by Fred Kaplan
In the spring of 1932 present history came distressingly alive. When he heard that thousands of protesting “Boners” who had assembled were encamped around the city, he thought they were “white skeletons like those jointed cardboard ones displayed at Halloween. Bony figures filled my nightmares until it was explained to me that these were not from slaughterhouses but from poorhouses.” Impoverished World War I veterans who demanded a bonus were rumored to have attacked the Capitol and to be looting stores. He imagined skeletons on the march. When the Senate met to vote on the Bonus Bill, he drove to the Capitol with his grandfather, who opposed the legislation. Senator Gore also opposed the Social Security Bill. A blind man who had risen from poverty on his own initiative, he believed it morally wrong to give people money. It would destroy character. As the Senator’s car got close to the Capitol, Little Gene saw shabby-looking men holding up signs. “Before we could pass through the line, Gore was recognized. There were shouts; then a stone came through the window … and landed with a crash on the floor between us. My grandfather’s memorable words were: ‘Shut the window,’ which I did.” General MacArthur’s soldiers, on horseback, dispersed the Boners and cleared Washington of the threat. They did not, however, immediately clear away the refuse left behind. The next Sunday, Big Gene took his son for an airplane flight over what had been the Boners’ encampment. “There were still smoking fires where the shanties had been. The place looked like a garbage dump, which in a sense it had been, a human one.”
The value of money was a prominent theme in the Gore household. The young boy heard speeches on it regularly. For the Senator, personal and public finances needed to fulfill the same basic accounting principles. The government held the people’s money in trust. A balanced budget and a sound currency, backed by gold, was the government’s sacred responsibility. Any deviation should be opposed as a matter of unalterable principle. A child of economic catastrophes, from the Civil War in the South to the depression of the 1890s, the Senator had experience with economic hardship. He had learned to watch his pennies, to spend assets sparingly, to live in expectation of more hard times just around the corner. The Great Depression of the 1930s did not come as a surprise to Senator Gore. His underlying adage, for himself and for government, was “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” unless absolutely necessary. Little Gene heard that message repeatedly, not only from the Senator but also, in a different voice and tone, from his father, who had made his way in the world largely indifferent to money but always with so little that he too needed to restrict his expenses. He was not eager to spend money on his son, partly because he did not have it, partly by temperament. Both Senator Gore and Gene Vidal kept their purses closely guarded. Small gifts were forthcoming, coins and birthday presents. His grandmother was more generous. Not unexpectedly, his impulsive mother was sometimes handsomely generous. But her gifts came with the characteristic barb, with touches of exaggeration and hysteria. In 1933 “the Depression was on every tongue. Even I knew what it was. You could see it in the streets. People selling apples and so on. My mother gave me for my eighth birthday a painting set, watercolors, with a solemn speech that this would probably be the last present I would ever get, as the Depression was upon us and everyone was broke and there was no money in the land. Her refrain from that moment on was that I just didn’t know the value of money, I was indifferent to the price of things…. Those speeches came out of her sense of drama. She no more understood the Depression than I did.”
March 1933. The excited crowd in front of the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, opposite the Commerce Department, had gathered to view the inaugural parade, the newly elected President about to deliver his speech in front of the Capitol. A loudspeaker system, which had been installed along Pennsylvania Avenue so the waiting crowd could hear the speech, suddenly came on. The high-pitched, patrician, mid-Hudson voice of Franklin Roosevelt crackled through the air. “We could actually hear his voice, all that distance, because of these speakers. They were hung on the streetlamps. It was a public-address system. And it was out of synch. So he would say, ‘WE HAVE NOTHING—we have nothing—WE HAVE NOTHING—we have nothing—BUT FEAR—but fear.’ It was doing this funny blip-blip.” From a voice that was to speak familiarly to Americans over the next decade, they heard his soon-to-be-famous words twice. As Gene and Nina went up, with Little Gene and a group of their friends, to watch the parade from a rented room in the Willard, Gene Vidal was hoping that he would serve in the new administration. From the hotel window they had a perfect view not only of the parade but of the classically columned Department of Commerce building on whose second floor Gene might have his new office. It was a moment of high excitement.
