by Gore Vidal
A dull red spot formed atop each presidential cheekbone. “I was under the impression that the war is now more popular with the average American than it ever was with me. And in spite of all the bad news from France.”
“Will there be a coal shortage?” Burden had been persuaded to ask this question by several senators from the mining states. “And will you—take action?”
Wilson looked glum. On the day after Christmas, the President had seized the railroads; and placed them under McAdoo.
“Will you nationalize coal, too?” The object of Burden’s visit, if not of Wilson’s invitation.
“There are … imperatives, yes. New York City is close to a real shortage; and tonight the temperature is below zero up there. We’ve made them cut down on electricity …”
“ ‘No lights on Broadway.’ ” The theaters had been furious in their response; the President adamant in his.
“It will be worse than that.” Wilson stood up. In the firelight he seemed like a scarecrow, ill-defined and not physically coherent. He shuffled to his desk and opened a drawer, which Burden by now knew was known as The Drawer, where the red-tagged important messages were piled. Wilson removed several documents. “Russia is now out of the war. The Bolsheviks have accepted Germany’s terms, not that they ever had any choice. I’d hoped we could keep the new Russian government as an ally, but now their whole country is falling apart.” Wilson glanced at one of the messages. “From our consul at Harbin. He says Irkutsk—which is in Siberia, I think—is in flames. The Bolsheviks have killed a number of their own people, as well as various French and English officials.”
“Do you think this is true?”
“I don’t think, Senator. I read what I am told is an account of what happens when extremists seize a country the size of Russia, the size,” Wilson sat again in his straight chair, “of the United States. I believe we have done everything possible to keep a line of communication open to those people. I have no choice. If Russia leaves the war, that will free an entire German army to reinforce the Western Front. Then what?” Wilson sighed. “We have had such bad news.” The President took off his pince-nez; rubbed the two small red marks on either side of his nose that matched, in miniature, the now fading ones on his cheeks. “There is England, too. We’re being drawn into their net. I have never seen anything like their ‘propaganda,’ as George Creel likes to call it. How can we convince the world that we are truly disinterested—asking for no territory, nothing—when England makes us look like a partner in imperialism rather than what we are, a republic that wants only peace …”
Wilson could do this sort of thing by the hour, and although Burden admired the President’s genuine high-mindedness, he himself tended to the literal, the objective, the useful. As if sensing Burden’s distraction, Wilson replaced one red-tagged document with another. “This came yesterday. It’s from Brest Litovsk, an appeal from the Bolshevik Trotsky. He’s an American, I gather—at one time anyway. Now he’s in charge of the Russian delegation. He rejects, thank God, the substance of the German agreement, but then he requests that the Allies make peace, which certainly pleases me, but then he adds this intolerable rubbish.” Wilson read from Trotsky’s statement: “ ‘If the Allied governments in blind obstinacy, which characterizes the falling and perishing classes …’ ”
“Us?”
Wilson nodded. “ ‘… again refuse to participate in the negotiations, then the working class will be confronted with the iron necessity of tearing the power out of the hands of those who cannot or will not give peace to the nation.’ ” Wilson put down the paper. “There is great mischief here. Should these Bolsheviks prevail, what effect might they have on our own people, on all our home-grown Communists and radicals and labor agitators?”
Burden was not impressed by Wilson’s alarm, if it was true alarm and not simply political play-acting. “Since we never imitated Russia when they had a highly colorful czar, I doubt if Mr. Trotsky of New York City, or wherever he is from, will have much effect either. But I thought,” Burden shifted to the real politics of the matter, “that Mr. Root had made a deal with the provisional government last summer.”
Elihu Root, the most brilliant as well as the most conservative of American statesmen, had been sent by the President to Petrograd to keep the Russians in the war. As counterweight, Wilson had sent with him two colleagues, of whom one was a genuine American Socialist. At the same time, to complicate matters, a World Socialist Congress was meeting in Stockholm. After much public agonizing, Wilson had refused to issue passports to the American delegates, citing their “almost treasonable utterances.” Deeper and deeper, thought Burden; but then he knew that as he himself was entirely of his place and time and class and so both isolationist and populist, the President was now as one with the, to Burden, un-American Eastern ruling class, always more prone than not to foreign adventures in collegial tandem with regimes that Burden would have only politely tolerated.
