The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Dick Morris, the political spin master whose sex life caused him to depart the as yet uncongenial Clinton White House, has written, thus far, the best account of how presidential politics work today. He is particularly intrigued by the Clinton-Gore relationship. “Gore is the single person in the world whose advice the president most values. He sees Gore as a junior president. . . . When he wants a clear-eyed assessment, he turns to Gore, as he does when he wants something really important handled really well.” Yet it was Al who helped bring aboard Leon Panetta as chief of staff: a fatal choice, because when the hard times came, Panetta was one of the first to turn on Clinton. Was this a setup? One almost hopes, out of sheer dramatic imagination, that the deliberately colorless Gore may yet turn out to be Iago, secretly planting handkerchiefs all round the West Wing. Certainly, he has placed a number of his own people in places of power. But he has also, thus far, living up to his own book, done his best to preserve the environmental-protection programs.

  About the 1995 battle over the budget, Morris makes an in-teresting observation: “A more subtle difference existed between Clinton and Gore. Both wanted a deal [with the congressional Republicans]. But Clinton wanted a compromise, whereas Gore wanted a deal that all but completely protected his priorities: the environment, technology, and so forth. Gore is more interested in specifics than in themes.” This is an important distinction that goes to the heart of American practical politics. By and large, the great presidents have been thematic. FDR never mastered the specifics of anything. But he had a genius for getting across to the electorate his general view of where the country should be going and who should make what deal—New Deal, even—to get us all there. FDR possessed what Bush so memorably disdained as “the vision thing.” But Al has a graduate student’s need to pile up specifics for a good grade. Like Carter, he dotes on facts, figures, blueprints of how to build that tree house. Certainly, it is a sign of seriousness and goodwill that he works on environmental matters not only on TV but behind closed doors; yet it is also a sign of tactical weakness that he has Jimmy Carter’s fascination with endless technical detail, more fitting for someone aspiring to a safe berth in Harvard’s American Civilization department than the presidency. FDR was the first to admit that he often stumbled. I may not, he once said, always get a hit each time I come up to bat. . . . But he had a buoyancy that was contagious. When one thing failed, he’d quickly try another. An over-attention to each tree and not to the forest that contains it could be the fatal flaw in the character of a miniaturist President Gore, whose mind is convergent—only connect things—while the great presidents know that nothing on earth or in politics really connects and that the quick, divergent mentality is the one that best adapts and moves ahead.

  In order to be reelected in 1996, the Clinton-Gore administration adopted a series of right-wing Republican, even protofascist, programs, with lots more prisons, death penalties, harassment of the poor, cries of terrorism, and, implicitly, control by government over the citizenry, as the Unabomber duly noted. As one sees these politics evolve in Morris’s narrative, one realizes that no one in the White House is thinking about much of anything other than, somehow, finessing the other party, which is slightly more in thrall to the Christian right and somewhat better funded by corporate America than are the Democrats. It is a somber narrative, particularly if one has been studying, as I have, the Bill of Rights lately. But we are now trapped in the rapid erosion of an ever more alien system, currently further skewed by all the atrocious law that Kenneth W. Starr has managed to squeeze from a brain-dead Supreme Court, where only its prince of darkness, Scalia, betrays an inkling of common sense about the harm being done our judicial system as lawyer-client and president-adviser protocols are overthrown in ill-written and worse-conceived judgments.

  In 1883 Congress passed a law preventing city and courthouse machines from obliging those on the public payroll to kick back at election time—a sort of tithing to raise money for an election or, perhaps, just riotous living: an evening at Delmonico’s with Boss Tweed. Virtue outlawed this practice, officially. Now Janet Reno of Waco ponders a special counsel to investigate Albert Jr., among others, for making calls to raise soft money from a public building, the White House, instead of from a cellular phone in the Lafayette Park convenience parlor. I consulted, in a vision, the Heavenly Campaign Manager of the Gores. He was dismissive. “If they try making something of that, what about Dole and Gingrich telephoning from Capitol Hill?”

