The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “If we don’t take it on Eugene Meyer will merge it with the Washington Post, and that will be the end of the paper.”

  “A good thing for Meyer. And probably a good thing for us, too. Anyway, the city’s far too small for three morning papers.”

  Blaise gazed thoughtfully at the boxwood hedge that had grown so enormously during his reign.

  “You’re really going to sell the place?”

  Blaise nodded. “Too much trouble to run. Irene’s got the energy. And she’ll pay my price.”

  “How is my nephew?”

  “Obstinate. Prefers his little magazine to the paper. I’ve always thought a publisher should be able to write and even, if necessary, think, which neither of us could really do but Peter can.”

  “Speak for yourself. I do nothing but think. Only now I promptly forget whatever it is I was thinking. Isn’t this the day Dewey is to be nominated?”

  “And elected in November. Yes. He’s about to be nominated. In Philadelphia. I should’ve gone but he’s such a bore. Even so, I’ll be glad to see the end of this gang. What’s happened to Tim Farrell?”

  “Other than my daughter Emma?” Caroline could not even simulate malice, so tired was she of the idea of her daughter as opposed to the reality, which she was cunningly able to avoid.

  “The picture Tim hoped to make was promptly made two years ago. The Best Years of Our Lives was the optimistic title. Harry Hopkins’ friend Robert Sherwood wrote it.”

  “Bad luck. For Tim.” Blaise went inside.

  “Bad luck,” she repeated to herself. Some relationships simply broke off, rather as if one of the two had died; others continued to flourish even after death, in memory. The affair with Tim had been erased while the affair with James Burden Day was a permanent part of her life in the present as well as the past; at least as long as she could recall herself at all, which might not be too much longer; promptly, she recited to herself, in a whisper, the speech of Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth. This was her touchstone: the day she could no longer remember the “Cousin speech,” as she always thought of it, she would be gone. Today she remembered it all, including the last line that American censors had not allowed her to say: “A bastard sits upon the throne of England.”

  Caroline had her lunch in Blaise’s study with Burden Day, demonstrating to herself the depth and nature of her fidelity to what should have been her husband had she ever actually wanted one. Now he seemed old to her but the charm was still present. “I see your nephew from time to time. We agree on most things, a sign of premature wisdom in one so young.”

  “Surely you’ve not become a socialist in your golden years?”

  Burden laughed. “No. Peter isn’t one either. But Aeneas Duncan can occasionally raise my blood pressure.”

  “I like him when he tells us about American culture. Apparently the musical comedy is our unique art form, and Cole Porter is our Phidias.” Caroline had quite enjoyed herself for a week in New York, going to the theater. She had even dined with Cole Porter in his Waldorf-Astoria Tower suite; and she had betrayed no surprise when a manservant carried the one-legged Porter into the drawing room and placed him carefully on a sofa as if he were a rare porcelain vase. “Caroline.” He took her hand; she kissed his cheek; he smiled his chilly gentle smile. He drank martinis as they spoke of the dead. Then the manservant asked her to step out of the room, which she did while Cole relieved himself.

  At dinner they were joined by the ancient but lively Elsie Woodward, who lived on another floor in the Tower with Van Dyck’s triptych of King Charles the First, which Caroline had always coveted. Elsie had reigned over New York’s society for so many generations that she had taken to exclaiming apologetically whenever she saw an old friend after any passage of time, “God seems to have forgotten me!” So she greeted Caroline, who replied, “At last we have something to be grateful to Him for.”

  “You are quite as bad as old Mrs. Wharton.” Elsie was reproving.

  “Isn’t it nice,” said Porter, “all of us being in the Tower together.”

  “So very hometown.” Elsie nodded at Caroline to show that she still kept up with the world.

  “I can’t think why Tim and I didn’t make those films here in the Waldorf. I’m sure that if we had, we’d still be making them. This is the real America, after all.”

  “What a good idea!” When Elsie smiled her face was crisscrossed with a thousand lines. “Make one now. And get what’s his name … Arnold Edward?… to play Herbert Hoover, who’s also in the Tower and actually rather fun! Of course, I’m a Republican.”

