by Gore Vidal
Daisy reads Beverly Nichols for hints on how to do up the house-to-be. Franklin thinks his own tastes are too simple for “B. Nichols” (how thrilled that silly-billy would have been to know that he was read and reread by the Leader of the Free World). Meanwhile, history kept moving. Reelection in 1936. Again in 1940. The Allied armies are finally beginning to win, and the President’s body is gradually shutting down. It is poignant to observe Daisy observing her friend in his decline. She tries to feed him minerals from one of her cranks. (Analysts found nothing harmful in them, and nothing beneficial either.) She puts a masseur on to him who tells him he’ll soon be walking. So eager is Franklin for good news that he claims to have been able to move a little toe.
* * *
Daisy never forgets that she is River, not Village. But Franklin the politician must speak for Village, too. She applauds his efforts at educating the national Village folk “because so many people in our class still object to more than the minimum of education for the mass of the people” as “they lose the sense of subservience to—shall I say?—us.” It is plain that neither Beekman cousin ever had much direct experience with Villagers.
Daisy records a very odd conversation with the President’s eldest son, James, on January 26, 1944 (the war is ending):
At lunch, Jimmy talked about the young, uneducated boys who are learning that you kill or get killed, etc., etc., and may prove to be a real menace if, at the end of the war, they are suddenly given a bonus, and let loose on the country—He thinks they should be kept in the army, or in C.C.C. camps or something like that, until jobs are found for them, or unless they are put back to school—He says many are almost illiterate.
Fear of class war is never far from the River mind. Happily, Franklin was ready with the GI Bill of Rights, which sent many Villagers to school, while his heir, Harry Truman, compassionately put the country on a permanent wartime footing, thus avoiding great unemployment. Curiously, River’s fear of Village was to come true after Vietnam when the Village boys came home to find that they had been well and royally screwed by a Village, not a River, government. The rest is—today.
At the time of the 1944 election, the infamous fourth term (decried by many Roosevelt supporters), Franklin was dying. But he pulled himself together for one last hurrah; submitting to heavy makeup, he drove in the rain in triumph through Manhattan. He was now sleeping much of the day. Harry Hopkins, his closest man friend, was also dying and so, in effect, the war was running itself to conclusion. It was Daisy’s view that Franklin wanted to stay in office long enough to set up some sort of League of Nations and then resign and go home to the River. Incidentally, in all the correspondence and diaries there is not one reference to Vice-President Truman.
Daisy’s last entries are sad, and often sharp, particularly about Eleanor’s abandonment of her husband. After some logistic confusion at the White House, she writes, “Mrs. R. should be here to attend to all this sort of thing. The P. shouldn’t have to—and it has to be done.”
Apparently, Franklin was always prone to nightmares. (Like Lincoln in a similar context?) One night he called for help with “blood curdling sounds.” He thought a man was coming “through the transom,” and was going to kill him. He asked to see a screening of Wilson, a fairly good film of obvious interest to Franklin as Woodrow Wilson’s heir and fellow Caesar; by the picture’s end, and Wilson’s physical crack-up, the President’s blood pressure was perilously high; and there were no beta blockers then.
The Yalta meeting wore him out and both Churchill and Stalin noted that their colleague was not long for this world. But he knew what he was doing at the meeting. Eleanor told me that when he got home—they met briefly before he went to Warm Springs—she chided him for making no fuss over leaving Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in Russia’s hands. The Realpolitik member of the firm told her that Stalin would not give them up without a war. “Do you think the American people, after all they’ve gone through, would fight for those small countries?” Eleanor sighed, “I had to agree that he was right again.”
