The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “Since he’s always been an isolationist, why would he take money to do what he’d have done anyway?”

  “This is Washington, Tim. Are any of Mrs. R’s Youth Congress kids on your list?”

  “One. But I haven’t seen him.”

  “I wouldn’t. Not now. They’re too mixed up with the communists, which means Russia. So they’ll be pro-Hitler for the next few months until Hitler double-crosses Stalin and starts his invasion of Russia and then Mrs. R’s kids will all have to switch again.”

  Tim was doing his best to absorb so many mind-boggling revelations. “Hitler, having just signed a pact with Russia, now plans to invade Russia?”

  “In the zoo, study your beast. Haven’t you read his book, Mein Kampf? It’s all in there. He gives the whole game away. But hardly anyone has ever got through the book, while the few who have read it never take him seriously. He tells just how he plans to carve up Russia. Enslave all the Slavs. Annex the Romanian oil fields, which he really needs. Get rid of all the Jews …”

  “How?”

  “However he can. He’s been selling a lot of German Jews to the West. But we’re not taking in as many as we should. I fear the worst. But people think I’m an alarmist to be alarmed by what is so plain to see. Anyway, thanks to some nice undercover work, Hitler won’t be invading Russia this summer as originally planned. He hadn’t figured on England and France going to war over Poland, so he’ll have to defeat them first. Then he’ll go after the real prize, Eastern Europe.” Again the amused smile. Tim wondered if Cuneo was making fun of him. Since September 1939 many scenarios had been prepared by various pundits but no one had yet sounded as positive, if not plausible, as this pudgy bald man who seemed to know everything as well as everyone.

  “You don’t think England and France can beat Hitler in a fighting war?”

  “No. England’s too small. England’s also broke. France is weak.

  With Blum they might have.… Anyway, let’s not indulge in what-might-have-been stuff. Without our help, money, ships, planes, information”—the last word he gave special emphasis to—“they’ll go down.” Cuneo was no longer smiling. He suddenly looked like the gangster Al Capone. “We need this film of yours to help with public opinion.”

  “So that the boys will enlist in the Army and follow Roosevelt into war?” Tim realized that he was being less than cool.

  “I know your inclinations are isolationist. Why not? Most Americans are, and you’re the recorder—if not the inventor—of a real America out there.” Cuneo knew Caroline well enough to have obtained a good blueprint of her onetime lover. “But we’ll be driven into this no matter what.”

  “In which case, Mr. Cuneo, why are you—and the British and all the others—swarming about Washington and Hollywood and the New York Times …?”

  “Our paper is the New York Herald Tribune.” Cuneo chuckled. “You’d think that the Times, with a Jewish owner, would be helpful but Sulzberger is afraid of not seeming to be ‘even-handed,’ as he calls it, so we rely on Mrs. Reid and the Tribune to get our views to the people.”

  “To the wealthy Anglophiles of New York, anyway—as Senator Borah would have said.”

  Cuneo crossed himself, eyes to the ceiling. “Heaven forbid that we are so elitist. Anyway we have Walter Winchell and Drew for the great public. Walter’s column is in a thousand papers. That’s twelve hundred words or more a day, six days a week. Then there’s his Sunday radio broadcast, which I also help with. Millions hear us.”

  “You do this for nothing?”

  “I do it for the President. Not to mention the lawsuits my clients get themselves into which I have to get them out of. Drew’s the worst. Walter sounds fierce when on the attack but basically he’s an actor. Drew is a believer. Drew’s righteous. Drew’s a killer.”

  Tim was impressed, the object of Cuneo’s exercise. But to what end? He asked; got an answer. “We need your help, that’s all.” Cuneo opened a briefcase on the banquette beside him. “Let’s see what your horoscope says. You don’t have to bother to give me your date and time of birth because I have it all here.” He was looking through a notebook. “Here we are. Sagittarius, Moon in the House of …” He muttered to himself. Then: “You will be unusually receptive to new ideas. Your native Sagittarian skepticism will quickly see through someone who is trying to influence you. That must be me.”

