by Gore Vidal
During filming, Tim had been fascinated by the gap between what interested the inventors of the news and the public itself, which largely ignored all the political medicines and cure-alls on offer in glossy magazines. But then something startling would always have to happen—like flying across the Atlantic alone—before the public finally registered a new name. Even the master of the news, Roosevelt himself, came and went in the public’s fickle consciousness.
For Tim, a Wall Street businessman from Indiana seemed like the last person on earth that the people would turn to if war came, and he was now certain that the United States was being carefully positioned to be not only the so-called Arsenal of Democracy but a provider of shock troops as well. Paris had just fallen. England was now under siege; and here he was in St. Paul, Minnesota, checking into the Lowry Hotel, the heart of the heartland, someone had said—as a joke?
“He’ll be speaking here in the ballroom,” said Cowles, “at eight.”
The crew went about their work of setting up; made no easier by the presence of a proprietary radio team from CBS. “We’ve bought a half hour of radio time tonight.” Cowles and Tim sat at the back of the seedy ballroom.
“Five hundred seats,” said Cowles, looking at the forlorn rows of folding wood chairs. “Empty … for now.”
Tim was amused. “Well, that’s my business, too. Getting people to pay to sit in chairs so that they can look up at shadows on a screen for two hours.”
“It isn’t easy, is it?”
“No. It’s not. Why Willkie?”
“Energy. Intelligence.”
“There’s always a lot of energy on tap, and even intelligence.”
“He’s self-made. He reads everything. He’s … well, every now and then you meet someone who’s sort of like an electric eel. You know?”
“I’ve never met one. Does he give you a shock?”
Cowles sighed. “Not the best analogy. But, yes, he does. In a way. Wakes you up.”
“Isn’t he really a Democrat?”
Cowles shrugged. “He was until a year or so ago. But that’s not a problem. Not these days. Because of the war, everybody’s shifting around. Some very strange politics are going on these days.”
They were joined by a dapper gray man in a pinstripe suit who seemed of no particular age; the result, Tim had observed in certain actors, of having gone bald early in life, thus minimizing facial lines while the camera—that is, the eye—is distracted by a quantity of smooth scalp and so settles for an illusion of youth.
“Mike.” The newcomer addressed Cowles by his nickname; cast a curious eye at Tim; sat down in the row just in front of them.
“Just can’t stay away from St. Paul, can you?”
“The bracing sea breezes are a tonic, I must admit.”
Cowles introduced his cousin Tom Lamont to Tim, who wondered why the name sounded familiar. Cowles explained Tim’s film to Lamont, who asked intelligent questions: “Mustn’t seem too one-sided, of course,” he murmured as Tim’s lighting man short-circuited his klieg light in a blaze of blue flame, prompting a series of oaths which the technicians from CBS Radio merrily cheered.
Tim hurried to join his crew. New lighting was again improvised. Inevitably, Tim found himself working against the clock. Nothing was ever easy on location. He also hoped that he was not wasting his time with this mysterious political invention of the Eastern press. Mysterious because in the matter of war or peace, they already had Roosevelt, a president preparing in his circuitous way for war. Why did the magnates want to divide the President’s vote with what was bound to be a far less resonant echo of the real thing?
Cowles then invited Tim to join his brother John and Mr. Lamont to share the blue-plate special at a nearby diner while the hotel lobby began to fill up with the evening’s audience, curious to see the latest political phenomenon if Time, Life, Fortune, Look, and the New York Herald Tribune were to be believed.
“It’s easier to get one of us to stop the isolationists,” said Cowles, “than for Mr. Roosevelt to get Republicans to switch over to the party of the New Deal.”
“But one way or the other, if Wendell is nominated, we’re covered,” said John Cowles. “That’s the point, really. Isolationists will all stay home come November.”
“But if he’s not nominated?” Tim had decided that the self-effacing Mr. Lamont was the leader—the warlock of this coven. Caroline’s image had stayed with him.
