The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  The following day, Peter met Billy Thorne at the Brass Rail at Seventh Avenue and Times Square. By the time Billy limped in, Peter had already occupied a booth and ordered a roast beef sandwich on rye, a specialty of what was a feeding ground for carnivores. Through the restaurant’s plate-glass window, passersby could see chefs at work, slicing joints of beef, ham, turkey.

  Peter knew that if he did not eat the famous Brass Rail cheesecake, he could not gain weight simply from lean beef. He felt virtuous already.

  “I’ve never been here.” Billy lurched into the booth. He was unnervingly the same. “I’ve passed by many times. I always think of cannibalism when I look through that window.” He shuddered.

  “You are simply a repressed vegetarian.”

  “I’ll have a ham sandwich,” Billy told the waiter. Then he pushed his wooden leg away from Peter’s leg.

  “How do you know when your leg’s next to mine?” Peter was genuinely curious.

  “I always move it even if it isn’t.”

  Peter noticed, with surprise, as he always had in the past, that one of Billy’s eyes was brown and the other blue. Although he preferred looking into the brown one, it was the blue that Billy now aimed at him. “How is Diana?” Peter asked the wrong eye.

  Billy shrugged. “I guess you haven’t seen her since we agreed that she get the divorce. She may have gone to Reno by now. Doesn’t the Senator keep you up to date?”

  “We’ve not seen each other for some time. She’s quit the magazine.”

  “To marry Clay. Poor Diana.”

  “Why—poor?”

  “Poor because, among other things, she has no money and so, now that Enid’s dead, Clay is going to drop her and marry a fortune.”

  Peter did not even try to simulate surprise. “Yes. That’s exactly what he would do.” He repeated, “Poor Diana.”

  “So then you’ll marry her. Frankly, I can’t think why she left you to go back to him. You know, once jilted, twice shy—or some such folk wisdom.”

  Peter’s face was growing hot. “I was not there to be left. Clay was not there to go back to.”

  “He made her think so. For his own reasons. He had to get elected with the help of her father, and so he charmed her all over again to make sure he had the old crook’s help in his last two elections, which, along with your dad’s money, will see him into the Senate next year.”

  Peter choked on his beef. Billy joyously pounded his back, the one thing not to do to someone with food lodged in the windpipe. Luckily, Peter was able to cough the gristle onto his plate. With a napkin, he dried teary eyes.

  “What,” said the now-contented Billy, “did I just say that most upset you?”

  “That Clay is running for the Senate next year. How do you know?”

  “First, because that’s what he would do, because it’s his last big chance. Fire over Luzon is still hot. People think he’s Audie Murphy. But by 1952 he’s just another congressman. So—go, go, go, Clay.”

  Peter put horseradish on his beef and, excitingly, burned his much harassed windpipe. “Does Diana know this?”

  “Why else do you think she came to New York to see me?”

  “To talk about divorce?”

  “A nickel phone call covers that. She wanted to know all about …”

  “The old crook?” Peter’s voice broke on the phrase. Horseradish had really burned his throat.

  “My testimony is sealed, for what it’s worth. But there’s one copy floating around, I’m told. I had a problem, you know, getting a security clearance for government work. New rules. They think communists are everywhere. So I made a deal with the Justice Department. I’d be cleared for certain government work I was doing—am still doing—if I’d report what I knew about Senator Burden Day and the Indian land sale back in 1940. That was the year Burden thought he could be president. So he made a deal with this lobbyist …”

  “Ed Nillson.” Peter was not sure he wanted any details at all, wanting all.

  “The very same. Ed wanted a parcel of federal land, with Indians on it, and oil under it. Land never to be sold. But Burden’s subcommittee said that it could be sold for a few beads. When the subcommittee voted, Burden was in Canada. But the decision to sell out the Indians had been his. Ed then became treasurer of the well-financed James Burden Day for President Committee, which, of course, came to nothing when FDR ran.”

  Peter stared out the plate-glass window at the people walking by, who stared right back in. It was like an aquarium with fish on both sides of the glass. “Does Diana know all this?”

