Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “Come, Colonel. Pull up a chair next to me. Take that one there, on the right. That will be the one you will sit in when the Cabinet meets.” The Major’s voice was deep and mellifluous. Although he had no discernible style in what he said, the way that he spoke was, simultaneously, inspiring and soothing. Hay tended to agree with Adams that McKinley, whether by accident or by design, was the first great president since Lincoln. Hay looked, inadvertently, at McKinley’s hand. The President smiled, and raised his right hand; he wore a thin gold ring on the third finger. “I almost always wear your ring. For luck, which I’ve been in need of almost constantly.”

  “Which you’ve deserved.” Hay was sincere. He also sincerely hoped that McKinley had honored his request never to reveal who it was who gave him, just before the inauguration, a gold ring containing a lock of George Washington’s hair. Hay had had engraved on one side of the ring the initials “G.W.” and on the other “W.M.” He had also written the Major, whom he had never known particularly well, a somewhat too effusive letter, expressing the hope that he would indeed be the new Washington. The cynically minded—the Five of Hearts, say—might have thought that ring, letter and financial contribution had got Hay first his embassy and now the greatest appointed office of state. And the cynically minded, Hay knew, would not have been entirely wrong, for he had indeed made one last effort, at age fifty-nine, to obtain an office so that he might exert power in a field where he knew that he was more competent than any other possible contender, foreign affairs. The Major had nicely taken the bait, and the world generally applauded. After all, as an editor of the Tribune, John Hay was the cultured voice of the Republican Party; as a man-of-letters, its poet laureate; as a man, its living link to the martyred Lincoln. The President produced a box of cigars. Then, with practiced hand, McKinley snipped the ends of two of them. “From Havana,” he said, contentedly.

  “The spoils of victory?”

  “You might say. I cannot thank you enough.” The Major took a long draw on his cigar; and Hay was aware that he was now an intimate of a president who was never seen to smoke, or drink anything but iced water. “For the way you handled Whitelaw Reid in London. He is the most … well, touchy man.”

  “Not to mention ambitious. He lusts for office.” Hay wondered at the spontaneity of his own hypocrisy: he sounded, he thought with some amusement, like Cincinnatus, torn from his plow to do reluctant service to the state. But, to be fair, his own ambition was a small thing compared to that of his old friend and colleague Whitelaw Reid, who had inherited the editorship of the New York Tribune from Horace Greeley, and then passed it on, in ’89, to Hay, when President Harrison appointed Reid minister to France; later, Reid was Republican candidate for vice-president, on a losing ticket. Now Reid wanted to be ambassador to England. “But Senator Platt has said no.” McKinley shook his head sadly. “And I can’t appoint a New Yorker without Mr. Platt’s consent—and advice, which I get quite a lot of as it is.”

  “I told Reid to make up with Senator Platt, but he won’t.”

  “Or can’t. Mr. Platt’s a very hard sort of man,” said the soft-looking President, contentedly puffing smoke at Hay, who congenially puffed smoke back at his chief. “I am so relieved to have you here, Colonel. I don’t think I have ever, in my life, been so tired and so … torn, as the last few months, and so without any help of any kind when it comes to foreign relations.”

  “You may be tired, sir, but you’ve accomplished a great deal more than any president since Mr. Lincoln, and even he didn’t acquire an empire for us, which you have done.” Hay laid it on, with sincerity.

  McKinley liked having it laid on—who does not? thought Hay. But the Major was too shrewd not to anticipate fortune’s capriciousness. “We are going to have to decide, in the next weeks, whether we are really going to set up shop in the empire business or not.”

  “There is a question?” Hay sat up very straight; and was rewarded with what felt like a meat-cleaver falling hard on his lower spine.

  “Oh, Mr. Hay, there is the biggest question of all in my mind.” McKinley looked oddly bleak for someone whose whole physiognomy was, essentially, cheerfully convex. “I came here to help the backbone of this country, business. That’s what our party’s all about. We are for the tariff. We are for American industry first, last and always, and we have a very big country right here to look after. Now we’ve got to decide if we really want to govern several million small brown heathens, who live half the world away from us.”

