I Told You So Read online

  So we left the building, and there was no place to go but the sidewalk, where there was a truck with sound equipment on the back—microphones and so on—so we go down there, and everybody gathers on the sidewalk, but some of them move out into Figueroa. And I was asked to amuse the crowd as the police, as you have so beautifully and chillingly described, marched by us, two by two, with plastic visors over their faces, carefully designed so you couldn’t see who they were. And they went marching into the building, with a kind of S.S. stride.

  So there I am, trying to amuse the audience—we can’t really get into anything substantive. I spoke and I handed the microphone to Christopher Hitchens who said—I wish I had said it: “Do you really think that if there was a bomb in there, the police would have gone in and run the risk of getting hurt? If indeed there was a bomb in there, specialists would have been sent in long ago, because if this place were blown up, it is close enough to also blow up the convention center,” where all the Democrats were gathered.

  We all thought this was terribly good deductive reasoning, very Hitchenseque.

  Then two by two the police marched out of the building and said we could go back in. By this time shades of evening had fallen upon the group, and I went home.

  The day before I had gone to the town hall meeting that The Nation magazine had held in a synagogue in Brentwood, which had been a rather exciting affair with Senator Wellstone, and Jesse Jackson’s son, a congressman, and the usual suspects were there. It was a good meeting.

  Q.The next morning Arianna Huffington said at a press conference that 100 members of the LAPD had shown up to protect the citizens of Los Angeles from Gore Vidal.

  A.She said that?

  Q.Yes.

  A.I am flattered, naturally. But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I was co-chair of the People’s Party1 and I have a house in the Hollywood Hills. We were carefully monitored—who came to the house and so on. I was told never to drive myself, always to be driven, because they would try to arrest you on traffic offenses, something or other they’ll trump up. Also back in ’68 they would do things like reach into the car and pick up a marijuana blunt. They would have had it in their own hand and then reach in and say, ah, look what we found. I have been driven around Los Angeles ever since. If they recognize you and you are against the policies of the LAPD nation, you better watch out.

  Q.This is a big season for Gore Vidal: your twenty-fourth novel, The Golden Age, is being published. A revival of your play, The Best Man, is opening on Broadway. I saw a preview last night and was on the edge of my seat thinking, how is this going to end? There aren’t very many plays that give you that feeling nowadays.

  A.I wrote it in 1959, and it opened forty years ago at the Morosco Theater. And in those days one thought a play, particularly one that had political ideas and machinations, ought to be interesting. I think we were more devoted to interesting an audience, which is best done by revelations of character that surprise an audience. It must be a fair surprise, because you must prepare for it, which takes the kind of energy that the average playwright doesn’t seem to want to expend or even care for.

  Somebody wrote that The Best Man was the last of the well-made plays. It was a phrase of compliment for many years, and then it became one of derision. A well-made play of course was one that had no content, a sort of mechanical thing put together by a carpenter. After all, we are called playwrights; we aren’t called poets. The theater changed in the early sixties. We got marvelous figures, generally from abroad, like Beckett and Ionesco. And the realistic play just withered. It either became the heart of commercialism, or it just went away entirely. I don’t think it was cause and effect, but Broadway folded. In the season of 1960-1961 there were about forty plays on Broadway, and I don’t think there’s hardly one anymore.

  Q. The Golden Age is about America in the forties and fifties. In some ways, the title is ironic because this is the age of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Joe McCarthy, but also, briefly toward the end, you portray a sort of cultural renaissance, at least in New York in the forties and fifties, of which The Best Man was a part, not to mention your novels.

  A.When we won the Second World War, or rather when the Russians beat the Germans on the ground, and we beat the Japanese by air and by sea, we and the Russians were allies, and we could have gone on being allies, were it not for a series of sinister events. Between 1945 and 1950 there were five years, the only five years since Pearl Harbor, the only five years out of sixty, until very recently, that we were not at war. Cold wars, tepid wars, hot wars. We’ve been through about seventy or eighty wars since Pearl Harbor. None of them declared by Congress, naturally, because not even Congress today would have signed off on them.

  Our golden age for the arts in New York was just spectacular. We suddenly shot to the top of the world in ballet, something we had never done before—before that we had been just imitations of European ballet. Suddenly there was Jerome Robbins, there was Agnes de Mille. Then there was the age of the great musical. Oklahoma, Kiss Me Kate—every week there was a new musical coming along, most of them classics by now. In the theater, one week you’d have a new Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, then Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman the next week. The plays of Bill Inge.2 The theater was never so alive. And we just thought that this was normal, we knew that things had been flat during the war, because people were away (including the audience) and when we got home, there was all this pent-up energy.

  And then the novel: in 1948, number one on the bestseller list was George Orwell’s 1984. Number two was Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead. Capote and I were around four and five on the list, and a half dozen other marvelous novelists of the period were on the bestseller list. I’m not just talking about being published, but they were being read. And, of course, it proved to be the beginnings of the golden age of poetry. Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop.

