by Jake Tapper
The young receptionist was expecting Charlie. “Welcome,” she said with an expansive smile. “May I take your coat? Your aide can wait out here.”
Charlie removed his overcoat and handed it to her, silently noting her perfume as she reached for it: Gourielli Moonlight Mist, a scent he recalled from a recent shopping trip with Margaret. Bernstein took a seat in the reception area while Charlie was led into a conference room down the hall. Inside, Kefauver was chain-smoking and flipping through a stack of reports. He stubbed out his cigarette, then took off his glasses and began polishing them with his pocket square. The room smelled like an ashtray.
“Senator Kefauver,” Charlie said, reaching out for a handshake. “Thanks again for inviting my wife and me to see the show; Margaret loved it.”
“It was my pleasure,” Kefauver said with a smile. He brought a new cigarette to his lips.
“I know you’re aware that Dad was a big admirer of yours in ’52 during the primaries. From across the aisle and behind the scenes, obviously, since we’re Republicans. Confidentially, I myself would have gone for you over Ike had you not been cheated out of the nomination.”
“But alas,” said Kefauver.
“Alas,” Charlie said, sitting down.
“Well, thank you, Charlie,” Kefauver said. “That means a great deal to me. Have faith. Another presidential election’s coming up.”
Charlie shifted in his chair uncomfortably. He would never have voted for Kefauver over Ike! And he’d never told a lie like that to ingratiate himself before. Why had he said that?
“There’s someone I want you to meet, Charlie,” Kefauver said. “He’ll be here in a minute. While we wait, can I offer you a drink?”
Charlie’s eyes quickly darted to the clock on the wall; it was shortly after two p.m. Charlie had already discerned that this was hardly Kefauver’s first cocktail of the day.
“Sure,” said Charlie.
The senator nodded to an aide whom Charlie hadn’t even realized was there, sitting in the corner near the door; the aide rose and reached for a square glass decanter from a bookcase, poured two glasses of bourbon, neat, and placed them, along with the decanter, on Kefauver’s desk. Kefauver nodded again and the aide left the room.
“Normally a scotch man, but I just got this bottle as a gift from a constituent. As Mark Twain once said”—Kefauver raised his glass—“‘Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.’”
Charlie smiled and lifted his glass in return. For a second he remembered his first bourbon experiment in high school; it had started with a meek sip and ended with him praying to a giant rock in Central Park. By now, however, it went down fast.
Charlie raised his glass again. “Churchill: ‘The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.’”
“Now, son.” Kefauver lifted a finger from his glass to wag it in Charlie’s direction. “Some of my House colleagues told me about your stunt at the Appropriations markup.”
“With respect, sir, it wasn’t a stunt,” Charlie said. “Houdini did stunts. The Wallendas do stunts. I took a stand.”
Kefauver narrowed his eyes, and when he spoke again his voice had lost a degree of its earlier warmth, though he was still making an effort to sound casual. “Well, now, that’s a matter of interpretation, I suppose.” He smiled, but there was no humor in his eyes. “Imagine that you’re a committee chairman who’s been here for decades, and some little pissant”—he saw Charlie about to object, so he amended his statement—“some freshly appointed congressman whom you perceive to be a nuisance comes along and objects to millions of dollars you’ve procured for an American company that provides thousands of jobs in congressional districts all around the nation,” Kefauver said.
“Right, I get that,” Charlie said.
“Those jobs belong to voters who are, of course, the ones who send us here,” Kefauver said. “They’re our bosses.”
“And surely our bosses would object to giving money to war profiteers who provided shoddy goods, risking and even costing the lives of our men,” Charlie said. “This is a fight I didn’t seek, sir, but to be frank, I’m stunned that any of my colleagues in Congress would challenge me on it.”
“Well, Charlie, I’m talking about the chairman of the committee and some others in leadership, and I’m quite certain they don’t think of you as a colleague. But of course you should fight for what you think is right. That’s an admirable trait, and too few of us possess it. Just know that this town isn’t built to reward it.”
“I’m starting to get that impression,” Charlie said.
Kefauver looked down at his glass. Charlie felt obliged to fill the slightly prickly silence.
“W. C. Fields,” Charlie said. “‘Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake.’”
Kefauver smiled. “What else shall we drink to?”
“To a real leader at the top of your party’s ticket two years from now,” Charlie said. Clink, clink. Kefauver downed the entire glass in one easy gulp.
The door to the conference room opened without warning and an older man walked in. His jowls sagged like a mastiff’s. Behind him stood one of the senator’s aides, who apparently had been trying to politely prevent the man from bursting in unannounced. Kefauver waved the aide off.
“Why, hello, Doctor,” Kefauver said, standing and extending a hand. “Congressman Marder, may I present Dr. Fredric Wertham.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, sir,” Charlie said, following Kefauver’s lead and standing to shake the doctor’s hand.
“This is the young congressman I told you about, Fredric,” Kefauver said. “His father and I are old friends.” He motioned for both men to sit down. “Charlie, I assume you’re acquainted with the groundbreaking psychiatric work Dr. Wertham has done at Bellevue and his philanthropic work with the colored people of your home city. The Lafargue Clinic—did I pronounce the name correctly, Doctor?”
