The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “Yes. An improvement, I’d say, on the ice princess from the Aurora Borealis.”

  Hopkins chuckled. “How you girls all took against Her Nordic Majesty! Anyway, there was a White House lunch for some of Eleanor’s lame ducks. But Eleanor was in New York that morning and the staff didn’t know how to arrange the seating, so Louise did it. Then Eleanor arrived just before the guests. Blew up at Louise for meddling. Redid the seating while Louise and I made arrangements to take a place in Georgetown.”

  “She is simply jealous?”

  “Of Louise?”

  “Of you.” Caroline recalled Eleanor’s confession to her. “Jealous of all the people that she loves, or so she told me once. I’m surprised that never occurred to you.”

  “How could it? I never counted on anyone loving me, which is why I’ve always made myself so useful …”

  “For which you were ever so greatly loved. At least by the Roosevelts.”

  There was a long pause. The bulging eyes nearly filled their dark sockets. “I’m glad you came. Actually, if I weren’t so busy dying, I’d be bored to death. Here I am back in New York, seeing the same social workers and trade union people that I escaped from thirty years ago. Full circle.” He sighed. “Full circles make zeroes, don’t they? And zero’s nothing.”

  Caroline put her hands on his cold bony one and steered the conversation away from those dark waters where monsters lurked. “Do you see much of Truman?”

  Hopkins shrugged. “A nice little man. Way out of his league. I wanted Wallace or Douglas but the Boss had to be reelected and Truman made the old-line Democrats happy.”

  “Surely Roosevelt knew he was picking the next president.”

  “No one believes he’s really dying. Oh, you accept the possibility while you’re alive and you live with it until you’re dead because waiting isn’t really your problem anymore. But I do think the Boss might have given him a course in foreign affairs. Harry knows nothing. Nothing at all. He didn’t know about the atomic bomb until the day he became president.”

  “Do you think Franklin would have used it the way Truman did?”

  Hopkins shrugged. “Who knows? Probably not. After all, the Japanese were ready to surrender—unconditionally. Of course, the Boss was secretly working on a special condition to their unconditional surrender. He was willing to keep the Emperor on, to stabilize the country.”

  “The left hand never knew what the right was up to.”

  “He was a master. Harry’s a muddler. Henry Wallace says Harry will agree with you before you’ve actually said what you mean. Then he’ll go around telling everyone he gave you hell. Now it looks like he wants to give Stalin hell. That’s bad news. The Boss was always willing to treat Stalin in a normal way. As the head of the other great world power. That’s why Stalin trusted him, to the extent Russians ever trust anybody. Then Harry goes off to Potsdam and starts to renege on every agreement we made at Yalta. All because he’s got the atomic bomb and they don’t. So we’re going to have a very expensive arms race and trouble everywhere.”

  A nurse came into the room with several newspapers. “Mrs. Hopkins gave me orders you were not to see the papers today …”

  “And you disobeyed her! Good girl.”

  “Oh dear,” said the nurse and left the room.

  “What shouldn’t you see?”

  Hopkins held up the New York Times. Caroline saw the headline: Pearl Harbor Inquiry.

  “The shoes keep on falling, don’t they?”

  Hopkins grunted, glanced at the front page. “Congress has been at this since November. I’ve offered to testify. But …” He pointed, somewhat incongruously, at the Renoir. “The doctors won’t let me up, much less out.”

  “We’re covering it at the Tribune.”

  “I know.” He held up the Tribune. “It’s a pity so many of us aren’t able to tell our side of the story. The Boss is dead …”

  “And Grace Tully won’t hand over the files.”

  “Why should she? And Knox is dead. Stimson’s ill. And I’m living it up here in Memorial Hospital.”

  “Stimson refused to be cross-examined.”

  “Happily, he was born senile.”

  “What would he have to fear? Three Democrats, who will say that the attack was a total surprise, and two Republicans who disagree.”

  “That’s the advantage of our controlling Congress.” He let the newspapers drop. “The only problem might come from some maverick in our own party.”

  “Why not just tell the truth?” Caroline hadn’t meant to be so blunt.

