by Gore Vidal
Clare and Harry were both interventionists by now, and they spent a night at the White House, working over President Roosevelt, who was all smiling amiability. Clare thought he looked old, with trembling hands. Yet it was fairly certain that in November he would run for a third term—and why not? A fourth one if the country should be at war.
Although politically minded, Clare could not be said to have any proper politics. She was basically a vulgar Darwinist. The rich were better than the poor; otherwise they would not be rich. She could mock the idle rich, but the self-made must be untaxed by such do-gooders as the Roosevelts. Harry was much the same, except for one great bee in his bonnet: he believed, fervently, that it was the task of the United States in the twentieth century to Christianize China, the job that his dad, the missionary, had so signally failed to do. The damage that this one bee did to our politics is still with us, as the Christian right now beats its jungle drums in the chigger belt, calling for war with China.
Clare became a kingmaker. She would elect as President Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger. Morris describes her appearance at Madison Square Garden: “She wore a plain black dress, and as she stepped forward on the platform, a powerful spotlight beamed down from distant rafters onto her glossy blond hair. The crowd responded with wild enthusiasm even before she opened her mouth. None of her experiences on a movie set or theater stage had equaled this moment. It was the giant arena she had sought since adolescence.” Even H. L. Mencken was impressed. “Slim, beautiful and charming . . . when she began to unload her speech, it appeared at once that she was also a fluent and effective talker.” Don’t cry for me, Dun & Bradstreet.
Two years later, she would be elected to Congress from a Connecticut district; she served two terms. The team of Luce would continue until his death, in 1967.
At our last meeting, in my Roman flat, the sirocco was blowing and the shutters were banging. An Italian woman who occasionally did typing for me unexpectedly arrived. When she saw the former Ambassador, she nearly fainted. She had worked for Clare at the Embassy. Clare was amiable. The woman left. I think it was Morris who asked what her function had been. “Actually,” Clare said, “she worked for my consort. She was traffic coordinator for Harry’s countesses.”
Morris heads her long list of acknowledgments with “Above all, I wish to thank the late Clare Boothe Luce for cooperating with me on this biography during the last six years of her life. From the age of fifteen . . . she had kept letters, diaries, scrapbooks and masses of other documents, all of which she courageously allowed me to see.” Courageously? Oh, dear. Could that knowing smile in the middle distance belong to the inexorable Janet Malcolm, brooding upon yet another example of her iron law, the necessary betrayal of subject by observer-writer?
She also submitted to countless hours of interviews and let me stay and work with her in her Washington apartments, her Honolulu house, and a rented mansion one summer in Newport. We spent time together in New York City, her birthplace, in Connecticut, her main residence for most of her life, and at Mepkin Abbey, the former Luce plantation in South Carolina, where she would be buried. We traveled to Canada and London for semi-centennial productions of The Women, and to Rome to see the villa and embassy where she had lived and worked as United States Ambassador to Italy. The fruits of that last research, as well as details of our complex personal relationship, will appear in the second volume of this biography.
Complex? All about Eve? The Lady or the Tiger? Rosebud?
Whatever wonders are yet to come, Sylvia Jukes Morris has written a model biography of a woman who, if born a man, could easily have been a president, for what that’s worth these days: a cool billion, I believe. As it is, if nothing else, Clare Boothe Luce certainly enlivened the dull—when not downright dangerous—century her husband so pompously hailed as “the American.” Now we are more modest or, as the current president somewhat edgily put it, we are the one “indispensable”—or was it “undisposable”?—nation, while Time no longer sets the pace for partisan ad hominem malice. Although Harry’s poisonous gift to American journalism is still widely imitated, the “fame” of the Luces themselves has been erased as century ends. Of their once proud monuments, nothing beside remains in the lone and level sands except the logo of a dull, incoherent conglomerate, Time Warner.
