Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  Fairbanks looked over his scotch. “To be altogether frank, I don’t think I could. I usually hold back a little something of myself… for myself, I guess… I don’t think I could change that, even if I wanted to.” He smiled faintly. “I’m sorry. I don’t see any point in lying about it.”

  Webster smiled too—more broadly. “Well, you’re honest,” he said wryly.

  “I’m a skeptic, I guess something of a cynic,” Fairbanks said.

  Webster laughed. “Any other disqualifications?”

  Fairbanks grinned. “I didn’t vote for you.”

  “I knew that. Bill Friederich told me. He also told me you had your reasons. He said you were circumspect and, if you agreed to work for me, would support me while you were with me. Was he right about that?”

  Fairbanks nodded. “I’m rather naive politically,” he said.

  Webster laughed again. “I hear otherwise.”

  A door from another room in the suite opened, and Webster’s daughter came in. Fairbanks recognized her from her pictures. “Lynne,” said Webster. “Pour yourself a drink and sit down. This is Ron Fairbanks. I’m about to offer him a job.”

  The young woman settled a critical eye on Fairbanks. She was nineteen or twenty, as Fairbanks remembered the press stories about the Webster family: a student, the President-elect’s youngest child. She was attractive, not to say beautiful; but Fairbanks thought she looked tired. He remembered reading somewhere too that Lynne Webster had said the campaign had exhausted her. She did pour herself a drink, and came to stand behind her father, as if waiting for him to dismiss Fairbanks and then she could have a word with him.

  “I want you to serve as Special Counsel to the President,” Webster said to Fairbanks….

  “I didn’t expect it,” Ron said to Lynne an hour later. He had not expected what followed, either. Webster had said he realized Ron had missed his return flight. He told him there was a room for him there at the Plaza; and then, for a further surprise, he said to Lynne that he could not have dinner with her after all, since Senator Fleming was arriving within the hour, and since Ron was stuck overnight in Detroit, alone, maybe it would be pleasant if they had dinner together.

  Here they were, then, in La Fontaine, the fine French restaurant in the hotel, sitting opposite each other at a table: the daughter of the President-elect and his new Special Counsel. Lynne was not pleased. She had expected to have dinner with her father, not to be pushed off on a stranger and be compelled to make conversation about such things as her impending move to the White House. She was silent. She dipped her hand in the water in the fountain from which the restaurant took its name—it was immediately beside their table—and said casually that the water was room temperature. People in the restaurant recognized her. They stared. She noticed and was uncomfortable; she stared at her hands. Two Secret Service agents sat at a nearby table too, rarely taking their eyes off her. Lynne glanced around. People were embarrassed to be caught staring and quickly looked away.

  “Assault by eyeball,” she said.

  The waiter lingered over their table, extending the ritual of opening a bottle of white wine so he would have more time to study the daughter of the President-elect, to memorize her features, her clothes, her figure, the better to be able to describe them vividly to friends later. Lynne accepted a glass of wine and held it between her hands, staring into it, frowning.

  “There are two things,” said Ron slowly, “that being the daughter of the President-elect does not involve.”

  “Oh? And what are they?”

  “First, it involves no obligation on your part to entertain me this evening, simply because your father held me in Detroit so long I missed my plane. Second, it involves no obligation on my part to attempt to entertain you when obviously you are uncomfortable and bored. I suggest I pay for the wine and leave.”

  She blushed. “I’m… I’m sorry—”

  “Third thing, no obligation to apologize. We were thrown together, no fault on either side… does he do that often?”

  “He meant well,” she said quickly. “He thought you and I would have things to talk about, things in common. He meant to relieve me of another evening of political talk.”

  “Well…” Ron shrugged, smiled.

  “Can you make us some interesting conversation, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  “I think so, Miss Webster… For starters, you have very good legs…”

  And from there it went quite well. The daughter of the President-elect defrosted, though still a bit edgy… nervous… in a way that made him more curious than he could explain…

  The White House, Tuesday, June 12, 10:15 PM

  Waiting in the Yellow Oval Room were the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the ranking Republican of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the White House Chief of Staff. They had watched on television the return of Air Force One to Andrews, and when the helicopter landed on the lawn they were assembled in the Yellow Oval Room, sipping drinks and munching on chips and nuts.

