painful.
Muir went next. He was a very rubicund man, almost bald, and the number of his chins varied from two to four according to the angle of his neck. Unlike most fat men he had a permanently doleful expression. He had a positively bucolic appearance about him, an unsuccessful farmer who concentrated less on the production than the consumption of what he grew on his farm. This proposed deal with the Arab nations could raise as many political as physical problems, which was why Under-Secretary of State Muir was along. Although it was almost impossible to believe he was unquestionably the country’s leading expert on the Middle East.
The President waved the last man aboard but John Morrison, waving his hand in turn, declined. The President acknowledged the gesture, smiled and preceded him up the steps. Morrison, a burly, genial man of unquestionably Italian ancestry, was not along for his energy expertise. Energy concerned him but not to the extent of causing him sleepless nights. He was along partly as a guide, partly because he conceived it to be his duty to accept the Presidential invitation. Although the President was the official host to his guests, this was Morrison’s parish and here he was both host and king. He was the Mayor of San Francisco.
In the rear coach, some fifty yards away, Branson saw the Presidential coach door close. He made a switch.
‘P2?’
‘Yes?’ Johnson.
‘We go now.’
‘Now it is.’
The motorcade moved off, led by a police car and motor-cycle outriders. They were followed by the lead coach, the Presidential coach, the rear coach, a second police car and two more outriders. There was no attempt to make any scenic tour of the town, that had been attended to the previous afternoon soon after Air Force 1 had landed at the International Airport. This was strictly a business trip. The motorcade went along California, right down Van Ness, left along Lombard, angled right up Richardson Avenue and so into the Presidio. From this point onwards the roads had been closed that morning to all normal traffic. They took the Viaduct Approach, curving right and to the north until at last, dead ahead, loomed the immensity of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge is unquestionably one of the engineering wonders of the world. To San Franciscans, inevitably, it is the engineering wonder of the world and as bridges go it must be at once the most spectacular and graceful in existence. To see the two great brick-red – or orange or ochre, according to the quality of the light-towers emerging from the dense banks of fog that so frequently billow in from the Pacific is to experience a profound sense of unreality and when the fog disperses completely the feeling changes to one of disbelief and a benumbment of the senses that men had not only the audacity to conceive of this epic poem in mechanical grandeur but also the technical expertise to bring it into being. Even while the evidence of the eyes is irrefutable it still remains difficult for the mind to accept that it actually is there.
That it is there at all is not, in fact, due to man but to one man, a certain Joseph B. Strauss, who, in the pig-headed fashion of considerable Americans, despite seemingly unsurmountable and political difficulties and the assurances of his architectural colleagues that his dream was a technical impossibility, just went ahead and built it anyway. The bridge was opened in May 1937.
Until the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in 1964, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Even now, it is only about twenty yards shorter. The two massive towers that support the bridge soar seven hundred and fifty feet above the waters of the Golden Gate: the bridge’s total length is just under one and three-quarter miles. The cost of construction was $35,000,000: to replace it today something in the region of $200,000,000 would be needed.
The one sombre aspect about the bridge is that for Americans who find the burdens of life intolerable to bear this is unquestionably the most favoured point of departure. There have been at least five hundred known suicides: probably as many again have gone undetected. There have been eight known survivors. Among the rest, the possibility of survival seems extremely remote. If any did indeed survive the shattering impact of the two-hundred-foot drop to the water, the surging tides and vicious currents of the Golden Gate would swiftly have completed what the jump itself failed to do. Those dangerous tides and currents make their effect felt for some distance on either side of the bridge. Three miles to the east lies what used to be the forbidding prison-fortress of Alcatraz Island. No precise figures of those who attempted escape by swimming are available: but it is believed that only three of those who tried it ever survived.
It is idle to speculate upon the choice of the bridge as a springboard to eternity. Psychiatrists would have it that it is a spectacular and attention-riveting finale to a drab and unspectacular life dragged out in a grey anonymity. But it would seem that there is nothing either eye-catching or spectacular in jumping into the darkness in the middle of the night.
The procession made its stately way under the first of the giant towers. In the upholstered luxury of the Presidential coach, the King, Prince and their two oil ministers gazed around them with a carefully controlled degree of regal and viceregal appreciation, for although there was a marked absence of Golden Gate Bridges in their dusty homelands – and, indeed, no need for them – it would not have done to admit that there were some things better done in the West than in the Middle East. Nor did they enthuse overmuch about the scenery, for although a million square miles of drifting sands might not be without its attractions for a homesick Bedouin, it could hardly be said to compare with the lush and fertile greenery of the farm land and forest land that stretched ahead of them across the Golden Gate. Indeed, the whole of the Bay Area could not have looked better than it did on that splendid June morning, with the sun already climbing high to their right in a cloudless sky and sparkling iridescently off the blue-green waters below. It was the perfect story-book setting for a day which, the President and Hansen, his energy czar, devoutly hoped would have a story-book ending.
The Prince looked around the coach, this time in open admiration, for he was very much a man of his own generation and possessed of a passion for all things mechanical and said in his clipped Oxford accent: ‘My word, Mr President, you do know how to travel in style. I wish I had one of those.’
‘And so you shall,’ the President said indulgently. ‘My country would be honoured to present you with one, as soon as you return to your homeland. Equipped to your own specifications, of course.’
The King said drily: ‘The Prince is accustomed to ordering his vehicles by the round dozen. No doubt, Achmed, you would like a couple of those to go with it.’ He pointed upwards to where two naval helicopters were hovering overhead. ‘You do take good care of us, Mr President.’
The President smiled non-committally. How could one comment upon the obvious? General Cartland said: ‘For decorative purposes only, your Highness. Apart from your own security men waiting on the other side and an occasional police car, you will see nothing between here and San Rafael. But the security is there all the same. Between here and San Rafael the motorcade will be under heavily armed surveillance literally every yard of the way. There are crackpots everywhere, even in the United States.’
‘Especially in the United States,’ the President said darkly.
In mock seriousness the King said: ‘So we are safe?’
The President regained his smiling composure. ‘As in the vaults of Fort Knox.’
It was at this point, just after the lead coach had passed the halfway mark across the bridge, that five things happened in almost bewilderingly rapid succession.
