Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In late October 1960, when a carping Robert Kennedy, two hours late, stepped out of the small plane that had just landed at Saugerties Landing in Ulster County and greeted the 29th District’s Democratic candidate for Congress, Gore’s intensive campaign had been in high gear for over four months. In early April the district’s Democratic committee had formally offered him the nomination. So too did the tiny Liberal Party. Since then Joe Hawkins’s good judgment had been confirmed. His main liability as a candidate, Gore told his two young campaign assistants, Janet Caro and Ruth Davis, as they drove to events around the five counties, was that if he told the voters what he really thought, they never would elect him. In four of the counties the registration was about four to one Republican, in Dutchess, influenced by Poughkeepsie, the odds only slightly against the Democrats, though even many of the Democratic voters were considerably more conservative than liberal. To many of them, federal funds for education and a national achievement test for schoolchildren in order to qualify for the funds seemed an unconstitutional, even Communist idea. Advocacy of the admission of Red China to the United Nations seemed unattractively radical. Before conservative groups Gore found it expeditious to emphasize family heritage, movie stars, and personal charm. To be elected he needed to swing twenty thousand Republican votes into his column, virtually an impossibility, as most political realists recognized, including friends like Dick Rovere and politicians like Joe Hawkins. From the start he had taken refuge in multiple motives for his candidacy, including the claims of civic responsibility, the fulfillment of family heritage, and the pleasure of high-level mischief-making. That he could not win he would never admit, though he remained throughout realistic about the odds. “The morning after the Boston opening” of The Best Man he “gave three speeches in Dutchess County and then flew back to Boston. It’s remarkable how much energy one has when one’s caught up,” he wrote in “On Campaigning,” an unpublished early-1960s essay.

  When Robert Kennedy, who knew that the presidential election would be excruciatingly close, confronted him at Saugerties Landing and testily demanded to know why he was not doing more to push the national ticket, Gore could only answer frankly, “Because I want to win.” The swing voters in the 29th District, to the extent that such a phenomenon existed in that Republican world, were suspicious of the Catholic Kennedys. While Gore admired Jack, he had little respect for Bobby, who seemed to him a relentlessly prejudiced Catholic ideologue who saw the world exclusively in terms of good and evil, all issues as black or white. At study sessions at his home in Virginia with invited intellectual guests, Robert Kennedy, Gore had heard from mutual friends, had revealed the intellectual flexibility of a rhinoceros. Anyway, there was no chance that the national ticket would carry the district. Rabidly partisan, as it made sense for the national campaign manager to be, Robert Kennedy believed that the Kennedy greater good would be and must be served by the self-sacrifice of all his supporters. Gore said no. Whatever chance he had of winning, he wanted his vote count to be as high as possible. From the start of the campaign, and as a condition that Joe Hawkins had agreed to, he had made himself as much an independent candidate as possible. He publicly supported Kennedy. But as he campaigned, his emphasis was entirely on other things. Apparently Jack, with his wry practicality, understood perfectly. Bobby never forgave him.

  That it would cost money to run even a congressional campaign had not been much on Vidal’s mind when he had encouraged Hawkins to arrange the nomination for him and when he had accepted. The 29th District Democratic committee had little to offer. Gore himself had no intention of spending any more than tiny sums of his own money. Wharton had the wealthy Republican machine behind him. He had become congressman, so rumor had it, when a powerful New York State Republican wagered with Governor Thomas Dewey that he could take “the most obscure person from the most obscure county and send him to Congress.” Wharton had been his exemplary choice. Gore, Janet Caro, recalled, “was very harsh—funny—about his opponent,” who had compiled an empty record as a legislator and who, except for one occasion, declined to appear on the same platform with Vidal. Wharton’s was a winning strategy. By mid-August, Gore was advised that his harsh even if witty personal attacks were counterproductive. “Sell yourself, don’t knock J. Ernest,” Ruth Davis advised. “Much of what you say about him is taken as ‘disrespect.’” And, Davis counseled, “This makes me sick! sick! sick!!—but be sincere! sincere!! sincere!!” The challenge was to disguise his feelings, sugarcoat his ideas, one of which at least was instantly attractive to voters of both parties and soon reached a larger constituency. Why not give idealistic youngsters when drafted into the military the opportunity to work as American goodwill ambassadors, bringing their technical skills to Third World countries where, under American supervision, they could help local people improve their living standard? When on one of his visits to Washington he mentioned the favorable reception the idea had been receiving, the Kennedys, separating the concept from military service, reconfigured it as the Peace Corps, which within weeks Kennedy formally advocated. Though its origin in Vidal’s proposal was not acknowledged, he was delighted to have made that contribution.