  Senator Kyle Pidgeon, the Republican, flushed and wheezing, held the Secretary of State tight in conversation; and it was only with visible effort that Lansard Blaine was able to break away, cross the room, and shake the hand of the President.

  “I’ll want you with me downstairs,” was all the President said to Blaine. He referred to a meeting in the Oval Office, scheduled for 10:30, when he would report to the other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to some from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (“It makes them feel damned important to meet with the President in the middle of the night,” he had remarked to Lynne as they walked from the helicopter.)

  Blaine sipped brandy from a snifter. “Solid front, hmm?” he said. “I heard O’Malley ask you if I’m resigning.”

  “I’ll deal with O’Malley,” the President said under his breath—just before he smiled broadly and reached to shake the hand of Senator Pidgeon.

  Ron Fairbanks studied the Secretary of State. Blaine had always impressed everyone with his self-assurance, with the reserve and calm he could display under intemperate attack by a senator or a protestor or an aggressive interviewer. It was plain tonight, however, that he was ill at ease. Ron watched him slip away from Senator Pidgeon once again and walk purposefully to the steward to order another cognac.

  “Are you going to check over the Pillsbury memorandum before you leave for the night?”

  Fairbanks’s attention was diverted by the question from Fritz Gimbel, the Chief of Staff. “I suppose so,” he said to Gimbel. “This is breaking up shortly…?”

  Gimbel glanced at his watch. “In eight minutes.”

  In eight minutes. Yes, in eight minutes precisely if that militaristic little creep had anything to do with it, Fairbanks thought… if he left the White House before the Webster Administration left office, it would be because of Gimbel. He was an unpleasant man, invested by the President with a great deal of authority. Small, wearing an ill-fitting gray checked suit, peering about with unfriendly eyes that stared through his austere steel-rimmed glasses, Gimbel orchestrated everything in the White House. In a minute he would order the steward to leave, so stopping the drinking. A few minutes later he would suggest firmly to the President that the meeting in the Oval Office should begin in three minutes if it were to begin on time. Likely, the President would accept the suggestion. Gimbel would hold open the door.

  Blaine too disliked Gimbel. Two men could hardly have been more in contrast. Blaine was a preppy, then a Yalie, and he had spent two years at Oxford. Gimbel was from Indiana and had graduated without honors from some small-town Indiana college. Blaine was a scholar of diplomatic history—had come, indeed, to the State Department from a professorship at the University of Michigan, which he had held with distinction for twenty years. Gimbel had gone from college to the Webster Corporation, first as an accountant, then as an administrator, finally as executive assistant to the President—he served Robert L. Webster in t
he White House almost exactly as he had served him in Detroit. Blaine had a calm, aloof panache. Gimbel was a nervous, abrasive little man.

  Blaine and Gimbel had aroused cries of cronyism early in the Webster Administration. Both of them had been personal friends of Robert and Catherine Webster for years. Catherine was a psychiatrist; and, until she moved into the White House as First Lady, she had held a professorship in psychiatric medicine at the University of Michigan. She and Blaine had taken leaves of absence from the Michigan faculty at the same time—Blaine was more of a friend of hers than of her husband, although Webster had retained Blaine as a consultant on foreign affairs during his senatorial campaign and again during his presidential campaign and had expressed both privately and publicly his confidence in Blaine’s judgment in matters of foreign relations. Gimbel had served the Webster family as well as the Webster Corporation in Michigan—as a babysitter sometimes, as a driver, as a runner of errands, as well as a trusted get-things-done man in the executive offices of Webster Corporation.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Lan?” the President’s daughter said to Lansard Blaine, She took hold of his arm. “I’m sure the senator will surrender you to me.”

  “Of course,” said Senator Pidgeon. He was a little drunk—on the couple of scotches he had had; that was all it ever took—and he attempted what he supposed was a courtly bow and stepped back two paces.

