Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [8]
SEN. BROWN: I’m not going to answer that question. Thank you, that will be all.
CLASSIFIED
Secret Service Incidence Report
BBO20111114.134
Agent Ira Kowalczyk
At 0535, formally assumed command of guard detail at the secure 7th & E Street apartment location, now designated Big Boy One. Big Boy scheduled to move in at 0630. Prof. Weschler scheduled to arrive at 0900 for full security briefing before assuming position as special transition liaison. Confirmed agenda this week includes general orientation, historical education, meeting with Congresswoman Taft (see attached schedule). Requests from Big Boy include access to Library of Congress (suggest remote access), acquisition of permanent wardrobe (suggest calling in on-site tailor services), visit to “authentic Filipino restaurant” (suggest take-out).
FOUR
The view from the Penthouse Balcony was so bright it hurt Taft’s eyes. Electric lights glittered across the city like a manmade firmament. Airplanes that must be the size of railcars roared overhead. He stood there gripping the handrail, the night air sighing across his bare and uncombed head, bringing with it the sounds of society and machinery he couldn’t imagine. This, he knew, was only the beginning of the wonders this new century had to offer him.
The only wonder he wanted, though, was Nellie.
Taft had run the Philippines as governor-general, stood up to the robber barons at U.S. Steel, faced down hecklers on stages and train platforms from sea to shining sea. Along the way, people had called him a dullard; they’d called him a traitor to both the Republican Party and the progressive cause; they’d called him prejudiced. Every sharp word had cut him to the quick. And yet he’d weathered such storms with as much fortitude as he’d been able to muster while in the White House. Let them call him a bad president, a spineless one. It was better to have them think he was weak than to have them know the truth: that it was, more than anything else, an acute case of heartbreak that had all but assassinated the twenty-seventh president of the United States.
He remembered the day he’d first lost his wife. He’d been in office only two months; he and Nellie had been aboard the presidential yacht on a getaway to Mount Vernon. Nellie fainted. Ice was put to her temples and a brandy poured down her throat. By the time they’d made landfall, though, it was clear this was no bout of seasickness.
The stroke laid Nellie low, left her unable to speak. More than that, though, it was a cruel trick of fate that left a woman of such great life force infirm and isolated—a child learning to use her body again—just as she’d finally achieved her lifelong dream of becoming first lady.
She was still alive, and she fought hard to regain her faculties, thank the Lord for that. But the engine that drove Taft died that day in 1909, leaving him to finish out the rest of his long term just as hobbled as Nellie was. He’d downplayed it, of course, with his booming laugh and his beaming smile and his promises of national pride and equity. All that eroded quickly, of course. Taft was first deflated and then defeated.
And now, he’d lost Nellie a second time. A final time. He had nothing left. Washington, D.C., was laid out below him, but it may as well have been Bangkok.
“President Taft?” A woman’s voice. Taft gripped the guardrail lest he launch himself over the thing.
“Ah, Miss Weschler.” He spoke but didn’t turn to face her. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me so. I had quite forgotten you were on the premises.” He felt a pang of guilt. The woman had been so kind to him, but, heavens, she needed to stop following him around like a little lost puppy.
“I, ah, I apologize. You were just so lost in thought out here, I was wondering