The deviousness of Franklin, the politician, was a necessity, increased no doubt by whatever psychic effect his immobility had on him. One of the reasons he tossed his head this way and that was not only for emphasis but to command attention—after all, he could never get up and walk out of a room—and his constant chattering was also a means to disguise what he was up to while holding everyone’s attention. Of the two, Eleanor was more apt to be brutal. It was a disagreeable surprise to me, an Eleanorite, to read:
Mrs. R. brought up the subject of the American fliers who came down in Arabia, & were mutilated & left to die in the desert. She insisted that we should bomb all Arabia, to stop such things. The P. said it was an impossible thing to do, in the first place, as the tribes are nomadic, & hide in secret places etc. Also, Arabia is a huge desert etc. Besides, it would be acting like the Japanese, to go & bomb a lot of people, who don’t know any better. . . . I put in one word, to the effect that we have lynching in this country still, but we don’t go & bomb the town where the lynching occurs—Harry Hopkins joined Mrs. R.—but their point seemed to me so completely illogical that I restrained myself, & kept silent!
One is struck by what such awesome power does to people and how it is the “compassionate” Eleanor who wants to kill at random and the Artful Dodger President who does not.
Finally, Franklin’s obsessive stamp collecting pays off. He knows his geography. Unlike subsequent presidents, he knows where all the countries are and who lives in them. He is also aware that the war with Japan is essentially a race war. Who will dominate the Pacific and Asia, the white or the yellow race? As of June 1944, race hatred was the fuel to our war against Japan, as I witnessed firsthand in the Pacific. Yet Franklin, Daisy reports, is already looking ahead:
In regard to the Far East in general which means the yellow race, which is far more numerous than the white, it will be to the advantage of the white race to be friends with them & work in cooperation with them, rather than make enemies of them & have them eventually use all the machines of western civilization to overrun & conquer the white race.
* * *
Today, such a statement would be denounced as racist if not, indeed, an invocation of the Yellow Peril.
* * *
Last speech to Congress to report on Yalta. I saw the newsreel at an army hospital in Alaska. The President spoke, seated; apologized for not standing but he said the weight of his metal braces was now too much. Never before had he publicly referred to his paralysis. The voice was thick, somewhat slurred. It was plain that he had had a stroke of some sort. Then Franklin and Daisy were off to Warm Springs, where they were joined by Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and a painter friend. Laura Delano was also on hand. The River was rallying around him. Then, while being painted, he slumped and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” As he was carried into the bedroom, Laura alone heard him say, “Be careful.” After fire, he most feared being dropped. Eleanor came and history resumed its course, and Mr. Truman does get a mention, when he is sworn in as president.
Toward the end Daisy was always there—closest companion—to feed him and watch him as he dozed off, to talk of the River and, doubtless, of Our Hill, though it had been plain for some time that he would never live there. I should note she signed her letters to him “M” for Margaret, her real name, or simply “YM,” “Your Margaret.” He signed his letters “F.” All in all, an unexpectedly sweet story in a terrible time, when, along with wars and depressions and dust bowls, Villages became cities and the River polluted and one Beekman cousin petrified into history while the other, Daisy, simply faded, smiling, away. Ward has made FDR’s story something no one else has managed to do, poignant, sad.
The New York Review of Books
11 May 1995
* WIRETAPPING THE OVAL OFFICE
It all began in the heat of the summer of 1940. Hitler was at his peak in Europe. France had been defeated. Operation Sealion, the inva
sion of Britain, would be launched once the aerial bombardment of England had, presumably, broken the spirit of the island’s residents. Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt, twice elected President of the United States, was doing his best to aid the British, who were flat broke, 88 percent of the American people wanted no part of a war in Europe, while the isolationists in Congress were uncommonly eloquent. But Roosevelt was a sly and devious man (and I mean those adjectives, as Nixon once said when applying them to Eisenhower, “in the best sense of those words”). Some time that summer, probably in June, FDR decided to run for a third term, something no President had done before. But slyness and deviousness were very much the order of the day, particularly when, after a closed session with Congressional leaders, FDR was promptly quoted as having said that the border of the United States was the Rhine River; this was a dangerous misquotation. What to do?