  “Probably.” Tim remained cool. “I’m not a believer in astrology, you know.”

  “Neither am I. But Hitler is, and so are most of the people who read Walter Winchell with moving lips. Also, a surprising number of politicians. Washington’s the city of clairvoyants. Life’s so uncertain for politicians.” Cuneo shut his notebook. “We’re syndicating nationally a distinguished Hungarian astrologist. Number one in his field. Hitler always reads him. Lately, our Magyar sees good things for us. Very good things.”

  “This stuff … works?” Tim was surprised.

  “Why not? Sort of like the polls, only not so tough to control. We have quite a time getting the good Dr. Gallup, when he polls our innocent folks, to ask our questions the right way.”

  Tim was now at home. Hollywood studios had been using polls for years and they knew that the way a question was asked predetermined the answer. Movies and politics were uncertain activities not, if possible, to be left entirely to dangerous chance.

  “We have some input with Elmo Roper’s poll. But that’s because his major client is Time, Life, Fortune magazines and Henry Luce is with us, at the moment. Roper says that sometimes he will do a poll to serve Harry’s interests only to find that Harry’s changed his mind and re-slants the poll. At Gallup we have a more discreet arrangement. We all think, Tim, that your picture could make quite an impression this spring.”

  “I certainly hope it will.…” Tim was uninformative. Cuneo chewed rather than smoked a fresh cigar.

  “The real figures—from Gallup and the rest—are not so good. For the Allies, that is.”

  Curious to see how Cuneo meant to play him, he played Cuneo. “Well, we’re an isolationist country, and since we got nothing out of the last war, why go that route again?” Tim used the familiar isolationist line.

  Cuneo nodded. “So why help England pull her chestnuts out of the fire again? I often coin memorable phrases. Actually, we got quite a lot out of that war. We got Prohibition and Al Capone and Brother Wilson’s war on the Bill of Rights, and then—the main feature—the Depression! Pretty good I’d say for a few months over in France during the off-season. You’re giving the isolationists a break, I hope?”

  “I have to. For a movie like this to work it can’t be one-sided. Can’t look to be one-sided.”

  “I love fair play!” Cuneo did a surprisingly accurate imitation of the President’s voice at its most richly ecclesiastical.

  Tim laughed in spite of himself. “Will he run this November?”

  “Well, if all goes as planned, yes, he’ll run for a third term and he’ll win.”

  “All what has been planned?”

  “First, we’ll have to take a good look at Hitler’s astrological chart for 1940. Our astrologist is busy working on it even as you and I do the Mayflower special breakfast tour of the world’s horizon. After all, Hitler can still be killed. We’ve even got a man standing by to do the deed. No Hitler no war, or maybe no war. And no war means Franklin will go home to Hyde Park, to his stamp collection, along with Judge Sam Rosenman, who will then write his memoirs for him, with some help from Harry Hopkins if he lives that long.”

  “But suppose Hitler survives?”

  “He’ll probably conquer most of Europe. I can’t think why he wants to. Imagine governing France! No one’s been able to do that since Napoleon, and he only did it by conquering Europe, for all of five minutes. Anyway, if England’s attacked, Franklin will do what no president’s ever done. He’ll run for a third term so as to save the world for freedom and democracy, not to mention for this and for that.” Cuneo was, Tim thought, a bit too blithe in
the face of so much catastrophic history.

  “So he’s already planning to run?”

  “If there’s war, yes. It’s all in a speech I wrote that was delivered July twenty-fifth, 1938, at Traverse City, Michigan, by Governor Frank Murphy. ‘Without Roosevelt in 1940,’ he trumpeted my notes, ‘we will be unprepared when Hitler invades—as he means to—the Western Hemisphere.’ Oh, it was a great speech. Played well in the press. Of course, poor Frank Murphy lost the election, but you can’t have everything, can you?”

  Tim had already written down the date and place and the name. Currently, Frank Murphy was a Roosevelt appointee to the Supreme Court. Was Cuneo lying? Or, more to the point, when exactly did he lie and when did he tell the truth?

