The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “I won’t. Goodbye.”

  “By the way, Clay’s got a new writer, a really good one, I think.”

  Peter prayed Billy would go, quickly. “Only the best for Clay.”

  “I guess you don’t know yet who it is.” Billy was most pleased with himself. “It’s Aeneas Duncan.” Then Billy was gone. Peter continued to stare, as if in total concentration, at a copy of the Mundt-Nixon bill, calling for the sequestration of all American communists in concentration camps as yet unbuilt.

  Finally, Peter switched on his intercom. The secretary answered. “Yes, Mr. Sanford?”

  “Please get me Mrs. Schiff. At the New York Post. I gave you her number the other day.” He switched off the intercom, and began to make notes on a yellow pad of legal paper, becoming more and more relaxed. There was something very satisfying—even ennobling—about writing the political obituary of Clay Overbury.

  4

  Aeneas was not in the least defensive. “I want to go to work in the engine room for a while. When Clay’s elected to the Senate, he’ll be the leading politician of his generation, which means …” Aeneas blew a perfect smoke ring. “It’s your fault, really. Always quoting Henry Adams and his friends until I started to find attractive what they found irresistible. Creating a president by educating a politician.”

  “Hardly possible in the case of a ‘villain.’ ”

  “Don’t exaggerate. By an accident of time and place, Clay is simply force concentrated and personified.”

  “Henry Adams would have demanded more.”

  “Would he? I thought that the one lesson you wise men of the republic had learned was how nothing matters in the end except force and energy.”

  “You astonish me,” was the best that Peter could do. Aeneas was seated in his old place at the partners’ desk. He had come back to finish out the month of June; then he would return to New York for good, with a job in publishing. Peter already missed him. But Clay—the wrecker, as Peter now thought of him—had done his work yet again.

  “What will you write that anyone will believe?” Peter’s story was due to appear in the New York Post on Monday the 26th of June. It was now Sunday and Peter and Aeneas were putting together the next issue.

  “Well, this is a vision for America, not the story of what a politician must say and do to get elected.” Aeneas twirled his wedding band. “There won’t be much of anything personal as I see the book.”

  “Just a program?”

  “Or another way of looking at things. Pretty much what we’ve been trying to do here.”

  “Clay can’t have another way of looking at things that’s at all different from what the Gallup Poll says is how the American people look at things as of that morning.”

  “We’ll see. Billy actually did a great deal of good work. I’m keeping a lot of it. We publish in October. When do you?” Aeneas stared at him through cigarette smoke.

  “Monday. After that, I don’t see how …”

  But Monday brought its own surprise. On Sunday, the army of communist North Korea invaded South Korea, whose army promptly fled and whose capital, Seoul, was soon in enemy hands, causing its American-sponsored dictator, Syngman Rhee, to withdraw to the relative safety of Taegu.

  Peter found it unnerving to have Aeneas sitting opposite him just as his own story about Clay was breaking. Diana had stayed the weekend at Rock Creek Park with her father while Aeneas was living at the Negro boardinghouse down the street, the only place, he maintained, where one could get a decent meal in Washington.

  Peter was brought the New York Post. “Here it is!” The young man beamed at both of them, unaware that Aeneas was now in the enemy camp if not yet a spy in theirs.

  Aeneas affected to be busy with a manuscript from a young historian in Madison, Wisconsin, while Peter absorbed the shock that his story was not on the front page, crowded out by dark war headlines. Ninety thousand North Korean troops had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, the dividing line between the Red dictatorship to the north and the free world of the south, under the benign protection of General MacArthur at Tokyo.

  Peter swiftly read what little Korean news there was. The President had returned from Independence, Missouri, and was now at Blair House (the White House was undergoing repairs). The National Security Council was meeting. The United Nations had been advised. It was expected that the President would go before Congress and ask for a declaration of war. Meanwhile …

  Meanwhile, at the center of the tabloid Post, there were two full pages of Peter’s story, as well as pictures of Clay, Audie Murphy, the airbrushed foot. Even downplayed, the story did its work. After a quick professional look, Peter shoved the newspaper across the desk. The equally professional Aeneas read the text slowly. “Is all this true?” he finally said.

