Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Hay rather wished that Adee were able to present a somewhat more virile face to the world. As it was, the Second Assistant was not unlike Queen Victoria, with a glued-on beard. “Obviously, I don’t work hard enough. But my question’s quite serious. What do I do?”

  “What you should do is let me do most of it…”

  “Well, we are old collaborators, of course…”

  “I’m serious, Mr. Hay. Why wear yourself out for nothing? There are dispatches from all around the world to be read-and replied to. I do most of that, anyway. I also write a really masterful letter of sympathetic rejection to would-be office-seekers, many of them nephews to senators.”

  Hay had a sudden, vivid vision of the tall fragile figure of President Lincoln, looking very much like “the Ancient” that his two young secretaries had nicknamed him, besieged in the upstairs corridor of the White House by men and women, shoving petitions, letters, newspaper-cuttings at him. “Whitelaw Reid now wants the embassy at London,” Hay began.

  But Adee was studying his glistening nails, and did not hear him. He must read lips, Hay thought. When Adee’s eyes are not upon your mouth, he does not hear. “You’ll be relieved to know that you now have nothing to offer anyone. The President has given away just about all the posts to keep his senators happy.”

  “I can still pick the first assistant secretary…”

  “There is a rumor…” Adee began; but a soft knock at the door interrupted him. “Come,” said Adee, and a smiling Negro messenger entered to present Hay with a silver-framed photograph. “This just arrived, Mr. Secretary. From the British embassy.”

  Hay placed the extravagantly signed photograph on his desk, so that Adee could also enjoy the figure depicted, a somewhat larger, stouter, bemedalled version of Adee’s own. “The Prince of Wales!” Adee’s accent now became, unconsciously, British. He mimicked compulsively, as the chameleon shifts its color to suit the landscape. “We’ve all heard what a success you were with the royal family. In fact, Her Majesty was quoted in the Herald, indirectly, of course, as saying that you were the most interesting ambassador that she had ever known.”

  “Poor woman,” said Hay, who had read the same story with quiet pleasure. “I told her Lincoln stories. And dialect stories. It was like being out on the Lyceum circuit. No matter how old the joke-or the Queen-the audience laughs.”

  Adee’s accent recrossed the Atlantic and hovered somewhere near Hay’s native Warsaw, Illinois. “I reckon your main job will be to help our good President, who knows nothing of foreign affairs and has no time to learn. He is mortally tired now of having been his own secretary of state for two years while running and winning a war and instructing our delegation to the peace conference in Paris, except he’s not sure what he wants them to do.” Adee stared at Hay’s lips. “As far as I can tell, that is,” he added.

  Hay had heard the same rumor: indecision in the White House; hence, confusion in Paris. “Do get me all the Paris dispatches. I’d better find out just what’s been said so far.”

  Adee frowned. “I’m afraid we don’t get to see them here. Judge Day always reported directly to the President.”

  “Oh.” Hay nodded, as if he approved. But the first warning bell had now sounded. Unless he acted quickly, he was to be excluded from the peace treaty by his predecessor’s indifferences.

  Mr. Eddy was at the door. “The White House just telephoned, sir. The President can see you anytime now.”

  “Have we a telephone?” asked Hay, who disliked the invention, not only for its dreadful self but for its potential threat to his beloved Western Union.

  “Oh, yes,” said Adee. “We are very modern over here. We have one in our telegraph office. Personally, I hear nothing at all when I put it to my ear. But others claim to hear voices, like Joan of Arc. There’s also one in the White House, in what was the President’s war-room.”

  “Surely, the President doesn’t, personally, use that… that menacing contraption?”

  “He says that it is addictive.” Adee was judicious. “He says that he enjoys the knowledge that he can always hang up when he is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear, and then he can pretend that the connection was broken by accident.”

  “The Major has become guileful.”

  “He’s a successful war-leader. It is inevitable,” said Mr. Adee. “Shall I walk you over to the mansion?”

  Hay shook his head. “No, I’ll go alone. I need to arrange my thoughts, such as they are.”

  “What to do with the Philippines?”

  “Above all.” Hay sighed. “We must decide, and soon.”

