by Gore Vidal
“A rule which you are now planning to break.”
Roosevelt laughed. “They call me the inscrutable sphinx, but for you I’m just a pane of glass.”
“No, Mr. President, a series of panes of glass, set at angles.”
Roosevelt accepted another serving of chicken curry. “Eugene Meyer has just come back from London. You know him?”
Caroline had met the banker who had bought the Washington Post, to the annoyance of Blaise and the fury of Cissy Patterson. “Hearst thinks his paper has a chance.”
“Then that means it’s done for.” Hearst was not a name to be dropped lightly in Roosevelt’s presence. “You yourself want us in the war, don’t you? I mean you’re not maybe yes but then maybe no like your brother.”
“I am yes, with no maybe.” Caroline had become an interventionist on the day that Hitler had driven through the streets of Paris.
“People think that I have all sorts of power that I really don’t. I can maneuver at times. Help out. Lend-lease. That sort of thing. But if you ever want me to do something that I can’t or won’t do—that I’m not able to do—you must force me.”
“How is that done?”
“A constant barrage in the press from those papers not thought to be pro-British, like yours. Insist that I do more. Indicate steps that I must take in order to save civilization, like—oh, direct military aid to Russia, that sort of thing. Accuse me of cowardice in the face of Nazi evil.”
“Surely, that’s more the Hearst style?”
“Well, perhaps it’s a bit lurid for the Tribune. Then describe me as …” He chewed a moment; swallowed. “I have just the word. Pusillanimous. I’ve always loved that word but no one ever uses it anymore and it’s absolutely perfect for a powerful editorial in a paper like yours.”
Thus, Caroline got her orders.
When the dinner table was cleared, the men settled down to a poker game while Caroline and Grace Tully sat in the stern and watched the dark rounded hills of Virginia glide slowly past. The air had suddenly cooled; heat no longer rose from the river. “It’s autumn now,” said Grace. “Just like that. Summer’s gone.”
“I shouldn’t think you ever get to see much of the seasons in the White House.”
“He works us hard.”
“How is Missy?” Caroline had got to like the unofficial wife of the President, whose stroke in June had paralyzed her right leg and arm and so affected her throat that she could hardly speak.
“Warm Springs is helping her. They say she’ll be walking soon, with a brace. She is—most people don’t know it—a very emotional person. She takes things hard.”
“And that brought on the stroke?”
“Combined with too many sleeping pills. I used to warn her, but …” Grace put her hand over the boat’s railing. “The river’s cooling off.”
Caroline, who had vowed never to betray curiosity, now betrayed her own vow. “Crown Princess Martha was considered, perhaps, an opiate too many for Missy?”
Grace turned to face Caroline. “What a time the gossips have had with that! Of course Missy was jealous. For years she’d sit beside the President when they went for drives in the country. Now the Princess sits next to him.” Caroline had found Martha both charming and transparent. After the Norwegian royal family had been driven into exile by the Nazis, the handsome Martha, with her young children, was sent to the United States while her husband and his father, the King, remained in London. Roosevelt had let her stay in the Rose Suite of the White House. He was besotted with her, to Missy’s grief and Eleanor’s judicious disdain. “Franklin must always have a beautiful woman nearby, to tell him how marvelous he is.” Eleanor shook her head. “Well, she is just his type. And, oh, how she simpers and does her little-girl performance for her dear kindly ‘Godfather,’ as she calls him. Too sickening.”
Like everyone, Caroline wondered if polio had rendered the President impotent. Some thought yes; others no. The President’s talkative son, Elliott, had told her, “Pa’s still active, particularly down at Warm Springs.”
“We hope Missy will be able to come back to her old room in the White House. She’s very lonely away from here. You know, there was a time when we all hoped that she and Harry Hopkins would marry but, thank heaven, they didn’t. Two invalids instead of one. Oh, dear.” Grace stopped herself as she recalled Caroline’s somewhat equivocal relationship with Hopkins.
