by Gore Vidal
“Giles is very worried about you, Mother.”
“Tell him not to be. I still have my … my wiles.”
“He thinks you’ve been taken in by Tim, who is a member of the Communist Party.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a Communist Party in this country. After all, a condition of our freedom is that it be exercised only in support of the majority, as Mr. Debs has discovered.”
Emma was humorless. “There’s a secret party, just the way the anarchists are secret.”
“You know their secrets?”
“Giles does, and so does Ralph Easley. They mean to overthrow the government. Look at what they did to Mr. Palmer.”
“He lost a few front windows. They—whoever they were—lost their lives.”
“You sound sympathetic.”
“Really? I thought I sounded factual, and indifferent.”
“Giles thinks—and so does Mr. Easley—that you should take a more active, a more unequivocal stand against Bolshevism.”
Caroline wondered if her daughter had, somehow, been bewitched. “I have never known you to show the slightest interest in politics, and now you lecture me on the Red Menace.”
Emma frowned and the stubborn jaw, so like her father’s, jutted out. “I’m not. I mean, in the usual nonsense. But I’m serious about this, Mother. We could lose everything, our whole country, our freedom if they win …”
“Who are they?”
“Trotsky, Lenin, the Hungarians, the Germans. They’re everywhere. Three thousand strikes this year in the United States alone. Why? Ask Lenin. He knows. He has this special committee. In Chicago. Direct wireless to Moscow. Who do you think ordered the strike in Seattle? Trotsky. We have his directives in a code, which we broke. We …” Emma was speaking more and more rapidly and less and less coherently. She kept interrupting herself, as a new subject exploded in her brain. But since she tended to begin in the middle of a statement, the subject was often unclear. “Naval warfare. Submarines. Under the treaty. The Red fleet now largest. Off Catalina Island. In June. Basic investment of a quarter-million dollars. La Follette, of course. Always La Follette. Connection between Moscow … the Third International was convened March this year. For every country. Everywhere. Workers unite! La Follette knows all about it. So does Borah. That’s why Tim’s film with your backing … last year ninety Communist films were made by Jews on orders from Trotsky, a Zionist. Everyone knows. Condition of the New York Times to support England in 1917. Homeland for communism in Palestine. Hearst only one who’ll speak up. You must …” Emma was temporarily out of breath.
“Must? I must what?”
“Giles—and Mr. Easley—think you should write—or be interviewed—or something—on communism in Hollywood, and how you were tricked by Tim into making that Red propaganda film—”
Caroline slapped the arm of her chaise-longue so hard that she hurt her hand. “Are you absolutely mad? You know nothing of politics or movies or anything else except mathematics. I was hardly tricked …” Like her daughter, Caroline had veered off into what might prove to be a cul-de-sac. Tim had indeed tricked her about the film, and their relationship was seriously frayed. In the autumn she would go to California and see what could be done to put together the pieces. Otherwise, she might simply weigh anchor and sail splendidly off into high middle age, without human moorings of any kind.
“Well, if you made the film deliberately, then Mr. Easley’s right, and you did know what you were doing, because you’re basically a foreigner, and should be deported under the Immigration Act of 1918 and also under the Espionage Act …”
“Shut up!” Caroline had never addressed herself quite so directly to her daughter. “You need help, plainly. One of those behaviorists or whatever they call them. I am not a foreigner. I’ve always had a foreign … I mean, an American passport …”
“Your mother was foreign. I know. She killed Uncle Blaise’s mother …”
Caroline was on her feet, shouting at Emma in French.
Only Emma’s superior smile at this proof of her mother’s foreignness stopped Caroline cold. “You are very … trying, Emma. I put it down to the bad influence of Mr. Decker.”
“No, Mother. It’s been a long time coming. Waking up, really, to the way we’re losing our country to you foreigners.”
“Perhaps you should find yourself a different young man.” Caroline was her silky self again.
“I don’t think that I could, really. You see, we were married this morning. In Maryland.”
Caroline had a hard time catching her next breath but, once caught, she was at perfect ease. “Then you are a fool,” she said.
“I know,” Emma sighed almost, for her, theatrically. “But then it’s not my fault, is it? That I’m illegitimate.”