  That the 29th District Democratic Party had little to contribute to his campaign was not a serious problem. Large sums had never been spent on congressional elections there. The party battle lines were sharply drawn. Wharton felt no need to spend anything but paltry amounts. Gore raised about $2,000 in contributions, almost entirely from friends. Print ads in local newspapers were cheap. When the largely Republican papers attempted to decline his ads, a group of Poughkeepsie merchants, mostly Jewish, who supported his candidacy threatened to withdraw their advertising. The newspaper owners immediately relented. As a supporter of Israel and as a public political statement, Gore was later to buy a $1,000 Israeli bond. Radio interview programs were delighted to have him. Leaflets, handbills, and posters cost next to nothing. The Democratic Party network provided foot soldiers, particularly the inexperienced but energetic Caro and Davis, both of whom enjoyed Gore’s entertaining company, and others, including Pat Walsh, Bill Walsh’s wife, who also drove him to events. Don MacIsaacs, his competent campaign manager, arranged his schedule, taking care of a thousand and one technical details. There were endless daily coffees and evening meetings, especially with small groups, many of them women delighted to hear about Jack Paar and Paul Newman and occasionally something specifically political. That Vidal was the author of a controversial novel, The City and the Pillar, or of any novels at all, almost none of the voters had any notion of. His advisers wisely counseled that the candidate do everything possible to keep his novels and his personal life out of the campaign. Howard kept as much in the background as possible, though of those who knew him as Gore’s secretary, some assumed he was also his personal companion, especially since he was regularly at Edgewater. With his own interests and somewhat puzzled about what Gore’s election might mean to their life together, Howard preferred to have little to do with the campaign. “I really had nothing to do with that campaign,” Howard recalled. “I didn’t like the campaign, all those people…. I was running away from that kind of world, and Gore was running to get into it after he had left his aristocratic world. I couldn’t understand it. I can’t understand why anybody would want to be elected.” When Wharton’s supporters attempted to damage Gore by alluding in broad terms to his sexual preferences, they did not get far. It was to some extent a forbidden topic, and the use of it risked damage to those who used it. At most, an anonymous whispering campaign could be sustained. That one of the crucial plot ploys of The Best Man involved a false accusation of homosexual activity against the Nixon-like candidate was both ironic and too thin to be of any use to Gore’s political enemies. Soon he was telling noticeably often the story of how he almost married Joanne Woodward. The issue mostly disappeared. The Democrats would automatically pull the lever for him, the Republicans for his opponent. In realistic terms, the only issue was how many of the small num
ber of independents and soft Republicans he could attract.

