Warsaw Concerto Read online

  James Philip

  ________

  WARSAW CONCERTO

  ____

  Timeline 10/27/62 – BOOK THIRTEEN

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2019. All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  The Timeline 10/27/62 Series

  ________

  Main Series

  Book 1: Operation Anadyr

  Book 2: Love is Strange

  Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules

  Book 4: Red Dawn

  Book 5: The Burning Time

  Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses

  Book 7: A Line in the Sand

  Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon

  Book 9: All Along the Watchtower

  Book 10: Crow on the Cradle

  Book 11: 1966 & All That

  Book 12: Only in America

  Book 13: Warsaw Concerto

  Book 14: Eight Miles High

  A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novel

  Football in the Ruins – The World Cup of 1966

  A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novella

  The House on Haight Street

  Coming in 2020

  Book 15: Won’t Get Fooled Again (2020)

  Book 16: Armadas (2020)

  USA Series

  Book 1: Aftermath

  Book 2: California Dreaming

  Book 3: The Great Society

  Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country

  Book 5: The American Dream

  Australia Series

  Book 1: Cricket on the Beach

  Book 2: Operation Manna

  For the latest news and author blogs about the

  Timeline 10/27/62 Series check out

  www.thetimelinesaga.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Author’s End Note

  Other Books by James Philip

  WARSAW CONCERTO

  [Book Thirteen of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series]

  I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

  Ioseb Besarionisdze Jughashvili (better known as Josef Stalin) - An aside to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov in 1943.

  This administration has proved that it is utterly incapable of cleaning out the corruption which has completely eroded it and re-establishing the confidence and faith of the American people in the morality and honesty of their government employees.

  Senator Richard Milhous Nixon – Commenting about the Harry Truman White House in 1951.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  It was only when US forces crashed into the de-populated, wasted lands of the Kingdom of the End of Days – most of Indiana, Northern Michigan, large parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and all of Wisconsin and Illinois – in July 1966 that the true scale of the nightmare became incontrovertible. Until then the magnitude of the atrocity had been rumoured, feared, and oddly, in some ways, psychologically deniable.

  Although, the awful truth was writ plain even before the spearheads of Norman H. Schwarzkopf’s – forever afterwards in popular memory Stormin’ Norman’s - 8th Armoured Division raced across Illinois to the Mississippi: inevitably, the question that plagued the nation and began to lap corrosively against the foundations of the Nixon Administration that dreadful autumn was: “Why did we not know?”

  Of course, the answer is that we did know but that most of us – as a national polity - elected not to believe it. A cursory trawl through the evidence to hand in the spring and summer of 1966 tells us that, had we wanted to know, or rather, to credit the wealth of information we already had to hand - like Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in the middle years of the Second War who knew if not exactly, then at least in broad terms what was happening to European Jewry in Hitler’s death camps - that we ought to have known about the genocide in the Midwest.

  However, there are sometimes very good reasons for not believing the wealth of intelligence coming across one’s desk. For Churchill and Roosevelt, it was a case of simply not believing that such atrocities could be carried out in the modern age. Stalin, on the other hand, had already inflicted much worse vicissitudes upon his own people, conspired with the Nazis to liquidate the whole Polish intelligentsia in 1939-40, and frankly, did not give a damn about the fate of the Jews.

  In the Nixon White House in the first half of 1966, there was a temptation to discount many of the horror stories as crude attempts by the rebels to goad the US into mounting an assault on ‘the Kingdom’ before it was ready; and at the time, in many ways that was a more rational explanation for what might be going on inside the rebel camp than the contemporaneous fragmentary accounts of mass killings, or of whole populations being marched off into slavery and worked to death.

  Also, another factor often misunderstood, or conveniently ignored even by ‘proper’ historians is that nothing ever happens in isolation. Even at the height of the rebellion when the legions of the End of Days were rampaging across the Midwest there was a lot of ‘other stuff’ going on in North America and the wider world; it would, therefore, be a misnomer to assume that even at the height of the January 1966 crisis, that major players in the US administration, the political establishment and the military were not, even then, still largely, or at least, in part, pre-occupied with events outside North America.

