by Gore Vidal
“Mrs. Sanford?” It was Harold Griffiths.
“I was daydreaming,” she said.
“Of France?”
“No, of Henry James.”
“You knew him?”
“We all did, back then. He liked—at least he said he liked—to come to Washington and stay with Henry Adams and laugh at all of us, in a kindly way. He took great pleasure in watching the cows trying to graze on the Capitol steps. So like the statesman within. What are you wearing?” Harold was dressed as an Army officer but without insignia.
“I’m a war correspondent.”
“To what war?”
“Moscow. For the Tribune.”
“Blaise has influence.” Caroline was mildly distressed that her superior influence had not been put to use. Plainly, Blaise had his own ways. “What will happen to the movies while you are gone?”
“They are on their own.”
“Your four-part series on—who was it?”
“Ida Lupino. Postponed until Hitler is defeated. Last things last.”
Blaise joined them. “You look very convincing, Harold!” He gave the new correspondent a War Department envelope. “You’re being routed through the Azores. It’s all in there. Of course, they can’t guarantee that you’ll ever get to Moscow …”
“How Chekhovian,” was Caroline’s absentminded contribution: she was now reading the front page of the Tribune, still smelling of fresh ink.
Harold withdrew, leaving his employers to their joint creation. “Blaise, where did this story come from?” The headline: Hull’s Message to Japanese Envoys.
“United Press. The Associated Press is hopeless. They simply parrot the State Department line. We thought that this might be authentic.”
“I wonder how the UP got a look at Hull’s message.”
Blaise shrugged. “We were all hoping you’d get the word from Hopkins.”
“He tells me no secrets that I haven’t already worked out for myself. You realize, Blaise, that …” Caroline put on her seldom-used glasses; the mock-up front page had started to go in and out of focus: expanding and contracting glowworms adorned the page. Was she about to faint?
“Are you all right?”
“No. Not really. I feel—it’s like morning sickness. Am I pregnant?”
“That doesn’t seem possible.” Blaise looked over her shoulder. “I can’t say I read this story all that carefully …”
“Read it now.”
Blaise read aloud. “ ‘The United States handed Japan a blunt statement of policy which informed quarters said …’ Those informed quarters sound like Laughlin Currie.”
Caroline liked the bright youthful Currie, one of the President’s administrative assistants. Currie’s principal task was to act as liaison with the Chinese; isolationists thought him to be a communist in thrall to Stalin. Actually, Currie was a shrewd observer of the world, loyal only to the President and somewhat overenchanted, like so many men, by the beautiful imperious Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Blaise continued. “ ‘… virtually ended all chances of an agreement between the two countries on the explosive Far Eastern issues. The United States government is reported to be demanding, as the price of any concessions it grants, that Japan abandon plans for future aggression, pull her armies out of China and French Indochina, restore the Open Door policy in China, and substitute peaceful negotiations for the sword in achieving her so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere.’ ”
Neither spoke for a moment. Caroline listened to the rattling of streetcars in Ninth Street, to the noise of horns being sounded despite every sort of city ordinance limiting their use. Then she said, for her own edification if not Blaise’s, “The other shoe has dropped.”
“The what?”
“Oh, something someone said was about to happen.” A young newsman entered the room on diffident tiptoe. “Mrs. Sanford … sir. I have Hulen’s story. He’s just filed it to the New York Times.” Caroline took the proof sheet, scanned it quickly as she tended to do with the predictable Times: Hulen was a company man in every sense, serving both his newspaper and the Administration. “He’s peddling the official line. ‘Facts’ about Chinese pressure on our government. Oh!” She laughed. “He has inside information that Japan will back down in China if we cancel our economic restrictions.” Caroline gave the proof back to the young man, who tiptoed from the joint Sanford presence.
“I can’t see how any sovereign country would accept such an ultimatum.” Blaise seemed more bewildered than alarmed while Caroline was simply alarmed. The scenario of the falling shoes was now in play.
“What is our editorial?” Caroline asked.
“Admonition.” Blaise had been obviously preparing the word. “We ignore the AP and the State Department. We respond to the UP’s report. We warn that the nation is not yet ready for a Pacific war.”
Caroline agreed. Blaise went into the office next to hers. Caroline rang Currie at the White House. He was in a conference with something the operator referred to as “the War Cabinet.” Then Caroline called in her secretary and dictated the next day’s editorial. Later, she and Blaise would compare notes with the chief editorial writer, who would mandarinize their efforts. Curiously, he had taken well to her recent use of the word “pusillanimous,” never suspecting its lofty origin.
As agreed, Senator James Burden Day arrived at exactly three in the afternoon. Caroline was, at first, somewhat dismayed by his appearance. He was unmistakably old. But then, on close examination, he was still handsome and the blue eyes shone much as they had when she seduced him, or had it been the other way around? In any case, she had fallen into his arms a virgin and arose, later, a woman fulfilled, totally fulfilled as it later proved, for she gave birth to Emma within the year, obliging her to persuade a dim but fortunately impoverished cousin named John Sanford to marry her, thus giving legitimacy to Emma and respectability to herself. During that period of planning and scheming and the deployment of troops, as she thought of her campaign to maintain an affair with Burden while creating a fairly convincing appearance of marriage with John, she had felt all-powerful if somewhat nervous, like Napoleon on that raft at … where was it? In Prussia …
“Tilsit,” she whispered softly into Burden’s ear as he embraced her with a surprising degree of warmth, considering the age of each.
