Flying across Illinois in a private plane, with special permission from the Air Force, Dan Rather broadcast one of the most moving reports of the whole famine. He talked about, ‘Acre upon acre of blackened fields… with grey smoke rising everywhere, like the fires of a primitive, prehistoric age…’ He was in tears as he finished his report with a prayer for the future.

The President, weak but improving, was released on Saturday evening from hospital. After he was briefed by his advisers on the national famine situation, and on the prospects of expediting aid from other countries, he asked about the freight train of supplies that was supposed to have come into Washington to help support the administration.

He was told gravely that it had been attacked by vigilantes, and burned. Bill Brinsky of The New York Times had appeared on television Wednesday night, and revealed ‘exclusively’ that the White House had arranged to feed top officials from secret stores of food, just as Ed Hardesty had claimed. As a result, angry mobs of black looters had raided each of the warehouses where government food was stored, and destroyed it or carried it off. ‘Perhaps our only consolation is that we didn’t have time to check the food for botulism or radiation,’ said the Vice-President.

‘You call that a consolation?’ asked the President, with tired but offended dignity. ‘The very least of our countrymen doesn’t deserve to die like a rat.’

The President’s economic adviser said later, ‘The President always finds it easier to be expansive when the worst has already come to the worst. By God, if he’d heard Bill Brinsky’s broadcast for himself, he probably would have had a heart seizure.’

During that first briefing, one report from the Pentagon went unnoticed. It lay on the President’s desk amongst a whole sheaf of papers on disease and medical treatment. It said, simply, ‘We are seriously concerned at this time about the preparedness of the United States to defend itself against pre-emptive military strikes from hostiles.’

The President was too tired, too confused, too hopeless, to read it and realise what it really meant.

Thirteen