I led her out, to the elevators, across Constitution Avenue, to the Grounds. I knew the Hill’s best side, and wanted to make sure she got it. We marched through the gardens, past my father’s favorite bench under a canopy of wisteria, down the cascade of marble steps, heading west toward the monuments of improbable victories and higher loyalties. “Perfect,” she said when we arrived on the great expanse of lawn in front of the Capitol. With the cupola rising grand behind me, she turned me this way and that, straight on, profile, standing, sitting, into the light. Outside of it.

Thirty-Seven

The Good Daughter No More: The Older Child of Late Senator Gregory Richardson Grapples with His Legacy—and Her Own

By Atlas Braidy-Lowes

June 21 at 3:01 p.m.

A few weeks after Daisy Richardson found out her father had written checks to the University of Virginia with money that wasn’t his, she tells the story of how, after the most recent and particularly brutal reelection season, her father decided that he wanted a quiet Christmas with his family in their Georgetown row house.

This was a surprise. If you remember anything about Senator Gregory Richardson, besides the fact that he died in bed with his lover and saddled his widow with leaden bags of debt and detritus, it is probably his reputation for being an indefatigable good-timer, who never refused a cocktail or a free steak dinner. People said that he’d survive a nuclear fallout, him and the cockroaches, and they meant it as a compliment. He was unbeatable, which is not to say he was unassailable; it turns out Gregory Richardson made just as many enemies as friends in this town. But we can say that the heart attack, to kill him, had to have been powerful. Anything less than massive and Gregory Richardson would have fought back, tooth to gum, nail to quick.

That Christmas, Daisy Richardson recalls, he had it in his head to make Peking duck. Neither she nor her mother was in the habit of questioning these sorts of whims. So Gregory took to the kitchen, dealing with baking soda, boiling water, and, at one point in the process, a bicycle pump. But the duck skin would not dehydrate. Daisy found her father, the last Christmas he was alive, softly weeping at his kitchen table. He looked small, and wounded, and—this was important—worried.

“It wasn’t about the duck skin,” she says now. “I knew it wasn’t. But I backed away, left him in peace, because I was scared to know what it was that had him in tears.” She sits on her mother’s couch, casually dressed, a senator’s former chief of staff, as of this week. For the first time since her father’s death, she is ready to discuss the depth and breadth of his deception to the American people and his own family, and what she’s learned in the aftermath.