  “I think we have, more or less. The Boss is guilty of only one thing. He kept saying they must strike the first blow. That was his order because he knew that if we hit first, our isolationists would say he had started the war. So in spite of all the information we had about their plans, he held back, and waited and waited until …” Hopkins was out of breath.

  “I’m sure that is a truth. But there are other truths—aren’t there?”

  “The only truth that matters is we won the war. If we win the peace, whatever that means, we’ll have all the cards including the nuclear one, so who cares why it took fifteen hours for General Marshall to warn the commanders in Hawaii. Anyway, the General’s a saint in khaki, according to the Tribune.”

  “That was Blaise. But why did Marshall wait so long? And then why did he send his warning by commercial Western Union and not by scrambler telephone?”

  “For want of a nail a shoe was lost.” Hopkins was suddenly in better mood. “Anyway, Marshall hates politics. So he won’t have to worry about what people will say when he’s busy not running for president in ’48.”

  “Who will run?”

  “Harry, if he can get through the next couple of years. If he doesn’t, Ike will. He’s a Republican, by the way. He told me that he voted against Roosevelt the first three times but …” Hopkins shut his eyes; gathered his strength. Eyes still shut, he said, “Funny thing. When I got back this time from Moscow, I reported, like always, to the President. I said Stalin was in friendly mood, which he was. Truman was suspicious, of course. He only sees hawks like Acheson and Marshall. Particularly Acheson, who wants to go to war as soon as possible. So I said, ‘Mr. President, you must learn to see things from the other side’s point of view.’ Truman stood up, took my hand, and said, ‘I want to thank you, Harry, for everything you’ve done for me and for the country for so long.’ ” Hopkins’ voice broke. “I had to go into that little room off the office, to pull myself together. When I came back, he said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘In all these years no president of the United States has ever said thank you to me.’ ” Hopkins opened red eyes, filled with tears.

  “Caroline!” It was the handsome Louise Hopkins at the door.

  “Dear Harry.” Caroline patted Hopkins’ hand and turned to greet Mrs. Hopkins at the door. “I hope I didn’t tire him out. We were talking about the Pearl Harbor Investigation.”

  Mrs. Hopkins frowned. “That should get his blood pressure up.”

  “Good thing since I don’t have any.” Hopkins waved, merrily, at Caroline. “Remember what Harry Truman said: ‘The country is as much to blame as any individual for what happened at Pearl Harbor.’ ”

  “You wrote that for him?”

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no more lies.”

  Mrs. Hopkins glared at Caroline, who smiled—compassionately, she hoped—and went. It was not until she was in the corridor following an anesthetized body on a rolling trolley that she started to wonder how on earth the American people, in their carefully nurtured ignorance, could have been responsible for an attack provoked by a governing class whose first principle was never to inform them of anything that might have to do with their welfare.

  2

  Peter and Aeneas Duncan were met at the door by James Burden Day, more than ever like an Old Testament prophet save for his still winning public man’s smile.

  “You could come, after all,” he said.
“I’m glad you found the time.” He led them into the garden room. Grapes from the adjoining loggia had begun to ferment on the ground.

  “It smells like a brewery in here. Kitty’s upset about the birds eating the grapes. It seems they’re drunk all the time.”

  They sat, with a view of the Senator’s woods, leaves bright red and yellow in October light.

  Peter felt obliged to make some comment about Clay. “He seems to have a good lead in what looks like a Republican year.”

  Burden nodded. “I’m going out for a two-week swing of the state. Might do him some good.” Peter wondered what it was in Clay that made him everyone’s ideal son or, as he put it another way to himself, why was it that he himself was no one’s son? No father figure, ever, in his life, starting with Blaise. When he had remarked on this to Diana, she had said, with her patented smile aslant, “Maybe you’re like Napoleon. When he was asked if he was descended from the noble Buonaparte family of Florence he said, ‘I am not a descendant. I am an ancestor.’ ”

  “I read your magazine faithfully,” said Burden. “You always come up with something no one else dares print.”

  “We are not very popular in a lot of places.” Aeneas Duncan was now opening his briefcase.

  “That’s all to the good, I’d say. We’ve got far too many secrets these days.”

