The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  President Johnson started installing recording devices his first day in office. Johnson is perhaps the only great comic figure to have occupied the White House. He was not only a master of Lincolnian outhouse humor but he was a deadly mimic. He recorded, between November 1963 and 1968, some 700 hours of White House meetings and phone calls: well worth a CD of his very own. When Johnson names the venerable Senator Richard Russell to the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s murder, they meet. Russell is furious.

  Russell: Well, Mr. President, you ought to have told me you were going to name me.

  LBJ: I told you. I told you the other day I was going to name the chief justice. I called you.

  Russell: You did not. You talked about getting somebody from Supreme Court. You didn’t tell me you were going to name [both Warren and me]. . . . Mr. President, please now. . . .

  LBJ: I just want to counsel with you and I just want your judgment and your wisdom, ’cause I haven’t got any Daddy and you’re going to be it. . . .

  Russell: Well, I’m not going to say anything more, Mr. President. I’m at your command.

  LBJ: You damned sure going to be at my command. You’re going to be at my command as long as I’m here.

  The most startling revelation is how clearly—and early—LBJ understood that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. As of 1964, he is again confiding in Russell.

  LBJ: What do you think of this Vietnam thing?

  Russell: I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it, without getting in a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. It’s—I—I—just don’t know what to do.

  LBJ: Well, that’s the way I’ve been feeling for six months. . . . I spend all my days with Rusk and McNamara and Bundy and Harriman and Vance and all those folks that are dealing with it and I would say that it pretty well adds up to them now that we’ve got to show some force. . . . I don’t think that the American people are for it. . . . You don’t have any doubt that if we go in there, and get them up against a wall, the Chinese Communists are going to come in?

  Russell: No doubt at all.

  LBJ: That’s my judgment, and my people don’t think so. . . .

  Russell: I guess going in there with all the troops, I tell you it’ll be the most expensive adventure that this country ever went into.

  Doyle quotes C. Douglas Dillon to the effect that LBJ so frightened everybody that no one dared tell him the truth about the extent of defeats until the Tet Offensive. But it is clear from what’s on record that he had a perfectly clear view of how he had been trapped by his inherited Kennedy advisers, to a man vain and blinkered, and by his own innate cowardice, which allowed him to be turned into a disastrous war-President instead of what he was born to be, the completer of the New Deal.

  Where Kennedy never forgot that he was being recorded, Nixon seems never to have remembered. He is being immortalized. Despite intermittent political skills, Nixon seems, on the evidence of the tapes, to have had no conscious mind. He is all flowing unconscious. Remembered slights, grudges, conspiracies. “We are surrounded by enemies,” he declared after his reelection by one of the greatest majorities in history. Two years into his first term Nixon joined the taping club. Along with the normal presidential desire to get something on others before they get it on him, Nixon had Kissinger. Nixon knew, everyone knew, that Kissinger would say one thing to the President and then just the opposite to journalists in order to build himself up in the eyes of the public. All in all, it would have been cheaper—and less bloody—for Nixon to have got a new foreign policy adviser, but, as Dick liked to say, jowls aquiver, that would be the easy way. Along with tracking enemies, Nixon used the tapes simply to rant against the Ivy League, Georgetown set as well as Jews, the Pentagon, the CIA. Regularly, he ordered crimes to be committed that his staff promptly forgot about. Doyle quotes Bob Haldeman as observing, “Nixon was the weirdest man ever to live in the White House.” The great Gen. Alexander Haig said, “My God, if I had done everything Richard Nixon told me to do, I’d probably be in Leavenworth today!” In any case, at the end, Nixon’s own talk did him in. He obstructed justice, suborned witnesses, and, most horrifying, talked dirty and even blasphemed in the Oval Office, the pure heart of our empire. So—California, here I come.

  Doyle accepts the generous view that Nixon was a master of foreign affairs who brought to an end the Vietnam War. That is one way of looking at it. But the war that he pretended to have a plan to end in 1968 kept right on going through 1972 and almost up to his own political end.

