Pandemonium

up. The eighth tee box was on a slight rise, and he had a clear view of the green. He leaned on his club and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was unusually hot for late September, almost tropical. In a few days they’d have to go back to Washington, back to the political swamp. The Republicans had taken a beating in the off-year elections a year ago, and his own reelection campaign was about to begin. He’d have to figure out what to do with Nixon. His staff wanted the man off the ticket. The drone of the plane grew louder again. Allen and Eisenhower looked around, saw the plane circling back, banking around to their left. They could see its glass canopy, the tops of its wings. The plane was just a Beechcraft trainer, but the air force seals had been overpainted with large red circles. Eisenhower squinted, said, “George, is there a man on that thing?”

A figure in red clung to the outside of the plane’s canopy. A white cape, perhaps a shredded parachute, rippled behind him. One hand seemed to be flailing at the glass that covered the pilot. The two secret service agents who’d been trailing the president ran up the hill toward them. One of them said, “Mr. President—,” and grabbed Eisenhower’s arm.

The plane came out of its turn. It wobbled, then straightened, the nose aiming down at them. Eisenhower could see the pilot’s face—he wore a white scarf around his forehead—and the face of the daredevil riding the plane’s back. The glass canopy had shattered, and the red-clad man was reaching down into the cockpit.

The agents hauled Eisenhower and Allen backward and pushed them down the hill. Eisenhower ran several steps and suddenly fell to his knees. One of the agents pulled the president to his feet. The plane struck a moment later. The next morning, Vice President Richard Nixon came across a short item in the paper noting that the president had suffered an attack of indigestion. Nixon turned the page without thinking much about it; Eisenhower was prone to that sort of thing. It wasn’t until Sherman Adams, the assistant to the president and White House chief of staff, called an hour later that Nixon realized the seriousness of the situation.

“There’s been an accident,” Adams said. “The president’s had a coronary.”

Five minutes later Nixon entered a basement room of the White House already crowded with staff: Jim Hagerty, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, the Dulles brothers, and several men he didn’t recognize. It was clear that they’d been talking for some time, perhaps hours.

Adams pulled Nixon aside and said, “Dick, you may be president within the hour.”

The chief of staff told Nixon what they knew: a plane crash, a dead secret service agent, another badly burned. Eisenhower had been struck by shrapnel and suffered a heart attack sometime after the crash. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness soon after reaching the hospital. George Allen was wounded but in good condition. Allen confirmed that the plane had dived for them, and that they’d been saved by a “daredevil” clinging to the plane.

“If he hadn’t made that kamikaze hit that hill we’d be dead,” he said. Nixon scowled. “What daredevil? What do you mean, ‘kamikaze’?”

The men in the room turned to the Dulles brothers. Allen, director of the recently created Central Intelligence Agency, handed a folder to his brother, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. “The plane was one of ours, stolen from Lowry Air Force Base,” Foster said. “But it was painted like a Japanese Zero.”

Nixon frowned but said nothing.

“The pilot was Lawrence Hideki, an Air Force helicopter mechanic of Japanese descent. The ‘daredevil’ is unknown at the moment—perhaps he was another airman on base. We’re checking to see if Hideki was troubled by psychological problems, or if he had any links to Japanese extremist groups. But frankly, we don’t expect to find anything along those lines.”

Again Nixon said nothing.

“This is not the first such attack on American soil,” Foster said. “Yesterday Allen ordered a search for similar cases.” He laid out several folders, and briefly described three previous attacks: May 1947, a Japanese man dressed as a kamikaze pilot stole a crop-duster plane in Kansas and crashed it an hour later, killing eight people attending a farm auction. July, 1949, a plane painted like a Zero crashed into the side of the USS Cunningham in San Diego, killing eighteen sailors. And in 1953, a secondgeneration Japanese sailor working on the aircraft carrier Antietam tried to hijack a fighter plane but was stopped before he could take off.