“I’m not sure ‘deal’ is the word to use.” Wilson’s nose twitched fastidiously. “In May their government agreed to continue the war with Germany while we extended to them over three hundred million dollars’ worth of credit at a very low rate of interest.”
“They were bought.”
“They were bought.” Wilson was equally flat. “But, as Mr. Frick said of Colonel Roosevelt, they did not stay bought.” He waved the red-tagged paper like a flag. “That was May when they loved us. Now it is December and … they do not. They encourage the worst elements of our labor movement. Read this … No. I just read Mr. Trotsky to you. He proposes that our workers overthrow us.” Wilson got up and replaced the documents in The Drawer. “By next year, according to all projections, our labor unions will have increased their membership by four and a half million.”
“Good news for the Democratic Party.”
“Let’s hope not for Mr. Trotsky. He’s trying to make capital—surely the wrong word—out of Thomas Mooney, who is innocent, he tells us, of the San Francisco bombings …”
“I’ve always thought he was.” Someone, in July of 1916, had interrupted a Preparedness Day parade with bombs. Nine people had died, and the labor radical Mooney had been arrested, found guilty of murder and condemned to death.
“I was not at the trial.” Wilson was legalistic. “But our ambassador in Russia wants me to commute the sentence, which I don’t think I can do, as the whole matter is under the governor of California. Colonel House thinks I should intervene, or seem to. So I’m setting up a mediation committee, and should they find new evidence, as such commissions tend to do, I shall ask the governor, most respectfully, to refrain from his auto-da-fé until there is a new trial, and so on, and so forth. They blackmail us!” Wilson rubbed his forehead. He looked ill. One of Burden’s friends, a doctor, had assured him that Wilson was prematurely arteriosclerotic, with a long and secret history of strokes. Like all doctors, sworn to secrecy, this one could not bear to remain silent on a matter so exciting. But then he was not the President’s physician, who was, suspiciously, in constant attendance. Also, it was well known that Grayson allowed his patient no more than three or four hours of office-work a day, broken by numerous automobile and horseback rides and golf. In frantic war-time Washington, the White House was the most tranquil place to be. Yet no one could say that this president was not entirely master of the nation’s politics and, probably, of its war-time allies as well. Burden had never known a mind so capable of swiftly relating one fact to another in order to achieve as large a view as possible of what was necessary to itself. But Wilson’s necessity might not be that of Leon Trotsky, of Lloyd George in England, of Clemenceau in France, while even to many senators in his own party, the President’s world-view was eccentric. There were still quite a few old-fashioned populists in the Congress who believed implicitly Trotsky’s charge that the United States had gone to war to protect J. P. Morgan’s loans to the Allies. Burden himself, on demagogic days, inclined to that bright simple view.
As
always, the President, once done with moralizing about man’s estate, descended to practical politics. It had been Burden’s experience that the great Wilson, in the unlikely event that any of the President’s many selves should ever be raised to that prime category, was the party manager. No congressional district was alien to him. On his desk he kept what looked like a large sentimental family picture album. Inside were the highly unsentimental photographs of every member of the House of Representatives and Senate. During the early days of the Administration, he had studied each face; and committed it to memory. Burden was almost alone in knowing that in the next year’s election Wilson was planning to purge those Democrats, mostly Southern and Western, who had ever defied him. Burden had warned him against this sort of reprisal but Wilson was grim. He would weed his garden; and that was that.
