The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  As you can see, I am uneasily circling a subject that few writers nowadays ever touch upon, and that is character. Ordinarily, I steer clear of such matters, too, out of tact, but as Albert Jr. may be the forty-third president at a crucial time in the republic’s life, we had better start finding out where he came from, who he is or if, relevant question, he is anyone at all.

  In the matter of race, Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., behaved as well as a senator with a southern border constituency could. Although he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (a vote he later said he regretted), he refused to sign Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1956 Southern Manifesto, a celebration of the joys and character-building aspects of slavery in the past and of harmonious inequality in the present. But when it comes to the matter of war and peace, Albert Sr. bears a comforting resemblance to T.P. in the previous generation. Alone, I believe, among the usually war-minded southern legislators, Albert Sr. spoke out against the long idiocy of the Vietnam War. Essentially, populists don’t like foreign wars, particularly in lands that they know nothing of and for no demonstrable goals. For exercising good judgment, Albert Sr. was defeated in 1970 by an opponent who used the familiar line that he was “out of touch with the voters of Tennessee.” If this was true, the voters, supremely misled by three administrations, were seriously out of touch with reality. Exactly fifty years after T. P. Gore departed the Senate because he had been against the First War, his cousin departed because of the Vietnam War. Curiously, the wives of each, though admiring their husbands’ integrity, discerned a common tendency to masochism in the name of duty. Albert Sr.’s wife, Pauline, herself a lawyer and a canny politician, has contrasted her son (whom she quietly brought up to be president) with his father: “Al, by nature, is more of a pragmatist than his father. As am I. I tried to persuade Albert Sr. not to butt at a stone wall just for the sheer joy of butting.” While Nina Kay Gore, wife to T.P., observed, “The Gores tend to be brilliant, but they’ve got no sense.” She would sigh whenever confronted with her husband’s implacability; as for my own, she used to warn, “Never stir up more snakes than you can kill with one stick.” Plainly, Albert Jr., his mother’s son, need never fear snakebite.

  The three Gore senators were never much at money-making, as opposed to fund-raising, where Albert Jr. is willing to be smeared as a pro- or crypto-Buddhist in his Grail-like pursuit of campaign money. Ninety-one years ago, T. P. Gore spent $1,000 on his successful Senate campaign. Although he was later to write the legislation for the oil depletion of resources allowance that made some of his constituents as rich as Saudi Arabs, he was never paid off by them; but then his campaigns were inexpensive. By Albert Sr.’s time, the costs of electioneering were high indeed. In 1938 he was elected to the House of Representatives, on borrowed money. Well, “family” money, as we shall see.

  Albert Jr. was brought up on his father’s Carthage, Tennessee, farm as well as in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Albans, an all-boys school that I had gone to twenty years earlier. The two Alberts had settled down on the eighth floor of our cousin Grady Gore’s hotel, the Fairfax (later the Ritz Carlton), where they lived, the Cousins chant, for free. Grady’s branch of the family had not gone west like the rest of us and so, staying on in Maryland, they had made a fortune, something the rest of us never quite managed to do. Grady’s daughter Louise is a Republican who has inherited that damaged gene that impels some people to public office. Certainly, whenever the moon is full, cousin Louise can be counted on to run for governor of Maryland. Although she has never won, she did persuade Richard Nixon to take as his vice president Maryland’s governor, Spiro Agnew, thus earning herself a merry footnote in history. Louise’s sister Mary lost her first husband in a crash on Northeast Airlines, a company that my father had founded and owned, showing how our lives crisscross in Faulknerian tragedy as well as in Faulknerian comedy. Later she “kept company with” Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, either just before or just after his time in prison. Plainly, we have our devil-may-care side.

