by Gore Vidal
“I do hope Mrs. Day will come to tea April twelfth.” This was Mrs. Benham’s greeting.
Burden said that he hoped that she would, too. “Edith is a treasure,” said Edith. “Of course, she’s Navy. We’re surrounded by Navy here. You know Admiral Grayson.” A small trim handsome man in mufti had come out of the southwest suite. “Senator,” he shook Burden’s hand; another Southerner, Burden duly noticed, more amused than not that it had taken Virginia less than a half-century to reconquer the White House with Woodrow Wilson, who had, as a boy, actually gazed upon the sainted features of Robert E. Lee in the days of their common country’s terrible ruin. Now the South had returned in triumph to its true home, city, nation; and the President was surrounded, as was proper, by Virginians. “He’s doing very well, sir.” Grayson spoke to Burden but looked at Edith. “Only don’t tire him. He’s strong as an ox but susceptible to strain. The digestive system …”
“… is the first to record the disagreeable.” Edith smiled, like a little girl, Burden noted; hence the President’s famous nickname for her, “little girl,” which had caused much mirth considering Edith’s ship-like tonnage, inevitably decorated, festooned, bannered with orchids. “I was horrified when I first learned about Mr. Wilson’s breakfast …”
“Two raw eggs in grape juice.” Grayson was prompt. “It solved the dyspepsia as much as one can. Anyway, let him conduct the conversation.” Grayson gave more instructions, to Burden’s deep annoyance. He was perfectly capable of talking politics in his own way to what, after all, was just another politician, no matter how elevated and hedged round with state. Then Edith led him into the bedroom.
Woodrow Wilson was propped up by four pillows; he wore a plaid wool dressing gown; and his famous pince-nez. Beside the bed, on a chair, sat his brother-in-law Randolph. Between them, on the coverlet, there was a Ouija board, and each had a hand on top of the table-like contraption that moved as if of its own will over a wooden board on which had been drawn the alphabet, stopping, as the spirit dictated, at this or that letter, which Randolph duly noted on a pad of paper. Wilson held a finger to his lips as Burden and Edith sat beside the bed, a huge affair of carved dark wood that Edith had had moved from the so-called Lincoln bedroom at the other end of the corridor. Actually, the “Lincoln bedroom” had been Lincoln’s office while the bed, known reverently as his bed, was never used by him. All that anyone could recall was that Mrs. Lincoln had bought it for a guest room. In any case, Burden regarded the bed as singularly hideous despite its provenance; but then he disliked anything to do with the Civil War era. Red plush, horsehair stuffing, gas-lamps were mingled with his own memories of growing up poor in the Reconstruction South before his family had moved west.
While the two men played with the Ouija board, Edith whispered to Burden. “The place was—is—so run-down. You must ride herd on everyone here twenty-four hours a day, which poor Mrs. Wilson, being sick, couldn’t do, and Mrs. Taft was too grand to do. Now, of course, all the money goes to Preparedness and so we just scrimp along.”
But they scrimped most pleasantly, thought Burden. A fire burned in the fireplace, while above the mantel a splendid American landscape afforded some relief from all those replicas of dim politicians and their wives that gave the White House rooms a sense of being mere stage-sets for an audience of glum, peering ghosts. The window opposite Burden framed a wintry view of the becolumned State War and Navy Building, where lights were already burning. On a table, beneath the window-sill, the President’s Hammond typewriter was set. It was said that not only could he type as well as any professional but he alone wrote those high-minded mellifluous speeches that had so entranced the country, including Burden, who was generally immune to the oratory of others.
Both Edith and Burden watched the President intently. But then he was most watchable, Burden decided. Roosevelt was always in motion, and so always the center of attention. But there was nothing of particular interest in T.R.’s chubby face or the rather jerky movements of his stout little body. On the other hand, Wilson was lean, large-headed, and nearly handsome. The long face ended in a lantern jaw; the pale gray eyes were watchful; the thin gray hair cut short; the sallow skin deeply lined. Grayson kept him physically active, particularly on the golf-course, where Edith often joined him; reputedly, she was the better player. At sixty, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, re-elected to a second term five months earlier, looked quite capable (in Virginia’s interest?) of being elected to an unprecedented third term in 1920. Such was the nightmare of the professional politician; and Burden himself was nothing if not professional, and like the rest of the tribe, he too saw himself abed in this house, if not with a Ouija board. Mildly dismayed, he gazed upon what might yet be the first three-term president.
