At Home

by Gore Vidal

  Oh, Midge, resist. Resist! Don’t you get the point? We stole other people’s land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We imposed our religion—and rule—on the survivors. General Grant was ashamed of what we did to Mexico, and so am I. Mark Twain was ashamed of what we did in the Philippines, and so am I. Midge is not because in the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy. She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for?), and that is what all this nonsense is about.

  Since spades may not be called spades in freedom’s land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews,*2 who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives and attack the likes of Mailer and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of Sharon and Greater Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too.

  “Well, one thing is clear in all this muddle,” writes Midge, adrift in her tautological sea, “Mr. Vidal does not like his country.” Poor Midge. Of course I like my country. After all, I’m its current biographer. But now that we’re really leveling with each other, I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.

  Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department. Also, I should think that tact would require a certain forbearance when it comes to the politics of the host country. But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.

  All in all, the latest Podhoretz diatribes have finally convinced me that the time has come for the United States to stop all aid not only to Israel but to Jordan, Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world. The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever. In any case, we would be well out of it. After all, the theological and territorial quarrels of Israel and Islam are as remote to 225 million Americans as—what else?—the Wars of the Roses.

  THE NATION

  March 22, 1986

  *1 Again, I was attacked as a racist, invoking the “Yellow Peril.” Simultaneously, the Japanese premier announced that the United States was a failure because there were too many inferior races in our heterodox land, while one of his cabinet ministers predicted that, in the next century, the United States would be Japan’s farm, and Western Europe its boutique.

  *2 This sentence has since been carefully revised by publicists like W. Safire and M. Peretz and C. Krauthammer to mean “all Jews,” thus demonstrating my “virulent” anti-Semitism. Well, ours is a sectarian society.

  CHAPTER 11

  OLLIE

  Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North (U.S.M.C.) has now met stasized in the national psyche rather the way that Tom Sawyer did more than a century ago. Like Tom, Ollie is essentially fictional; like Tom, Ollie is an American archetype: the con man as Peck’s Bad Boy. It is hardly possible for any of us not to succumb, if only momentarily, to Ollie’s boyish charm, as he hurries back and forth across our television sets, on his way, or so one gathers from the twinkle in his eye, to some top-secret Contra massage parlor. Actually my own favorite image of him is from the past: He has come, a mere boy, in uniform—direct from the battlefield—to put the case for the Vietnam War on a right-wing television program. The enraptured host is actually salivating at so much gung-ho martial spirit. Although I was, as always, briefly stricken, one detail bothered me. Why did he keep his garrison cap on? In the army we took them off indoors. Could it be that Ollie was deliberately playing a part even then? Could it be that he was not absolutely entirely sincere? Perish, as they say, the thought. He is a marine.

  Much is made by the present administration of the marines to whom, in my day, we used to go tell it to. Since a number of rogues in high places are former marines, we are daily reminded of the corps’s bravery and of its motto, Semper fidelis (always faithful), faithful particularly to those in high places. Now the real marines are indeed brave, that is, the enlisted men. On the other hand, I betray no secret when I say that those of us who served in the army in the Pacific during the Second World War regarded marine officers as, by and large, a bunch of dangerous boneheads, exuberantly careless with the lives of their men. Certainly they managed to decimate my generation with their legendary frontal assault, and if the recent off-the-wall ramblings of their retiring commander (General P. X. Kelly) archetypal, their collective IQ has not risen in the last forty years. So let us never forget that Ollie is not really a marine at home in Montezuma’s hall; he is a marine officer, and should be kept on a tight leash along with gutsy Don Regan and pastryman Bud McFarlane.

  In the coming days, Ollie will be the nation’s number one daytime television star. There will be incredible suspense. Will he be fidelis to the president who let him off the leash to commit so many astonishing crimes? Will he be the strong silent sort like G. Gordon Liddy, who held his tongue so that he could later find it, most profitably, on the lecture circuit? Or will Ollie just go ahead and shred Ron and Nancy and Galanos and all those who drove him to crime? Tune in. This is high drama. It is also simply appalling in its implications.

  Thirty years ago I wrote that should the United States ever have a dictator, it would not be a spellbinding autocrat like Douglas MacArthur; rather it would be someone really nice and folksy like Arthur Godfrey, a popular radio-TV pitchman of the era. In due course, big money, out to make even bigger bucks, cold-bloodedly hired an Arthur Godfrey to act the part of president. And we went along with him—or at least half of that bemused 50 percent of the electorate which bothers to vote in presidential elections did. Luckily, age and incompetence have saved us from a dictatorship, and the actor himself will soon be gone. But, for a moment, it was a very close thing indeed: A president deliberately tried to overthrow the constitution and place himself outside those laws he had sworn faithfully to execute. In retrospect, all this will seem pretty funny. Of course, Ollie will do time; he will also discover God yet again, be born a third time, and have a book written for him. He will be a celebrity forever and will enjoy the friendship of Pat Boone. On the other hand, we, the TV audience (and that is really all that we are—passive viewers and active consumers), will be living on in a republic that no longer works, its political system burnt out and its resources wasted during the reign of an actor whom we allowed so unwisely to step off the screen and into the White House.