  “Edward Arnold.” It was Cole Porter who corrected Elsie. Movies now absorbed everyone, Caroline noted, with a pang at what she’d once taken for granted, and lost.

  Blaise entered the study and switched on a mysterious box which turned out to be a new television set. “One of the editors just rang. They’re showing Harry Truman on that train tour of his. Here he is a week or so ago.”

  On the gray screen a blizzard swirled. A voice sounded. “President Truman arrived in Los Angeles on June fourteenth. He was driven from Union Station to the Ambassador Hotel.” The blizzard had begun to arrange itself into an open car, a waving president, and Wilshire Boulevard lined with cheering people. “A crowd of over one million people came out to greet the President.”

  “One million!” Burden was astonished.

  Blaise nodded. “I didn’t believe it either.”

  “This means,” said Caroline, “that he’ll be reelected in November.”

  Blaise and Burden laughed at her; rather rudely, she thought. “No chance. Dewey’s got it. He’s too far ahead.” Blaise switched to another channel. A convention hall. Dewey banners. Band music.

  A commentator looked the camera disconcertingly in the lens. “It seems that what was supposed to be Governor Dewey’s day here in Philadelphia has been preempted by the President and the Russians. The Soviet military has cut off all access to the American sector of Berlin on the ground that with the recent formation by the United States of a West German state, the city of Berlin, being within the Soviet zone of Germany, is rightfully an integral part of the communist German state. If the Americans can, unilaterally, create a West German republic, so can the Soviet. The question everyone is asking each other at this convention is—is this the start of an armed conflict?”

  Blaise switched off the set. “Well, Senator?”

  “It depends on how badly Truman wants to win. A war before November will certainly keep him in office.”

  Caroline did her best to appear unshaken by this appalling news. “It’s hard to believe that we would begin the third world war so soon after the second.”

  Blaise shook his head. “Stalin’s not ready—yet. He’s just bluffing. Testing us.”

  “Laboratory tests,” Caroline observed, “often explode, even in the best-run laboratories.”

  “It’s a curious—coincidence, I suppose,” said Burden, “that this morning Truman signed the Selective Service Act. All men eighteen to twenty-five must promptly register and then some two million of them will be drafted into the armed services, in peacetime, something unheard-of in a country like ours. At least, as ours was.”

  “Could Truman have known the blockade was coming?” Blaise was making notes at his desk.

  “Probably. Politicians like generals always fight the last war. Roosevelt began drafting troops while Willkie was being nominated in 1940, now Truman does the same to Dewey.”

  “Actors call it upstaging,” said Caroline.

  Blaise was on the telephone to his managing editor, who had a great deal to say while Blaise simply made noises of affirmation. Then he put down the receiver. “The President says that we’re staying in Berlin, according to the terms of the Yalta-Potsdam agreements.”

  “Terms we broke when we set up the West German government.” Burden shook his head. “The four powers were supposed to govern an undivided Germany jointly. Now we’ve gone and split the country in
two. We keep the rich part. We leave them the poor part. We act. Stalin reacts. Who can be surprised?”

  “Poor Mr. Dewey,” said Caroline. “This is not really his day, after all.”

  “It might be no one’s day.” Burden was glum.

  Blaise was grim: “We are preparing to fight our way into Berlin.”

  “Suppose we fail?” Caroline could only think of Russian soldiers looting Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.

  “It might encourage us to change our form of government.” Blaise was very red in the face. “To make sure that crazed haberdashers are not given the power of life and death over all the world.”

  Caroline rose. “Now we know what ‘mad as a hatter’ really means.”

  Burden rose too. “This hatter may be mad. But he’s sly.”

  Caroline circled the drawing room, responding graciously to the grandees of what had been for so long her city. Although only Alice Longworth had read her book, all had read the review of it in the New York Times, where the reviewer, one Wilbur or was it Orville something—Wright?—had been horrified by her repetition of the canard about Jefferson’s children by his slave Sally Hemings, so magisterially disproved by no less an authority than Balzac O’Toole. Worse, Wilbur found deeply offensive Burr’s letters describing his sexual exploits to his daughter, confirming the reviewer’s suspicion that Burr had been neither a moral nor a good man, the only sort worthy of a sympathetic biography.

