Authors: Gore Vidal
Advised by Hopkins, Peter had stationed himself at the back of the crowded stage, shortly before the balloting for vice president was to begin. The conservative majority favored the Southern Speaker of the House; only labor truly wanted Wallace. But on orders from Roosevelt, Southern operatives were now on the floor, going from delegation to delegation, threatening and soothing their fellow Southerners.
For so tall a woman, Eleanor Roosevelt looked unobtrusive as, head down, she slipped from the back of the stage onto the stage itself, the stout sweating Lorena Hickok at her side. They quickly found seats in a corner, out of view of the delegates or, indeed, anyone else except those in their immediate vicinity, who were now entirely distracted by the boos, the jeers, the rebel yells that had begun at the mention of the hated name of Henry A. Wallace.
Peter had never properly met Mrs. Roosevelt, but as she had been in the White House most of his life, he felt, as did the rest of the population, that he knew her. Unlike at least half the population, he quite liked her. Endlessly polite, apparently shy, she had come to Chicago to master the giant in the hall. She looked uncommonly elegant, all in blue with a blue straw hat, as she sat, head cocked to one side, listening to the excited Lorena until the arrival of Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx, a machine politician that the Roosevelts, despite their declared passion for free and absolutely open democratic elections, relied upon to turn out large manufactured majorities for them in New York City. Mrs. Roosevelt rose to greet Flynn. Then, as if by magic, the beefy red-haired
Mayor Kelly of Chicago and lugubrious Mayor Hague of Jersey City, two of the most lawless machine politicians in the land, had placed themselves protectively on either side of her. Peter was awed by the millions of votes that these three men represented; and he watched, again with awe, as Mrs. Roosevelt put her lions through their paces. She spoke to them in a low voice; they listened closely. This was brute power and she was now exerting it in order to bring the giant back of the white glare to its knees; her sons, Frank and Elliott, stood at the periphery of the power center. Peter strained but failed to hear what Mrs. Roosevelt was saying but the three bosses heard every word and were nodding, something no boss ever bestowed upon a mere mortal, since a nod was often a concession and always a commitment; yet, in the presence of absolute power, with the empress herself, they were obedient.
Finally Senator Barkley shouted at the roaring giant: “I shall now begin the roll call for the nomination for vice president.” Shouts and boos while anti-Wallace slogans on sticks were held high down front.
Eleanor nodded to her liege men. An understanding had been arrived at.
Peter heard Lorena, voice cracking: “Don’t you dare go up there! For God’s sake! All hell’s breaking loose.”
“Don’t worry about me, dear.” Eleanor was calm. Someone had alerted Senator Barkley, who now left the podium and hurried to greet Mrs. Roosevelt; he too whispered in her ear, no doubt telling her not to speak. But she simply kept smiling as she moved onto the podium. As the tall blue figure came into view, towering above the lectern and dominating the hall, there was an absolute silence, far more unnerving in its way than the animal noises that had so abruptly stopped.
Peter again experienced stage fright as if he were the one facing the mad giant in the dark. But Eleanor Roosevelt merely smiled as she looked out across the sea of faces and waited until her presence had been fully noted. Then, by a slow count to three, there began what sounded like thunder rolling toward the stage from the balconies. The cheering had begun. She remained motionless during the ovation. Peter noticed that she had no written speech or even notes.
Finally, total authority established, there was silence and she began
to speak, her high fluting voice kept very much under control. She spoke of the President and of the presidency; of how little her husband had wanted a third term but how he felt that now that men were being drafted into the Army he had a duty to go on as long as possible, even though “the strain of a third term might be too much for any man.” There was an odd sound of exhalation from the audience as if, to a man, all fifty thousand had been holding their collective breath, each quite aware that the invalid in the White House was a fragile aging man.
“You must realize that whoever is our next president, he will bear a heavier responsibility, perhaps, than any man has ever faced before. So you cannot treat it as you would an ordinary nomination in an ordinary time. So each and every one of you who give him this responsibility, in giving it to him, assume for yourselves a very grave responsibility because you will have to rise above considerations which are narrow and partisan. This is a time when it is the United States we fight for.