  “You should talk to Jim Farley. By the way, I’m legal counselor to the Democratic Party. Farley’s sort of my boss, and he’s running hard for the nomination. Roosevelt’s convinced him he won’t run. Franklin does like to raise people’s hopes. Keep everybody off-guard. Farley, of course, would be hopeless as president.”

  Tim knew, as everyone did, that the postmaster general and patronage dispenser would be a particularly hopeless candidate because he was an Irish Catholic from the hated city of New York and nothing had changed in the nation since Al Smith, another New York Catholic, had gone down to a dismal defeat in 1928, thus propelling FDR into the governorship of New York, and subsequent glory. Cuneo mentioned one or two Democratic rivals Tim might want to talk to. Then he signed the check for their breakfast.

  “Not long ago, Walter Winchell came to town and he wanted to meet Drew Pearson. Two historic figures, you know. After all, their combined newspaper circulation reaches just about everyone on earth, or so the two boys like to think. Anyway, as their mutual legal adviser, I invited them here one morning, to my regular table. This table. Drew was nervous. Walter was full of jokes. Then I tactfully crept away. Well, the next day when I came in for breakfast, George here …” Cuneo gave the smiling waiter the signed bill. “… says, ‘Mr. Cuneo, you never saw such a performance as those two put on over which one was not going to pay that check! Finally, around noon, they got out all these nickels and dimes and pennies, piled them up on the table, and split the bill.’ ” Cuneo shook his head. “They make millions, those two misers!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card on which had been written a name and a New York City telephone number. “This fellow should be very interesting for you to talk to. Lively. Bright. He’s tied in with the Morgan Bank. He’s also on the executive board of Fight for Freedom …”

  “Another interventionist.” Tim was flat.

  “But with a difference. He’s heartland American.”

  “With the House of Morgan?”

  “Every house must have a heart, as the old ditty goes.” Cuneo rose. “If you like, keep in touch. I might be helpful with this. And with that, too. Now I’ve got to soothe Drew over there in the corner, cowering behind the palm tree.” They shook hands, then Cuneo crossed the room, greeting every other table, while a bemused Tim looked at the card in his hand. “Who the hell,” he said aloud, “is Wendell L. Willkie?”

  TWO

  1

  Caroline’s old office in the Tribune building had been kept exactly as it was when she had finally sold out most of her remaining shares in the newspaper to Blaise, with the understanding that even as a minor stockholder she would be considered, when she chose, what indeed she was: the creator of the modern Tribune, and its co-publisher. Blaise seemed more pleased than not to have her back, if only as a pipeline to the White House.

  On one wall there had been placed a map of Europe; each day, Harold Griffiths would move about different-colored pins to show the advance of the German armies across the Rhine and the retreat of the French and British armies toward the sea. Above the map there was a modernistic clock, first revealed at the World’s Fair in New York the previous summer. It told the hour in every one of earth’s zones as well as the dates. Thus far, it was May 10, 1940, in Washington, D.C.

  As Caroline entered the office, it was six p.m. in Saint-Cloud-le-Duc and noon in the District of Columbia; she noted that the Germans were deep into France itself. Harold was busy putting blue British pins in a diagonal line, running south of Belgium toward the English channel. “Well, the Maginot Line was impregnable after all,” he said, turning to face Caroline, who enjoyed his unrelenting good humor—even wit—as the world fell apart.

  “So it was.” Caroline sat in a leather armchair next to her elaborately carved Victorian desk, the property of the founder of the original Tribune back in the days of Andrew Jackson.

  “Clever of Hitler to just go around it and then come down from the north.” Griffiths sat beneath the map.

  “Why didn’t it occur to the French that he’d occupy Belgium and Holland first?” Caroline was genuinely puzzled. “No one ever thinks of the obvious, I suppose. Except a military genius.”

  “Genius!” Harold was contemptuous. “If I thought of it, anyone could. They simply don’t think of anything, and now who cares about French politicians?”