  Alice was delighted to be able to console Caroline, who was delighted by this attention. “Actually,” she told Alice’s broad-brimmed hat, which hid her face from those taller, “Orville or Wilbur or whatever he’s called helped sell the book, according to Dutton’s.”

  “Curious how so many books get written by the likes of us in this place but no real writer has ever appeared until you.”

  “We did produce Henry Adams.”

  “He’s Boston.” Alice was precise.

  “Anyway, I’m only my grandfather’s editor.… But what about your father? All those books he wrote. All those copies sold.” Caroline laid it on. Actually, she had never been able to read anything by Theodore Roosevelt.

  But Alice was grateful for the praise. “Actually, I never think of father really being a Washingtonian. He’s the Wild West.”

  “Of Long Island?”

  Alice ignored the gentle mockery of the greatest American president of all. “Did you hear my line about Dewey?”

  Washington phrasemakers were like radio comedians or the newspaper wits who met regularly at the Algonquin Hotel in New York to exchange jokes. “That he is like the groom on the wedding cake? Yes. But in New York, Clare Luce is given credit for it.”

  The gray eyes looked like polished granite. “Clare claims everything. She even has the nerve to say that she actually writes her own plays.”

  “She will stop at nothing. But I did like what she said about your Cousin Franklin. ‘He lied us into war when he should have led us into it.’ ”

  “Not bad. But, of course, he should have done neither.” Alice was sharp. “So devious, the poor feather duster, while Eleanor is now so incredibly noble.” Alice bared her teeth, pulled in her chin; and looked exactly like her first cousin. Then: “I’m for Taft.” She allowed her features to reassemble.

  “But Dewey’s got the nomination.”

  “Republicans have a death wish. I should be in Philadelphia today but I’d rather talk to you about Aaron Burr. He seems so much closer to us than poor Harry Truman. But Bess is a joy. You know, she’s almost as large as Eleanor but then, unlike slothful Eleanor, she was a champion basketball player in high school. I hope she still finds time to play. To at least—what do they call it?—shoot a basket. Of course there will be all the time in the world when they go home to Independence next year.”

  2

  Alone in the train to Philadelphia, Peter enjoyed his solitude by reading Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, an entire novella printed in Life magazine. Hollywood funerary practices as viewed by the plump pop-eyed little Englishman who joyously lampooned the residents of movieland while himself embodying, inadvertently and advertently, every known cliché about the English. Doubtless it took a fraud to detect in such detail the fraudulent. Aeneas had wondered why no one had noticed how much Waugh had lifted from Aldous Huxley. Peter was then able to one-up Aeneas with Dawn Powell’s The Happy Island, in which a concert pianist, in need of money, had been hired by a Bronx mortician to guard the bodies and, if he chose, paint them prettily, for which useful service he could sleep on his own slab and, in the still watches of the night, practice on the funeral parlor organ.

  The taxi driver who drove Peter to the Benjamin Franklin said, “You’ve never seen such sour-looking delegates. They don’t need taxis. What they need is hearses.”

  Plainly, the Democratic Party was not in an optimistic mood. The Roosevelt sons, headed by James, had come out for General Eisenhower to replace Truman. But Eisenhower had, finally, said no. Considerable pressures must have been brought to bear on Eisenhower to force him to release a Shermanesque statement declining any nomination for president from any party. The whispering gallery’s rumor of choice was that during the war he had written, as military protocol required, a letter to Chief of Staff Marshall asking for permission to divorce his wife in order to marry the English woman that British intelligence had thoughtfully provided to spy on him as his personal driver. Marshall graciously gave permission for the divorce, with the offhand postscript that should this marital drama be enacted, Ike would be not only relieved of his supreme command of all Allied forces in Europe but he would also be granted early retirement in order to enjoy a second youth with the British Mata Hari. It was said, by some, that Truman had obtained a copy of the Eisenhower letter to Marshall. It was said by admirers of the sternly virtuous Marshall that he had destroyed the document. In any case, Truman had had no challengers of consequence. Today, he would accept the nomination of his party for president—a reluctant, no, a despairing nomination—and Peter was now trying out adjectives to describe what he expected would be one of the grimmest occasions in American political history, the nomination of an unelected but incumbent president, sure to lose.

