The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  In Hersh’s interviews with the Secret Service men, sex and drugs to one side, one is struck by how little actual work Jack got done. There were many days when Kennedy “didn’t work at all. He’d come down late, go to his office. There were meetings—the usual things—and then he had pool time before his nap and lunch. . . . We didn’t know what to think.” My own impression, reading this, was how lucky we were that he wasn’t busy all the time, because when he did set his hand to the plow Cuba got invaded and Castro was set up for assassination, while American troops were sent to fight in Vietnam, and the Diem brothers, our unsatisfactory viceroys in that unhappy country, were put to death in a coup, with White House blessing if not direct connivance.

  In a way, the voices of the Secret Service men are the most damning of all, and I was prepared for what I call the Historians’ Herndon Maneuver. William Herndon was for seventeen years Lincoln’s law partner and shared an office with him. Herndon is the principal historical source for those years, except when Lincoln told Herndon that he had contracted syphilis in youth and had a hard time getting rid of it. Herndon wrote this after the President’s death. The Lincoln priesthood’s response to the syphilis charge is Pavlovian: Herndon was a disreputable drunk and not to be relied on—except when he is. As I read Hersh, I knew that the Kennedy zealots would say the same about the Secret Service man who mentions Jack’s nongonorrheal urethritis and all the rest of it. On Larry King, a professor appeared along with Hugh Sidey. He conceded that JFK had a “squalid covert life.” Then, when one of the Secret Service men was named, it was Sidey who executed the Herndon Maneuver: the agent later had a problem with “alcohol.”

  I think Hersh comes to some wrong conclusions, inevitable considering his task. Incidentally, it is ridiculous to accuse him of not being a serious, sober historian, careful to footnote his way through a past that very few American academics could even begin to deal with. After all, if they were competent to do the job, what effect would it have on those powerful entities and personages who endow universities? Hersh is an old-style muckraker. The fact that he’s found more muck in this particular Augean stable than most people want to acknowledge is hardly his fault.

  I don’t believe, however, that Lyndon Johnson blackmailed Jack into taking him as Vice-President, which is what Hersh suspects. Although I certainly was not in the allegedly uncrowded room when the decision was made, I was a member of the New York State delegation, and I was present in Los Angeles as the candidates came around, one by one, to work us over. (Tammany Hall had already committed us to Kennedy—the highest form of democracy.) Johnson entered the room in a blaze of TV lights. He was no more manic than usual. Very tall, with a huge head, and a gift for colorful invective, he had taken to calling Kennedy, more or less in private, “that spavined hunchback.” He discussed his own recent heart attack—before any of us could. He was good as new now. But in the hospital he had wondered if he should go ahead and buy this blue suit he had ordered just before the attack. “Finally, I told Lady Bird, O.K., go buy it. Either way, I’ll be using it.” As he was leaving, he stopped to speak to several delegates. I was too far away to hear him. Later, I was told that he had mentioned something about Jack’s “illness.” He had been vague, but by evening Addison’s disease was being talked about. If Johnson had gone there to take second place, he would certainly not have mentioned Jack’s health. In any case, none of us could imagine why the omnipotent majority leader of the Senate would want to be a powerless Vice-President. Certainly, in the normal actuarial course of things, Jack was bound to outlive him. In those matters, it is wise to strop Occam’s razor. Jack had to carry Texas to win and with Johnson on the ticket he did, barely.

  Finally, a correction for Hersh and his readers: He writes, “There was some talk from inside the family of having a Kennedy-Kennedy ticket in 1964”—Robert to replace Lyndon as Vice-President—“most of it, Gore Vidal told me in an interview, coming from Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife.” Actually, it was Hersh who told me this story last year. As for Ethel Kennedy, I’ve only met her once. She wanted to know if I was writing a new dirty play, like Edward Albee.

  Hersh does not take his book where it is logically headed from the beginning, the murder in Dallas, and what looks to be a Mob killing. Too many lunatics have already checked in on that subject; and Hersh is wise to leave it alone. But it is also frustrating, since the inventors of our official history are forever fetched by that lone mad killer, eaten up with resentment and envy, the two principal American emotions, if our chroniclers are to be believed. Yet the gunning down in public view with wife to one side and all the panoply of state fore and aft is purest Palermo sendoff. Some years ago, the head of the Italian national police, General dalla Chiesa, was similarly killed—at the center of a cortège of police as he drove triumphantly down the main street of Palermo shortly after taking command of the “war” against the Sicilian Mafia.

  What, then, as movie producers like to say, is the “take-away” of Hersh’s book? This means, what is the audience supposed to think at the end? First, for me, the dangerous inadequacy of the American press. We are seldom, if ever, told what we need to know about how Presidents get elected and then, once in office, what they do of a secret and often unconstitutional nature, particularly abroad. That the political system doesn’t work is no news. Whoever can raise the most corporate money by providing services once in office will be elected, or at least get to be on offer. Clinton and Dole spent, it is said, more than half a billion dollars on the last Presidential election. The press accepts all this as just the way things are. On the rare occasions when a journalist does have a specific smoking-gun complaint, he will find few outlets available to him. Soreheads need not apply for space in the mainline press, much less hope for a moment on the Koppel hour of charm.