“It could be very hard for England.” Lamont separated a hamburger from its bun with a knife and fork, like a practiced surgeon making a first incision. “Dewey is an isolationist, if he’s anything—an unanswerable question. Taft is a zealot. Vandenberg drifts along with the majority …”
“Which is isolationist.”
Tim had discovered that the one thing that did not work with these highly suspicious and often surprisingly subtle nobles was polite agreement. They were more at ease with opposition. In defense of their case, they became ingenious in argument.
“So the polls tell us,” said John, with a secret smile.
“Ours or theirs?” Mike’s laugh was hardly secret.
It was Lamont who chose ingenuity. “The great imponderable at the convention—aside from our man if he takes off in the next four or five weeks—will be Mr. Hoover.”
Apparently the Cowles brothers were not prepared for this piece of news. Each said the same thing: “You’re not serious.”
“I may not be serious but President Hoover is very serious about being nominated again and then beating the man who beat him eight years ago. Hoover can still rally a lot of Republicans who went over to Roosevelt and are now ready to come back, just to stay out of war.”
It had never occurred to Tim to film Hoover and now it was too late. He only hoped Lamont was wrong. The return of Herbert Hoover to the presidency would be a macabre miracle on the order of the raising of Lazarus, and to have missed it in his film … His mouth had gone dry.
Two state troopers appeared in the doorway of the diner. All eyes turned on them as the diner’s owner hurried forward to greet the tall blond young man they were escorting.
“His Excellency the Boy Governor of Minnesota.” Mike Cowles rose, as did the rest of the table. Harold M. Stassen was now headed towards them while his two guards stationed themselves back of the table, eyes on the door to the diner, where who knew how many assassins lurked.
“Harold!” The Cowles brothers were amiable, Mr. Lamont polite, rather like the ambassador from some minor power, trying not to be noticed at a great powers conference. As Harold Stassen warmly shook Tim’s hand, he confided: “You know that movie of yours, Hometown, was probably the single decisive factor in my going into politics.”
Tim shyly acknowledged the thrill of having inadvertently made so large a contribution to history. Actually, as Stassen was now thirty-three, he could very well have been influenced by a movie that, Tim liked to say, had gone from box-office failure to classic without an intervening success. Such films often haunted the imagination of those who saw them at an impressionable age. Tim had felt the same when he saw D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, vowing that not only would he make films himself one day, but he would never allow himself to get involved in such a gorgeously haunting mess.
Stassen sat between the Cowles brothers and showed them the text of his introduction. “Only five minutes,” he said. “Radio time is expensive. I realize that.” Tim slipped away, aware, as was everyone who read Time, Life, Fortune, and Look, that he had been, for a moment, in the company of the next president but two or, perhaps, the more cynical politicians said, three. Stassen was a true political miracle, everyone agreed, and the same age, Tim noted with a flash of Holy Cross piety, as our Lord when He was crucified.
The ballroom was full; the heat was intense and the largely Scandinavian audience sweated rather more, Tim thought, than did leaner Mediterranean types.
The stage was poorly lit but, Tim decided, the lack of clear definition might make the point
that here was something slapdash and unprofessional—like the candidate.
Tim stood just back of the proscenium arch, maintaining eye contact with his cameraman in the center aisle, on a rickety wooden stand above the audience.
Governor Stassen was introduced. Boyish but statesmanlike; he shone like a figure out of some obscure Norse legend as he took his cue from the CBS radio director down front and began his speech. Then, out of the shadows of backstage, appeared Wendell Willkie, clutching a speech. Tim had the sense that he had seen him before until he realized that, by now, there had been so many thousands of pictures of Willkie that he must have seemed entirely familiar to everyone who read glossy magazines. Dark curly hair was cut in farm-boy style, one lock carefully trained to fall over his right eyebrow, pale blue eyes set in a round face; ingratiating smile punctuated by a Lincolnesque mole; only an exaggerated amount of jowl attached to a square Prussian jaw suggested that its owner was no stranger to fiery waters; he was also very much what was politely known as a lady’s man if all—or even some—of the rumors that Tim had heard were true. Willkie was exactly Tim’s age, forty-eight. He was also ten years older than his closest rival, Thomas E. Dewey. The Grand Old Party was uncommonly rich in boys this season while all the Democratic leaders were visibly aging, their famous faces etiolated from too much exposure to too many flashbulbs.
