I Told You So Page 5
Q.This is when Gene McCarthy, Democratic of Minnesota, made his famous speech nominating Stevenson, “do not neglect this man of honor…”
A.Yes, it was a great speech, but she gave a speech first. And she came out without a note. She was extraordinary. She was a very, very tall woman, and she just dominated the convention hall. She said, “How dare you turn your back on this man, who has led this party, and all that we stand for, the New Deal, and all. You want to turn your back on this man, who, even though he lost twice, got the most votes any Democrat had ever got before.” She balled out the delegates, and they just sat there like kids. She waved her finger at them. She really put on quite a show.
Then the Catholic Eugene McCarthy goes up. I give his religion because Kennedy was Catholic, and a lot of people, particularly in my upstate district, voted anti-Catholic. I would have been elected to Congress had Kennedy not been on the ticket. There was an anti-Catholic rage that went through the Hudson Valley. He didn’t do well. So Gene McCarthy was and is a rather serious, thoughtful man, and sort of in the German Catholic tradition which is very serious stuff. He thought Jack a flippant figure of no depth.
Q.There was good reason to think that in 1960.
A.There was good reason to think that until the end. I was charmed and delighted by Kennedy personally, and certainly he was intelligent. But any man who gave us an invasion of Cuba, a missile crisis, and the war in Vietnam in 1,000 days—give him another 1,000 days, and we would be irradiated atoms in space. No, he was a mistake as president.
This is all the background to the play The Best Man. I gave the manuscript to Jack to read, and he gave me a couple of very good lines, and he did say, “You know, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the meaning of it all.” I said, “Jack, you’ve been running for four years, I’ve only got two hours in the theater, I’ve got to concentrate it to move it along.” And he said it would be the first play he would see after he won the election. And it was the first play he saw after he won the election.
Q.So what would have happened in 1960 if the convention had listened to Eleanor? Stevenson would have been nominated. He might not have won, but Gore Vidal would have been elected to Congress from the Hudson River Valley. What then would have become of Gore Vidal? Would you have worked your way up and ended up in White House and not given us twenty-three novels?
A.No, I would have never gotten to the White House because I wrote The City and The Pillar. And that eliminated me. In The Best Man I put in a problem something like that, a smear I was using against my two rival candidates in the play. I would have been limited to the House, and maybe to the Senate and that would have been it.
Q.Would you have been happy in the Senate?
A.Oh, in the sixties, yes. As a Senator in the eighties, when I ran again, really just to show the flag—
Q.In ’82 you ran for the Senate in California—
A.—in the Democratic Primary. Really I ran just to show the flag and to say certain things that the other candidates were not talking about. You force them to talk about it. The L. A. Times is very good about that. If you bring up a subject that the other candidates won’t address—like the military budget—they then ask all the other candidates, and they’ve got to comment on it. As an educational exercise it was fun—educational for me as well.
But Senator Cranston, who was a Senator from California at that time, explained it to me. He said, “You know, you’re elected for a six-year term. If you want to be elected for another six years, you must raise $10,000 every week of your six-year term.” I had enough money of my own to keep me going during the campaign, but in trying to raise money, they give you a list of donors, and you have to call up a perfect stranger and ask them for money. The first thing I discovered during that race was that I am constitutionally incapable of doing that.
Q.So you would have had a short career as a senator.
A.I would have had no career, but I wouldn’t have wanted one once I realized this was the condition. You’re not going to be a statesman of any sort; you’re going to be a mendicant. You go to fundraisers, and that’s all you do.
Q.It’s hard to imagine Gore Vidal pleading for money from the corporate bigwigs.
A.I remember I did talk to one. I’m not entirely pure. At Fluor,7 they had a little money for a possible liberal, just as a garnish as it were. And I talked this guy a couple of times. We both decided that I would be no use to them in the Senate.
Q.That’s probably true.
A.Probably true.
Q.Let’s go back to 1960 for a minute. In 1959 you write The Best Man. There is a question of casting: who was going to play the Stevensonian hero of the play—idealistic, but vacillating? Who was considered for this part?
A.It was a hard part to cast, because most middle-aged actors who are right for a presidential role are essentially American boys who got just old. Because movies stars are boys, and female stars are girls, and they start out as boys and girls, and they start out playing boy and girl, and they keep on playing boys and girls, and they generally have no transition into a more mature presence. So I was faced with a lot of fifty- to sixty-year-old guys who are still playing high school seniors from Pomona High. They don’t sound right, they don’t sound like intellectuals. Franchot Tone was going to do it, and then his health was peculiar, so he didn’t. And then suddenly MCA said, “How would you like Ronald Reagan?
Q.Ronald Reagan?
