by Jake Tapper
“Yes, ma’am.” Charlie grinned, but with a slight wince. Political life seemed to require new levels of drinking, and lately liquor had become a slow-motion “Goodnight Irene” punch to the face, knocking him out for the night. Which, to be honest, he sometimes preferred to sober insomnia and nightmares about France, the hangover notwithstanding.
He kissed her good-bye and went downstairs to the foyer, where he bundled up in his heavy coat, put on his fedora, and descended the town-house stairs. As he stood outside on Dent Place, the cruel January chill felt like pins pricking his cheeks. Days-old snow and ice had turned the cobblestoned streets grimy, like mashed coal. Dodging ice puddles and frozen slush banks, he made his way around the corner to his new car, a silver Oldsmobile Super 88. Margaret had protested mildly when he chose it upon arriving in Washington—for a day or so she’d called him Hot Rod—but Charlie still had book royalties to spend. He felt a boyish thrill every time he saw its gleaming wraparound windshield, the chrome streak on each side creating the illusion of speed even when the car was standing still. It was his first car—as a New Yorker, he’d had no need for one—and despite his left-leaning wife’s occasional anti-consumerist gibes, he felt no guilt about his joy in the smell of the car’s interior leather and the satisfying hum of its 185-horsepower Rocket V-8 engine.
Even though it was chilly, he rolled down the windows and kept them open as he maneuvered through Georgetown. For Charlie, it was an aromatic tour as much as a visual one: garbage, brown sugar, cat urine, freshly baked bread. As he entered Rock Creek Parkway, he flipped on the radio. Playing defense against McCarthy, President Eisenhower was proposing to strip U.S. citizenship from Communists convicted of treason, but the broadcasters devoted much more time to the marriage of Yankee great Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe.
Charlie passed the Washington Monument on his left and the Jefferson Memorial, across the Tidal Basin, on his right. By nine a.m., he’d parked and begun his journey on foot to the very worst quarters in the House Office Building.
Three weeks after he’d first moved in, Charlie wondered if the novelty of walking into his office at the U.S. House of Representatives would ever wear off. This time last year, he’d been a rising academic star at Columbia, settling into the life he’d plotted for himself since he was a boy. But that all changed in December when Representative Martin Van Waganan, Democrat from New York’s Thirteenth Congressional District, was indicted for corruption and racketeering. Hours after the grand jury handed down its decision, Van Waganan’s dead body was found in a cheap motel in a blighted ghetto of Northeast Washington, DC. Police had no suspects; the crime scene was messy and inconclusive. The FBI had taken over, and the status of the investigation was uncertain. It was a grim business that had triggered Manhattan power broker Winston Marder’s quick phone call to Republican governor Tom Dewey to arrange for Charlie to fill the vacant seat for the remainder of the term.
The stated reasons for Charlie’s selection, the ones soon whispered to newspaper reporters by “the governor’s top aides,” were Charlie’s war record, his respected bestseller, his and his wife’s telegenic looks, and his GOP affiliation (important for Dewey at a time when his party controlled the House and White House). The subtext of Winston Marder’s pitch to Dewey went unstated: Dewey owed him. Charlie knew that his selection had been unusual, to put it mildly, and that there were plenty of congressmen and journalists who were waiting for him to fall flat on his face on Congress’s marble floors.
Charlie navigated the dim halls to find Catherine Leopold stationed in her usual position next to his congressional office’s open door, clipboard in hand, wearing the slightly disapproving expression she’d probably had since birth. “Good morning, Congressman,” she said crisply. “Today might be a good day to start emptying out those boxes in your office. The ones that you insisted you didn’t want me to unpack. The new intern will fetch you some coffee at the House Restaurant. Black, I presume?”
For all her attention to detail, Catherine Leopold seemed possessed by a peculiar determination to ignore Charlie’s stated preference; every day she asked him if he’d like his coffee black, and every day he said no. Black was how he’d had to take it in the trenches, black and like a mud puddle—if his platoon was lucky. Sometimes he had not been entirely certain the java wasn’t just sewage.