“I hate this shit.” Willkie’s Indiana accent was as countrified as his haircut.
“Campaigning?”
Willkie held up his speech. “No. Having to read a speech. I’ve never been able to. Never. I warned Mike. But … oh, this is Russell Davenport, Mr. Farrell.” Willkie was not yet a professional politician but he had all the right instincts: he had got Tim’s name right. Davenport was tall and rather opulent-looking, as befitted the editor of a magazine called Fortune. “The speech,” he said in a grave cultured voice, befitting the secretary of state in a Willkie Cabinet, “is very good.”
Tim moved around the curtain. He had told his crew to take their cue from the CBS director, who was now holding up five fingers—each one a second—as Stassen plunged into his peroration, filling the airwaves with his vision of a golden America, of a joyous future with freedom and democracy for absolutely everyone in the Republican Party.
Beside Tim, Willkie took a deep breath; then, on exhalation, he whispered, “Oh, shit,” again, and as the applause began and Stassen stood back from the lectern, the bearlike Wendell Willkie lumbered firmly into Stassen’s place. He was not, Tim noted, in the least nervous. Even Roosevelt’s hands sometimes shook but the smiling Willkie, as he now sailed into American history, seemed quite aware of an audience that plainly liked what they saw. But they did not like what they then heard. Willkie read as badly as he had predicted. The agreeable croak of his voice, so unlike the usual politician’s mellow sales pitch, started early to go wrong as he missed words, split sentences in two, stumbled from line to line.
Tim wondered how anyone could have thought that this blunderer might begin to compete with the master in the White House whose vast depths of benign insincerity could never be entirely plumbed by any mere mortal.
Willkie’s glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose by the time the CBS director made the throat-cutting gesture that signaled the end of the torture. “I thank you,” snarled Willkie.
“We’re off the air,” said the CBS director, his back to the stage. The soundmen gathered up their equipment. The audience applauded perfunctorily while rising to escape the overheated hall not to mention the dire speaker. In the wings opposite, the Cowles brothers were talking intently to Stassen, who was shaking his thick pink boyish head.
But Willkie, instead of leaving the stage, removed his glasses, took off his jacket, and draped it over the lectern. Then he picked up his speech and hurled it out over the audience. As the offending pages floated in the air, he stretched his arms wide like a bear coming out of hibernation. “Well, that’s that, ladies and gentlemen. As you could hear, that was all spinach. Now that we’re off the air we can really talk.” He stepped back from the lectern while the astonished audience sat down.
Tim waved to his cameraman to keep recording.
“So I can talk straight to you without all that damn fine language I have to use for radio.”
“Thanks, Wendell,” said Davenport, sourly.
“Your language?” Tim was amused.
“Yes. So, now what is he going to do? He has no text and the wire services are all out there.”
They didn’t have long to wait. Willkie began to prowl the stage from left to right and back again, keeping sharp eye contact with section after section of the audience.
“Now you know and I know that we’ve got to get rid of that bunch in Washington—and we’ve got to do it soon. This November, in fact.” There was a sharp round of applause.
As Willkie paced up and down the stage, he attacked the New Deal; the President’s Machiavelli, Harry Hopkins; the arrogance of bureaucrats. One by one he struck at everyone and everything that this audience most hated. But on the one great issue, war or peace, he was both blunt and sly.