Caroline was happy to set the record straight. “I’m just a—pal.” This was the first time Caroline could recall ever having used the word. “But he does need a wife. And very soon I should think.”
“Missy really married the President and now that she’s no use to him, she realizes that life’s simply passed her by. No husband, no children, and now she’s past the age.”
“Princess Martha must have been the last straw.” Caroline loathed herself for betraying such overt curiosity; on the other hand, this was court history. Saint-Simon would have asked the same questions.
“I can’t think why she takes it so personally. She certainly knows better. Years ago she told me that the President is incapable of a personal relationship.”
“I can understand that. It is the nature of power. Perhaps it is the secret of power. Indifference to everyone.”
Grace sat up straight. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Why not? I am very worldly and very old. I can figure this sort of thing out on my own. Anyway, he will always need people no matter what he may or may not feel for them. He’ll certainly always need you.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“The tooth.”
“What tooth?”
“The one he must wear over his front two teeth when he gives a radio speech, to keep from whistling into the microphone.”
Grace laughed. “He told you that! Now you know everything. Yes, he keeps his dental bridge in a romantic heart-shaped box in his bedroom. Then he forgets all about it until he’s in front of the microphone, ready to go on, and I have to rush upstairs to get it.” Grace rose. “I’m to bed. Or berth. Or whatever it’s called.” She was replaced a moment later by Hopkins, who fell onto the seat beside Caroline.
“I have been given my orders by the President,” she said.
Hopkins had shut his eyes. “An editorial about Russia?”
“How did you …?” Caroline stopped. “You really are his other self.”
“Or maybe he’s mine. That’s not for publication. The President cabled Stalin yesterday. Shipments of up to one billion dollars’ worth of materials are to be sent under Lend-lease.”
“Only the Russians aren’t covered by it, are they?”
“Once your voice is heard in the Tribune, Congress will replace Old Glory with the hammer and sickle. You might mention, in exchange, we’ll be getting all sorts of things from the Soviet Union.”
“Like what?”
“Caviar, I suppose. I’m sure you’ll think of something. Certainly we’ll think of something. Maybe coals to Newcastle. Don’t worry. Actually, the Russians have been covered by Lend-lease for the last two or three weeks.”
“Who did that?”
“Well, if it wasn’t ordered by what you call my other self, it was me.”
Caroline wondered how best to win over Blaise, who had, that summer, come under the unlikely spell of Herbert Hoover.
Hopkins smiled. “I’ll find you some Vatican quotes, to ease the pain of your Catholic readers.”
“Can Russia survive?”
“Not if there should be a mild winter.”
“There never is.”
“So that’s your answer. Hitler’s overextended. He must keep an army in the west. And another in the east, moving on Moscow.”
“We are in the same situation.”
Hopkins turned his head and opened his eyes. “How?”
“The German fleet in the east. The Japanese fleet in the west. Blaise’s new friend—don’t laugh—Herbert Hoover …” Hopkins laughed. “… is convince
d that we are deliberately provoking a war with Japan.”
Hopkins looked away. “We don’t have that much control over events, sad to say.”
“Hoover thinks that Prince Konoye was our last chance to make some sort of settlement with the Japanese but the President refused to meet him.”
“August was a bad time for a meeting with the Japanese. The Boss had to meet Churchill in Newfoundland. Then he was sick …”
“He was stalling? Why?”
Hopkins stared through the open salon door at the back of the President’s head, which its owner tended to use like a conductor’s baton to provide the tempo for those about him. “This wasn’t the best of times for him. Old Sara died. Then Eleanor’s alcoholic wreck of a brother died in Poughkeepsie. I’ve never seen either one of them so upset before.”
“Then he does have feelings for others?”
Hopkins gave her a somewhat suspicious sidelong glance. “Grace?”
“Grace? Innocent. Me. Caroline. Observation of Eleanor, really. She will suddenly blurt out something startling. Even—bitter.”