  I have often thought cousin Grady was the most interesting of the lot. In the 1930s, you could legally give as much as you liked to the candidate of your choice. Cousin Grady had always helped finance Tennessee’s senior senator, Kenneth McKellar, until cousin Grady asked McKellar to take on Albert Sr. in his office as an intern, a position of decency in that far-off time. McKellar turned Albert Sr. down. Grady said, “Why?” “Don’t like him,” said McKellar. Now, there is a saying in the South that “if a snake bites a Gore, they all puff up.” Grady puffed up. Told Albert Sr., “I was going to give that old bastard $40,000 for his reelection, but not now. I’m giving it to you. You’re running for Congress.” Thus Albert Sr. got to the House.

  Later, in 1930, Albert Sr. went into business with one of the century’s most gorgeous criminals, Armand Hammer. For those interested in Hammer’s life as a Russian-American friend of Lenin’s and a financial fixer for Stalin—a bridge, as he might have put it, between Communism and capitalism—I highly recommend Edward Jay Epstein’s Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. As chairman of Occidental Petroleum, Hammer befriended (or, as the FBI might say, “bribed”) many American politicians. At one point, he tried to get his hands on “a huge government-owned refinery in Morgantown, West Virginia,” that the army was willing to lease to the highest bidder. Hammer went after it: “He had extended . . . largesse to both Republicans and Democrats,” writes Epstein. “His principal contact among the Democrats in the House was Albert Gore of Tennessee. In 1950, Hammer had made Congressman Gore a partner in a cattle-breeding business, and Gore made a substantial profit.” Hammer failed to get the lease, because of alarm in the government about his close relations with the Soviets. Later, during détente, this connection worked to Hammer’s benefit. On January 19, 1961, “Hammer was Senator Albert Gore’s guest at one of the five black-tie inaugural balls.” (JFK had just been inaugurated.) “He could count on Gore for such invitations. He had made him his partner in the cattle-breeding business—a partnership that had proved profitable—and he had given him each Christmas over the past five years a gift of antique silver.” Gore also helped to get Hammer to Moscow later that winter, where Hammer did business successfully with Anastas Mikoyan and Khrushchev. Rogues have their uses. In 1970, when Albert Sr. was defeated for the Senate, Hammer made him chairman of his Island Creek Coal, the nation’s third-largest coal producer.

  Hammer had attended five presidential inaugurations as the guest of Albert Sr. He attended Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration as the guest of Albert Jr. Hammer not only reveled in reflected glory for its own sake but he had now a specific goal in mind, a presidential pardon. Since 1938 the FBI had six times investigated him for the bribing and blackmailing of public officials. “Hammer had avoided prosecution,” writes Epstein, “on a felony charge through a plea bargain.” In 1984 he applied for a pardon for the “misdemeanors” he had admitted to in order that he might obtain, presumably through a series of aurora borealis bribes, the Nobel Peace Prize (which Hammer actually deserved rather more than some of its recent recipients). But Reagan did not include him in the 1985 round of pardons. “In 1986, [Hammer] pledged $1 million to the Ronald Reagan Library. . . . This made Hammer the largest single pledger of funds for the project.” Again, no pardon. Hammer upped the ante to $1.3 million. Still no pardon. By 1990 he was dead, at ninety-two, vindicated only by a last-chance pardon from George Bush. Happily, the Reagan Library never got a single pledged penny from Hammer’s estate. Giants walked the earth in those days.

  Albert Jr. The official story of his life makes curiously depressing reading. Certainly by the time he was enrolled at St. Albans, he was running for president, and the other boys knew it, as did several teachers from my era. Since many of the boys came from political families, ambition of a political nature was hardly a surprise if it surfaced in any boy, no matter how young. I, too, was haunted by my grandfather’s failure to become vice president—and why not thane of Glamis and Cawdor and king
to be? I, too, wanted to complete the family business. But after three years in the army in the Second War, I had become a novelist. I had also been infuriated by American attitudes to same-sexuality, and so, between a political career already mapped out and publishing a book that would, the more effective it was, end all hope of completing the family business, I chose virtue and published The City and the Pillar, butting my head against a stone wall that others in the next generation were to dent somewhat. The book was published in January 1948. In March 1948, the Heavenly Campaign Manager of the Gores, aware that I was now a political dud, gave birth to Albert Jr., right on cue. The clan was back on track. There has been a weird symmetry in all this, whose meaning I leave to the witches on the heath.

