And then he had looked at his son in a way Bobby never forgot, with pride and hope, but more than that, a sense of trust, the certain knowledge that Bobby would not disappoint the high expectations he had for him.
“The first time you ran for office, that first campaign for Congress-you weren’t thinking then what you had to do to get reelected; all you thought about were the things you wanted to do, the changes you thought needed to be made. That’s why you’re different from all the others, the ones who just want to stay in office-you still think like that. The whole point is not to stop.”
Though Bobby was certain that his father had given him far too much credit, what his father had said became a kind of second conscience, a constant reminder of the kind of man he was supposed to be. It was surprising how often it had worked in the early years after he was first elected; how often, when he was tempted to go along with a majority opinion with which he disagreed, he heard not just his father’s words, but his father’s voice. It had become so much a part of him over the years, that second, deeper judgment, that he seldom any longer had occasion to remember where it came from and how it had started, but he remembered it now, as he took his chair in the committee room and looked across at the director of the CIA sitting with his hands folded at the witness table. From somewhere in the shadows of his mind, he heard his father’s voice reminding him of his obligation, as clear and distinct as the day he first heard him say it.
The chairman of the committee, Wilson Breyer of New Hampshire, gaveled the session to order. A former state court judge, with a mind narrowed to the strict necessities of the law, Breyer listened to the arguments of others but only seldom expressed an opinion of his own. There were those on the committee who suspected that it was because he did not have an opinion on anything that mattered, and it was a fact that no one could remember when he had voted on anything except with the majority. Hart was more charitable. He was willing to take the chairman at his word when he insisted that it was the business of a chairman to do what he could to get a consensus. Everyone agreed that Wilson Breyer ran things on schedule. The meeting had been scheduled for 4:30, and by 4:32 he had already finished with the opening preliminaries.
The chairman’s scholarly face was set in an attitude of interested attention, someone who would never take sides and would make sure that everyone was treated fairly. His hands were a different story. Kept out of sight, lest they betray him, one of them was always moving in a strange, manic dance, the nervous irritation he could never quite control.
“The committee has been called into session to hear from the Director of the CIA, Louis Griswald, what the agency has learned about the reaction to the death of President Constable and his replacement by Vice President Russell.”
Out of the corner of his eye, the chairman noticed that from his place two seats down, Bobby Hart had turned toward him. Breyer’s hand stopped moving; a nervous smile flashed briefly across his mouth. Believing that the smile was for him, the CIA director smiled back.
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There’s really not much to report.”
Louis Griswald had never felt the need to hold himself to the tight discipline Wilson Breyer had learned in court. Broad-shouldered and broad across the hip, he did everything with a certain swagger. He did not sit with his feet planted on the floor, looking straight ahead, but sideways in the chair like someone sitting with friends on a Saturday afternoon, lying about his golf game or what he had done on the athletic fields of Princeton thirty years before.
“Not much to report?” inquired the chairman in a quiet, affable tone.
“Nothing that we would regard as serious, radical elements in the Middle East claiming that the death of the president was Allah’s act of vengeance for the ‘Great Satan,’ speculation in various capitals about what, if any, change of policy might be expected from the vice president-I mean from the Russell administration. In other words, nothing you wouldn’t expect and nothing that could be construed as a new threat. There’s no evidence that anyone views what happened as an opportunity to move against us, either here or abroad.”
Shifting his bulky frame around, Griswald placed his thick arms on the table and hunched forward. His eyes, set beneath heavy lids, narrowed into a grim, almost brutal stare.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t, only that if they’re planning something, we don’t yet know about it.”
Hart knew what was coming next. Anyone who had been on the committee more than a year knew what was coming next.
“As I’ve told this committee time and time again: we don’t have the assets-we don’t have the budget, we don’t have the legal authority-to gather all the intelligence we need.”
The director pushed back from the table, folded his arms across his ample chest, and slowly looked from one member of the committee to the next, daring them, as it seemed, to disagree. Charlie Finnegan laughed.
“Isn’t it a simple rule of mathematics, Mr. Griswald,” Finnegan said, “that you multiply any number by zero and you still get zero? We could double your budget-we did that, remember, just two years ago-and you would still blame us when you had nothing to report. It’s an old game, Mr. Griswald, and I for one am getting a little damn tired of it!”
“We do what we can with what we have,” the director shot back. “But you’re right: I can’t guarantee results, no matter how much money you might give us. All I can tell you is that it would improve our chances. There are no guarantees in this business. We do what we can with what we have,” he repeated with all the blind assurance of a catechism.
Finnegan started to say something, but thought better of it, or, rather, just gave up. There was no arguing with this kind of posturing. He glanced across to see if Hart had anything to add.
“Director Griswald, I’m interested in the intelligence you had before the president’s death.”
The question caught the director off guard. He did not want to admit that he was not sure what the senator meant, and so he did not say anything.
“Before the president’s death,” repeated Hart.
Griswald bent his head slightly to the side. He still did not answer. The silence began to speak a language of its own. Other members of the committee, reading over a document, conferring quietly with an aide, stopped what they were doing. Hart’s gaze stayed fixed on Griswald; the director kept staring back.
“The president’s death,” said Hart in a voice that took on a new insistence, and a new authority, in the solemn silence of the room.
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Senator,” Griswald finally admitted.
“The president died in a hotel room,” said Hart, choosing his words carefully. “Died of an apparent heart attack. There have been rumors that he was not alone. If that is true, if he wasn’t alone, then…well, you can see where I’m going.”
The director was not sure he did. The line across the bridge of his nose deepened and became more pronounced, as his eyes drew close together.
“If he wasn’t alone,” persisted Hart, “that leads to the possibility that something may have happened, that he didn’t…”
“Die of natural causes?” Now Griswald understood. “I suppose it might, but you asked about any intelligence we might have had before the president’s death. If you mean, did we hear of a possible attempt on the president’s life, then, no, we didn’t.” With a show of reluctance, Griswald added that, like everyone else, he “had heard those same rumors-about the president not being alone when he died. But for the rest of it, that that had anything to do with his death, I haven’t heard anything like it, and have no reason to think it’s true.”
But that meant, as Hart immediately understood, that if what he had been told by Clarence Atwood was true, that the head of the Secret Service had told the director of the FBI and the FBI had started an investigation, no one had yet told the CIA.