“I’d love cream and sugar,” he said, as he did every day.
He could have sworn he heard Leopold give a mild harrumph of disapproval. He wasn’t sure if this was a rebuke of his dietary habits or a comment on his lack of manliness, though he didn’t care. The notion of what any particular civilian might think about his masculinity meant little to Charlie after he had experienced and borne witness in the war to all its various and grisly manifestations.
In his personal office, he hung up his coat and hat and turned to face the boxes full of books and pictures he’d been avoiding, all of them neatly stacked along one side of the small room. He knew he should just buckle down and unpack, but he also took some small delight in aggravating the über-efficient Leopold with his procrastination, and he was enjoying this rare moment of calm before his day swung into gear.
After carrying one box of books to the mahogany desk that dwarfed the room, Charlie eased himself into the leather swivel chair whose headrest had been smoothed and darkened by countless predecessors and emitted a small sigh of satisfaction. He tipped the chair back tentatively and peeked outside to see if Leopold was nearby, then he propped his feet on the desk’s broad surface and reclined, surveying his tiny kingdom.
The sound of Leopold’s voice outside his door brought him clattering to his feet; he knocked open the desk’s central drawer as he stood. He slid a pile of new pens and pencils that had been left for him on top of the desk into the drawer, and as he did, he felt something brush his fingertips. He pulled the drawer further open, looked down, and extricated a folded scrap of white memo paper. U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops, it read. An inscrutable relic, perhaps from the previous occupant. Leopold knocked from the open doorway and Charlie absentmindedly tucked the scrap into his pocket, not wanting to be seen wasting his time on such nonsense. He began removing books from the box on his desk just as Leopold entered. Why does she make me feel like an errant schoolboy? he wondered as he looked at her expectantly.
“There’s a regular poker game among some of the veterans,” she said. “Congressman Strongfellow holds it in his office. His secretary just called to ask if you’d like to join them. Are you free Monday? It will be a good chance for you to meet some of your colleagues.”
It made sense that other veterans would be flocking to Strongfellow, a former POW who’d escaped from behind enemy lines; his war heroism was legendary. “Yes, I’d love to go,” Charlie said, thinking he’d make a few friends and maybe even recruit some allies against Goodstone. Which reminded him: “Miss Leopold, if you have a minute, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this thing that happened at Appropriations yesterday.”
“Oh, I heard all about it.” She closed the office door behind her and stood almost at attention across from Charlie. “Quite a declaration of independence.”
“What have you heard?”
She frowned. “Mixed reviews, I would say.”
“I’m not giving a dime to that company,” Charlie said.
“Well, now, Congressman—” she said, then hesitated.
“Go ahead.”
“Sir,” she said, “do you want me to help you, the way I helped Congressman Van Waganan? Or would you prefer a yes-woman to just tell you your teeth are white and your shoes are shiny? Because I can do that, and it will be a lot easier. For me. Not for you. The opposite for you.”
Charlie smiled. “Okay,” he said, “you’re right. Tell me. What else are you hearing?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t expect,” she said in her charming Southern lilt. She was from Durham, North Carolina, and her voice conveyed warmth and a debutante’s coy wisdom. “You haven�
�t paid any dues and you weren’t even elected, so how dare you mouth off; you’re only here because of your father’s connections; and, of course, why on earth did you get Van Waganan’s seat on Appropriations?”
“Right,” said Charlie. “I would probably think that about me too. But that’s not really relevant to the point I was making, which seems more important than how I got here.”
He returned to the business of unpacking, and Leopold put down her clipboard to help. The next box contained books from his work library; Leopold handed him volumes to line his mahogany bookshelves. The Oxford English Dictionary, Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album…
After a few minutes of companionable silence, Charlie asked Leopold: “Did you work for Congressman Van Waganan long?”
“I did,” she said. “He was here for fifteen years and I was by his side for all of them. I started as his secretary and worked my way up to office manager.”