  I wondered about the Buddhist fundraiser for Albert Jr. “Forget it. Even the Bush family’s Heavenly Campaign Manager—dyslexic, by the way—says there’s no mileage in it.”

  “What about Clinton and Monica? Will that rub off on Albert Jr.?”

  “If Clinton goes before 2000—not much chance, I’d say—Al’s in place to run as a sitting president. Anyway, once Bill’s gone, end of sex story. You see, Al is sexproof. Designed never to lust in the Oval Office or even in his heart, and—the Beauty Part—no one lusts for him. Oh, we’re looking after—really looking after—the family this time.” As the vision started to fade, I was bemused to note that our family’s Heavenly Campaign Manager is wearing a saffron robe. A Buddhist campaign manager? Shantih shantih shantih.

  Since there is no earthly reason for Albert Jr. to be president, by the same happy logic there is no unearthly reason for him not to be. But should, by some mishap, the mandate of heaven not come to Albert A. Gore Jr., the next generation of Gores is bound to succeed, and I am now putting my money on the future president Blake Gore of Houston, Mississippi, who will initiate a golden age not too long after A.D. 2050.

  GQ

  December 1998

  * KOPKIND

  Most establishment American journalists tend to be like their writing, and so, duly warned by the tinkle of so many leper-bells, one avoids their company. On the other hand, after reading from beginning to end The Thirty Years’ Wars, I realized why it was that I so liked Andrew Kopkind and always read his bulletins from the political front, which were also, endearingly, bulletins from his own life as well, which ended much too soon last October.

  Born in 1935, Andy was a decade my junior. Since we were like-minded in so many ways that decade should not have made much difference, but it did in the sense that he was always somewhat exotic to me. The Sixties never meant much to me but they were everything to someone his age. I was—and am—the Forties–Fifties, shaped by the second war and Dr. Kinsey, “radicalized” by Korea and Joe McCarthy. Even so, the slight sense of strangeness I felt about him and his generation only made his take on matters of mutual interest attractively aslant.

  To read what Kopkind calls Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965–1994 is to be given a deliberately eccentric tour of the American empire’s slow deterioration as well as that of its mirror-image on the chilly steppes which so perversely cracked from side to side—seven years’ bad luck (and maybe seven more) as my grandmother used to say. I say eccentric because I always thought that I had first met Andy at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, but now I read that he had only touched base there for a moment or two. Then, before Mayor Daley could shout Sheeney! at Senator Ribicoff, Andy had gone to the real action: Czechoslovakia, where he observed the Russian invasion and Dubcek’s fall. While I was anticipating with excited horror Nixon’s coming victory, Andy was writing from Prague: “One of these days—when the ‘German problem’ is solved—the Czechs will find a new way out of the Soviet sphere and others will follow. Beyond that, Russia has discredited leftist parties and the left in general for years to come. And within the Warsaw Pact countries, and perhaps even in Russia, Czechoslovakia has already become an embryonic ‘Vietnam.’ ” It took twenty years for Andy to be proved right, during which time he did his best to shore up “the left” in our own essentially apolitical land.

  A generality about the sort of journalist Kopkind was. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the breed, he did not go in for Opinions, the daily ashen bread o
f the Sunday TV zoo and of those columnists who appear in such papers as Time and Newsweek, recycling the sort of mindless received opinion that dissolves before one’s eyes into its original constituent parts—blurred ink, glossy paper. He had opinions, of course, but he didn’t offer them until he had first proved, through detail, his reasons for holding them. Most American journalists who “do” politics cannot resist getting to know the Players. Walter Lippmann was typical of an earlier generation, the disinterested wise man who remained aloof, chiseling great thoughts on marble columns. Actually a casual trawl through FDR’s library at Hyde Park shows how eager Walter was for White House invitations and interviews. At least today’s media chorus are all openly bought as they rush to White House to help with a speech, then off to newsroom to praise their own work, then onto television where now they condescend—no doubt, rightly—to mere senators and Cabinet members. Who can forget, a few elections ago, the egregious Phil Donahue wagging a minatory finger in the faces of a clutch of presidential candidates? This is no way to keep separate first and fourth estate, but then, in so tight and collusive a system, it is to no one’s real interest to draw a line.

