« Eight Miles High » James Philip

It is over four years down a road in which the ‘swinging sixties’ never happened. Every attempt to restore normality, or even an illusion of a reality that does not promise either war without end or a return to medieval chaos has, thus far, seemed doomed to failure.



To the West the Soviet Union 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, the British and Free French troops seemed locked in an unwinnable war with the Chelyabinsk Kremlin’s proxies in the south. And then, while Congress seeks to 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 that strikes at the very root of everything the United States thought it used to hold dear – in that halcyon pre–October War era – breaks 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. And this is all happening in the wake of a seemingly disastrous, 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 many of 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, that one of those unaccountable pivotal moments in history may have just be on the horizon. Or has it? What is it to be? War without end; or something different? Or perhaps, something better…



Problematically, before anybody can move on there is the small matter of the war in France, and of the undeclared war along the length of the Rhine to halt Soviet infiltration out of the wreckage of Germany and …