“What?” They separated.
“I was trying to think of the place in Prussia where Napoleon … Oh, it’s not important. I’m writing an editorial.”
“You haven’t started talking to yourself, like Kitty.” He looked mildly alarmed.
“Nothing so … endearing.” That was the mot juste, she thought; then she motioned for him to sit on the leather sofa while she sat in a straight chair, back erect, chin high but not high enough to reveal her neck in all its latest imperfections.
“Do you ever see our daughter?” he asked.
“Not for months. Do you?”
“No. But then she still doesn’t know about me. I do keep an eye out for her. She’s almost exactly Diana’s age.”
“Do they get on?”
“Different interests. Emma seemed happy at the FBI. But when Hoover got involved with the British secret service, she quit.” He smiled. “She’s a passionate isolationist. Like me.”
“You are too sensible to be passionate.”
“Only if we are attacked.”
Caroline felt as if she had been suddenly administered an electric shock. There it was again, the phrase that would precipitate a war that she very much wanted if it meant the liberation of France but that, simultaneously, she did not want at all when she thought of the horrors that had befallen Europe during the Great War. In a sort of mindless daydream she had drifted through the past months, listening to Hopkins while hoping that, somehow, Hitler would be destroyed by Russia and the sorcerer’s spell broken. Burden continued to talk while she flitted in and out of her fantasy. Finally, she tuned him in, as he was saying, “Yesterday the President told the War Cabinet …�
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“A War Cabinet without a proper war.”
“Not for long. I thought, as a responsible publisher …”
“I wonder if I am responsible. I am too much at court.”
“Then perhaps it won’t come as a shock to you to hear that FDR said, yesterday, that the Japanese are apt to attack us by next Monday.”
“Then, today, he delivers his ultimatum which he knows will make an attack inevitable. Yes, the master plan is working nicely.”
“Master plan?” Burden was tense. “But that’s exactly why I’m here. I have proof he’s been planning this all along.”
Caroline was torn between loyalty to Hopkins and a not entirely extinct affection for her ancient lover and father to her admittedly unloved and unlovable child. “I think FDR has been preparing for this, which isn’t quite the same thing as bringing it on.” She had forgotten how quickly and easily and, she hoped, plausibly she could lie. A season at court had honed her skills. “No. From what I’ve seen of him I’m surprised that he hasn’t attacked the Japanese first.” This was first-rate. She commended herself.
“Wilson. Remember? He was reelected, barely, in 1916 ‘because he kept us out of war.’ Then, once elected, he promptly got us into the war and the people punished him. Turned down his League of Nations. Turned against him. Roosevelt also lied to get himself reelected. But he was cleverer than Wilson. He kept saying again and again and again, no foreign wars unless we are attacked.” Burden tapped the UP story on the Tribune’s front page. “Today, he has made sure that we will be attacked, perhaps next Monday, and then the country unites behind him and he’ll be ready for a fourth and then a fifth term—why not a dictatorship for life?”
“That’s a bit extreme,” said Caroline, who tended to agree with Burden. She also did not in the least mind a Roosevelt dictatorship. She had never much liked what passed for a republic in her homeland. Why not try something else? She thought of her native land, France. In two hundred years, the French had tried two or three monarchies, a directory, a consulate, a couple of empires, several republics. She had lost count.
“I have a friend in the Navy. An admiral who knows a great deal about what the President’s been up to. He thinks this ultimatum will lead to an immediate attack upon us. If it does, a number of us in the Senate will call upon the House of Representatives to bring an act of impeachment against the President.”
“You are extreme,” Caroline weakly reprised herself.
“War is extreme and he has started one, all on his own.”
Caroline held her chin even higher. “Will your admiral tell what he knows?”
“It depends on events.”
“When and where does he think the attack will come?”
Burden walked over to the map of the Pacific. “I have one of these in my office, too.” He pointed to the North Pacific. “Since July much of the Japanese fleet has been in this area. This means that they will probably strike at Wake Island and Midway or Guam down here.” He touched three specks in the pale blue paper vastness. “Since July they have been assembling their forces over here.” His hand moved west to the main islands of Japan. “This is the Kure Naval Base, where Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship is.”
“Is it true that we have broken their codes?” On this subject, the War Department had been both peremptory and nervous. Thus far, with the threat of total censorship hanging over the press, no newspaper had yet done more than obliquely speculate.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t say. But I don’t really know. I do know we have excellent intelligence. We even have someone who reports to us directly from what they call the Throne. That is, from the center of everything where the Emperor receives his prime minister and the chiefs of staff and they decide on war or peace.”
“They have already decided, haven’t they?”
Burden nodded. “Their ambassadors have come here with two proposals. The first plan was for a mutual peaceful settlement. That was scuttled today by Hull with his ten-point ultimatum. The second plan, which they will be prosecuting in a week or so, in response to Hull, will be a declaration of war.”
