Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Dos Passos ends his book with a sudden lashing out at the youth of the day. He drops the labor movement. He examines James Dean. Then he does a Salingeresque first-person narrative of an adolescent who stole some credit cards (remember a similar story in Life?) and went on a spree of conspicuous consumption. Despite stylistic confusions, Dos Passos is plain in his indictment: doomed is our pleasure-loving, scornful, empty, flabby modern youth, product of that midcentury dream in which, thanks to the do-gooders, we have lost our ancient Catonian virtue. I found the indictment oddly disgusting. I concede that there is some truth in everything Dos Passos says. But his spirit strikes me as sour and mean and, finally, uncomprehending. He has mistaken the decline of his own flesh and talent for the world’s decline. This is the old man’s folly, which a good artist or a generous man tries to avoid. Few of us can resist celebrating our own great days or finding fault with those who do not see in us now what we were or might have been. Nor is it unnatural when contemplating extinction to want, in sudden raging moments, to take the light with one. But it is a sign of wisdom to recognize one’s own pettiness and not only to surrender vanity to death, which means to take it anyway, but to do so with deliberate grace as exemplar to the young upon whom our race’s fragile continuity, which is all there is, depends. I should have thought that that was why one wrote—to make something useful for the survivors, to say: I was and now you are, and I leave you as good a map as I could make of my own traveling.

  Esquire, May 1961

  BARRY GOLDWATER: A CHAT

  Julius Caesar stood before a statue of Alexander the Great and wept, for Alexander at twenty-nine had conquered the world and at thirty-two was dead, while Caesar, a late starter of thirty-three, had not yet subverted even his own state. Pascal, contemplating this poignant scene, remarked rather sourly that he could forgive Alexander for wanting to own the earth because of his extreme youth, but Caesar was old enough to have known better.

  I suggest, with diffidence, that Pascal did not entirely understand the nature of the politician; did not understand that the inner mechanism of a Caesar is no different in kind from that of an Alfred M. Landon. The aim of each is power. One would achieve it through military conquest, the other through what it pleases us to call the democratic process. It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it.

  Suspended then between simplicity and wisdom, self-delusion and hard practicality, is the operative politician. He is not at all like other men, though he must acquire as protective coloration the manners of his society, join in its rituals (Caesar, the atheist, was a solemn high priest and our own Calvin Coolidge wore an Indian war bonnet), exploit its prejudices and anticipate its hungers.

  Like his predecessors, an American politician in the mid-twentieth century must conform to certain conventions. He must be gregarious (or seem to be), candid (but never give the game away), curious about people (otherwise, he would find his work unendurable). An American politician must not seem too brainy. He must put on no airs. He must smile often but at the same time appear serious. Most disagreeable of all, according to one ancient United States Senator, wise with victory, “is when you got to let some s.o.b. look you straight in the eye and think he’s making a fool of you. Oh, that is gall and wormwood to the spirit!” Above all, a politician must not sound clever or wise or proud.

  Finally, the politician must have that instinctive sense of occasion which is also the actor’s art. To the right challenge he must have the right response. He is, in the purest sense, an opportunist. He must be an accurate barometer to the weather of his time. He must know the phases of the political moon and the hour of the tides. He must be ready at a moment’s notice to seize that prize which is the game’s reward, power. He must know in the marrow of his bones when it is right to make the large effort. For example, at the Democratic convention of 1956 the Vice-Presidential nomination was unexpectedly thrown open to the floor. The young Senator from Massachusetts went for the prize. The moment was wrong but the move was right. In a car on his way to the convention the day of the voting, John Kennedy was heard muttering grimly to himself, “Go, go, go!” When to go, when to stay; that is the art.

  Even those who write knowledgeably about politics tend to make certain fundamental errors. They look for subtle motives where there are none. They believe there is a long-range plan of war when there is seldom anything more than quick last-minute deployments of troops before unscheduled battle. In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

  The junior Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, is a politician of some grace and skill who at this moment is studying the political sky for omens, waiting for a sign in which to conquer. His moment may come in the Presidential election of 1964, or of 1968 or never. There is every evidence that he is, this year, a divided man, uncertain how to proceed. His sense of occasion is keen; his sense of history is practical. He knows perfectly well that his views are at variance with the majority views of his time. To do great deeds, to take the prize, he must, paradoxically, surrender many of those positions he has so firmly taken in his reaction to a society he neither likes nor, many feel, understands. Yet, again paradoxically, his entire celebrity is due to his appealingly cranky rejection of those positions the majority reveres. In short, he is loved for those very attitudes which a majority of the electorate does not accept.

  Goldwater’s success is phenomenal considering that he is only a second-term Senator with no significant legislation to his name. He comes from a politically unimportant state. By his own admission he is not a profound thinker. His success in Arizona was due not only to his charm and hard campaigning in a state usually Democratic but also to the popularity of his family, one of the oldest in the state, whose business, Goldwater’s department stores, is to Arizona what Macy’s is to New York.

