Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  The left wing plays dirty pool, too, but I have no recollection of their having organized whispering campaigns of a sexual nature against Nixon, say, the way the right so often does against liberal figures. Knowing Eleanor’s active dislike of sex as a subject and, on the evidence of her daughter, as a fact, I think it most unlikely she ever had an affair with anyone. But she did crave affection, and jealously held on to her friends, helped them, protected them—often unwisely. Mr. Lash describes most poignantly Eleanor’s grief when she realized that her friend Harry Hopkins had cold-bloodedly shifted his allegiance to Franklin.

  Eleanor was also faced with the President’s secretary and de facto wife Missy Le Hand (“Everybody knows the old man’s been living with her for years,” said one of the Roosevelt sons to my father who had just joined the subcabinet. My father, an innocent West Pointer, from that moment on regarded the Roosevelt family arrangements as not unlike those of Ibn Saud). Yet when Missy was dying, it was Eleanor who would ring her up. Franklin simply dropped her. But then Missy was probably not surprised. She once told Fulton Oursler that the President “was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.”

  Mr. Lash writes a good deal about Eleanor’s long friendship with two tweedy ladies, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. For years Eleanor shared Val-Kill cottage with them; jointly they ran a furniture factory and the Todhunter School, where Eleanor taught until she went to the White House. The relationship of the three women seems unusually tangled, and Mr. Lash cannot do much with it. Things ended badly with an exchange of letters, filled with uncharacteristic bitterness on Eleanor’s side. If only the author of Olivia could have had a go at that subject.

  In a sense Eleanor had no personal life after the White House years began. She was forever on the go (and did not cease motion during the long widowhood). She suffered many disappointments from friends and family. I remember her amused description of Caroline Kennedy and what a good thing it was that the two Kennedy children would still be very young when they left the White House because, she frowned and shook her head, “It is a terrible place for young people to grow up in, continually flattered and—used.”

  I was with her the day the news broke that a son had married yet again. While we were talking, he rang her and she smiled and murmured, over and over, “Yes, dear…yes, I’m very happy.” Then when she hung up, her face set like stone. “You would think that he might have told his mother first, before the press.” But that was a rare weakness. Her usual line was “people are what they are, you can’t change them.” Since she had obviously begun life as the sort of Puritan who thought people not only could but must be changed, this later tolerance was doubtless achieved at some cost.

  When I was selected as Democratic-Liberal candidate for Congress, Eleanor (I called her Mrs. R) was at first cool to the idea—I had known her slightly all my life (she had liked my father, detested my grandfather). But as the campaign got going and I began to move up in the polls and it suddenly looked as if, wonder of wonders, Dutchess County might go Democratic in a congressional election for the first time in fifty years (since Franklin’s senatorial race, in fact), she became more and more excited. She joined me at a number of meetings. She gave a tea at Val-Kill for the women workers in the campaign. Just as the women were leaving, the telephone rang. She spoke a few minutes in a low voice, hung up, said good-by to the last of the ladies, took me aside for some political counsel, was exactly as always except that the tears were streaming down her face. Driving home, I heard on the radio that her favorite granddaughter had just been killed.

  In later years, though Eleanor would talk—if asked—about the past, she was not given to strolls down memory lane. In fact, she was contemptuous of old people who lived in the past, particularly those politicians prone to the Ciceronian vice of exaggerating their contribution to history, a category in which she firmly placed that quaint Don Quixote of the cold war, Dean Acheson. She was also indifferent to her own death. “I remember Queen Wilhelmina when she came to visit during the war” (good democrat that she was, nothing royal was alien to Eleanor) “and she would sit under a tree on the lawn and commune with the dead. She would even try to get me interested in spiritualism but I always said: Since we’re going to be dead such a long time anyway it’s rather a waste of time chatting with all of them before we get there.”