“I know. Anyway, one good thing. With the old lady gone, Eleanor will finally start to feel at home in Hyde Park.” Hopkins’ smile was crooked. “After only thirty-six years. Funny, the Boss and Eleanor are closer now than I’ve ever seen them before. The wicked witch is dead. Witch.” He repeated the word. “You know, the day the old lady died, the tallest oak on the property just fell over. And there wasn’t a breath of wind. No repayment for five years.”
“No what for five years?”
“No repayment of the loan to the Soviet Union. And no interest. We rely on your skill to indicate that this is a desirable form of bookkeeping.” On the shore closest to them, a number of shadowy figures could be seen dancing about a bonfire.
“What’s that?”
“Halloween,” said Hopkins. “It’s tonight.”
“So it is!” Caroline shuddered with—what? Nostalgia? “The night of all souls. In France they believe that for this one night the dead are abroad among the living.”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?” The question was serious.
“How could I? I’ve not been analyzed.”
“Low blow.”
“I always thought in my movie days that the shadow of oneself on the screen is the true ghost preserved forever, at least in theory.”
“I believe ghosts come to us in dreams.”
“That’s because you sleep in Mr. Lincoln’s office.”
“Well, I’ve never seen him. But one does feel trouble in that room. Almost as much as one feels it in the Boss’s bedroom down the hall when he’s having his breakfast in bed and looking at newspapers and cables and endless bad news.”
“He’s lucky to have you.”
“Lucky for me to have him. For the country, too.” A match blazed as Hopkins lit a cigarette. “For the record, Prince Konoye was no prince of peace. He was simply the most civilized of the Japanese politicians. The Boss saw no point in meeting someone who would soon be gone, which is what he was, two weeks ago, when General Tojo formed the military cabinet.”
“Had the President bothered to meet Konoye, he might still be in power.”
Hopkins coughed through the cigarette smoke. “Or maybe not. Anyway, for once, we have good information. They are finally ready for a war with us. But we won’t be ready for several months. So that’s why we stall for time.”
Caroline realized then that, as was so often the case at this imperial court, the truth was often a mirror reflection of reality, an obverse image intended both to mislead and signal.
She looked into the salon at the cardplayers. Each must know something of what was to come but only the President, in his shirtsleeves, understood the entire web that he was spinning all across the earth.
Caroline looked over the dark slow-moving water at the fires on the shore. What spirits, she wondered, were abroad tonight? “You know, it was on All Souls’ Eve, twenty years ago, that I turned over most of my shares in the paper to Blaise and moved home to France.”
“Home?”
“Yes. Home.” She allowed herself to frown in the dark. “Home that was, anyway. Now I’m a ghost abroad, too, for this one night at least.” The light from the bonfire on the Potomac shore illuminated Hopkins’ face, like a cheerful goblin’s.
“We are waiting,” he said, with what Caroline took to be a goblin’s Delphic gravity, not to mention his own special gnomic eloquence—if gnomes were ever eloquent, “for the other shoe to drop.”
Caroline recalled the prayer that her nurse had taught her. “Commemoratio omnium fidelium defunctorum …” she began.
“Defunctorum are the dead?”
“Yes.”
“There will be plenty of new ones soon enough.”
“I don’t doubt it. You should have put out some food in your room for Mr. Lincoln. The dead like it when they come home on this night.”
“I’m sure he’s in Springfield, Illinois, tonight.”
The bonfire suddenly flared and so lit up the boat that for a moment it looked to Caroline like a painting in which they were, all of them, forever fixed on canvas, and dead.
SEVEN
Blaise seemed more pleased than not for Caroline to be once again co-publisher of the Tribune on condition, of course, that her name would not appear on the newspaper’s masthead. “Your Roosevelt connection is purest gold,” he had observed as he welcomed her to the old office, unchanged in twenty years except for war maps covering one wall.
“The connection is fragile.” Sooner or later, she would be asked to write or do something that she could not or would not do and that would be the end of the gilded connection. The nation was littered with former Roosevelt intimates who had been found unusable.
