The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “I am. The South was quite an experience for me. I’m pretty well used to controversy. But not so used to having eggs lobbed in my direction. Harry Truman’s smear brigade has been working overtime.” He reached over to the desk; picked up a sheet of paper. “Latest Gallup poll says that fifty-one percent of the American people think the Progressive Party is run by communists.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Have you ever met an American communist who could run a shoe store? Of course, the few communists there are in the country are voting for me because they want peace between us and the Soviet while Truman wants confrontation, or worse. Now I’m not one to psychoanalyze public figures, but a half-blind mother’s boy is apt to have all sorts of complexes about trying to act like the way he thinks a tough boy would. When I was in the Cabinet, he always used to brag about how he had really told someone off but then you’d ask that someone what happened and you’d find Harry had been his usual affable, quick-to-please-the-customer self.”

  “But he did write you that tough letter, asking you to resign as secretary of commerce.”

  Wallace nodded. “That was truly out of character. Unless the rumors are true that he does a lot of letter-writing at night when he’s drinking and then, if he remembers the next day, he prowls around the White House looking for stamps; very hard to find stamps there, since the secretaries lock their desks. But if he does find a stamp he’ll mail the letter the next morning on his regular walk. I think that may have happened in my case. It was a … a low letter.”

  “Profane?”

  “No. More … Oh, full of phrases like ‘one hundred percent pacifists,’ ‘parlor pinks,’ and ‘soprano-voiced men of the Art Club,’ whatever that is, whoever they are. It was bar-room drunk’s sort of language. Anyway, when I got it, I rang him and I told him pretty firmly that this was not proper presidential behavior and neither of us must ever let the public see his handiwork. That was my mistake, I suppose.” Wallace shook his head wearily. “He agreed—he always agrees—and he asked me if I’d return the letter if he sent me a messenger. I said I would and I did. I also gave Harry a three-line note of resignation and that was that. He’s been really bad luck for this country.”

  “More than Roosevelt?”

  Wallace looked surprised. “I thought The American Idea was pro–New Deal.”

  “But then came Dr. Win-the-War.”

  Wallace nodded. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I fell out over that, as you know. While all the donkeys in the press and Congress were braying about the American century, I was talking about the age of the common man. The President—when I say the President I only mean Roosevelt—was divided on the subject. But he and I were agreed that there was no difference between us and the Soviets that couldn’t be worked out peacefully. Truman’s simply not up to the job. He plays to the jingoes. To the haters. To …”

  Wallace picked another piece of paper off the desk. “J. Edgar Hoover believes that one out of one thousand one hundred and eighty-four Americans is a communist. I wonder who did the counting for him? Anyway, I should doubt one in ten thousand has any idea what communism is. But since Harry has given us all these loyalty oaths and star chamber hearings where due process of law is chucked out the window, Hoover now sees his Federal Bureau of Investigation as another Gestapo with himself as Himmler. Well, I promise you that FDR, for all his faults, would not have got us onto the road to what can only turn out to be a fascist state.”

  “But he did give us Harry Truman.”

  “Yes. History will worry about that one, I suppose. The feeling against me was so strong that he …” Wallace stared out the window at a brick wall covered in dead ivy. He seemed to have lost his train of thought. “You know,” he said at last, “I had a very strange impression when we first really met. In 1932. At Warm Springs. He was looking for a secretary of agriculture and I was looking to be secretary of agriculture like my father before me.” He laughed. “I read how mystical, woolly-headed I am. Yet I am the first scientist to be a member of a president’s Cabinet. I’m a plant geneticist. I’m responsible for hybrid corn and, if I may boast in the Republican manner, I edited Wallace’s Farmer. I’ve met many a payroll and I built from nothing a multimillion-dollar business, while FDR couldn’t balance a checkbook. Fortunately, this didn’t stop him from being a political genius, unlike me.