“Every time Mr. Roosevelt damns Hitler and says we ought to help the democracies in every way we can short of war, we ought to say: ‘Mr. Roosevelt, we double-damn Hitler and we are all for helping the Allies, but what about the sixty billion dollars you’ve spent and the ten million persons that are still unemployed?’ ”
The hall erupted. Shouts. Rebel yells. Cheering. Even Tim felt the force of the man’s … character? Or was it art?
Willkie had now pulled the unreluctant Boy Governor from the wings. He thanked him for his introduction. Congratulated him on his potential greatness, so plain to all. He laid it on. Then, sweat streaming into his eyes, the deceptive lock of hair plastered to his right eyebrow, he declared in a voice that needed no amplifier: “I can think of no one better than you for the job you’ve just been given, which is to make the keynote address at our convention in Philadelphia next month. You speak for our country’s youth, which means you speak for tomorrow as well as for today. But I warn you, if you attempt to put the party on record as saying that what is going on in Europe is none of our business, then we might as well fold up!”
A huge breaking sound wave from the applause caused both men to step backward. Then Willkie, with a wave to the crowd, marched offstage, hands upheld, like a winning boxer after a knockout. Safe in the wings, he croaked to Davenport, “Bottle of whiskey.”
In Willkie’s suite a contented postmortem was taking place. The hero was reducing his adrenaline level with alcohol while the Cowles brothers, Lamont, and Davenport discussed the coming schedule, which, Tim could see, was being expanded to take in the whole country “with,” as Mike Cowles said, “no written speeches.”
“Swell.” Willkie’s voice was coming back. He drank bourbon neat.
Davenport reminded the brains trust that there would have to be written speeches to give to the press, otherwise the candidate’s progress would go unnoticed by the public.
Willkie agreed. “You write them and you hand them out to everyone except me. All I need to know is the general drift of what you’ll be handing out.”
Davenport was clearly not happy but he was outvoted.
Lamont turned to Tim. “You …?
“I plan to intercut him with FDR.”
Lamont smiled a very thin smile. “Why not? The new champ and the old. Would the studio … is it MGM?”
Tim nodded.
“… Object if I got Harry Luce to use some of this film from tonight in his newsreels? You know, those March of Time things that he does?”
Tim told Lamont to whom he must apply for footage. Lamont made a note.
Willkie waved to Tim. “We can do an interview now,” he said.
“No.” Davenport was abrupt. “It’s too late.”
“I’m afraid my crew’s gone,” said Tim. “Union hours.” He had now remembered where he had seen Willkie before. At Laurel House on the Potomac Riv
er, somewhat the worse for what he had drunk, while a woman—his wife?—tended to him.
“You said I could get nominated if I got out and fought for it.” Willkie addressed the brothers. “Well, this is the first round.”
“You won it,” said John Cowles.
“But it’s a big country,” said Mike. “A lot more rounds.”
“Roosevelt’s too nervous.” Willkie was still caught up in his recent performance. “That Minnesota crowd tonight is about as isolationist as you can get, but they’re scared of Hitler now. They’re ready to go arm real fast. I could hear them. Feel them.”
“But they aren’t ready to go fight in France like last time.” Davenport was there to dash cold water on the newborn overheated demagogue.
“What will happen will happen. For now we’ve got to help England hold off Hitler and FDR is just dithering. Wish he’d been out here tonight. He’s out of touch.” Tim was amazed at how quickly a Wall Street public utilities lawyer could become an entire nation personified. But then, perhaps, something in him had connected with something in the audience. After all, he was closer than FDR to the average Midwesterner because he was born one while the President was always the Hudson Valley lord of the manor, speaking kindly, even wisely, but always speaking down to an electorate that needed his guidance as he, apparently, needed theirs, which he demonstrated by his reliance on polls rather more than on their official representatives in the Congress.
“They know out there. They know that France and England are our first line of defense. If Hitler beats them, we’re next. We’ve got to shore up the Allies, every possible way.” He drank from the bottle; seemed to get more rather than less sober. “Short of declaring war on Germany, that is.” Davenport sighed his relief.
