The Hellfire Club(24)
“I see you’ve met the conscience of the Republican Party,” Kefauver said playfully, tilting his head in Smith’s direction. It had been four years since Joe McCarthy saw Margaret Smith on the Senate subway and told her she looked very serious. “Are you going to make a speech?” he asked. “Yes,” she responded, “and you will not like it.” Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience,” delivered on the Senate floor, derided McCarthy’s “Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” She and Kefauver were thus allies against McCarthy, whose demagogic mud-slinging campaign against anyone to the left of Generalissimo Francisco Franco had been roiling the republic for too long. McCarthy’s opponents were beginning to gain ground, but Tail Gunner Joe, as he’d been nicknamed by someone, perhaps McCarthy himself, was winning the war of attrition; his adversaries were exhausted. He remained popular with a strong segment of the public, whose support of him seemed impervious to obvious moments of indecency and prevarication. Those who feared McCarthy might never actually go away and that the fever of McCarthyism might never break were growing despondent.
Kefauver handed Charlie a folded-over New York Times and tapped a finger on a page 9 story: “Rival for Senate Assails Kefauver: Sutton, House Member, Runs in the Tennessee Primary, as ‘Ultra-Conservative.’”
Charlie had read the story about Congressman Pat Sutton, one of his new poker buddies. Sutton was quoted saying he liked Kefauver personally, that they had visited each other’s homes, but he didn’t like the senior senator’s record, that he “has consistently voted as a left winger against the loyalty oath in the Government, and he has voted against wire-tapping to catch the Reds.”
“Do you know this jackanapes, Charlie?” Kefauver asked. “It’s not enough that the Republicans in Knoxville have all but issued a hit on me this year, not enough that the newspapers are all controlled by Boss Crump’s corrupt machine—now this little blunderbuss with whom I’ve broken bread is accusing me of being a Commie symp.”
Charlie shifted in his seat. Sutton was a former navy lieutenant whose many medals included the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star with oak leaf clusters. A demolitions expert, he was a bona fide war hero and a fair poker player whose tell was boasting about his hand; that meant his cards were garbage. Charlie liked him.
“I don’t know him well, sir,” Charlie said. “He’s in my poker group, along with all the other veterans.” He held his tongue and stole a look at Smith, whose lips were pursed and whose eyes were distant; she seemed to be used to other senators talking as if she weren’t there.
“They’ll come at me as a Negro lover, for one, same way Russell did in Florida back in ’52,” Kefauver said. “Sutton is already pursuing the Dixiecrats. And goddamn Earl Warren’s Supreme Court is going to vote to desegregate schools any minute, which the good people of Tennessee are decidedly not prepared for. And as if that weren’t enough, a guy with a chestful of medals is coming into the Democratic primary and is damn sure going to ask why I didn’t fight in the war. Though a businessman I know told me that a guy with that many medals is either reckless or foolish.”
“Do you want me to say something to him about tempering his rhetoric, sir?” Charlie asked. “And if I may, I don’t know that I would repeat that ‘reckless or foolish’ line on the stump.”
“No, no, of course not,” Kefauver said. He looked at his young protégé. “Say, Charlie, what are you doing tomorrow night? I have an extra ticket to the Alfalfa Club dinner.” Charlie hesitated—Margaret was due home tomorrow, and he was longing to see her. Kefauver pressed him: “It will be a roomful of people you need to know better, Charlie.”
Charlie knew this would be an opportunity to lobby against Goodstone, and he also had to admit that he’d long been curious about the club. “I’d be glad to join you, sir. Thank you.”
“Get some rest,” the senator said. “It can be a wild night. Wives—and girlfriends—are not invited.”
As Kefauver walked away, Charlie glanced sympathetically at the fourteen-year congressional veteran in the pearls and cashmere sweater across the table who had sat silently, with a bemused smile, throughout the exchange.
“Don’t you worry about it any, Congressman,” Smith said, dipping her spoon into a bowl of New England clam chowder. “I’m used to it.”
The next night, as Charlie entered the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel to attend the dinner, he felt as dashing as the main character in the spy novel he’d read on summer vacation, an agent who played high-stakes baccarat in northern France, posing as a rich Jamaican playboy. Ushered into the Grand Ballroom, where multiple bartenders were stationed like sentries, Charlie immediately ran into Kefauver as he was delivering what appeared to be a successful punch line to Robert Hendrickson, the Republican from New Jersey with whom Kefauver was working on the comic-book hearings.
Charlie waited politely for their laughter to fade. Kefauver turned to him with a jovial grin. “Charlie, great to see you,” he said, switching his scotch rocks into his left hand and extending his right.
“Thank you so much for having me,” Charlie said. “I must confess, I know nothing about the Alfalfas except why you call yourselves that.”