  “No. I made it all up. Exactly the way the GI’s Homer does.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “About what happened or didn’t happen?” Peter felt a great relief now that the story was finally told. The score was even at last. “Don’t worry. I’m right. Now it’s up to the voters. That’s if Clay should stay in the race.”

  “He’ll stay all right.”

  “And lose?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Suddenly, Peter was exasperated. “What on earth are you doing with this monster? Why are you helping him?”

  “In a monstrous time we need our own monsters, don’t we?”

  “That’s honest but no answer. Why Clay?”

  “There’s been no one else since Henry Wallace sank out of sight …”

  “Clay? A New Dealer?”

  Aeneas shrugged. “Labels don’t really matter. He’ll be what the times require, and what they most require is someone with a sense of his own destiny, someone who will shift this way and that until the time is right to move.”

  Peter laughed. “Well, that could be Roosevelt or that could be Hitler.… No. I don’t think a run-of-the-mill opportunist in politics is much of a novelty out there in those amber fields of grain.”

  “But a superb opportunist, like Roosevelt, is just what we need. Clay’s the closest we’ve got.”

  Peter was astonished by Aeneas’s apparent seriousness. “Where, and at what point, on that long ride to Damascus did you behold this vision?”

  Aeneas’s smile was visible despite the cigarette between his lips. “When I realized that Harold Griffiths’ hero was a fraud.”

  Peter could not believe what he was hearing. “I thought you were the moralist and I was the relativist.”

  “Whatever. But I’m the one who has been studying the arts. Remember? The golden age that I said—you said—we are due for. The civilization that we’ve never achieved before but now …” Aeneas stopped; stubbed out his cigarette; shoved the Post back across the table. “Clay is the highest sort of artist: the self-inventor. That’s better than being an assembly-line product put out by a political party or class.”

  “My father doesn’t count?”

  “Your father definitely doesn’t count. It is a part of Clay’s art to use him just as he is using you.”

  “Me!” Peter hit the Post’s picture of Clay with his fist; the partners’ desk gave a satisfying creak. “How?”

  “This is all going to serve him in the end. Wait and see. For now, it’s something of a setback, but like Roosevelt …”

  “You’re not going to compare this to Roosevelt’s polio?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. But why not? Anyway, this story isn’t over with yet.”

  “Aeneas, you have, after all the time we’ve known each other, managed to amaze me.”

  Burden Day led Peter into the Senate dining room, blue with cigar smoke. There was a strong smell of charred beef and vinegar. Senators sat at tables with one another or with constituents. A Negro waiter led them to Burden’s usual table. Various senators greeted him as he passed. He was well liked at the heart of the small club that unofficially controlled the Senate. Due to seniority, he
dominated the Finance Committee, chaired Agriculture. Peter was very much aware that, for the first time in this august dining room, with its nineteenth-century white tessellated floor, he had been recognized by almost everyone in the dining room. He was no longer Blaise’s son; no longer American Idea, still unread by the conscript fathers; no longer unofficially affianced to Burden’s daughter. Rather, he was the dragon-slayer. He had, in a thousand newspapers by now, exposed as a fraud a great hero of the Second World War, not to mention current congressman as well as senator and king-to-be. After the first shock of the North Korean attack, which had overshadowed his revelations, the press had begun to pick up the Overbury story. Harold Griffiths had denounced Peter in the Tribune, presumably with Blaise’s blessing. Father and son had broken off all relations. Finally, Frederika had rung to say that Emma was trying to break Caroline’s will. “Too typical,” she sighed over the telephone. “Your father’s so annoyed with her.”

  “Along with me?”

  “Why with you?”

  “The Clay story.”

  “Oh, that. I cut it out of the Washington Post. And I’ll read it as soon as I can. I’ve hired Dorothy Draper to fix up the house here and she doesn’t give me a moment’s peace. Everything for her is stripes. Green and white stripes. I hate stripes.”

  That was probably the real world’s point of view. What was important in the Senate dining room hardly mattered to a lady with an expensive decorator hard at work across town.