  It is a clue to Goldwater’s recent success that he was primarily a salesman in the family business (his one creative contribution was the invention and promotion of men’s shorts decorated with large red ants in the pants) and he considers his role at the moment as salesman for the conservative point of view, which is not necessarily the Republican view. But, spokesman for the majority of his party or not, bumper stickers with GOLDWATER IN ’64 are beginning to appear around the country (as well as a few GOLDWATER IN 1864 stickers).

  Goldwater’s path to higher office is strewn with many hazards, not all of his own making. His father was Jewish (the family name originally was Goldwasser), yet he is an Episcopalian. Since he favors right-to-work laws and limitations on unions, organized labor is against him. Personally, he sees nothing wrong with Negro and white children together in the same schools. But he opposes any Federal interference with the rights of the Southern states to maintain segregation, even in the face of the recent Supreme Court decision. Goldwater has about as much chance of getting the Negro vote, according to one Tennessee politician, as “a legless man in a pants-kicking contest.” Reluctantly, Goldwater realizes that Social Security is here to stay—it is too late to take it away—but he does think the program should be voluntary and certainly not enlarged to include medical care for the aged or anything else. He favors breaking off diplomatic relations with the Russians; he wants to present them wherever possible with a take-it-or-leave-it, peace-or-war attitude which many thoughtful conservatives who approve his domestic program find disquietingly like brinkmanship. In his own party he is blocked not only by Nelson Rockefeller but by Richard Nixon.

  As if all these difficulties, inherent and assumed, were not enough, he is now seriously endangered by his admirers. Like most radicals of Right or Left, he is attractive to every sort of extremist. His most compromising support comes from the mysterious John Birch Soci
ety, whose beleaguered “Founder” (a title last used by the creator of Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery), Robert Welch, is firmly convinced that forty million Americans are Communists, including such unexpected conspirators as Milton and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stubbornly, Goldwater has refused to repudiate the Birch Society, a stand which has led one Republican leader to say, “That’s the end of Barry.”

  Yet, despite great handicaps, Goldwater is perhaps the country’s most popular politician, after Kennedy. He gets enormous crowds wherever he goes. They are enthusiastic and—hopeful sign—they include many young people. He has caught on as a personality even if his policies have not. It is common to hear, “O.K., so a lot of his ideas are cockeyed, but at least he tells you where he stands. He isn’t afraid to speak up, the way the others are.” That many of Goldwater’s ideas are in a state of flux and that many of his positions are quite as obscure as those of any other politician does not penetrate. Once a man’s “image,” good or ill, is set in the public’s mind, he can contradict himself every day and still be noted for consistency.

  Yet Goldwater is something new on the scene. He is perhaps the first American politician who, though spokesman for an unpopular minority, finds himself personally popular for reasons irrelevant to his politics. He is forgiven by admirers when he speaks against the $1.25 minimum wage, union activities or the Supreme Court’s power to integrate schools. So what? He’s a nice guy, and nice guys are not dangerous. He is also sincere, a vague quality far more admired by the lonely crowd than competence or intelligence.

  Barry Goldwater’s office is on the fourth floor of the old Senate Office Building. The corridors are marble with high ceilings and enormous doors which tend to dwarf not only visitors but Senators. There is an air of quiet megalomania which is beguiling in its nakedness.

  Behind the great mahogany door with its sign MR. GOLDWATER, ARIZONA is the outer office: wooden paneling, a view through large windows of the Capitol grounds. I was greeted by the Senator’s secretary, Mrs. Coerver. She is small, amiable, gray, with that somewhat fixed smile politicians and their aides develop. (One smile is a vote gained, maybe. One frown is a vote lost, definitely.) “The Senator will see you in just a moment.” She beamed.

  I approached this meeting with curiosity. For one thing, since his book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s fundamentalist ideas about the Constitution and society had undergone changes. When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are, where John Kennedy now is. Other observers of Goldwater had also detected a perceptible shift to the Center. Further shifts would depend entirely on whether the patient took a turn for the White House. I wanted, simply, to take his temperature as of that day, for like all illnesses the Presidential virus has its own peculiar ebb and flow. At night in the company of good friends the fever blazes. In a cold dawn on the way to an airport to speak in some far-off town the virus is at its lowest point: To hell with it! thinks the patient, almost cured.

  Also, I wanted to get an impression of character. I have often thought and written that if the United States were ever to have a Caesar, a true subverter of the state, (1) he would attract to himself all the true believers, the extremists, the hot-eyed custodians of the Truth; (2) he would oversimplify some difficult but vital issue, putting himself on the side of the majority, as Huey Long did when he proclaimed every man a king and proposed to divvy up the wealth; (3) he would not in the least resemble the folk idea of a dictator. He would not be an hysteric like Hitler. Rather, he would be just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere, and while he was amusing us on television storm troopers would gather in the streets.