  Hay stepped out into the dim high-ceilinged corridor, where a single policeman stood guard. Usually, the State Department was one of the most tranquil, even somnolent, of the government’s ministries, on the order of Interior, where, barring the rare excitement of the odd Indian war, a man could sleep his way through the life of an administration, or get a book written. But since the events of the summer, new translators had been added to the State Department, and the slow stream of paper into and out of Mr. Mullett’s masterpiece was now engorged.

  Hay was greeted respectfully by numerous functionaries whose functions were as unknown to him as their persons. But he pretended to recognize everyone, the politician’s trick, with a raise of an eyebrow if the face looked remotely familiar, a bob of the head if not; geniality was the politician’s common tender.

  Outside, in Pennsylvania Avenue, Hay was pleased at the absence of journalists. He was not expected until the next day, when he would take the oath of office. For now, no one paid the slightest attention to him except an old black man who was pushing a cart that contained everything needed for the sharpening of knives, the repair of scissors. They had seen each other for years in the street. After a solemn greeting, the old man said, “I didn’t know you was living on this side of the road.”

  Hay laughed. “No. I’m still living there.” He pointed to the dark red brick fortress, all turrets and arches, where he and Adams, like two medieval abbots, lived. “But I’m working here now.”

  “What sort of work they do in there?” The old man was genuinely curious. “I watched them building the thing. They say it’s, oh, just government, when I asked.”

  “Well, that’s what it still is. Remember the old State Department Building there?” Hay pointed roughly to what was now a section of the huge gray-stone Treasury Building which nicely obstructed any view of the Capitol from the White House.

  The old man nodded. “I can still see Governor Seward, with that big nose of his and those baggy pants, going back and forth across the road here, with this big cigar all the time.”

  “Well, I’ve taken his place, and now we do in here what he used to do in that little shack.”

  “Everything keeps getting bigger,” said the old man, without much pleasure. “This was a real small town back then.”

  “Well, now it’s a real small city,” said Hay, and continued on his way. He was pleased to note that the brilliant pains in his lower back had migrated to his left shoulder, where they gave him less dazzling discomfort. For an instant, a particle of an instant, John Hay remembered what it was like to be young, as he walked up the familiar semi-circular driveway to the north portico of the White House where, thirty-three years earlier, he had been Lincoln’s “boy” secretary. Somehow or other in the blurred interval between then and now, a generation had come and gone, and quick-stepped boy had changed to slow-moving man.

  In front of the portico Hay paused; and looked up at what had been the window to the office that he had shared with the first secretary, John G. Nicolay; and half-hoped to see his own young self, with dashing new moustaches, look out the window at his future self, with… disgust, Hay decided, accurately. He had not, like so many old men, forgotten the boy that he had once been. The boy was still alive but locked up for good-or life, anyway-in an aging carcass.

  The head doorkeeper, one Carl Loeffler, was waiting for Hay; plainly, the te
lephone wire between White House and Mullett’s masterpiece was in good working order. “Mr. Secretary, sir.” The stocky German-in Hay’s day, only Hibernians were entrusted with the door-showed Hay into the entrance hall where the enormous, even astonishing, Tiffany screen, a fantasy of stained glass and intricate leading, rose from tessellated floor to ornately stuccoed ceiling, the gift of that most elegant of all presidents, Chester Alan Arthur, who had dared to do what other presidents had wanted to do but dared not. He had put up a screen in order to hide the state apartments, the Red, Blue and Green Rooms, from the eyes of the multitudes who came to do business with the President, whose office and living quarters were still, as in Lincoln’s day, on the second floor, and reached by a shabby old staircase to the left of the entrance. Hay noted that the heavy dark wood railing was more than ever shiny with sweat, from the nervous hands of office-seekers. At present, a mere dozen political types were ascending, descending.

  As the head doorkeeper showed Hay up the staircase, he said, “Mr. McKinley’s in his office,” as if the President might have been in the boiler room. Suddenly, with wonder, Hay realized that he had not walked up this particular staircase since Lincoln’s time. Although he had been assistant secretary of state under President Hayes, he had never been summoned to the President. So, accompanied by a lifetime of ghosts, not least among them his youthful self, Hay stepped out into the long corridor that bisected the second floor from the offices at the east end, where he now was, and the living quarters at the west. The oval library, a no-man’s-land in the middle, followed the oval shape of the Blue Room directly beneath. The Lincolns had used the upstairs oval as a sitting room; other presidents had used it as an office.

