by Gore Vidal
“Well, we want to hear nothing else.” Hay did his best to be genial; and, as always, succeeded. The problem with Henry Cabot Lodge-aside from the disagreeable fact that he looked young enough to be Hay’s son-was his serene conviction that he alone knew what the United States ought to do in foreign affairs, and from his high Republican Senate seat he drove the Administration like some reluctant ox, toward the annexation of, if possible, the entire world.
Worse, at a bureaucratic level, Lodge meddled so much with the State Department that even the patient Adee now found unbearable the Senator’s constant demands for consulates, to reward right-thinking imperialist friends and allies. But the President wanted peace at any price with the Senate, and the price in Lodge’s case was patronage. In exchange, however, Lodge had taken charge of getting the Administration’s treaty with Spain through the Senate, a surprisingly difficult task because of the Constitution’s unwise stipulation that no treaty could be enacted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate, an august body filled with men of the most boundless conceit, as Adams had so neatly portrayed in an anonymous, highly satiric novel which even now no one, except the remaining Hearts, knew for certain that he had written.
Apparently, the Senators were, once again, running true to form, according to Lodge, whose British accent offended Hay’s ears. But then Hay still spoke near-Indiana, and deeply loved England, while Lodge spoke like an Englishman, and hated England. La-di-da Lodge was one of the less unkind epithets for Massachusetts’s junior senator, who was now denouncing his state’s senior senator, the noble if misguided anti-imperialist George F. Hoar, who had told the nation that “no nation was ever created good enough to own another,” a sly paraphrase of Lincoln. “Theodore writes me almost every day.” Lodge stood, back to the fire, rocking from side to side on short legs. “He says that Hoar and the rest are little better than traitors.”
Adams sighed. “I would think that Theodore would have quite enough to do up in Albany without worrying about the Senate.”
“Well, he does think of the war as his war.” Lodge smiled at Hay. “His splendid little war, as you put it. Now he wants to make sure we keep the Philippines.”
“So do we all,” said Hay. But this was not strictly true. Hay and Adams had thought, from the beginning, that a coaling station for the American fleet would be sufficient recompense for the splendors and miseries of the small war. This was also the view of several of the American commissioners at the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, one commissioner-a Delaware senator-had written Hay a curiously eloquent telegram to say that as the United States had fought Spain in order to free Spain’s colonies from tyranny, the United States had no right to take Spain’s place as tyrant, no matter how benign. We must, he said, stick to our word.
Hay had put the case to the President, but St. Louis, as it were, had inspired McKinley with a sense of mission. After ten days in the West, McKinley returned to Washington, convinced that it was the will of the American people, and probably God, too, that the United States annex the entire Philippine archipelago. He instructed the commissioners to that effect; he also offered Spain twenty million dollars; and the Spanish agreed. Meanwhile, something called the Anti-Imperialist League was breathing fire, and an odd mixture they were, ranging from the last Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, to the millionaire Republican Andrew Carnegie, from Henry Adams’s own brother, Charles Francis, a one-time president of the Union Pacific Railroad, to Mark Twain.
“I wish, Cabot, I could be as certain as you are…” said Adams.
“About everything?” Lodge was amused and slightly, thought Hay, patronizing. Hay had observed the phenomenon before: when the pupil has surpassed-or thinks he has-his teacher.
“No. I have never wished for senatorial certitude.” Adams was dry. “That is beyond me. I’m always uncertain.”
“You were certainly certain that the Spanish must be driven out of Cuba,” began Lodge; to be stopped by Adams, who suddenly raised a pale small poodle-like paw.
“That was different. The only important contribution that my family ever made to the United States was the invention of the doctrine that is known by President Monroe’s name. The Western Hemisphere must be free of European influence, and the Cuba Libre movement was the last act-the completion-of my grandfather’s doctrine. Now, in the large sense, Spain is gone from our hemisphere, along with the French and for all intents and purposes, the British. The Caribbean is ours forever. But for us to end up with vast holdings in the Pacific, that strikes me as potentially dangerous, as more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve sailed the South Seas…”
“Old gold,” murmured Hay, the phrase Adams had used to describe the entrancing native women of Polynesia.