“No,” said Caroline, standing up. “It is not your fault. Now—go away.”
3
The President was at his typewriter, as Grayson showed Burden into the upstairs study. “I’ll be just a moment.” Wilson continued to type at a near-professional rate. Burden was always impressed by such skills. Like most of the Senate, Burden relied on aides to assemble his own speeches. When he did write a speech for himself, it was in near-illegible longhand. But the President could not only create his own eloquence, he could type it neatly with hardly an error. On the other hand, Wilson could not bloviate, as the windbag Harding put it: speak impromptu with incoherent passion. Burden himself had a definite gift along these demagogic lines. But he saved it for the stump. In the Senate he prided himself on sharp brevity.
Wilson pulled the sheet from the typewriter, let it drop onto his desk; rose and shook Burden’s hand. The President’s face was more than usually pale—from the August heat? The Sixty-sixth Congress due to convene December 19, 1919, had been called to Washington in May. The President had returned from France in July. Now the entire government was obliged to endure the equatorial heat. The President, Burden noted, had developed a twitch at the corner of his left eye; and, all in all, seemed on edge. At Wilson’s gesture, Burden settled in his usual sofa at an angle to the desk. Neither liked being face to face to anyone.
To Burden’s surprise, Wilson did not mention the League, which Lodge was slowly killing with amendments in the Senate. “What would you do about labor, if you were me?”
“You mean the strikes?”
“I mean the whole arrangement between the managers and the workers.”
“When in doubt, do nothing. Are you in doubt, Mr. President?”
“Yes and no. I think we proved during the war that we could run the railroads as well as the owners. Well, now …”
“You think we—the government—should take them over?”
Wilson nodded. “It would be one way of bringing into line both managers and labor leaders.”
Blaise shrugged. “I don’t see much difference between the government running something and the owners running it. It will just make life more difficult for us if a railroad union strikes against the government.”
“Or less difficult. Most countries keep control of vital necessities like water, electricity, transport. We don’t. We allow anyone to gouge the customer, to exploit the worker.”
Burden smiled. “With all your other problems, Mr. President, do you want to be called a Socialist?”
“Why not? I’ve been called everything else. It’s because I’m terrified of Bolshevism that I think we might steal some of their thunder in order to keep them from stealing our country altogether. Have you seen my son-in-law, Mr. McAdoo?”
Burden shook his head. “I suppose he’s in New York, practicing law.”
Wilson sat back in his chair and allowed his head slowly to turn from left to right and then from right to left. Apparently a form of exercise. “There is pressure on me to make up my mind about next year. I’ve said that I don’t want a third term, and my son-in-law certainly would like at least a first term.” The smile was dour. “It would be useful for him if I were to rule myself out now. The
n he’d have a year to get ready.”
“Yes.” Burden gave nothing away. He wondered if Wilson knew about the conversation at the Chevy Chase Club.
“I wish I could oblige you—him, that is—but I don’t know. Until the League is safe, my work here is undone. When do you think the Senate will vote?”
“Lodge drags it out. He feels each day makes it harder and harder for us to support the League, and he’s right. Why not accept his reservations, and get the thing over right now?”
“Never.” Wilson’s voice was unagitated. “As you probably know, this morning the Foreign Relations Committee adopted fifty amendments that would keep the United States from ever serving on nearly all those international committees that would instrument the League. Lodge also got a nine-to-eight vote reversing the Peace Conference’s stand on Shantung.”
As Burden spoke, the tremor in Wilson’s eyelid became so pronounced that the President took off his pince-nez and, pretending to dry his brow with a handkerchief, brought pressure to bear on the wayward nerve. “So Tumulty told me.”
“Did he also report that Knox and Borah and Johnson and some of the other irreconcilables, as they call themselves, plan to stump the country, particularly the West, propagandizing against the League?”
Silently, Wilson folded the handkerchief in four. “So we must all, now, go to Caesar.”
