Authors: Gore Vidal
Newsreel cameras, arranged by Blaise, had greeted the knight at Union Station when he stepped off the train to take his place in the Capitoline frieze of gods and heroes. He would be president in a dozen years, thought Peter, staring with open distaste at his admittedly decorative as well as decorated brother-in-law, soon not to be related to him in or out of law. Could Clay and his father actually be lovers? So Enid had charged the night that she shot Aaron Burr instead of Blaise, or had Clay been her target? Peter could never determine which of the two had been the chosen victim or even if she had made her selection as she denounced them and then, for fatal emphasis, fired her pistol at drunken random.
Peter stood up, holding in his stomach. Clay’s lean body was visible reproach to a less-disciplined contemporary. “You two seem to have business …”
“No. No.” Blaise waved him back into his seat. “Clay and I are finished. I want to talk to you, Peter.” In a flash of golden light, white teeth, blue eyes, Clay firmly, sincerely, shook Peter’s hand, allowing—deliberately?—the essence of his own persona like a surge of electricity
to flood Peter’s somewhat weaker system. Then Clay was gone, and Blaise was again his usual self. What, Peter wondered, idly, did Enid really know?
“How is
The American Idea
doing?”
“The real thing or the paper?”
“I doubt if there is a real thing. We’re stuck with too many ideas as it is. No. The paper.”
Peter told him, more or less accurately, the unglamorous circulation figures. Blaise understood all this better than he did. Then, “How’s your ex-communist working out?”
“I doubt if he ever had the nerve to be one.” Tension between the two was on the rise. Billy Thorne had interpreted the Yalta meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin as the beginning of a partnership that would stabilize and restore all of Europe, while Peter was certain that everything would fall apart with Roosevelt dead and the American military on so many simultaneous warpaths. There were other quarrels, including the implicit one over Diana. Although Billy could hardly be said to be in love with his wife, he was not about to give up so shining a capitalist trophy, while, simultaneously, Peter was not about to dissolve into thin air. “We’ve also got Aeneas Duncan. He was with me at the Pentagon. In A-2. Intelligence. He’s basically a philosopher.”
“Heavy stuff. I’ve tried to read him. Do you think you’ll ever break even?”
“Yes. There’s nothing else really. Nothing that treats Washington today as if it were already history.”
“Well, I’m sure you know better than I about that sort of thing.” Blaise’s humor, never light, was now oppressively heavy. “I’ve always thought history doesn’t really begin until it’s over.”
“Well, when it’s over—when you’re absolutely certain it’s over—I hope you’ll let me know.” Peter meant to infuriate; and failed.
Blaise was bland. “Have you thought about the paper?”
“Yes. And … no.”
“I have no heir, except you.”
“There’s Aunt Caroline.”
“She’ll vanish into the French countryside any day now.”
“Her daughter?”
Blaise shuddered. “Emma has gone back to fighting the menace of communism.”
“Is she still with Tim Farrell?” Peter had been as amazed as everyone else in the family when Emma Sanford had, with such aplomb, collected her mother’s old lover and gone off to join him during his filming of the war in Europe.
“I’m not in touch with Emma. Or with your Aunt Caroline, who’s on the West Coast this week. Anyway, you’re perfect, now, for the
Tribune
once I’m …” Blaise paused.
“You’ll never let it go, which would make me highly imperfect for your purpose.”
“I could die.” This was said with some effort—superstition?
“So can anyone. Even I. But you won’t for a long time. Train Harold Griffiths.”
“Tiresome pansy.” Blaise seemed to have turned a page in his head. He opened a manila folder. “This mysterious weapon …”
“It’s almost ready to be tested.”
“
What
is it?”
“It has greater power than anything man-made. It is supposed to be able to disintegrate the planet.”
“In that case, hardly an ideal weapon. On the other hand, for our country’s greatest secret, what’s known already is too much.”
“At the Pentagon, we assumed that the Nazis, now defeated, and the Japs, on their way to the exit, knew about it all along because the science—which has something to do with breaking up atoms—is known to everyone in the physics business, but apparently only we had the technology and the money to build it. Aeneas is my expert, at the moment. He has good sources …”
“You wouldn’t …?”
“I don’t see how I could.”
