The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  At the beginning of Mudd’s first harangue, I must say I did wonder what on earth had caused such distress. It was clear that neither cue-card reader had any particular interest—much less competence—in American history; but then, I had forgotten the following aria:

  Our presidents, now prisoners of security, have been for a generation two-dimensional figures on a screen. In a sense, captives of the empire they created. Essentially, they are men hired to give the commercials for a state which more and more resembles a conglomerate like General Electric. In fact, one of our most popular recent presidents spent nearly twenty years actually doing commercials for General Electric, one of our greatest makers of weapons. Then Mr. Reagan came to work here [in the White House], and there was the same “Russians are coming” dialogue on the same Teleprompter, and the same makeup men.

  The GE panel, carefully, made no reference to their fellow pitchman Reagan, but they found unbearable my suggestion that we have been surpassed, economically, by Asia. I noted that:

  As Japan takes its turn as world leader, temporarily standing in for China,* America becomes the Yellow Man’s Burden, and so we come full circle. Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia. Then the Americas became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun, setting in our West, is rising once more in the East.

  This really hurt Mudd, and he couldn’t resist noting that Japan’s standard of living is lower than ours, a factoid that, presumably, magically cancels our vast debt to them. He reminds us that we have also been hearing a lot of bad economic news about other countries; but then we always do, lest Americans ever feel that they are being short-changed by a government that gives its citizens nothing for their tax money and companies like General Electric billions for often useless weapons and cost overruns. Approvingly, Mudd tells us that “industrious immigrants” are rushing to our shores. Well, those we have helped to impoverish south of the Rio Grande do come looking for work, particularly from countries whose societies we have wrecked in the name, often, of corporate America (United Fruit in Guatemala, ITT in Chile), or they come from Southern Asia, where our interferences dislocated millions of people, some of whom unwisely boated to our shores, lured by our generous minimum wage, universal health care, and superb state educational system.

  Mudd’s mouse squeak becomes very grave indeed as he tells us how the defense budget has been slashed to a mere fraction of what it used to be and must be increased if we are ever to keep the peace of the world through war. Yet today we outspend the military budgets of Western Europe and Japan combined. Although there have been large cuts in personnel as military bases are turned over to the real estate lobby, outlays of the sort that benefit Mudd’s employers still run to nearly $300 billion a year.

  The two historians were less openly protective of General Electric and military procurement. Schlesinger doesn’t find much in the way of historical distortion. But then what motive would I have had to neglect what Jefferson liked to call “true facts”? I am neither political publicist nor hagiographer, and I know the country’s history as well as most people who have dedicated a generation to its study.

  Schlesinger does say that I misquote Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. That must sound pretty serious to the average viewer. It also sounds pretty serious to me that Arthur doesn’t realize I was quoting, accurately, the original preamble, not the one edited and published by Congress. Jefferson—and I—preferred his first version, of which only a fragment still exists but, luckily, later in life he re-created the original: “All men are created equal and independent.” Congress cut the “and independent.” Then: “From that equal creation, they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” Congress (looking ahead to the Rev. Pat Robertson and all the other serpents in our Eden?) changed this to “They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The introduction of a Creator has done our independence no good.

  Early on, I observe that “an adviser to President Truman announced, ‘What is good for General Motors is good for America.’ The adviser was president of General Motors, of course.” Arthur correctly notes that Charles Wilson was not a member of Truman’s Cabinet but of Eisenhower’s. Nevertheless, he was a significant adviser to Truman. Unfortunately, his famous advice to Truman got edited out of my final program. Here it is. In 1944 Wilson gave his rationale for a permanent militarizing of the economy: “Instead of looking to disarmament and unpreparedness as a safeguard against war—a thoroughly discredited doctrine—let us try the opposite: full preparedness according to a continuing plan.” This was to be the heart of the National Security Act of 1947, and the new nation in whose shabby confines we still rattle about.

  It is a little late in the day to turn Lincoln into an abolitionist, but the GE panel saw an easy way of making points by piously declaring how much great-hearted Lincoln hated slavery. But I had already noted, “He disliked slavery but thought the federal government had no right to free other people’s property. In this case, three million African-Americans at the South.” It should be noted—yet again—that American history departments are now bustling with propagandists revising Lincoln so that he will appear to be something quite other than the man who said that if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do so, or freeing some and not others, he would do so, or freeing none at all he would free none for the Union’s sake. But for General Electric, blushing bride of Mickey Mouse, the image of Lincoln cannot remain half Disney and half true.

