The Hellfire Club(37)
“And we think today’s reporters are rough,” Charlie joked.
MacLachlan raised an eyebrow. “We do? I don’t. You’ve gotten some tough coverage?”
Charlie thought about it. There had been a few vicious jabs at him in tabloid political columns—mostly about his father’s role in his appointment and his privileged background—but as a married academic and war veteran with a shiny clean reputation, he had largely avoided bad ink. The same could not be said for his predecessor, Congressman Van Waganan, whose reputation was still being dragged through the grimiest mud imaginable, with no lurid rumor spared repetition.
“I suppose not, not me personally,” Charlie admitted as they continued their journey toward the second floor.
“Truth is, most of our so-called Fourth Estate is focused on nonsense. Even the ones fixated on McCarthy’s daily theater. Same so-called journalists he’s attacking as Commies today were only too happy to give McCarthy’s character-assassination campaign front-page attention a few years ago with nary a scintilla of editorial discretion or judgment that what he was peddling was pure balderdash. As if there does not exist such a thing as empirical fact!”
“You don’t think there are Reds in the government, Mac?” Charlie was surprised to hear MacLachlan’s skepticism about McCarthy, given his deep conservatism and loathing of the Godless Communists. He’d made a few comments over poker one night about how happy he was that Alger Hiss was in Lewisburg Federal Prison; he’d been imprisoned for perjury, since the statute of limitations had run out on his acts of espionage. “I don’t care if they get him for jaywalking as long as they get him,” he’d said.
“Of course there are Reds in the government,” MacLachlan replied. “They’re infesting it like termites. But McCarthy isn’t finding them. Hoover is. McCarthy hasn’t produced the name of one proven, clear, actual Communist agent. Not one! And that’s not even the point. It’s a distraction, or—what did Isaiah call it?—the old okey-doke. Look over here! Look over here! And meanwhile your pocket’s being picked.”
“Yeah, he said that about the comic-book hearings,” Charlie said, wincing a bit internally at the thought of an event he dreaded.
MacLachlan patted his shoulder and grinned. “Better you than me, my friend.” Charlie grimaced and followed MacLachlan down two hallways of the second floor to the door of the Speaker’s Lobby. “Talking about ghosts, Charlie, John Quincy Adams is said to haunt this room,” he said, opening one of the doors; Charlie peered inside. “In the middle of a debate over some fairly innocuous issue, he had a stroke on the House floor,” MacLachlan said, pointing at a sturdy couch with light green cushions. “The Adams box sofa, where he died. Awful way to go.”
“Can’t think of many good ones,” Charlie replied. “Hey, where are the Senate bathtubs, the place where Vice President Wilson fell asleep, nearly froze to death, and then died of a stroke?”
“In the basement somewhere,” MacLachlan said. “The basements here are confusing and they go on forever, like ancient caves.”
“I’ve heard that sometimes late at night, right outside the room where Vice President Wilson died, folks can catch a whiff of the soap they once used.”
“Yes, I’ve heard those tales as well,” said MacLachlan. “And some people claim they hear Wilson coughing. All very silly. Like the wails of agony from the ghost of the Union soldier who died in the Capitol Rotunda. The tales are nonsense. But the deaths are very real. And those are just the ones we know about. Think of all the…inconvenient people over the years who must have met their ends in this building or nearby and then vanished forever.”
Charlie was too startled to ask what in the hell MacLachlan was talking about, and anyway they were now walking onto the House floor, where hundreds of members of Congress were convening. They joined a small circle of friendly faces. No one seemed to be paying much attention to the debate at the front of the room about whether or not to allow more Mexican migrant workers into the country. Democratic congressman Ray Madden was railing against the bill, which he claimed would allow Mexicans to “take over jobs that millions of unemployed Americans are entitled to.”
On the floor, House Speaker Joe Martin, a Republican from Massachusetts with a boyish face and a mass of hair he always had to brush away from his eyes, was diligently trying to buttress his narrow seven-seat Republican majority by enlisting the support of Southern Democrats eager to help the farmers and big businesses who relied upon cheap Mexican labor.
Strongfellow swung himself over to Charlie on his crutches.
“Ted Williams broke his collarbone today,” Strongfellow said.
“How?” asked Congressman Ben Jensen. He was a mousy Midwest Republican who had served in World War One and loved talking about Iowa.
“Shoestring catch,” said Strongfellow. “Line drive.”
“He’s about twenty pounds overweight,” noted Charlie.
“Ike is dropping another H-bomb on the Marshall Islands today,” said Democratic congressman George Hyde Fallon, a machine politician from Baltimore. “And you fools are talking about Ted Williams’s collarbone.”
They tried and failed to look contrite. The debate over the migrant-worker bill continued, with various House deputy whips dispatched to corral votes.