  Although a marvelous friend and conscience to the world, she was, I suspect, a somewhat unsatisfactory parent. Descendants and their connections often look rather hard and hurt at the mention of her. For those well-placed by birth to do humanity’s work, she had no patience if they were—ultimate sin—unhappy. A woman I know went to discuss with her a disastrous marriage; she came away chilled to the bone. These things were to be borne.

  What did Eleanor feel about Franklin? That is an enigma, and perhaps she herself never sorted it out. He was complex and cold and cruel (so many of her stories of life with him would end, “And then I fled from the table in tears!”). He liked telling her the latest “Eleanor stories”; his sense of fun was heavy. A romantic, Mr. Lash thinks she kept right on loving him to the end (a favorite poem of the two was E. B. Browning’s “Unless you can swear, ‘For life, for death,’/ Oh, fear to call it loving!”). But I wonder. Certainly he hurt her mortally in their private relationship; worse, he often let her down in their public partnership. Yet she respected his cunning even when she deplored his tactics.

  I wonder, too, how well she understood him. One day Eleanor told me about something in his will that had surprised her. He wanted one side of his coffin to be left open. “Well, we hadn’t seen the will when he was buried and of course it was too late when we did read it. But what could he have meant?” I knew and told her: “He wanted, physically, to get back into circulation as quickly as possible, in the rose garden.” She looked at me as if this were the maddest thing she had ever heard.

  I suspect the best years of Eleanor’s life were the widowhood. She was on her own, no longer an adjunct to his career. In this regard, I offer Mr. Lash an anecdote. We were four at table: Mrs. Tracy Dows, Mrs. Roosevelt, her uncle David Gray (our wartime Ambassador to Ireland), and myself. Eleanor began: “When Mr. Joe Kennedy came back from London, during the war…” David Gray interrupted her. “Damned coward, Joe Kennedy! Terrified they were going to drop a bomb on him.” Eleanor merely grinned and continued. “Anyway he came back to Boston and gave that unfortunate interview in which he was…well, somewhat critical of us.”

  She gave me her teacher’s smile, and an aside. “You see, it’s a very funny thing but whatever people say about us we almost always hear. I don’t know bow this happens but it does.” David Gray scowled. “Unpleasant fellow, that Joe. Thought he knew everything. Damned coward.” I said nothing, since I was trying to persuade Eleanor to support the wicked Joe’s son at the Democratic convention; something she could not, finally, bring herself to do.

  “Well, my Franklin said, ‘We better have him down here’—we were at Hyde Park—‘and see what he has to say.’ So Mr. Kennedy arrived at Rhinecliff on the train and I met him and took him straight to Franklin. Well, ten minutes later one of the aides came and said, ‘The President wants to see you right away.’ This was unheard of. So I rushed into the office and there was Franklin, white as a sheet. He asked Mr. Kennedy to step outside and then he said, and his voice was shaking, ‘I never want to see that man again as long as I live.’ ” David Gray nodded: “Wanted us to make a deal with Hitler.” But Eleanor was not going to get into that. “Whatever it was, it was very bad. Then Franklin said, ‘Get him out of here,’ and I said, ‘But, dear, you’ve invited him for the weekend, and we’ve got guests for lunch and the train doesn’t leave until two,’ and Franklin said, ‘Then you drive him around Hyde Park and put him on that train,’ and I did and it was the most dreadful four hours of my life!” She laughed. Then, seriously: “I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known.”

  To read
Mr. Lash’s book is to relive not only the hopeful period in American life (1933–40) but the brief time of world triumph (1941–45). The book stops, mercifully, with the President’s death and the end of Eleanor and Franklin (Mr. Lash is correct to put her name first; of the two she was greater). Also, the end of…what? American innocence? Optimism? From 1950 on, our story has been progressively more and more squalid. Nor can one say it is a lack of the good and the great in high places: they are always there when needed. Rather the corruption of empire has etiolated the words themselves. Now we live in a society which none of us much likes, all would like to change, but no one knows how. Most ominous of all, there is now a sense that what has gone wrong for us may be irreversible. The empire will not liquidate itself. The lakes and rivers and seas will not become fresh again. The arms race will not stop. Land ruined by insecticides and fertilizers will not be restored. The smash-up will come.