Into history strode one Henry Kannee—a mere walk-on, an under-five-lines player, as they say in movies. But remember that name. This under-five changed history, permanently. Why not, he said, bug the Oval Office? FDR was delighted. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, was sent for, presumably with his drills and wires and toolbox, as well as a Kiel Sound Recorder, the ancestor of today’s tape recorder.
William Doyle has written Inside the Oval Office, an entertaining study of “The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton.” This subtitle is something of a misnomer, since not all the presidents taped themselves and their visitors. Ronald Reagan, as befitted a bona fide movie star, was not about to be demoted to what, in effect, was a mere radio performer. He occasionally called in video recorders to show him in full majestic crisis-control as well as in full color to emphasize those curious bright red clown spots on his cheekbones. (It should be noted that Doyle is partial to our very conservative presidents, as opposed to the standard conservative models we are usually permitted.)
In 1988 Doyle made a fascinating documentary for television. Apparently, from August to November 1940, FDR was haphazardly taped (the microphone was in his desk lamp). The tapes were not discovered until 1978. One FDR admirer has remarked how similar his private speaking voice was to his high ecclesiastical speechifying. What is fascinating is how un-bishoplike the New York politician is in private. The voice is dry; vowels short; consonants clipped at the end like every other farmer in the Dutchess County of those days. He was something of a chatterbox and often filibustered to make sure that he wasn’t told what he didn’t want to hear. He also, as Harry Truman sternly noted, “lies.” Associates of Truman have noted the same thing of Truman and, indeed, shocking though it must be to contemporary members of the House of Representatives, presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a President lies successfully, he is called a statesman.
FDR’s tapes provide little of interest. He does wonder how best to smear his opponent in the 1940 election, Wendell Willkie, who was having a fairly open affair with “the gal,” Irita Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review (imagine George W. Bush even knowing the name of Michiko Kakutani). They were intellectual giants then. FDR tells civil rights leaders that he’s been integrating blacks into the armed services; this is a real whopper. When challenged, he forlornly notes that the innate musicality of Negroes might pep up the military bands and so could lead, with luck, to an indigo band leader. Doyle affects shock that FDR refers to black men as “boys,” particularly in front of black civil rights leaders. It is sickening, of course, to be exposed even fifty-nine years after the fact to such a horror at a time when our sensibilities have never been so delicately attuned to the feelings of others. But I suppose this is a small flaw in the man who gave us the entire world. Doyle sadly quotes Dean Acheson, an Assistant Secretary of State at the time, on how FDR “condescended [to people]. . . . it was patronizing and humiliating.” Doyle neglects to note that Acheson was bounced by FDR in 1933 only to be rehired in a lesser capacity eight years later. I don’t think Doyle likes FDR; if he does, why does he note gratuitously that FDR “laughed at his own jokes”?
Potentially, the most interesting tape is the Cabinet meeting after our fleet was sunk at Pearl Harbor. Although FDR knew that his ultimatum of November 26, 1941, would oblige the Japanese to attack us somewhere, it now seems clear that, thanks to our breaking of many of the twenty-nine Japanese naval codes the previous year, we had at least several days’ warning that Pearl Harbor would be hit; yet, mysteriously, the American commanders in Hawaii were given no alert. It was commented upon at the time that the President was less astonished than others by what had happened; in any case, it would be interesting to reinterpret the talk in the Oval Office on December 8, in light of the revelations about to be made in Day of Deceit (The Free Press, December), where Robert Stinnett, after years of studying those coded naval intercepts, shows that FDR was complicitous in the attack since, otherwise, he could not have got the American people into the virtuous war against Hitler. With this latest information, one might be able to . . . well, decode the cryptic White House conversations about the—expected?—attack that brought us into the Second World War.
Except for a brief tryout of FDR’s recording apparatus, Harry Truman did not record himself or others for history or even blackmail. Doyle is now obliged to slog his way through the management styles of various presidents. While Truman presented us with a militarized economy and government, Eisenhower brought the skills of a military politician to the Oval Office. He regarded the taping of conversations as a “management tool,” and in his memoir Crusade in Europe he duly notes that he was a recorder of talk from early days. Of course, “I made it a habit to inform visitors of the system that we used so that each would understand its purpose was merely to facilitate the execution of business.” This shows a noble concern but such candor was not, perhaps, the best way to get interesting information out of people who didn’t want their secrets put on the record.