  Peter ordered the Senate specialty, bean soup—with chopped raw onion for those who liked that sort of thing: both Burden and he did.

  Burden seemed neither pleased nor displeased by Peter’s handiwork. “No matter what, this is going to be a close election, and if Clay loses, the Democrats could lose their Senate majority.”

  “Will the sky fall in?”

  “No. Have you heard from Clay?”

  Peter shook his head. “I don’t think I shall.”

  “He’s been in the state. Issuing denials. Well, I’m out of it.”

  “I wish you were back in it.”

  Burden put oyster crackers in his soup, proving he was, at heart, a Southerner still. “No, thank you,” he said.

  They were joined by Tom Connally, an implausibly broad caricature of a Texas senator, with wavy white hair that curled over his collar like a nineteenth-century statesman’s while a pair of huge pink ears seemed capable of flight at any moment. “Brother Day.” He shook Burden’s hand; gave Peter a blank stare that turned, swiftly, to recognition. “Oh. You’re the young Mr. Sanford. I begin to tremble in your presence, sir. Will all my malfeasances be exposed by you to the public gaze?”

  Peter assured the Senator that no one as virtuous as he could ever be so libeled. “Real shame,” Connally turned to Burden, “that the boy didn’t break his story before you pulled out of the race.”

  “I was still checking it out.” Peter saved Burden the embarrassment of answering.

  Connally got down to business. “We’ve got us a constitutional problem here. This Korean thing happened when we weren’t in session, which always suits the White House just fine. So while we’re off preparing our Fourth of July speeches back home, old Harry has pushed us into a brand-new war.” Connally pulled a Government Printing Office document from the pocket of a brown linen suit that floated about him like a circus tent. “Have you seen this yet?”

  “No.” Burden took the pamphlet.

  “Obviously, Harry was supposed to come over here today and ask us for a declaration of war …”

  “I thought last week that he said he was just going to go over to the United Nations and collect an international sanction for war.” Burden stirred his soup. Peter wondered if he could ask for another bowl.

  “That was last Tuesday. Then last Thursday he orders up two of our divisions and sends them off to Korea. So where the hell are we in all this? Congress does the war-declaring, not the President.”

  “He’s not addressing us today?”

  “Not today. And not tomorrow.” Connally indicated the pamphlet beside Burden’s plate. “Brother Acheson, our international lawyer, has sent us this special brief for our instruction and edification. Apparently, on eighty-five occasions in the past, presidents have got us into wars without a declaration from us, as required by the Constitution. Seems we shot up pirates in Florida. Overthrew undesirable governments that might, one day, be a menace to Standard Oil in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean. Now, in the same frisky mood, our thirty-third president is planning to go to war on the mainland of Asia, without our sanction. Because,” Connally put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles and read, “ ‘North Korea’s a threat to international peace and security; a threat to the peace and security of the United States and to the security of United States forces in the Pacific.’ ”

  He took off his glasses, and looked not at Burden but at Peter, who boldly asked, “How?” without ever himself having been elected to the Senate. “How a threat?”

  Burden sighed. “Some things, like the Trinity, are too sacred and mysterious for the mere human to comprehend.”

  Connally accepted Peter’s self-election to the greatest debating society on earth; and responded in the name of Texas. “The answer to your ‘how’ is that Acheson has convinced himself and Harry that Stalin’s given orders to every communist everywhere on earth to keep whittling away at us until we cave in. I heard it all with my own two ears at Blair House last week when those two were busy working the congressional leadership over. They’re sure as can be Stalin’s behind North Korea’s attack. They’re also afraid Stalin’s gonna order Mao to come to the aid of North Korea. Even so, they have gone and turned down Chiang Kai-shek’s kindly offer of troops. Apparently, a big war with China isn’t in the cards—their cards—just yet.”

  “You know, Tom, for the first time I’m actually glad I’m getting out of here. We aren’t even junior partners anymore. We’re just the chorus. A Greek chorus, at that.”