“Speaking of fragile, how is Hopkins?”
“He moves back into the White House next week.” All through November she had visited Harry regularly at the Naval Hospital. She had gracefully, she thought, handled the inconvenience of having to leave the room whenever the President rang on the specially installed telephone. Since the conversations lasted longer and longer, Caroline had become a familiar figure as she paced up and down the hospital corridors, trying to recall how she had once played a wartime nurse.
The Japanese had sent two special envoys to Washington; one was a diplomat, the other an admiral. The noble-looking white-haired secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was dealing with them as best he could, which was apparently none too well according to Hopkins. “Of course, it’s not his fault we don’t have a policy at the moment.”
“Stalling is a policy, isn’t it?”
“But for how long? We need five months to be ready for them.” The eyes were glistening now but he was skeletally thin while the parchmentlike skin of his face was whiter than the sheet pulled up to his chin. He complained of the cold.
“If I may criticize the regime …” Caroline began.
“That is your function.”
“Accepted. Isn’t it always wisest to strike the first blow?”
“Wisest for whom?” He lit a forbidden cigarette.
“Wisest for the side that means to win the war.”
“You sound just like Churchill.”
“I had not noticed the resemblance. He wants us to strike first?”
Hopkins nodded. “But we won’t because it is wisest for the President to let them make the first move. We think they’ll attack Manila, and if by some miracle they should manage to blow up that horse’s ass MacArthur, our cup will truly runneth over.”
“All this because of a campaign promise? No sons of yours will …”
“… ever fight in a foreign war, unless attacked.”
Caroline blinked. “This is all very daring.”
“Fate decides what must be done. I’m convinced of that. Anyway, there’s no going to war unless all your people are united behind you. Well, they are nowhere near united even though we keep losing ship after ship to the Nazis and no one b
links an eye. So we must take one great blow and then …” He stopped.
“Then what?”
“Then we go for it. All of it. And get it.”
“What is it?”
“The world. What else is there for us to have?”
Caroline was properly chilled. “One hears that Hitler’s table talk is somewhat like yours.”
Hopkins grinned. “Was, I suspect. You have to change your tense when you start something you can’t finish. And he can’t. Joe Stalin’s got him stopped. Then, when we join in, the whole world gets a New Deal.”
Mentally, Caroline replayed Hopkins’ speech as the late edition of the November 26, 1941, front page was placed on her desk. She had never heard an American speak like Harry since the turn of the century when Adams and his circle used to discuss the possibilities of an American world hegemony that had, thus far, not come to pass, for which she had always been grateful. At the time, she had agreed with the ever-wise, always droll Henry James that where the acquisition of an empire had been the making of the British it would be the ruin of the Americans, who would simply export their Tammany Halls all around the globe. “Imagine,” said the master, taking a deep breath as he prepared to unfurl one of his elaborate sentences, “the sight somewhere in—would it be a luxuriant green jungle? loud with the cries of strange scarlet birds, all dominated by the minatory presence of an elaborate wigwam, so called by the sachems, as I believe the masters of Tammany are known to their faithful followers, themselves so many avatars of the savage Americans whose preferred edifice was not actually a tent or wigwam but a cabin fashioned from huge rude logs, not unlike the very first residences of those bold Europeans who settled the island of Manhattan, so gloriously celebrated—the island not the immigrants—by the good Walt Whitman. In any case, either in some island wilderness or, now, in the Spanish city of Manila, all whitewashed and ablaze beneath a tropic sun, we have enlarged our domain to include half a watery world whilst bringing its residents all the arts of political corruption as demonstrated by numerous—countless—ceaseless elections, wringing vote after vote from the poor immigrants or, in this case, the former joyous clients of Spain’s flowery archipelago, now so many American wards huddled together beneath Old Glory, their plaintive cries for freedom unheard by the Great White Patriarch—sachem—call him what you will—at Washington …”