  At this remove – over half-a-century - it is easy to forget that it was during the Civil War that the United States began again to selectively re-assimilate its post-Second War global responsibilities. Even in the darkest days of January 1966, US forces were reinforcing the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek on Taiwan, and the Eighth Army, brilliantly extracted from its encirclement in Korea – a feat which will be Lieutenant General Colin Powell Dempsey’s eternal epitaph - in November and December 1965, was redeploying, reinforced by West Coast National Guard units airlifted all the way across the Pacific via Hawaii, to transform the Japanese home islands and the Philippines into impregnable bastions to resist further communist encroachment in the Western Pacific.

  Elsewhere, the Pentagon was to be almost as focused upon re-building a new incarnation of the pre-October War North Atlantic Treaty Organisation throughout 1966, as it was putting down the rebellion at home.

  At sea the US Navy, which other than in amphibious operations on the Great Lakes and in keeping open the Mississippi, had been a peripheral player in the Civil War; was otherwise wholly engaged re-asserting its presence as a world-wide blue water force.

  Moreover, let it not be forgotten that the ongoing upgrading of US strategic missile, and command and control systems already under way in 1964 and 1965 actually picked up pace – as scheduled - during this period, as did Project Gemini when the White House green-flagged NASAs request to again ‘run with’ JFK’s re-stated 1963 challenge to put a man, an American, on the Moon if not by the end of the decade but – more realistically – sometime in the first half of the 1970s.

  Similarly, there was never a moment when there was not at least one Looking Glass aircraft in the air, and at least four and usually six B-52s flying strategic thermonuclear strike missions to Arctic failsafe points, and by the early spring of 1966 US Navy SSNs blockaded every major Soviet and Chinese port in the Pacific and the Arctic.

  In 1966, the United States managed the war in the Midwest as a semi-discreet project, a separate military-economic-industrial enterprise, to some degree ‘hived off’ from ‘normal business’, insulated from the short-term dislocation – albeit extreme in the ‘bombed states’ and those where the fighting took place – to life in the three-quarters of states not directly impacted by the New Year’s Day nuclear terrorism or subsequent physical invasions.

  This is not to minimise the shock which momentarily paralysed, and then, within hours, galvanised the Nixon administration into action on New Year’s Day 1966; si
mply to remind the reader that history is complicated and that not everything which seems obvious, or self-evident through the long lens of history, is anything of the kind.

  Especially, at the time!

  Sometimes, our leaders do not get the benefit of the doubt when they justly deserve it; and sometimes they get a free pass when they ought to have got jail time. That is the essential imperfection of the human condition and it applies to history as it applies to everyday life.

  Which one of us might not have benefited from knowing what we know now twenty, or thirty, or fifty years ago?

  So, give the men – back in 1966 it was mostly men – who were in charge when the cataclysm struck a break.

  And, credit where it is due.

  The atomic bombing of six US cities on New Year’s Eve 1966 and the war in the Midwest may have led to the deaths of as many as seven million Americans, and shattered the lives of perhaps two or three times as many. At the war’s end there was a gaping, obscenely open wound at the heart of the nation and yet, counter intuitively, the United States emerged from the conflict stronger than it had been at any time since October 1962 and in countless ways, truly united for the first time since the Second War.

  Richard Nixon, who had humbly stood before his fellow Americans and accepted the blame for everything that had gone wrong, initially emerged from the war with a higher approval rating than his old boss, Dwight Eisenhower, had enjoyed in his mid-1950s halcyon years. Such stellar approval ratings never last but Nixon’s survived long enough to ensure that in the mid-term elections of November 1966 – held as scheduled as if to confound the traumatic events of the previous year – the Republicans swept to power in both Houses of Representatives.

  Thus, if New Year’s Day 1966 had marked the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the Nixon Administration, its anniversary was to be the high-water mark of both the President’s and in retrospect, the GOP’s twentieth century prestige and success.

  After the mid-term elections of that fall the Democrats were like a lightweight who had mistakenly stepped into a ring with Sonny Liston. The party was virtually wiped out in some races and left dazed, humiliated as many of its stalwarts and ‘big men’ were unceremoniously rejected by previously loyal districts and states. It was hardly surprising that in no time at all leading Republicans were openly talking about ‘another twenty years in the White House’ – much as had happened after the ‘last’, or first Civil War back in the nineteenth century.

  Given that only a little over two years before, the country had been within a whisker of lurching to the left under JFK and briefly, Lyndon Johnson it was a remarkable turnaround; those days were gone, seemingly forever, and a jubilant GOP was damned sure they were not coming back any time soon!

