III. Hollywood and The Golden Age

Wilson's successors in the White House, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, are both much more wary of foreign entanglements. (Vidal pays short shrift to Calvin Coolidge, who served between Harding and Hoover, perhaps because Coolidge merely carried out Harding's foreign policies.) Blaise Sanford looks at Harding and muses that

[t]he fact that Harding's career had been one of astonishing success could not be ascribed solely to brute luck or animal charm. Without luck and charm, Harding would probably not have had a political career. But he had had the luck and the charm and something else as well, hard to define because he was so insistently modest.¹²⁸

So modest is Vidal's Harding that he publicly gives all credit for his administration's triumph at the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference in 1921 to his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes. In fact, as Vidal tells it, all Hughes had done was "read off the particulars of Hard-ing's secret plan," under which "the United States was willing to scrap thirty capital ships" and "Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy were invited to rid themselves of close to two million tons of war-ships."¹²⁹

Harding had figured that if any word of his plan were to leak to the press, military expansionists everywhere would have time to rally public opinion against disarmament. Hence the thunderbolt, hurled by Hughes in the presence of the benign presidential author. It was Harding's theory that once world opinion was appealed to, there would be no way for the various governments to back down.

Harding's theory proved correct. His "gamble paid off. The world was enthralled, and in the course of a single morning Harding became the central figure on the world's stage, and the most beloved."¹³⁰

Herbert Hoover, who entered the White House as president six years after Harding's sudden death, attempted to continue his predecessor's peace-loving foreign policy, only to be brought up short by the machinations of his own Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. Stim-son, according to Vidal's Hoover,

"wanted to make all Asia our responsibility. That means if the Japanese would not let go of Manchuria, we would go to war with them. When I realized what he was up to, I called a Cabinet meeting and read Henry the riot act. I agreed that although Japanese behavior on the mainland of Asia was deplorable, we were in no way threatened, economically or morally."¹³¹

Making war under such circumstances is repugnant to Vidal's Hoover. "I would never sacrifice any American life anywhere," he states forth-rightly, "unless we ourselves were directly threatened." "People forget," Vidal's Hoover complains, "that when I was elected president we were occupying most of Central America and the Caribbean. I pulled the Marines out of Haiti, out of Nicaragua, and then when our war lovers insisted that we invade Cuba and Panama and Honduras, I said no." ¹³² After 1932, Hoover is helpless to prevent war so easily, for he has been voted out of office and replaced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a distant cousin of the earlier, Republican Roosevelt, who had been so bellicose and eager for hostilities. The new, Democratic Roosevelt "goes on and on about how he hates war because he has seen war," Vidal's Hoover declares with evident contempt. "As usual, he lies. He toured a battlefield or two after Germany had surrendered. And that was that. He saw no war. Does he hate what he has never experienced? Who knows? But I had to feed the victims of that war and I don't want anything like that to happen ever again. But Stimson does. Roosevelt does. I find them unfathomable."¹³³

By the time Vidal's Hoover utters these remarks the two unfathomable creatures at whose motives he so marvels are busily working together, for Roosevelt names Stimson his Secretary of War just after winning an unprecedented third term in the White House in November 1940. And thereafter, Vidal's Stimson and Vidal's FDR conspire to turn American public opinion around 180 degrees so that it will favor the course they themselves fervently advocate: U.S. intervention in the European war that began in 1939. Another of their co-conspirators is Harry Hopkins, the former social worker turned presidential confidante and adviser. "A principal architect of the New Deal, as the President's largely unsuccessful plan to end the Depression was called, Hopkins was the man in the shadows, forever whispering into the President's ear, as they experimented with programs and secretly manipulated friends and enemies."¹³⁴ And, as luck would have it, Hopkins also becomes a close friend of Caroline Sanford, who returns to Washington in 1939, at the beginning of The Golden Age. She is sixty and has spent the last decade in Europe, but is now bent on playing an active part once again in the daily publication of the Washington Tribune. Her friendship with Hopkins makes her privy to much interesting information.