  “You know, he used to filibuster when he was sizing people up. So when we were down in Georgia, supposed to be discussing agriculture, he started in on this long story of a treasure hunt that he’d had an interest in on some island off Nova Scotia. Well, he went on and on, probably the only subject—buried treasure—of absolutely no interest to me, and I kept wondering, what is this man all about? Was he preparing me with a parable? Perhaps he was, because the first thing he wanted to do was cut my department’s budget. I guess that was his buried treasure. He truly wanted a balanced budget. Never got one, of course.” Wallace shut his eyes; rocked back and forth slowly.

  Then, just as Peter was convinced that he had gone to sleep, he opened his eyes. “At the end, he was not himself anymore. There was something wrong with his circulation. You could tell the way what seemed like parts of his brain would suddenly light up while others would just go dark. The choice of Truman came out of … I’ve talked to doctors, authorities on circulation …” Wallace stopped: his own blood not flowing to the Roosevelt area of his brain?

  “People thought FDR was arrogant, cold, indifferent to people. I suppose he was all those things up to a point. Certainly he felt that he had to dominate everyone. Felt he had to know more about everything than you did. I always knew, each day, the price of cotton in a dozen markets. But he’d still call me and say, ‘I bet you don’t know the latest price of cotton on the New York Exchange.’ But I always knew. Drove him crazy.”

  “Why do you think he felt he had to replace you in 1944? With Truman of all people.”

  Wallace shrugged. “The South mainly. ‘Go back to Russia, nigger-lover,’ they were yelling at me just yesterday in Virginia. I’ve never seen human hate in the raw like that. But once you see it, you can understand how someone like Hitler can exploit it for his own purposes. Then there was my supposedly mystical bent. The letters that some journalists got copies of to my guru. A joke between me and a theosophist friend. I’m fascinated by theosophy, by Buddhism. Yet I was also probably the only believing Christian in the Administration. But, somehow, there’s the idea that if one is curious about such things one must be mentally unstable. When the story first broke, FDR handled it very well. ‘He’s not a mystic,’ he said. ‘He’s a philosopher.’ Thank God the press has no idea what a philosopher is, because that could sound pretty bad to a lot of people. Finally, he just let me go and took Harry Truman aboard, figuring that as a four-eyed sissy he would be for peace, not realizing that sissies are driven to appear tough. Harry’s got to get us into a war to show how tough he is. Then there was Winston Churchill.…”

  Wallace shut his eyes; began to rock. “I never hit it off with him. He worshiped that empire of theirs, never suspecting that FDR had every intention of folding it along with the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese colonies.” Wallace opened his eyes. “You know, Harry’s been secretly financing the French in Indochina, one of the first places that FDR intended to boot them out of. Well, Churchill and I were at a dinner and he proposed that after the war the British and the Americans share a common nationality. I could see how this was a good deal for the residents of those offshore islands but a bad one for us. I was, I hope, polite. I pointed out that this Anglo-Saxondom would be considered elitist by those excluded, not to mention all those Americans who come from different racial stock. ‘Of course it’s elitist,’ he said in that cheery lisp of his, ‘because we are the superior stock. Always have been.’ I said that I disagreed. Later FDR told me that Churchill told him that he needed a new vice president.”

  “The President was just stringing Churchill along?”

  Wallace nodded. “As he did everyo
ne.” He smiled. “Last time I really talked to FDR was after the election of 1944, just before he went off to Yalta. We were almost always on pretty good terms. Particularly on one of his good days. Well, this was one. I was waiting for him downstairs in the Map Room. A young naval officer, very nervous, was pushing his wheelchair. I stood up. The President was cheery. We started to talk, then something went wrong with the brakes on the wheelchair. The young man lost control of the chair, which started going faster and faster, with the boy trying desperately to slow it down, to stop it. The President was looking very alarmed at this point. Then the boy aimed the chair—and the President—into an open closet full of filing cases, where the chair came to a full halt. The President’s face ended up in a drawer. I rushed over to help. The boy was in a state of shock. Unable to be moved, the President then took charge of the wheels of his chair and slowly backed himself out of the closet. By then he was delighted. “I must say, Henry, I’ve heard about presidents being got rid of by assassination but this is the first time an attempt has ever been made to simply file a president.”

