I Told You So

3 The 2000 Shadow Convention: Radio Interview
Plaza Hotel, New York City
September 9, 2000

Vidal was in New York City in September, 2000, for the revival of his play The Best Man, which that year starred Charles Durning, Spalding Gray, and Chris Noth. The interview ostensibly was for KPFK radio in Los Angeles, where I had a show, but we talked much too long for that, an hour and twenty minutes, and the station ended up broadcasting only excerpts. He invited me to do the interview in his suite at the Plaza Hotel, where he and his partner Howard Austen were staying. When I arrived, he was wearing the hotel white terrycloth robe, and I had some difficulty finding a place attach the microphone for our new Digital Audio Recorder.

It was a big season for Gore: not only was his play being revived on Broadway, but the final novel of his “Empire” series, The Golden Age, had just been published. And of course we were in the middle of the Bush v. Gore political campaign, and many on the left were supporting Ralph Nader, arguing that there was little difference between Gore and Bush.

Q. The last time I saw you in Los Angeles, a month ago [August 2000], you were standing on the back of a flatbed truck downtown on Figueroa Avenue, as the Democratic Convention was reaching its climax three blocks away. You had been scheduled as a speaker at the Shadow Convention, a left-wing alternative to the DNC, but the police had ordered an evacuation of the building where you were to speak. Hundreds of people had gathered in the street around this flatbed truck; the LAPD’s finest had lined up, in riot gear, batons at the ready, at both ends of the block; and you were addressing the assembled crowd. What was that like for you?

A. After all, I lived through the wars in Chicago in 1968, when the police rioted, and I saw disturbing similarities between 1968 and 2000. However, the Los Angeles Police Department was pretty clever. As you know, they have their own foreign policy, and their own C.I.A., and no doubt a unit to remove from the sphere with extreme prejudice certain individuals. Obviously they had decided that Ms. Huffington’s Shadow Convention should not take place.

The Shadow Convention was for speakers whose views did not go along with the establishment of the county and were going to say things opposite to what was being said at the Democratic Convention. We were going to talk about, among other things, legalizing drugs. A lot of them were for Nader, and it might have been quite interesting. I arrived there, Christopher Hitchens was there. We sat and we talked, and we waited and we waited. I wondered why we were waiting. There were 600 people in the hall, people who had come to take part in the Shadow Convention. We waited and waited, and nobody seemed to know what was happening, except that we knew nothing was happening.

Then Ms. Huffington came in to tell us that there had been a bomb report—that a bomb had been set in the building and we could not go on. So we sat and discussed that. And this seemed a very unlikely thing, but you never know. We live in a very dangerous world. Then the word came that we were to evacuate the building—this was presumably great-heartedness on the part of the police, to save these vile people who did not celebrate the American way of life as does the LAPD.

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 Party ¹ 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 Powell ³ 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 President. 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. Here’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.

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 year ¹², 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.

But the Party of the People was an exciting movement. It was made up of farmers who had been ruined, and they got in workers from the north. They put together a very vibrant party, whose off-and-on official voice was William Jennings Bryan. Now the East, when they saw this, knew it was dangerous. A party of the people—and they called themselves that—Populists. You know more about this than I do because I haven’t written about it yet. But the co-opting that went on, and I know this from my grandfather, he organized Oklahoma as a state—previously it was Indian territories—and he brought them in to the Union in 1907, he was their first Senator. By then, the Populists had become Democrats or Republicans, generally Democrats. So he had been a Populist candidate in Texarkana, Texas in 1896, but by 1907 there was no question of running as a Populist in the new state of Oklahoma or the state of Mississippi. It had been co-opted by the Democrats.

Then came the fatal union between the banks—eastern banks—as represented by Woodrow Wilson, and the Populist forces as represented by William Jennings Bryan. The payoff being Bryan becomes Secretary of State under Wilson. My grandfather in the Senate was the Populist leader, along with Lafollette, who was the Progressive leader from the North. So this uneasy balance, FDR forged into the greatest political machine we’d ever seen. For about twenty years it governed the county, uneasily. What did the former slaves and former slave holders have in common with bankers from New England? But with FDR they all got along for a time.

