by Gore Vidal
There was an eccentric English duke who, according to legend, spoke only once a year. His remarks were treasured. At the time of the abdication of Edward VIII, he suddenly said at a Sunday dinner, “If there is any trouble anywhere, look for an archbishop.” Change “archbishop” to “monotheist” and one understands the powerful engine that drives Therns to write bad history. Also, in fairness, it must be noted that Judaism’s two dreary spinoffs, Christianity and Islam, have given even wider range to the notion of the true godless folk as “white man’s burden,” “cursed infidels” and “lesser breeds” so much less human than those whipped up in the true God’s bookish image.
Finally, a bad historian is one who dares not say what he means. He must count on his “evidence”—those stats—to bring us round to his often hidden-in-plain-sight point of view. At the conclusion of their screed, the Therns produce such tautologies as “the issue of group differences is actually enormously complicated.” This extraordinary insight appears as late as page 541. “The complexities of the matter become evident when we notice that the socioeconomic gap between Jews and Christians today is greater than the gap between blacks and whites. Jewish per capita incomes are nearly double those of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap. Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans. . . . Asian Americans similarly outrank whites on most measures.” We are also told that Scots are highly educated but don’t make all that much money, because they are drawn to “the ministry and teaching.” Cajuns? Forget it. “What explains why some of these groups have done so much better than others is very hard to say.” Actually, it is quite easy for a Thern to say, but perhaps a bit dangerous. So at the end of their long book, the matter of race is both a reality and a chimera. In short, complicated; yet, to the Therns’ credit, we know exactly what they mean.
Perhaps the only literary form perfected by late-twentieth-century United Statespersons is the blurb for the dust jacket. It is for us what the haiku was for the medieval Japanese. Of all the varieties of blurb, the Academic Courtesy is the most exquisite in its balances and reticences and encodements. Now, there was one blurb that the Therns knew that they dare not publish without: that of the chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Would this elusive, allusive—illusive?—figure misread their text as hoped or, worse for them, would he actually read it for what it is? Great risk either way. One can picture the Therns agonizing over how best to rope him in. He was their White Whale, nay, their Cinque of Sierra Leone. Night after night, Therns and their ilk flitted about Harvard Yard, suitably hooded against the night air. Meanwhile, the beleaguered chairman, quite aware of their plot, was careful to take the Underground Railroad when crossing the Yard. But in the end, he broke. He gathered loved ones around him. “I can no longer live like this, in terror of the Therns. I’m going out.” Loved ones keened, “But not tonight. The moon’s full. This is Thern weather.”
But the chairman said, “I fear not. My blurb will protect me from all harm.” Blurb? Had he perjured himself? No, he had not, he declared; and so, casting aside fear, he entered the Yard, where a posse of howling Therns promptly held him for ransom in the form of what proved to be the very paradigm of all Harvard blurbs: “This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the state of race relations at the end of the great American century.” Thus, he tricked his pursuers and freed graduate students as yet unborn from, at the very least, a hoisting by the Thern petard.
The Nation
20 April 1998
* BLAIR
LONDON
In 1964 I watched the election returns in a ballroom at London’s Savoy Hotel. The room had been taken by Pamela Berry, whose husband owned The Daily Telegraph. As one would expect, considering our hostess’s powerful political views, the guests were largely Conservative, though the odd transatlantic visitor could stare at the vast screen which, historically, the first British “television” election was filling with faces and numbers. Whenever Labour won a seat, there were boos and hisses. When a Tory prevailed, applause. Then the moment of awful truth: Labour had won and the next Prime Minister would be Harold Wilson. Lives and sacred honor, not to mention fortunes, were now at risk as universal darkness buried all.
Gladwyn Jebb, former ambassador to the United Nations, said to me, “Parish pump politics. Let’s go watch the real news.” He led me into a side room where, on a small screen, the fall of Khrushchev was being gloated over. Jebb: “Now this is the real thing.”
A third of a century later I was again in London at the start of the election just concluded. BBC television had hired me to chat about it. Most of the surviving Tories from the Savoy—or their children and grandchildren—were voting for something called New Labor, headed by Tony Blair, while the Conservatives were led by John Major, a Prime Minister who made much of the fact that he was a lower-middle-class Everyman pitted against a posh elitist who had gone to public school. The startling difference between 1964 and 1997 was that where Labour once represented the working classes and poor (today’s “disadvantaged”), it is now a home for prosperous suburbanites on the go as well as disaffected Scots and Welsh. In the end, the Tories did not win a single seat in Scotland or Wales, something that has not happened in a century.
The only real issue was, Should the British, if they ever meet the required standards, join a common European currency? But no politician was about to stick his neck out on that one. Another big issue that the local press was fretting over: Are British elections becoming Americanized? Presidentialized? Devoid of relevant content? The answer is, more or less, yes. The tabloids have created a terrible Clintonian atmosphere. “Sleaze” is the principal word one sees in every headline. Since Rupert Murdoch, a devotee of honest government, has abandoned the Tories for New Labour, and as this Australian-turned-American is allowed to own Britains most popular daily paper (The Sun) as well as the weekend News of the World, Tory politicians are being wildly smeared as sexual degenerates and crooks.