Adams affected not to hear. “Now you want us to take over a hostile population, made up of worthless Malay types, and Roman Catholics, as well. I thought you had enough of those in Boston without taking on another ten million or so.”
Lodge was airy. “Well, unlike the ones in Boston, we won’t let your worthless Malays vote, at least not in Massachusetts elections. And they’re not hostile, at least not the ones who matter, the people of property, who want us to stay.”
“Those are the tame cats, the ones who liked the Spanish. But all the rest follow this young man Aguinaldo, and they want independence.” Adams tugged at his beard, which was a white version of Lodge’s beard as Hay’s beard was a grizzled compromise. Hay was touched that a relatively young politician should want to emulate his elders when modern politics now required clean-shaven men like McKinley and Hanna, or the moustachioed Roosevelt. What did beards imply? he wondered. The early Roman emperors, like the early presidents, were clean-shaven; then decadence-and beards; then Christianity and the clean-shaven Constantine. Was McKinley to be a religious leader, as well as imperial consolidator?
Hay gave the latest news of Emilio Aguinaldo, whose troops had fought with Admiral Dewey on condition that once the Spaniards were gone there would be an independent Philippine-or Visayan-republic. But McKinley’s change of heart had put an end to that dream. Now Aguinaldo’s troops-mostly from the Tagal tribe-had occupied the Spanish forts. Aguinaldo had also occupied Iloilo, the capital of Panay province. Thus far, neither side had been eager to begin hostilities. “But this can’t last much longer,” said Hay, completing his tour of the archipelago’s horizon as viewed from the State Department. Elsewhere in Mullett’s wedding cake of a building, Hay knew that the War Department was contemplating games that he knew nothing of; and did not want to know about.
“Obviously some sort of incident now would get us our two-thirds vote.” Lodge sat in the armchair opposite Adams and adopted the same meditative pose as his old professor-and editor. After Lodge had graduated from Harvard, Adams had hired his former student to be an assistant editor of the North American Review, with one standing instruction: when editing historians, strike out all superfluous words, particularly adjectives. Hay had always envied Adams’s continence in the matter of English prose. Adams wrote like a Roman, with an urgent war to report; Hay’s prose simply idled, waiting for a joke to turn up.
“We had-you had-the two-thirds vote two weeks ago.” Adams scowled. “Then the whole thing was frittered away. How I wish Don Cameron was still in the Senate…”
“And La Dona across the square,” Hay added. Without Lizzie Cameron, Adams was incomplete. But the Camerons were wintering in Paris; and Adams was more than usually irritable and restless in Washington.
For once, Lodge did not make an excuse or, rather, more characteristically, blame someone else for the erosion of support in a Senate where the Republicans not only had a majority but he himself was the guiding spirit of the Foreign Affairs Committee. “I’ve never seen so much pressure brought to bear, never heard senators give so many positively crazed reasons for not doing the obvious. Anyway, we now have help from Mr. Bryan. Or Colonel Bryan, as he calls himself…”
“And who does not, who can?” said Hay, himself a major in
the Civil War, who had never fought because he was Lincoln’s secretary. Then, the war won without his participation, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel; hence, always and forever, he was Colonel Hay just as the President was always Major McKinley. But the President had actually seen action under his mentor, Ohio’s politician-general Rutherford B. Hayes, whose own mentor had been yet another politician-general, James Garfield, and Hay’s dear friend, as well. When General Garfield, the golden, had been elected president, he had offered Colonel Hay the position of private secretary; but Hay had gently declined. He could not be in middle age what he had been in youth. Now, of course, all the political generals from Grant to Garfield were dead; the colonels were on the shelf; and the majors had come into their own. After them, no more military-titled politicians. Yet every American war had bred at least one president. Who, Hay wondered, would the splendid little war-oh, fatuous phrase!-bring forth? Adams favored General Miles, the brother-in-law of his beloved Lizzie Cameron. Lodge had already declared that Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila was equal to Nelson’s at Aboukir. But of course Lodge would support McKinley, who would be reelected; and so there would be no splendid little war-hero president in the foreseeable future.
