Dah, Palimpsest

Dah

BEFORE THE CARDS that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt. One’s family. A cousin has just sent me a 1936 newsreel of my grandfather’s last campaign for the Senate. Thomas Pryor Gore looks and sounds weary. He predicts the coming of the Second World War; and he reminds the electorate that he is the last remaining member of the Senate of 1917 and that as he had opposed American intervention in the war then, so he does now. “I will not sacrifice your sons to the dogs of war.”

My first memory is of early evening in a room that overlooked the driveway of my grandfather’s house in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park. I am standing up in a playpen—euphemism for cage. I stick my head between the slats of the pen; get stuck; roar. Someone comes and I am freed. If recurrent dreams can be relied on, I also have a memory of being born. I am in a narrow tunnel, wriggling toward the light, but I get stuck before my head is free of the tunnel. I cannot move forward or backward. I wake up in a sweat. Nina’s pelvis was narrow and I was delivered clumsily, with forceps, by a doctor not used to deliveries: he was officer of the day in the Cadet Hospital at West Point, on a Saturday, October 3, 1925, at about noon.

Some weeks later, Eugene Luther Vidal, West Point class of 1918, resigned as first lieutenant in the army: He had been the Academy’s first instructor in aeronautics, as well as football coach. In 1917, he had been an all-American quarterback as well as a track star who had taken part in the Olympic Games at Antwerp. Gene, Nina, and child moved into her parents’ house in Washington, thus richly ensuring the failure of that marriage.

*My grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore. This is pretty much how I recall him, in his old age. He is being painted by Azadia Newman, who is soon to marry the film director Rouben Mamoulian.*

Much of the first ten years of my life was spent on the hill above Broad Branch Road—the branch being Rock Creek itself, a clear, pure stream that rushed shallowly over rocks between wooded hills, a haven for salamanders and all sorts of freshwater life. Senator Gore owned three acres of woods above the creek where, shortly before my birth, he had built a gray stone mansion. Because of T. P. Gore’s antiwar and anti–League of Nations positions, the good people of Oklahoma had denied him a fourth term in the U.S. Senate and so, from 1920 to 1930, he practiced law in Washington, D.C., and built his house, now residence to the Malaysian ambassador.

In the crash of 1929, Gore lost most of his money; in 1930 he returned to the Senate. Predictably, he fell foul of the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By then, Gore was a populist turned conservative. He and the president quarreled over whether or not the dollar should go off the gold standard. “If you do,” said Gore, “you will have stolen the money of those who had faith in our currency.” Carter Glass, a senator present at the meeting, later told the blind Gore that the president had gone gray in the face. But Roosevelt took the currency off gold. Later, of the half-dozen senators that Roosevelt tried to purge in 1936, T. P. Gore was the only one to lose his seat for good.

I was ten when he was defeated. My stepfather sent him a thousand-dollar bill for his campaign. I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill much less a thousand-dollar one. Even so, he lost the primary to a Roosevelt ally. He came home in the spring. He was melancholy, to say the least, and somewhat bored during the last thirteen years of his life, practicing law in Washington, mostly to get the government to pay the Indian tribes for those lands that it had stolen from them.

For a child—like a cat—the place where it lives is often more important than the people who live there. Rock Creek Park was very much my territory. The house itself was gray-yellow Baltimore stone. On one side, there was a steep lawn that overlooked Broad Branch Road and the winding creek, while, on the other side, there was the front door, approached by a circular drive at whose center was a small fountain. In those days, from the house, one saw only green woods, a rose garden, rows of flags, as we called irises, and a small vineyard of purple grapes. At the edge of the woods was a slave cabin, falling to pieces. In the heart of the woods, there was a spring of cold water that one was warned, even then, not to drink. Magically, water bubbled from soft gray sand, which I used to build elaborate sand cities, usually in the style of those I’d read about in Lane’s translation of the Arabian Nights, a book I never ceased to read and reread.