  Wallace laughed; as did Peter. The dour mood lifted. Then the door to the study opened, and a radio crew appeared. Peter wished the candidate luck. He was rewarded with an absent smile.

  4

  The secretary of state–in-waiting, John Foster Dulles, was in mellow mood after dinner at Laurel House. “Essentially we will continue along the same lines that Dean Acheson and I have laid down. After all, our foreign policy has been bipartisan since President Roosevelt died. I must say I have generally worked well with Dean and I’m sure we’ll go on working together if the law doesn’t take up too much of his time. Poor man. Every time he starts to make a little money, he’s called back to the White House.”

  A dozen guests were seated in the drawing room, listening to President Dewey’s secretary of state, a dour, hard-faced Wall Street lawyer. He was, everyone agreed, born to be secretary of state; he was a nephew of Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, who had himself married Eleanor Foster, daughter of Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state. Foster had been born “in the purple,” as Peter wrote when Aeneas, although a lover of exotic words and concepts, had forbade him to call Dulles a porphyrogenite, the word for a Byzantine emperor’s son born in a special red marble chamber, signifying his divine right to succeed to the throne. Nevertheless, to annoy Aeneas, Peter had begun work on an ever-lengthening piece entitled “Porphyrogenitism,” his word to describe those political dynasties that had decorated or degraded the American republic from the splendid Adams family down to the merry Roosevelts.

  Blaise encouraged Dulles to “speak freely,” something not in that lawyer’s nature. The other guests, among them the British ambassador, were all keen to know what was in store for the world during the next four years. Dewey himself had not bothered to confide in the voters. In three days, on Tuesday, November 2, 1948, the nation would vote but, thus far, the deep-voiced Dewey—“the ideal radio voice” he’d been acclaimed—had no message for the people other than that “unity” would be needed in the days ahead. He did echo the House Un-American Activities Committee by deploring the Administration’s “coddling of communists.” But to Peter’s surprise, Dewey did not endorse Truman’s plan to outlaw the Communist Party in the United States. “We’ll have no thought police,” intoned Dewey.

  Meanwhile, Truman had covered some thirty-one thousand miles in his whistle-stop train; he had given over 350 speeches to ever larger crowds who plainly energized him by shouting, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” and he had obliged. Sometimes, overenergized—or was it bourbonized?—he went too far. “A vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism” did not play well. On the other hand, in a nation daily terrorized by press, television, films, communism was the greatest bogey of all, and with broad gleeful strokes he painted Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party bright red. “I do not want and I will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat.” Since Henry Wallace had not proposed an alliance, this seemed excessive, but then it was necessary for Truman to destroy completely the political heir of Roosevelt in order that he alone, a conservative Southerner, could replace the great cosmopolite and all his works in the interest not of a new deal but of a somewhat mysterious “fair deal.” Despite Wallace’s appeal to liberal Democrats, Truman had managed to hold on to most of Roosevelt’s Jewish and Negro support. After the convention, he had integrated the armed services. In May he had recognized Israel, a few minutes after the state was created, in exchange, it was said, for Jewish money to finance his train. It was also said that his secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, had managed to tap the China lobby for whatever other money was needed. Mrs. Roosevelt, who had told Caroline that she could not possibly support such “a weak and vacillating person” whose cronyism reminded her of Harding, finally came around at the last moment in a broadcast: “There has never been a campaign where a man has shown more personal courage and confidence in the people of the United States.” Peter had found the last part of the endorsement singularly shrewd. Truman really was one of them in a way that Roosevelt never was nor would have wanted to be.

  Harry was us the people against them. Yet he was going to lose. The final Gallup poll showed Dewey ahead at 49.5 percent to Truman’s 44.5.

  Dulles held the floor. “I think where we might differ from current policy is in our recognition of the Soviets’ master plan to conquer the world. I think Dean has underestimated their tenacity. Whenever we stand up to them, they back down. But that doesn’t mean they give up. They simply regroup. As they did in order to seize Czechoslovakia. We should have stopped them.”

