by Jake Tapper
“Don’t give up the fight,” Eisenhower said. “We need brave people like you—and your wife—people who are willing to do the right thing. Heroes. Heroes like your dad and Congressman Street. That’s how we defeat enemies, foreign and domestic. With men—and women—of character.”
All Charlie could think about were the moments since he’d come to Washington when he was not brave, when options were put in front of him and he had decidedly not done the right thing. He hadn’t gone to the cops immediately after waking up in Rock Creek. He’d passed the Boschwitz file over to Bob Kennedy. Swiped the NBC documents about Strongfellow from his dad’s office and handed them over to Roy Cohn. He had done what was most comfortable and advantageous for himself, nothing more. Here was the president suggesting he was on the path of the righteous because midway through it, he’d snapped out of his stupor and worked with Margaret and Isaiah on a plan to rebel, and somehow they’d all survived.
He wanted to ask Eisenhower about this. Did all heroes feel like such frauds? What had Charlie done, after all? Killed Carlin and helped Street save Margaret. She was healthy and would soon give birth, and the doctor reported that the baby looked great too, and that was the most important thing. But the CEO of General Kinetics was fat and happy manufacturing his poisons, and the Hellfire Club was down one monk but still thriving and pulling strings. Nothing had really changed except he and Margaret were not immediately being threatened. But McCarthy and Cohn and Abner Lance were still out there. His father had told him that Allen Dulles had sworn that Charlie and Margaret were safe for now, but how long would that last?
“I feel as though I have failed this nation more than I have fought for it, sir,” Charlie said. “Since coming here to Washington, anyway.”
Eisenhower looked grimly down at his desk. “Charlie,” the president began. He stood and stared out the window. “In October 1952, I was campaigning in Wisconsin. Milwaukee. I was going to give a speech. And in it, I planned to stand up for my friend General Marshall. McCarthy had been smearing him as a traitor for the better part of a year. I was very excited; I had a section in this speech vouching for my friend’s patriotism. And I would do so in Milwaukee with McCarthy onstage. It would be a moment I could feel proud of.”
He exhaled, and the life seemed to go out of him. He turned and put his hands on the back of his chair. “Then the governor got his hands on a copy of the speech, and he convinced my aides that they should take out that section, that if I stood up for George Marshall, I might alienate McCarthy, which could cost me Wisconsin’s electoral votes.”
There was another knock at the Oval Office door, and Mrs. Whitman once again poked her head in. The president turned to her. “One more second,” he said. She closed the door. Eisenhower paused, apparently trying to find his place in the story.
“So what did you do after you heard that the governor told your aides to take out that section?” Charlie asked, attempting to help.
“I had them take it out of my speech,” Eisenhower said. “I wish I hadn’t. And this ended up, of course, not being the last time I had to defer to the egoism of this demagogue. McCarthy kept coming and coming and coming at me. My secretary of the army has been trying to accommodate him; that hasn’t stopped him. He is incapable of stopping, even when it’s in his own interests. Smearing and lying. It’s what he does. One cannot appease the insatiable.”
“And, as it turned out, you didn’t need Wisconsin’s electoral votes,” Charlie noted.
“And it turned out I didn’t need the electoral votes,” Eisenhower agreed. He smiled at Charlie. A sad smile, tinged with regret.
“Okay, soldier, dismissed,” Eisenhower said, extending a hand to shake Charlie’s. “Take care of that pregnant little lady of yours.”
Charlie thanked the president and walked out of the Oval Office and the West Wing. It was a gorgeous spring day, sunny but with a cool breeze rising from the Potomac River. Grape hyacinth and tulips decorated the North Lawn; men in dark suits and skinny ties and young women with tight blouses and high heels walked with determination to and from the building.
Outside the White House grounds, across Pennsylvania Avenue, Margaret sat in the driver’s seat of the parked car, waiting for him. He walked around to the passenger side and got in.
“So where to?” Margaret asked. “Capitol Hill? Back to Manhattan? Somewhere else entirely?”
Her face was glowing with possibility and trust and partnership. She grinned at him expectantly, her eyes sparkling with joy. Charlie put his hand on Margaret’s swelling belly and smiled.
“Wherever you want the road to take us,” he said.
Sources
To state the obvious, The Hellfire Club is a work of fiction. That said, I did rely on numerous nonfiction accounts to write this book, ones to which I am indebted.
As a general note, David Halberstam’s The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994) was a great resource. Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Washington Confidential (New York: Crown, 1951) provided a severely flawed but otherwise revealing and muckraking account of the sleaze in the nation’s capital in that era.
Chapter 2: For details about the life of Senator Estes Kefauver, I relied on Joseph Bruce Gorman’s Kefauver: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Jack Anderson and Fred Blumenthal’s The Kefauver Story (New York: Dial Press, 1956).
I took some liberties regarding Charlie’s appointment. In real life, vacant House seats remain vacant until an election (special or otherwise). Governors appoint senators in case of an unscheduled vacancy, and resident commissioners for Puerto Rico can be appointed in such cases, too. First-term members of Congress were not considered for Appropriations until the 1970 reforms. But this is a work of fiction.
