Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Essentially, he is a pragmatist with a profound sense of history, working within a generally liberal context.*3 Since the United States is in no immediate danger of economic collapse, and since there is no revolutionary party of Left or Right waiting to seize power, our politics are firmly of the Center. The problems of the nation are a lagging economic growth, which under an attentive Administration can be corrected, and foreign affairs, where the United States vis-à-vis Russia remains a perhaps insoluble problem, but one to which Kennedy is addressing himself with a commendable lack of emotion.

  Perhaps Kennedy’s most unusual gift is an objectivity which extends to himself. He can discuss his own motives with a precision not usual in public men, who tend to regard themselves tenderly and according to the rhetoric of the day.

  Before the primaries last spring, when his main opponent for the nomination was the attractively exuberant Senator Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy remarked privately that the contest was really one of temperaments, of “images,” and though he confessed he did not have the Senator’s passion for liberal reform, he did not think that was what the country in its present mood wanted or needed. Kennedy admitted to being less interesting and less dramatic than Humphrey, but for this time and place he felt he himself would prove more appealing, a correct if unflattering self-estimate.

  Kennedy is certainly the most accessible and least ceremonious of recent presidents. After last month’s conference with the Canadian Prime Minister, the two men appeared in front of the White House for the usual television statement. Kennedy said his few words. Then he turned to the Prime Minister and said: “Now you make your statement while I go back to the office and get your coat.” And the Prime Minister made his statement and the President got his coat for him.

  A few days later, when Eleanor Roosevelt came to see him at the White House, he insisted that she allow him to show her her old home. As they were about to leave his office, he motioned for her to precede him through the door.

  Mrs. Roosevelt drew back. “No,” she said. “You go first. You are the president.”

  He laughed. “I keep forgetting.” With her lovely, deliberate blandness, she replied, “But you must never forget.”

  Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the last Administration was President Eisenhower’s open disdain of politics and his conviction that “politician” was a dirty word. This tragic view is shared even now by the majority of the American electorate, explaining the General’s continuing appeal.*4 Time and again during those years one used to hear: “O.K., so he is a lousy president, but thank God he’s not a politician!”

  Kennedy, on the other hand, regards politics as an honorable, perhaps inevitable, profession in a democracy. Not only is he a master of politics, but he also takes a real pleasure in power. He is restless; he wants to know everything; he wanders into other people’s offices at odd hours; he puts in a ten-hour office day; he reads continuously, even in the bathtub.

  Most interesting of all, and the greatest break with tradition, have been his visits to the houses of friends in Washington, many of them journalists. Ever since the first protocol drawn up for George Washington, the president seldom goes visiting and never returns calls. Kennedy has changed that. He goes where he pleases; he talks candidly; he tries to meet people who otherwise might never get to him through the elaborate maze of the White House, in which, even during the most enlightened Administration, unpleasant knowledge can be kept from the president.

  Inevitably, a president is delivered into the hands of an inner circle which, should he not be a man of considerable alertness and passion, tends to cut him off from reality. Eisenhower was a classic case. It was painfully evident at press conferences that he often had no knowledge of important actions taken by the government in his name; worse still, he was perhaps the only president not to read newspapers. The result was that when crises occurred, despite good intentions, he was never sufficiently aware of the nature of any problem to have a useful opinion as to its solution.

  Only by constant study and getting about can a president be effective. As Harry Truman once remarked, despite the great power of the office, it is remarkably difficult to get anything done. “You tell ’em what you want and what happens? Nothing! You have to tell ’em five times.”

  Most presidential staffs inevitably take advantage of their president, realizing that in the rush of any day’s business he will make many decisions and requests which he cannot possibly follow up. Kennedy, however, has already shown an unusual ability to recall exactly what he requested on any subject, and the impression he gives is of a man who means to be obeyed by his staff.

  “He is deliberately drawing all the threads of executive power to himself,” remarked one adviser. The cumbersome staff system of the Eisenhower Administration has been abandoned in favor of highly personal relationships between President and advisers. No one’s function is ever clearly defined. The president moves men from project to project, testing them, extracting new points of view.

  Not only is this a useful way of getting the most out of his staff, but it also ensures, rather slyly, Kennedy’s own unique position at the center of the web of power: he alone can view and manipulate the entire complex of domestic and international policy. No one in his Administration may circumvent him, because none can master more than a part of the whole.

  This ultimate knowledge of the whole is power, and, finally, the exercise of power is an art like any other. There is no doubt of John Kennedy’s mastery of that art. He is a rare combination of intelligence, energy and opportunism. Most important, he is capable of growth. He intends to be great.

  What he will accomplish depends largely upon his ability to rally the bored and cynical Western world, to fire the imagination of a generation taught never to think of “we” but only of “I.” There are fragile signs (the warm response to the Peace Corps) and favorable omens (popular approbation reflected in polls) that a torpid society has at last been stirred by its youthful leader. If true, it is in the nick of time. Civilizations are seldom granted a second chance.