Randolph announced the message from the spirit world. “Use mines to sink German submarines. Signed Horatio Nelson.”
“I wonder how Nelson knows about mines. Or submarines.” The President’s voice was resonant, and only an ear as sharp as Burden’s could detect Virginia beneath the correct professorial diction. If Wilson had not written more books than his nemesis Theodore Roosevelt, he had written weightier ones—solemn histories that were used as university texts, which made him something of an anomaly. The historian suddenly torn from his study in order to make history for others to write about. Most politicians disliked him for this suspected—true?—doubleness. But Burden found it intriguing. The President seemed always to be observing himself and others as if he knew that sooner or later, he would be teaching himself—others, too.
The fact that there had never been a president quite like Wilson made him all the more difficult to assess. For one thing, did the professional historian, who preferred the British parliamentary system to the American executive system, inhibit the president in his duties? Certainly Wilson had begun his reign with a dramatic parliamentary gesture. Instead of sending a message to be read to the Congress like his predecessors, he himself went up to the Capitol and read his own message, the first president to do so since John Quincy Adams. He had behaved like a prime minister in the Congress, except no one there could ask him a question in that constitutionally separated place. He also enjoyed conferring directly with members of the press; thus, he could mitigate if not circumvent their publishers. Finally, as he could not alter the checks and balances of the Constitution, he was obliged to maintain his power through his adroit mastery of the Democratic Party, a delicate task for one who belonged to its minority eastern wing made up of Tammany Hall and Hearst and worse, while the party’s majority was Southern and Western and far too long enamored of William Jennings Bryan.
Burden knew that he had been summoned to the White House because, with his elevation to the Senate, he was now leader of the Bryanite wing of the party, which hated war, England, the rich, and, by and large, Woodrow Wilson, too. Wilson’s re-election had been a very close thing indeed, thanks to his own party’s suspicion that he wanted to join the Allies in the war against Germany. Only the inspired slogan “He kept us out of war” had, finally, rallied the faithful. Now war was at hand. What to do?
Wilson motioned for Randolph to remove the Ouija board; and himself. Edith also took the hint. At the door she said, “Don’t tire yourself.”
“That’s hardly possible, little girl, in a sickbed.” She was gone. Then Wilson noted the elaborate bed, rather like a Neapolitan hearse that Burden had once seen at the base of Vesuvius. “Though I’m not so sure about this bed.” Wilson removed a sheaf of papers from his bedside table, and placed them on the coverlet.
“Have you seen Mr. Bryan?”
Burden shook his head. “I think he’s in Florida.”
“The Speaker?” Wilson stared at Burden out of the corner of his eye, a disquieting effect. But then they were embarked upon a disquieting subject. The speaker of the House, Champ Clark, was the de facto heir of Bryan. He had opposed Wilson at every turn and he had been, in 1916, a serious candidate for the presidential nomination. Had it
not been for the maneuvering of such Wilsonian Bryanites as Burden, Champ Clark might now be enjoying a chill in the Lincoln bed.
“The Speaker’s Southern. Southerners—Southwesterners—tend to peace at any price—in Europe, anyway.”
“I know. I’m one, too. That’s why I’m far too proud to fight.” Wryly, Wilson quoted himself. This single phrase had enraged every war-lover in the land, particularly the war-besotted Theodore Roosevelt, who sounded no longer sane. Wilson picked up the papers. “I tell you, Mr. Day, I have done everything a man could possibly do to stay out of this terrible business. I’d hoped Germany would be sufficiently intelligent not to force my hand—to allow us to go on as we are, neutral but helpful …”
“To England and France.”