  “How?” Blaise exerted his right as host to address the oracle straight on.

  “There were several options that I’m not supposed to discuss.” Dulles was very smooth, Peter decided. “But I think there is a general hard-line approach which I find lacking in Dean, good man that he is. Dean is too wary of direct confrontation. I’m not. The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe is essentially fragile. At a signal from us, I don’t think it will take much for the Hungarians, the Poles, even the East Germans to simply overthrow primitive Russian masters.”

  “You would signal them?” Blaise was politely inquisitive.

  “At the right time, yes. My brother Allen is at the CIA, and according to his information, the Soviet itself is none too stable. Russia was—is—a devoutly Christian nation, and should there be sufficient pressure from outside—yes, from us—even Stalin himself might be overthrown in the name—I’m not ashamed to say it, and I’m not a bishop’s son like Dean—of our Lord.”

  Peter had had enough. He slipped away. In his father’s study he put in a call to his sister, Enid. Instead he got Dr. Paulus, the head of the sanitarium. “She’s under sedation, Mr. Sanford. We’ve had a restless day, I fear.”

  “When can I see her?”

  “Sunday, as usual, if you like.”

  Peter hung up. He had no faith in Dr. Paulus. More to the point, Enid, though admittedly alcoholic, was not in the least insane. She had simply had the bad luck to be inconvenient to those interested in Clay’s career. How to set her free?

  Peter glanced at the advance copies of magazines and columnists’ proofs on Blaise’s desk. Henry Luce’s Life magazine ran an inspiring photograph of Dewey aboard a ferry crossing San Francisco Bay, not unlike George Washington crossing the Delaware. The Luce publications oscillated between ecstasy and reverence as they hailed the president of earth’s most blessed Christian nation engaged in holy war with the Russian Antichrist. Drew Pearson praised the team of dedicated apostles that had made Dewey’s election possible, their heroic work cut out for them in the years of strife ahead with relentless communism. The Alsop brothers were simply impatient. Why wait ten dangerous weeks for the Dewey installation? Lame-duck Truman, resign! Go home!

  Election Day, Peter and Aeneas stayed in the offices of The Americ
an Idea. They had now recruited a dozen young people who could report stories, write and rewrite, sell advertising space, and, otherwise, do everything that the two editors could do.

  Most of them had voted for Wallace. But Peter had had a sudden change of heart, an illumination just short of a celestial vision in the Fairfax courthouse. He voted for the Socialist candidate, Norman M. Thomas. After all, Thomas had originated, in his lonely way, all the social programs of Roosevelt and Truman. So why not vote for the true author of change in order to—encourage him? Earlier in the summer, Peter had taken a Manhattan subway at Times Square. Opposite him, in a linen suit with no tie, was the lean bald sympathetic Thomas. No one but Peter had recognized the sixty-three-year-old Presbyterian pastor who had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union; been associate editor of The Nation; Socialist candidate for governor of New York; and then head of the Socialist Party in 1926 after the death of the noble Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned by Woodrow Wilson because he had opposed Wilson’s 1917 Espionage Act under which he himself was promptly tried and sentenced to ten years in prison. While a prisoner, he got nearly a million votes for president in 1920. Upon election, good President Harding had freed him. Thomas was now in his fifth race for president.

  Fascinated, Peter watched him rehearse a speech. He made notes; put them aside; moved his lips silently, shaping the words that he would presently be speaking to some forlorn New York socialists, mostly idealist Jews and Italians. When Thomas got off at Columbus Circle, Peter had a presentiment that he would vote for him in November, which he did, hoping that the members of the Ku Klux Klan, lingering on the courthouse steps, would not know the terrible un-American thing that had taken place upon their hallowed lynching ground.

  Out of consideration for the youth of his staff, Peter served beer and wine. There was a long night ahead.

  The first tally came from a New Hampshire village: Dewey had won it. Aeneas was the first to quote the old joke, “As New Hampshire goes, so goes Vermont.”