  In writing The Golden Age, I try to remember what we ate, where did we go to eat, and who said what to whom—and what Dawn Powell3 was like when she was well and truly drunk, and well and truly brilliant. I have a very nice aria of Dawn Powell giving her real opinion of her friend Hemingway, it is absolutely devastating. Part of it is direct quotes I found in letters of Dawn Powell giving her view about how unlucky Hemingway was to have survived his plane crash in Africa, because he got to read all of his obituaries. And of course, you know “a great oak has fallen leaving a hole in the sky where it once bloomed and blossomed…” She said now poor Ernest, having read these marvelous obituaries, is going to have bad press until the end of his life, and will never be allowed to read the bad obituaries he is going to get later on, everyone had sort of shot their wad with Hemingway.

  But it was a great time. American literature, for once, was now being recognized around the world. Europeans had been cut off from us by war and fascism, and the communist system did not allow much literature in. It wasn’t so good for people like Mailer and me—we were too new. They were just catching up on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. John Dos Passos, the Europeans really liked that season. American literature was all over Europe, and it had never been before. People like Camus and Sartre were translating American writers, and we were translating them.

  So, for five years we had the beginning of a golden age, and my book’s title is essentially ironic, because five years does not make an age, but it suggests what an age might have been, had it been left alone.

  But Harry Truman happened to us. Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman became President. Dean Acheson—I think evil is a good word for him—became, at least in action, his Prime Minister, or Secretary of State. And they talked themselves into two things. One, believing that the Russians were coming—that they were our enemies, that Stalin was a vicious dictator, all of which was true—except the Russians were not coming.

  The Russians wanted to live by Yalta, the last meeting that Roosevelt had with Stalin and Churchill.4 And then a few things happened. Roosevelt died, and Truman became Pr
esident. He didn’t know anything about foreign affairs, he didn’t even know about the atom bomb. They had a second meeting with the Russians planned, at Potsdam. Truman goes there, ready to just give it to the Russians, because they weren’t living up to their agreements in Poland and so on. But they were trying to live up to them, and we had agreed at Yalta that Germany would be governed by the four powers—France, Britain, Soviet Union, the U.S.—jointly. And the Russians never backed off from the Yalta agreement. We did. And we did because while the meeting was going on, Truman got a message from Los Alamos that the atom bomb worked, which meant we didn’t need Russia. There was still a war going on with Japan, but we didn’t need Russia. He used that as an excuse to break the agreement, Roosevelt’s agreement, with Stalin. And we became obstinate, we wouldn’t agree to anything.

  In no time at all we divide Germany, and Stalin, horrified, immediately denied us access to Berlin, and then came the Berlin airlift, which we got through without too much damage done us, but the damage done our relationship with the Soviet Union was total, as was intended.

  Truman, with Acheson, had decided to have what Charles Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”5 When he militarized the economy we had a permanent enemy: communism. By 1950 we were back on a wartime footing, and North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman didn’t even dare ask Congress for a declaration of war that soon after Hitler had been defeated, so he called it a UN police action. The draft was back in peacetime. Imagine, a draft. The income tax was high. They took all the money, they put it in armaments. We started NATO, we started the C.I.A. We started a lot of secret police.

  So that was 1950, that was the end of the golden age. Then McCarthy comes, and the blacklist, and people are living in a police state. And with no redress, because the national security state is not representative, it is an imposed state of affairs. It is military, and it is hierarchical. The people were then excluded. And that is the world, my friends, that we have been living in for the last fifty years.

  Q. The Golden Age starts in 1940, and very much like your play The Best Man, which is set in 1960, a political convention is front and center at the beginning of the novel. Both conventions, the 1940 Republican Convention, which we visit in The Golden Age, and a hypothetical 1960 convention which we visit in your play, are political battles with real drama, real excitement, real suspense. What has happened to the political convention? Today, you wonder: how could they have not known who was going to be the candidate?

  A.In 1940 there was an elaborate plot that no one knew about. Well, some people knew about it—those who were in on it. I was a kid, and even though I lived in the house of a Senator, he wasn’t included in it, he was a Democratic senator.

  France had fallen, I think it was around May 1940, and the conventions are around June or July, and England is endangered by Hitler, and Roosevelt and the Eastern establishment, which governs the Republican party and has great control over the Democrats—the banks and the corporations wanted us to go to war against Hitler on the side of England. It was a virtuous thing to do at one level, but against the will of the American people. Before Pearl Harbor, which was the next year, ’41, 80 per cent of the American people did not want to go back to a war in Europe. We’d been stung in 1917 with the First World War, we got nothing out of it, except prohibition of alcohol which made us a lawless country. So here they are, trying to get us into the army again to get us to fight in Europe, but the country is isolationist. One of the reasons why the word has been demonized is because they had to do it. The average American is an isolationist.

  Q.That is one of the most striking things about the picture you paint of America in 1940: Today we are told about “the greatest generation” that went and fought Hitler, but you remind us just how powerful the sentiment was in 1940 against going to war, and how hard it was for FDR to change public opinion.