The New Yorker
26 May 1997
* TRUMAN
An English paper asked a number of writers to meditate, briefly, on their heroes or villains. My villain, I wrote, is a perfectly nice little man called Harry S. (for nothing) Truman. A worthy senator, he had been casually chosen by our Augustus, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to be vice-president in 1944. Some months later, Augustus joined his imperial ancestors Jefferson, Polk, Lincoln, and cousin Theodore in Valhalla (just above Mount Rushmore). Truman was now master of the earth, a strange experience for a failed farmer, haberdasher, and machine politician from Missouri.
Roosevelt, the late conqueror, had not bothered to tell his heir that we were developing an atomic bomb or what agreements he had made about the postwar world with the barbarian chieftain and ally, Stalin. Truman had to play it by ear. The whole world was now his: what to do with it?
Lately, as the American empire bumps to an end—too many debts, insufficient military enemies—Truman and the empire are being mythologized at an astonishing rate. A recent biography of Truman emphasized his grit, and his miraculous reelection against terrible odds.
At no point in the hagiographies of Truman does anyone mention what he actually did to the United States and the world. First, he created the National Security State. He institutionalized the Cold War. He placed us on a permanent wartime footing. He started that vast hemorrhage of debt which now is more than $4 trillion and growing by $1 billion each day. Why did he do this? First, the good reason. When the Japanese, much provoked by us, attacked, we had not got out of the Depression that followed the crash of 1929. The Roosevelt New Deal of the Thirties had been palliative, but not a solution. There was still great unemployment and the specter of violent social change. War gave us full employment. War removed our commercial rivals and put an end to the colonial empires of our allies, empires we quietly took over in the name of “self-determination,” democracy, and Grandma Moses, an icon of the day.
Truman and his advisers from both political parties decided that they would, in effect, declare war on a vile religion known as Communism and its homeland, the Soviet Union. The demonization of the Soviet Union started in 1947, when they were no threat to the American empire and its clients. They were indeed unpleasant masters to their own people and to those buffer states that we allowed them to keep after the war. We thought they were unduly paranoid about being invaded, but a nation that has been three times invaded from the west might be forgiven a bit of nervousness.
Although the United States has not been invaded since the British burned down Washington, D.C., in 1814, Truman and company deliberately created a siege mentality. The Russians were coming, they proclaimed. To protect us, the National Security Act was passed in 1947. Thus, government was able to regiment the American people, keep the allies on a tight leash, and lock the Russians up in their northern cage. In 1950 the American republic was quietly retired and its place taken by the National Security State, set up secretly and outlined in a document not to be made public for twenty-five years, the National Security Council Memorandum 68. War and Navy Departments were combined into a single “Defense” Department while the CIA, an unconstitutional secret police, was invented. The NSC-68 established the imperial blueprint that governed the world until the recent crack-up of the Soviet Union, which happened not as a result of our tactics of ongoing wars, and an arms race that they could not afford, but was due to the internal fragility of an artificial state which was, in a sense, a crude mirror of our own, now falling apart, as well, through debt and internal ethnic wars.
Truman’s blueprint made seven points. First, we were never to negotiate with the Soviet Union in an
y honest way. Two, we were to develop the hydrogen bomb. Three, build up conventional forces and reinstate the draft. Four, increase taxes to pay for this—in 1954 I earned $100,000 and paid $90,000 to the peacetime government of the U.S. This is the only thing that Ronald Reagan, equally hit in the same town, Hollywood, and I ever had in common. Five, mobilize through the media all Americans to fight Communism—Truman instituted “loyalty oaths,” a nice totalitarian gimmick that Joseph McCarthy would have a lot of fun with. Six, control the Allies with NATO, hence our military presence to this day in Europe. Seven, propagandize the Russians through misinformation, and so on. Since 1950 the U.S. has been compulsively at war (hot) in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq; (tepid) Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala; and (cold) Iran, Angola, Chile, Grenada. Also, the interference through our secret police in European elections, start-ing with April 1, 1948, when the CIA ensured the election of the Christian Democrats in Italy, through the harassment of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the Sixties, to various crimes in every continent. . . .
I shall stop here. Deliberately, the thirty-third president of the United States set in train an imperial expansion that has cost the lives of many millions of people all over the world. Now we are relatively poor, unloved, and isolated, with a sullen polity ready for internal adventures. Thanks a lot, Harry.