“Whoever you now nominate for vice president is … very apt …” She paused; took a deep breath. “… to become himself the president and I am sure you will want that president to be the man my husband has chosen to get us through a perilous time and to a safe shore. No man who is a candidate or who is president can carry this situation alone. This is only carried by a united people who love their country.”
She stopped speaking; stared gravely at the audience; then, with only the hint of a smile, she raised her right hand as if in benediction and, turning away from the light, moved swiftly to the back of the stage before any applause could begin.
Senator Barkley picked up his cue smoothly. He praised the lady for her gracious wisdom. Then: “The clerk will now call the roll of the states.”
Peter was again at the back of the stage, watching with amusement as Mrs. Roosevelt made a swift arc around the three bosses. Photographers tried to catch her with this or that personage but she moved too swiftly for them, her two sons running interference for her. Peter
joined Harry Hopkins, who was now shaking her hand, below the stage.
“I must say,” Peter heard Mrs. Roosevelt say very clearly to Hopkins, “you young things just don’t understand politics.”
In due course Wallace was nominated by an unhappy convention, which was then addressed from Washington by the President, his voice echoing eerily over a loudspeaker system. With a deep sense of responsibility he accepted their nomination because “today all private plans, all private lives have been, in a sense, repealed by an overriding public danger.”
Hopkins was well pleased when he met with his aides in the Blackstone suite. Joe Alsop, in Cassandra mood, said that if the British were not to get sufficient ships immediately, they could not defend the Channel should Hitler invade, as planned, in August.
Hopkins was reassuring. “The Boss is doing everything possible to get those ships to England …”
“Churchill asked for them over a year ago.”
“Maybe Churchill should talk to Congress. The Boss is convinced that if he sends so much as a rowboat on his own without Congress’s permission, he will be impeached.”
Mayor Kelly had arrived in the sitting room of the suite. Hopkins poured him a drink as they conducted a postmortem of the day’s work.
Peter hovered nearby. But learned very little. Professional politicians talked to each other mostly in code. Kelly did ask, “Is it true the Boss isn’t going to campaign?”
“Well, he’s got a lot on his plate, you know. Rearming the country. He also thinks Willkie’s going to wear himself out, dashing all over the place.”
“He’s picking up support.” Kelly looked unhappy.
“Now, Ed, you know how important it is to have a president who keeps a sharp eye on everything.” Hopkins grinned. “I can guarantee you there will be a lot of inspection trips around the country where all the defense plants are, and the votes.”
“Smart,” said Kelly.
“But no political trips. I think, Ed, we’re all agreed that the world’s too serious a place for old-fashioned politics. We are all of us real statesmen now.”
Joe heard this last. “By the end, Cousin Franklin will be tearing around the country like a banshee. This isn’t going to be an easy election. That’s why he took so long to make up his mind, about running.”
“When did he make up his mind?” Peter was curious.
“Whoever knows with him? Eleanor thinks that Dunkirk did it. The thought that Hitler might actually invade England set him in motion.”
“That’s history, which I like.”
“That’s journalism, which I like,” said Joe Alsop. “Anyway, there’s going to be quite enough of both to go around.”
Harry Hopkins said goodbye to the Mayor at the door. “To think,” said Joe, “if today were two years ago he’d be here complimenting him.”
“Him? Who?”
“Him, Harry Hopkins. He was the Roosevelts’ choice to succeed Franklin.”
“I can’t believe it.” Peter had come to admire Hopkins, as a brisk, brusque political manager. But this sallow unimpressive social worker out of the heartland, or wherever he hailed from, seemed no heir to the grand Hudson Valley squire.
“You didn’t know him before. Before the cancer. He was wonderfully fierce and bright and even attractive as a leader. He was ideal for continuing the New Deal which Cousin Franklin is now about to bury once and for all in order to play war president like Wilson.”
Peter was not surprised that war would take precedence over the New Deal, a worthy series of social enterprises that were all doomed in so reactionary a country: except for social security—a small income instead of the well-earned poorhouse for every senior citizen. But even that small victory had been a harrowing political battle; as for public works, Wendell Willkie was thoughtfully pointing out that nine million men were still out of work. “Any war president can end unemployment.”
