The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her

by Joe Rothstein

  Lincoln Howard, the Washingtonia Grand’s chief of security, quickly regained his feet and raced up two flights of stairs from the security office to the ballroom level. The dark cloud blowing through the ballroom doors flashed scenes etched in his memory from two tours in Iraq. Howard ducked into a bathroom, surprising three women standing immobile at the sinks. “Get out!” he shouted to them. “Get out of the hotel!” They ran. He grabbed fistfuls of cloth hand towels, soaked them in water and raced into the ballroom through a door closest to the stage, wet towels covering his face.

  Howard was no stranger to dead and wounded bodies. But his years in the Marine Corps never produced a scene like the one at the other end of his flashlight beam. It was as if a deranged choreographer had positioned a vast expanse of bodies on the floor, bodies partially hidden by white table cloths. Shrouds. Shrouds adorned with memorial wreaths of flowers, scattered from dinner tables by the force of the explosion.

  Despite the arc of horror framed by the blackness beyond flashlight range, the stench of something, what, chemicals of some kind, he took a few tentative steps on a floor now slippery, sticky with salad oil and vinegar, water from overturned vases, wine, the color of blood, mixing with the still bleeding bodies all around him. Howard edged into the ballroom swinging his light’s beam, searching for movement, any sign that someone was alive, anyone who might claim priority for removal from this grotesque tableau.

  Back and forth he swung his light, one delicate step after another, feeling the terrible softness of draining life under his shoes. Then he saw her. With disbelieving eyes, he saw her. On her back, as still as the parquet floor beneath her, a woman in a green suit, right sleeve hanging from her shoulder, skirt pock-marked with what appeared to be charred holes from tongues of flame, blood painting her forehead and cheeks. The president of the United States was in the tight beam of his flashlight, for the moment, a star, spot-lit, the center of his attention, his alone, her eyelids tightly shut. Nothing about her suggested life.

  Howard lifted her gently, arms tightly wrapped around her as precious cargo. Once in the light of the hotel lobby he carefully laid her on a sofa and used a wet towel to wipe blood from her cheeks and forehead.

  Only one television remote truck survived the blast, the one from local Channel 6. Gloria Graham, a tech intern pressed into on-air commentary, was the only voice of live coverage. Harley Littlefield, a Channel 6 videographer, manned the only live camera at the scene.

  Littlefield’s daily grind was covering traffic accidents long over and fires long extinguished. He had learned long ago to be inventive about how to make stale stories seem interesting. Here he needed no camera tricks. Everywhere he turned there was anguish, panic, smoke and suffering. He was in the front row while the show was still in act one. No shortage of powerful images. He headed for the large glass main entrance doors of the hotel. Gloria had no choice but to go with him, terrified that she might have to interview survivors, responders, anyone at all. Gloria had never interviewed anyone and never planned to. Her ambition was to one day be in the truck, turning dials, not on the street in the midst of chaos.

  The main lobby was a sea of bodies and walking injured. No ambulances yet, no emergency workers, no fire trucks. Not even a wailing siren. Hotel employees and guests were braving the remnants of smoke to carry survivors from the ball room. Sounds of pain wove around excited voices. The lobby’s rich golden carpet was washed with pools of fresh blood. Hotel workers were arms deep in blankets, sheets, and pillows. Everywhere, a chorus of ring tones from cell phones never silenced.

  Harley Littlefield was recording all of this on the camera he shouldered, transmitting it through the long trailing cable that tethered him to the Channel 6 truck directly across the street. Gloria followed his lead, trying to add voice to the images on the screen.

  “So many victims. Oh, so many look so bad. So hurt. And more coming out of the ballroom all the time. It looks like whatever happened, happened there, in the ballroom. I’m looking for Peg Merchant, our news director. She was in the ballroom. And Bill Crawley, our cameraman, was there, too. I hope they’re okay. I don’t see them here. I hope the ambulances get here soon. Injured people are even giving first aid to each other.”

