Authors: Gore Vidal
“What is the delicate situation?” Caroline had guessed.
“Disguising the fact that we are the world empire now and they are simply a client state. A bunch of offshore islands. Certainly they are close to us in many ways, but they aren’t necessary to us. To be blunt, we can survive—even thrive—without them, which is the wicked wisdom
of the intelligent isolationists who are not just for America First, as they like to say in their speeches, but for
Amerika über Alles
.”
“I had not realized,” said Caroline, at last introduced to an entirely new thought, “that they were so … profound.”
“They aren’t. The drum-beaters aren’t. But there are a few, like crazy-as-a-fox Henry Ford, like your fellow publisher in Chicago, Colonel McCormick, like Tom Lamont, who means to find—or mold—a Republican candidate in his own image.” Hopkins stopped. The gray-yellow skin of each cheek now sported a red smudge, like rouge clumsily applied. “That’s further down the road, of course. Like next month.”
“Harry!” The President was being wheeled out from behind his desk. “Bring Caroline in to dinner, and when you’re in New York don’t forget to visit that little cheese place.”
The other guests followed the wheeled throne.
“What little cheese place?”
As Caroline helped Hopkins up, his arm felt like a bone wrapped in flannel.
Hopkins laughed. “Well, it isn’t a cheese place, and it isn’t little, and it isn’t in Forty-second Street. But the President, like our Lord, talks in riddles and parables. It’s actually Greengrass’s delicatessen on the West Side of Manhattan, where I buy him smoked salmon and all the things that God created Eleanor to keep him from eating because he likes them. We would starve around here without Barney Greengrass, known to every real New Yorker as the Sturgeon King.”
Tim and his camera crew arrived at St. Paul, Minnesota, two hours late. “Air traffic” had been the vague excuse. But the skies from New York had been empty and no planes seemed ever to have used the dusty airport, where weeds grew to unusual heights and a listless wrinkled
stocking hung from a flagpole, registering no wind. They were met by a small van and Gardner Cowles, who, with his brother John, published
Look
magazine, something of a publishing wonder and already a serious rival to Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine.
Tim sat in the front seat next to Cowles, who drove them through the flat dull green countryside, shimmering in damp heat.
“We expect a full house,” said Cowles. “We also got you rooms in the same hotel where he’ll be speaking.”
“This is the start, isn’t it?”
“Well, we hope it’s the start of something. It’s his first campaign speech.”
“A bit late.” The Republican convention was only six weeks away.
“Very late. But at least we got you out here before you finished your film. Our theory is that Dewey and Taft will deadlock at the convention and then he’ll be the dark horse. But even a dark horse has got to be visible before he can be
the
dark horse. So we’re starting him off out here. He comes from the Midwest, you know. Indiana.”
“And Wall Street,” Tim could not help but add. Ever since he had been given the card with the name Wendell L. Willkie scribbled on it, hardly a day had passed that he hadn’t read a major magazine or newspaper story about the rustic Hoosier who had been for some years president of Commonwealth and Southern, a Wall Street public utility holding company which had done battle with the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority—and lost. Plainly Willkie was now the candidate of those publishers like Henry Luce as eager for war as they were for an end to Rooseveltian socialism. But despite the best efforts of Luce and the Cowles brothers, even those who read their magazines and newspapers still had no vivid idea of who or what Willkie was.
During filming, Tim had been fascinated by the gap between what interested the inventors of the news and the public itself, which largely ignored all the political medicines and cure-alls on offer in glossy magazines. But then something startling would always have to happen—like flying across the Atlantic alone—before the public finally registered a new name. Even the master of the news, Roosevelt himself, came and went in the public’s fickle consciousness.
For Tim, a Wall Street businessman from Indiana seemed like the
last person on earth that the people would turn to if war came, and he was now certain that the United States was being carefully positioned to be not only the so-called Arsenal of Democracy but a provider of shock troops as well. Paris had just fallen. England was now under siege; and here he was in St. Paul, Minnesota, checking into the Lowry Hotel, the heart of the heartland, someone had said—as a joke?
“He’ll be speaking here in the ballroom,” said Cowles, “at eight.”