  One of Albert’s teachers marveled to me at his no-doubt hard-earned lack of spontaneity: “He forced himself to be good at sports and win school elections. But he was not a natural at anything except painting, where he was really first-rate.” I asked what sort of paintings he did. “Miniatures. They were exquisite. The sort of things only someone capable of great concentration and hard work could do.” A Mr. Hank Hillin, in the book Al Gore Jr., His Life and Career, thinks the other boys envied Al his hard-won school success and later career, but my impression is they were mocking him for the uncool obviousness of his ambition when they nicknamed him Ozymandias, after Shelley’s King of Kings, whose ruined colossal statue lies in the sands with the admonition “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Al’s contemporaries were dealing in irony of a sort not available to Hank or to his subject, Al, who, in order to sound more down-home folksy, changed his name to the bleak, rather unsuitable “Al Gore,” under the pretense he was just another sharecropper farm boy who had come to pick cotton in Washington’s Cathedral Close.

  One advantage of being brought up in Washington in a senator’s house is that you very quickly get the point to how and why things work. Where someone from outside might come to politics in order to bring justice to the people or, at the very least, Frank Capra, those on the inside know that it is all an intricate game of personalities and what today is called spin. Who you really are is not as important as how you have been made to seem; hence, the universal paranoia about media. Issues that so enthrall the politically minded outside the magic circle of hereditary politicians mean very little to those who start life with a political name that will act as a minimal description of its bearer. A Gore will be—or, let us say, will be thought to be—a mild populist, interested in the welfare of farmers, no open friend to conglomerate America and so on. The classic Gores are against foreign military adventures. It was here that Al Jr. broke with tradition when he was one of only ten Democratic senators to support George Bush’s Persian Gulf caper; before that he had approved Reagan’s Grenada and Libyan strikes.

  At Harvard, Al Jr. met his own eminence grise, Martin Peretz, a sometime schoolteacher who had married a considerable fortune, thus making it possible for him to buy The New Republic, a once respectable liberal paper belonging to my brother-in-law Michael Whitney Straight. Yes, our Washington world is astonishingly small, and lives cross and recross for generations. Peretz is a mega-Zionist, and Al Jr. has proved to be a good investment for his lobby—and vice versa, though in Al’s 1988 bid for the presidency, the Peretz connection cost him New York’s black vote and got him practically none of the Jewish vote, except, possibly, the one cast by Mayor Ed Koch. Peretz has been known to take credit for Al Jr.’s speeches.

  In the matter of Vietnam, our hero played it perfectly. He knew that he could not stay out, even though, like his father, he was against the war; and he knew that a visit to Canada’s cooler climes would be fatal in the eyes of his patriotic constituency. So he became a journalist for six months with an engineering unit outside Saigon. He never saw action, but he did see to it that, weapon in hand, he was photographed for the Al Gore, Jr., Library. Plainly, the nation had changed after the Second War. I can think of hardly anyone of my generation who dodged the draft, while many of us, especially those with an eye to politics, enlisted and even got killed, something the gung ho Vietnam generation never did as they found solace in neutral lands or hearkened to a call from God to join His ministry on earth.

  Along the way, Al married an appropriate wife and had four appropriate children, all rather better-looking than is usual in the clan, but then they also had a mother as did he. Of Pauline Gore, one of his teachers at St. Albans said, “She was the driving force, not the father. She was the one who wanted him to be class president and so on.” Where Albert Sr. saw himself as a voice for truth in the world, his wife and his son duly noted that he was not spending as much time at home with the folks as he should, and so number one on the checklist of what the son would not do when he began his ascent was neglect the home folks. He would, also, work hard to play down nonfolksy St. Albans and Harvard, as well as Vanderbilt, where he studied, briefly, for the ministry in order “to atone for the sins” in Vietnam, whatever the sins of a noncombatant might have been; then, once he had exorcised the trauma of man’s inhumanity to man, he shifted over to the law school.