  Harley continued to scan the room with his camera, recording quiet bedlam. Faces in pain, improvised tourniquets, rescuers with towels for masks braving entry to the still smoking ballroom. The ballroom was his destination, too, the apparent center of the carnage. As he edged closer to the ballroom entrance, Gloria moving as best she could ahead of him, trying to stay in camera view, his viewfinder came across a tall man, dressed in suit and tie, guarding a figure on a sofa. He focused tightly on that cameo.

  “Gloria!” he shouted abruptly. “It’s the president.”

  Gloria turned where Harley motioned. She had seen so much in the last few moments. She heard herself speaking as if a disembodied presence, barely thinking words before she spoke them. Was this really happening, or was it just an intern’s dream? If this was happening, was it really the president? Yes, it was. It was her. Before she realized what she was doing, out of pure instinct, she tried to conduct her first interview.

  “Madam President?”

  No answer. The image of the president seen by tens of millions watching on television was startling, particularly for those who only moments before had seen her clothed impeccably, chin high, awash in love and triumph. Her hair now a mat of gray ash and dust. One cheek charred, the other bloodied. Her wool suit jacket, the color of healthy green summer grass, ripped to the lining at the right shoulder, her matching skirt riddled with what appeared to be burn holes from the erupting blaze.

  “Madam President?” Gloria repeated.

  Lincoln Howard held his arms out to wave off Gloria and Harley.

  “Please,” he pleaded, leave her be.”

  The sound of sirens suddenly filled adjacent streets, uniforms appeared, men and women with medical bags and equipment. Gurneys, oxygen tanks, people in full fire gear, hoses. Help had arrived.

  A team of Secret Service agents swept into the lobby. Lincoln Howard waved them toward the president. Harley’s camera showed two agents lifting the president, one carried her toward the lobby door. They didn’t speak nor did they ask anyone’s permission. Harley’s camera followed them as far as he could until another Secret Service agent blocked his way at the door.

  

  In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was rushed by ambulance to the George Washington University Hospital suffering from gunshot wounds. Now it was another president, Isabel Tennyson, lying in the same hospital’s emergency room, the entire building in downtown Washington ringed by police cars, Secret Service agents, remote television trucks with extended antennae, and adjacent streets filled with people waiting for word of her condition. She was thought to be alive, possibly even conscious, but no one could be sure. Speculation filled news casts. Some who had been at the hotel recalled seeing Secret Service agents carry her from the lobby, not waiting for EMT workers, equipment or even a stretcher. The fear of further explosions or building collapse motivated a quick exit. She had arrived prone, in the back seat of a black Suburban, sirens screaming, at the hospital’s emergency entrance. Medical crews were waiting.

  Now there were more sirens, more Secret Service agents parting the waiting crowds. A recognizable face, Vice President Roderick Rusher, emerged from one of the caravan’s limousines and walked quickly through the ER entrance surrounded by guards. Rusher had insisted on this visit. Oscar Samoza, his chief of security this terrible night, could do little but comply, even though no one was certain that the threat of more bombs, more violence, was over.

  “Control of the U.S. government is at stake here,” said Rusher. “I have to know her condition and not rely on reports.” Rusher had spent decades in Congress. He knew how suspect second-hand reports could be in times of unexpected crisis. He had to see for himself.

  Chief surgeon Maurice Winegard was leading a sur
gical team behind doors where even the vice president was not permitted. It was hospital director Sarah Isaacs who met Rusher and gave the preliminary evaluation.

  “Concussion, broken ribs, broken collar bone, broken left leg, multiple cuts, some deep. The medical team is evaluating her for possible blood on the brain, internal bleeding. She was barely conscious and in shock when she arrived. Now she’s under sedation while the team works on her various injuries. Fortunately, Dr. Winegard was delivering a dinner seminar for new medical residents when the hospital was alerted to prepare for an unknown number of blast and burn victims. Many of our top people were already here.”