  Perhaps the most startling aspect of this whole affair has been the fact that no one seems particularly troubled. Congress is thrilled by the attention but its members refuse to lift the lid on anything important like, let us say, the CIA. But then the CIA is now totally unaccountable to anyone and Congress dares not ask such questions as: Were arms flown by the agency to the Contras in Nicaragua? And were those planes then filled with cocaine for the return journey? Of course only a communist would ask such a question. Meanwhile, marines are casually sacrificed in Lebanon by a government with no morality and an officer corps with no sense; the president compulsively tells lies on television as he has done throughout his entire political career and no one minds because he has such a nice smile.

  The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrevelant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

  NEWSWEEK
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br />   July 13, 1987

  [N.B.: The true significance of Ollie was missed by all at the time, including me. There are two governments of the United States: the more or less secret National Security State* (National Security Council, Pentagon, CIA, etc.) and the cosmetic “constitutional” government of Congress, the judiciary and the ongoing, never-ending, issueless presidential election. In the constant presence of a benign crisis manager from Langley, Ollie tried to tell the Senate that he worked for the real government to which they were irrelevant, while Reagan’s easygoing vagueness in the matter derived from the president’s dual function. Although he is the chief irrelevancy, he is also, if he chooses to be, a player in the actual government. He was very much at play in Nicaragua and Iran; but the cosmetic Congress dared not put a finger on him.

  Several days after my piece in Newsweek appeared, the White House correspondent for Time magazine rang me. I’ve known him slightly for a long time. He is called Hugh Sidey; and he has yet to meet a president he could not worship. He had been at Camp David with President and Mrs. Reagan, and the President had said, “with a twinkle in his eye,” how inaccurate Vidal is (good to know that he reads Newsweek). Apparently in my book about Lincoln, I show Lincoln watching the dawn from his office. But, said Reagan, you can’t see the sun rise from the office. Sidey had been going through the book with a researcher: There was (how do they say at Time?) an edge of panic in his voice. We can’t find the scene, he said. Because, I said, there was no such scene in the book: Lincoln did not get up as early as Reagan. I also reminded him—and the president—that Lincoln’s office was at the southeast end of the second floor of the White House, with a fine view of the Potomac as well as of sunrises and sunsets. The present office, which has no view, was only built in 1904. Sidey reported in the next issue of Time the president’s aria about how wrong I was “because I had Lincoln seeing something he couldn’t have seen from the White House.” The very stuff of history.]

  * See next chapter.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE

  Every now and then, usually while shaving, I realize that I have lived through nearly one third of the history of the United States, which proves not how old I am but how young the Republic is. The American empire, which started officially in 1898 with our acquisition of the Philippines, came to a peak in the year 1945, while I was still part of that army which had won us the political and economic mastery of two hemispheres. If anyone had said to me then that the whole thing would be lost in my lifetime, I would have said it is not possible to lose so much so quickly without an atomic catastrophe, at least. But lose it we have.

  Yet, in hindsight, I can see that our ending was implicit in our beginning. When Japan surrendered, the United States was faced with a choice: Either disarm, as we had done in the past, and enjoy the prosperity that comes from releasing so much wealth and energy to the private sector, or maintain ourselves on a full military basis, which would mean a tight control not only over our allies and such conquered provinces as West Germany, Italy, and Japan but over the economic—which is to say the political—lives of the American people. As Charles E. Wilson, a businessman and politician of the day, said as early as 1944, “Instead of looking to disarmament and unpreparedness as a safeguard against war, a thoroughly discredited doctrine, let us try the opposite: full preparedness according to a continuing plan.”

  The accidental president, Harry Truman, bought this notion. Although Truman campaigned in 1948 as an heir to Roosevelt’s New Deal, he had a “continuing plan.” Henry Wallace was onto it, as early as: “Yesterday, March 12, 1947, marked a turning point in American history, [for] it is not a Greek crisis that we face, it is an American crisis. Yesterday, President Truman…proposed, in effect, America police Russia’s every border. There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia’s expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war.” But how to impose this? The Republican leadership did not like the state to be the master of the country’s economic life while, of the Democrats, only a few geopoliticians, like Dean Acheson, found thrilling the prospect of a military state, to be justified in the name of a holy war against something called communism in general and Russia in particular. The fact that the Soviet Union was no military or economic threat to us was immaterial. It must be made to appear threatening so that the continuing plan could be set in motion in order to create that National Security State in which we have been living for the past forty years.*1