A.Ronald Reagan. He had fallen on hard times. I think that year was the year that he did a nightclub act in Las Vegas, reading jokes off a teleprompter or whatever they had in those days, and introducing showgirls. And I said, “Well, he is a very good actor,” which he is. This business about him being a grade-B actor is nonsense, nonsense put out by the Republicans, because they thought it might occur to people that he is brilliantly acting the part of a President. He doesn’t know how to do it, but he knows how to act it—which was indeed the case. He’s a wonderful actor, but he is Pomona High School. He’s got the high school boy voice, and I don’t think he would be convincing to an audience as an Adlai Stevenson-type of candidate. So I am forever known as rejecting Ronald Reagan as not being a credible President to a theater audience. We cast Melvyn Douglas instead, who went on to greater stardom.
Q.Now, let’s just speculate again: what if you had accepted MCA’s offer and cast Ronald Reagan as the lead in The Best Man?
A.He would have had a renewed career, as Melvyn Douglas had, after he was put in it. He would have been a star on Broadway, something he never did, although he was used to speaking on platforms. Or my fear about him not being very credible as an intellectual might have sunk the play. I think I made the right decision, though the great joke is being rejected as a presidential candidate by me for Broadway, he then had to become governor of California, and on to the White House.
Q.Whereas if you had just given him a chance, he might have made a career on Broadway, and had a long and happy life in the theater.
A.Except I think he always would have ended up in politics. He was obsessed by politics. However, the door didn’t open for him until he became the spokesperson for General Electric. He introduced that TV program, and then he made thousands of speeches for them on the virtues of capitalism and the horrors of communism—which is essentially the campaign speech that he gave all his life. So, if he had the G.E. Theater, I think he would have become President in any case. If he had the lead in The Best Man, like Spalding Gray currently, and Melvyn Douglas originally—
Q.And Henry Fonda in the movie—
A.Henry Fonda in the movie, he would have had a renewed career.
Q.I want to go back to The Golden Age, your new novel about history. I’m speaking now as a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, and I wanted to say how much I appreciated your taking the reader to visit St. Paul in 1940 to meet the boy wonder Harold Stassen, Governor of Minnesota. It’s also where you introduce us to Wendell Wilkie. How did you get the brilliant idea of shifting the scene to St. Paul?
A.Because that’s where the scene shifted. Because that is where Wendell Wilkie made his first heartland speech. Gardner Coles—that was his real first name, wasn’t it?
Q.Yes.
A.His nickname was Mike Coles. The Coles brothers published a very successful picture magazine called Look.
Q.And they published the Minneapolis Tribune.
A.Yes. So they thought they would start him off in St. Paul, to see how he took with the audiences. He couldn’t give a written speech, but he was great at improvising. So they have coverage for radio, and they have newsreels and so on. But he makes a terrible speech, and Wilkie throws away the pages of the script and says, “Well, that’s over with,” and he walks up and down and improvises, and the house just explodes. They realize they’ve got a viable candidate here, and so he speaks across the country. And they are manipulating the Gallup polls, manipulating all the polls, making him look more popular than he is, making it look like people are more eager to come into the war on England’s side, though they never got a good polling answer on that one. I describe his entry into Philadelphia, I’ve got his hotel—you know, these details are all correct. If I say he was at room such and such at the Blackstone hotel in Chicago, or whatever it was, he was there.
Q.So you actually did a lot of archival research. This actually happened in St. Paul?
A.Oh yes. In St. Paul, I have Governor Stassen come there to introduce him, and he’s got two state troopers with him, and they all have a ghastly dinner at a diner before he goes on stage. That’s pretty much what Stassen said and did. T.W. Lamont, the head of the House of Morgan, was in town to look over the new Republican internationalistic candidate. I followed the facts very, very carefully.
Q.Your play The Best Man, which opened in 1960, has some uncanny contemporary notes, although do I understand correctly that you haven’t changed a single word from the original script?
A.Yes, this is the original script.
Q.One of the biggest lines for the audience last night, I noted: a political person says: “In those days, you had to pour God over everything like ketchup.” The audience in the theater burst into laughter, obviously remembering just a couple weeks ago, when Joe Lieberman referred to God seventeen times in his acceptance speech.8
A.It’s come back. We didn’t do God much in the sixties.
Q.What do you make of the presence of God in the political field today?
A.I deplore it, naturally. After all, I am an atheist, and if people want to promote these cults they should do it not through the political system but through the social system. If people want to go to church, they have every right under out constitution to do it. It’s about tact. And I think that is where the Senator from Connecticut lost me. It’s tactless to lay your religion upon other people. It makes it sound like you have found the golden way and no one else has. That is impertinent, and rather dangerous, in a country as sectarian as the United States, in a country with so much religious bigotry boiling around under the surface.
Q.Americans go to church a lot more, they tell us, than Italians.
A.Oh, Italians don’t go near churches, unless it’s to get married. But I don’t believe those statistics about the heartland, or “the chigger belt,” as H.L. Mencken called it—
Q.Oh dear.