  In late 1966 and actually, throughout much of 1967, if anybody had suggested that Richard Nixon was not a shoe-in for a second term in the White House in November 1968 they would have been a laughing stock, ‘whistling in the wind’ as post-war euphoria continued to blow down Mainstreet America.

  However, it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good.

  As early as December 1966 the members of the Democrat National Committee were in such a mood of despair that there was a brief groundswell of opinion which held that perhaps, the party’s last best hope of surviving – forget winning the next Presidential race – might be to invite either LBJ, or possibly, even Jack Kennedy back into the fold. It was in this mood of defeatism that the small, voluble caucus promoting Bobby Kennedy’s claim saw an opportunity for their man, and of course, there was always the contrary, nationally unelectable Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesotan poet until then dogged by the DNC’s stoically tepid support – as befitted a man the Committee had long since regarded as a potential pied piper – lurking around the fringe. Not that at the time it mattered a ‘mess of beans’ if the party’s next candidate for the Presidency led the party to its notional doom, because the only thing practically everybody agreed about was that their cause had pretty much hit absolute rock bottom.

  It was into this well of despond that Claude Otto von Betancourt stepped. By then well into his seventies, the legendary East Coast fixer and Kennedy family litigator, brought with him his immense wealth, a lifetime’s worth of political favours done which, like chips at a casino he planned to cash in, and his family’s slick, very mean and lean, political machine. Betancourt was a lawyer and a businessman and unlike the DNC – which was practically waving a white flag of surrender hoping the GOP and the American people would be gentle with it - he saw nothing but opportunity in the wreckage of the old Democrat Party.

  ‘Daddy once said to me,’ his daughter Gretchen reminisced to this author many years later, ‘that hardly anybody on the DNC understood what had happened or more importantly, why it had happened to them but that did not matter because neither did Richard Nixon, or anybody around him with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. Daddy always thought very highly of Henry… Daddy’s theory was that hubris is what brings down all administrations in the end, and there was a heck of a lot of that flying around Richard Nixon’s White House that winter after the war. Daddy was a fixer, the shrewdest operator I ever knew, and he believed all along that the Republicans were riding towards the edge of the cliff, and that sooner or later the bottom would fall out of their market. It was just a question of waiting for ‘real world’, realpolitik if you like, factors, which had never gone away, to re-assert themselves. The way he saw it, Nixon’s people did not understand how they had got into so much trouble in the first place; now, only months later, they were convinced that they were the masters of the universe with the Midas touch. Hubris, you see. Hubris and the fact that they had completely mis-interpreted what Daddy called: the runes of history.’

  So, while the other great men of the Democratic Party establishment held their heads in their hands and fixated on nightmare scenarios, like one in which the firebrand segregationist George Wallace ‘hijacked’ the rump of the Party, and hoped above hope that a unifying figure like the late Adlai Stevenson would emerge from the miasma of defeat, Claude Betancourt quietly, and ruthlessly, set about coppicing out the dead wood on the Democratic National Committee.

  He had chosen his moment well.

  By and large, the weeks and months of the ‘long knives’ went unnoticed across America and during 1967, albeit slowly, barely acknowledged by the all-powerful GOP and the denizens of the triumphant Nixon White House, the Democrats began to rebuild and to become a completely new force in US politics.

  But that, like a lot of things in those years and since, was not obvious to casual observers, or even to experienced commentators at the time. When I met Walter Kronkite many years ago, once I had got him past talking about my mother and father – particularly my mother, the mere mention of her name brought a nostalgic fond twinkle to the old man’s eyes, a thing I got used to over the years! – he recounted a counter-anecdote which, I confess, made this author question many of her own assumptions about the period.

  ‘Sure, all the old democrats in our contact notebooks had been whipped so badly that they had lost their faith in things. They just did not have it in them to stand together… But maybe, what we did not appreciate at the time was that the men and women, a lot of them boys and girls, really, kids, a lot of them from Yale, Princeton, Caltech, college kids who connected with the Reverend King’s people in the south, the ‘beat generation’ on the West Coast and a lot of the displaced people in the Midwest, who were full of what I would call practical idealism, soon pretty much infiltrated, or took over, like in a peaceful coup, the machinery of the DNC and became, by the end of that year [1967] a vocal, articulate activist movement. The only thing the kids were missing was a leader, a figurehead. Bobby Kennedy was damaged goods, Eugene McCarthy was well, McCarthy, unelectable, and others like Hubert Humphrey were no longer around. It was only when somebody came along that the Party could stand behind that we all realised that the Democrats were back…’