The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  The special phone rang; and a voice said, “This is Senator Taft. I want to congratulate you …” Peter and Joe withdrew to the living room. “Now all the enraged losers will be ringing their new leader.”

  “Their? Or your?”

  “Not mine, Peter. I shall be working for Cousin Franklin now that we have a safe Republican candidate.”

  “I understand,” said Peter; and he did.

  The next morning the miracle in Philadelphia had entered political history.

  Peter joined Tim on the train to Washington. Along with news of the miracle, the newspapers reported that Churchill had been inspecting the antiaircraft batteries on the east coast of England, where the German invasion was due to begin.

  “There won’t be an invasion now. Roosevelt’s spiked the Republican guns. We’re at war.”

  “Will you say this in your film?”

  “Never say anything. Just show.” Tim chuckled. “Did you see what Mencken wrote?” He took a clipping from his pocket and read, “ ‘I am thoroughly convinced that the nomination of Willkie was arranged by the Holy Ghost in person, wearing a Palm Beach suit and smoking a five-cent cigar.’ ”

  “Sam Pryor,” said Peter.

  “Sam Pryor,” said Tim.

  FOUR

  1

  Harry Hopkins had finally agreed to go “hiking,” as he put it, on the green wooded knoll where the Wardman Park Hotel towered above Wisconsin Avenue. There were tall trees back of the hotel, as well as tennis courts; Caroline assured him that if he simply looked at them, it would be the equivalent of playing six sets.

  Also, midafternoon of a weekday in July, they had the grounds to themselves. Back of them, like a stale chocolate cake, was the huge ugly dark brick main building connected by an incongruously long glass-enclosed corridor to the smaller hotel annex where all sorts of dignitaries lived in quiet seclusion, starting with Cordell Hull, the noble-looking secretary of state, and Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, whose mystical letters to his “guru” were certain to be published if he was nominated for vice-president at the Democratic convention, only five days away. Thus far, the White House had been unusually silent about the President’s plans. It was accepted by all—by some bitterly—that Roosevelt would be the first third-term candidate in history, but on what, if any, conditions would he run and with whom?

  “Peaceful,” said Harry, settling on a bench near the packed red-earth tennis court where a young couple were playing a desultory game.

  “It is such a beautiful city.” Caroline sat in an iron chair opposite him. “And such a pity that no one ever notices it.”

  “Never notices it? Why, they go on and on about those dreary Roman temples, and all the marble covered with pigeon …”

  “Well, that’s the part I would tear down.”

  “With luck, Hitler’s bombers will blow up Capitol Hill. Then we’d have some really picturesque Roman ruins. I might give him a hand there.”

  Only that morning a selective service bill had been sent to Congress in order to register one million men for the draft. The nays of the Senate old guard were now resounding throughout the press, not to mention in the dim green Senate chamber whose ruins Hopkins envisaged with such quiet satisfaction.

  “Do you think Hitler could ever get this far from home?”

  Hopkins shrugged, then belched; what was left of his stomach was irritable, and Caroline realized that if he was at all tense, as he was most of the time in the White House, he suffered. “No. I don’t. On the other hand, I didn’t think he could polish off France in a few weeks, or blow up London the way he’s doing now.” Hopkins took a swig from a medicine bottle. The gray face gained a hint, no more, of color.

  “Even so, I don’t see him invading England now.”

  “Why not?” He looked at her curiously.

  “Well, I have my spies, too.”

  “How good are they? Ours are pretty bad.”

  “Bill Donovan?”

  “The colonel? You know Wild Bill?”

  “Everyone knows him.”

  “So what did I tell you? Our spies are lousy.”

  But Caroline knew that Donovan was uncommonly talented. A hero of the Great War and a Republican politician, he had gone to work for President Roosevelt as a sort of roving ambassador. For the last five years, he had been a one-man State Department, reporting only to the President from the Balkans to beleaguered England. Caroline had met him through Léon Blum, whom Donovan had the uncommon good sense, for an American conservative, to admire despite Blum’s socialism and his failed Popular Front government.