Vidal got the prestigious job of director of aeronautics by route of both competence and politics. Both were necessary. The competition had been stiff. Able to demonstrate, with the first frequency-per-mile analysis, that profits in the airline industry would increase to a satisfactory level with an increased number of flights, Collins and Vidal had made the Ludington Line a success. When after a year of operation the airline showed a net profit of over $8,000, the Ludingtons were ecstatic. Despite a November 1931 accident that killed two pilots and three passengers, the airline had established an industry standard for efficiency, low costs, and safety. “That whole period was one of the most glamorous in American history,” Gore Vidal recalled. “And very dramatic, since everybody was getting killed all the time. Until I was twenty I thought half my father’s friends wore neck braces for ornament; they always landed on their heads, those that weren’t killed.” Fear of flying, understandably, kept passenger numbers low. Those who had flown one way often would, if the weather looked bad, cancel return reservations and take the train. Gene devised the policy of selling only round-trip tickets. The first Ludington Line flight of the day was flown by one of their best pilots, who was to report immediately, when he landed, on the weather along the route. “If he reported the weather to be all right,” Gene recalled, “then we sent out the later scheduled departures; if not, they stayed on the ground.” For “carrying a load of passengers in those days of no radio or other contact with the ground gave you gray hair…. When one of our airplanes was en route we never knew where it was until we saw it approaching the airport. When a plane was late, with a load of passengers on board, we really sweated it out. We operators stayed right at the airport until all planes were in or accounted for, regardless of the hour.” Some passengers would “build up their courage by imbibing heavily” before the flight. “Sometimes they would carry a bottle of liquor on board.” Since the plane windows could be opened, they often flung the empty bottles out. The bottle would hit the propeller, which bounced the pieces back against the fuselage, putting holes through it. Finally the windows were fixed in place permanently.
Equally dangerous to the Ludington Line were rival companies, piranhas eager to dominate routes and profits, especially the Curtis-Key group, for whom Vidal had worked at TAT. Its subsidiary, Eastern Air Transport, competed for government mail contracts, without which Ludington could not survive. Passenger income alone failed to cover costs, and political clout and corruption concerning the mail routes shaped the emerging industry. To help strengthen Ludington in its competition with Eastern, Vidal and Collins offered a revision of their initial contract that would decrease their now runaway salaries and options. Based on performance, partly measured in cost per flight mile, their bonuses would transfer most of the company’s assets to them. They revised the formula downward. The Ludingtons happily agreed. But the real threat to viability was from Curtis-Key’s political clout. Though Vidal demonstrated in memo after memo the strikingly lower cost at which Ludington could transport mail, Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general preferred to award the mail routes to Eastern Air, without competitive bidding, at rates two to three times what Ludington offered. Without mail contracts, the Ludingtons saw the handwriting on the wall. Still, they had high hopes for a while longer. Wanting a more direct role in decision-
making, they were eager to consolidate their executive headquarters in Philadelphia rather than Washington, the site of the operational facilities. When they insisted that Vidal move to New Jersey, Gene refused. He “didn’t want to be away from operations.” Disappointed in his decision, Nicholas Ludington brought in as president a TWA executive whose main innovation was to spend large sums on what Vidal and Collins thought extravagant frills. Gene was not happy. The idea for the airline had been his. His efficient planning had resulted in profits. Though he would have been pleased to have been elevated to the top position, he had not been offered the title. Also, since Vidal’s and Collins’s incomes were based on an incentive cost-efficiency formula and since costs per mile increased under the new president, their incomes declined sharply. The Ludingtons’ profits disappeared entirely. In about three months, a no-frills had been transformed into a no-profit airline. At the end of September 1932 Gene resigned. Eastern Air Transport soon made an offer to the unhappy owners. The Ludington Line disappeared forever.
Gene’s imminent appointment as assistant director for air regulation, then director of aeronautics, was the result of his relationship with Amelia Earhart, whose influence with the First Lady and with the President had paved the way. Earhart’s boyish good looks, her combination of willfulness and feminine charm, her eagerness to advance women into new roles and to champion their equality, her courage as a pioneering aviator eager to publicize the new industry and women’s rights, even her few early years as a social worker, struck an admiring chord in the older woman. But, whereas Eleanor may have been enchanted with Amelia, Amelia was in love with Gene. They had met in 1929 when both worked for TAT. When they became lovers is unclear, as is the kind and extent of their lovemaking, though Gene apparently controlled the affair and kept it as nondisruptive as possible. By the late 1920s, Nina and Gene had gone their separate sexual ways, though perhaps still occasionally getting together. How much Gene knew or cared to know is unclear. Nina’s affairs were casual, spontaneous pleasures, sometimes helped by or even dependent on alcohol, an extension of an afternoon’s boredom or a late-night party. Working and traveling for work, handsome, always elegantly dressed, prominently in the national news, Gene Vidal had innumerable opportunities. Affairs were commonplace, divorces a nuisance. When, in February 1931, Earhart married George Palmer Putnam, it was, for her, mostly a marriage of convenience. She insisted on the right to sleep with whomever she wanted, partly a statement of her attempt to redefine marriage, partly an expression of lack of erotic feeling for Putnam.