“Impressive.” Charlie stacked and then strained to lift all six volumes of Winston Churchill’s series on the Second World War. Leopold stepped forward, took the top two volumes, and placed them alongside the others on the shelf.
Charlie cleared his throat. “Miss Leopold…I’m sorry about what happened with Van Waganan.” She looked up, and their sudden proximity seemed to make her uncomfortable; she took a couple of steps back.
“He was a good man,” she said. “And then he wasn’t.” She blinked and briefly looked away.
Awkwardly, Charlie busied himself straightening the Churchill volumes.
“Oh, well,” she said, immediately regaining her composure. “Do what thou wilt, I suppose.”
Charlie was about to ask what she meant by that cryptic remark when there was a knock at the door and a young woman peeked in. She was in her early twenties and attractively wholesome, with brown hair, a dusting of freckles, and a sweet smile. Handing a cup of coffee to Leopold to give to the congressman, she seemed to have trouble meeting Charlie’s direct gaze. He suspected it was shyness; he’d seen it before with some of his students at the beginning of a new semester. His bestselling book gave him a kind of celebrity that Charlie didn’t feel was particularly deserved.
“There’s a phone call,” the woman said to Leopold. “Senator Kefauver’s office. The senator would like the congressman to swing by today. After lunch.”
“Did he say what it was about?” Leopold asked.
The young woman’s face flushed. “I didn’t know I could ask!”
Leopold turned to Charlie. “Congressman, this is Sheryl Ann Bernstein, a senior at Georgetown, majoring in American history. She’s our new intern this semester, and as luck would have it, an admirer of your book.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Bernstein.”
Bernstein cleared her throat. “I have to tell you how much Sons of Liberty meant to me,” she said. “It made me love history in a way I never had before; to be honest, it set me on my current path. I’m going to pursue a PhD.”
“Thanks,” said Charlie, “it’s kind of you to say that. What are you going to focus on?”
“Colonial history, I think. I’m doing my senior thesis on the propaganda techniques of Sam Adams.”
“What a scoundrel,” Charlie said. “Him, not you.”
“Thank you, Sheryl Ann,” Leopold interjected, dismissing her. “Congressman, I’ll set up your meeting with Senator Kefauver, and I’ll let Congressman Strongfellow know you’ll be in attendance Monday evening.”
The two women turned to leave. Leopold slowed her pace until the intern was out of earshot, and then she turned again to face Charlie. She drew back her shoulders and smoothed her sensible tweed skirt.
“Congressman, I say this in the spirit of what we discussed earlier, about my helping you,” she said. “I wouldn’t push the Goodstone approp issue. And if you want me to alert the chairman’s office that you’ll be backing off, I’m happy to do so in a discreet way.”
Charlie’s jaw clenched slightly. His voice was firm: “No.”
“This is a man who will kick you off the committee just for spitting on the sidewalk.”
“I’ll be polite,” Charlie said. “But I’m not going to back down.”
Chapter Four
Friday, January 15, 1954—Afternoon
U.S. Capitol
Sheryl Ann Bernstein’s eyes were bright and she seemed to be trying hard not to bounce in excitement as she followed Charlie into the wicker coach. “Thanks for inviting me to tag along,” she said as they boarded the monorail from the Capitol to the Senate Office Building. “This contraption is amazing!”
“Don’t get used to it, Bernstein,” Charlie teased as they sat down. “We can only use this train when I have an actual appointment with a senator.”
“Why don’t members of the House have an underground train to reach the Capitol? Why do you guys have to walk?”
“You need to ask?” he said. “We’re serfs. Lucky the senators deign to even acknowledge us.”
“Well, you have to admit,” she said, “members of the House can be rather unsavory.”
“Malodorous?”
“Opprobrious.”
Charlie smiled, but he felt he should steer the conversation to something more educational. “Pop quiz: What do you know about Kefauver?”
“Let me see,” Bernstein said, her eyes darting skyward as if that’s where the information was stored. “He ran those organized-crime hearings a few years ago. He’s incredibly popular with Democrats. He was on TV shows like What’s My Line? and such. He ran for president in 1952 and won the New Hampshire primary.”