With a BBC crew I made the rounds of the three parties. Each presented its program to the nation. Liberal Democrat Paddy Ash-down received the press in a small crowded ecclesiastical room. “To make it look like a great crowd,” a journalist whispered in my ear. Pamphlets were distributed. Ashdown is blond, athletic-looking; also quick-witted by American standards, but then any public schoolboy in England speaks more articulately than any American politician except for the great Oval One.
Ashdown played the honesty card, something of a novelty. He wants better education for everyone. He admits that this will cost money. The two other parties swear they will never raise taxes, which, of course, they will. . . . honesty card, something of a novelty. He wants better education for everyone. He admits that this will cost money. The two other parties swear they will never raise taxes, which, of course, they will. . . .
I go to the Royal Albert Hall. Major points out Tony Blair’s contradictions and evasions. I suspect a few ancient heads in the audience were at the Savoy that night so many years ago when Harold Wilson won and socialism would level all. (Once in Downing Street, Wilson quickly said that, actually, he had never read Marx.) As the hall filled with the gorgeousness of Elgar, I intoned for the camera: “Land of hope and glory, of Drake and Nelson, of Clive and Crippen.”
The fascinating kickoff was Mr. Blair’s. We were in an early-nineteenth-century building with a dome, dedicated to engineers. Press milled about in the rotunda downstairs, where stood a tall dark man, Peter Mandelson, reputedly Blair’s Rasputin. He gave solemn audience to the journalists of the lobby. Words murmured to one, hand held over his mouth. TV cameras, including ours, avoided. He had the insolent manner of one born to the top rung but three. The mood of the Labourites was paranoid, particularly the handsome blond girls in black suits with curled lips and flashing eyes. Blair’s lead was so great in the polls that only a blunder o
n his part could stop his irresistible rise. So one could not be made. Although the BBC and I had been cleared by the press party office, I suddenly looked like a possible blunder.
We take our seats. Blair enters, followed by what will be much of his Cabinet. He has been told not to smile. The smile has been criticized by the press. Too loopy. Too youthful. He is forty-three, JFK’s age in 1960. He is slender with a beaky, mini-Bonaparte sort of nose. The dark hair does not entirely convince. He holds up the party manifesto with his own face, smiling on the cover. I am close enough to him to realize that he does much of his breathing through his mouth. Lips pressed tight together cause his nostrils to flare as he tries to get enough air in. The speech, his program, was written, we have been told—as if it were from the hand of St. John of Patmos—in his own garden in his own longhand. As it turns out, he has no program. But things will be better, he tells us. Afterward, to every question he says simply, “Trust me.” He departs.
The press, seeing that I’m all that’s left in the room, surround me. The blondes try to shoo them away. Question: “Are we becoming more Americanized?” Answer: “Well, you do resemble us in that you now have a single party with two right wings.”
Question: “Which wing is more to the right?”
Answer (in my gravest and most reverential voice): “One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput.”
Then we were all thrown out. Labour complained to the BBC that I had preempted their affair to “slag Blair.”
In the next six weeks, Blair makes no errors. He now has a huge majority in the House of Commons. Although he has no plans, I am sure that whatever it was that Mr. Murdoch wanted him to do, he will do. I talked to a Scots MP who knows Blair well. “He’s another Thatcher. Authoritarian. Hands-on control freak.” I go to my splendid ancient friend and former head of the Labour Party, Michael Foot: “Blair is excellent. Really excellent.” I ask, “Whatever happened to socialism?” At this Mrs. Foot looked grim. “Yes,” she asked her husband. “What did?” He smiles. “Socialism? Oh, socialism! Yes! Yes! . . . Well, there’s time. . . .” I move on. “The young, even in America,” I said, “are reading Gramsci.” Foot was delighted. “Good. Good. While you and I are reading Montaigne.”
Question I never got answered by anyone: You are an offshore island. But off whose shore? Europe’s or ours?
The Nation
26 May 1997
*
PART III
*
* HOW WE MISSED THE SATURDAY DANCE
Duke Ellington on the jukebox: “Missed the Saturday dance, heard they crowded the floor, duh duh duh-duh. . . .” I can almost carry a tune but I can’t remember the words to any song, including the inspired lyrics of our national anthem. But this song, and those notes, have been sounding in my head for over half a century, ever since I heard them at a dance hall near the army camp where I was stationed.
Just out of Exeter, I had enlisted in the army at seventeen. That was a year after George Bush, just out of Andover, enlisted in the navy. Most important, my best friend from a Washington, D.C., school enlisted in the Marine Corps. He had been “safe” at Duke: he had a contract to be a professional baseball player when the war was over. But he thought that he should go fight too. He became a scout and observer for the Third Marine Division in the Pacific. He saw action at Guam. He was assigned to “Operation Detachment” and shipped out to Iwo Jima, where the Japanese were entrenched in tunnels beneath that bleak island’s surface.