  At one point, Slotkin accuses me of dealing in hindsight. But that, dear professor, is what history is, and you and I and even Arthur are historians, aren’t we? It is true that I refused election to the Society of American Historians; but I am no less a historian than those who are paid to keep the two essential facts of our condition from the people at large: the American class system (there is no such thing, we are flatly told) and the nature of the U.S. empire (no such thing, either). Apparently, it is perfectly natural for a freedom-loving democracy, addicted to elections, to have bases and spies and now FBI terrorist fighters and drug hounds in every country on earth. When Vanocur tries to get Theodore Roosevelt off the imperialist hook, Schlesinger does mutter that the great warmonger did believe in “a vigorous foreign policy.” Then Arthur makes a slip: TR was really only interested in our “domination of the Western Hemisphere.” Well, certainly half a globe is better than none. But then, as TR said, “No accomplishment of peace is half that of the glories of war.”

  Schlesinger notes that if Jefferson and John Quincy Adams were to return today, they would be surprised that we had not annexed Canada, Cuba, and other Western properties. For the GE panel such continence is proof that there is no such thing as a U.S. empire. Well, it is true that after two failed invasions, Canada escaped us; even so, we have a naval base on Canadian soil (at Argentia), and Canada plays its dutiful if irritable part in our imperium, economically as well as militarily. Cuba was, in effect, our brothel during the Batista years; now, for trying to be independent of us, it is embargoed while we maintain on the island, as always, the military base of Guantánamo.

  Toward the end of their “discussion,” one of the Mouseketeers mocks the notion that big business is in any way responsible for a U.S. empire that does not exist. The GE panel, to a man, then proceeds to ignore this key section of my script:

  TR’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, invaded Mexico and Haiti in order to bring those poor people freedom and democracy and good government. But stripped of all the presidential rhetoric, the flag followed the banks.

  The President was simply chief enforcer for the great financial interests.

  Many years later, the commanding general of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Smedley Butler, blew, as it were, the whistle, not just on Wilson, but on the whole imperial racket.

  I had showed some fine newsreel footage of Butler, of Marines in Haiti, Taiwan, the streets of Shanghai. I did an imitation of his voice as I spoke his actual words:

  “I spent mos
t of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. Made in Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”

  In later years, Butler also set up shop in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and China where, in 1927, the Marines protected Standard Oil’s interests.

  Vidal as Butler: “The best Al Capone had was three districts. I operated on three continents.”

  Needless to say, General Butler is a permanent nonfigure in our imperial story.

  Slotkin began to paraphrase exactly what I had been saying—modern empires are not like the old-fashioned sort where you raise your flag over the capitol of a foreign country. From 1950 on, I demonstrated how the domination of other countries is exercised through the economy (the Marshall Plan after World War II) and through a military presence, preferably low-key (like NATO in Western Europe) and politically through secret police like the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the DIA, etc. Currently, the empire is ordering its vassal states not to deal with rogue nations (the Helms-Burton bill).

  Although the Soviet Union went out of business five years ago, we still have bases in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. In Britain we have seven air force and three naval bases. In 1948, Secretary of Defense Forrestal installed two B-29 groups in the English countryside; it would be a good idea, he said, to accustom the English to a continuing U.S. military presence. To create and administer a modern empire you must first discover—or invent—a common enemy and then bring all the potential victims of this ogre under your domination, using your secret services to skew their politics as the CIA did, say, to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.

  Today, elsewhere, we have military presences in Bermuda, Egypt, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Panama, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., not to mention all over the United States and our territories as well as two bases in Australia, one of which is a mysterious CIA unit at Alice Springs. If all this does not constitute an empire I don’t know what does. Yet we must not use the word, for reasons that the GE panel never addressed. At one point, Vanocur pretended that I had said the American people were eager for conquest when I said the opposite. Our people tend to isolationism and it always takes a lot of corporate manipulation, as well as imperial presidential mischief, to get them into foreign wars. Sadly, Schlesinger confirmed that this was so.

  Slotkin thought that I had been saying that the late-nineteenth-century presidents were creatures of big business when what I said was that big business was off on its rampage and that the presidents, between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, were dimly accommodating.

  Then the question of why I was so evil was gravely addressed. Mouse ears were now on the alert. Schlesinger noted that I had headed the America First chapter at Exeter in 1940 and that I still seemed to be an isolationist. Vanocur said isolationists were right-wingers. Schlesinger countered that many, like Norman Thomas (and me), were on the left. Mud, as it were, in hand, Vanocur said that isolationism is “tinged with anti-Semitism,” but that did not play. Schlesinger did note, with a degree of wonder, that there are those who do not seem to understand how our future is inextricably bound up in the politics of all the other continents. This might have been a good place to start an enlightening debate. Had I been included, I might have said that unless the nation is in actual peril (or in need of loot—I am not angelic) there is never any reason for us to engage in foreign wars. Since George Washington, the isolationist has always had the best arguments. But since corporate money is forever on the side of foreign adventure, money has kept us on the move, at least until recently.

