The Hellfire Club

by Jake Tapper

  “This is exactly what I hate about coming down here to DC for these rubber-chicken affairs,” LaMontagne whispered, his breath warm and minty. “A bunch of old guys balling each other off and a room of brownnosers laughing like their next performance review depended on it.”

  Charlie noted the contrast between LaMontagne’s smooth, polished demeanor when they’d met earlier and his one-of-the-boys crudeness now that he was in different company. Social chameleons were a source of fascination to him; he envied their ability to fit into any situation, a talent he lacked. He’d felt its absence acutely since arriving in the capital.

  Onstage, Byrd was “nominating” for president Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the Eisenhower administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. Lodge, a Republican, had been the U.S. senator from Massachusetts until Jack Kennedy defeated him two years before.

  “Did you know Kennedy’s grandfather lost a race to Lodge’s father for the same Senate seat?” Charlie whispered to LaMontagne. “The very same one! In 1916.”

  “Jack’s around here somewhere, I saw him hobble in earlier,” LaMontagne said. “I’m hearing a lot of chatter about him making a play for VP in ’56.”

  “Good thing we fought that war against royalty.”

  “My overprivileged friends,” Lodge began, prompting disproportionate howls of laughter.

  “What’s the ratio going to be tonight of laughter to quality of joke?” LaMontagne quietly asked.

  “Twenty to one, I’d wager,” Charlie said. He was enjoying LaMontagne’s company as well as the liberal supply of cocktails.

  Kefauver, sitting to Charlie’s left, shot Charlie a look that seemed to suggest that he and his new friend needed to pipe down.

  “Once I am elected,” Lodge said grandly, “I can guarantee you one thing: It will always look as though big things are happening. Maybe they won’t be happening, but it will look that way!”

  Riotous laughter.

  “I may be doing nothing to stop the war in Korea, or nothing to balance the budget, or nothing to solve anything, but there’ll be a lot of name-calling, there’ll be all sorts of headlines!” Lodge pledged. “The trivial will reach a new place in American politics and believe me: when you consider the place it has had in previous administrations, that is no idle boast!”

  Hysterics in the crowd. Kefauver actually wiped tears from his eyes. LaMontagne slipped Charlie a business card.

  “I can only take so much of this,” he whispered. “Give me a call, let’s tell war stories.” He got up and then leaned in one more time. “Enjoy yourself if you can.” He swiftly exited the ballroom, as graceful and stealthy as a leopard. Charlie felt woozy from the booze and the bullshit and the conversational whiplash. He wanted desperately to talk to Margaret, but he’d never felt further away from her.

  Chapter Nine

  Thursday, February 18, 1954

  Georgetown, Washington, DC

  “You’re up early,” said Margaret, not looking up from her book as Charlie walked into the kitchen.

  “I have meetings and an early committee vote,” he replied. He yawned and removed the Maxwell House percolator from the cupboard. “The defense spending bill—thankfully without any money going to Goodstone this time.”

  In the three weeks since the Alfalfa Club dinner, Chairman Carlin had told Charlie that he would remove the earmark for Goodstone if Charlie would just drop the matter and entrust it to him. Sensing no other option and disarmed by Carlin’s responsiveness, he agreed and told his fellow veterans that all was well.

  “You’ve no doubt been up for hours already?” he asked, reaching for the tin of coffee grounds in the cabinet.

  She shrugged. The early pregnancy had meant not just morning sickness but also insomnia. She’d been awake since before dawn, vaguely troubled and uneasy.

  A silence hung in the air, but it wasn’t the normal one born of comfort. Since Margaret’s return from Nanticoke Island and Charlie’s official baptism in the DC swamp by the Alfalfas, she felt that they’d drifted apart a bit. She suspected the pregnancy was a likely culprit, or at least an accomplice; every evening when Charlie returned home from work or from one of the various fund-raisers and social functions he had to attend, she was often sound asleep. But there were grievances too, growing stronger and healthier.