  Rusher thanked Isaacs. His chief of staff, Beverly Rawley, would be here soon and remain as long as needed with an open line to him. For now, said Rusher, he would give the public this news: the president is alive, her injuries are being treated and her condition is being evaluated. More information will be given as soon as it’s available. Isaacs agreed that this was all that could be said for now. It was too soon to know whether her injuries were life-threatening.

  Ten minutes later, after hospital staff alerted the media that there would be an announcement, Vice President Rusher delivered the president’s condition report. With these additions: Rusher, his family, and all Americans were praying for the president’s recovery; no effort would be spared to determine the cause of the explosion; and he, Roderick Rusher, would be at the helm until President Tennyson was able to resume her duties. There would be no gap in continuity for the United States government.

  There was general agreement that the vice president handled this night of crisis with composure, respect, and the assurance required for an anxious public.

  40

  Crime scene investigators arrived in the second wave of emergency vehicles. If there was one bomb, there could be two or more, with fuses delayed to cause maximum fatalities. Experience in Iraq and Afghanistan changed investigation protocol. Tread with care, expect the worst. While fire fighters worked to extinguish the blaze, bomb squad specialists from the FBI, the U.S. Army, and other agencies combed three square blocks around the hotel, searching for anything suspicious, anything that could be that second, or even third bomb.

  The direction of the explosion was obvious, the hotel’s south side, where the rail tracks were located and damage most severe. Television trucks, police vehicles, motorcycles, the entire presidential vehicle entourage and the bodies of many who arrived with them, formed a scene of carnage from which no one appeared to have survived.

  By dawn, fire still smoldering but no longer an obstacle, bomb crews were able to climb to the uprooted tracks and twisted steel that faced the hotel. Four rail cars were lying at various places along the track bed, two were blown completely off the tracks onto the pavement 20 feet below. Rail crews were working at fever pitch to remove some type of milky substance still draining from damaged tank cars to adjoining streets.

  One tank car had been cut in two by the explosion. It now lay on its side, two gigantic wads of steel. Little science was required to determine that this car was the source of the explosion. By noon, investigators concluded that the explosive device was an IED, an improvised explosive device, the most deadly weapon used against U.S. troops in Iraq. The bomb had been attached to the underside of the rail car, a car transporting ammonia nitrate.

  In a cruel duplicity of popular applications, ammonium nitrate is both a valuable and widely used soil additive that enhances crop growth, and an extremely dangerous compound that mining companies use to blow off the tops of mountains. One of the worst disasters in U.S. history, one that all but destroyed the port of Texas City, Texas, in 1947, was triggered when 2,600 tons of ammonium nitrate aboard the cargo ship Grandcamp exploded so powerfully that it broke windows forty miles away and brought down two small planes flying at 1,500 feet. Ammonium nitrate was used by Terry Nichols to destroy Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, an explosion felt fifty-five miles away and recorded at 3.0 on the Richter scale.

  Who attached the explosive to the rail car and why remained a mystery to be solved. This much was clear to those walking the ruined tracks even as fire fighters worked to extinguish the last glowing embers around the hotel: It was an act of terrorism.

  41

  Members from both chambers were gathered on floor of the U.S. House in an extraordinary special sesssion, not for the purpose of hearing a presidential speech or an appearance by a visiting head of state, but to pay tribute to fallen colleagues and to respond to an attack aimed at the heart of the U.S. government in the center of the nation’s capital.

  Florida Senator Carson Coulter had died in the explosion, moments after introducing the president at what was to have been the celebration gala. Four members of the U.S. House, honored guests seated near the dais, where the explosion’s force was most deadly, also were killed. So was Rita Gonzales, the president’s long-time staff member who had labored through the Senate years and early months of the presidency to achieve immigration reform. Most members of the Washington, D.C., police patrol that escorted the president to the hotel had been killed instantly. They were parked and waiting directly across the street from the obliterated tracks and took the full force of the blast. The death toll included Secret Service agents, media people, hotel workers, members of the band, dozens of guests standing and cheering their president as their final acts on earth. Hundreds more had been treated for injuries, many remained in local hospitals, some in critical condition.