Hay caught himself daydreaming; and not listening. In his youth, he could do both. What was Lodge talking about? “He holds court in the Marble Room back of the Senate. They come in, one by one, to get their instructions. He’s like the pope.” Bryan. Colonel Bryan was in town to persuade the Democratic senators to support the treaty on patriotic grounds; then, the treaty passed, they would support a separate resolution to the effect that, in due course, the Philippines would be given their independence. Hay decided that Bryan was probably clever. If imperialism proved to be as popular as McKinley sensed it was in St. Louis, Bryan could enter the next presidential race as one who had joined the army and then favored the treaty and temporary annexation; but if imperialism, for some reason, should not be popular, he was on record as favoring the independence of the Philippines while the Major was now firmly for annexation. “He’s also like the pope in that he is not a gentleman.” Lodge could not resist the double thrust. Hay, who had not begun life as a gentleman by Lodge’s standards, had become one; so much so, in fact, that he, unlike Lodge, never saw any need to use the dangerous word in any context. Politicians, no matter how patrician their birth, were a vulgar infantile lot. “We should be grateful to him, of course, wild man that he is. Because if the treaty passes…”
“No ‘if,’ please.” Hay refused to envisage the treaty’s failure.
“It’s going to be close, Mr. Hay, very close. But Bryan’s changing votes. I’m changing votes, I think, and…”
“And Mark Hanna’s buying one or two,” said Adams. “Such is the way of our world.”
“A very good thing, too. Corruption in a good cause is a good thing. So who cares that a senator’s been bought in the process?” Hay got to his feet, with some difficulty. Although the mortal ailment was, temporarily, in recession, he had lately developed an exciting new set of pains, both arthritic and sciatic; as a result, what felt like jolts of electric energy kept assaulting his nerve ends while odd tendons twitched quite on their own and joints, for no reason, would suddenly lock. “I’ve come around, Cabot. At first I thought it not only wrong but inconvenient to try to govern so many Catholic Malays. But time’s running out on us. The Europeans are partitioning China. The Russians are in Port Arthur. The Germans are in Shantung…”
“I want us in Shanghai.” Lodge’s eyes gleamed at the prospect of yet more Asiatic victories.
“Well, I want us in Siberia,” said Adams. “We have no future in the Pacific, but when Russia breaks up, as it must, there’s our opportunity. Who controls the Siberian land-mass is the master of Europe and Asia.”
Happily, Hay was spared an Adams meditation on the world’s ever-shifting balance of power by the arrival of ladies. Hay greeted Mrs. Lodge, known as Sister Anne or Nannie, at the door, aware that her suspicious eye was on her husband. She did not entirely approve of Lodge when he was too much the senator; husband gave wife an innocent look. “Henry and I talk and talk about the treaty, while Cabot, who knows everything, just sits and listens, quiet as pussy,” said Hay, maintaining peace in the Lodge family. “In fact, cat’s got his tongue tonight.”
“There is no cat,” said Nannie Lodge, “large enough to get Cabot’s silver tongue.”
Meanwhile, Clara Hay and their two daughters quite filled the study, and Adams began to shine, as he always did when young women were present, while Lodge grew ever more courtly, and Sister Anne witty. Three of five Hearts in the same room: Hay was content. But contentment ceased in the midst of the bombe-glacée, Clara Hay’s ongoing masterpiece. Although cooks came and went over the years, Clara, who could not, as they say, boil water, nevertheless was able to pass on the secret receipts to a number of all-important dishes of which the bombe-glacée was the quivering, delicate, mocha-flavored, creamy, filigree-sugared piece, as Hay called it, of least resistance.
Hay’s fork was posed for a stab at this perfection when the butler appeared in the doorway to announce, “The President, sir. He would like you to go over to the mansion.”
The dining room was silent. Lodge’s dark eyes shone; and the bumblebee nose looked as if it scented pollen. Adams gave his old friend a mournful look. Clara was firm. “He can wait until we’ve finished dinner.”