The crew went about their work of setting up; made no easier by the presence of a proprietary radio team from CBS. “We’ve bought a half hour of radio time tonight.” Cowles and Tim sat at the back of the seedy ballroom.
“Five hundred seats,” said Cowles, looking at the forlorn rows of folding wood chairs. “Empty … for now.”
Tim was amused. “Well, that’s my business, too. Getting people to pay to sit in chairs so that they can look up at shadows on a screen for two hours.”
“It isn’t easy, is it?”
“No. It’s not. Why Willkie?”
“Energy. Intelligence.”
“There’s always a lot of energy on tap, and even intelligence.”
“He’s self-made. He reads everything. He’s … well, every now and then you meet someone who’s sort of like an electric eel. You know?”
“I’ve never met one. Does he give you a shock?”
Cowles sighed. “Not the best analogy. But, yes, he does. In a way. Wakes you up.”
“Isn’t he really a Democrat?”
Cowles shrugged. “He was until a year or so ago. But that’s not a problem. Not these days. Because of the war, everybody’s shifting around. Some very strange politics are going on these days.”
They were joined by a dapper gray man in a pinstripe suit who seemed of no particular age; the result, Tim had observed in certain actors, of having gone bald early in life, thus minimizing facial lines while the camera—that is, the eye—is distracted by a quantity of smooth scalp and so settles for an illusion of youth.
“Mike.” The newcomer addressed Cowles by his nickname; cast a curious eye at Tim; sat down in the row just in front of them.
“Just can’t stay away from St. Paul, can you?”
“The bracing sea breezes are a tonic, I must admit.”
Cowles introduced his cousin Tom Lamont to Tim, who wondered why the name sounded familiar. Cowles explained Tim’s film to Lamont, who asked intelligent questions: “Mustn’t seem too one-sided, of course,” he murmured as Tim’s lighting man short-circuited his klieg light in a blaze of blue flame, prompting a series of oaths which the technicians from CBS Radio merrily cheered.
Tim hurried to join his crew. New lighting was again improvised. Inevitably, Tim found himself working against the clock. Nothing was ever easy on location. He also hoped that he was not wasting his time with this mysterious political invention of the Eastern press. Mysterious because in the matter of war or peace, they already had Roosevelt, a president preparing in his circuitous way for war. Why did the magnates want to divide the President’s vote with what was bound to be a far less resonant echo of the real thing?
Cowles then invited Tim to join his brother John and Mr. Lamont to share the blue-plate special at a nearby diner while the hotel lobby began to fill up with the evening’s audience, curious to see the latest political phenomenon if
Time, Life, Fortune, Look
, and the New York
Herald Tribune
were to be believed.
“It’s easier to get one of us to stop the isolationists,” said Cowles, “than for Mr. Roosevelt to get Republicans to switch over to the party of the New Deal.”
“But one way or the other, if Wendell is nominated, we’re covered,” said John Cowles. “That’s the point, really. Isolationists will all stay home come November.”
“But if he’s
not
nominated?” Tim had decided that the self-effacing Mr. Lamont was the leader—the warlock of this coven. Caroline’s image had stayed with him.
“It could be very hard for England.” Lamont separated a hamburger from its bun with a knife and fork, like a practiced surgeon making a first incision. “Dewey is an isolationist, if he’s anything—an unanswerable question. Taft is a zealot. Vandenberg drifts along with the majority …”
“Which is isolationist.”
Tim had discovered that the one thing that did not work with these highly suspicious and often surprisingly subtle nobles was polite agreement. They were more at ease with opposition. In defense of their case, they became ingenious in argument.
“So the polls tell us,” said John, with a secret smile.
“Ours or theirs?” Mike’s laugh was hardly secret.
It was Lamont who chose ingenuity. “The great imponderable at the convention—aside from our man if he takes off in the next four or five weeks—will be Mr. Hoover.”
Apparently the Cowles brothers were not prepared for this piece of news. Each said the same thing: “You’re not serious.”
“I may not be serious but President Hoover is very serious about being nominated again and then beating the man who beat him eight years ago. Hoover can still rally a lot of Republicans who went over to Roosevelt and are now ready to come back, just to stay out of war.”
