Even with slippery streets, a car seemed better than a helicopter in the heavy snowstorm. He got out in front of the South Portico, where a snowman greeted him with widespread arms—brooms—and a jaunty grin dug into the snow face as if with two fingers. It wore a scarf whitened with new flakes, and a snow-covered basket resembling a coolie hat that shielded the bottle-cap eyes. The new roof on the East Wing Theater had been completed over the weekend, Cromwell noticed. The mortar attack had done the first hostile damage to the White House since the British had burned it in 1814, and surely the most aggravating. The trial was already over, and the three men sent to Alcatraz Penitentiary, renovated during the Wheeler Administration. Cromwell had deliberately arrived nearly a quarter hour before the NSC meeting was scheduled to begin. He walked briskly to the Executive Wing through eight inches of white, stomping the snow off his feet in the small portico there. Then he went in, returning the salutes of the marines at the door, and entered Martinelli's office.