The President was not tolerant of interruptions. He had taught others for too many years: ladies at Bryn Mawr and gentlemen at Princeton; and at neither place had the students been encouraged to interrupt the inspired—and inspiring—lecturer. “England and France. But also there is—was—cotton to the Central Powers, at the insistence of the anti-war ten-cent cotton senators …”
“Of which I am one.”
“Of which you are one.” Although Wilson smiled, his mind was plainly on the set of papers which he kept distractedly shaking as if to dislodge their message. Burden noted that two of them were tagged with red seals. “It is curious that if I am impelled to go to war, it will give pleasure to the Republicans, our enemies, and pain to much of our party.”
Burden was still enough of a lawyer to seize upon a key word. “Impelled,” he repeated. “Who impels you?”
“Events.” Wilson gazed vaguely out the window, toward a row of lights where his clerk-like secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was, no doubt, busy doing clerkly things, so unlike his predecessor, the Great Commoner, who was incapable of clerkdom or indeed of anything less mundane than Jovian thunderings for peace.
“I know that many of you thought I was … uh, striking a bargain during the last election. That you would get out the vote because I had kept us out of war, despite so much provocation. Well …” He had either lost his train of thought or he was preparing to indulge himself in the presidential privilege of abruptly abandoning a potentially dangerous line of argument. “Someone asked me the other day—an old colleague from Princeton—what was the worst thing about being president.” Wilson looked directly at Burden, the face solemn but the eyes bright behind the pince-nez. “Luckily, he didn’t ask me what the best thing was. I might never have thought of an answer to that one. Anyway I could answer what was the worst. All day long people tell you things that you already know, and you must act as if you were hearing their news for the first time. Now Senator Gore tells me,” there was plainly a bridge from repetitions of the obvious to Oklahoma’s blind senator, whose opposition to the war had set in motion a series of parliamentary maneuvers designed to smoke out the President’s intentions, “that I owe my re-election entirely to his efforts for me in California.”
“But you do owe your majority to California.”
Wilson had gone to bed on election night thinking that his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, had been elected; so, indeed, had “President” Hughes. The next day the Far Western returns came in and Wilson was narrowly re-elected. Burden knew that this might not have happened if that professional spellbinder Gore had not been persuaded to leave his sulky seclusion in Oklahoma City and go to California and take the stump for Wilson. Gore had done so on condition that he could guarantee that Wilson would continue to keep, as he had kept, the peace. On election night Gore had wired Tumulty the exact figure by which Wilson would carry California.
Now Wilson was faced with his own less than courageous record. At various times, he had managed to be both war and peace candidate. This sort of thing never troubled the public, whose memory was short; but senators were constitutionally endowed with long memories and, often, mysterious constituencies as well. Some were obliged to follow the prejudices of their pro-German constituents. Others saw themselves as architects of a new and perfect republic, and their leader was La Follette of Wisconsin, far more dangerous in his idealism than any of the Bryanites, who were bound to be swayed by popular opinion, a highly volatile substance produced, often at whim, by William Randolph Hearst in his eight newspapers, not to mention all the other publishers, to a man for war. Thus far, Hearst was still the voice of the Germans and the Irish; and his papers in the great Northern cities played shamelessly to that city mob which he still counted on to make him president in 1920.
“I expected to be a reformer president.” Wilson sounded wistful. “There was so much to do right here at home, and we did do so much, so fast.”
Burden agreed, without reserve. The sort of reforms that Roosevelt had always spoken of with such transcendent passion Wilson had actually accomplished with gentle reason, combined with the subtle twisting of congressional arms. But then, as he liked to say, anyone who could master the Princeton faculty and the alumni association would find a mere Congress easy to deal with. Was it Senator Lodge who had said, “But he never did master them. That’s why politics was his only escape?”
“What position will they—will you take if I were to ask for war?” Wilson had collected himself.
“It will depend on what your reasons are. I always thought you missed your chance—if war is what you want—when the Germans sank the Lusitania, and so many American lives were lost. The public was ready for war that day.”
