by Gore Vidal
Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight. TR’s slaughter of the animals in the Badlands outdoes in spades the butcheries of that sissy of a later era, Ernest Hemingway. Elks, grizzly bears, blacktail bucks are killed joyously while a bear cub is shot, TR reports proudly, “clean through…from end to end” (the Teddy bear was yet to be invented). “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” TR was still very much the prig, at least in speech: “He immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, ‘Hasten forward quickly here!’ ” Years later he wrote: “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
There is something strangely infantile in this obsession with dice-loaded physical courage when the only courage that matters in political or even “real” life is moral. Although TR was often reckless and always domineering in politics, he never showed much real courage, and despite some trust-busting, he never took on the great ring of corruption that ruled and rules in this republic. But then, he was born a part of it. At best, he was just a dude with the reform play. Fortunately, foreign affairs would bring him glory. As Lincoln was the Bismarck of the American states, Theodore Roosevelt was the Kaiser Wilhelm II, a more fortunate and intelligent figure than the Kaiser but every bit as bellicose and conceited. Edith Wharton described with what pride TR showed her a photograph of himself and the Kaiser with the Kaiser’s inscription: “President Roosevelt shows the Emperor of Germany how to command an attack.”
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I once asked Alice Longworth just why her father was such a war-lover. She denied that he was. I quoted her father’s dictum: “No triumph of peace is quite as great as the supreme triumph of war.” A sentiment to be echoed by yet another sissy in the next generation: “Meglio un giorno da leone che cento anni da pecora.” “Oh, well,” she said, “that’s the way they all sounded in those days.” But they did not all sound that way. Certainly Theodore, Senior, would have been appalled, and I doubt if Eleanor really approved of Uncle Teddy’s war-mongering.
As president TR spoke loudly and carried a fair-sized stick. When Colombia wouldn’t give him the land that he needed for a canal, he helped invent Panama out of a piece of Colombia; and got his canal. He also installed the United States as the policeman of the Western Hemisphere. In order to establish an American hegemony in the Pacific, TR presided over the tail-end of the slaughter of more than half a million Filipinos who had been under the illusion that after the Spanish-American War they would be free to set up an independent republic under the leadership of Emilio Arguinaldo. But TR had other plans for the Philippines. Nice Mr. Taft was made the governor-general and one thousand American teachers of English were sent to the islands to teach the natives the sovereign’s language.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, TR’s “open-door policy” to China had its ups and downs. In 1905 the Chinese boycotted American goods because of American immigration policies, but the United States was still able to establish the sort of beachhead on the mainland of Asia that was bound to lead to what TR would have regarded as a bully fine war with Japan. Those of us who were involved in that war did not like it all that much.
In 1905, the world-famous Henry James came, in triumph, to Washington. He was a friend of Secretary of State John Hay and of Henry Adams. “Theodore Rex,” as James called the president, felt obliged to invite the Master to the White House even though TR had denounced James as “effete” and a “miserable little snob”—it takes one to know one—while James thought of TR as “a dangerous and ominous Jingo.” But the dinner was a success. James described the president as a “wonderful little machine…quite exciting to see. But it’s really like something behind a great plate-glass window on Broadway.” TR continued to loathe “the tone of satirical cynicism” of Henry James and Henry Adams while the Master finally dismissed the president as “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”
Alice Longworth used to boast that she and her father’s viceroy Taft were the last Westerners to be received by the Dowager Empress of China. “We went to Peking. To the Forbidden City. And there we were taken to see this strange little old lady standing at the end of a room. Well, there was no bowing or scraping for us. So we marched down the room just behind the chamberlain, a eunuch, like one of those in that book of yours, Justinian, who slithered on his belly toward her. After he had announced us, she gave him a kick and he rolled over like a dog and slithered out.” What had they talked about? She couldn’t recall. I had my impression that she rather liked the way the empress treated her officials.
In the years before World War II, Alice was to be part of a marital rectangle. The heart having its reasons, Alice saw fit to conduct a long affair with the corrupt Senator William Borah, the so-called lion of Idaho, who had once roared, “I’d rather be right than president,” causing my grandfather to murmur, “Of course, he was neither.” In 1940, when the poor and supposedly virtuous Borah died, several hundred thousand dollars were found in his safety deposit box. Where had the money come from? asked the press. “He was my friend,” said Senator Gore, for public consumption, “I do not speculate.” But when I asked him who had paid off Borah, the answer was blunt. “The Nazis. To keep us out of the war.” Meanwhile, Alice’s husband, the Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, was happily involved with Mrs. Tracy (another Alice) Dows.
Rather late in life, Alice Longworth gave birth to her only child. In The Making of Nicholas Longworth, by Longworth’s sister Clara de Chambrun, there is a touching photograph of Longworth holding in his arms a child whose features are unmistakably those of a lion’s cub. “I should have been a grandmother, not a mother,” Alice used to say of her daughter. But then, she had as little maternal instinct toward her only child as TR had had paternal instinct for her. When Nicholas Longworth died in 1931, Alice Dows told me how well Alice Longworth had behaved. “She asked me to go with her in the private train that took Nick back to Ohio. Oh, it was very moving. Particularly the way Alice treated me, as if I was the widow, which I suppose I was.” She paused; then the handsome, square-jawed face broke into a smile and she used the Edwardian phrase: “Too killing.”