Caroline thought of Hopkins’ almost casual admission that the United States was not ready to fight a war in the Pacific. Why, she wondered, had the President’s shrewd stalling for time been so suddenly abandoned?
“Yesterday, the main Japanese fleet began to move east, in our direction. My naval friend is concerned about the lack of intelligence Washington has made available to the Pacific Fleet. Everything is filtered through the White House and the War Department. Before my friend left the Navy, he set up his own naval intelligence center in the Pacific and out of Washington’s reach. He’s been tracking Yamamoto. He’s also tracking the Navy Department. They have done nothing except for an order from Admiral Stark—just this morning—to the naval commander at Pearl Harbor, telling him to send his two newest aircraft carriers, along with twenty-one other new ships, west toward Midway and Wake …”
“Where, presumably, they will meet Admiral Yamamoto on his eastern cruise.”
“Yes. It is … diabolic.”
“Or, maybe, very … complicated. There is something uncanny about Mr. Roosevelt, other than diabolism, of course. He leads so many lives. Last night he dined alone upstairs with Princess Martha. Eleanor had conveniently gone off to New York earlier to stay with lady friends and so … What do you want, Burden?”
Burden sat heavily on the leather sofa. “To talk. To talk to you. To talk to someone who knows far more than I do about Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hopkins.”
“I know character, perhaps, but I don’t know their war plans, if they have any. I get the sense that they are just drifting, waiting for something terrible to happen.”
“My naval friend thinks that we should bomb the Japanese fleet. Now.”
“So does Mr. Stimson. ‘It’s not too difficult,’ he told Hopkins, ‘maneuvering them into firing the first shot without them doing us a lot of damage in the process.’ ”
Burden nodded. “The first sensible thing I’ve ever heard attributed to Stimson. All right, what do I want? I’ll see to it that the Tribune gets the full story of what the President did and did not do. I’m holding subcommittee hearings in mid-December. All I want from you is fair coverage, something we’re not apt to get in the rest of the mainline press.”
“Oh, you can count on me, up to a certain point.”
“France?”
“France. But I think you’ve delayed too long. If there’s a war by Monday, there will be censorship on Tuesday. Also, I can’t see your other senators indicting—or whatever it is they do—the Commander in Chief in a time of peril.”
Burden shrugged. “We shall see what form the peril takes.” He smiled; shifted a gear. “I think about you—often.”
“I return the compliment.”
“If I’d been free to marry …”
“I was never designed for marriage, other than the one of peculiar inconvenience that I was obliged to make, thanks to our …” She laughed at the phrase: “… love child.”
As Caroline led him to the door, she tried to recall exactly what it was that she had once felt for him. Lust, she finally decided, giving herself moderately high marks for inner truthfulness. They embraced at the door. She felt in full control of herself not only now in the present but in the turbulent past tense as well.
“I gather that our offspring is in London,” said Burden.
“Oh?” Caroline had no idea where Emma was.
“Yes. She’s working on a film with your old friend Farrell. I assume you got him to hire her. Keep it all in the family, as they say.” And with this unexpected haymaker, James Burden Day was gone, leaving the ever-cool, superbly well-balanced Caroline trembling with unanticipated rage.
Hopkins returned to the White House on December 3. The next day, at his invitation, Caroline went straight to his sitting room in the Lincoln suite. He was seated in an armchair, reading what looked to be War Department memoranda. “There
you are!” He waved at her. “I had intended to leap boyishly to my feet but …”
“Don’t.” She kissed the top of his head. “Did they find out why you were having trouble walking?”
“Of course not. But whatever they did, I don’t totter as much as before. Your paper is beginning to sound suspicious of us.”
“That’s only because we are. Because I am.” Caroline sat opposite him, deliberately facing away from the portrait of a brooding Lincoln, the bad-luck, in her eyes, president. “I don’t understand Hull’s infamous ten points. You say you stall for time and then you order the Japanese out of China, out of everywhere, and expect them to obey you.”
“Hull’s given up. Hull …”
“It’s not Hull. It’s the President. Why?”
Hopkins placed the War Department documents facedown on a table beside him. “Hull should have waited one more day, because we had just come up with a brand-new series of delays. But this may all be for the best. We’ll soon have the Japanese response to Hull.”
“This morning General Tojo said that the United States will be driven from East Asia by a great wind.”
Hopkins pulled himself out of his usual slouch. “A great wind?”
Caroline repeated Tokyo’s cryptic message to the fleet that morning. “East wind rain.”
Hopkins shook his head. “False alarm, I think. Most of their fleet is still in home waters.”
“Except for six or seven aircraft carriers.”
“Who tells you these things?”
“In the Washington whispering gallery all things are told.”
“All things false as well as true. Senator Burden Day, I’ll bet.”
Caroline made a little speech on the sacredness of the relationship between a journalist and his sources; neither of them listened to her.
“Tell your spy in the Navy Department that much of the Japanese fleet is now heading south, toward Saigon. That’s the area where they will take us on, and the British and the Dutch.”