“To our masters.” Burden smiled, as he always did, when he contemplated the fiction that the American people in any way controlled their own fate. The Constitution had largely excluded them while custom had, paradoxically, by enlarging the franchise limited any meaningful participation in government by the governed. Naturally, the emotions of the people had to be taken into account, but those emotions could be easily manipulated by demagogues and press. If the irreconcilables were to play skillfully to America’s hatred of the foreign, then Wilson must play to their own high self-esteem in a world where they were now, so it was believed, not only the greatest power but the most shiningly innocent. It was so easy, given time. Without a thought in his head, Burden could rouse an audience to accept the League and a Pax Americana; then, as easily, he could excite them with the spectre of liberties lost to a British-dominated League, to be rejected out of hand in obedience to George Washington’s sacred warning against foreign entanglements. This was all that there was to politics in the great democracy. Once Professor Wilson had grasped this, he had opted for a parliamentary system. But President Wilson now grasped the sceptre and the orb without question; and played the game.
“I go, too,” he said replacing his pince-nez. “Mrs. Wilson and Grayson want me to take a rest, but I have no choice.”
“You’re taking to the stump?”
Wilson nodded. “I shall be trailing the senators from one end of the West to the other.” Wilson named the cities that he intended to speak in, and Burden quickly grasped that this intensive tour of the nation was the beginning of Wilson’s campaign for a third term, something no president had ever attempted.
Burden gave some advice on the cities to be visited. Wilson made notes. When they discussed Senate strategy, Wilson picked up the sheet of paper that he had been typing on. “This is anonymous.” He smiled at Burden. “I want you to know about it, and Hitchcock, too. But no one else. Secretly, I am willing to compromise on the treaty.”
Burden was astonished and delighted. The mad President who would not yield because he was doing the Lord’s work was, once again, the master politician, capable of any adjustment to get his way. “I have listed four areas of interpretation of the treaty on which you—the Democratic leadership—will agree to compromise in order to get the League approved. But Lodge must never know that this comes from me. If he knew, he would want four times four in the way of adjustments. But these, I think, cover any differences and should be acceptable to all but the professional clowns.”
Burden took the paper. “I am relieved,” he said. “I think we’ll have no trouble, now we can maneuver.”
“But sooner or later the Senate—Lodge’s friends, that is—will have to take their medicine.” Wilson kept oscillating between rigid truculence and supple negotiation. Was this, Burden wondered, for effect? In many ways the mild scholarly man of 1912 was noticeably changed. He was more than ever irritable and thin-skinned while his once-formidable ability to concentrate on a subject was gone. Finally, in addition to Wilson’s congenital arteriosclerosis, the President had been extremely ill in Paris, Burden had been told. Officially, he had had the flu, unofficially there were rumors that he had had a stroke. Simultaneously, there had been a falling-out with Colonel House, which explained the disarray on the American side when the final peace treaty had been hammered out in a spirit quite at odds with the lofty “peace without victory” that Wilson had proclaimed when he led the United States to war.
There would be no third term, Burden decided, as the President began to read from an inventory. “You know that I am personally held responsible for the contents of the house in the Place des Etats-Unis, just as I was responsible for the Villa Murat, which is only fitting. Our government should not pay for the glasses that Mrs. Wilson and I break, though she herself broke none and I only one. Yet they have written ten, which is, you’ll agree, intolerable.” Wilson stared up at Burden. He brought the same gravity to the broken glass as he had to the League of Nations.
“It would seem so, Mr. President. But why don’t you turn all this over to Mr. Tumulty?”
“If only I could. But he wasn’t there. I alone know for certain about that broken glass. It was in the bathroom, the first Sunday morning after we got back to Paris and settled in the new place. The other nine glasses, if broken, were broken by someone else. I do not rule out the French themselves. After all, every single one of them assigned to our household was a spy. I even heard two of them whispering together in English.” He stared intently at the book in front of him. “And now this! The broken frame to the Fragonard copy, not even an original but a very common sort of copy, that was hanging in Mrs. Wilson’s boudoir …”
Edith was suddenly in the room, serene and commanding. “Woodrow,” she murmured. She closed the inventory book. “That’s my work. How did you get it?”
“I saw it on Miss Benson’s desk, and of course I must check each item, including Fiume, to which Italy …”
Burden caught the look of fear in Mrs. Wilson’s eyes; more a fear of Burden being witness to … what? Wilson was not mad, as he had demonstrated with his masterful four points of compromise, but he was obsessed in some incalculable way. To him, the inventory was of equal moral weight with the League, and the two seemed to be blurring in his mind. Grayson was also in the room. Did they listen at the keyhole? Wife and doctor were resolutely cheerful and helpful.