For plot purposes, The Pajama Game is shown premiering in DC in January of 1954; while the show did have tryouts in other cities before it opened on Broadway that spring, DC was not one of them.
Nixon’s poker skills were documented in Chuck Blount’s “How Playing Poker in the Navy Transformed Richard Nixon,” San Antonio Express-News, February 21, 2017. Nixon talked about his poker skills with historian Frank Gannon on February 9, 1983; the interview is available at the University of Georgia website.
Chapter 3: The wild ponies of Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands are loosely based on the actual wild ponies of Chincoteague and Assateague Islands. You can read more about the wreck of La Galga at the National Park Service website https://www.nps.gov/asis/learn/nature/upload/wildhorses-%20In%20Design.pdf, and you can read more about the ponies in general in Ronald Keiper’s The Assateague Ponies (Atglen, PA: Tidewater, 1985).
Chapter 4: For details about Fredric Wertham and his work, I relied on his own Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954) and David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Picador, 2009). The website http://www.lostsoti.org is also a great resource.
Chapter 5: Charlie’s general war experiences were based on the actual heroics of the very real men of the Twenty-Ninth Infantry, many of whom shared their stories at the wonderful Twenty-Ninth Infantry Historical Society website (http://www.29infantrydivision.org/). Some other details were taken from William R. Buster’s Time on Target: The World War II Memoir of William R. Buster (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
Street’s time as a Tuskegee Airman was based on the actual experiences of those heroes detailed at http://www.tuskegee.edu as well as Dr. Daniel L. Haulman’s “Misconceptions About the Tuskegee Airmen,” Air Force Historical Research Agency, July 23, 2013.
Chapter 6: New York Yankees pitcher Bill Bevens did indeed get put on the DL after a reaction to a smallpox inoculation, but it took place in 1947, not 1941, as it appears here. (And Bevens didn’t join the Yankees until 1944.) See James Dawson, “Yankees Release Medwick Outright—Reynolds Will Oppose Browns Today with Bevens Ailing from Vaccination,” New York Times, April 30, 1947.
Chapter 7: The crash
of the USS Shenandoah on September 3, 1925, has been written about; see http://www.airships.net/us-navy-rigid-airships/uss-shenandoah/ and Tony Long, “Sept. 3, 1925: Shenandoah Crash a Harbinger of Grim Future,” Wired, September 3, 2009.
Chapter 8: The Chase Smith conversation with McCarthy is recounted in her book Declaration of Conscience (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972).
Kefauver was upset about this story: “Rival for Senate Assails Kefauver; Sutton, House Member, Runs in the Tennessee Primary, as ‘Ultra-Conservative,’” New York Times, January 24, 1954.
Ambassador Lodge’s speech and some of the details of the Alfalfa Club event that night were taken from “Lodge Wins ‘Nomination’ for President Alfalfa Club,” Courier-Journal, January 24, 1954.
Chapter 9: Information about baby monitors in this chapter and throughout the book came from Rebecca Onion, “The World’s First Baby Monitor: Zenith’s 1937 ‘Radio Nurse,’” Slate, February 7, 2013. Also see Roger Catlin, “After the Tragic Lindbergh Kidnapping, Artist Isamu Noguchi Designed the First Baby Monitor,” Smithsonian.com, December 20, 2016.
McCarthy hearing testimony taken from transcript for March 10, 1954, in Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, volume 5, Eighty-Third Congress, Second Session, 1954.
Chapter 10: Poems are “The Lodestar” by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” by Alan Seeger. The information that the latter was a favorite of John F. Kennedy, who often asked Jackie to recite it, is from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website.
Chapter 11: Congressman Taulbee being killed by a reporter is true; see Peter Overby, “A Historic Killing in the Capitol Building,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, February 19, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7447550.
The ghosts that haunt the Capitol were described by Bootie Cosgrove-Mather, “Haunted House on the Hill,” Associated Press, October 31, 2003.
Debate on the Mexican Labor Amendment to the Agricultural Act of 1949 is taken from the House debate as recorded in Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1954, 10th ed., 02-128-02-129 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1955), http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal54-1360893.
The March 1, 1954, attack on the House of Representatives had five very real victims (the fictitious Congressman Chris MacLachlan not among them). Details about the incident were taken from Manuel Roig-Franzia, “A Terrorist in the House,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004; Leada Gore, “In 1954, an Alabama Congressman Was Shot in the U.S. Capitol’s House Chamber: Here’s What Happened,” AL.com, August 24, 2016; J. Michael Martinez, Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012); memo by House Parliamentarian’s Office employee Joe Metzger, as entered into the House of Representatives Congressional Record on March 1, 1994.
Chapter 13: Details about the Howard Chandler Christy painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution came from the website of the Architect of the Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/art/other-paintings-and-murals/signing-constitution.