  Nixon’s appointed Vice President, Gerald Ford, vowed that he would not record. Doyle has found an authorized telephone tape between Ford and Kissinger. They appear to think the world of each other. Doyle also pads things out with the minutes of the tense national security meetings over the seizure of an American merchant ship by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Communists. Thus Gerald Ford underwent his baptism of fire as, yet again, the resolve and will and credibility of the United States, the earth’s only good nation, were being tested by crafty Asian Communists. One senses the tension in those meetings. Also the playacting. Even Doyle recognizes that the “participants seem to be as concerned with bellicose posturing and inflicting punitive damage on Cambodia as much as with the actual rescue. Kissinger advised: ‘Let’s look ferocious.’ ” The United States has now entered its Cowardly Lion phase. The appointed Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, has a presentiment of what is to come when he warns: “Many are watching us, in Korea and elsewhere. The big question is whether or not we look silly.”

  Carter did not record. He was also ill suited for the presidency because his virtues—an engineer’s convergent mind—were of no use in a job that requires almost surreal divergency. Engineers want to connect everything up and make sense. Politicians—and artists—realize that nothing really makes sense and nothing ever hooks up. As Carter’s Vice President, Walter Mondale, sadly noted, “Carter thought politics was sinful.” Happily, he was born to be a former President, a phantom office that he has since enhanced. Two years after Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, he too was faced with a crisis. The free world was at risk, yet again, thanks to ruthless Commies at work on the small island of Grenada, where 1,000 Americans, many of them medical students, might possibly be at risk from a Mr. Bishop, the local point man for the evil men in the Kremlin. Well, Ron stood tall; he hit his mark. An actor’s got to do what an actor’s got to do—so we invaded, ’cause if we hadn’t we’d reveal to the world “that when the chips were down, we backed away.” This is a great scenario only slightly spoiled by mean old General Haig, who observed that “the Provincetown police force could have conquered Grenada.”

  I feel that Doyle is somewhat dazzled by the Great Communicator, who slept more on the job than any other President since his idol Calvin Coolidge, who wisely stayed in bed every chance he got. Reagan did attend to his occasional acting chores but, as in his movie career, he almost never had a good script. Sample: Reagan is being videotaped as he tries to sell some senators on his pro-contra line: “I think what is at issue today is whether we’re voting for or against a plan, we’re really voting are we going to have another Cuba, a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian country as we have now in Nicaragua, on the mainland of the Americas, or are we going to hold out for people who want democracy.” Well, it probably played better than it reads. It was Reagan’s astonishing luck to have, in Gorbachev, a Soviet leader who was willing to switch off the cold war (and the Soviet Union in the process, presumably by accident), and a wife, Nancy, who finally took U.S. policy in hand and made peace with the Russians while not missing a single lunch with Betsy Bloomingdale. Tapes of their telephone conversations would indeed be the stuff of history.

  On to Bush. We are faced by even more Enemy of the Month Club choices now that the Soviet Union is flying apart. Qaddafi, Noriega (invasion of Panama, hooray!), Saddam Hussein (light show over Baghdad!). Next—Clinton. Bit soon for a useful summing up. D
oyle does think that the White House should be wired for the record, but with the tapes sealed for twenty years unless otherwise needed. He seems aware of the dangers of absolute surveillance over everyone, today’s trend. He quotes Frank Church’s warning of a quarter-century ago. The Senator realized how, with modern technology, we now have the capacity “to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we can never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

  Doyle seems to think that there is nothing wrong with the American political system that a few honest guys and gals in high office couldn’t cure. But to obtain high office those guys and gals have to raise millions and millions of dollars first and this can only be done dishonestly, even by our Rube Goldberg rules, the ever-shifting campaign financing laws. As for intellectual honesty, the consumer society in which we glory is based on advertising which is at best hype and at worst plain lying. Thus even the most virtuous candidate is sold, with a merry spin. It has been a long time since any public figure has openly said anything useful, much less true, even in the relative privacy of the Oval Office. Up to a point, this is the nature of our society and kind of fun. When the wise Frank Church heard the virtuous Jimmy Carter promise the American people that he would never lie to them if elected president, Church said, with morose delight, “He would deny the very nature of politics.” But when, as must happen, all sense of social reality is lost, the rulers and the ruled then plunge into the churchly abyss where nothing at all is ever real again and even the ghost of the Republic is gone while the first, and probably last, global nuclear empire reels from crisis to crisis, involving ever weaker enemies, led by ever more off-the-wall rulers.