Q. There was a fascinating piece in the New Yorker by Nick Lehmann, who has been writing profiles of Gore and Bush. He says, “Let’s look at the fathers of today’s candidates in the thirties.”Albert Gore Sr., the Senator, was from one of the poorest parts of America in the thirties, where everyone went broke, while at the same time, George Herbert Walker Bush, future President, was being driven by his family chauffeur to his prep school. Class differences were immense in the thirties. But they are not so different for the sons today.

A. I think Albert Jr. has moved out of—what was it, “ten cent cotton”? [a very low price for cotton farmers] “Ten cent cotton” was one word to us. It meant poverty. I grew up with that. My grandfather, Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, said that every year the head of the Grange would come in front of his committee and said, “Senator, I’ve got to tell you: the crop has been below average for the last eighteen years.” No, the South didn’t rise till the second World War, and the fact is that they kept their Senators and Representatives in Congress forever and they became chairmen of committees, so the South is sinking under the weight of these military bases.

Q. But our Al Gore didn’t grow up with ten cent cotton.

A. No, Albert Gore Sr. had freed himself of that world, though he represented “the folks” in Eastern Tennessee, which was always the liberal part of Tennessee. Albert Jr. was brought up in Washington, D.C. I remember them going on about the Fairfax Hotel, a luxurious hotel where they lived for nothing, because our grandfather Grady Gore owned it. He was very colorful.

When George Washington came along, inventing Washington, D.C., he conned these Maryland farmers who owned what is now the District of Columbia. And my direct ancestor, a Gore—Thomas Notley Gore, I think it was, owned a big farm which contained what is now the White House, and all the way up what they called the Tiber River up to Capitol Hill. We sold out and went west, which in those days meant Mississippi. There was one Gore who stayed and is rich as Croesus today, and Grady built this small hotel, the Fairfax, and gave Albert Sr. and Albert Jr. shelter for many years. It was a kind of seedy boarding house. It’s called the Ritz Carlton now, so everybody thinks it was always grand. It was not.

Grady always financed Senator McKellar, who was a horrible old man from Tennessee.¹³ Now Grady tried to get McKellar on the phone, but McKellar wouldn’t answer his call. Grady got so angry he called up Albert Sr. and said, “I’ve got $20,000 in cash here and I was going to give it to McKellar but I can’t get him on the phone. I’m going to give it to you and I want you to beat him.” And that is how Congressman Albert Gore Sr. became Senator Albert Gore Sr.

Q. George W. Bush, Governor of Texas: his main claim to fame seems to be, as you pointed out, that his father was President. But where in the world do sons succeed their fathers as heads of state? Syria, Jordan, and North Korea come to mind. Isn’t this un-American?

A. It has happened before. The Adams family, who are the most distinguished family ever in American politics, even more than the Roosevelts. Father and son, or father and grandson, both held office. Forget the Bush family, they are the most negligible family in the country. They are unintelligent, they are reasonably decorative, they are obedient to the great economic powers. Nixon said something interesting to Murray Kempton about Bush senior when he became President. Murray and Nixon used to have lunch, and when Murray said, “Well, what is this Bush like?” Nixon said, “Oh, nothing, nothing there, just a lightweight. He’s the sort of person you appoint to things, like the U.N., the CIA. But that Barbara Bush, she’s really something; she’s really vindictive!”—which was the highest complement that Nixon could deliver.

Q. The one thing we have not talked about in your book, The Golden Age, is the most striking part of it: your detailed picture of what FDR did to convince Americans to overcome their deep-seated isolationism and agree to go to war against Hitler.

A. It was an elaborate plot. First he made sure the Republicans would nominate somebody who would be an interventionist in case he died or got defeated. So with Wilkie he felt safe. He and Wilkie were then plotting, that he would serve out his fourth term—he was elected in ’44. Roosevelt would have his fourth term, and then, if still alive, he would not run for a fifth term, but he would run Wilkie. And they would form a new party—the liberal end of the Democrats, the liberal end of the Republicans, and specifically the interventionists—because now we have created an empire. We were masters of Europe, Western Europe, and we were the masters of Japan. We had everything, and we should have an imperial party to go with it. Which would also be a Wall Street party, with some interest in the people, as Roosevelt’s New Deal had done more for the people at large, things like Social Security, than any of his predecessors.