At the moment, the President was not looking to future elections; rather, he was still shaken by the recent election of the Hearst-Tammany candidate for mayor of New York City, a Brooklyn County judge named John F. Hylan. When Hearst saw that his own candidacy would divide the Democratic Party, he and the Tammany boss, Murphy, had selected Hylan to defeat the incumbent, John Purroy Mitchel. The election had been unusually bitter. Colonel Roosevelt had campaigned for Mitchel, denouncing his ancient enemy Hearst as “one of the most efficient allies of Germany on this side of the water.” Hearst was the Hun within the gate, more dangerous than the one without. “Hearst, Hylan and the Hohenzollerns should have been a winning slogan for Mitchel,” said Roosevelt. Then Hearst’s candidate had won by 147,000 votes. So much for the Roosevelt magic.
“I don’t understand that city. I never have.” Wilson shook his head.
“I do,” said Burden, “it’s anti-war, anti-English, anti-French. What I don’t understand is Hearst. Why, with all he’s got, does he bother?”
“To come here, my friend. He thinks he’ll be nominated in 1920; and elected. That’s the arrangement he made with Murphy.” Wilson was now very much the nuts-and-bolts politician. “Hearst stays out of the mayoral race, pays for Hylan, supports him with his papers, and a grateful Tammany delivers the New York delegation in the summer of 1920, an eternity away.”
“But if we all survive this eternity, it will be you, Mr. President, not Hearst.”
Wilson smiled. “If I have done that well with the war and then the peace, I might think myself worthy …”
“You are modest. You’ll be elected by acclamation.”
“No, Senator. Never that. I am not a popular sort of man, like Roosevelt. Nothing is ever easy for me. Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Burden nodded a sorrowful assent to this astonishing falsity. In exactly two years, Wilson had been elected both governor of New Jersey and president. No American politician had ever had such a rapid, lucky rise. But then no one knew how Wilson himself saw those elections, or how he saw himself in relation to the field, much less to history. Vain about his intellectual achievements, he was oddly modest about his political prowess. It might, Burden thought somewhat enviously, be the other way around. The schoolteacher Wilson was very much, as Lodge liked to remind anyone who would listen, run-of-the-mill, but as political manager and eloquent if sometimes monotonous enunciator of man’s better nature, Wilson was unique.
“Do you know Hearst?”
Burden nodded. “I saw a good deal of him when he was here in Congress.”
“Amazing to think of him in so humble a job.”
“He was a bit amazed, too. I had to show him how to introduce a bill.”
“I wonder,” said Wilson, not listening, “if he could be charged with treason.”
Burden unfolded his legs; and his two feet struck the floor simultaneously. “For what?”
“For aiding the German cause in war-time. Of course, I’m not a constitutional lawyer and I’ve never properly studied the Espionage Act, but it seems that we might charge him, somehow, with aiding and abetting the infamous Paul Bolo Pasha, a proven German spy. After all, Hearst used to entertain him in New York.” During the election, much had been made of Hearst’s connection with the unsavory Bolo, who had later been given money by Bernstorff in order to subvert the French, who had promptly imprisoned him. Put on the defensive, Hearst had said that he had met Bolo only once; then he printed even more colored flags on the Journal’s front page.
“Well, Mr. President, I’d be very careful with Hearst. He’s capable of anything.”
“So,” said the kindly old Presbyterian minister in the chair opposite, “am I.”
“Yes,” said Burden; and left it at that.
“Do you remember that dreadful photo-play serial—Patria—that Hearst made two years ago?”
Burden nodded. Whenever news was dull, Hearst would invoke the Yellow Peril. But in Patria he had outdone himself. He had combined the Yellow Peril with Mexican outlaws, each bent on the destruction of the United States. The Japanese government had complained bitterly. “I used to see it at Keith’s,” said Wilson. “Ridiculous, I thought. But I had to write him a letter, asking him to desist. Moving pictures have such a—powerful effect on public opinion. They can actually alter circumstances.” Wilson laughed. “I have just made a paraphrase of Burke, which suits us all: ‘Expediency is the wisdom of circumstances.’ ”
Burden nodded his appreciation; then he made his own gloss: “Wisdom is to find it expedient to do nothing at all.”