  To read of Eleanor and Franklin is to weep at what we have lost. Gone is the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action. Eleanor never stopped believing this. A simple faith, no doubt simplistic—but it gave her a stoic serenity. On the funeral train from Georgia to Washington: “I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night. The only recollection I clearly have is thinking about ‘The Lonesome Train,’ the musical poem about Lincoln’s death. (‘A lonesome train on a lonesome track/ Seven coaches painted black/ A slow train, a quiet train/ Carrying Lincoln home again…’). I had always liked it so well—and now this was so much like it.”

  I had other thoughts in 1962 at Hyde Park as I stood alongside the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth, and the thirty-sixth Presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for her funeral (unlike the golden figures in Proust’s last chapter, they all looked if not smaller than life smaller than legend—so many shrunken March of Time dolls soon to be put away). Whether or not one thought of Eleanor Roosevelt as a world ombudsman or as a chronic explainer or as a scourge of the selfish, she was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went past me, I thought, well, that’s that. We’re really on our own now.

  The New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971

  *My sister responded to this story by reminding Mrs. Longworth of a certain peculiar episode in the Governor’s office at Albany between T.R. and a lady. Mrs. Longworth was not amused.

  H. HUGHES

  Is Howard R. Hughes the most boring American? Admittedly, the field is large; over two hundred million of us are in competition. Yet on the strength of an old associate’s recent memorial, I am inclined to give Hughes the benefit of the belief I have long held that the more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes. Certainly there is not much you can do with the fact of someone else’s fortune except stare at all those naughts upon the page. Then, naughts aside, Hughes the actual man emanates a chloroform quite his own: the high droning voice, the catatonic manner, the absence of all humor (a characteristic of the very rich American, but here quintessential), the lack of interest in the human, the preoccupation with machinery (yet he is “a lousy engineer,” according to my father, a long-time aviator acquaintance, and “a menace as a flier”), the collecting of beautiful and famous women to no vivid end (although feisty Ava Gardner did knock him out with an ashtray), and, of course, the grim eating habits (dinner is always a steak with peas, followed by vanilla ice cream and cookies).

  The best thing about Hughes has been his withdrawal from the world—for this, if nothing else, he ought not only to have been honored but encouraged by a grateful nation. Yet even in the shadows of his cloistered motels, the inept tycoon insists on pulling strings, making a mess of TWA, a disaster of RKO, a shambles of vice in Las Vegas, all the while creating the largest unworkable plywood plane in the world at a cost to the taxpayers of twenty-two million dollars. There is something peculiarly inhuman even about his incompetence. At least John D. Rockefeller gave out dimes and drank mother’s milk (from other people’s mothers, that is). Why then contemplate Howard Hughes? Because he is involved in politics and even a cursory glance at his career is a chilling reminder of the nation’s corruption at every level.

  In 1925, Noah Dietrich was engaged by the nineteen-year-old Howard Hughes to run the business Hughes had inherited from his father (the manufacturer of a special kind of drill much favored by Texas oil men). The handsome young heir had moved to Hollywood where the girls and the movies were. Aware that he knew nothing about money, Hughes hired Mr. Dietrich, a certified public accountant, to look after his affairs. This profitable association lasted until 1957, when Mr. Dietrich, feeling the shadows lengthen, asked for some stock and a few capital gains to supplement the large salary on which he was forced to pay a large tax. Hughes promptly let him go. If Mr. Dietrich is a bitter man, the book Howard, the Amazing Mr. Hughes (by Noah Dietrich and Bob Thomas) does not reveal it. Every page radiates octogenarian serenity—the CPA at Colonus. Nevertheless, despite the sunny manner, Mr. Dietrich and Mr. Thomas, his prose stylist (as such workers are called in Youngblood Hawke), have managed to give us a highly detailed and most plausible portrait of what is apparently an honest-to-God American shit.