For Earhart, who expressed her romantic side in poetry and in adventuresome flight, her career came first. For Vidal, whose taste was for younger women, feminine in their figures and attitudes, Earhart appealed more as pal than lover. About aviation matters, they rarely made a move without consulting. Between 1929 and 1931 they saw one another regularly on their travels to air shows and publicity events around the country as well as in New York and Washington. In the comfortable Westchester County, New York, home that Earhart and Putnam established, Gene was, weekend after weekend, a frequent visitor who Putnam unhappily knew was a special friend of his wife’s. When Gene came up from Washington, Amelia would drive the long distance to the airport or the train station to pick him up and take him back. When Amelia’s cousin fell in love with Gene, she soon realized that when Gene and Amelia were together, they had no interest in anyone else. As late as 1935 Amelia kept a silver hairbrush with her monogram in the bathroom of Gene’s apartment in Washington, “her hairbrush with her little red hairs in it, an antique sterling silver hairbrush with a little oval in the center with her initials in old English lettering and around it embossed roses and daisies. I always figured,” Gene’s sister-in-law recalled, “they were more than business partners…. When I saw that hairbrush, it was as if she had just been at Gene’s apartment. I’m sure she stayed overnight.”
With a large number of candidates for the position of director, Roosevelt, urged by Earhart and others, appointed Gene Vidal assistant director for air regulation, pending the reorganization of the aeronautics division. Roosevelt expected William Roper, his Secretary of Commerce, to run the department cheaply, effectively, and politically. There were two key issues in the aeronautics division: (1) how to create as many patronage jobs as possible without undercutting the division’s technical mission and (2) how to create on a minuscule budget (40 percent less than the division had had previously) the large number of safety changes needed to create public confidence in air travel. Any new director of aeronautics would have his hands full. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the President’s son, without much clout of his own, had pushed Gene’s credentials for the directorship. They had recently become friends. Rumor circulated that Senator Gore was lobbying for his son-in-law. Years later Nina claimed that she and her father were responsible for Gene’s appointment. Gore had campaigned for Roosevelt. But Roosevelt hardly owed Gore a favor and probably sensed that the senator from Oklahoma would be more foe than friend to the New Deal. In late 1932 Gene’s connection to Senator Gore may have been in his favor but, if a factor at all, it was insignificant: Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were his champions and, later, defenders. He was shortly in need of defense. In fact, his tenure as director of aeronautics became embroiled in controversies that had little to do with him. When he was promoted to director in September 1933, the political die had already been cast.
As director, constantly in the field, often flying himself around the country, Gene Vidal made news, much of it serious, some of it controversial. In December 1933 Time magazine, in the process of becoming the journalistic voice of American nationalism, had highlighted his success with the Ludington Line by devoting its cover to his handsome face. To the general public he became known as an advocate of a two-passenger personal airplane he hoped would be as widely used as the automobile, a kind of Model T Ford of aviation. Despite widespread media coverage, the idea did not take off, mostly because it proved to be more expensive, impractical, and complicated than he had anticipated. At a time of stringent budgets it seemed to many that the director should not be diverting money from issues of air safety to what appeared an impractical project. Congress was constantly fighting about aviation policy and implementation. Caught between a political assistant secretary of commerce and a scheming assistant to the director, Vidal was soon on the hot seat. When Roosevelt, in February 1934, for political reasons, without taking proper advice, abruptly canceled all commercial airmail contracts and instead required the Army Air Corps to deliver the mail, eleven Army fliers were killed in crashes and expensive equipment destroyed. There was an attempt to blame Vidal. When Vidal declined to do the bidding of the most powerful man in commercial aviation, Juan Trippe, who had taken him and others on a TWA South American junket, Trippe and his Hearst newspaper allies became vituperative enemies. When another series of crashes shocked the American public, congressional hearings tried to blame the director of aeronautics. A well-known senator had been killed in one of the mishaps. The hearings exonerated Vidal; none of the other charges stuck to him. What was clear was that in the face of an insufficient budget Vidal had done everything possible to improve air safety, to regularize the industry, to encourage technical innovation, and to gain support for aviation as an essential part of the current and future American infrastructure.
