Split Thirty

For the second installment of his acclaimed Henry Bell trilogy, author and lawyer Michael Davidow sends his band of god-soaked advertising men into the most famous political campaign of all time: Richard Nixon’s run for the presidency in 1972, the epoch-making year of the Watergate scandal. Newly divorced from his wife, Henry Bell makes his way east, gets hired to handle New York finances for his party’s nominee, and is soon juggling stacks of cash, secret videotapes, and the attention of too many plain-clothes cops. Entrusted with the delivery of illegal funds to Washington, D.C., he also gets double-crossed by a group of conservative businessmen he did not even know he was working for. And his only means of escape entails destroying all he holds dear. His oldest son is missing in Viet Nam. His friend Bert Kahn is sneaking pictures of the godhead into television spots for the Democrats. His friend Chandler Peterson is laundering campaign contributions with help from hippies. And from Madison Avenue to Universal City, from San Diego to Capitol Hill, and from the Central Park lagoon to an abandoned quarry in Rutland, Vermont: all these worlds collide on a moonlit night under marble stone, for Bell himself to meet his maker on the cold gray banks of the Hudson River. America changed forever with this election. SPLIT THIRTY shows why.