“We’re in Harlem,” Wertham said, ignoring the question. “I set up the clinic just after the war, a project with Richard Wright and some others. You know Wright, I assume?”
“The writer?” asked Charlie.
“Of course,” snapped Wertham, as if it had been glaringly obvious that the only Richard Wright he might know would be the author of the acclaimed Native Son.
“Well, it’s not an uncommon name,” Charlie couldn’t help observing. “Anyway, I don’t personally know him, but the book was haunting. Could have done without the stage adaptation.”
“On that we are in agreement.” Wertham softened a bit. “In any case, Richard and I established a mental-hygiene clinic for the good people of Harlem who are unable to afford psychiatric care, not only because of the unjust capitalist system that keeps them impoverished but also because most psychiatric institutions do not admit Negroes.”
Wertham’s face had turned pink and his voice was rising. “How are we to solve the problem of crime in New York City without addressing the psychiatric needs of the very underclass committing the crimes!” He was only about three feet away from Charlie, close enough for Charlie to identify the smell on the gust of bad breath he exhaled. Tuna fish.
There was an uncomfortable silence, one Charlie filled when he suddenly remembered the first time he’d heard Wertham’s name.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Charlie said, “but weren’t you part of the defense in Albert Fish’s trial?”
Albert Fish was a child molester, a murderer, and a cannibal. He had been executed in 1936, when Charlie was sixteen.
“Yes, I testified in that trial,” Wertham said to Charlie. “What a travesty. The jury did not care in the slightest that Mr. Fish had no control over himself. His illness was just as real as if he’d had a tumor rotting his brain. And yet they punished him for his disease. The twelve boors on that jury had bloodlust just as bad as Mr. Fish’s—but their taste for
flesh was the kind that society deems socially acceptable.”
“My father was on the defense team,” Charlie said. “Winston Marder?” Wertham looked at him blankly. “Anyway, admirable work for the people of New York,” Charlie said. “How can I help? What can I do?”
“I’m glad you asked,” said Kefauver. “We’re holding hearings on juvenile delinquency this spring. Maybe April. Wertham is our key witness. The hearings will be in New York, in your congressional district, and we’d like you to help host and arrange a venue. We’d also like you to participate.” He glanced at Wertham.
“Estes here feels we need some youth on the panel,” Wertham said.
“I’m thirty-three,” said Charlie. “Hardly young.”
“For Congress, you’re an infant,” said Wertham. “This place is practically a museum exhibit of sarcophagi.”
“These are going to be big, Charlie,” said Kefauver. “We’re going to tear the lid off one of the most pernicious influences in our culture today. There will be a lot of press coverage; it will be a stellar opportunity to establish yourself. When folks hear you’re part of my next project, my guess is they’ll be more inclined to treat you with the respect you clearly feel you deserve.”
“And what are we going after?” Charlie asked, ignoring the gibe. “What exactly is the pernicious influence?”
Wertham smiled; it was the moment he’d been waiting for.
“Comic books,” he said.
Chapter Five
Monday, January 18, 1954
Maryland Rural Route 32/U.S. Capitol
“Comic books?” asked Margaret. “So did you laugh in his face?”
Margaret was using the desk phone at Polly’s Lodging, a motel about five miles from the Nanticoke Island campsite where she’d been conducting her research for the last two days. She’d volunteered to drive back to the mainland to buy some batteries and bread for the group, and she’d seized the opportunity to phone Charlie at work. She’d asked the long-distance operator to call back after their conversation was done and tell her the charges so she could give that amount to the motel owner, a dour older woman, presumably Polly.
“You should have seen their faces,” said Charlie. He was sitting behind the desk in his congressional office staring at a framed photograph of Margaret from their wedding day, one that captured her laughing uproariously, her head thrown back. He reached for a cigarette. “It was as if they were revealing that milk causes cancer. But it was about goddamn Batman.”
Charlie looked out his office window. Being the most junior member of the Eighty-Third Congress, he had a view of the air-conditioning unit of the second-most-junior member.
“Right after the meeting, Kefauver couriered over a package. Wertham has a book coming out in a few months…what’s it called—” He leafed through the manila folder. “Seduction of the Innocent.”
“Sounds very dangerous,” she said. “Innocent people shouldn’t be seduced!”
“This is no joke, Margaret!” Charlie protested in mock horror. “Kefauver sent me an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal from last November. On the front of the magazine: ‘What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books.’” He paused to read dramatically: “‘Here is the startling truth about the ninety million comic books America’s children read each month.’ He argues that comic books are literally instruction manuals for children to become hardened criminals.”
“It sounds…kind of silly,” Margaret said.
“Yes, and Kefauver wants to hold goddamn hearings on this in Manhattan in April!”
Margaret paused and Charlie had a feeling he knew why. She probably didn’t care to hear him discuss doing something he didn’t want to do, something he thought was an idiotic distraction. Their lives until now had been refreshingly free of any need for compromise. They were academics, idealists who’d participated in fund-raisers to fight polio and to foster better education for poor children. For the first time, they were facing choices they didn’t like.