  “She knows now. She also knows that Clay knows.”

  “So what will happen?”

  Billy shrugged. “I’m out of it.”

  “What are you into?” The subject needed changing.

  “I write for the Wall Street Journal. Analysis of foreign markets. Europe is my specialty.”

  “Thanks to the Lincoln Brigade?”

  “In spite of the Lincoln Brigade. I also do some work for the Treasury. They tip me off. I tip them off.”

  “It sounds,” Peter was pleased to note, “like the CIA.”

  “The CIO?” Billy had learned to act during his years of lecturing on how he’d been duped by the communists.

  “Central Intelligence Agency. It is a clubhouse for the Daughters of the American Revolution, sponsored, as always, by Eli Yale.”

  “Oh, that!” Billy sucked at his teeth, an old habit that Peter had managed to forget until now. “Well, I do know that as of this month the ladies are on record, in their sorority house, of course, to the effect that the first move of the Soviet towards eventual world domination—their phrase—will be the annexation of China. The mainland of Asia is the Soviet’s primary goal.”

  “Do they believe this or do they just say it?”

  “Don’t you believe it?” was Billy’s question.

  Peter suddenly found himself staring into the “honest” brown eye. “I believe,” said Peter, “that if Stalin could push a button and annex China, he’d push it. But Mao is slippery. China is a far greater fact in history than Russia. Mao is more apt to manipulate Stalin.”

  “Which proves my point. Acheson frets over the economies of Western Europe, over the Italian elections, over the Berlin airlift, while the real action is in Asia, which he ignores. You should write about that.”

  “You write it. You know more than I.”

  “In the Wall Street Journal?” For an instant Billy’s scorn almost blew a perfect cover. He quickly readjusted his mask. “They’re very good about Europe. But like Acheson, they only think of Asia when Formosa and Chiang Kai-shek are in danger. I can’t get them worked up.”

  Peter looked at his watch. He was due to meet Latouche in half an hour. “Something urgent,” was the message. “Why is your CIA—I mean the DAR—suddenly so upset about Stalin and Mao?”

  “If I were with the CIA, I wouldn’t tell you, and if I was with the DAR, I wouldn’t know. Speaking for our little group at Treasury, I can say that we believe there will be some sort of military action soon. Mao’s been asking Moscow for planes that can be used to parachute troops. Parachute where? Formosa. Where else?” Peter decided then that the energetic Billy was also on the payroll of the China lobby, which had, in the last few years, siphoned off more than two billion dollars from the American government in order to buy, with American tax money, the American government itself, starting, if the rumor was true, with Truman’s campaign train as well as numerous members of Congress, some more notoriously venal than others.

  “Why isn’t the Administration keeping the same sharp eye that you are on Asia?”

  Billy ordered cheesecake. “Just plain,” he told Frank, a square-jawed Scandinavian waiter, usually to be found slicing beef in the plate-glass window.

  “And you’ll have your usual,” said Frank to Peter. “The cherry cheese.”

  Peter’s mouth slowly opened to say no; then it shut; Frank was gone and with him the rigorous Spartan regi
me Peter had intended to inaugurate that very day. Later, he would have to swim twenty laps in the pool at the New York Athletic Club, to which he would jog a few blocks to the north. Yet it was Frank, not he, who had made the fatal decision.

  Billy spoke. “Eurocentric.”

  “Our government?”

  “Europe’s the whole world for Acheson, as it was for Roosevelt. But it was Japan who attacked us. These people learn nothing. By the way, there’s some new material on Pearl Harbor. I gave it to Diana. As a divorce settlement.”

  The cheesecake arrived. “Stalin’s not going to make a move against us in Europe before 1954, if ever.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because by then he’ll have atomic parity. He’s already got a sort of atomic bomb. Acheson’s bracing for that. Sometime this fall it will be tried out and the Alsops’ famous balance of power—Truman calls them the Sop Sisters, by the way—will start teetering. Then we rearm, totally.”

  “We’ve been doing that since Potsdam.”