  Blaine allowed Lynne to lead him to a wing chair, where he sat staring into his brandy while she, standing beside the chair, firmly kneaded his shoulders. Blaine did not look up. He accepted a massage from the President’s daughter without acknowledging it.

  Lynne had a nose that turned up, a pert lively face, a lithe figure (although a little heavy in the bust). Of all the presidential family, the burden of the White House seemed heaviest on her. She seemed to labor under a sense of it: the dignity and burden of it.

  Ron Fairbanks watched her rub Blaine’s shoulders, looking curiously intent and grim. Ron sipped Irish whisky—Old Bushmills, which they had not served at the White House before Catherine Webster noticed his preference for it and ordered it. He was not jealous of Lynne’s somewhat intimate attention to the Secretary of State. He had no claim on her; and, after all, Blaine had been a close friend of her family for many years before he even met her. It did annoy him, just the same, to see the way Blaine accepted her ministrations without seeming even to notice, as though it were his due. Ron had seen her do this many times before, and he had seen Blaine receive it just this way.

  Lansard Blaine was the author of an estimable two-volume history of American foreign relations, a number of single volumes on specific episodes of that history, and numberless monographs in scholarly journals. He was a rare bird, one editorialist had said: a theoretician who had been given the opportunity to put his theories into practice and had seen them work as well in fact as they did on paper. His skillful, subtle—still almost brutally forceful—intervention between India and Pakistan a year ago had averted a war, conceivably even an atomic war; and a quiet campaign was underway to promote a Nobel Peace Prize for him. He had reason to be satisfied with his tenure as Secretary of State, and the President had reason to be satisfied with it. The rumors of his likely resignation were inexplicable to Ron Fairbanks. Seeing him unlike himself tonight—nervous, withdrawn—gave credence to the rumors. Ron watched him, and wondered….

  ***

  During the first six months of the Webster Administration, Blaine had hardly spoken to him. Their duties did not throw the Secretary of State and the Special Counsel together very often. Besides, Blaine had been quoted as disdaining lawyers; he was fond of quoting Henry VI—“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But over coffee and brandy one night, when the President and Catherine Webster had called Blaine and Ron upstairs to relax with them for half an hour at the end of a particularly difficult day, Ron had won Blaine’s momentary admiration and at least a small share of friendship from him. “Come,” Blaine had said over the cups and snifters—in his very personal way disdainful yet challenging his opposite to overcome his disdain—“what, really, does it require to be a lawyer? What qualities of mind, personality, character? What?” Ron had smiled tolerantly. “To name just one quality,” he had said, “I think we might mention tact.” The President had guffawed. Catherine Webster had leaned back and laughed. And Blaine… Blaine had laughed too and leaned over and slapped Ron’s knee. “Damn good, Fairbanks. Damn good.”

  Like almost everyone in politics, Blaine had a public persona and a private personality; and, as was often with people in politics, the private personality was rather less attractive than the public persona. Publicly he was smooth, self-confident, erudite, witty. Privately he was often self-contained, impatient, egoistic. Sometimes he smoked cigars, strong-smelling cigars whose aroma pervaded a dozen rooms. One thing he never was—bland. No one forgot him. No one mistook him for someone else. He defied categorization. Every pundit—and there were many—who tried to settle Blaine into a tiny pigeonhole was sooner or later embarrassed by his error. Ron remembered a luncheon at the Madison Hotel when a Post columnist, commenting on the election of an independent as governor of Florida, called it a fluke and compared it to the Bobby Thomson home run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants in 1951. “Your simile is inapposite,” Blaine remarked. “The Bobby Thomson home run was no fluke. Thomson was a great hitter.” The newspaperman, a gray-head of many years’ experience, pulled his pipe from his mouth and smiled on Blaine. “I didn’t know you were a baseball expert, professor,” he said sarcastically. Blaine shrugged. “Bobby Thomson hit 32 home runs in 1951. And .264 in his career. He is one of the seventy-five or so all-time great home-run hitters.” Period….

