direct line to the one man whose word was God in western Europe: General Sir Michael Power Carver, the victor of the Gulf War and the Chief of the British Defence Staff.
And his good friend Frank Waters was at his side!
Until now de Boissieu had been surrounded by a combination of faithful ‘yes’ men who blindly obeyed him, and by fair weather lackeys who thought they knew better. True, he was a hard man to gainsay, even if he was in the wrong which he did not think happened very often but now that the British Prime Minister’s husband was at his side, he knew he had somebody to turn to who would always, fearlessly speak his mind. Moreover, ‘somebody’ with the heart of a lion!
“Why on earth didn’t those beggars in Royan wave a white flag like those fellows in La Rochelle and on the Ile d’Oleron?” The Englishman complained jovially as the two men drank their mid-morning coffee.
The old chateau around them was a hive of activity, its draughty corridors ringing with the sound of booted feet as the headquarters staff got used to the idea that from here on in, they were riding a rollercoaster.
Or, as the more faint-hearted among them feared, upon the back of an awakened Tiger!
Yesterday afternoon, two Royal Navy destroyers had cautiously steamed into La Rochelle and landed a hundred Royal Marines to occupy key points in the town. Last night, men of the British Expeditionary Force had entered the town and liberated it, that morning crossing the causeway onto the Ile d’Oleron on a similar, unopposed mission. Only the idiots at Royan had stood firm and now, regrettably, the seaside port at the neck of the Gironde Estuary lay in ruins, burning fiercely having been bombarded by HMS Kent and HMS Belfast at dawn, both big ships having steamed within five miles of the coast to batter the misguided – now mostly deceased – defenders into submission. As if to emphasise that the Allies really meant business, Buccaneers and Sea Vixens flying off HMS Victorious, thirty miles out to sea in the Bay of Biscay, and three Lincolnshire-based Avro Vulcan V-Bombers – the latter carrying mixed payloads of up to thirty, one-thousand and five hundred-pound high explosive bombs – had attacked targets in and around Bordeaux.
The two men got to their feet as Major General – his forthcoming promotion to Lieutenant General, belatedly recognising that he now led a ‘corps-sized’ command, would be gazetted on 1st February - Peter Hunt, DSO, the commander of the BEF, was ushered into de Boissieu’s room.
“How was your flight from Brittany, Peter?” The Frenchman inquired solicitously in English.
“Bumpy,” the newcomer grinned from beneath his neatly clipped moustache as hands were shaken. “My goodness, I thought the Regiment had well and truly retired you, Frank?” He demanded jovially of his fellow Englishman.
“So, did I, old man!”
Presently, the three men removed to the Map Room, the former dining hall of the old house, where de Boissieu’s staffers and Hunt’s GSO2 (Intelligence), a bespectacled lieutenant colonel with the badge of the Middlesex Regiment prominent on his battledress tunic, awaited the principals for that day’s command conference.
“If you would bring us up to date with developments in your sector please, Peter?” De Boissieu suggested.
Hunt deferred to his GSO2.
His report was succinct, unemotional.
“HMS Kent is scheduled to deploy inshore to within approximately two miles of the coast tonight and bombard suspected Red Dawn depots, vehicle concentrations, encampments and strong points west of Bordeaux, and miscellaneous other positions which aerial reconnaissance suggests may have been prepared to guard the entrance to the Gironde Estuary opposite Royan. It had been planned that the Belfast would be in company with the Kent but she is proceeding directly to Gibraltar at her best speed. Something fouled or damaged one of her propellers during yesterday’s action. Our naval forces have suffered no battle casualties in the last two days’ operations. Admiral Leach plans to take his task force south tonight. His ships will need to top off their magazines and bunkers preliminary to departing Gibraltar to take up station in the Bay of Lions on the 29th or 30th January to commence operations against the southern territories of the Front Internationale along the Bay of Lions and the Riviera.”
“What are Brigadier Bramall’s intentions?” De Boissieu inquired.
“I have authorised Edwin to exploit south of Royan along the north bank of the Gironde Estuary but to avoid getting entangled in a scrap with significant enemy forces,” Peter Hunt reported. “The tip of the Royal Tanks’ spear is getting somewhat thin down there. Edwin’s left flank has been hanging in the air for the last fifty or so miles as he has moved south. SAS patrols are still indicating that what hostile forces may be present in the region are mainly entrenched for the winter. Nevertheless, I share your unease about that long eastern flank, Alain.”
De Boissieu nodded.
Since that seismic ‘clear the air’ summit in Dover he and his English allies had literally, ‘started over’ as American colleagues would say at NATO briefings and such like. He liked to think that he had had something to do with that but actually, it was the presence of Frank Waters, ever avuncular and clearly delighted to be back in harness, which had so utterly transformed the mood music. It was as if men like Peter Hunt had suddenly realised that de Boissieu had been a kindred spirit all along, not an awkward bloody Frenchman!
The Supreme Commander listened to the updates from his own staffers.
A week ago, he had been livid about the unconscionable ‘mess’ that unauthorised ‘British adventurism’ had made of the previously relatively stable, secure, tidy Loire line. If any such ‘front line’ still meaningfully existed it ran raggedly from the Bay of Biscay a few kilometres south of Royan northward up a relatively narrow sliver of the Atlantic coast, widening as it went before it slashed across the Poitou towards Tours, thence roughly east-north-east through Troyes to Nancy where it dog-legged to Strasbourg, the point at which the Rhine at last gave it an identifiable eastern flank.
Despite his misgivings, Edwin Bramall’s ‘adventurism’ had proven, if not incontrovertibly, then with reasonable confidence, that the enemy forces barring the Allied path south on the right, and by inference, on the left of his line, were relatively weak and disorganised. In effect, by outflanking and causing the surrender of the White Brigade, the 2nd Tanks had removed the last coherent, well-led obstacle to their southern advance. Thereafter, they had moved forward with the assurance of a red-hot knife slicing through butter, encountering only weak, exhausted, hungry and poorly co-ordinated opposition.
It was possible – just possible – that there were no significant hostile forces between the Loire and the plateaus of the Massif Central over two hundred kilometres to the south; and that places like Poitier, Angouleme, Limoges, Bourges, Dijon and Besancon, perhaps Montluçon and Mâcon, and the whole of Burgundy might be defended by no more than a few gangs of bandits. Suddenly, the possibilities were powerfully seductive if only he could seize this moment and galvanise his people into a great crusade.
‘Look, old chap,’ Frank Waters had counselled, ‘there’s nothing for it but to get out there and talk, bully if you have to, your people into following you once more into the breach, and all that rot!’
His friend had been deadly serious.
The Free French Army had spent the last autumn settling into its winter billets, fortifying its defences; it was going to take more than a few choice invectives to snap the dormant army out of its inaction.
