It is January 1967, over four years have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. Over four long years down an altered timeline in which the swinging sixties never happened.
To the West the Soviet Union still seems hell-bent on confrontation, in Washington DC a President whom only months before was the victor of terrible civil war finds himself at the nexus of a blizzard of controversy, while in Europe, British and Free French troops seemed locked in an unwinnable war with the Chelyabinsk Kremlin’s proxies in the south.
And then, as a partisan Congress seeks to re-fight old battles with the defunct Kennedy Administration over the provisional report of the Warren Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, a new scandal strikes at the very root of everything the United States thought it used to hold dear – in that halcyon pre-October War era – breaking like a tsunami upon the White House, the CIA and the FBI as the President prepares to travel to San Francisco to attend the rededication of the United Nations.
All this is happening in the wake of a disastrously acrimonious summit with the British – America’s only ‘special allies’ in world full of enemies, at Camp David which has done absolutely nothing to paper over the gaping chasms in their respective approaches to the great issues of the day.
Yet, oddly, not all may be lost. There are even a few people, although – truth be told – not very many, who dare to believe that a turning point, one of those unaccountable pivotal moments in history may just have appeared on the horizon.
Or has it? What is it to be? War without end; or something different? Or perhaps, something better…
Problematically, there is the not so small matter of the undeclared war along the length of the Rhine to halt Soviet infiltration out of the wreckage of Germany and Central Europe; and the unfinished business of the rusting French battlefleet anchored at Villefranche-sur-Mer, not to mention the poisonous schisms inside both the US and the Soviet leaderships, all playing out as events as the best laid of plans begin to unravel across half a world…