The article appeared on a Sunday. The New York Times covered practically all of its first page, and twelve subsequent pages inside, to the first installment of Harrison Lee's series. The title, straightforward and forceful, covered all of the paper's width: THE ARCHITECT: THE SECRET HISTORY OF EZRA PRENTICE AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY.
It was a sensation. A political and social thunderclap. Before noon, all the rest of the papers back in the nation were desperately working at catch-up, reprinting large sections of the Times article. Radio commentators interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to discuss the revelations. In the corridors of Washington, in the Wall Street board rooms, in the college faculty lounges, there was one and only one topic of conversation.
The series was genius journalism, weaving an interesting, epic narrative from the privileged access Ezra had granted. It was the story of an intelligent, lonely patriotic prophet who had grasped the Second World War while others were blinded. It recorded his secret funding of the atomic project, his personal war against Nazi agents, his single-handed development of those technologies that had saved an American army at Korea. It produced an image of an ambiguous, rugged man who had been forced to operate in the shadows, to make the tough, morally questionable choices that had been necessary to save the state.
His valet tale, Thomas Riley, was exactly where Ezra wanted it to be: one, melancholy, and finally inconclusive paragraph from the fifth book. It was presented as a marginal tragedy, an "individual tragedy that has beset Prentice," an encomium upon the dark, human cost of the great, secret war he'd been forced to wage. The accusation of murder was lost, drowned upon the ocean of greater, broader revelations.
The public reaction was a whirlwind of controversy. Ezra was both hailed as a national hero and criticized as an irresponsible, unchecked authority. Congressmen called for hearings. Some decried his patriotism as heroism; others decried the fact there was a "secret government" run by one industrialist. But the core narrative, the legend Ezra worked so hard at building, had take hold. He was no longer just a wealthy hermit. He was The Architect.
His legend had its intended effect upon his strategic position. His political opponents, the isolationists and his economic rivals, the industrialists, could now attack far less effectively a man now broadly credited with the development of the atomic bomb and the Korean War victories. His grasp upon his industrial and political empire was now stronger than ever, bolstered by an abiding and potent public legend. He was a living legend, and legends are very difficult to assassinate.
The actual punishment, however, was never published. It remained confidential.
In his Fifth Avenue house's spacious library, John D. Rockefeller Jr. read the series, his hands slightly shuddering. He was disgusted, fearful, and, unbeknownst to him, severely chastened. He finally comprehended the bleak, fearful reach of what his brother-in-law had been doing all these years. He had thought Ezra a grasping corporate raiding party leader, an individual preoccupied with profit. He now perceived an individual all along at play on scale he could not begin to understand, and whose pieces were countries and whose stake was the fate of the planet.
His own opposition, founded all along on an ironclad, black-and-white code of morality, now seemed narrow, old-fashioned, and dangerously naive faced with the gigantic, world-making saga that played itself out behind closed doors. He disapproved. He could never disapprove of the means, of the terrifying concentration of authority upon one man's shoulders. But he was at last and completely beaten. He could not oppose one man who came to be legend.
The most important and most anguished accounting took place at Kykuit. Alta read every word of the series spread out before her upon the sitting room table. She saw the brilliant performance, the adept blend of fact, partial fact, and outright fiction. She read of his wartime heroics, and she prided herself. She read the fabricated lies with regard to the "necessary" flogging of the faithful valet and with regard to the "tragic coincidence" of his death, and her heart got burdened with an accustomed, gnawing sorrow.
She knew him better than he knew himself. She knew the taste of his truths and the shape of his lies. She could spot the seams in the great legend he'd spun for the world.
She came up to him one evening, not enraged, but with an exhausted, soul-killing lethargy. He was sitting in his study, with the Times lying on his desk, and he was gripping one glass of brandy.
"That story you've made for the world," she whispered from the doorway, "it was magnificent. A work of art. You've made for yourself a legend, Ezra."
He regarded her, his expression unreadable. "It was what was necessary."
"Yes," she responded, and her voice was weighted with an enormous sadness. "But it wasn't the whole truth, was it? Not with regard to Thomas. Not with regard to all the rest... necessary things." She probed his eyes, hoping to find some glimmer of the man she once knew. "It wasn't the truth with regard to what you've become."
She didn't need him to confess. She didn't need to be told the filthy details. She'd shared the fortress he'd built for years, and she knew, as only a wife could know, the harsh and terrible price of building it. She knew the truth, not from his mouth, but from the harsh, isolated emptiness of his eyes.
He had won. He had bested his competitors, silenced his enemies, and spun public legend that made him bulletproof. But at what final cost? His wife now looked at him with eyes empty of the innocent belief she once reserved for him, but with sadness and knowing distance. The last vestiges of innocent belief were destroyed and filled with the weary, bitter recognition of the wife of a great, fearsome, and extremely isolated man.
He gained everybody's admiration but he forfeited the fundamental, honest intimacy of his own marriage. He became a hero to millions and yet he became a ghost at home.
He sat alone afterwards, long after she was out of sight, the congratulatory headlines of the newspaper seeming to mock him in the bleak light. His brilliant maneuver had worked. It worked to perfection. He had defined the story. But in doing this, in being The Architect, he was an immortal and lonely captive of the very myth he had so skillfully created.