  “You read too much of yourself.” Billy was mocking.

  Peter’s stomach began to rumble. “First,” he said, “came the draft. In peacetime. Then the rearmament of Germany …?”

  “A few policemen.… Anyway the draft, so far, isn’t producing much. We’ve got maybe a hundred thousand more men, all in need of serious training. Four years ago we had twelve million seasoned troops. Now we’ve got less than two, all because the mothers of America got to their congressmen, who made Truman send them home.”

  Peter belched, softly. “If he hadn’t they would have mutinied. The war was won. They knew our republic was never intended to be permanently militarized.”

  “Old intentions must yield to new realities, as crafty old Lenin used to say. George Washington thought the Atlantic and Pacific were impregnable defenses. Anyway, all that’s going to change this year because it’s a matter of survival for us. Already, Stalin and Mao control more of the world than we do.”

  “A couple of billion impoverished peasants between them? No. The power’s with us. And …” Peter saw the familiar expression of the dedicated hawk staring at him over the cheesecake. But Peter did not provide sufficient pause to allow for the usual citation of statistics: hawk and dove were nowadays engaged in such stylized debate that each could make his case—or that of the other—without a moment’s thought. “The figures that the Daughters of the American Revolution so much enjoy quoting, how the Soviets are spending over thirteen percent of their gross national product on war and the United States only seven percent, make no sense at all considering the wealth of the American economy and the poverty of the Soviet economy, at its best famously inefficient and ineffective.” Peter filibustered Billy into silence; then he addressed his colorful cherry cheesecake.

  Billy was mild. “I think you’re wrong. Luckily for the Administration, McCarthy’s Red Scare has given the National Security Council all the excuse it needs to do what it’s wanted to do all along, which is the largest, most expensive military buildup in history, whose crown jewel will be the several-billion-dollar hydrogen bomb.”

  “Who pays for all this?”

  “The people. Who else? Thanks to the atomic bomb, they’ve never been more prosperous. So now we shake them down to pay for a hydrogen bomb and even greater prosperity, which will make them feel wonderfully secure as they pay the highest taxes in our history.”

  “Not even the Russians-are-coming crowd will buy that.”

  “We’re not selling. Fact, we’re not giving them any choice. Why should we? After all, we’re redesigning the country to save their lives. Defense. Security. Freedom. Democracy. These are the four horsemen of absolute peace …”

  “Achieved, presumably, by war.”

  Billy ignored this. “Of course, it will cost us a lot, but it will bankrupt the Russians. So maybe the average American couple may be reduced to only one and a half Chryslers per year, but that’s only for a decade or two. A mere generation at the outside. Meanwhile, our defense industries will grow richer and richer as they pay more and more people more and more money to build weapons of every sort while, thanks to the withholding tax, Roosevelt’s one stroke of genius when it came to financing all-out war for all-out peace, the newly rich working class will gratefully finance through their humble little taxes the federal machine that hires them to build these weapons that we need to defend freedom and democracy, forever. What Truman’s people learned from Roosevelt’s act of necessity in wartime is how to use, in peacetime, the same methods to finance an ever-expanding federal apparatus to save us from a savage adversary, longing to destroy us. Oh, they have the nation by the balls, which is why they are grateful for Senator Joe McCarthy’s demented ravings.” Out of breath, Billy lit a cigar.

  “I had not believed,” said Peter, gulping the last bit of cheesecake, “that you were so sincere an employee of the Wall Street Journal. You have actually come full circle from communism to capitalism.”

  “The scales have fallen from your eyes at last.” Billy blew smoke across the table. “Taken to their logical conclusion, the two are nearly identical. Where the ideal communist’s socialist state would use the national wealth for the good of the citizens, strictly regulated, of course, by a centralized money power, we are now, in the interest of defending ourselves against an enemy both Satanic and godless—very important point, ‘godless,’ in selling high taxes to simple Americans of deep religious faith—we are creating a totally militarized socialist state by ignoring such frills as the welfare of the people themselves. After all, the true American likes to stand on his own two ruggedly independent feet, which our nuclear state will encourage him to do. He is also free to go to the church of his choice, unlike the communist Russian slaves. I must say the accidental brilliance of our leadership still astonishes me. Haberdasher Truman and Lawyer Acheson and Soldier Marshall are creating a militarized economy and state that leaves those two bumblers Stalin and Mao far behind in the dust, staring skyward at our B-29s, soon to start darkening their red skies. Peter, you have made me poetic.”