  London Sunday Telegraph, April 9, 1961

  I liked Kennedy personally to the end. But I did not like his presidency from the day he invaded Cuba to the last month of his life when he turned hot the cold war in Vietnam. Kennedy misplayed his cards from the beginning. Khrushchev frightened him at Vienna. Because Republicans would always suspect a Democratic president of being not only a nigger-lover but a fellow traveler, Kennedy’s response was predictable. Secretly, I think he thought war was fun. He was in good American company. See this page.

  *1Never delivered.

  *2Alas. The intellectual establishment can take a great deal of credit for the attempted conquest of Asia and the subsequent collapse of America’s imperial pretension. The end may be a good if serendipitous thing. Unfortunately, to achieve it, the Bundys and the Goodwins and the Rostows helped shatter those fragile balances which made the Republic, on good days, a place to take pride in. If Kennedy had devoted more time to sex and less to speed-reading the memos of the clerks, he might still be alive, a small matter, not to mention the large matter of saving the lives of those hundreds of thousands of Asiatics and Americans who died to make Harvard Yard Palatine Hill.

  *3This is a fairly accurate description, subtracting the word “profound.” It was given me by Richard Goodwin, the Iago of the sixties. Today the same description could, of course, be used to describe Richard Nixon.

  *4Ike wasn’t so wrong.

  JOHN DOS PASSOS AT MIDCENTURY

  There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, a legacy no doubt of the Old Frontier. But where the inspired tail-talesman of simpler days went on and on, never quite certain and never much caring what the next load of breath might contain, at his best he imparted with a new demotic flare the sense of life living. Unfortunately, since these first originals the main line of the American novel has reverted to
incontinent heirs, to the gabblers, maunderers, putters-in of everything. Watch: Now the man goes into the barbershop and sees four chairs with two people in them, one with a beard and the other reading a comic book about Bugs Bunny, then the man sits in the chair, he thinks of baby’s first curls shorn and (if he’s been analyzed) of castration, as he lists for us the labels on every bottle of hair tonic on the shelf, records every word the barber has to say about the Series—all the time wondering what happened to the stiff white brush smelling of stale powder they used to brush the back of your neck with….To get that haircut the true gabbler will devote a dozen pages of random description and dialogue none of which finally has anything to do with his novel’s theme, assuming there is one. It was included at that moment because the gabbler happened to think of a visit to a barber, the way good old Tom Wolfe once named all the rivers of America because he felt like it.

  For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another, and that anything which pops into the head is worth putting down. It is an attitude unique to us and deriving, I would suspect, from a corrupted idea of democracy: if everything and everyone is of equal value, then any word is as good as any other word to express a meaning, which in turn is no more valuable than any other meaning. Or to put it another way, if everyone is equally valuable, then anything the writer (who is valuable) writes must be of value, so why attempt selection? This sort of writing, which I call demotic, can be observed at its purest in the recent work of Jack Kerouac.

  Thackeray said of Smollett, “I fancy he did not invent much.” There it all is: the two kinds of writer, underscored by the choice of verb. To fancy. To invent. Most of our writers tend to be recorders. They tell us what happened last summer, why the marriage went wrong, how they lost custody of the children, how much they drank and whom they laid, and if they are demoticists the task of ordering that mass of words and impressions put between covers will be the reader’s. Of all the recorders of what happened last summer—or last decade—John Dos Passos is the most dogged. Not since the brothers Goncourt has there been such a dedication to getting down exactly what happened, and were it not for his political passions he might indeed have been a true camera to our time. He invents little; he fancies less. He is often good when he tells you something through which he himself has lived, and noted. He is well equipped to be a good social critic, which is the role he has cast for himself: conscience to the Republic, stern reminder of good ways lost, of useful ways not taken.

  With what seems defiance, the first two pages of John Dos Passos’s new novel Midcentury are taken up with the titles of his published work, proudly spaced, seventeen titles to the first page, sixteen to the second: thirty-three books, the work of some forty years. The list is testament to Dos Passos’s gallantry, to his stubbornness, and to his worldly and artistic failure. To paraphrase Hollywood’s harsh wisdom, the persistent writer is only as good as his last decade. Admired extravagantly in the ’20’s and ’30’s, Dos Passos was largely ignored in the ’40’s and ’50’s, his new works passed over either in silence or else noted with that ritual sadness we reserve for those whose promise to art was not kept. He himself is aware of his own dilemma, and in a recent novel called The Great Days he recorded with brave if bewildered objectivity a decline similar to his own. I shall not try to ring the more obvious changes suggested by his career. Yet I should note that there is something about Dos Passos which makes a fellow writer unexpectedly protective, partly out of compassion for the man himself, and partly because the fate of Dos Passos is a chilling reminder to those condemned to write for life that this is the way it almost always is in a society which, to put it tactfully, has no great interest in the development of writers, a process too slow for the American temperament. As a result our literature is rich with sprinters but significantly short of milers.