  A.That was the case. The country was isolationist, as it has always been when left alone, and not hyped, as it were, by the media, which in turn are owned by international banking systems interested in making money out of war. The people did not want to go, there wasn’t anything FDR could do to get us there. He did everything he could to help England. He did the destroyers deal and we got some bases out of it. Come 1940, he makes the historic decision that he will secretly help England, and that he will run for a third term, which no President had ever done. And his Republican operators would see to it that the Republicans also nominate someone dedicated to getting the United States into a war on England’s side against Hitler.

  And that’s what I begin the book with—that is what that 1940 Republican convention was about. They had picked a Wall Street lawyer with a strong Hoosier accent—Wendell Wilkie, “the barefoot boy from Wall Street” he was called. They decided they were going to nominate him. Now, the convention wanted to nominate Robert A. Taft, the leading conservative in the county, and a noble, if somewhat limited figure, but he certainly would have kept us out of the war if he had become President. So they had to destroy Taft. Well, they did it—read the book to see how they did it, but it was an astonishing story.

  I was there, in the audience with Senator Gore, my grandfather. From the age of ten he was blind, and this is one of the reasons why I was prematurely overeducated in politics, because I read to him. He wanted to go to that Republican convention, even though he was a Democratic senator. So we went there and sat in the gallery and we watched Wendell Wilkie being created by this extraordinary cabal, which involved the Cowles bothers, who owned something called Look magazine, I think Henry Luce was involved in it, and they defeated the isolationists.

  And the galleries—they were bringing in people from the streets, I think they were paying some of them, and they would start this chant, which would go “We Want Wilkie! We Want Wilkie!” It was an extraordinary crescendo of sound, and after a number of ballots, they got Wilkie.

  Now Roosevelt was covered. Should he die—and he always knew that he was going to die in office, he was not a well man—or, if he were defeated, then the next Republican president, Wilkie, would support his foreign policy. That was my first encounter with conventions. It seemed open, and it seemed democratic, and of course we learned later that is was beautifully manipulated.

  The next convention I went to was the Democratic convention in 1960.

  Q.You were a candidate in 1960.

  A.I was a candidate for Congress from upstate New York, and I was also a delegate to the convention which met in Los Angeles, which picked Jack Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson. That was fairly fixed in advance, but there was room for maneuver. Johnson was quite prepared to use, if he could figure out how to do it, the fact that Jack Kennedy probably wouldn’t have lived much longer. He suffered from Addison’s Disease…

  Q.Which we didn’t know. You might have known, but none of the rest of us knew in 1960.

  A.I knew, and the family knew, and Johnson knew. I mean, everything is known among a certain group that has to know things. Jack was known as “yellow Jack” in Congress.

  Q.That’s what you called him in the book.

  A.He was bright yellow, and he said it was due to malaria, and indeed he had had malaria. But it was also part of having no adrenal function. He would turn this awful color. Later he looked like he had a permanent suntan, that was the way they sort of modified the color of his skin. So Jack was in danger from that threat from Johnson, but Johnson didn’t dare hit. I don’t know why, but they scared him off. He came by the New York delegation to work us over and said, “I had a heart attack a couple of years ago, but I’m in perfect shape now. I said ‘Bird,6 you better cancel that blue suit I just ordered’ [to wear in his coffin]. And Bird said, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ I said, ‘well, one way or the other I’ll be wearing it’” [i.e. alive or dead].

  Now that was not only a nice joke, it was a cryptic remark about Jack’s health. Those of us in the delegation knew what he was doing, but everyone else was mystified. It just didn’t make any sense at all. H
ere’s a young man, he’s not going to die of anything.

  A year before that, in ’59, I wrote this play, The Best Man, in which the Democratic Party was divided. On the one hand, we had Adlai Stevenson loyalists—Stevenson had been our candidate in ’52 and ’56, and Mrs. Roosevelt, his chief supporter, wanted him again in 1960, and a hard core still did, right till the end. But the Jack Kennedy insurgency had happened, and a lot of Stevenson-ites were defecting to Kennedy.

  I remember when Arthur Schlesinger finally went over to Jack from Stevenson—he didn’t know Jack at all in those days. I remember Mrs. Thomas K. Finletter saying, “This is the greatest betrayal since Benedict Arnold.” Feelings were high. Adlai Stevenson was still being pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt. So Jack Kennedy talked to Frank Roosevelt Jr., and me, and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the United Auto Workers, and also the intellectual of the labor movement and the great favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting that the three of us go up to Val-Kill cottage, where she lived at Hyde Park, and talk her into supporting him.

  Q.That was a big job!

  A.She gave us dinner, and she had a position paper which turned out to be her next day’s “My Day” column on why Stevenson should run, why Stevenson should be elected. And Frank Jr. said, “Now look, Ma, he won’t say he’s running. He’s been asked all week, and he won’t say.” She said, “Well, that’s the way he is.” And Frank said, “Well, yes Ma, that’s the way he is, and that’s why we don’t want him.” Anyway, we didn’t budge her, and she didn’t budge us. Then the convention came.