  “I think, sir,” Hay was diffident, “that the Spanish converted most of the Filipinos. I think they’re just about all of them Roman Catholics.”

  “Yes.” McKinley nodded; he had not been listening. “All of them heathen and completely alien to us, and speaking—what?”

  “Spanish, most of them. Of course, there are local dialects …”

  “I’ve tried everything, Mr. Hay, including prayer, and I still can’t decide whether or not it’s in our interest to annex the Philippines.”

  “But we must keep Manila, sir. We must have fuelling stations all across the Pacific, and up and down the China coast, too.” Hay began to sound, a bit anxiously, like a state paper. “The European powers are getting ready to divide up China. We’ll lose valuable markets if they do, but if we are entrenched nearby, in the Philippines, we could keep the sea lanes open to China, keep the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese from upsetting the world’s balance of power. Because,” Hay realized glumly that he was parroting Brooks Adams, “whoever controls the land-mass of Asia controls the world.”

  “Do you honestly think we’re quite ready for that?” McKinley suddenly resembled nothing so much as a seventeenth-century Italian cardinal: bland, clever, watchful.

  “I don’t dare speculate, sir. But when history starts to move underneath you, you’d better figure how you’re going to ride it, or you’ll fall off. Well, sir, history’s started to move right now, and it’s taking us west, and we can’t stop what’s started even if we wanted to.”

  The Italian cardinal produced a faint self-deprecating smile. “Mr. Hay, I can still get off the horse, if I need to. I can let the Philippines go.”

  “Would you leave them in Spanish hands?”

  “Between us, I’m tempted to keep Manila. As for the other islands, if they seem incapable of self-government, like most of those natives out there, I’d let Spain stay on. Why not? Oh, Mr. Hay,” the cardinal was now a harassed Republican politician from Ohio, “I never wanted any of this war! Naturally, I wanted Spain out of the Caribbean, and that we’ve done. Cuba is now a free country, and if the Puerto Ricans were capable of self-government, I’d free them, too, because I honestly believe it’s a mistake for us to try to govern so many colored heathens whose ways are so different from ours.”

  Hay now presented his own foreign policy, already rehearsed in the course of several well-received speeches in England. “Mr. President, I have always thought that it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races, specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and to,” Hay took a deep breath, and played his best if most specious card, “Christianize the less developed races of the world. I know that England is counting on us to continue their historic role, and they believe, as I believe, that the two of us together can manage the world until Asia wakes up, long after we’re gone, I pray, but with our help now, a different sort of Asia, a Christian Asia, civilized by us, and so a reflection of what was best in our race once history has seen fit to replace us.”

  McKinley stared a long moment at Hay. Then he said, “Colonel Bryan was in here last week.”

  Hay felt deflated; his eloquence for naught. But then he had forgotten the first rule of politics: never be eloquent with the eloquent. “Who is Colonel Bryan, sir?”

  McKinley’s smile was both warm and malicious. “He is a very new untested Army colonel, stationed in Florida. You perhaps know him better as William Jennings Bryan.”

  “The cross of gold?”
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br />   “The same. My opponent. He came here to try to get me to release him from the Army, but as we still have military problems in the Philippines, I took the position that I just can’t let every politician go home when he pleases.” McKinley was enjoying himself. “Particularly when there’s an election starting up.”

  “On the other hand, you let Theodore go home and run for governor.”

  “How could I say no to a genuine war hero? Colonel Roosevelt is a special case.”

  “As well as a Republican.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Hay.” Suddenly, McKinley frowned. “Mr. Platt’s worried. He tells me it’s going to be a pretty close race for us in New York. Of course, the mid-term election’s always bad for the incumbent party.”

  “Not when the party leader’s fought and won a war in a hundred days.” All in all, Hay rather wished that he had not used the now much quoted phrase “a splendid little war,” as if he were a jingo, which he was not. The phrase had come to him as he somberly compared the war with Spain to the Civil War, and found the war with Spain both splendid and blessedly unlike the bloody ordeal of Lincoln’s war to preserve the union. Hay had long known that it was good politics never to try to have the last word in a dispute; now he had begun to see the wisdom of not trying to have the first word either.

