by Gore Vidal
Neither hero nor heroine quite agrees on what happened at the end. The dull look of the economy should have been enough to eject an incumbent President, but Mary thinks that Bush was done in, ultimately, by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel, who, on October 30, 1992, produced sufficient smoking revolvers to convince 3 to 7 percent of American voters that Bush was up to his ears in the Iran-contra capers of the Reagan era. If, as the Bush campaign kept chattering, the election was based on “trust” (I think the word they meant was “plausibility”), then Bush lost on October 30. A Time magazine poll reported that 40 percent thought Clinton was lying about his draft status, but 63 percent thought Bush was lying about Iran-contra. That did it, somewhat helped by the debates, where Clinton came through as “caring” while Bush looked at his watch (Mary is angry that the public thought this was a sign of boredom at the debates, when it was really a signal to the questioner to cut off a long-winded Clinton answer), and the small but imperfectly formed Perot failed to get onto the high stool assigned him: he managed the first rung but not the second and so ended up leaning, oddly, against—what else? the impossible dream. Of such stuff is our little history made.
Mary is shattered by Bush’s defeat. James is more thrilled at not losing than winning, although “I always fall in love with my candidate.” A last meeting with the Clintons. Falstaff with Henry the King. Everything is changed. Prince Hal is no more. James will not serve in the Administration. There is a fond farewell, then James goes home to Mary.
James still checks in at the White House, as Woodward reports. Mary is now prime-time, big-time television. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are currently suffering the trials of Job. George Bush is alone with his memories, of which, perhaps, the most vivid he describes to Mary: They are aboard his campaign train through Ohio and Michigan.
“He called me into the back car, had something he wanted to tell me.
“ ‘I’ve been mooned. I’ve been mooned!’
“ ‘Oh, my God.’
“He thought this was incredibly funny. ‘Yes, an entire family. Mother, father and children. Can you imagine?’ ”
One can imagine very easily. But it was not the good man from Kennebunkport, Texas, who was being so honored. Rather, it was the system that he and Bill and James and Mary represent. Moonie power is bound to prevail in the end—or so we optimists believe as we wait, impatiently, for the James and Mary film, The Mooning of the President.
The New York Times Book Review
18 September 1994
* CLINTON–GORE II
Four years ago, I wrote that “nothing less than earthly intervention (by Perot?) can prevent the Clinton–Gore team from assuming, as the Chinese say, the mandate of Heaven.” Now history seems ready to repeat itself: Clinton will defeat Dole, whose original choice for a vice-presidential running mate, I can now reveal, was God. Why not? God has expressed no preference for either party, and on abortion, not even Pat Buchanan can instruct Him in those uterine mysteries the far right so furiously celebrate in the eldritch caverns of Eleusis, Mississippi. But God had other fish to fry.
In 1992 I compared Arkansas Clinton and Tennessee Gore to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, which was how they were presenting themselves to the folks. Actually, Clinton (Yale Law School) is plainly avatar to the Artful Dodger, while Gore (Harvard) is wealthy heir to a dour political dynasty. But each presents himself as an old-style southern moderate, while each has that haunted look of the southern lad who knows, as he enters middle age, that no amount of jogging and dieting will prevent him from one day becoming unelectably fat.
Usual question: What are the Clintons really like? Here is William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe) on the subject recently: “Hillary was born forty, and she’ll always be forty. . . . I was born sixteen, and I’ll always be sixteen.” So he has engagingly remained. There is a famous picture of him at about that age, shaking President Kennedy’s hand at the White House. The boy Clinton is radiant. “How,” one can imagine him thinking, if not daring to ask, “do you get laid around here?” In a candid mood, the thirty-fifth president could have had a lot of tips for the forty-second. After all, at heart, Kennedy was a sophisticated nineteen-year-old with a ravenous sexual appetite, while Jackie was as old as Mother Nile. For some, power is quite enough. For Mrs. Thatcher, to be alone with her boxes was, surely, world enough and time. But Clinton seems almost in the Kennedy class of innumerable brief encounters with that majority of the electorate which, appreciatively, favors him by an astonishing 24 percent over Dole, while with the male minority he barely holds his own. Women like men who like women, no matter how exasperating. When there was a rumor that Hillary had flung a lamp at her husband, a White House aide solemnly acknowledged that this was true. “Not only did she throw it,” he said, “she hit him with it, and we have buried him in the Rose Garden. We never thought you people would notice.”