  To tempt these voters to give him a hearing, he had at least one effective weapon, some formidable friends, though their impact could cut both ways. To the extent that they were prominent Democrats, they solidified his Democratic support, but they were not likely to help with independents or Republicans. To the extent that they were celebrities, they did bring out people regardless of party affiliation, eager to see Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, for example, both of whom came up at least twice to widely advertised rallies and both of whom, nervous, did their best to tout their good friend. Glamour helped. But with the stolid Republican mainstream it was an entertainment, not an influence. Eleanor Roosevelt, totally unglamorous in appearance, was both celebrity and prominent Democrat. From the beginning she liked and supported Vidal, though at first she had had reservations about his candidacy. She may have wondered whether he would actually take the campaign seriously. She also knew how formidable were the odds. Her husband had not carried the 29th District in any of his four presidential campaigns. From the moment in fall 1959 that Gore had arrived at Val-Kill, her Hyde Park home, and discovered her arranging gladioli in a toilet bowl to keep them fresh, there was a low-keyed rapport between them. As the campaign swung into high gear in August 1960, she happily allowed herself to be photographed at Hyde Park inaugurating a series of coffee meetings for the candidate. “My husband always said: one has to have the hide of a rhinoceros to survive in politics,” she remarked to him at dinner one hot June night at Val-Kill a month before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. The other guests were the labor leader Walter Reuther and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. “Eleanor Roosevelt’s curious small eyes turned, looked straight at me,” Gore later wrote. “They are her most interesting feature, the whites very clear, the blue somewhat opaque; when she thinks you are not watching her, she watches you; to catch her staring at you makes her flush and sometimes she will giggle nervously and look away; the eyes are those of an interested girl.” She told him, probably unconvinced by his claim that he was protected by bright armor, that people in Hyde Park who had known her husband all his life believed that he did not suffer from polio but “‘from something you get from not having lived the right sort of life,’” perhaps an allusion to Gore’s also being vulnerable to the charge that he had not lived “the right sort of life.” Reuther had traveled to Hyde Park to try to convince Mrs. Roosevelt to support John Kennedy. Franklin, Jr., had just come from campaigning for Kennedy in West Virginia. For some time now Gore had been in the Kennedy camp. Earlier in the year Dick Rovere had privately told Gore that Kennedy had Addison’s disease, which would put him in an early grave, a fact Rovere intended to reveal in an article in Esquire. Jack, who had heard of Rovere’s intention, called Gore from Washington and blandly, persuasively lied: “Tell your friend Rovere that I don’t have Addison’s disease.” Mrs. Roosevelt—partly because she detested the Kennedy patriarch, Joe Kennedy, for his pro-Nazi, anti-Roosevelt sympathies at the start of World War II, partly because she distrusted Jack and Bobby for their friendship with Joseph McCarthy—remained loyal to Adlai Stevenson. Just before the evening at Val-Kill, at a small dinner party at Alice Dows’s, Gore had heard Mrs. Roosevelt’s detailed indictment of Joe Kennedy’s cowardice and perfidy. Like Dick Rovere, with whom Gore wagered on the issue, Mrs. Roosevelt did not believe that Kennedy could win and did not want him as the candidate. Her dinner guests did not get her to change her mind.

  Smoke hovered over the convention hall in Los Angeles in July. The atmosphere seemed especially surreal to Gore as he stepped from the gallery “into that vast hall.” There was a “terrible strange blue light over everything.” He was feeling ghastly, suffering from ambulatory pneumonia, as a doctor soon told him, probably caught on the flight out, though except for some totally energyless, feverish hours in his hotel room he kept to his full schedule as an alternate delegate from New York. Throughout, however, he felt disoriented, and it seemed odd to him to be in Los Angeles not “as a reigning screenwriter but as a delegate.” His request had been honored by the New York party bosses, a routine accommodation for a congressional candidate. That he was a friend of the Kennedys and the author of a currently running Broadway hit having special appeal to politicians would not have been irrelevant. Unlike most of the New York delegation, headed by Robert Wagner, New York City’s mayor, Gore was at home in Los Angeles and both served himself and paid back small debts by hosting for his state’s delegation a celebrity-studded Hollywood party at Romanoff’s restaurant on July 12. It was one of the early synergistic mixtures of Hollywood and politics, “easily the best attended and highest calibre affair given during Convention week,” an. acquaintance somewhat hyperbolically wrote to Gore. Norman Mailer, sitting at the bar, drinking heavily and glowering, said enviously, “I hate you. You’re too successful,” though Gore could not help wondering if what he himself felt was not illness but jealousy of Jack Kennedy. Movie stars like Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and Charlton Heston, whom Gore knew from the filming of Ben-Hur and who at this time had no quarrel with Vidal’s account of his contribution to the script, rubbed shoulders, among dozens of other stars, with all the important Democratic politicians, including Lyndon Johnson—with the exception of John Kennedy, whose night it was to be out philandering, Gore later observed. It was still a splendid party, confirmed by the fact that the New York Times picked up a story first published in a Poughkeepsie newspaper accusing the New York delegation of “neglecting its duty” by attending. This gave the Times the opportunity to headline, “Vidal Denies Democratic ‘Malingering’ by New York State Delegates at Los Angeles.” The night after the nomination he was himself a guest at another Hollywood political bash, this one hosted by Tony Curtis and his wife Janet Leigh, surrogates for Frank Sinatra, who had been prevented from being the official host by the Kennedys’ concern that his Mafia associations might damage Jack’s chances for the nomination. “It was a dreadful evening,” Gore recalled. “Curtis gave an all-star party for the victor, and Jack didn’t come. There were a lot of round tables, about two or three hundred movie stars, and I was waiting there at the main round table where Janet Leigh presided with Frank Sinatra and some bimbo and me. They waited for Jack and they waited for Jack. Eunice went to the phone. Came back to report, ‘He’s gone to the movies!’ Which meant that Jack was off fucking. I looked at Sinatra, and it was Attila the Hun. If he could have killed Jack and half the earth, he would have.”