On February 19, 1945, the Marines landed on Iwo Jima, after a long, fairly futile aerial bombardment. The Japanese were out of reach belowground. On D-Day plus nine, elements of the Third Division landed on the already crowded island, eight square miles of volcanic ash and rock. Like the skull of some prehistoric brontosaurus, Mount Suribachi looms over the five-and-a-half-mile-long island. Lately, I have been watching closely each frame of an old newsreel that now seems so long ago that it might as well be a series of Brady stills from Antietam except for the fact that it is still as immediate to me as yesterday, even though I was not there but on another Pacific island, far to the north in the Bering Sea. It took a month to win the island. Twenty thousand Japanese were killed; 6,821 American troops, mostly marines, were killed. On D-Day plus ten, 1 March, 1945, at 4:15 a.m., Pvt. James Trimble was killed instantly by a grenade. He was nineteen years old. Bush and I survived.
It is somehow fitting that our generation—the war generation, as we think, perhaps too proudly, of ourselves—should be officially as well as actuarially at an end with the replacement of George Bush by a man who could be his—our—son. I say fitting because our generation, which won in battle the American Empire, is somehow nicely epitomized by the career of Bush, who served with energetic mindlessness the empire, always managing, whenever confronted with a fork in the road of our imperial destiny, to take, as did his predecessors, the wrong turning.
Elsewhere, I have noted that the American Golden Age lasted only five years; from war’s end, 1945, to 1950, the Korean War’s start. During this interval the arts flourished and those of us who had missed our youth tried to catch up. Meanwhile, back at the White House, unknown to us, the managers of the new world empire were hard at work replacing the republic for which we had fought with a secret national security state, pledged to an eternal war with communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. It is true that Harry Truman and our other managers feared that if we did not remain on a wartime footing we might drift back into the Great Depression that had not ended until the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and everyone went to war or work. It is part of the national myth that the attack was unprovoked. Actually, we had been spoiling for a war with Japan since the beginning of the century. Was the Pacific—indeed Asia—to be theirs or ours? Initially, the Japanese preferred to conquer mainland Asia. But when it looked as if we might deny them access to Southeast Asian oil, they attacked. Had they not, we would never have gone to war, in the Pacific or in Europe.
I was born eight years after the end of the First World War. As I was growing up, it was well remembered that we had got nothing out of that war in Europe except an attack on the Bill of Rights at home and, of course, the noble experiment, Prohibition. Young people often ask me, with wonder, why so many of us enlisted in 1943. I tell them that since we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to defend our country. But I should note that where, in 1917, millions of boys were eager to go fight the Hun, we were not eager. We were fatalistic. In the three years that I spent in the army, I heard no soldier express a patriotic sentiment, rather the reverse when we saw the likes of Errol Flynn on the screen winning freedom’s war, or, even worse, John Wayne, known to us by his real name, Marion, the archetypal draft-dodging actor who, to rub it in, impersonated a Flying Tiger in the movies.
Although we were not enthusiastic warriors, there was a true hatred of the enemy. We were convinced that the “Japs” were subhuman; and our atrocities against them pretty much matched theirs against us. I was in the Pacific Theater of Operations, where the war was not only imperial but racial: the white race was fighting the yellow race, and the crown would go to us as we were the earth’s supreme race, or so we had been taught. One of the ugliest aspects of that war was the racial stereotyping on both sides. In Europe we were respectful—even fearful—of the Germans. Since blacks and women were pretty much segregated in our military forces, World War II was, for us, literally, the white man’s burden.
So while the Golden Age had its moment in the sun up on deck, down in the engine room the management was inventing the “Defense” Department and the National Security Council with its secret, unconstitutional decrees, and the equally unconstitutional CIA, modeled, Allen Dulles remarked blithely, on the Soviets’ NKVD. We were then, without public debate, committed to a never-ending war, even though the management knew that the enemy was no match for us, economically or militarily. But, through relentless CIA “disinformation,” they managed to convince us that what was weak
was strong, and that the Russians were definitely coming. “Build backyard shelters against the coming atomic war!” A generation was well and truly traumatized.
The Korean War put an end to our title as invincible heavyweight military champion of the world. We might have maintained our mystique by avoiding this eccentric war (we did call it a “police action”), but by then we had so exaggerated the power of the Soviet Union in tandem with China that we could do nothing but reel from one pointless military confrontation to another.
Unfortunately, Kennedy was less cynically practical than those who had presided over what Dean Acheson called “the creation” of the empire. Kennedy actually believed—or pretended to believe—their rhetoric. He liked the phrase “this twilight time.” He believed in the domino theory. He believed in “bearing any burden.” He invaded Cuba, and failed. He turned his attention to Asia, to “contain China” by interfering in a Vietnamese civil war where a majority had already voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh, who, quoting Jefferson, asked Eisenhower to make Vietnam an American protectorate. But, as Ike explained in his memoirs, this wasn’t possible: they were Communists.
In June 1961 Kennedy began the fastest buildup militarily since Pearl Harbor; he also rearmed Germany, setting off alarm bells in the Soviet Union. They spoke of denying us land access to our section of Berlin. Kennedy responded with a warlike speech, invoking “the Berlin crisis” as a world crisis. In response, Khrushchev built the wall. It was as if we were, somehow, willing a war to turn sad twilight to incandescent nuclear high noon.