  Now I have put the case extremely only because in recent months there has been an unusual rash of extremist groups like the John Birch Society, reminding us that there is a totalitarian potential in this country just as there is in every country. Fortunately, barring military or economic disaster, none of these groups is apt to come to much without a leader who could appeal personally to a majority. It seemed to me that Goldwater was perhaps such a man: (1) He has already attracted many extremists, and he has not denied them; (2) he oversimplifies a great many issues (getting “tough” with the Russians is fine and getting rid of the income tax is fine, too, but toughness costs money; where will it come from?); (3) he is exactly the sort of charming man whom no one would suspect of Caesarism, least of all himself.

  Barry Goldwater entered Mrs. Coerver’s office in his shirt sleeves and said, “Come on in.” At the door to his own office he turned to a departing interviewer and said, finishing some earlier thought: “You know, of all the untrue things they write, the wildest one is how I’m a millionaire. I’ve been called that now so many times I’m beginning to feel like I ought to live like one.” Chuckling at his own hyperbole (he is a millionaire; he does live like one), he led me to his office. The large desk was catercornered so that the light from the windows was in the visitor’s face. Beside the desk was a bookcase containing, among other works, a leather-bound set of the speeches of Barry Goldwater. On the mantel of the fireplace was a bust of Lincoln. In the far corner of the room stood three flags. One of them was the Senator’s own flag: he is a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve. On the walls were photographs of the Arizona landscape, as beautiful and empty as a country of the moon.

  We sat and looked at each other a moment. At fifty-two, he is lean and obviously in fine condition. The hair is gray. The eyes are small, alert, dark blue; the face tanned from a recent trip home. The nose is pleasantly crooked. The nostrils are odd, visible only when he tilts his head back, like the small neatly round punctures in a child’s rubber mask. The mouth is wide and thin-lipped, the jaw square. The smile is attractive but when his face is in repose there is an unexpected hardness, even harshness. Neither of us, I noticed, was very good at looking straight at the other. Simultaneously, each looked away. I looked out the window. Goldwater examined his brigadier general’s flag (for those who believe the old saw that an honest man must have a direct gaze, I refer them to a contemporary’s report that the shiftiest-eyed man he had ever met was Thomas Jefferson).

  I began compassionately: “You must get awfully tired of being interviewed.” He smiled. “It’s repetitive, but…” His voice trailed off. It is a good voice for politics, light but earnest, with a slight rural accent of the sort made familiar by television Westerns.

  I had debated whether to bring a tape recorder. I knew that Goldwater had a small wrist-watch recorder which he used gleefully to disconcert others as well as to protect himself from misquotation. I decided to take notes instead. On a small pad of paper I had written a few topics. First, the John Birch Society. Recently Goldwater had said that “a great many fine people” were members, including “Republicans, liberal Democrats, conservatives,” and he thought it would cause considerable political embarrassment if they were attacked en masse. He had also implied that besides the two known Birchers in Congress, Representatives Edgar Hiestand and John Rousselot, both Republicans of California, there were others. In one interview, however, he suggested that Robert Welch resign. Later he denied he had said this. I asked him how well he knew Welch. He frowned thoughtfully.

  “Well, I’ve known Bob Welch five, maybe six years. But I didn’t really get to him until that summit business, you know, when we all tried to keep Eisenhower from meeting Khrushchev. Welch and I worked together then. Of course all that stuff of his about Eisenhower being a Communist and so on was silly. Fact, I told him when he gave me that book of his [The Politician] to read, I said: ‘Unless you can prove every one of those statements about people being Communists is true, you better go destroy every single copy of that book.’ ”

  “Do you think Welch should resign as head of the society?”

  The answer was quick: “I do. Just the other day I sent somebody over to the Library of Congress
to get me the bylaws of the Birch Society, and I was disturbed about this dictatorial thing, how he personally can chuck people out any time he pleases. I didn’t like it.”

  “What did you mean when you said there were liberal Democrats in the Birch Society?”

  “Because there are. There’re all kinds of people in that group. I know. I’ve met ’em and a nicer-looking bunch you never saw. That thirty- to forty-five-year-old group you want in politics. They’re thoughtful people and they’re concerned. But don’t get the idea they’re all conservatives because they’re fighting Communism. A lot of people are fighting Communism who aren’t conservative.” I had the impression he wanted it made clear that his own conservative position was one thing and the fight against Communism was another thing. Most conservatives regard the two as synonymous. Goldwater does ordinarily, but this day I felt he was preparing a possible escape hatch.

  I asked him if he knew of any members of Congress who belonged to the society, other than the two Californians. He paused. Then he said, “No.” It was a slow, thoughtful “no,” hard to interpret. Then: “You know, I don’t really know that much about those people.”

  I asked him if he approved of their methods, as outlined in Welch’s Blue Book. “Never read it. I don’t know.” It seemed to me strange that he would read the bylaws and The Politician yet not read the Blue Book, which contains not only the bylaws but a ten-point program on how to expose and discourage “Communists.”