  The evening before, in the convention hall, still feeling wobbly but determined to be there for the climactic moment, Gore ran into John Kenneth Galbraith, the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Harvard economist, an enthusiastic Kennedy stalwart, and the slim, small, bespectacled Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with his characteristic bow tie, who had recently turned from Stevenson enthusiast into committed Kennedy partisan. Galbraith had made his popular reputation with his book The Affluent Society, an influential social and economic analysis of post—World War II American prosperity. Schlesinger had published the first volume of what was expected to be the definitive history of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. After attending the Boston opening of The Best Man, Schlesinger, who predicted that “the play will be a great success,” had written Gore an encouraging letter and invited him to a dinner party at his Cambridge home. “The Reinhold Niebuhrs and the Edmund Wilsons will be there and, I think, John Strachey.” Gore, who had met Schlesinger through Rovere, had urged Rovere to tell Schlesinger to give up on Stevenson. When he did, Eleanor Roosevelt thought it a betrayal. Both intelligent liberals, Galbraith and Schlesinger had signed on to provide Kennedy with ideas and words. As the roll call of the states proceeded, there was an electric thrill in the blue light. When Wyoming’s votes put the Kennedy candidacy over the top, the three men exploded simultaneously amid the general eruption of wild cheers and ecstatic applause. They all congratulated one another. They felt allied with destiny. The young political columnist, Murray Kempton, looking up at Gore
from his typewriter, said, “‘Is this … all there is to it?’” Ted Sorenson, a member of Kennedy’s inner circle and his chief speech coordinator, came up to them out of the crowd. Mutual congratulations again. The three of you “ought to get cracking now,” he said. “We’ve got to get a good acceptance speech,” a draft of which Gore, still feeling ill, quickly wrote and sent to the Kennedy suite at the Biltmore. Apparently it never got into Sorenson’s hands. “Jack also asked me. At Hyde Park he said, ‘You know, we have everything but words. I haven’t got anything to say.’” The good-spirited trio, soon awash in rum, went off together to a popular Polynesian restaurant in Beverly Hills. Neither members of the Kennedy inner circle nor his recreational companions, they had not been invited to join the nominee’s celebration. At dinner they debated which one of them “would tell Jack to stop saying ‘between you and I.’” In the middle of dinner Gore suddenly thought of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “last appeal to the convention. We were making a mistake, she had said, waving a long finger at us, if we did not nominate Stevenson. But no one had listened. Her passion for Stevenson was the source of many cruel jokes and her loathing of the Kennedys thought to be unfair: the father’s sins ought not to pass to the next generation. With a twinge of guilt, and some malice, I asked my companions, ‘Have we made a mistake?’ Certainly not! They were euphoric.” In front of the restaurant Galbraith tried to turn the restaurant’s decorative ship’s wheel, shouting “‘This is the ship of state!’” As it was immovable, several spokes broke off.