However, Roosevelt dies not long after his fourth inauguration, Wilkie dies, and Truman inherits. So Roosevelt’s plan had fallen to pieces, because he wanted to live in friendship with Stalin, and he recognizes Stalin’s sphere of influence, and Stalin’s paranoia, and Stalin recognizes that we were in charge of the entire Western hemisphere. We were now in charge of the Pacific ocean and we are now in charge of Japan, we were really in charge of everything. So why not get along with Russia, who will take at least two or three generations to catch up with us, and by then of course it’s a different world.

The machinations start in the beginning of The Golden Age, and my sort-of heroine, Caroline Sanford.…

Q. I like Caroline.

A. Oh, she’s a good character. She was in Empire, and she was in Hollywood. In fact, I’ve described her in those novels ever since she was a young girl at the turn of the century. She’d gone to the same school that Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to in France, but later. So, she just comes to Washington and is invited to stay at the White House, as they casually did with a lot of friends. I’m able to use her inside as a pair of eyes, and she has sort of a flirtation with Harry Hopkins, who I knew pretty well, since my father worked with him in the Roosevelt administration. Hopkins is one of the most fascinating figures in our history. I show the details as they unfold chronologically.

Then you see him goading the Japanese into attacking us. Finally, I think it was in August of 1941, he delivers an ultimatum that they must get out of China. Now they’ve been trying to conquer China since 1937. And here we are blithely telling them they must get out of China, or we will turn off the oil, which we did do, and they are dependent on American oil for their war machine. And we stopped all sale of scrap metal. They have no metal; they have to buy scrap from us. With that, they had to attack us. Roosevelt knew it. And if they attacked us, then Germany and Italy would come together, as they had an alliance with Japan, and with luck, would declare war on us. That was exactly what happened. The wickedness of Roosevelt, of course, was Pearl Harbor.

Q. Do you think Roosevelt knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be the target of this attack?

A. I read everything that was available, and there is a lot of stuff that became available as of 1995, because of the Freedom of Information Act. Yes, I think he did know it. Circumstantial evidence says that he did. In fact it was Charles A. Beard who wrote the first book on the steps that Roosevelt had taken to get the Japanese to attack us. The White House line was always that yes, they knew there would be an attack, there would be a rupture after our ultimatum, but they thought they would attack Manila, as that was nearby. However, we were reading all of their codes. They had something like sixteen naval codes, and we had been reading them. We knew where their fleet was, and the fleet was saying, “We are going to rendezvous near Wake Island,” and so on. They were over in the central Pacific, and the only thing below them was Hawaii.

Another cousin of mine, Admiral James O. Richardson, Commander of the Fleet, was relieved of duty when he fought with Roosevelt at this point. He said, “You’ve got to send the fleet back to San Diego.” That’s where the fleet was stationed. He said, “They are overexposed in Pearl Harbor, there is no motive for having them at Pearl Harbor.” Roosevelt said, “They are staying.” Richardson, in his memoirs, said he told the President, “If you want a war, what you’re doing is provocative, and may bring one on. You should realize that the senior officers of the navy do not have confidence in this administration.”¹⁴

He was relieved of his command then and there. He was a great friend of my grandfather’s, as well as his cousin, so I had picked up a lot of that stuff during his lifetime. I have no proof, no smoking gun. But a week before Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt wrote a letter to his new friend, Wendell Wilkie, and said, “We may be attacked before Monday.”

That letter exists. But the court historians are never going to bring any of this out. I don’t know how they gloss it over. I’ve had my battles with them, as you know, with the Lincoln Brigade. The way they ignore evidence is a startling thing, and I think they should be in religion rather than history.

Q. Gore Vidal, thanks so much for talking to us today.

A. Thank you.