The Independent Magazine
3 October 1992
* HERSH’S JFK
Early spring, 1959. Dutchess County, New York. My telephone rang. “Senator Kennedy is calling.” It was Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary. (Her employer hadn’t yet metamorphosed into the imperial acronym JFK.) Years later, Mrs. Lincoln wrote a fairly unrevealing memoir of her years with Kennedy—a pity, since she knew a great deal about him, including the subject of his call to me. Jack came on the line. No hello. No how are you. “That friend of yours up there, Dick Rovere. He’s writing a piece for Esquire about ‘Kennedy’s last chance to be President’ or something. Well, it’s not true. Get to him. Tell him I don’t have Addison’s disease. If I did, how could I keep up the schedule I do?” Many more staccato sentences. No time to lose. Primaries were coming up; then the Convention. Before I went down the road to see Rovere, I looked up Addison’s disease: a deterioration of the adrenal function that can lead to early death. No wonder Jack was panicky. Even a hint that he was mortally ill . . .
Background: In 1953, Jack married Jacqueline Bouvier, whose stepfather, H. D. Auchincloss, had been my stepfather until, in a fit of generosity, my mother passed him, like a well-stuffed safety-deposit box, on to Jackie’s needy mother. Through Jackie, I got to know Jack; delighted in his darkly sardonic humor, not unlike my own—or Jackie’s, for that matter. In due course, I shifted from the noble—that is, Adlai Stevensonian—side of the Democratic Party to the raffish gang of new kids from Massachusetts, by way of Riverdale, N.Y. Then I, too, went into active politics; by 1960 I would be the Democratic-Liberal candidate for Congress from New York’s highly conservative Twenty-ninth District, and our party’s Presidential candidate was a matter of poignant interest to me. When Jack rang me—the first and last time—I was eager for him to be nominated, even though I had already seen a poll that indicated that his Roman Catholicism could cost our district the election. In the end, I was to get 43.3 percent of the vote to his 38 percent; this was very satisfying to me. Unfortunately, the Republican incumbent congressman got 56.7 percent. This was less satisfying. “Your loss,” Jack grinned afterward, “was a real tragedy for our nation.” Whatever else, he was funny.
Richard H. Rovere wrote the much read and admired Letter from Washington for The New Yorker. “The Washington Letter as mailed from vital Rhinebeck, New York,” Jack used to chuckle. “That shows real dedication. Endless tracking down of sources. In-depth analyses on the spot . . .” But Dick was now on to something that could cost Jack the nomination.
Rovere lived in a gingerbread frame house on a tree-lined street in Rhinebeck. He had a large, nearly bald head with patchy red skin and a scarred neck. Jack had asked me if he was a drinker. I said no, I thought it was eczema. Thick glasses so magnified his eyes that he seemed like some rare aquatic specimen peering back at you through aquarium glass. In youth, Rovere had been a Communist. Later, when he saw that the Marxist god had failed, he left the Party; he also must have made some sort of inner vow that never again would he be taken in by anyone or anything that required mindless loyalty. As of spring 1959, Rovere was inclined to support Stevenson, who had not yet made up his mind about running for a third time.
I began, to the point, “Kennedy does not have Addison’s disease.”
Rovere insisted that he did. He had acquired the journalist’s habit of always being, no matter what the subject, more knowledgeable than anyone else in the room. I asked him how he knew. “A friend’s wife has Addison’s, and they took her to the Lahey Clinic in Boston where they have all the latest procedures, including one that was cooked up for Kennedy. They put a pellet under your skin and it’s supposed to drip adrenaline into you for a week or so and then you get another pellet.”
I used Jack’s arguments. How explain his tremendous energy? How could he have been campaigning so furiously ever since 1956 if he was ill, etc.? Dick was unimpressed. He had the doctor’s name; he had a lot of clinical data. He was already writing the piece. Esquire had been advertising it. No turning back.