  She felt exasperated and stretched thin, trying to work with the research team’s notes and conclusions from their first outing to the Maryland island. Plus she was finishing up a paper for the Journal of Zoology comparing the health of giraffes at the Bronx Zoo with those at the Philadelphia Zoo, based on research she’d completed the previous November, plus unpacking their moving boxes and decorating their new town house, plus keeping a home for Charlie—who meanwhile was consumed with his new job. They were on completely different tracks and traveling in opposite directions.

  Margaret watched Charlie pour himself a cup of coffee from the percolator, surely their most useful wedding present, and she thought about the space that had grown between them. It didn’t seem unbridgeable. She imagined Charlie as being like a beach ball in the surf that a sudden breeze had carried away from shore—retrievable, but it would require effort. They had been married for almost nine years now, so the notion that marriage was work was hardly revelatory, but she felt further away from him than she had in years, perhaps even since those early days when the war was too much with him.

  She thought about their life in New York. Conversations had been lively and frequent, and they shared a genuine interest in each other’s lives and careers. She had loved to hear his stories about the ridiculous, vicious battles within the Columbia University faculty; his odd brush with intellectual celebrity visiting What’s My Line? and other shows to promote Sons of Liberty; the few memories that he was willing to share of his time in the army. And he was as good a listener as he was a storyteller; she could lay out a knotty research problem or writing challenge and he was eager to talk it through with her until she arrived at possible solutions. He was her sounding board for her frustrations with her mother and sister, and though Charlie never spoke an ill word about his parents, he laughed when she did.

  But somehow, all that had changed a few weeks after their move. Beyond her unavailability after seven p.m., she knew some blame lay with her and her growing impatience with the political world he seemed to find increasingly seductive. Or, if not seductive, irresistible. Its rituals and caste systems were abhorrent to her, and sometimes she couldn’t help reacting to Charlie’s stories with eye-rolls and crossed arms.

  She’d been bitterly disappointed in him when he told her he had backed off his behind-the-scenes campaign against Goodstone because the chairman had made a noncommittal remark about taking care of matters. And the comic-book hearing seemed like the height of nonsense to her; she’d given up pretending to understand why he was taking part.

  Margaret held her tongue as often as she could, but he made that difficult by confiding in her and telling her everything—about his moments of unctuousness with Kefauver and Carlin, about each of his compromises. Each instance of confessed deference became a presence in the house, an ugly piece of furniture they had to walk around. Charlie eventually stopped telling her about his day in anything but the broadest and most positive outlines, and she in turn felt less inclined to tell him about hers. She was sure that he resented her refusal to join him in his new world, but she just couldn’t make herself comfortable in a place where compromise and obsequiousness were as much a part of the landscape as traffic circles and monuments to long-dead generals.

  Charlie sat down at the table with his coffee, picked up the Washington Times-Herald, and folded it lengthwise, as all New York subway commuters learned to do, no matter that he’d be leaving it behind to drive to work shortly. She felt a burst of affection for him suddenly, for his predictable habits; now he was adding milk to his coffee and as he reached for the small sugar bowl, she counted down silently—Three, two, one—until his daily utterance “I forgot to get
a spoon.” He got up to retrieve one.

  He sat back down and looked over at her. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  Being reminded of the book she was holding extinguished the tiny spark of fondness she’d been so happy to welcome just now. She found her bookmark—a faded National Park Service ribbon given to her by a park ranger that summer she spent in Maryland as a girl—and flipped back to an earlier page. “A load of manure,” Margaret said. “See if you recognize it: A six-year-old boy, an ardent comic-book reader, fashioned for himself a cape and—quote—jumped off the cliff to fly as his comic-book heroes did. Seriously injured, he told his mother, ‘Mama, I almost did fly!’ A few days later he died from the injuries he had received.”