Clinton’s disposition is also highly mercurial. One of Clinton’s most useful aides is the small but exquisitely formed George Stephanopoulos. When the First Magistrate is in a rage, he seizes his youthful adjutant and begins to hurl him around the room. As the stoic youth ricochets off the wall like Buster Keaton, he gamely serves his president until the storm is passed and they can move more serenely on to some seminar, at which they will eat lots of fried things together.
As Clinton moves—majestically now—through his campaigning, he seems sure of his reelection. Certainly, this time around, the earthly Perot poses no threat to anyone except perhaps the Dole–God dream ticket, and even then, a well-aimed thunderbolt could send him scurrying back to his home planet, Texas.
Thunderbolts of human rather than divine construction are on all our minds these days. Foreigners find mystifying the amount of mayhem permitted in the United States despite ever more draconian laws against something loosely called terrorism. There is now one gun for each of the country’s quarter billion citizens. As yet, each man, woman, and child has not got his gun, but that day of perfect equality is bound to come. After all, according to one of the most powerful buyers of politicians, the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Meanwhile, the gun lovers have now learned how to blow up federal buildings with only farm detritus, while easily manufactured pipe bombs can cause a good bit of havoc in a public park. Clinton, after choking up on television at the thought of terrorism’s innocent victims, rushes to join Congress in making laws intended to remove the protecting shield of the Bill of Rights from any citizen tagged as a potential “terrorist.” But no candidate dares explain to the American people why the country is apparently spinning into chaos, because to do so would be to confess that there are, in effect, two governments of the United States. There is the visible (official) one, which is powerless to do anything about the economy short of waging—but never declaring—a war, preferably on a very small country, like Panama. Then there is the invisible government, the actual ownership of the country—currently (and uncharacteristically) at sea almost as much as its employees in Congress. Could it be that times have changed?
Our traditional panacea, the undeclared war, is less profitable than it used to be, and the wartime economy that Harry Truman and company imposed on the United States in 1950 is now some $5 trillion in debt—which does not stop 77 percent of the country’s before-tax income from going to the 1 percent that owns most of the wealth. Some 39 million Americans now live in poverty of a sort unknown to other First World countries; and despite happy cries from the Clinton administration at each job created by the fast-food emporia, the median income of the famous middle class (some 65 percent of the whole) has dropped 13 percent since 1973, when the wives of workers were first obliged to take jobs just to maintain the family budget. As one woman happily observed on television the other day, “Oh, Clinton’s right when he says there are plenty of jobs out there. Fact, my husband and I have four jobs between us, and we’re still broke.”
Although the stunning increase in the wealth of the few—the core of
the invisible government—and the increase in the poverty of the unrepresented many have been precisely noted by the Congressional Budget Office, no politician will explain how we mislaid what was once a fairly egalitarian, highly prosperous society. As the people at large are instinctively aware that their visible government neither represents them nor regards them benignly, they have pretty much stopped voting.
The American takes it for granted that his moral fiber is never to be weakened by health care, education of the people at large or, indeed, anything at all except Social Security, a moderately profitable independent trust fund set up in 1935. Unfortunately for the American, thanks to the expense of the all-out cold-hot war on the Great Satan of the North Pole, the fund is for all practical purposes empty. Dolorous representatives of the Pentagon now tell us that it was wasteful “people programs” that used up the money—even though, in the interest of an arcane rite called “balancing the budget,” what small amounts that did go to the poor in the way of job training and welfare have just been cut back by Clinton, always one step ahead of a Congress that has, since 1992, been in the hands of zealous reactionaries in thrall to the fetus and the flag as well as at angry war with those who do not have money. It does not take the ghost of a Marie Antoinette to realize that when the few declare war on the many, the millinery business is headed for bad times.