  “Anyway, if Hitler doesn’t invade in the next few weeks, he’ll turn to the east. That’s his real interest. Russia. Or so my spies tell me.”

  Hopkins nodded. “You should share your spies with us.”

  Caroline smiled as mysteriously as cosmetic surgery would allow her. Actually her only spy was, on occasion, Cissy Patterson, who got most of her information from her former son-in-law, Drew Pearson, who was usually more wrong than right in his predictions. Basically, Caroline’s view of the Hitler phenomenon had been shaped by Blum, who, very early, took him seriously; very early realized that it was Eastern Europe that he wanted as “room-space” for the golden-haired, blue-eyed Teutonic master race of which he himself was a perhaps less than perfect example.

  “Operation Sea Lion will be abandoned.” Caroline used the “secret” German code name for an invasion of Britain. “If the British put up a strong enough air defense.”

  “They have so far. That’s why we’ve got to get those ships and planes to them. Are the boys upstairs?” Hopkins gestured vaguely toward Caroline’s rooms in the annex.

  “I gave them keys.”

  The boys were indeed there. Sam Cohen, a White House lawyer, and John Foster from the British Embassy were seated at the kitchen table, a pile of books between them and pads of yellow lined legal paper scattered about. It had been Hopkins’ idea that they should meet in secret, far from White House and embassy. Caroline’s rooms were the answer.

  “You see us conspiring,” said Foster.

  “Welcome to the Anglo-American conspiracy.” Sam Cohen, in addition to doing legal work, sometimes helped out with presidential speeches. Now the two men were preparing a letter to the New York Times, requesting prompt military aid to England in the form of fifty over-age destroyers.

  Hopkins went to the refrigerator and found Coca-Cola, which he had insisted that Caroline keep for him.

  “Who’s going to sign the letter?”

  “A number of your leading constitutional lawyers.” Foster stretched his great ursine frame. “Felix is assembling them now.”

  “We certainly don’t want Felix’s name on the letter.” For an instant Hopkins looked troubled. The conservative Supreme Court justice had the reputation of being a Roosevelt radical; he was also a Jew. During Caroline’s days as a publisher, she had always marveled at how wide of the mark were the labels pinned to public figures.

  “The signers will be sans peur et sans reproche.” Foster was blithe.

  “They will also be without any collective legal sense.” Cohen was moody.

  Hopkins smiled approvingly. “But your letter will appear to make sense?”

  “Legally, none, I should hope.” Foster was cheerful. “Your Constitution is, if you’ll forgive me, a somewhat airless document and aggressively flat in certain matters where true political genius requires luminous vagueness.”

  “The greater the challenge.” Hopkins sat between the two men, glanced at their notes. “Isn’t your main obstacle the various neutrality acts?”

  “Yes,” said Cohen. “But Congress has been changing its ground rules so often lately that we can probably fit ourselves into one of their versions.”

  “What legal authorization does the President need to give over those destroyers?”

  Anything to do with the holy Constitution always appealed to Caroline, who found it a mystery more dense than the Trin
ity.

  “In theory, probably none. Just an executive order. But since there’s an election coming up the President needs his fig leaf.” Hopkins pressed his stomach; struggled with gas.

  “So here it is. Our fig leaf, courtesy of Mr. Foster.” Cohen opened an old law book.

  “I dote on congressional prose,” said Foster.

  “Luckily for us. I’d never have got as far as you have.” Cohen read, “ ‘In 1892, Congress gave the secretary of war the right to lease military property “where, in his discretion, it will be for the common good.” ’ ”

  Hopkins frowned. “But does the secretary still have the power to … what’s the word? To lease?”

  Foster nodded. “I have read everything pertinent to this subject, and, let me confess, I have secretly reveled in your military law. Trembled at forgotten urgencies. Those Indians. That warpath, always crowded with twirling tomahawks. Anyway, the 1892 right is in perpetuity unless Congress should specifically revoke it, which they obviously forgot to do in the blind rush of history which sweeps us all before it, not to mention in and out of office.”