A.—where the Gores come from. Mississippi. Yes, there’s a lot of church-going, because there isn’t much else to do in those villages. Social life revolves around the church. As Eudora Welty said to me, “There isn’t really anything else to do up in the north of Mississippi, where the Gores come from. Of course, I’m from the city. I’m from Jackson. We’re not quite that religious down here.” But no, religion is back. Only 20 per cent of the American people accept evolution, accept Darwin. Now, if America is supposed to be keeping abreast of the civilized world, I would say we are already falling pretty far behind. We have the worst educational system for the average citizen, for the non-rich, in the world. The history textbooks—you know about them. Frances Fitzgerald wrote brilliantly about them.9
Q.Yes she did.
A.Then we invented something called terrorism. Only two American planes have ever been damaged by terrorism—one was at Lockerbie and one was out of Athens.10 Neither took off in the United States. For those two airplanes, we are totally harassed by the American government. The American citizen is asked, “Did someone else pack your bag for you? Did you leave your bags anywhere at any time? Do you have an ID with a photograph on it? Well, no that won’t do!” I have to carry a passport in my own country. Now this really reminds you that you are in a police state. This is like traveling in the Soviet Union twenty years ago. I find this intolerable, and I don’t know why people put up with it. The only terrorism against us is provoked when we blow up an aspirin factory in Sudan.11 And I think the Sudanese have been very nice not to blow us up with a kamikaze bomb or something. We have been overactive and over-provocative everywhere, and the American people have not been told about it, because obviously the media belongs to the provokers. We are kept in innocence and we are kept in ignorance, and this is not healthy.
Q.I want to talk about third party politics in this country a little bit. Your new book The Golden Age has quite a sympathetic picture of Henry Wallace’s 1948 run for the presidency, and you have yourself have been both a Democratic candidate and part of a third party effort after 1968. How do you evaluate the Nader campaign this year12, and how does it compare to Wallace in 1948, which started out as sort of a good effort and then ended up very weak and disappointing.
A.Nader waited too long. He could have been more active. I suggested running him in the early 60s, when he was first getting known. I did a big piece about him and we put him on the cover of Esquire. I said, why not have a President who has done a few things, besides running for things, and he has done the following things that would be useful for the American people. Seat belts may not be very dramatic, but at least he did something useful. He took on big business and the auto industry. I was told he wasn’t very pleased with my piece.
I’ve never met him. I was interested in him four years ago [1996], and then of course he did nothing. He just said he was a candidate, and they put his name on the ballot, and that was it. He’s working harder now. But you’re not going to build anything around him. People say, oh it gives the Green Party a position on the ballot, which means they’ll get federal funding four years from now. Four years from now there may not be an election. Everything has just ground to a halt. The second law of thermodynamics is working beautifully, entropy is up ahead. Nothing is working in this country. Representative government has stopped.
There isn’t one person in America who has ever thought about politics who doesn’t know that every single member of Congress is paid for by corporate America and it isn’t to represent the people of their state, it is to represent corporate America’s interests, which are not those of the people at large. So, they’ve given up on the idea of having representatives in Congress. They see two candidates this year [Gore and Bush] who, whatever their pluses or minuses, represent nothing at all that has to do with the people. These are people who go to fundraisers, who create fundraisers. Bush became the Republican candidate because he has the same name as a failed President, and he got 70 million dollars on the strength of that from corporate America. Gore is running neck and neck with him. So, that system is over.
First of all, we shouldn’t talk about a third party or fourth party—we should talk about a second party. I mean, we’ve got one party, the party of corporate America, with two right wings: Republican and Democrat. There are ways of creating political identity and interest in the country, but you’d have to go to that, 60 per cent, I would guess, that don’t vote—at least not in congressional elections, and well over 50 in presidential elections. I’m sure this year 60 per cent will not vote for President. I would go out there and start looking among those people. They aren’t stupid. They aren’t well informed, how could they be? They don’t believe the newspapers or television, but they know things are wrong, and why somebody—a billionaire with some sense of civic duty—doesn’t go out and—I mean, only 14 per cent of America people are unionized, but I’m sure there are some workers who wouldn’t mind having better healthcare, and better retirement and this and that, that are quite discontented with the way things are.
You would begin, as it were, by “beating the Bushes,” looking for the majority, because it is a small minority that votes. One per cent owns the country, as we know, and their political operators deliver the government to them each time, which means the treasury, which means dividing it up. Presently, 51 per cent of the budget goes to the military. That’s going up because the Pentagon is getting restive, giving ultimatums to the Clinton administration, as they will to the Gore administration. They will get the payoffs they want—and there isn’t any money for anything else.
Q.Al Gore says the central contest today is between the people and the powerful.
A.I must say, the road to Damascus is more crowded than I thought. We are, the Gore family, probably the principal populist family of the south. It goes back to my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, his father, who was a Civil War veteran, to the 1880s when the Party of the People was founded. It started in Georgia, South Carolina, but Mississippi was a great catalyst, because in northern Mississippi they weren’t slave owners, they were rednecks, and they were Unionists. They were against the Civil War, they only went out of patriotism to their own class.