“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.