  She held up the book: Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which was to be published next month and which was the basis for the special investigative hearing that Kefauver and Hendrickson hoped to hold in Charlie’s district in April.

  “Have you actually read this, Charlie?” she asked. “No footnotes. No endnotes. No citations. Nothing.”

  As academics, Charlie and Margaret had both developed healthy skepticism about anecdotes that proved too perfect. A rival of Charlie’s on the Columbia University faculty had been ignominiously terminated when it became clear that he’d massaged details in his book about Joseph Stalin. It had caused something of a stir, since the details that the professor had tweaked—and, in at least two cases, that he seemed to have created out of whole cloth—depicted Stalin’s actions during the Great Purge in an even more horrific light. The professor, a conservative, claimed that the faculty was compromised and was treasonously trying to cover up for their comrade. Charlie agreed that the faculty was jam-packed with Communists and socialists and liberals who didn’t take the evils of Communism seriously, but he happened to side with his pinko colleagues in this case when it came to academic standards.

  “I’ve read it,” Charlie said. “And I agree with you.”

  The book was filled with shoddy scholarship and twisted interpretations, a conclusion in search of evidence. Batman and Robin were “like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Superman was a fascist, Wonder Woman a lesbian dominatrix.

  “And yet you’re still actually participating in this hearing?” she asked. “Are you really helping them book the Foley Square Courthouse?” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t understand how you can be a part of any of this.”

  He mumbled something about needing to work with Congress in order to be able to do some larger good. But it didn’t sound any more convincing than all the previous times he’d said it, and the look on his face told her the disappointment on her own devastated him.

  Charlie walked into his congressional office just before eight thirty and was surprised to find LaMontagne standing there, smoking a cigarette and examining the various pictures and framed political memorabilia on the wall. Leopold, who had followed Charlie into the office with her ubiquitous clipboard in hand, emitted a sharp gasp of surprise.

  “How did you get in here?” she asked. “What the—”

  “It’s okay, Miss Leopold,” Charlie said. “Davis LaMontagne, this is Miss Leopold, who runs my office.”

  They exchanged terse pleasantries before Leopold, still clearly unhappy about the intrusion, left the two men alone. Since their first encounter at the Alfalfa Club, they’d run into each other several times, never making plans to get together but often ending up in the same corner of a social event, swapping war stories and mocking the various displays before them. LaMontagne had advised Charlie to go along to get along, do what Kefauver and Carlin and others asked him to do. And it seemed to be working, with Kefauver singing his praises in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune and promising to give him a showy role during the comic-book hearings.

  Charlie took off his suit jacket and loosened his Brooks Brothers tie while LaMontagne moved to the couch and held out his pack of cigarettes, offering one. Charlie nodded and LaMontagne tossed him the pack of Chesterfields. Charlie used his German lighter.

  LaMontagne gestured toward the lighter. “Looks familiar,” he said. “I got one too, plucked it off a dead Jerry. So, listen, I’m here because I know something, and I thought you could maybe bring this information to the right people. But I need your discretion, of course.”

  “Of course.” Charlie sat down behind his desk. “How can I help you?”

  “A guy who used to work for us…”

  “At Janus Electronics.”

  LaMontagne nodded. “A few years ago we were told that he was a Communist.”

  “In what way? Actively?”

  “Exactly—what way,” LaMontagne said. “I don’t really care if someone believes in some pie-in-the-sky notion of equality in theory—we fought alongside Stalin’s army in the war, after all. But no, this was more than watercooler talk. He went to meetings. He distributed literature.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Jackass handed a brochure to one of our clients, who recognized him from a pitch meeting.”

  “Pitch meeting?” asked Charlie.

  “Yes,” said LaMontagne. “This wasn’t the guy who pushed the pastry cart. This was one of our main guys in R and D.”

  “Working on what, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I really need you to keep this between us, Charlie.”

  “Of course.”

  “Surveillance technology,” LaMontagne confided. “It has commercial applications but the research is much more for the Pentagon and Central Intelligence.”

