Saturday was the first day of the final collapse of American society. Millions of people, most of them used to two or three substantial meals a day, now hadn’t eaten properly for three days. They were still strong enough to resist opening cans suspected of containing botulism, but few were so fussy about foods that might have been irradiated by cobalt-60. They were so convinced that ‘something would turn up’, and that they wouldn’t have to survive on contaminated rations for more than a few days that they decided to risk it.
Something might have turned up, if the looting and the burning hadn’t inflicted such grievous damage on the cities and the towns and the countryside, and if the National Guard and the Army had been able to devote their energies to distributing food and organising new crop programmes. But hunger and fear had broken down everything that had held the United States together. Brotherhood, E Pluribus Unum, had been a luxury that only affluence had been able to sustain. Now, each racial and ethnic and class community turned in on itself for protection, and within days the nation was tribalised.
On Saturday afternoon, declaring New York State a War Zone – the ninth state in two days – the Vice-President said that ‘twenty years of Civil Rights struggle had vanished in twenty minutes, as if it had never been.’ He added that ‘those people who are dying today are showing us that John Kennedy and Martin Luther King died in vain.’
Although interstate communications were now severely disrupted, and it was impossible to make an accurate count, it was estimated by the besieged Department of Health that somewhere between two and three thousand Americans died of botulism during Friday night.
Worse – hunger was beginning to affect the morale of the armed forces. Men of the 101st Airborne division, based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, refused to go to the assistance of beleagured National Guardsmen in Lexington until they were issued with rations. Deserters walked off camps and air bases in their hundreds, many taking their weapons with them. Five men of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were shot at Fort Bliss, Texas, for attempting to hijack a tank.
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.