When, in 1936, it seemed Vidal would be forced to resign, Earhart made it clear in a telegram to the First Lady that she could not fulfill her commitment to campaign for the President’s reelection if Vidal were dismissed. When the waves were smoothed, Amelia and Gene arranged that Vidal write to the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee to tell her that Earhart would, after all, campaign for the President. “We are all very grateful to you for … getting Miss Earhart interested in working for President Roosevelt,” she wrote back to him. The director of aeronautics did his share also. As technical adviser to the Democratic National Campaign Committee’s air fleet, displaying pro-Roosevelt banners ac
ross the country, his thank-you was to be jokingly commissioned “Flight Commander of Roosevelt Aerial Caravans.” No one, though, could last very long in such a high-risk position. There were too many masters to serve and too little money with which to serve. Not a politician by profession or temperament, Vidal was good neither at bureaucratic infighting nor at administering subordinates. Office work bored him. He preferred tinkering, inventing, dreaming, publicizing. Many of his ideas, inevitably, were overtaken by technical progress, especially faster, safer, more cost-efficient large airplanes and airports that made air travel economical and instilled public confidence in its safety. Always the good soldier, Vidal had placed his resignation in Secretary Roper’s hands numbers of times. He had agreed to stay on at the Secretary’s pleasure in order to prevent the impression that Roper had capitulated to the Senate committee investigating the crashes. But Gene was relieved when, in March 1937, he was at last out of government service.
Some months before the country had a new President and a New Deal, Little Gene had a new school. His three years at Sidwell Friends, from 1933 to 1936, now went by in a blur, focused mostly by his enthusiasm for organizing a gang of classmates. His games were mostly imaginary, invented characters or toy soldiers. He played organized team sports only when forced. On the field, as the game progressed, he relieved the tedium by thinking of other things. “One reason I didn’t like football was the boredom of putting on and taking off all that gear. Even so, at an early school, I made what I thought was an unusually brilliant touchdown against what proved to be, on closer analysis, my own school.” Tall, thin, alert, well coordinated, he seemed to others a likely athlete. His father’s athletic fame prompted the assumption that he would follow in his footsteps even if he could not fill his shoes. From an early age he did everything short of insubordination to disabuse people of this notion. His father took it with his usual good grace. His mother was deeply disappointed, even angry, as if it were purposeful defiance. She wanted her boy to be like other boys, even more so. Though now in their arguments she made fun of her husband’s athletic achievements, she wanted Little Gene to put down his books and take up his playthings. She could not stand that he preferred to be solitary. “She was always on about that, my not getting good grades and not being a good mixer, not being a well-rounded person, not being athletic. I’d have to turn over a new leaf, she’d say.” When one day he reported to Nina that Tommy Hopkins had been bullying him, she gave him a dog leash and told him to smash Tommy with it. Nina knew how to fight. She believed in all-out war. Her son learned to fight, especially how to counterpunch. Going back to the playground, he smashed Tommy above the eye with the dog leash. Thereafter, Tommy and he played together without incident. Another local boy, Jim Tuck, accompanied by his governess, became a target at the Bancroft Street playground. “Gene was always clever enough to lure mademoiselle into chasing him. Then Tommy would pounce on me, rip off my hat, and push me into the sandbox,” Tuck recalled. At Sidwell Friends, Gene created a gang, imposing a game of his own on others. At one end of the playground there was “a tremendous pile of lumber” formed from “the collapsed frame” of an old building where both gravity and the boys created rooms and tunnels, a clubhouse from which girls were excluded. Gene asserted himself as “king of the lumber pile…. We had all been warned not to go inside the ruin, a haphazard pile … with many intricate passageways and dead ends—a maze of delight where we would hide out, preparing for war with other gangs.” Though not physically aggressive, he learned to be verbally and, when necessary, physically preemptive or retaliatory, to dominate by force of personality, by verbal skill, by cunning. He had decided that he would rather be victimizer than victim.