  “Commercial applications?”

  “They’re called baby monitors,” LaMontagne said. “Zenith invented them after the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping. A few years ago they introduced the Radio Nurse. When your baby is born, you and the missus will be able to sit in the living room while the sounds of your baby are piped in from his bedroom.”

  “One-way, so the baby doesn’t hear you?” Charlie said.

  “Right. A good idea, but the ones in the stores right now are clunky and the reception is awful. The signal is sent through your own electrical wiring in your home, so signals get crossed and you might all of a sudden pick up the latest Senators game. Plus, they’re pricey, like twenty bucks each, so they’re not exactly flying off the shelves. But we have a good model that’s about to hit the stores. I’ll get you one.”

  “No need, but forget the commercial application—you want Central Intelligence to buy this baby-monitor technology for what? Listening devices at the Soviet embassy?” He’d meant it as a joke, but as soon as he said it, he realized it actually made sense.

  “Bingo,” said LaMontagne, and he landed an elegant forefinger on his nose in approval. “But we didn’t trust that the Communist-leaflet guy, Boschwitz—that’s his name, Ira Boschwitz—wasn’t going to tip off his ideological brethren at the embassy. Or, even worse, give them the blueprints. So we fired him.”

  “And how can I help?”

  “Well, believe it or not,” LaMontagne said, stubbing out his cigarette, “Zenith hired him.”

  “And McCarthy’s holding hearings right now on the Army Signal Corps.”

  “That’s why I’m in town, they’re going after Leo Kantrowitz today. Zenith fired him as soon as he got subpoenaed.” Charlie had read in the morning paper—indubitably leaked by McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—that prior to Zenith, Kantrowitz had done classified work for the Army Signal Corps while he was a member of the Communist Party. “But Kantrowitz is small potatoes,” LaMontagne said. “They’re missing the real problem.”

  “Boschwitz?”

  “Boschwitz.”

  “Why haven’t you just gone right to the committee? I’m sure they’d be interested in hearing this.”

  LaMontagne lit another Chesterfield. “Our in-house counsel advised us against direct coordination. We’ve attempted other avenues, but so far members of the committee have thought we were just bad-mouthing a competitor. Also we didn’t h
ave any evidence other than anecdotal.”

  He withdrew a manila folder from his briefcase and tossed it onto the coffee table in front of Charlie, who picked it up but didn’t open it.

  “Are you just bad-mouthing a competitor? Is the fact that he went to Zenith a big part of this?”

  LaMontagne stood. “Just open the folder. Anything you could do to pass it on to Cohn or Bob Kennedy would be very deeply appreciated.” He looked at his watch. “But I gotta run, have a thing with Dulles in an hour.”

  “John Foster or Allen?” Charlie asked, as he had to wonder why a midlevel electronics executive would be meeting with either the secretary of state or the director of Central Intelligence, both of whom quietly wove their tentacles around anything and everything that could be construed as being in the national security interests of the United States.

  “Does it matter?” LaMontagne asked. He grabbed his hat and jacket from the coatrack and nearly bumped into Sheryl Ann Bernstein on his way out the door. She smiled at him brightly—Charlie sometimes wondered if there was any encounter that wouldn’t prompt that cheerful Midwestern smile—and stood aside to let him pass.

  Bernstein reminded Charlie of many of the Barnard students he’d taught: bright, eager, wide-eyed. And, though he’d be loath to make such an observation aloud, a touch flirtatious—very mildly, like a teenager permitted to apply only some modest lipstick, her coy glances almost like a risqué outfit she was trying on in the store just to see how it felt. Not that there was anything particularly sensual about the bond they were forming, which was rooted in intellectual pursuits more than anything else. But he would be lying if he pretended that being around a woman who seemed delighted to be talking to him wasn’t a welcome change. He knew this was the emotional equivalent of a Hershey Bar, but that didn’t make it taste any less sweet.