  “I have the impression,” said the Major, stumping out his cigar in a cheap ceramic souvenir mug, depicting his own head with a detachable Napoleonic hat for lid, “that Bryan is going to give us a difficult time on annexation. His people—the South, the West, the farmers, the miners—seem to have lost interest in free silver, which, thank Heaven, he has not.”

  “But the speech is so good he’ll never give it up.”

  “Luckily for us. Even so, there is a feeling out there that we ought not to be like the European powers, with colonies full of heathens and so on, and I understand that feeling because I share it, to a point. But Cleveland—usually very sound—is being very difficult while Andrew Carnegie …”

  “Has he written you, too?” The wealthy irascible Scots-born Carnegie had been bombarding Hay with letters and messages, denouncing the annexation of the Philippines, or anything else, as sins against the Holy Ghost of the Republic.

  “Yes, yes, he has.” McKinley held up the Napoleonic mug, as if searching for some secret message hidden in what, after all, was his own smooth painted face. “I shall go to Omaha,” said the President; he had obviously received a secret message from his ceramic self.

  “Omaha? And what will you do in Omaha?”

  “I shall make a speech. What else?” The small cardinal’s smile was visible again; the large eyes glowed. “Omaha is Mr. Bryan’s city. Well, I shall begin my tour of the West—which I haven’t visited since ’96—with Omaha. I’ll beard him in his own town, and I’ll persuade the folks to …” The President paused.

  “To welcome the annexation of the Philippines?”

  “I’ll see what I find there first.”

  Hay nodded. There were those who liked to think that McKinley was Mark Hanna’s puppet, but anyone who had known either man back in Ohio, as had Hay, knew that the President was the perfect political animal, endlessly cunning and resourceful with a genius for anticipating shifts in public opinion, and then striking the right note. Hanna—now a senator from Ohio—was simply McKinley’s crude moneyman. Currently, he was “milking,” as he put it, every wealthy Republican in the country to ensure Republican majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

  “How are the negotiations in Paris?” Hay realized that McKinley was not going to volunteer anything.

  “There are problems. The first is, simply, what do we want? I’ll know that better at the end of October. I’m going to St. Louis, too. When in doubt, go to St. Louis.” The Major looked cryptic; a cardinal again. “The Spaniards will cede whatever we want. But there is bad feeling.”

  “I would suggest a payment for the islands.”

  McKinley looked surprised. “I thought the cost of the war was the cost of the islands.”

  Hay had given the matter some thought. He had also got the idea from his old friend John Bigelow. “If we pay, as we did for Louisiana and Alaska, then there is no doubt of the legitimacy of the ownership. The bill of sale is the proof. Otherwise, we can be accused of theft, or brutal imperialism, which is not our way, or ought not to seem to be our way.”

  “That is a very good idea, Mr. Hay.” McKinley got to his feet. He touched a button on his desk. “Explain it here tomorrow morning, when the Cabinet meets. But I warn you. Foreign relations are now your department. I am free of such entanglements.”

  “Except for the peace conference in Paris.” Hay was dogged. Should he be left out of that, he might as well have stayed on in London; or retired to 1603 H Street.

  “Judge Day likes to deal with me. But while I’m gone, Cortelyou will keep you informed. When does Mrs. Hay join you?”

  “In a couple of weeks.” Cortelyou was now in the doorway. “She has to stop off in New York to do the Christmas shopping.”

  “Christmas shopping? In September?” The Major was astonished.

  “Actually September’s a bit late for my wife. She usually does all her Christmas shopping in August.”

  “We could certainly have used her at the War Department.” McKinley put his arm through Hay’s and they crossed together to the door.

  “How is Mrs. McKinley?” The delicate subject.

  “She is—comfortable, I think. You will come to dinner, I hope. We don’t really go out. What is your son Adelbert doing now?”