  The overall impression that Inside the Oval Office gives is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is now in serious play: Everything is running down. From our Augustus, FDR, who never worried about his place in history because he knew that he was supremely history, to the present day one notes the increasing second-rateness of our Oval Ones. I suggest that this has nothing to do so much with the caliber of the individuals as it does with an overextended military industrial political complex that wrings tax money from Congress to fight drugs, terrorism and bad guys who use eyeliner like Qaddafi. Money for “defense” (sic) should be spent repairing our rotted home base. But it won’t be. Meanwhile, the Ovoids do their best to please the corporations that house them so nicely. They also talk, as politicians always have, in code. FDR was accused of making different agreements with different people. Wearily, Eleanor Roosevelt, if she remembered, would warn those about to approach FDR in his office: “When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn’t agreeing with you. He’s just listening to you.” So when polls show that the American people over a weekend rate highly this or that President, they are really only saying yes, yes, yes because there’s not much point in saying no, no, no until we can find a new way of selecting what, after all, are essentially powerless figureheads—except in wartime, which is why . . . You complete the sentence. I feel their pain.

  The Nation

  27 September 1999

  * CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

  In the summer of 1967, I wrote my father from Venice about a ball given at the Palazzo Rezzonico. Guests arrived by gondola. Hundreds of torches lit up the facade of the palace on the Grand Canal, while inside thousands of candles burned in the great chandeliers as liveried footmen offered champagne to what looked to be every Perhapsburg in Europe. I had arrived with my assigned date, Clare Boothe Luce, the recent widow of the founder of Time, in whose giggly pages both my father and I had so often been fictionalized. Time was founded as a news magazine in 1923; actually it was an opinion magazine that presented real people as if they were characters in an ongoing melodrama where Christ and Capitalism were forever at risk. Time set, alas, the tone for most journalism since. The malice was unremitting, the humor merry as an open grave.

  As our gilded barge docked, Clare and I stood, rather like Antony—well, Octavian—and Cleopatra, while the flashbulbs of paparazzi douched us in that blinding icy white light—limelight—each found so nourishing. At the ball, by candlelight, the sixty-four-year-old Clare was a perfect silvery moon set among the zircon stars.

  I had known her slightly most of my life. Our relationship is pretty much summed up in the note I sent to my father:

  I said I felt novels were finished. She said, “Yes, but there’s still a kind of fiction people love!” “Yes,” I said, “Time magazine.” “No,” she said, “I meant fiction.” “I know,” I said, “I meant Time.” “Don’t be naughty,” she said. “I meant detective stories.” Then she insisted we be photographed in the room where Browning died (enclosed).

  The picture is lost. But I recall that as we stood beside a round table (that he wrote at?) Clare, in a melting voice, misquoted “My Last Duchess.” Gently, I corrected her. Then I misquoted Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “I shall but love thee better after death” sonnet, and she radiantly corrected me. One-upmanship was how we passed the rare times we saw each other.

  The last time I saw Clare Boothe Luce was in 1985, on her final trip to Rome, where, from 1953 to 1956, she had been Eisenhower’s turbulent ambassador, single-handedly saving Italy from Communism, blissfully unaware that Italian Communists had little interest in leveling the classes—her great fear—and little sympathy for the ci-devant Soviet Union. No matter. Clare was a fierce professional warrior for God and the deserving rich and, at one point, for Trieste to rejoin Italy—or was it the other way around?

  The American Ambassador gave a dinner for her, which Imelda Marcos excitingly crashed. A ten-year-old godchild of mine was put next to Clare. She spent most of her time at table amusing the wide-eyed girl, who could not believe that an interesting and witty grown-up would want to talk to her when there were so many fascinating folk at hand to dazzle. Clare was endlessly seductive. She was also a great many other things, as Sylvia Jukes Morris points out in Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce (Random House; $30), which takes her life up to 1942, when, after three hit plays on Broadway and the power marriage to Henry R. Luce, she got elected to Congress from Connecticut; here Morris ends her first volume.

