These days, Peter lived with his sixty-two-year-old mother in a stuffy, high-ceilinged apartment in the old Wellington Hotel. Or rather he slept there: like most of his staff, he spent most of his waking hours in the office, particularly when there was a panic project on, like the Blight Crisis Appeal.

During the morning, Peter had called Joe Dasgupta, the brilliant and expensive Indian constitutional lawyer, and Joe Dasgupta was already working on a legal structure for the fund and considering how it should be registered. Peter had also called Fred Newman, the chairman of the Kansas Wheat Growers’ Association, at his home in Palm Springs. So far, Fred Newman’s own farm had suffered little damage, and he agreed with Peter Kaiser that the financial interests of Kansas farmers would best be served by ‘soft-pedalling the blight, media-wise’. He also accepted Peter Kaiser’s invitation to act as expert adviser to the Blight Crisis Appeal, in return for ‘necessary expenses’. Shearson Jones had recognised the importance of having Fred Newman attached to the fund from the beginning, since most of the suitcase farmers who owned land in Kansas were strong Newman supporters.

Fred Newman had always argued that ‘Just because a man doesn’t actually dig the soil with his own bare hands, that doesn’t mean his heart isn’t in farming,’ and that sentiment had won him the votes of almost every wheat grower who preferred to spend fifty weeks of every year in New York or Los Angeles – in fact, anywhere except out in tedious Kansas, amongst all that tiresome wheat.

While Peter Kaiser had been making those calls, his staff of eleven girls had been canvassing major industries all over the country – particularly those industries connected with farming, farm machinery, fertilisers, and food transportation. By lunchtime, they had rustled up pledges of more than five million dollars in contributions, and by mid-afternoon, after CBS and ABC news had both run stories on the Kansas wheat blight, with serial footage of the blackened crops, they had jumped to eight million dollars, all tax deductible.

In the Senate itself, Shearson Jones spent the morning smoking a large domestic cigar and gathering support for his emergency aid bill among Republicans and Democrats alike. He ate a heavy lunch with Wallace Terry of the Washington Post, and told him that he was leaning heavily on anyone who owed him a favour, and a few people who didn’t, ‘simply to rescue those poor beleagured farmers in Kansas.’