“More important,” she finally said, “how’s the Goodstone fight?”
“Nothing since we last spoke, really. Kefauver cautioned me to be careful; Miss Leopold is against my doing it. I’m going to a poker game for veterans in Congress tonight. I’ll see if I can get them on board.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said.
“So how are the ponies?”
“They’re grand,” said Margaret. “About an hour after we arrived on Nanticoke, we saw some of the ponies literally frolicking in the surf.”
“So one research team’s on Nanticoke and the other is on Susquehannock?”
“Yes, I’m with Louis and one of his research assistants from Wisconsin.”
“And,” he said, hesitating, “when will I get to see you again?”
“Probably Saturday. It’s so nice being back in the field, and if this is my last project for a while because of the baby, I don’t want to leave too soon.”
“Sounds like wild horses couldn’t drag you away,” he muttered.
“Ugh, awful,” she chided him. “You know, you shouldn’t make bad dad puns until you actually become a dad.”
“But you won’t really need to return to the field after the baby,” Charlie said. “If you want to make this book project a reality, you can work from home, right?”
“Sure,” said Margaret. “And I suppose we could set up a situation where I just squeeze out baby after baby between edits? Maybe one per project?”
He was rapidly coming to understand that there was nothing that he could say on this topic that didn’t sound selfish or, alternatively, insincere. So, not for the first time, Charlie didn’t say anything in response. He chuckled and tried to change the subject, and the momentum of their phone call quickly petered out.
Just after seven that evening, Charlie knocked on Strongfellow’s congressional office door. No one answered, but the door was unlocked, so he went in. Through the smog of cigar smoke, he saw a glorious view of the Capitol out the window. Twenty members of Congress were standing around and sitting at tables in Strongfellow’s reception area and conference room.
Strongfellow swung around on his crutches, greeted Charlie, and shook his hand. “Thanks for coming, Charlie,” he said, his boyishness offset by the gravity of his war wounds.
“Thanks for the invitation,” Charlie answered, looking around the room.
“We started this during freshman orientation, back in November ’52. We called it Dogface Poker because it was just me and three infantry guys. Just a way to blow off a little steam. But then it kept going and cav and then navy and air force and others joined, and they didn’t care for the name—”
“Because we don’t have hideous dogfaces like you goddamn blister-feet!” This from a handsome dark-haired man seated nearby; Charlie recognized him as Congressman Pat Sutton from Tennessee, a navy man and a Democrat. Strongfellow laughed.
“Anyway, it took on a life of its own. Bipartisan. Just vets. Everyone here fought in the war, so we know how doggone meaningless most of this Capitol Hill ‘Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay’ is. It’s a good place to unwind. The only rule is that nothing leaves here unless it’s supposed to.”
“And just so you know,” Sutton said, “this is only for real fighters. No JAGs, no cushy office jobs in personnel. If you were in the air force and you’re here, you weren’t a fucking penguin—you flew. Guns in hand, mud on boots.”
Charlie wondered if the remark had been a veiled reference to Senator McCarthy’s supposedly exaggerated war record. Sutton shifted around in his seat to shake Charlie’s hand. “Offer him some bourbon, you Mormon bastard,” he said to Strongfellow before turning back to the game and examining his cards.
“I hear Kefauver’s taken you under his wing,” Sutton said to Charlie. “I raise fifty cents.”
“He’s been very kind,” Charlie said.
“Pat’s taking him on in the primary,” said Strongfellow.
“Looks like Estes is going to get beat anyhow, so I might as w
ell be the man to do it,” Sutton said.
Charlie looked at Strongfellow, who seemed happy and in his element, surrounded by fellow veterans.
He recalled reading Strongfellow’s widely publicized story. Part of the clandestine military intelligence Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, Strongfellow, a former Mormon missionary, had parachuted into Germany during the war to rescue an atomic physicist and bring him to Allied territory so he could be whisked to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work with the team building the first atomic bomb. But one of his contacts was a double agent, and after a furious gun battle in which Strongfellow was gravely wounded, he was taken to the Belsen prison at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
One night during his imprisonment, Strongfellow experienced a religious epiphany. God was with him and would guide him out of the prison. Amazingly, whether through divine providence or dumb luck, Strongfellow did manage to escape and make it to safety. After he recuperated and returned to Utah, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints found his tale so compelling they took him around the state to preach the power of faith. His congressional election victory in 1952 followed easily soon after.
“I don’t drink, Charlie, but Sutton brought a bottle of what I’m told is some stellar Tennessee whiskey,” Strongfellow said, gesturing toward a half-full jug sitting on his receptionist’s desk. “We’re starting a new game over here,” he added, pointing at the couch, where another congressman was shuffling cards.
Charlie poured himself a drink and took a seat on the couch as Strongfellow grabbed a chair. The other congressman introduced himself as Chris “Mac” MacLachlan of Indiana. In his fifties, steely-eyed, balding, with bushy eyebrows and an expanding waist, MacLachlan was a Lutheran minister.
“Army?” MacLachlan asked Charlie.
“First Battalion, Hundred and Seventy-Fifth infantry,” Charlie said.