When Alice Dows died she left me a number of her books. Among them was The Making of Nicholas Longworth, which I have just read. It is a loving, quite uninteresting account of what must have been a charming, not very interesting man. On the page where Alice Dows makes her appearance “one evening at Mrs. Tracy Dows’s home…,” she had placed a four-leaf clover—now quite faded: nice emblem for a lucky lot.
In the electronic era, letter-writing has declined while diaries are kept only by those ill-educated, crazed, lone killers who feel obliged to report, in clinical detail, just how crazed and solitary they are as they prepare to assassinate political leaders. Except for Christopher Isherwood, I can think of no contemporary literary figure who has kept, for most of a lifetime, a journal. The Diaries of Anaïs Nin were, of course, her fiction. Fortunately, the pre-electronic Roosevelts and their friends wrote countless letters and journals and books, and Mr. McCullough has done a good job of selection; one is particularly grateful for excerpts from the writings of Elliott Roosevelt, a rather more natural and engaging writer than his industrious but not always felicitous older brother. Mr. McCullough’s own style is easy to the point of incoherence. “The horse he rode so hard day after day that he all but ruined it,” sounds more like idle dictation than written English. But, all in all, he has succeeded in showing us how a certain world, now lost, shaped the young Theodore Roosevelt. I think it worth noting that Simon and Schuster has managed to produce the worst set of bound galleys that I have ever read. There are so many misspellings that one has no sense of TR’s own hit-or-miss approach to spelling, while two pages are entirely blank.
Now that war is o
nce more thinkable among the thoughtless, Theodore Roosevelt should enjoy a revival. Certainly, the New Right will find his jingoism appealing, though his trust-busting will give less pleasure to the Honorable Society of the Invisible Hand. The figure that emerges from the texts of both Mr. McCullough and Mr. Morris is both fascinating and repellent. Theodore Roosevelt was a classic American sissy who overcame—or appeared to overcome—his physical fragility through “manly” activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war.
As a politician-writer, Theodore Roosevelt most closely resembles Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini. Each was as much a journalist as a politician. Each was a sissy turned showoff. The not unwitty Churchill—the most engaging of the lot—once confessed that if no one had been watching him he could quite easily have run away during a skirmish in the Boer War. Each was a romantic, in love with the nineteenth-century notion of earthly glory, best personified by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose eagerness to do in his biological superiors led to such a slaughter of alpha-males that the average French soldier of 1914 was markedly shorter than the soldier of 1800—pretty good going for a fat little fellow, five foot four inches tall—with, to be fair, no history of asthma.
As our dismal century draws to a close, it is fairly safe to say that no matter what tricks and torments are in store for us, we shall not see their like again. Faceless computer analysts and mindless cue-card readers will preside over our bright noisy terminus.
The New York Review of Books
AUGUST 13, 1981
The State of the Union Revisited (1980)
Five years and two presidents ago, I presented in the pages of Esquire my own State of the Union Address, based on a chat I’d been giving in various parts of the republic. Acting as a sort of shadow president, I used to go around giving a true—well, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle being what it is, a truer report on the state of the union than the one we are given each year by that loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president, who is called, depending on the year, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter. Although the presidents now come and go with admirable speed, the bank goes on forever, constantly getting us into deeper and deeper trouble of the sort that can be set right—or wrong—only by its man in the Oval Office. One of the bank’s recent capers has got the Oval One and us into a real mess. The de-Peacock-Throned King of Kings wanted to pay us a call. If we did not give refuge to the Light of the Aryans (Banksman David Rockefeller and Banksman Henry Kissinger were the tactical officers involved), the heir of Cyrus the Great would take all his money out of the bank, out of Treasury bonds, out of circulation in North America. Faced with a choice between loss of money and loss of honor and good sense, Banksman Carter chose not to lose money. As a result, there will probably be a new president come November. But whether it is this Banksman or that, Chase Manhattan will continue to be served and the republic will continue to be, in Banksman Nixon’s elegant phrase, shafted.
In 1973, Banksman D. Rockefeller set up something called the Trilateral Commission in order to bring together politicians on the make (a tautology if there ever was one) and academics like Kissinger, the sort of gung-ho employee who is always eager to start a war or to improve the bank’s balance sheet. Not long after the Trilateral Commission came into being, I started to chat about it on television. Although I never saw anything particularly sinister in the commission itself (has any commission ever done anything?), I did think it a perfect symbol of the way the United States is ruled. When Trilateral Commission member Carter was elected president after having pretended to be An Outsider, he chose his vice-president and his secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, as well as the national security adviser, from Chase Manhattan’s commission. I thought this pretty bold—even bald.