  Before a watching nation, religious leaders of all faiths paid homage to the victims from the well of the U.S. House. Vice President Rusher spoke with emotion about his visit earlier that morning with President Tennyson, who had been moved to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for longer-term recovery from her head injuries, now diagnosed as serious, but not life-threatening. Her body had been battered. Healing would take time. Rusher praised the president’s strength and courage and promised that the terrorists, whoever they might be, would feel the full force of retribution from the United States government, a promise that drew an extended standing ovation from the assembled members of Congress. It was a day of sorrow, a day of resolve for a nation always quick to unite when under attack.

  Following the joint session there was another meeting. House and Senate leaders of both parties met in the ornate Capitol office of Democratic Senate leader Sidney Alcorn.

  The subject of this meeting was impeachment. At the time of the blast, the U.S. Senate was within days of a decision on whether to remove President Tennyson from office. Now the nation was in mourning, the president was hospitalized, there were funerals to plan and attend. National shock to be calmed. Assassination attempt or not, the charges against the president remained to be resolved. The House had voted. The U.S. Constitution required the U.S. Senate to act. But it could not act now. The assembled leadership decided to delay a Senate vote until the president’s medical condition became more certain. Best case, after she returned to the White House. The day of judgement would be delayed. It could not, though, be avoided.

  42

  A busy rail freight line crosses the Potomac River from Virginia to reach Washington, D.C. at 14th street, in the district’s Southwest quadrant, about a half-mile from the White House. Once in the district, the tracks turn to the east, roughly paralleling many government agencies and the National Mall with its many museums. At 7th street, the tracks turn diagonally southeast, along the riverfront. This rail line, running through the heart of the nation’s capital, is an important link in rail’s north-south traffic corridor. It also has long been a controversial link, one that the city’s leaders and federal safety experts have tried to relocate for its obvious dangers to local and national safety.

  After years of effort an agreement was struck. The line would be moved to less congested surroundings. Hazardous material transport through the city would be avoided. The agreement had been signed last year. Construction of the new route was under way. A year too late.

  Despite
the agreement, it was commonly known that the rail line would occasionally ship hazmats on this corridor, generally with advance notice so that in the unlikely event of a spill or derailment, emergency crews would be available. In fact, the day before the explosion, officials were notified that a small amount of ammonium nitrate was on the transport schedule. The Secret Service asked that the shipment be delayed until the president left the Washingtonia Grand hotel.

  Clay Bergman puzzled over this. Bergman was chief of the FBI’s national security branch and the designated lead officer assigned to investigate the explosion. Pressure was intense to find the bombers. The U.S. military was on alert to respond, and in fact, eager to respond at any definitive sign that this was an al Qaeda or Isis operation. Many congressional voices were demanding action, even without firm evidence. Who else could it be?

  Bergman was not so sure. No one had claimed responsibility. That was unusual for terrorist groups after a successful operation. And this was no hit and run event like the Oklahoma City bombing. Someone had access to avoid detection while attaching the bomb to the rail car. The car exploded precisely when it was opposite the hotel and exactly at the time the president was speaking. The device was not timed to explode; it was remotely detonated. For Bergman, this operation had all the earmarks of an inside job.

  While the labs continued to analyze the twisted remains of the tank car for finger prints and other clues, Bergman and his team scanned railroad employee lists and interviewed the train’s crew and rail officials. Yes, rail officials were aware of the request to delay shipment of ammonium nitrate. Yes, the request had been relayed to operational people both verbally and in writing. Each member of the operational staff was quizzed. None had an explanation for why the request was ignored, why the car was sent, why, in fact, the train had come to full stop opposite the hotel at that critical moment.