  Right off, let me say that unlike most of Dos Passos’s more liberal critics, I never cared much for his early work even at its best. On the other hand, I have always enjoyed, even admired, the dottiness of his politics. His political progress from Radical Left to Radical Right seems to me very much in the American grain, and only the most humorless of doctrinaire liberals should be horrified. After all, it is not as if Dos Passos were in any way politically significant. Taken lightly, he gives pleasure. There is a good deal of inadvertent comedy in his admiration for such gorgeous Capitoline geese as Barry Goldwater, while page after page of Midcentury is vintage Old Guard demagoguery. For instance there is that old Bourbon comforter “Roosevelt’s war” for the Second World War, while, every now and then, a passage seems almost to parody Wisconsin’s late wonder:

  Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union cut off support from the Communists. Stalin needed quick help. Warmonger Roosevelt became the Communists’ god….War work meant primarily help for the Soviets to many a Washington bureaucrat.

  That “many” is superb. “I have here in my hand a list of MANY Washington bureaucrats who…” Politically, to make an atrocious pun, Dos Passos is for the Byrds.

  Midcentury is about the American labor movement from, roughly, the New Deal to the present, with occasional reminiscences of earlier times. The form of the book is chaotic. There are prose poems in italics, short impressionistic biographies of actual public figures, several fictional narratives in which various men and women are victimized by labor unions. And of course his patented device from USA: using newspaper headlines and fragments of news stories to act as counterpoint to the narration, to give a sense of time and place.

  To deal with this last device first. In USA it was effective. In that book, Dos Passos stumbled on an interesting truth: nearly all of us are narcotized by newspapers. There is something about the way a newspaper page is set which, if only from habit, holds the attention no matter how boring the matter. One does read on, waiting for surprise or titillation. The success of the gossip column is no more than a crude exploitation of newspaper addiction. Even if you don’t want to know what the Duchess of Windsor said to Elsa Maxwell or learn what stranger in the night was visited by Sir Stork, if your eye is addicted you will read on numbly.

  (Parenthetic note to writers on the make and a warning to exploited readers: any column of text, even this one, will hold the eye and the attention of the reader if there are sufficient familiar proper names. Nat King Cole, Lee Remick, Central Park, Marquis de Sade, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Marilyn Monroe. See? I trapped a number of you who’d skimmed the denser paragraphs above, deciding it was pretty dull literary stuff. “Marquis de Sade? Must’ve skipped something. Let’s see, there’s ‘titillation’…no, ‘Hollywood’…no.”)

  Also, dialogue has almost the same effect on the eye as names and newspaper headlines. In an age of worsening prose and declining concentration, most readers’ attention will wander if there is too much unbroken text. On the other hand, even the most reluctant reader enjoys descending the short sprightly steps of dialogue on the page, jumping the descriptions, to shift the metaphor, as a skilled rider takes hedges in a steeplechase.

  The newspaper technique is a good one; but to make it work the excerpts ought, minimally, to have some bearing on the narrative. In Midcentury one has the impression that Dos Passos simply shredded a few newspapers at random and stuffed them between the chapters as a form of excelsior to keep the biographies from bumping into one another. On the whole these biographies provide the book with its only interest, although the choice of subjects is inscrutable. Walter Reuther, John L. Lewis, James Hoffa are relevant to a novel dealing with organized labor, but then why include Robert Oppenheimer and Eleanor Roosevelt? And what exactly is Sam Goldwyn doing in the book? Or James Dean, that well-known statesman of organized labor? But, disregarding the irrelevance of many of the subjects, Dos Passos handles his impressionistic technique with a good deal of cunning. It is a tribute to his m
ethod that I was offended by the job he did on Mrs. Roosevelt. He is wonderfully expert at the precise, low blow. Thus, referring to Oppenheimer’s belated political awakening (and turn to the Left): “Perhaps he felt the need to expiate the crime of individuality (as much of a crime to the solid citizens of the American Legion posts as to party functionaries Moscow-trained in revolution).” That’s good stuff. He may not make the eagle scream, but he can certainly get the geese to honking. Yet despite his very pretty malice, the real reason the biographies work is again newspaper addiction: we know the subjects already. Our memories round the flat portraits; our prejudices do the author’s work.

  Finally, we come to the fictional characters, buried beneath headlines, feature stories and prose poems. (Walking the earth under the stars, musing midnight in midcentury, a man treads the road with his dog; the dog, less timebound in her universe of stench and shrill, trots eager ahead….Not since Studs Lonigan’s old buddy Weary Reilley was making the scene has there been such word-music, I mean wordmusic.) Excepting one, the invented characters are cast in solid cement. Dos Passos tells us this and he tells us that, but he never shows us anything. He is unable to let his characters alone to see which will breathe and which will not. The only story which comes alive is a narrative by a dying labor organizer and onetime Wobbly who recalls his life; and in those moments when Dos Passos allows him to hold the stage, one is most moved. If Dos Passos were a novelist instead of a pamphleteer he would have liberated this particular character from the surrounding cement and made a book of him, and in that book, simply told, not only made all his urgent polemical points but art as well. As it is, Dos Passos proves a point well taken by Stendhal: “Politics, amidst the interests of the imagination, are a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. This noise is ear-rending, without being forceful. It clashes with every instrument.”