  Happily, Andy did not collude, he drew a line: kept his eye steadily on the obscure who might or might not be making a revolution in the national consciousness if not in the streets. How to explain him? He started life in conventional middle-class New Haven. Father, a Republican District Attorney. There was Yale nearby, the Vatican of reactionary politics not to mention nursing mother to OSS and CIA. But Andy had the good luck to have, as he put it, a “commie pinko rabbi.” He avoided Yale; went to Cornell as a pre-med student. Like me, he was exposed young to the New Statesman, a paper that once had the power not only to enlighten but to convert the susceptible to socialism. Medicine was abandoned for writing; then two and a half years at the London School of Economics, trying to be a “classy” English journalist. Then home for a stint at Time magazine at the height of its “unleash Chiang” mania.

  Unlike so many Jewish left-leaning journalists of that period, Kopkind never bought into Jewish nationalism, which means wholehearted support of Pentagon, Christian right, as well as of those legions of anti-Semites who support Israel in order to benefit, if not from Rapture at Armageddon, military procurement. He regarded Israel as any other polity.

  After some police trouble in California (he had been caught practicing same-sexuality, which is an abomination not only in the eyes of the Lord but, rather more important, in those glazed mica-like orbs of Henry Luce), Kopkind was obliged to turn “straight” with the aid of a psychiatrist paid for by Time. Despite prayers to Freud as well as the numerous ritual dances and dietary observances necessary to achieve that state of heterosexual grace which has made the United States a thigh-slapping joke in the Western world, he failed to Mature. At twenty-nine, Kopkind left Time.

  Time at Berkeley. Some writing for The New Republic before it became press office for the Israeli Embassy. Then, early 1965, the march on Selma in Alabama. This was the beginning of the latest but, alas, so far unconcluded phase of the black attempt to achieve parity in a society where whiteness is compulsory if one wants to be a full citizen. Suddenly, there was an eruption of radical political activity—SNCC, SDS—and Kopkind plunged in: “I was still the journalist, but I was part of the movement too. The genie was out of the bottle,” and for the next thirty years the genie was on duty.

  It is odd to note the change of words over the years; in 1965, Negro starts to change to black. The times really seemed to be changing with Jack Kennedy murdered and Martin Luther King moving, in triumph, to the same slaughterhouse that awaits all agents of change in our imperial history. Kopkind is more kindly than not with such enemies of change as the ADA liberals: “It is hard for liberals, traumatized by both Stalinism and McCarthyism, to understand the new left’s attitudes about communism.” That is to riot in understatement. The radical activist takes far more fire from the liberal establishment that so loyally upheld the right of the United States to be in Vietnam than ever it will from the likes of George Wallace.

  In due course, after the April 17, 1965, March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, the movement splintered and the war went on for another decade, making it possible for a radical movement to pick up the pieces. But no such movement has ever, thus far, been able to get through to—much less rationalize—our society. As for promoting economic justice . . . that’s really un-American. To understand why it is not possible to do anything is the burden of Kopkind’s genie-hood. Meanwhile, he hates the absurdities of official rhetoric: “The best that can be said about the domino theory is that it works in reverse. The deeper America’s involvement in Vietnam becomes, the less effective is its deterrence value. It is one thing to lose a war with 17,000 advisers and quite another to lose it with 125,000 battle troops” (this was written in 1965); “to win it (whatever that means) with a land army of half a million would be worst of all. That kind of victory is the death of policy, not the foundation of it.”

  He quotes Carl Oglesby (president of SDS), who “accused the liberals of underpinning the elements of the very system that the New Left attacked: the military and industrial ‘corporatism’ that keeps . . . the poor alive but powerless and, in the end, still poor.” Plainly, we live under a malign star: thirty years later this analysis still describes our estate.

