Murder at the Kennedy Center Read Free Page B

president bad enough, to which McCarthy replied, in his urbane manner, “No one should want to be president
that
bad.” McCarthy had gone on to say duringthat interview that he thought every president should take off one day a week to read poetry, or to listen to music. Ewald had smiled at that comment; it represented, to some extent, his own feelings, even though he knew the suggestion was impractical.
    He also thought back to Ronald Reagan, the only president who seemed to come out of the White House looking better and almost younger than when he’d entered. Days off to read poetry and listen to music (or to watch old western movies)? Perhaps. It really didn’t matter. The fact was, Ken Ewald
did
want to be president of the United States, because he felt the things he believed in were good for the country, would take it from a White House mortgaged to big business, oil, and the furthest right of military interests, and return it to a White House in which people mattered more than machines and money.
    He went back to the anteroom and hung the seal on the wall. Critics said that he was naive in some of his plans involving social welfare. There were his own dark moments when he thought they might be right, that the only way to govern America was to be hard-nosed, isolated, ruthless. Maybe. But even in those small hours, he told himself that he was not without his own hard edges, his own recognition that to govern effectively
was
to compromise, to allow pragmatism to take the edge off dreams. He was ready to do that. His dreams would be accommodated in the larger context of being president. First, you had to win. You had to
be
there if any part of any dream was to be realized.
    By the time he returned to the stage, the party had gained momentum.
    Ewald was delighted to see Paul. His son’s successful import-export business had kept him in the Far East for two weeks, and there had been a question whether he would make it back in time for this salute to his father. Ewald had to smile as he thought of the telephone conversation they’d had a few days ago. Paul had called from Hong Kong, and after some talk about how well the campaign was going, he’d concluded with, “Dad, you know I’ll be there if I have to rent a Chinese junk and row it all the way back myself.”Ewald often told his friends that if you were only going to have one child, you were lucky to have one like Paul.
    His daughter-in-law was another story. Small and slender, lips abstemious and poorly defined on a pinched face, Janet was a moody young woman—at least when Ewald was around her, which, he was grateful, wasn’t often. What his handsome, successful son saw in her was beyond him, although he’d settled long ago on her superior bosom, surprising for such an otherwise meager frame.
    Ed Farmer joined him. Ewald grinned, nodded, and said, “She’s a beautiful woman, isn’t she?” referring not to Janet but to Roseanna Gateaux, surrounded by a group of admirers off to the side of the sixty-four-feet-deep stage, a stage almost as large as the Metropolitan Opera House at New York’s Lincoln Center, or Russia’s Bolshoi.
    His campaign manager said nothing.
    “Just lusting in my heart,” Ewald said, his smile expanding at the corners of his mouth. That smile, and the form it took, was part of the boyishness that balanced the crags and lines in his tan face. Soft, curly brown hair helped, too. He was forty-six, one of the youngest presidential candidates since John Kennedy.
    Farmer looked meaningfully in the direction of a Washington columnist, stationed nearby behind a glass of champagne. “Keep those lines to yourself until after you’re president … 
Senator
,” Farmer said sharply. “Come on, we need photos.”
    Ewald watched Roseanna Gateaux move gracefully to where a pianist, bassist, and violinist recruited from the National Symphony played show tunes, their melodies floating harmlessly up into a canyon of lights, pipe battens, grids,