“Time for a drive,” said Grayson.
“It’s gotten cooler.”
“Equatorial days,” said Edith. “My poor mother is near extinction in the Powhatan Hotel and she has six fans all going at once and a cake of ice in the middle of her sitting room.”
Wilson, perfectly sane and normal, walked Burden to the door. “Many thanks for the … information. As for the other …” He held up a finger.
Burden nodded. “Only Hitchcock is to know.”
They shook hands. Unusually, Edith did not walk him to the elevator. She and Grayson stayed with the President while Hoover, the chief usher, escorted Burden. Over the years, Burden had cultivated this dignitary. Often one could learn more from five minutes’ idle chat with the chief usher or a Secret Service man than with any of the principals. “I see where you’re going on a long trip.”
“The President, Senator. I’m staying put. I wish he would, too.”
“He seems fully recovered,” Burden fished.
“Oh, he’s fit as a fiddle except for this heat, and tiredness. We’re all pretty strung-out after Paris, and now the Senate. If you’ll excuse me, sir.”
“I’m one of the good guys.” At the elevator door, Burden was inspired to ask, �
�Who did break the frame of the Fragonard copy?”
There was the briefest look of alarm on Hoover’s face. Then he was the soul of blandness. “The President is very conscientious, isn’t he? Like it was his own property, that dirty palace.”
Burden’s own palace was clean at last and furnished, too. In the afternoon light the two-story mansarded gray stone house shone against the blue-greens of Rock Creek Park. They had decided to inaugurate the house with a casual tea, a popular thing to do in August if you lived on a wooded hill above the cool and cooling swift Rock Creek.
A half-dozen Negro waiters had been hired for this occasion. Kitty was already dressed in a long yellow-green gown while Diana was not yet undressed. She would be allowed to watch the arrivals from the great window on the first landing with its view of the driveway, now presided over by a special policeman both known to the guests and knowing. Burden always called him Sergeant, like the sergeant-at-arms of the Senate, who knew every senator and his ways.
Burden showered; then put on a white suit of the sort affected by Southern statesmen as well as by the late Mark Twain, whose white hair, moustaches, suit were all perfectly coordinated as he made an occasion for applause his strategic entrances at the top of the stairs that descended into New Willards’ Peacock Alley.
Burden crossed to the side porch, his favorite spot in the house, and the coolest. Through the thick surrounding woods he could hear the shallow creek as it swirled over its rocky course. A bird—a cardinal, all scarlet—perched on a chair opposite him, waiting to be fed by Kitty. But she was too busy and Burden lacked intimacy with the wild. Fondly, Burden gazed over his two acres of woods, and wondered why anyone needed more of anything. He had started poor; he was now secure, thanks to Kitty’s inheritance and the voters’ indulgence. But the first was being spent and the second was, to say the least, volatile. Particularly now when a number of things were very much out of joint in the United States.
The war had been fraudulent. It had never been of the slightest concern to the United States whether or not Germany commanded Europe; indeed, most Americans believed, as a matter of course, that the entire point to their country was that it provided a safe refuge for those Europeans who could no longer endure the old continent’s confusions and cruelties. Wilson, for reasons obscure, had maneuvered the republic onto the world stage. If there was a design to history, then Wilson had been obliged to conform to the inevitable. If there was no design, only chance, then Wilson had—through vanity?—made a bad choice. To the extent that the American people thought of foreign affairs at all, they inclined to tribal loyalties that, over the generations, vanished. Recent German immigrants had favored the Kaiser; recent Irish immigrants wished England ill. But neither tribe was eager to return, in any guise, to the ancient continent so thoroughly abandoned. Only the crudest, most unremitting propaganda could stir up so essentially placid a polity. As it turned out, the propaganda had been inspired and the Germans had been thoroughly demonized. But now with so much hatred still in the air, the professional politician knew, instinctively, that he himself might fall a victim to those emotions that had been called up from the deep. To make matters worse, a financial crisis had begun and the people at large were restive and in a mood to punish them, whoever they happened to be. He would soon have to decide how he would present himself for re-election in 1920.