  “I didn’t know you knew him.” Was this the politician’s trick of boning up in advance whenever someone important called? or had Del, unknown to him, got to know the President?

  “He was down here in June, before he graduated. Senator Lodge brought him by. I was most impressed. I envy you, having a son.” The McKinleys’ daughter had died young. It was said that their bedroom was a shrine to the dead child. “Perhaps we can find some work for your boy here.”

  “You are kind, sir.” Actually, Hay had considered taking on Del at the State Department, but then decided against it. They did not, for reasons obscure to him, get on. There was never unpleasantness; there was simply no sympathy. Hay was happier with daughters; as Adams was happiest with nieces, real or honorary.

  As the President and Hay stepped into the corridor, a tall, gaunt figure stared intently at Hay, who stared, bewildered, back. McKinley said, “You remember Tom Pendel, don’t you? He’s been a doorkeeper here ever since your day.”

  Hay smiled, not recognizing the old man. “Why yes,” he began.

  “Johnny Hay!” The old man had no teeth. But his handclasp was like a vise. “I was new here, remember? One of the guards back then when you and Mr. Robert were in the parlor there, when I came in to tell you the President had been shot.” Hay had a sense of vertigo. Was he about to faint? or, perhaps, poetically, die? Then the world righted itself.

  “Yes,” he said, inadequately. “I remember.”

  “Oh, it was terrible! I was the last one here to see Mr. Lincoln into his carriage, and he said to me, ‘Good-night, Tom,’ just like that.”

  “Well, the sentiment, under the circumstances, was not unnatural.” Hay tried to make light of the matter. He had been warned that McKinley did not enjoy hearing about his predecessors.

  “I was also the last man here to see off General Garfield that summer morning when he left for the depot, and said, ‘Good-by, Tom.’ Just like that, and then he was shot, in the depot, and lingered on and—”

  McKinley was growing restive. “Our Tom has seen so many of us come and go.” Cortelyou signalled the President. “I must go to work. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Cabinet meets at ten.” McKinley and Cortelyou vanished into the Cabinet room. A dozen ladies, making a tour of the White House, stared with awe at the President’s back.

  As Hay extricated himself from the highly historic Tom Pendel, he was told that Colonel Crook, who had
been Lincoln’s bodyguard, was also still on duty. “But the rest are all gone, sir, like snowflakes upon the river. You were so young back then.”

  “I am not,” said Hay, “young now.”

  THREE

  – 1 –

  CAROLINE had not realized the extent of her own courage as she walked, all alone, in Peacock Alley, a corridor as long as that block of Thirty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues which was encased—exquisitely entombed, she had begun to feel—by the magnificence of New York’s newest and most celebrated hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria. Even in Paris, the new hotel had been written about with, for the French, wry respect: one thousand modern bedrooms, untold restaurants, palm courts, a men’s café and, most intriguing, the Peacock Alley, which ran straight through the double building, a splendid promenade with walls of honey-colored marble that reflected rows of relentlessly glittering electrified chandeliers. Between potted palms and the mirrored entrances to alluring courts and restaurants, sofas and armchairs lined the alley; here sat what looked to be all New York, watching all New York go by. Like the city itself, the Waldorf-Astoria never slept. There were late-night supper rooms as well as early-morning cafés where men in white tie and tails could be seen drinking coffee with men in business suits, drones and worker-bees all in the same buzzing honey-filled hive.

  Caroline had been warned that no proper young lady could ever be seen alone in Peacock Alley. But as she was there to meet a gentleman, she would not be alone for very long; and so she took pleasure in the interest that she—and her Paris Worth gown—aroused, as she proceeded from lobby to Palm Court, all eyes upon her progress. So, she decided, animals in the zoo watch their human visitors. Certainly, the notion that it might be she who was on display in the monkey house, and the fleshy ladies on their divans and the stout gentlemen in their armchairs were the human audience, she found perversely amusing; also, she noted, in their general grossness, the New York burghers were more like bears than monkeys: upright and curious, dangerous when disturbed.