  The corridor was much the same; but the world was different. Where once there had been new gas-lamps, there were now electric lights, with dangling wires crisscrossing the shabby walls in every direction. Fortunately, the unlovely greenhouses did produce quantities of flowers and plants that were placed on every table and in every corner; as a result, the inevitable tobacco and whiskey smell of politicians was hardly detectable in that rose-crowded place, where efficient-looking, highly modern young men strode decisively, at least whenever they got near the reception room where the petitioners gathered daily. The effect of a swift-moving modern office was somewhat undone by the floor, which not only shook with every step but vibrated whenever a streetcar passed. Termites, Hay thought; and knew that he had come home.

  Hay entered his old office, with its view-now of Hay’s own house across Pennsylvania Avenue. But instead of his own young self, he was greeted, somewhat to his disappointment, by George B. Cortelyou, the President’s second secretary. “Mr. Hay!” Cortelyou was in his forties; a short-haired, short-moustached, straight-featured, short man. McKinley, in an uncharacteristic move, had hired a Connecticut swell named Porter as secretary. But Porter had proved disastrously inept, and so McKinley had, with characteristic tact, turned over Porter’s duties to Cortelyou, managing to offend no one. “Can’t tell you, sir, how happy-how relieved-I am that you’re here and that it’s-well, it’s you.”

  “Your predecessor?” Hay indicated the office. “I always sat back to the window. The stove was there. I see you’ve got a steam radiator. This place gets cold in winter.”

  “I often think of you in this room, sir. And Mr. Nicolay across the way.”

  “Do you, really?” Hay could not believe that those two young men of long ago were remembered by anyone, except their aging, ailing selves. Nicolay was often ill these days. Fortunately, he had a small pension from his days as marshal of the Supreme Court; and there was still income from the various Lincoln books that, together with Hay and separately, he was involved in.

  “I particularly thought of you during the war this summer. The scale was different from your war, naturally, but…”

  Hay nodded. “The anxieties are always the same. You never know when you start where and how you’ll end.”

  “You were lucky, sir. So were we. So far.” Cortelyou led Hay out into the corridor. “We’ve changed a lot of things around since your day. In fact, since Mr. Cleveland was here. The secretary-Mr. Porter, that is-has the comer office at the end there, and the President has the middle office. Then there’s the Cabinet room, which connects with the oval library. Only the President can’t put up with the crowds, so he’s moved out of his office, which we now use for the visitors, and into the Cabinet room, where he camps out, he says, quite comfortably, at one end of the Cabinet table.”

  “How is Mr. McKinley?”

  “He’s weary, sir. The pressures are very great from the Hill…”

  “The Senate…?”

  “The Senate. On top of that he’s developed eye-strain; can’t read small print, has headaches. He also doesn’t get enough exercise, but I tell him that that’s his fault. He used to ride. But now he doesn’t.” Cortelyou stopped at the dark mahogany door to the Cabinet room. A doorkeeper stood guard. Cortelyou signalled the man to open the door.

  Cortelyou stood in the doorway and said, “Mr. President, Colonel Hay is here.” Then Cortelyou shut the door behind Hay, who crossed what had been, in his day, the Reception Room to the long table at whose end, beneath an elaborate bronze lighting fixture, stood William McKinley, a man of medium height with a large full smooth-shaven face and an equally large high firm paunch contained by an elegant white piqué waistcoat. The frock-coat was open, as if to frame the splendidly clothed, curved belly; in the presidential lapel a dark red carnation glowed like some exotic foreign order. The entire effect was impressive; and highly agreeable. McKinley’s smile was always directed at the person to whom he was speaking and not set in permanent place by grim necessity. As Hay shook hands, he stared for a moment into the large, marvellously expressive-but of what other than generalized good will?-eyes, and, suddenly, for no reason at all, Hay recalled that as Lincoln had been the first bearded president, McKinley was now the first clean-shaven one in a generation. Why, Hay wondered, had he thought of that? In his place, Adams would be drawing some vast historical Plutarchian distinction between two paragons while all Hay could think of was beards; and hair coloring. The President, he noted, did not dye his thin graying hair, unlike Hay, who had recently taken to using some of Clara’s Special Gentlelady’s Henna, with a reasonably authentic result. Clara claimed that he still wanted to be the youth he had been rather longer than most men; and Clara was right.

  “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 horn 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.