To my amazement, my warnings were promptly heeded by, of all outfits, the American Right, a group of zanies who ought deeply to love the bank and all its works. Instead, they affect to fear and loathe the Trilateral Commission on the ground that it is, somehow or other, an integral part of that international monolithic atheistic godless communist conspiracy that is bent on forcing honest American yeomen to get up at dawn and walk to work for the state as abortionists and fluoride dispensers. Needless to say, although the American right wing is a good deal stupider than the other fragile political wings that keep the republic permanently earthbound, their confusion in this matter is baffling. The bank is very much their America.
Although there has never been a left wing in the United States, certain gentle conservatives like to think of themselves as liberals, as defenders of the environment, as enemies of our dumber wars. I would think that they’d have seen in the bank’s Trilateral Commission the perfect symbol of why we fight our dumber wars, why we destroy the environment. But not a single gentle liberal voice has ever been raised against the bank. I suppose this is because too many of them work for the Bank….I shall now use the word Bank (capitalized, naturally) as a kind of shorthand not just for the Chase Manhattan but also for the actual ownership of the United States. To quote from my earlier State of the Union message: “Four point four percent own most of the United States….This gilded class owns 27 percent of the country’s real estate. Sixty percent of all corporate stock, and so on.” The Bank is the Cosa Nostra of the 4.4 percent. The United States government is the Cosa Nostra of the Bank.
For more than a century, our educational system has seen to it that 95.6 percent of the population grow up to be docile workers and consumers, paranoid taxpayers, and eager warriors in the Bank’s never-ending struggle with atheistic communism. The fact that the American government gives back to the citizen-consumer very little of the enormous revenues it extorts from him is due to the high cost of what the Bank—which does have a sense of fun—calls freedom. Although most industrial Western (not to mention Eastern European) countries have national health services, the American taxpayer is not allowed this amenity because it would be socialism, which is right next door to godless communism and free love, followed by suicide in the long white Swedish night. A major part of our country’s revenue must always go to the Pentagon, which then passes the money on to those client states, industries, and members of Congress with which the Bank does business. War is profitable for the Bank. Health is not.
Five years ago, incidentally, I said: “The defense budget is currently about a quarter of the national budget—$85 billion….[It] is now projected for the end of the decade to cost us $114 billion. This is thievery. This is lunacy.” The requested defense budget for the first year of our brand-new decade is $153.7 billion, which is still thievery, still lunacy—and highly inflationary to boot. But since the defense budget is at the heart of the Bank’s system of control over the United States, it can never be seriously reduced. Or, to put it another way, cut the defense budget and the Bank will start to die.
Since my last State of the Union Address, the election law of 1971 has come into its ghastly own. The first effect of the law was to give us the four-year presidential campaign. The second treat we got from it was the presidency of Banksman Jimmy Carter. It is now plain that anyone who can get elected president under the new ground rules ought not to be allowed to take office.
For once, even the dullest of the Bank’s depositors is aware that something is wrong. Certainly, there have never been quite so many demonstrably dim Banksmen running for president as there are in 1980. Part of this is historical: not since the country’s bright dawn have first-rate people gone into politics. Other countries take seriously their governance. Whatever one might think of the politics of Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, each is a highly intelligent man who is proud to hold a place in government—unlike his American equivalent, who stays out of politics because the Bank fears the superior man. As a result, the contempt in which Carter is held by European and Japanese leaders is not so much the fault of what I am sure is a really swell Christian guy as it is due to the fact that he is intellectually inferior to the other le
aders. They know history, economics, geography. He doesn’t—and neither do his rivals. The Bank perfers to keep the brightest Americans hidden away in the branch offices. The dull and the docile are sent to Congress and the White House.
I don’t know any thoughtful person who was not made even more thoughtful by the recent Canadian election. The new prime minister was not popular. He made mistakes. In the course of a half-hour vote of no confidence, the government fell. There was a nine-and-a-half-week campaign that cost about $60 million. At its end, the old prime minister was back. In a matter of weeks there had been a political revolution. If the United States had had a parliamentary system last April, we would have been relieved of Jimmy Carter as chief of government after his mess in the Iranian desert. But he is still with us, and the carnival of our presidential election goes on and on, costing tens of millions of dollars, while the candidates smile, shake hands, and try to avoid ethnic jokes and the demonstration of any semblance of intelligence. Although the economy is in a shambles and the empire is cracking up, the political system imposed upon us by the Bank does not allow any candidate to address himself seriously to any issue. I know that each candidate maintains, in some cases accurately, that he has superb position papers on all the great issues; but no one pays any attention—further proof that the system doesn’t work. After all, since the Bank owns the media, the Bank is able to decide who and what is newsworthy and just how much deeptalk its depositors can absorb. Plainly, the third American republic is drawing to a close, and we must now design for ourselves a fourth republic, a democratic society not dedicated to war and the Bank’s profits. Third republic? Fourth republic? What am I talking about? Let me explain.