When Senator Herbert Lehman, Democrat from New York, claimed during that Senate debate that one hundred Communists were crossing into the U.S. from Mexico every day, he was quoting the Acting Commissioner of Immigration: “It was recently discovered that approximately 100 present and past members of the Communist Party had been crossing daily into the United States in the El Paso area; also that the number of present and ex-members of the Communist Party residing immediately across the border from El Paso number about 1,500, and it has been established that there exists active liaison between the Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party in the United States.” Senate Congressional Record, March 8, 1954, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1954-pt2/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1954-pt2-21.pdf.
The racism of Representative Howard Smith, Democrat from Virginia, is long established and vile. See Clay Risen’s “The Accidental Feminist: Fifty Years Ago a Southern Segregationist Made Sure the Civil Rights Act Would Protect Women. No Joke,” Slate.com, February 7, 2014.
The people of Mossville, Louisiana, have indeed been victims of the very real problems caused by chemical plants in their midst. Some of the details for this book were taken from Bernard H. Lane, “The Industrial Development of Lake Charles, Louisiana 1920–1950” (Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, January 1959); Tim Murphy, “A Massive Chemical Plant Is Poised to Wipe This Louisiana Town Off the Map,” Mother Jones (March 27, 2014).
Details about Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. were taken from his own memoirs Adam by Adam (New York: Dial Press, 1971) and Keep the Faith, Baby! (New York: Trident Press, 1967) and from Wil Haygood, “Power and Love,” Washington Post, January 17, 1993. Some of the information about the Senate debate comes from “Power to Recruit Mexicans Is Voted; Bill Authorizing the Admission of Migrant Labor Goes to White House,” New York Times, March 4, 1954.
Chapter 14: Roy Cohn was vividly brought to life in Nicholas von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Cohn’s own book about his mentor, McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1968), is also quite revealing.
That Joseph Alsop did work for the CIA was revealed by Carl Bernstein in “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
Yes, Joe McCarthy would eat a stick of butter when he drank! At least according to Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May’s McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the “Ism” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953). Roy Cohn’s speech in chapter 14 about why McCarthy would be a good president is taken from comments made by Urban Van Susteren (Greta’s dad) about McCarthy in that book. More about the Nazis he defended can be found in Gabriel Schoenfeld, “The Truth, and Untruth, of a German Atrocity,” Weekly Standard, June 19, 2017, and the Malmedy Massacre Investigation, Report of the Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services of the United States Senate, Eighty-First Congress, October 13, 1949.
If you’re interested in reading more about Sam Zemurray and the relationship of the Dulles brothers to United Fruit Company, please check out Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (New York: Picador, 2013). One interesting excerpt: “John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell—he negotiated that crucial United Fruit deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s—was Secretary of State under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was head of the CIA under Eisenhower; Henry Cabot Lodge, who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. You could not see these connections until you could—and then you could not stop seeing them. Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam’s hires.”
Chapter 15: Yes, night-vision technology existed in the 1950s; see “Black-Light Telescope Sees in the Dark,” Popular Science (March 1936). (But no, there were no night-vision binoculars available commercially.)
Information on John F. Kennedy, especially about his health, comes from Ted Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), and Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John Kennedy (New York: David McKay, 1965).
Chapter 16: Details about Communism in academia were gleaned from Ellen Schrecker, “Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Years,” University of California History Project, October 7, 1999, http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loyaltyoath/symposium/schrecker.html; David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Samuel W. Bloom, “The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis: The Case of Bernhard J. Stern, 1894–1956,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences
26 (January 1990).
You can learn more about the saga of Clinton Brewer in Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Jerry W. Ward and Robert J. Butler, eds., Richard Wright Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008).
Chapter 17: Some basic details about trains in the 1950s came from Mike Schafer and Joe Welsh, Classic American Streamliners (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1997). Also see “The Congressional Services” at https://www.american-rails.com/congressional.html; “Pennsylvania’s Congressional, 1952–1967” at http://www.trainweb.org/fredatsf/cong52.htm.
Chapter 18: Details about the history of the Harvard Club of New York were taken from its website: https://www.hcny.com/.
The story of Martin Couney came from Claire Prentice, “How One Man Saved a Generation of Premature Babies,” BBC, May 23, 2016.
There are many fine books and articles that detail how pesticides became what is commonly referred to as Agent Orange. Among them: Alvin Lee Young, The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange (New York: Springer, 2009), and Biologic and Economic Assessment of Benefits from Use of Phenoxy Herbicides in the United States, Special NAPIAP Report Number 1-PA-96, United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Pesticide Impact Assessment Program in cooperation with Weed Scientists from State Agricultural Experiment Stations.
Chapter 21: Before it was Xerox, it was the Haloid Company. Background on the photocopy machine is from Alfred Zipser, “Printing System Speeds Drawings: Xerox Machine Can Make Copies of 10 Different Plans a Minute,” New York Times, October 26, 1958. Other information about the history of xerography comes from the Xerox.com website.
Chapter 22: The incident with sheep at Skull Valley, Utah, happened in 1968. For more, see “Nerve Gas: Dugway Accident Linked to Utah Sheep Kill,” Science, December 27, 1968; and Jim Woolf, “Feds Finally Admit That Nerve Agent Was Found Near 1968 Sheep Kill,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1998.