Guilt by Association (36 page)

“Stick with me, kid,” said the congressman-elect, who had been a child during World War II, an adolescent during Korea, and too well-connected to get within a continent of Vietnam. “There’s no telling how far we can go.”

But James Randall Neuburg knew exactly how far they were going to go, and he had already reserved his ticket for the full ride.

Capitol Hill was a prestigious plateau, and over the years many had carved out a piece for themselves and settled into it with considerable complaisance and limited vision. But in Randy’s clear blue eyes, the House of Representatives was nothing more than a brief resting place on the journey up Pennsylvania Avenue.

The West Virginia lawyer had no great desire to reign over the Oval Office himself, understanding clearly that the qualities one needed to be elected President of the United States had nothing to do with the qualities one needed to run the government.
But he knew at first glance that Robert Will-mont, with his looks and charm and his Utopian philosophy of making America strong again, would make an excellent leader. And Randy Neuburg, standing in the shadow of power and quietly wielding a substantial share of it, would be the one to transform his mentor’s ideals into a practical road map for steering the nation into the twenty-first century.

It was pretty heady stuff for the twenty-six-year-old son of a West Virginia steelworker and a seamstress.

“You got brains, Randy, and determination, and they got you a scholarship to Princeton,” his father told him. “Make the most of it.”

Randy intended to.

“There’s only one thing that really means a damn,” he once overheard the state senator say, “An’ it ain’t money, and it ain’t sex, and it ain’t no sheepskin from some snot-nosed Ivy League college, either. It’s power. That’s what it is—power, pure and simple. Gettin’ it, holdin’ on to it, knowin’ how to use it.”

It was a message the young law student never forgot. Now, halfway through Robert Willmont’s second congressional term, Randy was seeing it in action.

“So, what’s the word from upstairs?” Robert asked once they were safely settled in the limousine. “Go or no-go?”

“Upstairs” was a euphemism for the particular machine that controlled party politics in California. They were no longer the cigar-smoking back-room boys of old, they were now chief executive officers, bankers, financiers and image makers who met in fortieth-floor penthouse suites and were a hundredfold more powerful than their predecessors had been.

No candidate was elected to public office in the state without their endorsement, and few who had it were defeated. They saw something in Robert Willmont that greatly appealed to them—an attractive, intelligent man who successfully straddled the fence between conservative and liberal interests, who carried the weighty Drayton mantle with polished assurance, and who was a proven vote-getter.

They saw him as a man who believed in a strong America but an America that was generous, a man who believed that the balance of trade meant exactly that, and that free enterprise was not in conflict with a worker’s right to earn a fair wage. They noted that he was not above deploring the quality of education in California—once in frustration he had even suggested that the best solution might be to bus every school child into Oregon.

He campaigned in one of the wealthiest sections of San Francisco, where he himself had been born and raised, on a platform that said: “If we can’t get past the philosophy of
me first
in this country, we’re going to wake up one day and find
us last”

His sincerity couldn’t be questioned—the Draytons were too well known for their generations of philanthropy. And it soon became clear that he could stir a crowd in the same youthful, energetic way that John F. Kennedy could in the days of Camelot. In the rarefied air where the power brokers met and considered and orchestrated, he got the nod.

“It’s a go,” Randy said.

A broad grin spread across the congressman’s face and he reached across and slapped his aide on the knee.

“Well, all right!” he exclaimed.

Randy had been sent back to San Francisco a week earlier to open a dialogue with the nameless, faceless upstairs people. He had prepared his speech carefully, with exactly the right mixture of confidence and humility.

The House of Representatives was an excellent training ground, but the congressman was a quick learner and easily bored. He was eager to take the next step up, into the Senate. Everyone knew the doddering incumbent standing for reelection was vulnerable.

Randy’s mission was to feel the upstairs people out and, if possible, get the green light. The time was right. Robert knew it, Randy could feel it. Upstairs agreed. The young congressman’s record in the House, while perhaps not dramatically distinguished,
was certainly consistent. In his one-and-a-half terms, he had accomplished exactly what he had set out to accomplish. He had learned the ropes, played the game, and earned the respect of his colleagues. He had made his deals and kept his promises,
and had won the devotion of his constituents as a sincere representative of his district who, although born to wealth, possessed genuine compassion for those less fortunate.

Furthermore,
Poppas
v.
Ridenbaugh
still lingered in the minds of a substantial number of Californians. It was a sig
nificant issue that they felt went right to the heart of Robert’s character. Randy knew they would be able to capitalize on that during their campaign against the grandfatherly incumbent. He also knew that, if they were forced to wait until the next Senate seat was contested,
Pappas
v.
Ridenbaugh
would be past history, and useless to them.

“Get Mary Catherine out here—tomorrow, if possible,” Robert was saying, “and let’s start the wheels in motion.”

“Yes, sir,” Randy replied, jotting the congressman’s trusted administrative assistant’s name down in his notebook.

Robert turned to the woman sitting beside him, holding the sleeping child. “So tell us, Mrs. Willmont,” he mimicked the pretty young reporter, “how would you like to be the wife of a United States senator?”

Elizabeth had been paying only marginal attention to the conversation, yet she forced a weary smile.

“Step two,” she murmured obediently, but her words lacked enthusiasm.

As far as she was concerned, the birth of her son was the crowning achievement of her life, and it had taken a great deal out of her. It was her fourth pregnancy, the other three having ended in miscarriages. The doctors had warned her that not only were the chances of her being able to carry a baby to term slim to none, but the risk to her health was considerable,
and they had embellished their dire predictions with a lot of multisyllabic words she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t understand.
Elizabeth thanked them politely, paid their exorbitant fees, and proceeded to ignore their advice.