  The White House, Tuesday, June 12, 11:47 PM

  In the darkness of his office, Fairbanks saw the light in the button on his telephone before he heard it ring. He had just switched off the lights in the room and was checking the lock on the door to be sure it was secure, when the telephone line lit up and the telephone began to ring. He closed the door and left it blinking and ringing in the darkened office. It was Fritz Gimbel, probably, checking to see if he had read the Pillsbury memorandum—another irritating habit of Gimbel’s was to check repeatedly to see if someone were really doing what he had promised to do. Fritz could go to the devil. At this hour he was not going to stay in the office another two minutes to assure Fritz Gimbel he had read the Pillsbury memorandum.

  The West Wing was quiet. The meeting in the Oval Office evidently had not lasted long. Ron loosened his tie. His car was parked on Executive Avenue, and he could be home in ten minutes in the light traffic at this time of night. He did not carry a briefcase. He would be back here before eight in the morning, there was no need to take anything home.

  “Mr. Fairbanks.”

  One of the night guards greeted him perfunctorily, and Ron nodded perfunctorily.

  Another night man was on duty at the door, as always. But this time the night guard was standing, blocking the door, frowning as Ron walked toward him along the dimly lighted corridor past the closed and locked doors of offices.

  “Mr. Fairbanks, I’m sorry; I can’t let you out.”

  There was of course no arguing with these fellows. Most of them were humorless, all of them were armed, and some of them were touchy. This one was named—as he recalled—Swoboda; he was one of the Secret Service men who had been with the President in Chicago when the shot was fired from the hotel roof. “What now?” Ron asked wearily.

  “I’ll check, sir,” said the man. He picked up the telephone.

  Ron stood impatiently and watched Swoboda call someone for instructions. He could see the bulge of the pistol under the man’s suit jacket. They had ceased to be subtle about the way they guarded the President.

  “The President wants to see you, sir. As quickly as possible. In… the Lincoln Sitting Room. You’re to go to the elevator. Someone will be waiting for you there.”

 
Ron hurried through the West Wing halls. When he reached the Mansion itself he found the doors held open for him. At the elevator, Bill Villiers of the Secret Service was waiting for him.

  “What’s up?”

  The Secret Service man only shook his head. Villiers was ordinarily not a difficult man to talk to; but now he ran the elevator in grim silence.

  They went up to the second floor. Villiers led Ron briskly through the long east-west hall. It was silent and deserted until they reached the east end, where Fritz Gimbel stood, talking quietly but with clear tension in his voice, in the center of a knot of Secret Service men. Ron recognized an FBI agent, too. Still without a word, Villiers led him to the door of the Lincoln Sitting Room. He rapped on the door.

  The President opened the door. “Come in,” he said. He was pallid. His voice was hoarse and somber.

  Ron stepped into the room. Two more Secret Service men were there—Wilson and Adonizio—and Dr. Gilchrist. They stood around one of the horsehair-upholstered Victorian chairs, and at first Ron did not see what was on the chair. Then he saw—

  Blaine. Not Blaine. The remains of Blaine. The body of the Secretary of State was sitting on the ugly black chair, the head lolling forward and to one side, the chest—the shirtfront and jacket—drenched with blood. Blaine’s right hand still clutched a telephone. His left was clenched in his lap, clutching the fabric of his jacket. The blood—so much of it—soaked his trousers, the chair, even the carpet beneath the chair. His throat had been cut. The wound circled his throat just above the glistening red collar, and the blood still oozed from it.

  Ron felt the President’s grip on his arm. Then he heard his barely audible voice… “My God… murder in the White House…”

  The Lincoln Sitting Room, Wednesday, June 13, 2:20 AM

  If Woodward and Bernstein were right, Nixon and Kissinger knelt and prayed on the floor of this room the night before Nixon resigned in 1974. Ron Fairbanks had read about that a long time ago. As far as he could recall, that was all that had ever happened in this room. It was a small room, as rooms in the White House went; and it was not a very attractive room—he did not like the heavy Victorian furniture, which he thought gave the room a close, brooding atmosphere. It would have to be re-carpeted now, and the chair replaced. The late Secretary of State Lansard Blaine had bled to death, and clearly not by his own hand.