  In Hollywood Hughes produced a number of pictures. Those in which he took no “creative” part sometimes made money (like Milestone’s Two Arabian Knights); those he himself worked on invariably lost money, including the renowned Hell’s Angels (the aesthetic value of these works will not be dealt with here). Incidentally, during the first thirty years of his association with Dietrich, Hughes made only one visit to the Hughes Tool Company. As a result, the company was a great success, producing the money Hughes promptly lost on movie-making, on a color process for films, on a new kind of automobile, on the career of Miss Jane Russell (a lifelong search for the perfect set of boobs ended abruptly for Howard in a dentist’s office when Nurse Russell suddenly made her appearance carrying a tray of pliers). For an American bore of major standing, Hughes demonstrated, from the beginning, an attractive talent for failure which almost—but not quite—catapults him into the ranks of the human.

  “My first objective is to become the world’s number one golfer. Second, the top aviator, and third I want to become the world’s most famous motion picture producer. Then, I want you to make me the richest man in the world.” So spoke the young Faust to Mr. Dietrich, his eager counter-Faust. For a very rich young man the realization of such simple dreams ought to have been an easy matter. Unfortunately, Hughes’s golf was not all that good; as a flier, he was the Icarus of an entire generation of aviators; while the movies he produced brought him only publicity. Mr. Dietrich did make him very rich, but not as rich as J. P. Getty.

  It would seem, on the evidence of this memoir, that Hughes was never interested in money or movies or airplanes or women. What did absorb him was tinkering with bits of machinery or celluloid. Hour after hour, day after day, he would concentrate totally (and to no ultimate purpose) on a carburetor or the editing of a zoom shot. Detail work was his narcotic. But attempts to relate the details of the work to some larger unit like an automobile or a finished film (or a love affair?) were quite beyond him, as even devotees of The Outlaw must admit.

  Mr. Dietrich gives us a bit of character analysis, but not much. This is wise. The point to Hughes is that he is what he seems: a simple, uneducated man, interested in machinery. He apparently never liked anyone very much, man or woman. Suffering from hereditary deafness, he went into retirement because it was difficult for him to hear conversations at parties (he can hear perfectly on an altered telephone and so prefers to conduct his business at long distance). Since his family is not long lived, he has become frightened of the germ and its carrier, people. �
��Everyone carries germs around with them. I want to live longer than my parents, so I avoid germs.” Living alone, with only servants to look after him, he has developed a somewhat solipsistic turn of mind, given to night fears—not only of germs, death, betrayal, but of monsters like the ones he watches so avidly on The Late Late Show coming to kidnap him, to eat him up.

  The interesting part of Mr. Dietrich’s book begins during the war. Over the years, Hughes had managed to offend a number of important generals (Hap Arnold, the army air force’s commander, was turned away at the door to the Hughes plant). In the interest of landing war contracts, Hughes decided to corrupt the generals and their masters, the politicians. Why not? All businessmen dealing with the government do—or try to. Hughes hired an amiable man-about-town called Johnny Meyer, who “certainly knew how to please the tired politician or general, and he was lavish with hotel suites, fancy dinners, champagne, and caviar, not to mention $100-per-night beauties. You’d be surprised how many senators, governors and generals partook of his largesse.”

  I think Mr. Dietrich exaggerates the surprise of those of us born under the dread sign of the unshredded Dita Beard. What we really want to know is not how our masters behave in the sack but what deals they make in the office. “Despite his obviousness Johnny Meyer produced results for the Hughes enterprise.” The most important VIP that he snared was Elliott Roosevelt. Parenthetically, when my father became Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce (1933–1936), young Elliott told him, “Everyone else in the family’s got their man in the Administration. Well, you’re going to be mine.” Thus from an early age, Elliott showed a great interest in the future of aviation, and worked hard to give America that mastery of the skies she has so long held.