  “Sam, can the Boss get away with this?” Hopkins was blunt.

  “Who will object except the isolationists? And no matter what the legal basis, they are always going to say no anyway. But, presumably, there aren’t enough of them, assuming the President wins in November. Yes. This covers us.”

  “And,” said Foster, with a demure smile, “if your Boss doesn’t win, we’ll still have Wendell on our team.”

  “Congratulations.” Hopkins finished the bottle of Coca-Cola. “Now how do you go about leasing a destroyer?”

  “Couldn’t be simpler or more primitive,” said Foster. “We barter. We have no money at all, as Lothian so tactlessly admitted the other day, but we do have an empire upon which the sun never dares to set. We’ll let you lease the odd island or two from us while you lease us those ships, as well as some B-17 bombers while you’re about it. In exchange we’ll give you some ninety-nine-year leases on bits of the empire; jewels in the King-Emperor’s crown. So for starters, how would you like Bermuda? It’s close to home, lovely beaches.”

  “What about Nassau?” Caroline was getting into the spirit of a game not unlike Monopoly.

  “I’d personally love for you to have it, Mrs. Sanford. But do you really want the Windsors? They go with it, you know.”

  “Tourist attraction?”

  “I’ll tell the Treasury.”

  “Newfoundland,” said Hopkins. He was serious. “We need it for our defense. We’re also planning to occupy Iceland now that Germany’s taken over Denmark.”

  Foster was suddenly serious. “Meanwhile, what are you doing about the French and the Dutch colonial empires? Part of Japan’s recent alliance with Germany is Hitler’s concession to them of French Indochina and Dutch Java, which will give the Japs all the oil they will ever need.”

  Hopkins shut his eyes. “You have just mentioned our worst nightmare.”

  “Japan’s conquest of Asia?” Caroline thought it curious that in all the worry over Europe, the ever-expanding Japanese Empire was seldom mentioned at the White House. Between the fall of France and the promised invasion of England, the President was totally involved with Europe. But Caroline’s earliest imperial memory was of a morning in Kent, at the house of Lizzie Cameron, when she joined her hostess and Henry Adams and American Minister John Hay on a terrace overlooking the Weald of Kent in all its bright summer green to be told that the brief war between the United States and Spain was now at an end and Spain’s colonial empire had become American property. Hay was delighted by what he had called “a splendid little war,” demonstrating yet again, as Adams sardonically called it, Hay’s fatal gift of phrase.

  Adams saw nothing but trouble for the United States in its role as sovereign of the rebellious Philippines just off the coast of China. “What are we doing there?” he had asked, not only rhetorically but practically. But no one had ever really answered him, since empires were living expansive organisms. Caroline had had no difficulty in grasping that principle, as she helped Lizzie Cameron arrange summer—always summer for empire?—roses. Now over forty years had passed. Hay and Adams were long since dead. The Franco-German wars that had begun with Bonaparte were now in their fourth and, presumably, final act. If Hitler were to win … But Caroline had never forgotten Adams’ crafty smile at the time of the third act in the Franco-German war for supremacy in Europe. “Germany is too unimportant to have such pretensions. Once we’ve done them in for good, there will only be two powers in the world, the United States and Russia.”

  “No England?”

  “Poor England. No. No England. Even smaller than … You see, at the end, there will be no Europe of any importance. Europe’s our glamorous past. The Pacific is the near future. Then the northern continents. Shansi Province in China. Manchuria. Siberia. The power’s all with us now. With Russia, too. More’s the pity,” he would always add, and Caroline would wonder, pity for whom? Arguably, for that brave pompous invention of the Enlightenment, the United States set in a wilderness, forever dreaming itself Athens reborn even as it crudely, doggedly, recreated Rome. Perhaps Adams, whose intellectual roots were so deeply set in old Europe, pitied the sudden irrelevance of his beloved Chartres Cathedral as the humming American dynamo began to turn over and over, ever more rapidly, generating as it did more and more of the powers of the sun.

  Hopkins congratulated Cohen and Foster. “We shall hide behind your forgotten secretary of war, and throw our military might behind England and its empire, too, of course.”

