Blast from the Past

57

Nibs and her husband had made an uneasy peace. She would stand by him, even lie for him, and in return he had promised that this sordid little affair would be his last. He tried to kiss her to say thank you but she was not yet ready for that.

They had just ordered coffee when a knock came at the door.

“I said we weren’t to be disturbed,” Nibs’ husband said as his principal private secretary entered the room.

“I’m extremely sorry, Mr President, but the State Department felt that you should know this. I’m afraid that we have bad news from London. General Jack Kent seems to have shot himself. It looks like some kind of sex thing. He was in the apartment of an Englishwoman. Another man is dead also. We have no further details at present.”

The president and the first lady were horrified. They had both known Jack quite well. Nibs in particular knew Courtney Kent and could only imagine how she was feeling.

“I’ll call Courtney,” she said and left the president with his aides.

“Jack Kent of all people,” the great commander said. “We were going to propose him for chairman of the joint chiefs.”

The president was truly sorry to hear the news, but he was a politician and already he could see that from a personal point of view there was an upside to this tragedy. Jack’s suicide would be enormously newsworthy, particularly if it did turn out that there was a sexual angle to the case. Anything that diverted attention from the president’s own problems was to be welcomed.

“In the meantime there are practical considerations,” the president added. “This is going to hit the army hard. We need to fill this gap and quickly, and, for Christ’s sake, can we please try to find a clean pair of hands.”

A few days later, to his utter shock and abject terror, General Schultz, Jack’s blundering, indecisive colleague, whose anonymous career had shadowed Jack’s for so many years, was appointed chairman of the joint chiefs. He had turned out to be the only senior officer in the armed forces who had never done anything that anybody considered suspect. The reason for this being, of course, that General Schultz had never done anything.

Two years later Schultz’s name would be spoken of as a potential presidential candidate for exactly the same reason.

“It isn’t a case of who’s most qualified these days,” the Washington powerbrokers had wearily to admit. “It’s a case of who’s least likely to be disqualified.”