“When do you get out of the Army?”
“I am out. As of last week. Didn’t I tell you? But since I don’t have any clothes that fit, I still wear my uniform and sleep in the office.”
“In the Union Trust Building?” Blaise chuckled. “Well, you’re at the center of power.”
“Why?”
“The law firm of Covington and Burling is located there. You must see them from time to time.”
“They dress very well. At least that’s how they look in the elevator where I see them.”
“Dean Acheson is back with them. But not for long. The President wants him at the State Department. To keep an eye on Jimmy Byrnes.”
Like most of Washington, Peter had hardly been surprised when Truman selected his old Senate crony South Carolina senator Jimmy Byrnes, to be secretary of state. Peter’s last memory of Byrnes had been during the 1940 Chicago convention, where the sharp conceited little man had, for a moment, thought himself the next vice president only to lose to Wallace, who had then been cast aside in 1944 for Harry S—the S was for nothing—Truman, a senator not only Byrnes’s junior but, in the eyes of Washington as well as of Byrnes, his inferior. The relationship had already begun to go badly or, as Blaise put it: “ ‘A president,’ Acheson said to me, ‘can be his own secretary of state, but a secretary of state cannot be his own president.’ ”
“Words of wisdom …”
“Do you want to see them all in action at Potsdam, with Churchill and Stalin?”
“As a
Tribune
reporter?”
“Correspondent.”
“I’ve too much to do here.”
The two-room office suite in the Union Trust Building contained not one but two chief editors in almost perpetual conflict. Billy Thorne’s assistants had taken on Billy’s harsh contrarian style, while Peter’s team responded with polite contempt which, in the case of Aeneas Duncan, took the form of cold disapproving silence. Aeneas was again a civilian, with a child-psychologist wife in New York, which obliged him to commute between the two cities twice a week, writing book reviews in the club car of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Capital Express. In order to see as little as possible of her estranged husband, Diana worked at home in Rock Creek Park and only came to the office
when Billy was not there, which was a good deal of the time, since he was now in some demand as a lecturer on the evils of communism as observed at first hand in the Spanish Civil War. Precisely how his eyes had been opened to the menace was never entirely clear to Peter, who had yet to attend one of Billy’s excited and exciting lectures.
Peter shared a partners’ desk with Aeneas. They faced each other at the center of a room lined with bookcases and filing cabinets as well as a woman secretary whose typing was so rapid on an Underwood so old that its staccato sound was like an unceasing firing squad. On the walls there was a mock-up of the next issue of
The American Idea
. One entire blank sheet was headed “Potsdam.”
“All I’ve got in the way of news is hearsay.” Peter was having trouble sorting out his impression of the surreal meeting in the Berlin suburb where he had been a part of the world’s press, kept to a most unworldly minimum. In fact, it was only as Blaise’s son that he was able to be billeted in the appropriately named Babelsburg, the seat of what had once been the German film industry. The conference itself was held at the Cecilienhof Palace, located in the relatively unruined suburb of Potsdam. Armed with passes, Peter did his best to look invisible as he drifted from hall to hall.
Although the Russian military were very much in charge of the palace, they plainly had orders not to disturb the American and English visitors; that is, the few actually accredited to the conference. Of perhaps two hundred journalists assembled in Potsdam and Berlin, Peter was one of the few allowed inside the palace, thanks to Blaise’s friendship with the President’s military chief of staff. Admiral Leahy had been Roosevelt’s principal adviser; now he performed the same task for Truman.
One of Leahy’s aides, an amiable lieutenant commander Peter’s age, took charge of him and let him look into the totally off-limits conference hall, whose large round table was covered with a dark red cloth. “The red’s a bit tactless of the Russians,” whispered Peter. Everyone tended to whisper in the vast halls, as if terrified of awakening the slumbering gods of war.
“Well, it is their city. For now. Actually, they’re pretty easy to get on with. So far.”
From a distance, Peter duly noted Churchill’s small fat figure as he lumbered into the anteroom with its somber wrought-iron chandeliers. He moved as if he were, physically, a giant; muscle-bound with power. He was usually accompanied by his sad-looking doctor, Lord Moran. Stalin was as small as Churchill but not as plump. He had a genial expression somewhat undone by pale yellow eyes more suitable for the lion house at the Rock Creek Park zoo than a peace conference. Truman wore a gray suit; his breast-pocket handkerchief was arranged in four structured peaks of equal size.