  Peter’s face was suddenly hot. One secret—if true—was that Burden Day might have taken a bribe from an oil company. “We’ll leave this one to Drew Pearson,” he had told Aeneas. “Don’t tell Diana.”

  “You say, sir, you have new material on what happened at Pearl Harbor?” Aeneas withdrew a sheaf of papers from the briefcase.

  Burden nodded. “We should have started our own Senate investigation the day after Pearl Harbor but FDR was too quick for us, setting up his own board of inquiry with all their whitewash.”

  Aeneas carefully arranged documents side by side on a coffee table: each equidistant from the other just like, Peter thought, morbidly, the sunken ships that had been berthed all in a row at Pearl Harbor. “He—or they, to be exact, have had a lot of time to suppress evidence.” Aeneas tapped a folder. “A rear admiral named Leigh Noyes was ordered to hide or destroy all the coded Japanese diplomatic and military intercepts. Ostensibly, we didn’t want the enemy to know that we had broken their codes. But it is my theory, in dealing with our government, that the enemy invariably knows all our secrets—like the making of the nuclear bomb—while it is the American people who must be kept in the dark.”

  Aeneas picked up another document. “As soon as Japan had surrendered, the Senate, quite rightly, set in motion the present investigation. You will see here,” Aeneas held up a somewhat smeared mimeographed sheet, “an order from Admiral King, placing every relevant document out of the Senate’s reach by describing it as top-secret. Any naval person, if he reveals any one of a million top secrets, is subject to imprisonment, loss of veterans’ benefits, and so on. They must honor, presumably until death, a secrecy oath that each has been obliged to take.”

  “But the joint committee has already been shown all sorts of Japanese coded messages—intercepts.”

  Aeneas replaced his blurred glasses with an even thicker pair. “What has been shown the committee are transcripts from what is called Code Purple. This was the diplomatic code used between Tokyo and its embassies in Washington and London and so on.”

  “So that’s what Owen meant!” Burden sat back in his chair.

  “Sir?” Aeneas was very much the respectful graduate student faced with an oral examination.

  “Senator Owen Brewster—a Republican but my only friend on the committee—told me that the War Department won’t produce anything to do with Pearl Harbor or with those … those …”

  “Intercepts from the Japanese fleet as they were preparing for war. Yes. Most of them are either destroyed or hidden away.”

  “How do we get our hands on what’s left?”

  “Sir, I am not the legislative arm of the republic. You are. The war is over. The Executive has no authority to withhold anything from the Legislative. After all, constitutionally, you financed the war. It’s your business if negligence is being covered up. Not to mention a policy of provocation.”

  Burden nodded. “That’s what we’re really after, isn’t it? I have been told that there exists the original Navy plan, to force Japan into attacking us.”

  “And then to blame the disaster on the Pearl Harbor commanders, who were kept in total ignorance of Washington’s game.”

  “Proof?”

  “There is so much.” Aeneas sounded weary, but then, as Peter knew, he had been working for more than a year with his various sources. Washington’s famed whispering gallery was always full of rumors, mostly conflicting, since different players want to disguise the nature of the games they play but, sooner or later, all things are revealed if one knows how to assemble the puzzle.

  “One indirect proof—a negative proof—is that the Navy has made unavailable to everyone, including Senator Brewster, anything to do with what actually happened at Pearl Harbor. Everything is under lock and key until 1995, by order of Admiral Noyes.”

  “A bit late for Owen and me.”

  “A bit late,” said Peter, “for the truth to make us free.”

  “The truth, more likely,” said Aeneas, “would get us imprisoned for treason or whatever they decide to trump up against the first whistle-blower.”

  There was a silence as all three stared at Aeneas’s “evidence,” spread out on the coffee table. Then Burden spoke, as if for the prosecution. “Every time Owen and the others speak of codes, the War Department refers only to the diplomatic codes. Is that right?”

  “Code Purple. Yes, sir. By October 1940, our cryptographers had broken that code. Simultaneously, we broke what is called the Kaigun Ango codes … twenty-nine naval codes. Every time the committee gets close to a naval code, the Navy produces Code Purple. For instance, we broke the Japanese Code Book D. This made our victory at Midway possible. Now, the Navy pretends it was actually the Purple Code that told us all we needed to know, which is nonsense.”