  What is the National Security State? Well, it began, officially, with the National Security Act of 1947; was then implemented in January 1950 when the National Security Council produced a blueprint for a new kind of country, unlike anything that the United States had ever known before. This document, known as NSC-68 for short, and declassified only in 1975, committed—and still, fitfully, commits—us to the following program: First, never negotiate, ever, with Russia. This could not last forever; but the obligatory bad faith of U.S.-U.S.S.R. meetings still serves the continuing plan. Second, develop the hydrogen bomb so that when the Russians finally develop an atomic bomb we will still not have to deal with that enemy without which the National Security State cannot exist. Third, rapidly build up conventional forces. Fourth, put through a large increase in taxes to pay for all of this. Fifth, mobilize the entire American society to fight this terrible specter of communism. Sixth, set up a strong alliance system, directed by the United States (this became NATO). Seventh, make the people of Russia our allies, through propaganda and CIA derring-do, in this holy adventure—hence the justification for all sorts of secret services that are in no way responsible to the Congress that funds them, and so in violation of the old Constitution.

  Needless to say, the blueprint, the continuing plan, was not openly discussed at the time. But, one by one, the major political players of the two parties came around. Senator Arthur Vandenburg, Republican, told Truman that if he really wanted all those weapons and all those high taxes to pay for them, he had better “scare hell out of the American people.” Truman obliged, with a series of speeches beginning October 23, 1947, about the Red Menace endangering France and Italy; he also instituted loyalty oaths for federal employees; and his attorney general (December 4, 1947) published a list of dissident organizations. The climate of fear has been maintained, more or less zealously, by Truman’s successors, with the brief exception of Dwight Eisenhower, who in a belated fit of conscience at the end of his presidency warned us against the military-industrial complex that had, by then, established permanent control over the state.

  The cynicism of this coup d’etat was breathtaking. Officially we were doing nothing but trying to preserve freedom for ourselves and our allies from a ruthless enemy that was everywhere, monolithic and all-powerful. Actually, the real enemy were those National Security Statesmen who had so dexterously hijacked the country, establishing military conscription in peacetime, overthrowing governments that did not please them, and finally keeping all but the very rich docile and jittery by imposing income taxes that theoretically went as high as 90 percent. That is quite an achievement in a country at peace.

  We can date from January 1950 the strict governmental control of our economy and the gradual erosion of our liberties, all in order to benefit the economic interest of what is never, to put it tactfully, a very large group—defense spending is money but not labor intensive. Fortunately, all bad things must come to an end. Our huge indebtedness has made the maintenance of the empire a nightmare; and the day Japan stops buying our Treasury bonds, the troops and the missiles will all come home to a highly restless population.*2

  Now that I have defined the gloomy prospect, what solutions do I have? I shall make five proposals. First, limit presidential election campaigns to eight weeks. That is what most civilized countries do, and all democratic ones are obliged to do. Allow no paid political ads. We might then enti
ce that half of the electorate which never votes to vote.

  Second, the budget: The press and the politicians constantly falsify the revenues and the disbursements of the federal government. How? By wrongly counting Social Security contributions and expenditures as a part of the federal budget. Social Security is an independent, slightly profitable income-transferring trust fund, which should be factored out of federal revenue and federal spending. Why do the press and the politicians conspire to give us this distorted view of the budget? Because neither they nor their owners want the public to know how much of its tax money goes for a war that does not exist. As a result Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan could say last March, and with a straight face, that there are only two options for a serious attack on the deficit. One is to raise taxes. The other is to reduce the entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. He did not mention the defense budget. He did not acknowledge that the so-called entitlements come from a special fund. But then, he is a disciple of Ayn Rand.

  In actual fact, close to 90 percent of the disbursements of the federal government go for what is laughingly known as “defense.” This is how: In 1986 the gross revenue of the government was $794 billion. Of that amount, $294 billion were Social Security contributions, which should be subtracted from the money available to the National Security State. That leaves $500 billion. Of the $500 billion, $286 billion go to defense; $12 billion for foreign arms to our client states; $8 billion to $9 billion to energy, which means means, largely, nuclear weapons; $27 billion for veterans’ benefits, the sad and constant reminder of the ongoing empire’s recklessness; and, finally, $142 billion for interest on loans that were spent, over the past forty years, to keep the National Security State at war, hot or cold. So, of 1986’s $500 billion in revenue, $475 billion was spent on National Security business. Of that amount, we will never know how much was “kicked back” through political action committees and so-called soft money to subsidize candidates and elections. Other federal spending, incidentally, came to $177 billion in 1986 (guarding presidential candidates, cleaning the White House), which was about the size of the deficit, since only $358 billion was collected in taxes.