“Correct,” said Charlie. “Beating President Truman and essentially chasing him away from the idea of running for reelection.”
“Really? I thought ol’ Harry was already planning not to run.”
“Revisionism. Truman would have run, but Kefauver cleaned his clock,” said Charlie, which prompted a loud chuckle from the tall senator in the cart in front of them. Charlie looked and realized they were seated behind Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson, Democrat of Texas, who looked back at Charlie, smiled, and winked, then returned his attention to the Washington Star.
“Kefauver then went on to run the table in the primaries,” Charlie said in a more hushed tone. “So why wasn’t he the Democratic presidential nominee?”
“Party bosses thought Stevenson a better candidate?” Bernstein guessed.
Johnson folded his newspaper and twisted his body to face Charlie and his intern. “There’s a few reasons for that, young lady,” LBJ said in his thick South Texas drawl, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “Some of the party bosses liked Truman, who sure didn’t like Estes. Some of the bosses are big-city Democrats who didn’t much care for Senator Kefauver looking into organized crime in the big cities. For reasons you might expect.” He chuckled.
Charlie stole a glance at Bernstein, who was quite obviously stunned to be getting a history lesson from the Senate Democratic leader.
“I never thought that old egghead Adlai would win,” Johnson said. “I bet on a different horse, Dick Russell, in the primaries. But the thing about Estes is, he’s a lone wolf. He’s not on a team. You can’t win without allies, not in Congress, and not if you’re tryin’ to get to the White House.” Johnson turned around and reopened his newspaper.
Bernstein took a Camel cigarette from her petite clutch bag, prompting Charlie to reach into his pocket for his German lighter. A paper scrap was sticking to it: the note he’d found in the desk that morning. Once again, he thought of the late congressman Martin Van Waganan and wondered what had happened to him, how a man so admired could throw it all away for petty corruption, meeting such a sordid and grotesque end.
“What’s that?” Bernstein asked him.
“Nothing,” Charlie said, tucking the note into his inside jacket pocket and lighting Bernstein’s cigarette for her.
The monorail was slowing down. “Th
is is our stop,” Senator Johnson drawled over his shoulder to them.
“Thank you, Mr. Leader,” Charlie said as the three of them exited onto the marble floor.
“You’re Winston’s boy, aren’t you?” Johnson said, extending his hand. “You can call me Lyndon.” Charlie shook his hand, an act that Johnson made seem oddly warm and intimate. Johnson caught sight of an aide waiting for him and smiled good-bye to Charlie, then threw a wink to Bernstein before he strode down the hall.
“Geez,” said Bernstein. “My senior-thesis adviser isn’t going to believe this.” She paused, then nodded toward Charlie’s pocket. “What’s with the little scraps of paper? Should I be taking notes for you so you don’t have to keep notes in your pocket? Miss Leopold gave me a stenographer’s pad.” She lifted the corner of it from her purse to show him.
Charlie pulled the folded note from his inner pocket and handed it to her. “I found it in my new desk. I think it was Van Waganan’s.”
She looked at the cryptic note—U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops—and said, “What does it mean?”
“Beats me,” said Charlie. “If you figure it out, let me know.”
“Great!” she said with a note of sarcasm, tucking the note into her purse. “More homework!”
“Actually, I do have some homework for you, Bernstein,” Charlie said. “And don’t feel compelled to keep Miss Leopold completely up to date on all aspects of this research. We can make this our little project.”
The walls of the reception area of suite 410 in the Senate Office Building were festooned with photographs of the fourteen-city, fifteen-month Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. In a central place of honor was a framed copy of the March 12, 1951, Time magazine cover illustration of Kefauver next to an octopus, which was meant to represent the Mafia. Displayed in three different spots were coonskin caps, souvenirs from Kefauver’s 1948 Senate campaign, during which his nemesis, Tennessee political boss Ed Crump, had claimed he was “working for the Communists with the stealth of a raccoon”; Kefauver had laughed it off by donning a coonskin cap and embracing it as a trademark.