Most Presidents tend to have a low view of their immediate predecessors. Eisenhower, the methodical staff officer executive, disliked FDR’s chaotic, secretive style, and he was disgusted by Truman’s use of cronies. It was Ike who switched off the British Empire for good at the time of Suez. In “secret,” Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt, ostensibly to recover the Suez Canal, which Nasser had rudely seized. Ike and Prime Minister Anthony Eden (recorded by a “dead key”—someone listening in on the telephone) provided a poignant last post for Eden, Suez and the ghost of the Raj. The beginning of their talk is superb and sets the tone. Eisenhower: “This is a very clear connection.” Eden: “I can just hear you.” Was it not ever thus between slave and master? Ike has ordered a cease-fire at Suez. An edgy Eden sounds as if he has to go to the bathroom; actually, he is due in “my” Parliament in five minutes. Eden takes down his orders; then Ike says, “Now that we know connections are so good, you can call me anytime you please.” Eden: “If I survive here tonight I will call you tomorrow.” Three months later Eden was, as they say nowadays, toast.
Kennedy was the least prepared of the presidents whom Doyle deals with. He quickly demonstrated his inability to execute a coherent policy at the Bay of Pigs, a misadventure cooked up by his predecessor that he had then made his very own, with disastrous results. Although Kennedy had a sharp mind, he was not used to hard work of any sort other than the haphazard barnstorming of politics. After the Cuban disaster, McGeorge Bundy wrote him a memo, placing the blame firmly, if tactfully, on Kennedy’s management style, to the extent that he could be said to have one. “We can’t get you to sit still. . . . Truman and Eisenhower did their daily dozen in foreign affairs the first thing in the morning, and a couple of weeks ago you asked me to begin to meet you on this basis. I have succeeded in catching you on three mornings, for a total of about eight minutes, and I conclude this is not really how you like to begin the day.” Although the Kennedy promiscuity has been much discussed, far more important for the state was his bad health. He was in bed a good deal o
f the time, and the cortisone injections he was obliged to take did not concentrate his mind.
In the summer of 1962 Kennedy installed the most thorough recording system of all, wiring the Oval Office, Cabinet room, parts of the living quarters. In his office, a button controlled the recording switch. When it was on, others did most of the talking while the self-conscious President was laconic, grave, noncommittal. Doyle gives us the dialogue with the Governor of Mississippi when the university was being integrated and civil war seemed a possibility, at least in Oxford, Mississippi. Kennedy expertly maneuvers the Governor into place. He’s learning.
On October 16, 1962, McGeorge Bundy informs the President that the Soviets have placed missiles in Cuba. Crucially, military intelligence is certain that the missiles do not have nuclear warheads. Oddly, no one really questions the absolute certainty of the team that brought us the Bay of Pigs. It was only a few years ago that we learned that the missiles were indeed so equipped and that if Cuba was attacked, the Russians were willing to take out a number of American cities as far north as Seattle. The dialogue is chilling in light of what we now know. Shall the missiles be taken out with an airstrike, promptly followed by invasion? General Taylor notes that the United States is vulnerable from the south. Ambassador Thompson comes up with a compromise—a blockade. But Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay (“Bomb ’em back to the Stone Age”) is all for some serious bombing. It has been reported that LeMay’s presence at any meeting with Kennedy was sufficient to give the President “fits.” LeMay is ready for an all-out war over Cuba; Berlin, too, if we’re not chicken. This does not play well in the Oval Office. In the end, Kennedy’s political instinct was classic: When in doubt, do nothing, particularly if the something that you do could end life on the planet. When Khrushchev helped Kennedy end the crisis, JFK was heard to say: “If they want this job, fuck ’em. They can have it—it’s no great joy to me.”