Robert was then in his first term in the United States House of Representatives. He was busy and excited and each moment brought him new challenges. Elizabeth was able to share in his glory, but not in his day-to-day involvement. Once the fervor of the campaign and the election were over, her life seemed to lose its focus.

“I know something you can do,” Robert told her when he came home one night a week after the election. “You can find us the right place to live.”

“To rent or to buy?” she asked.

“To buy,” he replied with a confident grin. “I think you can count on us being in Washington for a while.”

Elizabeth spent a month searching for the perfect house, finding it finally on a graceful wooded acre in Rock Creek Park,
and she spent another three months having it redone. At last, this was the home that would truly be just hers and Robert’s.
She put all her energy into the redecorating, supervising the entire project herself, thinking and then rethinking even the smallest detail, personally selecting each fabric, approving every paint sample, shopping endlessly for exactly the right pieces of furniture.

The result was gracious and comfortable and spoke softly of good taste and breeding. Those who were fortunate enough to be invited into it were charmed.

It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be as enchanted with the lovely Mrs. Willmont as San Francisco had been a decade earlier. Soon her style was being imitated by other Washington wives, and her advice on fashion, always a step ahead of vogue, was being sought by women from Capitol Hill to Embassy Row.

“They know class when they see it,” Robert observed to Randy when, only a few months into his first term of office, Elizabeth was asked to join the planning committee of one of the capital’s most prestigious annual balls.

But once the Rock Creek Park house was completed, Elizabeth again found herself without focus. Her charity work, while certainly worthy, no longer gave her the satisfaction it once had, and the various luncheons and teas she chose to attend each week filled time but not the growing emptiness inside. She knew only one solution to that particular problem. So, at the ripe old age of thirty-four, she made one last stab at motherhood.

“Why would you want to go and do that?” Robert asked in dismay when she told him she was pregnant.

“Because I heard my biological clock ticking,” she replied. “Very loudly.”

“Do you think it was wise, under the circumstances?”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking wise, I was thinking baby.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t have to do this, you know,” he assured her. “Not for me.”

“I’m not doing it for you,” she replied.

“But children aren’t essential for us anymore. I mean, we’re doing fine just the way we are.”

“No, you’re doing fine, Robert,” she told him. “I’m doing carpeting and fund-raising.”

“What about the doctors—did they say it was all right to try again? I mean, the risk?”

“I don’t care about the doctors,” she declared. “I want to have a baby.”

“Don’t you think maybe we’re a little old to be starting a family now?” he persisted.

Elizabeth shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“But won’t it look, well, a little strange to people? I mean, at our age?”

“If you mean people here in Washington, who cares?” she retorted. “If you mean people back home, I rather think that voters like having a family man in office—young or old.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she confirmed. “
I
certainly do, at any rate. I automatically assume that politicians with children are … well… more stable than ones without.”

“I’d have to see some polls on that,” he retorted.

But by the time Adam Drayton Willmont was born, ten days before 1980, Robert no longer cared about polls. His wife had made it through the delivery, and he had an heir.

Almost from the start, Elizabeth had problems with the pregnancy, but she was determined not to lose this baby. She curtailed her charitable activities, accepted very few social invitations, and managed to keep up a brave front for her husband, which wasn’t too difficult because he was so preoccupied with his work that he often left for Capitol Hill well before she awoke in the morning and came home long after she was asleep.

But she couldn’t hide from her doctors. They saw her weekly, changed her diet, pumped her full of vitamins, and performed endless tests to monitor fetal progress. Her first
miscarriage had occurred early in the pregnancy, her second in the fifth month, her third in the fourth. The day she entered her sixth month and felt the baby kick for the first time, Elizabeth cried with relief.

“Don’t get your hopes up yet,” the doctors cautioned, knowing that a sixth-month abort or even a still birth, with her history,
was a very real possibility. “You have a long way to

go.”

“I’m going to make it,” she told them fiercely. “We’re both going to make it.”

She began to bleed two days later.

“What do I do?” she begged the doctors. “Tell me what to do.”

“Nothing,” they replied. “Absolutely nothing.”

They meant exactly that. Elizabeth spent the last four months of her pregnancy in bed, and she almost didn’t survive the eighteen-hour labor, but Adam was perfect.

The doctors called it a miracle.

Even after two years, Elizabeth was still struggling to regain her strength, and the long flight from Washington had taken its toll. She yearned for her bed, although it was barely the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t that she was no longer interested in her husband’s political ambitions, it was more that she had just so much energy to expend, and she chose to expend it on her son.

Adam was her life now. Her charitable activities, her social commitments and her congressional obligations became peripheral.
When Robert was at home, he was included in what she thought of as her heart circle. When he was not, she rarely thought about him at all. Her days were full of Adam—his first words, first steps, first lessons. Her nights were filled with planning—for his education, his future, his happiness.

Robert wanted to employ a nanny. Elizabeth refused

“I have no intention of letting a stranger raise my son,” she declared.

“You’re the wife of a congressman,” he retorted, “and a Drayton. You have obligations.”

“I’ll maintain an association with one or two worthy char

ities and I’ll attend every social and political function that you feel is necessary to your advancement,” she said firmly.
“But my only obligation is to Adam.”

Although it was often beyond her endurance, she forced herself to accompany Robert to as many as three social events a week without complaint, charming even the crustiest of statesmen with her sweet smile and well-bred manners.

It was the little pink pills that got her through. Her doctors prescribed them when she complained of lethargy. One per day,
they said, would fix her right up. By the end of six months, she was taking as many as three a day, sometimes four if she were facing an especially late evening.

Elizabeth had been looking forward to the Christmas break, and was delighted when Robert told her they would have an extra two weeks away from Washington. Even the thought of Amanda’s grousing hadn’t dimmed her anticipation of the quiet month ahead.
But what she had just half-heard had.