  This is a biography of the sort that only real writers—as opposed, say, to professional scholars or journalists—can write. Morris has done serious research; yet she writes in short, sharp, dramatic bursts. Like her subject, she has a gift for aphorism: Clare became, in later life, “more conservative now that she had so much to conserve.”

  This sort of book does make one wonder what will become of the mallsters’ novelists. Clare’s life has every staple of pop fiction: illegitimacy (hers), poverty, a mother who advanced from lowly call girl to kept woman; then Clare’s marriage to and divorce from a rich alcoholic by whom she had a daughter, later tragically killed. Once divorced, she goes to work, rises from caption writer at Vogue to managing editor of Vanity Fair while being herself somewhat kept by that busy financier and world-class bore, Bernard Baruch. Then on to the heights: the marriage to Luce in 1935; the hit plays; the elections won. . . . The Collins sisters are left far behind in the gold dust of fact.

  Everyone turns up in Clare’s story, in or out of bed. One can only hope that Morris does not belong to the coitus-interruptus school of biography so starkly personified by her husband, Edmund Morris (after a splendid first volume on Theodore Roosevelt’s life, he has kept us waiting for eighteen years for the next shoe to drop) and by sly Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who put aside in medias res his distinguished multivolume life of FDR to grind out fictional narratives about the wayward residents of Riverdale, New York’s, house of Atreus.

  What was Clare like to know? I’ve used the word “seductive.” Most people do. She was five feet five and slender, and she was often compared to a Dresden doll because of her yellow hair, blue eyes, and chiseled features—chiseled first b
y Noguchi in marble and then by a plastic surgeon, obliging Clare to call Noguchi in for an emergency session to make her marble nose conform to “Nature.” Noguchi denies that he made the change, but he did. In any case, “Dresden doll” suggests a delicate figurine easily broken. Clare was not breakable. In her senior years, she swam, snorkeled, water-skied; and outlived most of her detractors, while occasionally dropping a bit of acid.

  The day after the Embassy party, we had lunch at Vecchia Roma, near my apartment in Largo Argentina. Clare was accompanied by her biographer, Ms. Morris. I remember wondering, How is this going to turn out? Because if they become friends . . . ? A further complication for an honest biographer: Clare enjoyed lying about herself. But then there had been a great deal for her to lie about, starting with a failed-musician father, who never married her mother; and a mother who married a country doctor but was kept to the end by one Joel Jacobs (she wouldn’t marry him because he was a Jew); and, finally, Clare’s syphilitic brother, who failed at everything, including embezzlement (he got caught).

  But I did note, at lunch, that she was being candid about most things. Also, for once, she and I did not row about politics. Instead memory lane beckoned. My stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss (known as Hughdie), awash with Standard Oil money, befriended an impoverished Yale classmate, one Harry Luce, son of a missionary in China, awash with Jesus and raw ambition. Hughdie paid for Harry’s first trip to Europe. In reflective mood, Hughdie would observe, “You know, wherever we went in Europe, Harry managed to make new enemies for the United States.” Later, Hughdie put up a part of the eighty-six thousand dollars with which Harry started Time; when the magazine was profitable, he was repaid, without interest. Later still, Harry, no doubt in sentimental mood, tried to take Hughdie’s wife away from him. I think that is why my mother was one of the few women of Clare’s generation who did not hate her on principle. After all, she could afford to be generous: she had, as they used to say, put the horns on Clare. “Poor Clare,” she would sigh, after she turned down Harry’s offer of marriage in the spring of 1942. (I was in the next room and heard him say, “Clare doesn’t understand me. We don’t share the same interests. We’re getting a divorce.”) As it turned out, my mother did divorce Hughdie in order to marry not Luce but an Air Force general, while the Luces, now seriously incorporated as business partners, continued their manifold good works to the end of his life. She had her affairs. He had his. Understanding, finally, had everything to do with it.