  A five-year stint at the Nashville Tennessean taught him a great deal about how newspapers work, and about publicity. Meanwhile, he took part in his father’s various livestock and tobacco dealings. Later he was to share, most publicly at a convention, the guilt he still felt because he had once grown and sold the poisonous leaf that had struck down a beloved sister in her youth. He ceased to traffic with the murderous weed, prayed for forgiveness. He promptly had to face what friends call the “Gore jinx.” The speech—the work of Marty Peretz?—wetted every eye, including the speaker’s. Actually, Al had somehow forced himself to continue in the tobacco business for quite some time after her death. Plainly, the cigarette burned more brightly than the bush on the hard road to Damascus.

  The Gore jinx becomes operative whenever Al is inclined, as Sam Goldwyn used to say, to geld the lily. All politicians do this, of course. But Al’s air of solemn righteousness sets him up every time for a pratfall, including the astonishing assertion that he and his bride had inspired Erich Segal to write Love Story in their common Harvard days. Segal is a brilliant classicist, whose Roman Laughter, a study of Plautus, I highly recommend; he sharply denied any connection. Pratfall. Al should have stayed in the family and said that Myra Breckinridge had been inspired by the magic couple.

  Lily gelding is a harmless activity and, perhaps, a necessity for someone fearful of being thought too young for the presidency in 1988. Al also portrayed himself as a home builder, the developer of a subdivision; actually, others did the work, while he and his father were fairly inactive partners. But Al did make a packet by reselling some of his father’s farm after he had first bought it with a Federal Farm Credit System low-interest loan of the sort usually made to finance farmers’ crops. Profit to one side, he gelds lilies in order to create an image of himself as farmer, home builder, warrior, relentless crime reporter who sent to jail corrupt officials (they didn’t go to jail), and so on. But then, as a member of the House who served with him observed, “Around here he’s what we call a ‘glory boy.’ He gets to the House and starts running for the Senate. Gets to the Senate and starts running for the White House. There’s no time left to do any of the real work the rest of us have to do.”

  Four terms in the House, then to the Senate in 1984. After four years of the Senate, at the age of thirty-nine, Al is ready for the presidency. During the primaries, family lines crossed. Senator David Boren of Oklahoma told me that the more Al stumped T. P. Gore’s state, the closer the family connection became: “By the end, you’d have thought he was your nephew.” Save for the Peretz connection, a nephew to be proud of, by and large. In politics, credit is taken, if not given, for just about anything admirable or popular at the moment: anything that can’t immediately be checked on, that is. The Al Gore résumé is wondrously virtuous, if slightly short on achieved specifics.

  T. P. Gore used to say that the most fervent prayer of
any politician was “Would that my opponent had written a book!” In 1992 Al did just that. Earth in the Balance was the ominous title of his hostage to fortune. Ecology and the Human Spirit was the subtitle, while, under that, “ ‘A powerful summons for the politics of life and hope’—Bill Moyers.” In the introduction, the author says that he has for “more than twenty-five years . . . [been] in search of a true understanding of the global ecological crisis and how it can be resolved.” All right, so it was not exactly twenty-five years. How about twenty-four? Certainly, the book is solidly researched; the prose as resolutely dull as its author’s speeches; the conclusions obvious to nearly everyone who has given the matter thought, except, ironically, the great sources of pollution and warming, Corporate America, without whose money and media no one can be elected president. But then, when Al wrote the book, he had taken himself out of the ’92 presidential race, never thinking that, within a year, he would be Clinton’s vice president and that his “antibusiness” tract would outrage The Wall Street Journal’s fellow polluter-travelers. Since no good deed goes unpunished, one suspects this will convince Al that his unique moment of reasonable altruism is not going to go unpunished and perhaps he’d better go back to endorsing such military-procurement programs as the MX, the Trident D-5, etc. Meanwhile, the Gore jinx again surfaced when the book’s greatest fan proved to be the Unabomber.