  “The President …”

  “As early as January 1941, Mr. Roosevelt was receiving full reports of Japanese naval movements in the Pacific. He continued to be kept informed right up until Pearl Harbor. I’m still working on the chronology. The Administration has already admitted that they expected a Japanese attack but not at Pearl Harbor, which is why they now say that they didn’t warn the local commanders. Yet at least twenty-four hours before the attack they knew that a large Japanese fleet was coming down from the North Pacific. It is also possible that they had known this for some weeks before. But I can’t penetrate the vaults of the Navy any more than the Senate can. Worse, my informants are terrified of being found out.”

  “Why then,” asked Burden, “do they inform?”

  “Why,” Aeneas was sharp, “did those German officers get themselves hanged for trying to kill Hitler?”

  Burden smiled bleakly. “Not an analogy that would have appealed to Franklin. Now I ask for no names.” Burden began to pace slowly up and down, past a series of paintings of his dry cactus-studded state. “I have a naval friend.”

  “I know,” said Aeneas. “Admiral Richardson.”

  “You said the name, not I.” Burden did not seem surprised.

  “It is my impression, Senator, that Richardson opposed the President’s policy of provocation and so was relieved as commander in chief of the United States Fleet.”

  “Your analysis, sir, not mine.” Burden was formal. “In the course of your investigation, Mr. Duncan, which is plainly considerably more thorough than that of Justice Roberts or Congress, have you come across a young officer who might have drawn up a plan? Of provocation?”

  “Yes, sir. I even worked with him, briefly, in Naval Intelligence. He was head of the Far Eastern Desk. I was on loan from Air Forces Intelligence. His name is Arthur McCollum.” Aeneas handed Burden a folder. “T
he plan of what you call ‘provocation’ is here, with some other relevant information.”

  Burden opened the folder. “Annapolis. Regular Navy. Born 1898 in Nagasaki, Japan. That’s ironic, I suppose.”

  “Parents were Baptist missionaries. McCollum speaks perfect Japanese. He says he taught the Crown Prince, now Emperor Hirohito, how to dance the Charleston. In due course Lieutenant Commander McCollum ended up here in Naval Intelligence as an authority on Japan. It would seem that his principal task, other than using his own first-rate intelligence for the service, was to act as liaison between the Navy and President Roosevelt. He did this from the beginning of 1940 up to Pearl Harbor. The President liked him. They also seemed to have come to an agreement since each believed the war with Japan was inevitable, why not provoke it at a time convenient to us.”

  Burden sighed. “Convenient!”

  “Well, sir, it is inconvenience that undoes Machiavelli.”

  “Nice,” said Peter.

  “I just made it up.” Aeneas smiled wanly. “It’s probably not true.”

  “If this is the same young man that my naval friend was referring to, did he ever draw up a … program for the President?”

  “Yes, sir. Eight points of provocation in a memo dated October seventh, 1940. The same month that we were breaking the Japanese codes. As far as I can tell, all copies—and there couldn’t have been many—have disappeared.”

  “Grace Tully must have one.”

  “So has McCollum, I should think. I worked out the contents from other documents currently missing from the open files.”

  Burden was looking at a page in the folder. “These eight points. From A to H …”

  “If acted upon, would require the Japanese to respond with an act of war.” Aeneas took back the folder; began to read.

  “ ‘A. Make an arrangement with Britain to use their Pacific bases, particularly Singapore. B. The same arrangement with the Dutch for the East Indies. C. Then more and more aid to Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland of Asia. D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Philippines. E. Send two divisions of submarines to the same area, possibly based at Singapore. F.’—this is what upset your naval friend—‘Keep the main Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor instead of San Diego.’ In order to tempt them—as I read it—to try for a knockout blow. When Admiral Richardson objected, the President fired him. ‘G. Oblige the Dutch to stop all sale of oil or anything else to Japan.’ Finally, H., which produced Mr. Hull’s memo of November twenty-ninth, 1941. We would embargo all trade with Japan if they did not withdraw from China, Manchuria, and so on. That did the trick. Since they could not accept this ultimatum, they blew up our fleet. So the eight-point plan did the trick.”