“But,” Wilson was cool, “I was not. It was too soon. We were—we are—not prepared.”
“Two weeks ago,” Burden was enjoying the game, “when you sent Ambassador Bernstorff home, the people were ready, again. Now comes the Zimmermann business.…” Although Burden was most sensitive to Wilson’s aversion to advice of any kind, he knew that he had been invited to the President’s sickbed to give him a reading of the Senate’s mood. He took the plunge. “The time has come. The thing is here. You can’t wait much longer. The press is doing its work. Gallant little Belgium. Raped nuns. Devoured children. The Hun is the devil. If there is to be war, prepared or unprepared, now is the time.”
Wilson stared at the papers in his hand; and waited.
Burden proceeded. “Isn’t that why you’ve called a special session? To ask us to declare war?”
“If I do, how many would oppose me? And on what ground?” Wilson’s usual Presbyterian moralizing and cloudy poetic images tended to evaporate when faced with a political problem. He was now very much the political manager, counting heads.
Burden named a dozen names, the leaders. “Actually, there is a clear but weak majority in each house that is against war, and nothing will stir them unless you have some new example of Hunnishness.”
Wilson took off his pince-nez; rubbed the two indentations on either side of his nose—like red thumbprints. “I do believe that the Germans must be the stupidest people on earth. They provoke us. Sink our ships. Plot with Mexico against our territory. Then—now—they have done it.” He held up the red-tagged papers. “Today three of our ships have been sunk. The City of Memphis. The Illinois. The Vigilancia.”
Burden experienced a chill as the names were read off. “I have tried—I believe with absolute sincerity, but who can tell the human heart? least of all one’s own—to stay out of this incredibly stupid and wasteful war, which has so suddenly made us, thanks to England’s bankruptcy, the richest nation on earth. Once we are armed, there is no power that can stop us. But once we arm, will we ever disarm? You see my—predicament, or what was a predicament until the Kaiser shoved me this morning.” The President’s face looked as if it had just been roughly brought forth, with chisel and mallet, from a chunk of gray granite.
“Why,” asked Burden, “have you taken so long when it’s been plain to so many that your heart has always been with England and the Allies?”
Wilson stared at Burden as if he were not there. “I was three years old,” he said at last, “when Lincoln was
elected and the Civil War began. My father was a clergyman in Staunton—then, later, we moved to Augusta, Georgia. I was eight years old when the war ended and Mr. Lincoln was killed. In Augusta my father’s church was a … was used as a hospital for our troops. I remember all that. I remember Jefferson Davis being led a captive through the town. I remember how he … My family suffered very little. But what we saw around us, the bitterness of the losers in the war and the brutality of the winners … well, none of this was lost on me. I am not,” a wintry close-lipped smile divided for an instant the rude stone face, “an enthusiast of war like Colonel Roosevelt, whose mentality is that of a child of six and whose imagination must be nonexistent. You see, I can imagine what this war will do to us. I pray I’m wrong. But I am deathly afraid that once you lead this people—and I know them well—into war, they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. Because to fight to win, you must be brutal and ruthless, and that spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life. You—Congress—will be infected by it, too, and the police, and the average citizen. The whole lot. Then we shall win. But what shall we win? How do we help the South … I mean the Central Powers to return from a war-time to a peace-time basis? How do we help ourselves? We shall have become what we are fighting. We shall be trying to reconstruct a peace-time civilization with war-time standards. That’s not possible, and since everyone will be involved, there’ll be no bystanders with sufficient power to make a just peace. That’s what I had wanted us to be. Too proud to fight in the mud, but ready to stand by, ready to mediate, ready to …” The voice stopped.
There was a long silence. If the sun had not set, it had long since vanished behind cold dense clouds; and the room was dark except for the single lamp beside Wilson’s bed and the fading coals in the fireplace. Although Burden was used to the President’s eloquence, he was not entirely immune to its potency. Wilson had the gift of going straight to the altogether too palpitating heart of the business.