  “Save it for the Journal.”

  “They would never use a word of it. We’re not supposed to give the game away, ever. But, to be fair to my editors, they believe what they write even though it’s always wrong, as the masters of our new nation intend it should be.”

  “Militarized Keynesianism,” Peter said, as the change for five dollars was brought him.

  “Not a bad phrase.” Billy was in a good mood.

  “So you don’t think that in this new world order there is room for World War Three?”

  “Who knows? We do keep pushing the Russians. And it’s possible that one day they’ll really push back. But I doubt it. They had their chance over Berlin only to discover that our airlift worked. Next month they’ll accept our terms. No more airlift and we win again, for now. Then Congress will start implementing National Security Council order number twenty-something-or-other and you’ll see every last Republican—penny-pinchers to a man—voting in the name of national defense for the biggest amount of government spending the world has ever seen. We are now inventing mega-socialism in order to protect the free world.”

  “It sounds more like reinventing fascism.”

  “Mussolini wasn’t from Missouri.” Billy put out his cigar. “Not only is industry going to be supported by the federal government but the universities, too.”

  “How?”

  “Huge federal grants to higher learning to find new scientific ways of defending freedom. Also, new ways to silence the so-called humanities. We’re even planning to set up independent journals and newspapers all around the world to counteract reactionary, un-American papers like yours. Our periodicals will be known as ‘liberal,’ of course, in the Americans for Demonic Action sense. At last true benign socialism.”

  “What was wrong with socialism before?”

  “It was Russian and they were far too poor and dim-witted to do anything with so noble a concept. They also wan
ted to look after the education and so on of their people. That’s not for us. Ever. What’s good for General Motors …”

  “Is good for General Electric. Yes. I understand you, Billy.” And Peter thought that now, finally, he did.

  At the door to the Brass Rail, they parted. Billy’s last words were, “I’m fairly sure Clay’s going to run against my ex-father-in-law next year. I hope Diana doesn’t take it too hard. Ruthlessness is part of Clay’s charm. He’s going to be president, you know. If not by 1960, ’64…. Read his book.”

  “I have. Fire over Luzon …”

  “No. No. That’s Harold Griffiths’ great gushing tribute. Read Clay’s Vision for America.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “That’s because I haven’t finished writing it.”

  Billy stumped down Seventh Avenue towards Times Square. Peter went back into the Brass Rail and rang Latouche and canceled their meeting. Apparently, the movie star John Garfield was being fired from a film because he had known communists in his youth. Peter said that he would do what he could, which was very little. As he hung up he wondered if the bill for a militarized state, based on keeping the citizens in a constant state of panic, might prove, in the end, more devastating than World War Three, which so many, so excitedly, predicted was at hand.

  Although the New York Post was the oldest and most liberal of New York’s newspapers, its plant looked rather the worse for wear—from time or liberalism? Peter wondered if it could survive the new printless world that he saw up ahead. Certainly, it would be a pity not to have the Post’s hectoring voice, day after day, warning of crime in high places, celebrating virtue in low.

  The publisher’s office was small and strewn with proofs. Dictionaries and a copy of Who’s Who crowded a small table. The publisher, Dolly Schiff, greeted him at the office door. She was a slender handsome woman in early middle age with a square jaw, a thin mouth, and more or less blond hair. “I’m so glad you could come by.”

  She pushed proof sheets off a sofa and indicated for Peter to sit beside her. “Wechsler tells me you’ll say no but I’m always for trying. We need a young writer. We particularly need someone in Washington who knows Washington. Murray Kempton’s marvelous on the subject but he’s got all of New York to worry about, too.”