  “Frankly we’d really rather have your money.” Foster had a pirate’s white-toothed grin. “The ambassador and I just sent on a report to Mr. Churchill. Subject: American military might. As of June 1940 how does the American army compare with other world armies?”

  Hopkins sighed. “You’ve found a humiliating statistic.”

  “Thanks to your Congress—give credit where credit is due—your army ranks, as of now, number eighteen in the world, just behind Romania.”

  “So we’d better steer clear of Romania.” But Caroline had noticed that Hopkins had winced. Then: “But next year we’ll be number one …”

  “After Russia. On the ground, that is. But it will be in the air that you will come into your own. We’ve already worked out a plan for you to supply us with air-cargo planes, of which you’re now building a great many. You shall ferry what we lease from you, thus bringing prosperity to idle plants and green or—how does your patriotic song go?—amber waves of grain to the dust bowls.”

  “Congress permitting,” said Hopkins.

  “Roosevelt allowing,” said Foster. “It is a pity your people have always disliked us so.”

  “Dislike.” Hopkins made the one word not a question but a neutral observation.

  “The polls …” Cohen began.

  “… are all rigged,” Foster agreed. “Often by us. Often by, it is whispered, the White House, too. To show support for England.”

  Hopkins did not rise to the challenge. He stared out the kitchen window at the hazy whiteness of the day. Then he said, “You’ve got some smart people over there on Massachusetts Avenue.”

  “Not enough. Our propaganda mills are known as truth dispensers. Gallant little England. Alone. Holding back Hitler so that our kith and kin over here will not be absorbed into the Third Reich, and so on.”

  “And so on,” Hopkins repeated. “I must meet Churchill soon. The Boss wants me to go to London as soon as possible.”

  “Not possible,” was Caroline’s contribution. “Your health.”

  “If only,” Hopkins went on, “to get him to stop this kith and kin nonsense. He’s a century out of date.”

  “We value that sort of traditionalism in our statesmen.” Foster was mild. “Even so, by a small margin, Americans whose ancestors come from the British Isles still predominate even though Germans, unfriendly to us, and Irish, definitely unfriendly to us, form large mino
rities. Six million Americans were born in Germany …”

  “A bit under two,” said Hopkins. “No. You’re not popular. Americans think of your snobbism, your imperialism, your reluctance to pay your debts.”

  “We have made it a rule never to pay what we don’t have.”

  “Borrow.” Caroline was on her feet.

  “Or lease it.” Foster rose, too. “We are trying out a new kind of propaganda. England and America together after Hitler. Partners in a world without class. The working classes as one with each other; the special relationship. Am I tempting you? Are you excited? Pulses beating hard?” He was looking at Hopkins.

  Hopkins smiled, wanly. “You have made me well. The sick and the halt will rise …” He pulled himself up by the kitchen table. Caroline noticed the same terrible strain in his face which she had once noticed when Roosevelt, in an unguarded moment, clutched at a table and pulled the dead weight of his body from wheelchair to sofa. “I’ve heard of the special relationship you’re cooking up. With England as senior partner.”

  “Well, we are so old, you know. The Raj and all that. World maps covered with pink. That’s us. Surely we bring you all sorts of expertise. And real estate.”

  “Twenty-five percent of Americans are forever anti-British.” Hopkins was, again, oddly, blankly, matter-of-fact.

  “Irish … Germans …?”

  “The President’s neither.” Hopkins was now cold. “He’s also un-amused by reference to the childlike giant.”

  “Oh, dear. I knew that phrase should never have been put in our most secret code.”

  “I don’t say he would disagree. He has been guiding the child for almost a decade. It’s hard work. But he does not turn to you for wisdom about the future which he believes is all ours. We are in a friendly alliance. Nothing more. We’ll never let Hitler invade you. But we will never accept you—with or without an empire—as an equal anywhere in the world. If we win, we win.”

  Foster no longer pretended to smile. “Churchill will never let India go or, indeed, any other bit of pink.”