  “Well, if there’s gonna be a Greek kind of tragedy it will be because we’re letting the United Nations shove us into their wars …”

  “No. Harry’s shoving them, not the other way round. He’s making the case that the entire globe is ours to do whatever we want with. Now he’s asking all our dependent states at the UN to follow him into Korea.” Burden indicated the memorandum. “Is this going to be read to us today?”

  Connally nodded. “It’s supposed to take the place of an actual visit from the President to ask for a declaration of war.”

  “Which he could have got so easily.” Burden shook his head. “Even Taft is willing to go to war …”

  A bright blue light from the doorway illuminated the dining room. Television light. Reflexively, senators checked their wigs; pushed at their hair; adjusted smiles. In his shadowy corner, Joe McCarthy seemed to expand like some huge bullfrog in the glow of the source of his power, television. Peter also noticed that his head was trembling. Delirium tremens, it was said. Two young men at his table sat up very straight.

  But the lights were not for him, nor, indeed, could the cameras have been allowed into the dining room. Only certain Capitol corridors and the rotunda, with permission, were available.

  All eyes in the dining room were now on the door. As Clay Overbury entered, there was a general intake of breath, then, once everyone was aware that he wore the uniform of a colonel in the American army, with two rows of ribbons over his heart, Joe McCarthy began the applause.

  “Well. I’ll be damned,” said Tom Connally, giving a perfunctory clap. “I’ll be damned.”

  “I am damned,” Peter muttered while Burden crumbled a cracker and looked at his plate.

  Clay came straight to their table; pulled back a chair. “May I?” he said to Burden, who nodded.

  “Senator Connally.” Clay was polite. “Peter.”

  Connally’s smile was wide, gracious, old-school. “You have, my boy, flocked, as it were, to the colors, to defend the free world for yet a sec
ond time.”

  “I had no choice, really. You see, yesterday, Sunday, I was with Frank Pace, the secretary of the army.” He glanced at Peter, as if he expected him to be taking notes for an interview. “At my request he had my orders ready. More important, he told me that a huge army of North Koreans has now crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and that President Truman has ordered General MacArthur to come to the aid of the South Korean government. That’s all going to be in the President’s message today.”

  “So you will be going to Korea?” Burden’s tone was matter-of-fact.

  “I’m flying out tonight. To Tokyo. Then—who knows?” He looked at Peter, all patriotic innocence.

  Peter indicated the television crew in the hallway. “What are they doing here?”

  “Frank Pace is using me as a sort of recruitment ad. The Army’s got all three networks to cover my going off to war. A second time. I’ll be a field officer, like before. But this time, I’m a colonel.”

  “You’re out of the Senate race?”

  “Oh, no!” Clay’s smile glittered as he turned toward the lights in the hall. “I’ve just announced that I’m still a candidate but that the only campaigning I plan to do will be in Korea, fighting communists. Gentlemen.”

  Clay rose and shook hands all around the table. The entire Senate dining room was focused on him.

  “Good luck,” said Burden.

  As Clay strode to the door, Tom Connally gave a loud whistle. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. Then, with wonder, “I have met the perfect bastard at last.” He turned to Peter. “Your story’s forgotten already.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “I know.”

  FIFTEEN

  1

  At exactly nine in the evening of a sharply cold November day, Peter and Diana, each carrying a small suitcase, were met at the main entrance to the Union Station by four Secret Service men, who greeted them politely, took their suitcases, and led them into the station, nearly empty at this hour. Capital of the world or not, Washington was hardly a hub of commerce or, indeed, of anything except politics. As a native, Peter could never understand why, in good weather, so many people were eager to come as tourists to the city. Certainly, springtime beside the Potomac was agreeably tropical and the Japanese cherry blossoms, at such risk during the furies of war, still bloomed, but he wondered what the city actually yielded to the average citizen. The Lincoln Memorial was splendid, and even accurate in scale, but Jefferson’s memorial was curiously out of kilter, the statue too large and clumsy for its Palladian lean-to. The obelisk to General Washington looked as if it would be more comfortable beside the Nile than the icy Potomac, while the mile or two of pseudo-Roman colonnades created an inhuman monotony of effect as they rose from what had once been a swamp to the Capitol, high on its irregular hill, all brown mud and leafless trees.