"There is no way," Hopkins tells Caroline,

"that we—this administration anyway—will let England go down. We can always handle the isolationists here at home [...] [w]ith some protective camouflage for Churchill, for England. The fact is they haven't been a great power since 1914. But we all kept pretending they were until Hitler came along. Up till then the whole thing has been a sort of bluff. That's why we keep going on about a special relationship between the English-speaking nations, [...] [d]isguising 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 uber Alles."¹³⁵

The question is how the president is going to involve the United States in the European war, coming to the aid of the British, when most Americans clearly oppose such an intervention. Former U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, the blind politician turned out of office in 1936 by his constituents (perhaps for his outspoken criticism of the popular, if "largely unsuccessful," New Deal), remains in Washington, where he has spent so much of his career, practicing law, talking politics with his numerous friends in and around the District, and relying on his grandson, Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr. (who will later become famous as the novelist, playwright, and essayist Gore Vidal), as an assistant and guide around the Capitol. In a conversation with the fictitious Senator James Burden Day, Vidal's Gore declares unequivocally that "the President has a plan, even some sort of timetable," and that he is "provoking Japan into attacking us so he can live up to his campaign promise that, if elected, no sons of yours will ever fight in a foreign war—unless, of course, we are attacked." In that event, if the attacker were Japan, not only would "the nation [...] be willing to enter the war," but the United States would also be involved in the European conflict, "because Germany and Italy would have to honor their military treaty with Japan."¹³⁶

"It's a very clever game." Gore's one glass eye had strayed northward, while the blind eye was half shut. "Eighty percent of our people don't want us to go back to Europe for a second world war and nothing will ever persuade them, no matter how many of our ships the Germans sink. So we at least learned that lesson from last time. But to get the Japanese to strike first is true genius—wicked genius."¹³⁷

Hopkins instructs Caroline on the wisdom of this plan. "[I]t is wisest for the President to let them make the first move. We think they'll attack Manila, and if by some miracle they should manage to blow up that horse's ass MacArthur, our cup will truly runneth over." Even if they don't blow up MacArthur, however, "there's no going to war unless all your people are united behind you. Well, they are nowhere near united even though we keep losing ship after ship to the Nazis and no one blinks an eye. So we must take one great blow and then..."

Hopkins pauses and Caroline prompts him by asking, "Then what?"

"Then we go for it," Hopkins replies. "All of it. And get it."

"What is it?" Caroline demands, frustrated.

"The world," Hopkins tells her. "What else is there for us to have?"¹³⁸

Vidal's Roosevelt succeeds in provoking the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor. He succeeds too in concealing his foreknowledge of this event from the naval command in Hawaii, thereby insuring that the "one great blow" his nation must take is a great one indeed—great enough, devastating enough, to bring about the complete turnaround in public opinion that is necessary for the president to take the nation into a foreign war without committing political suicide in the process. However, FDR does not live to see the end of the war he leads his nation into. That pleasure falls to his successor, the unassuming Missouri haberdasher Harry S. Truman. And Truman minces no words in making it clear that he favors precisely the sort of U.S.-dominated world envisioned by Roosevelt and Hopkins. When Blaise Sanford's son Peter covers one of Truman's early speeches on foreign policy for his magazine The American Idea, he finds that

[t]he President not only briskly assumed for the United States global primacy but made it clear that from this moment forward the United States could and would interfere in the political arrangements of any nation on earth because "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by outside pressure."¹³⁹

On the other hand, this is not to say that everything in President Truman's foreign policy would have met with the approval of either Roosevelt or Hopkins. On the contrary. As Hopkins puts it to Caroline,

"Henry Wallace says Harry will agree with you before you've actually said what you mean. Then he'll go around telling everyone he gave you hell. Now it looks like he wants to give Stalin hell. That's bad news. The Boss was always willing to treat Stalin in a normal way. As the head of the other great world power. That's why Stalin trusted him, to the extent Russians ever trust anybody. Then Harry goes off to Potsdam and starts to renege on every agreement we made at Yalta. All because he's got the atomic bomb and they don't. So we're going to have a very expensive arms race and trouble everywhere."¹⁴⁰

In summary, then, Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels tell a tale of American history that would seem passing strange to anyone whose understanding of the subject is confined to what has long been conventionally taught in American public schools and colleges. In Vid-al's American history, the Founding Fathers are not graven saints, but fallible mortals driven as often by vanity, greed, and lust (whether for power or for the flesh of attractive slave girls) as by any belief in the nobility of their cause, and more often bent on benefiting themselves and the members of their social class than on benefiting Americans in general. In Vidal's American history, Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union at the cost of destroying everything about it that had made it worth preserving—the protections supposedly afforded by the Constitution to the inalienable individual rights of American citizens. In Vidal's American history, a cabal of racist imperialists had seized control of the federal government within scarcely more than a hundred years of the Constitution's ratification, and sent its young men on a rampage of international meddling and mass murder that culminated in the total destruction of two Japanese cities. In Vidal's American history, it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, which launched and then prolonged the Cold War.