Does Clinton know what he’s doing? (Even the invisible government’s chief media spokesman, The New York Times, termed the reduction-of-welfare bill that he signed “odious.”) As the most intelligent politician on the American scene, yes, he knows pretty much what is wrong, but he is not about to do anything that might cost him a single vote.
Clinton has learned to play the dull, reactive media like the virtuoso he is, and Dole, if not God, can’t think what to do about him. No matter what new bêtise the Right comes up with, Clinton has got there at least a day early and has made their issue his. Currently, everyone hates (when not raping or corrupting on the Internet) teenagers. What is to be done with these layabouts? This is a crucial Republican–family values issue, the result of all that money (practically none, in fact) thrown at the poor, who, by nature, are lawless, drugged, sexy, violent. But before the Doleful could get around to a death penalty for pubescent vagrants, Clinton struck. Curfews for teenagers, he proclaimed. Whoever said “freedom to assemble” applied to anyone with acne? Uniforms to be worn at school, particularly those whose students come from families with not enough money to buy ordinary clothes, much less brown or beige shirts. Then, before Dole had picked himself up off the greensward, Clinton called for a national registry of sex offenders and a crackdown on fathers who do not pay for their children, two groups that could well overlap. All Dole could gasp was, “Character. Integrity. Or whatever. That’s what it’s about. America.”
Clinton struck again. No more violence on television (the freedom to censor is the hallmark of a democracy). No teenage sex, much less smoking. Since there isn’t any public money left (military procurement still burns up about $250 billion a year for that big war with China—gotta be ready), Clinton is now turning to the states and cities to help him with his programs in a joint crusade to go “roaring into the twenty-first century, united and strong.” Meanwhile, Dole is on his knees, communing with Him, who might have been his copilot.
On the Friday before the Democratic Black Tuesday of 1994 that saw the election of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, I had dinner with Hillary Clinton, her aide Maggie Williams, and three other guests. We had been invited to the White House (I’d met Mrs. Clinton when she visited Ravello, an Italian town where I live part-time), but as I have no fond memories of the Executive Mansion, I proposed a hotel across the street. Mrs. Clinton was delighted to come out. Maggie Williams was grimly funny about the hazards of life in the White House. A few weeks earlier, a small plane had been crashed—deliberately?—into the building. “So just as soon as I had finished explaining for the hundredth time to my mother that an airplane can fall on top of you just about anywhere, and she was getting to believe me, this man comes along and sprays the front of the White House with a machine gun.”
“You should apply for combat pay,” I said to Mrs. Clinton.
“What about pay? I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”
We all knew that the Tuesday vote was going to be bad for the Democrats, so we avoided the subject. Talked about Washington in general. About Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I’d known and she was fascinated by. Then I began to probe, tactfully, I hope: How well did the Clintons understand just what they were up against? Did they know who actually owns and is rather idly ruling the United States—a very small class into which Bush had been born and trained and they had not? So, Who? What? How? I gave an example of poignant concern. In 1992 the country, by a clear majority, wanted a national health service. But insurance companies, in tandem with the medical-pharmaceutical axis, have always denounced any such scheme as Communist, and so the media, reflecting as it must the will of the ownership, had decreed that such a system is not only unworkable but un-American. As our people are never allowed more than one view of anything, Mrs. Clinton failed to get the administration’s health plan through Congress. But worse was to befall her and the president. The always touchy ownership of the United States felt that it had been challenged by what were, after all—despite such lofty “visible” titles as “president”—mere employees. If the Clintons could not be got rid of in an election, they could at least be so blackened personally and politically that they would no longer be taken seriously. So, to this punitive end, the ownership spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertisements “proving” that under the Clinton plan each citizen would lose his own doctor and become a cipher in a computer (which he is pretty much anyway, thanks to the FBI, etc.), while its authors were guilty of everything from murder to ill-grooming.