  The genie hovers over the Watts riots and notes the obvious: there is more fire to come. In 1966 he was one of the few who thought that “mini-star” Reagan would beat Pat Brown and become governor of California because Reagan’s “philosophical line is an entirely incomprehensible jumble of every myth and cliché in American life.” But there are the odd small victories along the downward way: the House Un-American Activities Committee takes a well-earned hit. “The kids” were out in force, mocking the committee. Not only did no one take the Fifth, no one showed anything but contempt of Congress. One youth said, “I will not answer that question on the grounds that it nauseates me and I might vomit all over the table.” Times a’changing? Well, they did change, in this instance. No more HUAC.

  Kopkind’s pieces for the New Statesman are brief but elegant. In The New Republic he is more thorough but not as lively. In Ramparts he now has an unmistakable voice; read a sentence or two and you know who wrote them. For a time, he pins his hopes on Senator Robert Kennedy, but even in The New York Review of Books (Bobby-enthralled as of 1967), Kopkind suspects that there is not much substance behind the rhetoric; that he is not an “insurgent,” since the official liberal line was that Bobby is in place to “save” the system the way that the New Deal “saved” the system. But Kopkind sees that this wouldn’t work even if there was a system worth saving. He has radically grasped the point: top-down reforms are bound to fail. “It is not Kennedy’s fault that he can do no other; it is his situation.” This is generous. He does not note Kennedy’s presumably deep conviction “that we have every moral right to be in Vietnam.”

  There are crucial moments when Kopkind was not on the spot. The two Kennedy assassinations are not recorded, only referred to. The rise of Nixon happens in the margins of his prose. But he keeps a close eye on those in the ranks (down-top) who are for civil rights and an end to war and to the militarized state. Along the way he makes a disturbing sketch of Allard Lowenstein’s politics and death, bringing together Kopkind’s two central themes—radicalism of politics (we must go to the roots of our distress) and same-sexuality, which tormented Al, or so Kopkind thought. Al’s first political campaign was, briefly, for me in 1960. I found him bright but consumed with a sort of ambition that I don’t think Andy could have imagined, so alien was it to his own serenely balanced communal nature. Al realized that without a sacrifice of his true nature on the altar of Family, he could not be president or even an influence on one. He was not tortured by who he was but by what he had to do in order to rise. He married (happily, I am told) but continued to burn; and was burnt, as it were, to death. Also, there is the troubling possibili
ty that overwrought ambition had made him a double agent, or, as Kopkind puts it, “Lowenstein was part of a cultural and ideological nexus that sanctioned covert operations and mounted public movements against radicalism at home and abroad.” If so, his radical death was grimly ironic.

  May 1968 finds Kopkind in North Vietnam. He is impressed by how well people are coping with enforced decentralization. He captures the differences: “Our questions often made no ‘sense’ to the Vietnamese because they assumed a context of issues in our own society, not theirs.” If only McNamara had had the slightest of clues! He captures the spirit of the Republican convention at Miami Beach (it is here, I think, that we met). “The party found its perfect hero in Barry Goldwater because he expressed the inevitability of human defeat; now its choice of Miami Beach . . . completes the metaphor.” He did not share my sudden vision, as the born again and yet again R. M. Nixon lurched forward to accept the nomination, that here was our thirty-seventh President and that we hadn’t seen nothing yet. In the fall of that crucial year, Kopkind goes to Cleveland to visit white blue-collar Wallaceland. Again he zeroes in on the real people as opposed to the PR simulacra at Miami Beach. One worker muses aloud: “Humphrey—everything good . . . but he’s too easy on race, that’s a minus. (Boy, am I making myself out a racist?) Wallace—I only like him 40 percent . . . but the fact that he won, or got a lot of votes, would get people together. So I’m for Wallace. . . . But you know, sometimes I’m not sure why I vote for someone. Does that make sense?” It did to Henry Adams and it does to our current landslide Republican Congress, elected by only one-third of the electorate: Two-thirds thought that it made sense to give up on a system from which they are excluded.