Hay had discovered a new and almost painless way of getting out of a chair; he used his relatively strong right arm rather than his relatively bad knees to get to his feet. Now he pushed hard against the arm of his chair; and was, almost painlessly, upright. “Henry, you be host. I’ll be back-when I’m back.”
“I can’t think,” said Clara, “what the Major is doing up at this hour. Over there, they go to bed with the chickens.”
“A fox,” said Lodge, “is loose in the chicken house.”
At the foot of Hay’s majestic staircase stood Mr. Eddy and a White House messenger. Hay’s descent was cautious; the scarlet runner a magnificent peril. “What is it, Mr. Eddy?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Secretary.”
“I don’t know either, sir,” said the messenger.
“All I know, sir, is he wants you straightaway, sir.”
“In mid-bomb,” Hay murmured sadly, as the butler got him into his fur-lined coat.
Although February had been lethally cold, no snow had yet fallen, and the three men were able to walk across the avenue to the White House, where the offices in the east end were ominously lit up while the downstairs was dark.
The German doorkeeper greeted Hay in the near-darkness of the entrance hall; he said, somewhat surprisingly, “The President’s waiting in the conservatories.” An usher stepped out of the shadow, to lead the way. In the dim light of a single lamp, the Tiffany screen looked incongruously Byzantine.
During Lincoln’s time the conservatories had been modest; now they covered acres. One greenhouse was devoted exclusively to orchids, another to roses, another to exotic tropical fruits. At evening receptions, the Marine band would play in the rose house, and the young couples would wander from glass-house to glass-house, invariably getting lost. But there had been no such evenings since the sinking of the Maine.
The President was in the carnation greenhouse, seated in an armchair, smoking a cigar, a stack of papers in his lap. Hay was quite overwhelmed by the scent of flowers, not to mention the moist warmth in such marked contrast to the icy night beyond the panes of glass, which were now so many black mirrors reflecting the artificial-looking colors of the carnations on their green straw-like stalks. Electric lights made summer noon of winter night.
“I come here when I want to get away.” The Major started to get up but Hay’s hand on his shoulder kept him in place. Hay got into a chair opposite him; they were at the center of a perspective of carnations, arrayed in tables according to color. Those at hand were pale pink, a color Hay disliked and the Major doted on. “Tonight I�
�ve been working on my speech to the Home Market Club in Boston. It’s for the sixteenth. I want to make the case, once and for all, for annexation. Please go over the text. Add anything, subtract anything. Just make it right. You’re the best I know for this sort of speech.”
Hay wondered if the President might not be a little mad: to summon him away from a dinner party, admittedly a late one, to sit in a stifling greenhouse in order to discuss a speech two weeks away. “Is that the text?”
“This?” McKinley held up the top paper on his lap; the huge waistcoated belly had crumpled an edge of the paper where belly rested upon vast presidential thighs. “No, Mr. Hay. This is what we have to talk about. It is from the Manila correspondent of the New York Sun. It will be in all the papers tomorrow.”
As Hay read the cabled story, the agitated President spun his eyeglasses on their silken cord; first clockwise, then counterclockwise. On the island of Luzon, Aguinaldo’s gun-men had opened fire on American troops. Hay returned the cable to the President. “I am not surprised,” he said. “It was only a matter of time-and timing.”
“We have a second war on our hands, so close to the other.” The Major sighed. “It is always the unexpected that happens, at least in my case. I thought my Administration would be a quiet affair, dedicated to sound business, sound money. Instead I am thrust by events into war after war…”
“Mr. Lincoln said I do not act. I am acted upon. My policy is to have no policy.”
“In this, we are as one.” McKinley suddenly shook the cabled report as if it were a child in need of discipline. “How foolish these people are! Don’t they realize that this will get us our treaty? The people will insist on it now.”
Hay nodded; he was also growing suspicious. “Do we know who fired the first shot?”
“All we know is what you’ve just read. It sounds as if they fired first or provoked us to fire first. I’ve cabled General Otis for a report. Just the other day he said he thought he’d need as many as thirty thousand troops, to run things properly. I disagreed. As it is, our army of occupation is twenty thousand men, all-”