Question for today: Did I suspect that the story was true? I suppose, in court, I’d say I’m not a pathologist and so how could I know? Jack had had, all his life, numerous mysterious illnesses. Four times, he had been given the last rites. The yellow-gold complexion (typical of Addison’s) was explained as the result of wartime malaria. I suppose now, with hindsight, I had already made up my mind that if he thought he could survive four years of the Presidency “vigorously”—his key word that season—as well as he had survived four years of campaigning, then whatever was wrong with him was under control. Thus one embraces, so painlessly, falsity.
Dick’s piece duly appeared with no mention of Addison’s disease. I did bet him a hundred dollars, even money, that Jack would be nominated and elected. Dick was cheerfully condescending. “At those odds, I can get you a lot more bets.” In November, he paid off. Oddly—well, not so oddly—Dick and I never again alluded to our business.
Point to story: How easily so many people—best and brightest as well as worst and dullest—got caught up in the Kennedy bandwagon. The amount of lying that went on in that era was, the ineffable Nixon to one side, unique in our homely history.
Three years later, Rovere and I had a row that pretty much put an end to our friendship. Again the subject was Kennedy lying. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was resolved between Kennedy and Khrushchev with a secret deal: we would remove our missiles from Turkey if the Soviets withdrew theirs from Cuba. Neither side would give the game away. No gloating. No publicity. But, as always, there was a leak. To plug it, Jack got his old friend the journalist Charles Bartlett to write a Saturday Evening Post article declaring that the bold macho leader of the free world could never have backed down on anything. JFK had simply ordered the Russians off the premises, and they had slunk away. In a fit of thoughtful malice, Jack decided that this would be a good moment to knife his ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, and he added that “that old woman Adlai” had wanted the President to make a deal. Bartlett wrote that the resolute Jack never made deals with darkness.
I learned what had happened from Bartlett’s assistant: my half sister, Jackie’s stepsister, who had heard Bartlett discussing details of the article with Kennedy over the telephone. I repeated the matter to Rovere. “No!” he said, which was his response to whatever anyone said. Dick got very red. A heavy smoker, he almost vanished in a blue-white cloud. To my amazement, he was, by now, so much a Kennedy loyalist that not only could he not believe so vicious a tale but if it was by any chance even remotely true he was done with Kennedy forever, presumably as he had finished with that other god
that failed him.
Now I read in One Hell of a Gamble, a fascinatingly detailed narrative of the Cuban missile crisis (by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali; Norton; $27.50), that an aide to McGeorge Bundy was sent round to Bartlett to tell him that Stevenson “had angered the President by suggesting that the United States pull out its missiles in Turkey in an exchange for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. . . . Poor Adlai Stevenson, the two-time failed Democratic Presidential nominee . . . was being hung out to dry.” Later, “Bartlett had a private dinner with the President. He handed over the draft of the article. . . . As Bartlett recalls today, the President ‘marked it up.’ ”
“I told you so,” I muttered to myself, in lieu of the now dead Rovere, when I read the confirmation of Jack’s lively malice.
This is a deliberately roundabout way of getting to Seymour Hersh (The Dark Side of Camelot, Little, Brown; $26.95) and his current collision with what I have just been describing: the great disinformation apparatus put in place forty years ago, a monster that even now continues to metastasize within academe and the media to such a degree that myth threatens to overthrow history. Spin is all. Spin of past as well as present.
For some reason, Hersh’s “revelations” are offensive to many journalists, most of whom are quick to assure us that although there is absolutely nothing new in the book (what a lot they’ve kept to themselves!), Hersh has “proved” nothing. Of course, there is really no way for anyone ever to prove much of anything, short of having confessions from participants, like the four Secret Service men who told Hersh about getting girls in and out of Jack’s bed. But when confronted with these smoking guns the monkeys clap their hands over their eyes and ears and chatter, “Foul allegations by soreheads.” The responses to Hersh’s book made me feel as if I were in a deranged time warp. Since there is not, in any foreseeable future, a Kennedy candidate for President, why is there so much fury and fuss at Hersh’s attempt to let daylight in on old, old black magic? Sufficient, surely, to the day is the blessed martyr Paula Jones, small potatoes, perhaps, but our very own tuber rose.