  I said that Stalin drastically disarmed after the war. Arthur rightly pointed out that so did we: pressure from the isolationist masses forced the government to let go millions of GIs, including me. But two days after the announcement of Japan’s surrender, Truman said (August 17, 1945) that he would ask Congress to approve a program of universal military training—in peacetime! He made the request, and got his wish. We rearmed as they disarmed. Briefly.

  Between May and September 1946, Truman began the rearmament of our sector of Germany while encouraging the French in their recolonization of Indochina, as well as meddling militarily in China and South Korea. The great problem of living in a country where information and education are so tightly controlled is that very little news about our actual situation ever gets through to the consumers. Instead we are assured that we are so hated by those envious of our wealth and goodness that they commit terrorist acts against us simply out of spite. The damage our presidential and corporate imperialists have done to others in every quarter of the world is a nonsubject, as we saw in August, when my realistic overview accidentally appeared on an imperial network and a panel of four was rushed into place to glue mouse ears back on the eagle’s head.

  Vanocur then affects to be mystified by why I say so many terrible things about the Disneyland that pays him his small salary. But I thought I had made myself clear. I am a patriot of the old Republic that slowly unraveled during the expansionist years and quite vanished in 1950 when the National Security State took its place. Now I want us to convert from a wartime to a peacetime economy. But since the GE-style conglomerates that govern us will never convert, something will have to give, won’t it?

  When the egregious Vanocur wondered why I had done this program, Arthur said, “To entertain himself—and to entertain the audience.” That was disappointing but worthy of the Dr. Faustus of Harvard Yard.

  I did not report on my country’s disastrous imperial activities with much amusement. All I wanted to do was tell a story never told before on our television—and never to be told again as long as the likes of GE and Disney are allowed to be media owners and manipulators of opinion.

  What to do? Break up the conglomerates. That’s a start. And then—well, why not go whole hog—what about a free press, representative government and . . . Well, you get the picture.

  The Nation

  30 September 1996

  * U.S. OUT OF UN—UN OUT OF U.S.

  The first American Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, on July 15, 1949, in the name of NATO, the Four Freedoms, and the pursuit of happiness, accomplished the first successful invasion of England since the Normans when he sent two groups of B-29s to the U.K., observing privately to President Truman that it would be a good idea “to accustom the English” to the ongoing presence of the American air force. Less than a year later, suffering from nervous exhaustion, he put down his copy of Sophocles’ Ajax and jumped out of a hospital window, leaving behind not only his annotated Ajax but the outward visible sign of American occupation, our English bases.

  A busy half-century now draws to a close. Along the way, in 1989, the Evil Soviet Empire surrendered to our goodness. Now, as the self-styled Sole Global Nuclear Power, we fire commands rapidly at friend and foe alike. President Clinton, responding gleefully to Congress’s targeting of “terrorist nations,” has warned the entire world that if any foe or ally dares do business with Libya and Iran and Iraq, much less leprous Cuba, we shall . . . well, like Lear, we’ll do something or other. Don’t worry. Are we not the SGNP?

  Currently American conservatives (whatever that word now means) are calling for a new imperialism. In the pages of the latest Foreign Affairs William Kristol and Robert Kagan (aesthetically, one wants a third “K”) tell us that “today’s lukewarm consensus about America’s reduced role in a post–Cold War world is wrong.” They like simple declarative sentences. So here’s one for them. The largest debtor nation on earth has no choice but to reduce its imperial role. No money. The Ks are Reaganites and see the former President as a sort of American Bismarck, although it was as General Custer that he made his mark in movie history, which seems to be their only history, too. The Ks are in the grip of a most unseemly megalomania. “American hegemony is the only reliable defense a
gainst a breakdown of peace and international order.” Tell that to the Asians.

  The Ks also say that as we have never been so well off, we can afford to spend an additional $60–80 billion a year on war. This is nonsense. (The style is contagious.) They want a Reaganesque military buildup of great profit to aerospace industries and no one else. Their high-minded line is that there are bound to be many, many more exciting wars for us to fight and win. They seem to believe that our Declaration of Independence was not just for us but a blueprint for the whole world, which is longing to be American. The truth seems otherwise. Hearken to the howls from our allies as the radiant Oval One, from his ever more Byzantine capital, tells others with whom they may not trade.

  One must at least give the “conservatives,” as represented by the Ks, a mark for trying to find something for the United States to do now that the world has settled down to its usual mess of tribal rivalries and trade wars. The British, after the Suez debacle, were given to quoting Dean Acheson—a creator of the Global Empire—to the effect that Britain had lost an empire but had yet to find a role. In answer, J. B. Priestley wrote a wise meditation on the royal coat-of-arms—suggesting that now that the days of the lion were done, why not turn to the unicorn, a mythical elegant beast suggestive of magic and art? And so a considerable flowering in the arts lasted for at least a generation. We have no comparable heraldic lineage, only the bald-headed American eagle, so reminiscent of General Eisenhower when he tried to give up smoking.