The Hellfire Club(111)
He wanted to ask Eisenhower about this. Did all heroes feel like such frauds? What had Charlie done, after all? Killed Carlin and helped Street save Margaret. She was healthy and would soon give birth, and the doctor reported that the baby looked great too, and that was the most important thing. But the CEO of General Kinetics was fat and happy manufacturing his poisons, and the Hellfire Club was down one monk but still thriving and pulling strings. Nothing had really changed except he and Margaret were not immediately being threatened. But McCarthy and Cohn and Abner Lance were still out there. His father had told him that Allen Dulles had sworn that Charlie and Margaret were safe for now, but how long would that last?
“I feel as though I have failed this nation more than I have fought for it, sir,” Charlie said. “Since coming here to Washington, anyway.”
Eisenhower looked grimly down at his desk. “Charlie,” the president began. He stood and stared out the window. “In October 1952, I was campaigning in Wisconsin. Milwaukee. I was going to give a speech. And in it, I planned to stand up for my friend General Marshall. McCarthy had been smearing him as a traitor for the better part of a year. I was very excited; I had a section in this speech vouching for my friend’s patriotism. And I would do so in Milwaukee with McCarthy onstage. It would be a moment I could feel proud of.”
He exhaled, and the life seemed to go out of him. He turned and put his hands on the back of his chair. “Then the governor got his hands on a copy of the speech, and he convinced my aides that they should take out that section, that if I stood up for George Marshall, I might alienate McCarthy, which could cost me Wisconsin’s electoral votes.”
There was another knock at the Oval Office door, and Mrs. Whitman once again poked her head in. The president turned to her. “One more second,” he said. She closed the door. Eisenhower paused, apparently trying to find his place in the story.
“So what did you do after you heard that the governor told your aides to take out that section?” Charlie asked, attempting to help.
“I had them take it out of my speech,” Eisenhower said. “I wish I hadn’t. And this ended up, of course, not being the last time I had to defer to the egoism of this demagogue. McCarthy kept coming and coming and coming at me. My secretary of the army has been trying to accommodate him; that hasn’t stopped him. He is incapable of stopping, even when it’s in his own interests. Smearing and lying. It’s what he does. One cannot appease the insatiable.”
“And, as it turned out, you didn’t need Wisconsin’s electoral votes,” Charlie noted.
“And it turned out I didn’t need the electoral votes,” Eisenhower agreed. He smiled at Charlie. A sad smile, tinged with regret.
“Okay, soldier, dismissed,” Eisenhower said, extending a hand to shake Charlie’s. “Take care of that pregnant little lady of yours.”
Charlie thanked the president and walked out of the Oval Office and the West Wing. It was a gorgeous spring day, sunny but with a cool breeze rising from the Potomac River. Grape hyacinth and tulips decorated the North Lawn; men in dark suits and skinny ties and young women with tight blouses and high heels walked with determination to and from the building.
Outside the White House grounds, across Pennsylvania Avenue, Margaret sat in the driver’s seat of the parked car, waiting for him. He walked around to the passenger side and got in.
“So where to?” Margaret asked. “Capitol Hill? Back to Manhattan? Somewhere else entirely?”
Her face was glowing with possibility and trust and partnership. She grinned at him expectantly, her eyes sparkling with joy. Charlie put his hand on Margaret’s swelling belly and smiled.
“Wherever you want the road to take us,” he said.
Sources
To state the obvious, The Hellfire Club is a work of fiction. That said, I did rely on numerous nonfiction accounts to write this book, ones to which I am indebted.
As a general note, David Halberstam’s The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994) was a great resource. Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Washington Confidential (New York: Crown, 1951) provided a severely flawed but otherwise revealing and muckraking account of the sleaze in the nation’s capital in that era.
Chapter 2: For details about the life of Senator Estes Kefauver, I relied on Joseph Bruce Gorman’s Kefauver: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Jack Anderson and Fred Blumenthal’s The Kefauver Story (New York: Dial Press, 1956).
I took some liberties regarding Charlie’s appointment. In real life, vacant House seats remain vacant until an election (special or otherwise). Governors appoint senators in case of an unscheduled vacancy, and resident commissioners for Puerto Rico can be appointed in such cases, too. First-term members of Congress were not considered for Appropriations until the 1970 reforms. But this is a work of fiction.
For plot purposes, The Pajama Game is shown premiering in DC in January of 1954; while the show did have tryouts in other cities before it opened on Broadway that spring, DC was not one of them.
Nixon’s poker skills were documented in Chuck Blount’s “How Playing Poker in the Navy Transformed Richard Nixon,” San Antonio Express-News, February 21, 2017. Nixon talked about his poker skills with historian Frank Gannon on February 9, 1983; the interview is available at the University of Georgia website.