  But Caroline was apprehensive about her friend Léon Blum; he was a Jew, and if Hitler should … She put the thought out of her mind. France was still a world empire and a great military power. Hitler would be stopped, just as the Kaiser had been twenty years earlier. She saw it clearly: the fighting would drag on until the United States finally came into the war. Then trenches. Mud. Barbed wire. Poison gas. But could history repeat itself? For one thing, the speed with which the German tanks were moving through Europe was something new under the sun. She looked at the map. In April, in a few hours, Denmark had been overrun. Norway had taken a little longer. Now the Germans were approaching Paris as the defeated British troops raced for the English Channel and what would be, for the lucky ones, a most perilous voyage home.

  Caroline was now going through her in-box. The world may be afire, but social Washington never stopped its formal round as people arranged themselves each day in different houses to scheme, to pass on information, to advance who knew what astonishing causes. There was a telegram from Tim. He was in New York, cutting his film. He had decided “War or Peace?” was too portentous a title. What should he call it?

  “Where are the Italians in all this?” Harold asked the question that everyone was now asking. Mussolini had not gone, as expected, to the aid of his Berlin ally.

  “Don’t they always stay out until they know who is going to win? They are very sensible that way.” Caroline tried to recall exactly what it was that Italy had done in the Great War to get onto the winning side.

  “That’s what the British say about us.”

  “John Foster is endlessly tactless.”

  “That’s why they made him a diplomat. Did you hear what Lord Lothian told the press yesterday?”

  Caroline quite liked the unmistakably attractive if eccentric ambassador. “He said what they all say. England needs ships, planes, bullets but not men, which of course England does, particularly now.”

  Harold shook his head. “No. He said that at the press conference, the official one. Later, he held a second press conference which he began with ‘Well, boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your dollars we want.’ ”

  Blaise had shown Caroline a secret report from the American Treasury to the effect that Britain had lost one-fourth of its wealth and so could not even pay the interest on old loans from the United States; presently, England would default. If that were to happen …

  Blaise entered the room. “Chamberlain’s out. The King has sent for Winston.”

  Harold left the room.

  “Not Halifax?” Ever since the recent British military fiasco in Norway, Prime Minister Chamberlain’s days had been numbered. Caroline thought that he should have gone after the Munich meeting where he had failed to “appease” Hitler, with his brisk businesslike sellout of Czechoslovakia. As Chamberlain left the Munich Conference, wielding his umbrella like a shepherd’s crook for the cameras, Hitler was said to have
said, “If that old fool ever comes back here, I’m going to kick him down the stairs and jump up and down on his stomach in front of the Pathé news camera.” From the beginning of Hitler’s career, Caroline had noted with professional eye what a remarkable screen actor he was; certainly, for a professional rabble-rouser he had a surprising range of effects, including such delicate rhetorical instruments as irony and even not-so-bad jokes. Unfortunately, the West had not taken him seriously until too late. Only Blum had seen the coming danger, but the French were not a people who took well to being told anything that they did not already know. Caroline had watched the Bastille Day parade of 1939 from a friend’s Paris flat, and though it was made colorful by Moroccan and Senegalese troops, there were no latest-model tanks, only cavalrymen with curved sabers, guarding the open car in which the Premier, Daladier, glumly rode, unaware that in less than a year’s time Hitler himself would be able to drive through the streets of Paris. Caroline wished that she had had a premonition of things to come. But she had not been able to imagine the unimaginable. Besides, as of May 10, 1940, Paris was not yet occupied. A miracle could still light up the skies.

  “The government has left Paris.” Blaise was reading her mind. “No, I don’t know where your friend Blum is. We can’t even find the Premier. Last we heard from our man in Paris he was sticking close to the fleeing government, which means we’ve lost him, too, for the moment.” Blaise crossed to the map. Found a dot to the northwest of Paris, “Rennes? Is that where they are? The Associated Press is helpless. Hopeless.”

  Caroline then tried to ring Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. All overseas lines were busy. “Isn’t there someone we could radio?” She sat at her desk.