  Peter looked into the hotel dining room, half hoping to find Ernest Cuneo. But that depository of secrets was elsewhere, spinning webs. Eight years earlier, thanks to war and Willkie, Philadelphia had staged one of the great political dramas, involving all the star players as well as the secret dramatist, President Roosevelt himself. Now there were nothing but secondary politicians and party leaders in town for a wake. The age of President Dewey had seized the nation by its throat.

  Virtuously, Peter determined to skip lunch. Then he telephoned Aeneas in Washington. What was the latest news?

  “You’re on the spot.” Aeneas sounded querulous. “You tell me.”

  “At the moment, I’ve seen nothing but unhappy faces …”

  “Well, Dwight Macdonald still hasn’t sent us his piece on the Kinsey Report.”

  That was too bad, thought Peter. The tall giggling Macdonald had made a great impression on him when they met in New York, particularly with his offhand dismissal of The American Idea. “Just a lot more court history. Oh, I’ve read your paper. Bits and pieces, anyway. Washington insider stuff. If you don’t watch out you’ll grow up to be Walter Lippmann—always wrong. Truman’s a subject, I’ll admit that. Those loyalty oaths. Sickening. All this trumped-up fear of communism. Why? I was taken in for two minutes. Then saw it was the wrong religion at the wrong time in the wrong place. Sex is the latest politics. The row over the Kinsey Report is true radicalism in action. Facts versus superstitions. Now we’re getting to the real roots of real politics. Why is poor Lionel Trilling trying to be so middle-class respectable up at Columbia? What’s he scared of? That men are promiscuous? Does he really believe in God? If he does, why not say so? Kinsey’s the only politics today. The revolutionary.”

  “Write it for us!”

  “What do you pay?”

&
nbsp; The price was met but the piece had yet to be delivered.

  Aeneas said that if the platform were too strong on what was known, euphemistically, as civil rights, Alabama and Mississippi would walk out of the convention and, presumably, the Democratic Party. “So with Henry Wallace organizing the liberal Democrats and the South threatening to set up a new party to restore slavery, Truman’s left holding an empty bag!”

  Inside the hall, the television lights were blinding. Sam Rayburn presided over the convention, snarl more than usually fixed on his face. The party’s platform, just arrived from the Hotel Bellevue-Stratford, was now being read to the delegates, who seemed exhausted even though the evening was just begun and there remained hours of speeches up ahead, followed by the voting, followed by a speech from Truman himself, who was said to have just arrived from Washington and was now waiting backstage.

  Peter entered the section reserved for the press, to a man furiously as one in their denunciation of the television networks who were blocking their view of the rostrum while, simultaneously, blinding them and—was it possible?—replacing them as the national “medium” of choice. But at least some of the giants of what were known in the latest jargon as the “print media” had deigned to attend this funereal occasion.

  Arthur Krock, chief of the New York Times Washington bureau, greeted Peter and offered him a seat at the Times table. Peter had always liked the somewhat pompous but always affable Krock, who was, on any subject, the absolute font of received opinion. “Well, nothing like this has ever happened before, has it?” Peter tacked on the question, to show deference to the vast if somewhat shallow knowledge of so comfortingly predictable an oracle.

  “No.” Krock indicated for Peter to sit beside him. They now had a clear view of Rayburn fidgeting at the podium; ready to maintain order. “At least not in my time. Harry’s done something no one thought possible. He’s broken up FDR’s all-powerful coalition of big-city machines, Southern courthouses, and labor unions. Everything’s up for grabs now.”

  “The wonder is it held together so long.” A young aide handed Krock a slip of paper, who read to Peter: “ ‘The Southern delegates are going to vote for Senator Richard Russell, as a protest.’ ”