Edith entered on Burden’s diminuendo. “The clan is gathering. Do stay, Senator.”
“No. No. It’s late. I have my own clan gathering and then …”
“New Year’s Eve at the McLeans’.”
“Exactly.” Burden bade the President a happy New Year; he had received not only the information that he wanted on the possible seizure of the coal mines but a dozen other messages of the sort that politicians exchange without the use of sometimes compromising and always ambiguous spoken words.
Edith led Burden onto the cold dimly lit landing. The only comforting light came from the open door to the upstairs oval sitting room, where the voices of her family were slightly louder than those of his. “I have the book.” Edith crossed to her secretary’s desk beneath the fanlight at hall’s end. Burden had entirely forgotten what book he had asked for. She returned with a thin volume. Philip Dru, Administrator was the title. Burden remembered: a novel by Colonel House, published six years before. Now that House was the President’s alter ego in Europe, Burden was curious to know more about this courtly wealthy Texan, who wanted only to serve as the President’s loyal eyes and ears if not always tongue, for, according to Edith, “He is something of a yes-man. A few weeks ago I showed him Mr. Wilson’s address to Congress, the one where he took over the railroads—and the Colonel didn’t like it one bit. And he told me why. And I was really impressed. So I told him to tell the President the next day. Naturally, I warned Woodrow, and he was upset because he thinks the world of Colonel House. Well, the next day, Woodrow says he’s sorry Colonel House doesn’t like the message about the railroads, and the Colonel got all nervous and said, ‘Well, I’ve reread it since and I now agree with every word of it.’ ”
That, thought Burden, was the only way to handle the President; and he admired Colonel House all the more. Burden took his leave with the book, which, he had been told, dealt with the first dictator of the United States, a most enlightened and benevolent man who, having solved all domestic problems, solves those of the world as well by setting himself up as the chief of a world concert of nations.
4
The fact that the McLean estate, Friendship, had once been a monastery never ceased to delight Blaise, as he and Frederika descended from what she called “our land yacht,” a huge enclosed sedan, driven by a Russian refugee, who spoke French and claimed to have been captain of the Czar’s personal guard. “All in all, not a good reference,” Frederika had said.
Friendship was an extraordinary place to have within the limits of the District of Columbia, and Blaise quite envied the Ned McLeans their eighty acres o
f ponds and streams and parks; he did not envy them the somewhat common old-fashioned house with the low ceilings favored by the glum heat-conservers of the previous century. But now, after the icy night air, the warmth of the house was an agreeable shock. The Friendship conservatories had produced a thousand rare plants; and the rooms smelled of wood smoke and gardenias. Once outer coverings had been surrendered, they were warmly received by the butler. In the long run, Blaise decided that the only people one ever really got to know in life were servants and bartenders and maîtres d’hôtel. He had had more conversations with the headwaiter at the Cosmos Club than with his mother-in-law, who now stood, blindly, in the doorway to the main drawing room.
“It’s Mother,” murmured Frederika in much the same tone of voice that a fourteenth-century woman might have warned her family of plague.
Simultaneously, the butler announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Blaise Delacroix Sanford,” and mother and daughter embraced, while Evalyn approached, wearing on a chain that huge ominous lump the Hope Diamond, and the glittering Star of the East in her hair. Evalyn greeted the rival publisher with a somewhat frothing champagne kiss. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“You! As always.” Blaise wondered what “it” was.
“Yes!” Evalyn embraced Frederika, who had fought Mrs. Bingham to a standstill.
“Can you tell?” Evalyn looked at Blaise conspiratorially, but turned her body toward Frederika. “I’m pregnant.”
“That is wonderful.” Frederika had a way of drawing out her syllables that made the listener feel as if he alone of all the world’s population had attracted not only her interest but delighted wonder.
“Vinson needs a little brother, I said to Ned.”
“What,” asked Frederika, “did Vinson say?”
“He is only six.”
“I,” said Mrs. Bingham, eager to dispense terror, “would get rid of that diamond first if I were you.”