As an old Washingtonian, I mentioned some of the ways in which great corporate entities destroy politicians. “It will never be on the issues. It will always be something unexpected. Something personal. Irrelevant. From long ago. Then they will worry it to death.”
“That’s certainly true.” Mrs. Clinton was grim. “No story ever ends around here. Even when it’s over.”
I was about to suggest that if there was to be a war (as there is) between hated insurance companies and a popular plan, why not target the insurance companies publicly as the enemy and go on the attack? But Paul Newman, another guest, saved Mrs. Clinton from the golden treasury of my hindsight: “Get Gore to tell you about the day the horse ran away with Eartha Kitt. . . .”
Like a pair of dusty Ronald Reagans, we told Hollywood stories of the Fifties. She brightened considerably. “I wish I’d been there. Back in those days. You make it sound so interesting.” She has beautiful manners. She asked about the Roosevelt years, and I told her how Mrs. Roosevelt delicately one-upped those who attacked her. “No, I’m not angry,” she would say with her gentle half smile. “Only a little . . . sad.” I told her, too, that until the war there was practically no security. The president would drive himself along nearby country roads.
Mrs. Clinton shook her head, amazed. “I was talking to one of the Secret Service men about security the other day, and he said that as far as they were concerned, they’d be happier if we lived in a bunker and traveled the streets in a tank.”
I, amazed in turn, asked, “Was he joking?”
She gave us her dazzling blue-eyed smile, said, “Good night,” and made her way back to the White House, where painters had been hard at work hiding the machine gun’s bullet marks.
Meanwhile, whither the republic? The election: Should the various inept business dealings of the Clintons back in Arkansas become a serious issue, the many millions of dollars that Dole has acquired over the years while serving the great corporations in the Senate will suddenly become an issue so large that even the highly conservative media will be forced, as in the case of Watergate, to report who paid how much to which c
ampaign for what favor in return. But this sort of thing usually ends in a stalemate. In 1960 Kennedy’s sex life and an allegedly annulled first marriage could not be used by the Nixonites because the Kennedyites would then bring up all the money that the billionaire plane maker Howard Hughes had funneled to the Nixonites. “It’s so funny,” Jackie Kennedy once said, “all the money we—and they—spend digging up all this dirt, and then no one ever uses any of it.” She sounded a bit wistful at the thought of so much frivolously wasted money that she might have liked.
The financial state of the union will never, in 1996, be addressed. In 1992 Clinton vowed he would cut back the Pentagon budget. He did get rid of a lot of manpower, but the real government promptly set him straight on weapons procurement; yet even they must have been mildly embarrassed when their members of Congress insisted on giving the Pentagon a billion or two more dollars than the bottomless pit had actually asked for. Clinton spoke nobly of a reform of the way that the few can buy elections under the current rules. Now, as a beneficiary of the ownership’s largesse, he is silent. They may fear and loathe him, but they always hedge their bets and always pay for both candidates; later, at the dark of the moon, they collect their ton of flesh from the winner.
Although much of the election will be about Important Moral Issues like abortion, prayer in school, and the status of “gays,” terrorists will be the word most sounded in the land from now until November. Until recently, terrorist has been a code word for the Muslim world, which does not love Israel, whose lobby in Washington controls Democratic presidents on Middle East matters. Republican presidents are less vulnerable, but even they must placate the lobby. More worrisome, terrorist has now become a word used to describe those lumpen Americans who have come to hate a government that builds more prisons than schools, intrudes on their private lives through wiretaps and other forms of surveillance, and puts in prison for life young people caught a third time with marijuana.