Peter parroted popular opinion. “This war could complete the New Deal.”
“Who cares? Because this war will give us the whole world this time. That was Uncle T’s dream. I think it’s Cousin Franklin’s too. He pretends to revere his old boss Woodrow Wilson, but every now and then, he says what he really thinks of him.”
“The man who made the world safe for democracy?”
“The man who made this bloody war inevitable.” Joe gave Peter a baleful stare, as a stand-in for Wilson, or was it Hitler? “Wilson was a pompous little professor who should never have left—no, not Princeton, he was already out of his depth there—his classroom at Bryn Mawr, surrounded by the brightest of bright bluestockings. Outside that classroom of young ladies, he was a bungler, to put it politely.” Joe poured himself a large glass of whiskey. “To Cousin Franklin.”
Peter held up his glass. “Let us pray,” said Peter, getting into the spirit that history now required of them, “that he does not bungle.”
“Or,” said Joe, ominously, “die on us. Before we get the world.”
Two liveried footmen somehow did not look at least one too many as they opened the door to the Dupont Circle palace so that Caroline could make her one-woman entrance to be met in the great hall by Cissy Patterson, also alone. The ladies embraced and all that Caroline could think of, as she gazed over Cissy’s shoulder at the marble staircase, was the young man at the party making his way up the stairs to prepare himself as sacrificial goat upon peach-tinted crepe-de-chine sheets.
“You’ll have him all to yourself.” Cissy broke from their sisterly embrace. “I’ve got a meeting at the paper. Anyway, it’s better you see your old beau alone for lunch, just the two of you in the study.”
“Old beau? I thought it was to be the two of us.” Caroline wondered if the old beau might be James Burden Day; wondered if, after so many years, they would have anything to talk about.
“It’s a surprise for you, and a joy for him, of course, particularly if you’d talk about Harry Hopkins. I’ll join you all later.”
“I’ve nothing to tell. I hardly see him. He’s busy arranging the election for a president who says he won’t campaign.”
“Franklin always waits until Labor Day. By which time I’m afraid
poor Wendell will have lost what little voice he has.” The butler had materialized beside Cissy. “Show Mrs. Sanford into the study. Serve the lunch.”
“Yes, Countess.”
Cissy winked at Caroline. “Ain’t I grand?”
“But you
are
a countess.”
“Only in Poland, which is now half German and half Russian. I would like to murder Hitler. Stalin, too.”
“So you aren’t an isolationist any more?”
“I don’t know about that. I do know I’d like to kill my daughter. Felicia’s just written a novel about how awful I am.”
“But that was years ago.”
“This is a new one. She’s arrived back from Europe. She also says how awful Drew was in bed.” Cissy laughed. “I can’t say I minded that part. What about your daughter?”
“Oh. I hate her, too. But she doesn’t write novels.”
“Count your blessings.”
Cissy was gone and the butler ceremoniously led Caroline through several grand rooms to a small book-lined study, where she found a mountainous old man standing in front of a fireplace, closely examining the underside of a Meissen plate.
William Randolph Hearst must now be seventy-eight, she calculated; and somewhat deaf, as he’d not heard her entrance. Caroline motioned to the butler to go, quietly, while she prepared herself for this unexpected encounter. Even in France, she had been able to follow the shipwreck of the Hearst empire. Personally, he was well over a hundred million dollars in debt. He had bought too many castles, too many works of art, some beyond value, some of no value at all; the palace at San Simeon above the Pacific, with its zoo and its hundreds of attendants, was constantly being added to while the dozens of newspapers and magazines that supported all this spending did less and less well in the post-Depression era. A “conservation” committee of Hearst executives was formed to curb the Chief’s spending and sell off—usually at a loss—heavily mortgaged newspapers and properties, which was how Cissy Patterson had ended up leasing the Washington
Herald
from him and, as she was not shy in telling everyone, lending him one million
dollars. Finally, and what probably hurt the most in Caroline’s view, he had to give up the film production company that he had shared with his mistress-for-life, as it were, the film star Marion Davies. Since Caroline and Tim had been grimly obliged to do the same, she was prepared to find the ancient Hearst like King Lear upon the heath as he slowly turned to greet her.