The lieutenant commander gave Truman high marks. “He’s on the spot and he knows it. Not only does he have to prove he’s up to Roosevelt’s standards, which he isn’t, but he’s got to ride herd on Jimmy Byrnes, who thinks he’s Metternich at the Council of Vienna, except he wouldn’t know who Metternich was.”
That was one obvious theme, Peter had thought at the time. A wily South Carolina senator with no knowledge of foreign affairs and a president who affected a profound knowledge of history although whenever he made an allusion to the historic past he unerringly got it wrong. Apparently, FDR had had neither the time nor the inclination to educate Truman during the weeks of his vice presidency. This now looked to be a real-life version of a Capra movie: honest little American guy, up against both the sinister smooth English and the bloody barbarian Asiatics. Peter had a lot to write about, only …
Peter put down the draft of his piece; looked across the desk at Aeneas, who was looking at him. “Problems?” Aeneas wheezed; always a signal for him to light another cigarette, which he did, careful to blow the smoke in Peter’s direction.
“Yes. I’ve written a mystery story—a murder mystery, really—but I don’t know who did the murder or why.”
“Obviously, we can’t accept the New York
Times
view of Potsdam, where the conquerors met in perfect harmony, the future of Poland and reparations only mild amusements.”
“Something happened on—” Peter checked the date—“July 16. Up until then Stalin had twice reassured Truman that by mid-August the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan. He also said he’d do nothing to help the Chinese communists. Yet later that day—no, the
next day—I was with Leahy and my lieutenant commander at the lunch break. They were looking grim. They kept referring to ‘the message.’ Leahy said, ‘I pray the damned thing won’t work.’ The aide said, ‘But, sir, the message sounds like it does.’ Then Leahy said, ‘For what it’s worth, Eisenhower’s against using it.’ That was all I heard. I couldn’t ask either of them what they were talking about. I’d already heard too much. But the whole mood of the conference suddenly changed. Oh, everyone was still friendly and Truman kept boasting about how well he was getting on with ‘Uncle Joe.’ He seemed to think he was back in Kansas City with Boss Prendergast.”
“It’s obvious they were talking about that project I’ve been researching for years now. But all I really know is top-secret hearsay.” Aeneas was strict in matters of ethics. If one could not absolutely verify a story, it was not to be used. Hence, his low-key but quite genuine loathing of Billy Thorne.
“Maybe.” Peter looked at his typescript for inspiration. There was none. “Actually, I had stopped believing that there was such a weapon. Seemed too much like the sort of thing we were hired to peddle at the Pentagon. But after I eavesdropped on Leahy’s comments, I could tell there was a definite change in mood at Potsdam. Nothing more was said about Russia entering the Pacific war, which means …” Peter shut the folder. “Truman’s decided to use it, whatever it is, and so he feels that we don’t need Russia’s help in defeating Japan. All our show now.”
“Guesswork.”
“Yes.”
“Then you can’t use it, can you?”
Peter sighed. “No.” He put the Potsdam story in the top drawer of his desk.
Two weeks later, he opened the drawer. On August 6, 1945, the United States Twentieth Army Air Force had dropped an “atomic bomb” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 130,000 people. The world was duly stunned. Peter began to type, vigorously, with two fingers. He finished his piece on August 9, just after the news came that another atomic—now called nuclear—bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 70,000 people. Five days later, Japan, which had been trying for some months to surrender, surrendered.
Peter had now solved the mystery—literally a mass-murder mystery set in secret motion at Potsdam to intimidate the Russians and keep them out of the war in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Peter was now the first of many to ask, in print, why a dramatic demonstration would not have been as effective as the incineration of so many innocent citizens. Why not transform the snowy top of holy Mount Fujiyama into a deep crater-lake whose radioactive waters would be guaranteed to heal a myriad of skin diseases? Why not …? With this one issue
The American Idea
was well and truly launched; and the day it was on the streets, Peter, in a complex move worthy of Stalin in his glory days, fired Billy Thorne.