  In retrospect, it has always been incredible that someone as thoroughly disreputable as Joe Kennedy should have been allowed to buy his sons major political careers. So—could that happen today? Yes. It is even worse now, as anyone can attest who has so much as gazed disbelievingly upon Steve Forbes or Michael Huffington, empty suits with full wallets. We all agree, monotonously, that a change in the campaign-financing laws would be helpful, but no Congress or President elected under the present corrupt system could bear to kick over the ladder that got him and his tools to the second floor.

  Quite as serious is the danger of electing someone totally dependent on all sorts of mind-altering drugs to enhance mood, not to mention simply stay alive. Curiously, on April 9, 1961, I published a piece about Jack in the London Sunday Telegraph. Rereading it, I can see that, subliminally at least, my knowledge of his Addison’s disease was bothering me then, just as not having gone public with it in 1959 bothers me now. I wrote that because of the “killing” job of the Presidency, “despite his youth, Kennedy may very well not survive.” This is a pretty peculiar thing to write of a “vigorous” man of forty-three. I go on: “Like himself, the men Kennedy has chosen to advise him have not reached any great height until now. They must prove themselves now. Government service will be the high point of their lives.” Alas, this turned out to be true. Between the second-rate cronies who made up the Irish Mafia—only Larry O’Brien was outstanding—and the “efficient” managers, like McNamara, with no conception of the world they had been set loose in, one wishes that he had taken on a few more aides and advisers who had made their mark elsewhere. But, as he said, plaintively, at the time, “I don’t know anybody except politicians. Who the hell is Dean Rusk?” So it came to pass, and even now the photogenic charm of the couple at the center of so much corruption and incompetence still casts its spell, and no harsh Hersh? light let in upon them can ever quite dissolve their magic until time itself places Jack in history’s oubliette, alongside another handsome assassinated President, James Abram Garfield.

  The New Yorker

  1 December 1997

  * NIXON R.I.P.

  On April 23 I was awakened early in the morning by a call from BBC
radio. Richard Milhous Nixon had met his terminal crisis peacefully in the night. Sternly the program’s host told me that both former Prime Minister Edward Heath and Henry (never to be former, alas) Kissinger had referred to the thirty-seventh President as a “towering figure.” I said to the host that the first would have had a fellow feeling for another leader driven from office, while Kissinger’s only claim to our attention was his years in service as Nixon’s foreign policy valet. Otherwise, Henry would now be just another retired schoolteacher, busy at work on Son of Metternich.

  So John Kennedy and Richard Nixon (Congress, class of 1946) are now both gone—paladin and goblin, each put back in the theatrical box of discarded puppets and, to a future eye (or puppet-master), interchangeable. Why not a new drama starring Jack Goblin and Dick Paladin? In their political actions they were more alike than not if one takes the longest view and regards the national history of their day as simply a classic laboratory example of entropy doing its merry chilly thing. In any case, as I wrote in 1983, “We are Nixon; he is us.”

  Much is now being made, among the tears for a man whom only a handful of Americans of a certain age remember, of Nixon’s foreign policy triumphs. He went to Moscow and then détente. He went to Beijing and then saw the Great Wall. Other Presidents could have done what he did, but none dared because of—Nixon. As pictures of Johnson and Mao come on the screen, one hears that solemn baritone: “I am not saying that President Johnson is a card-carrying Communist. No. I am not even saying that his presence on that wall means that he is a Communist. No. But I question . . .” As Nixon had been assigned the part of the Nixon, there was no other Nixon to keep him from those two nice excursions, ostensibly in search of peace.

  After I heard the trumpets and the drums, and watched our remaining Librarians—the high emeritus rank that we bestow on former Presidents (a witty one because now no one does a whole lot of reading)—I played a film clip of Nixon in his vice presidential days. For some reason the soundtrack is gone. A silent movie. An official banquet of some sort. Nixon remembers to smile the way people do. Then a waiter approaches him with a large, corruptly sticky dessert. At that moment, Nixon leans over to speak to his partner on the left, frustrating the waiter’s effort to serve him. The waiter moves on. Nixon sits back; realizes that his dessert has been given to the man on his right. He waves to the waiter, who does not see him. Now the Nixon face is beginning to resemble that of the third English king of his name. Eyes—yes, mere slits—dart first left, then right. The coast is clear. Ruthless Plantagenet king, using his fork like a broadsword, scoops up half the dessert on his neighbor’s plate and dumps it on his own. As he takes his first taste of the dessert, there is a radiance in his eyes that I have never seen before or since. He is happy. Pie in the sky on the plate at last. R.I.P., R.M.N.

  The Nation

  16 May 1994

  * CLINTON–GORE I: GOIN’ SOUTH

  As I write these lines, nothing less than earthly intervention (by Perot?) can prevent the Clinton–Gore team from assuming, as the Chinese say, the mandate of Heaven come November.