It had never occurred to Tim to film Hoover and now it was too late. He only hoped Lamont was wrong. The return of Herbert Hoover to the presidency would be a macabre miracle on the order of the raising of Lazarus, and to have missed it in his film … His mouth had gone dry.
Two state troopers appeared in the doorway of the diner. All eyes turned on them as the diner’s owner hurried forward to greet the tall blond young man they were escorting.
“His Excellency the Boy Governor of Minnesota.” Mike Cowles rose, as did the rest of the table. Harold M. Stassen was now headed towards them while his two guards stationed themselves back of the table, eyes on the door to the diner, where who knew how many assassins lurked.
“Harold!” The Cowles brothers were amiable, Mr. Lamont polite, rather like the ambassador from some minor power, trying not to be noticed at a great powers conference. As Harold Stassen warmly shook Tim’s hand, he confided: “You know that movie of yours,
Hometown
, was probably the single decisive factor in my going into politics.”
Tim shyly acknowledged the thrill of having inadvertently made so large a contribution to history. Actually, as Stassen was now thirty-three, he could very well have been influenced by a movie that, Tim
liked to say, had gone from box-office failure to classic without an intervening success. Such films often haunted the imagination of those who saw them at an impressionable age. Tim had felt the same when he saw D. W. Griffith’s
Intolerance
, vowing that not only would he make films himself one day, but he would never allow himself to get involved in such a gorgeously haunting mess.
Stassen sat between the Cowles brothers and showed them the text of his introduction. “Only five minutes,” he said. “Radio time is expensive. I realize that.” Tim slipped away, aware, as was everyone who read
Time, Life, Fortune
, and
Look
, that he had been, for a moment, in the company of the next president but two or, perhaps, the more cynical politicians said, three. Stassen was a true political miracle, everyone agreed, and the same age, Tim noted with a flash of Holy Cross piety, as our Lord when He was crucified.
The ballroom was full; the heat was intense and the largely Scandinavian audience sweated rather more, Tim thought, than did leaner Mediterranean types.
The stage was poorly lit but, Tim decided, the lack of clear definition might make the point that here was something slapdash and unprofessional—like the candidate.
Tim stood just back of the proscenium arch, maintaining eye contact with his cameraman in the center aisle, on a rickety wooden stand above the audience.
Governor Stassen was introduced. Boyish but statesmanlike; he shone like a figure out of some obscure Norse legend as he took his cue from the CBS radio director down front and began his speech. Then, out of the shadows of backstage, appeared Wendell Willkie, clutching a speech. Tim had the sense that he had seen him before until he realized that, by now, there had been so many thousands of pictures of Willkie that he must have seemed entirely familiar to everyone who read glossy magazines. Dark curly hair was cut in farm-boy style, one lock carefully trained to fall over his right eyebrow, pale blue eyes set in a round face; ingratiating smile punctuated by a Lincolnesque mole; only an exaggerated amount of jowl attached to a square Prussian jaw suggested that its owner was no stranger to fiery waters; he was also very much what was politely known as a lady’s man if all—or even some—of the rumors
that Tim had heard were true. Willkie was exactly Tim’s age, forty-eight. He was also ten years older than his closest rival, Thomas E. Dewey. The Grand Old Party was uncommonly rich in boys this season while all the Democratic leaders were visibly aging, their famous faces etiolated from too much exposure to too many flashbulbs.
“I hate this shit.” Willkie’s Indiana accent was as countrified as his haircut.
“Campaigning?”
Willkie held up his speech. “No. Having to
read
a speech. I’ve never been able to. Never. I warned Mike. But … oh, this is Russell Davenport, Mr. Farrell.” Willkie was not yet a professional politician but he had all the right instincts: he had got Tim’s name right. Davenport was tall and rather opulent-looking, as befitted the editor of a magazine called
Fortune
. “The speech,” he said in a grave cultured voice, befitting the secretary of state in a Willkie Cabinet, “is very good.”
Tim moved around the curtain. He had told his crew to take their cue from the CBS director, who was now holding up five fingers—each one a second—as Stassen plunged into his peroration, filling the airwaves with his vision of a golden America, of a joyous future with freedom and democracy for absolutely everyone in the Republican Party.