“Where did you learn that?” she asked. “With the drain cleaners? How did you know that they would be so dangerous if you combined them? Or that the furniture polish was flammable?”
“The comic-book hearing!” Charlie laughed. “Good thing for us the nation’s comic-book publishers offer courses to America’s children on how to turn household products into horrific weapons. But it was your idea about the baby monitor that gave us the upper hand.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the baby,” she said, smiling and patting her stomach.
He put his hand on hers.
“It took us a little while, but I think we’re finally figuring out how to survive in the world of politics.”
Epilogue
Friday, April 30, 1954
Washington, DC
Washington was in mourning.
Five days before, a small plane had crashed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and taken the lives of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Franklin Harris Carlin, Republican of Oklahoma, as well as several others, including Charlie’s own office manager, Catherine Leopold, and two unknown men, presumably the pilot and copilot. Their plane had disappeared on the way to Oklahoma. After locating the wreckage, authorities said the bodies had been burned beyond recognition.
That was what everyone was told, at any rate.
The funeral aired live on local television in Washington, DC. A camera inside the National Cathedral panned across the faces of the more illustrious guests at the service: Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, and, in the pews behind the vice president, Senators Kennedy, McCarthy, and Kefauver. House Speaker Joseph Martin and Democratic leader Sam Rayburn had also been given prominent seats.
Charlie watched the proceedings on the television in the West Wing lobby foyer. Originally he’d planned to attend the funeral, as insincere as that might have been, but an early-morning phone call from Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower’s personal secretary, forced him to change plans.
The funeral made him uncomfortable, not because Charlie had killed Carlin, but because the oratories eulogized an evil and manipulative politician. Then again, Charlie knew, Carlin wouldn’t be the first or the last politician so falsely memorialized.
“Pretty creepy to hear all that praise,” Bernstein whispered to him. He had brought her for the company, because neither of them had ever been to the White House, and because her internship was soon going to end. In May, she would be heading back home to Los Angeles for a summer job at UCLA. In the fall, she would return to Georgetown for grad school, but it wasn’t yet clear if she wanted to continue working in Charlie’s office. Her experience had been quite a bit more than she’d expected, and a return to normalcy sounded enticing.
The West Wing lobby was filled with men and women darting in and out of offices for appointments with various officials, some sitting on leather chairs and sofas to be greeted, others with special badges, walking around determinedly as if this were Penn Station. Charlie’s eyes went everywhere but the television—to fellow visitors, to the black-and-white-checkered marble floor, to the paintings of American history. The work most clearly in his line of sight was the oddest and most disconcerting one in the room: President James Garfield, post–assassination attempt, suffering through his last miserable days on earth before the infection from the bullet took his life. Snatches of conversations of aides walking by urgently filled the room:
If Secretary Dulles doesn’t say Indochina is in the security interests of Southeast Asia, then France will know we ain’t sending even one soldier.
The networks should be paying McCarthy. I hear ratings are through the roof.
The veep gets one o’clock shadow. They don’t make enough makeup.
So Toscanini freezes. He forgets all the music or something. And the network panics. They cut away; they didn’t know what to do.
At least now no one has to pretend that Margaret Truman can sing.
He’d already read every article in the Washington Post on the coffee table in front of him, including the exposé on the front page, below the fold, “The Curious Case of Phil Strongfellow,” in which it was revealed that the U.S. government had no record of the Utah Republican having ever been in the OSS or any other clandestine service. A spokesman for Strongfellow stated that the congressman would be directly appealing to the Eisenhower administration for his war records to be released.
“So what’s going to happen to Strongfellow?” Bernstein asked.
“He’s over and done,” said Charlie. “You see the unnamed Republican congressional aides quoted in the story saying the party leadership is looking around for someone else to run for the seat in November?”
“Why did he lie?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I don’t know if he’d be able to explain it either.”
Charlie wondered whether the Hellfire Club had leaked the information to the Post or if it had been shared by his dad or his associates, whatever they called themselves. The Post story depicted Strongfellow as either delusional or criminally mendacious. There really wasn’t any acceptable explanation; even the most benign version suggested serious emotional problems.
Ann Whitman appeared at the far end of the lobby and spoke to the receptionist, who motioned to Charlie. In her forties, trim and attractive in a no-nonsense way, the president’s secretary strode purposefully toward him.
“Congressman, we’re ready for you now,” she said.
“You should probably get a cab back to Capitol Hill,” Charlie said to Bernstein as he got up to follow Whitman. “I don’t know how long this is going to last.”
Bernstein nodded, stood, and smoothed her dress. She seemed to want to say something, but no words came out.
“It’s okay, Bernstein, we’ll talk more when I get back to the office,” he said. She nodded, and Charlie followed Whitman out of the reception area and down the hall to the Oval Office.
Charlie had met Eisenhower once before, back in 1948, when the retired general and hero of World War II had been president of Columbia University. Attending a reception honoring students and faculty who had served in the military during the war, Charlie was one of many who stood in line to shake the hand of the former supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. At the time, Charlie was pursuing his PhD in American history, and Eisenhower, then fifty-eight, was just beginning what would be an ill-fated tenure at the Ivy League school. Their interaction lasted maybe thirty seconds—handshake, information about the company Charlie had served with and where, photograph, “Thank you for your service.”
“Come in,” the president said now when Whitman knocked on the Oval Office door, his voice as flat as the Kansas plains where he’d been raised.
Eisenhower hadn’t changed the Oval Office decor much after moving in a year and a half earlier. The walls were gray and the rug was a blue-green; he’d even stuck with the Teddy Roosevelt desk that Truman had brought out of storage. At the opposite end of the room, an immense floor globe stood before the fireplace, on the mantel of which were thirteen miniature flags. To the president’s left sat a smaller version of the famous Seated Lincoln sculpture.