  They are, at first glance, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the sight of them in shorts, like a pair of ducks waddling down rustic lanes, reminds us that they are not natural athletes, like the ancient, long-limbed Bush. Also, attractive Huck seems to have Tom’s conniving character, while Tom seems to have no specific character at all. But at least we will be rid of Ichabod Crane (Bush) and his little pal Penrod (Quayle), who can now go home to Indiana.

  In many ways, this has been the most interesting election of my lifetime because, unexpectedly, the people at large have become aware that the political system functions no better than the economic one, and they are beginning to suspect, for the first time, that the two are the same. When this awful connection is made, we will be seeing many more Perots and Dukes and worse, if possible, crawling out from under the flat rocks of the republic as the tremors grow more violent.

  Since what is wrong with us is no longer cyclic but systemic, I suspect that more than half the electorate won’t vote in November [it was four years later that they didn’t vote] even though, paradoxically, they are more than ever worried about the economy. Yet they are bitterly aware that if there are solutions, no candidate has mentioned even one. Certainly the record and rhetoric of such a highly conventional, professional team as Clinton–Gore do not suggest that there will be a new dawn. Worse, the potential Clinton Cabinet, as guessed at by the press, lacks all vitality, much less new ideas. [It proved to be a gorgeous ethnic-sexual mix or mess, a sinking Noah’s Ark of correctness.]

  Even so, for the next hundred or so days after the election, we shall be reading in the press about the vigorous new team in Washington. Hopeful notes will be struck. The Sunday electronic zoo will honk and twitter over who is the real number three at State; meanwhile, a tax bill will be sent to Congress. Slightly higher taxes will be requested for the rich (Congress will say no: too little too late, if not too much too early). There will be no increase in the tax rate on corporate profits because, for all practical purposes, corporations are tax-exempt. In 1950, 38 percent of federal revenues came from a tax on corporate profits. Today, corporations provide only 10 percent. Corporations will not be taxed because they don’t want to be taxed, and so they are not taxed, thanks to the Congresses and presidents that their political contributions have bought. After all, 90,000 lawyers and lobbyists are in place in Washington, D.C., not only to exempt their corporate employers from taxation but also to make sure that they can “legally” avoid those frivolous federal regulations that might require them, let us say, to cease poisoning their customers. Meanwhile, the Vice-President is the head of something called the President’s Council on Competitiveness, which sees to it that any corporation can evade any disagreeable governmental regulation or standard in the interest of “competitiveness.”

  The new president will be applauded when he attacks waste at the Pentagon. Everyone is praised for attacking waste. But no one ever does anything about it because no one ever can. Although there have been no declared wars since 1945 (except those of our own undeclared intervention) the United States has a total war economy, and we shall go right on building aircraft carriers and Seawolf submarines until all the money’s gone. Over the years, the Pentagon has seen to it that there is a significant “defense” plant in each congressional district; that is why most congressmen will always say no to cutbacks because of the Effect on the Economy.

  In any case, Clinton–Gore, as southern conservatives, are wedded from birth to the military. Partly this is due to the hawkish nature of the southern states. During Reconstruction, politics and the army were about the only careers open to the ambitious southerner. Even for the unambitious, military service was often the only way out of poverty. The fact that southerners traditionally keep their congressional representatives in office longer than other regions means that they end up with those committee chairmanships that deal with the military, and so the South’s great source of revenue has always come from “defense.” Since expenditure on war is what got us into our present mess, one would think that the military budget—and its ominous twin, the interest that we must pay on $4 trillion of debt—should have been the centerpiece of the campaign.

  But Clinton–Gore never got close to the subject, and they will not address it in office. Bush himself wisely kept the campaign focused on the sacredness of the fetus, hard to upstage in a country where, according to the good Dr. Gallup, 47 percent think that God created Man one afternoon out of some convenient mud, while 40 percent think that God may have taken a bit longer to put the finishing touch on what, after all, is His self-portrait. Only 9 percent believe in Darwinian evolution and science. So with folks like that out there, perhaps it is better to talk about abortion and adultery and who spells Jennifer with a G and who spells it with a J, and what can this mean?

  In foreign affairs, we have one great opportunity, which only crafty Dick Nixon ever truly grasped—Russia.
Although we don’t have much money left to give them, a lively president and a few corporate magnates with no more than average IQs could start making deals to develop Russian oil and other resources. This would generate the money for the Russians to buy our consumer goods, which, in turn, would make us prosperous again. Naturally, this will require intelligence and planning, two things our corporate governing class has not been capable of since 1945. But the opportunity is superb. Until two years ago, it looked as if West Germany had landed the Russian account, but then their union with East Germany threw them off course. That leaves us and Canada as Russia’s friendly industrialized neighbors in the Northern Hemisphere. H. L. Mencken noted many years ago that the “Russians were like the Americans. They, too, were naturally religious and confiding; they, too, were below the civilized average in intelligence; and they, too, believed in democracy, and were trying to give it a trial.” The time has come for an economic union.

  Our allies are deeply disturbed by the intensity of the sick religiosity that the United States is currently experiencing (due more to television preachers than to the Good Book). Obviously, a people who cannot deal with the natural sciences is not going to do very well in the twenty-first century, when religion will play hardly any part, at least in Western Europe and Asia, our competition.