The main hall smells of fried bacon, floor wax, irises, books—thousands of dusty books. There is a large dining room on the left, with a fireplace and a niche on either side in which there are two tall gaudy pink-and-gold Sèvres vases. Back of a screen, there is the door to the large white kitchen, where the large, dark Gertrude Jackson presides. I used to watch her cook by the hour, telling her stories that I made up as I went along. She was stout, from Maryland’s Eastern Shore; she was also sly. She stole a gold pin from Nina and then, a year or two later, absentmindedly wore it to work. We all thought that the loss of her cooking was rather more serious than that of a gold pin.

To the right of the hall, a living room with a large bay window framed by bookcases. I recall a set of Mark Twain and a set of Voltaire in a red binding; also, the works of Brann “the Iconoclast.” A large sofa, covered in pumpkin-yellow and salad-green. Beside the fireplace, the Senator’s chair, and a smaller one where I would sit when I read to him, drinking Coca-Cola and trying not to let the ice tinkle. He forbade Coca-Cola in the house because it contained cocaine.

Perversely, the Senator, who had done his best to put his rural origins behind him, insisted on keeping chickens—to impress visiting constituents?—but as there was too much shade, they moped in the woods. I found them a bit dull, but I did my best to keep them amused.

One day at table I was told, “Eat your chicken.” A terrible knowledge of Edenic magnitude filled me with horror. This? On the plate? The same? The same. I would not eat chicken for many years, despite my grandmother’s cunning ways to trick me into what I took to be a form of cannibalism.

The Senator called his wife Tot, which I rendered as Dot. To her, he was Dad, which I rendered as Dah, an Irish locution, I am told. Her first name was Nina. I never heard her call the Senator by his first name except once, when they were in the small sitting room off their bedroom; he wore a long nightshirt and she was in her usual uniform, a pale pink wrapper over a lace nightdress—since he could not see her, she never bothered with her appearance unless there was company. While reading to him, she noticed that his nightshirt had ridden up to his knees. “Put your dress down, Tom,” she said. Otherwise he was Dad or Mr. Gore.

No one that I know of ever called him Tom or Thomas. President Roosevelt, in his squire-of-the-manor way, addressed him once, and once only, as Tom. The Senator ignored him until he was addressed properly. As a boy in Mississippi, he had been called Guv, short for Governor, tribute to an ambition that was noticeable even then. There seems never to have been a time that he was not in demand as an eloquent and witty speaker, particularly at those political picnics which were one of the few communal pleasures during harsh Reconstruction days.

The Gores belonged to the Party of the People; hence, populists. T. P. Gore’s father was clerk of Walthall County, an elected post of peculiar power in that state, a sort of regional chancellor. Since there were few blacks in north-central Mississippi, Gores have never been slaveholders, unlike Dot’s father’s family, the Kays of South Carolina, or her mother’s family, the McLaughlins of Meridian, Mississippi. “I still remember how my mother used to just step out of her clothes in her bedroom at night and leave them right there on the floor wherever she happened to be standing and, of course, I’d have to come along and put them away. You see, before the War, there was always a slave girl to take care of her.”

Dot and Dah complemented each other. She was dark, with large eyes and high-arched brows; she was also small—hence, Tot. She had a beautiful low speaking voice. When Dah first heard it at a political picnic in Palestine, Texas, where her family had moved after the War, he said, “I’m going to marry you.” He was a twenty-five-year-old blind lawyer, practicing law with his father and two brothers. After losing a campaign for election to the Mississippi legislature, he had left the state. The campaign had been unusually dirty. Also, rather more to the point, he was already bound for the United States Senate; this meant that he must leave Mississippi, where one had to wait for an incumbent to die, which could be decades; much too long a time for a man in a hurry. First, he headed west to Texas; then on to the Indian territories, where he helped organize the state of Oklahoma. In 1907, he was sent to Washington as the state’s first senator.

I’ve just come across a clipping from what looks to be The Washington Post. It is 1930, and the reporter pays a call on the recently reelected senator, who is baby-sitting me. At five, I am still called Gene.

Stacks of books surround the blind Senator’s chair, piles and piles of them, all colors, all kinds. Last week, there was a fire in the house. The bookcases are being repainted.

Baby Gene runs about among the stacks of books. The radio drones on.

“Tell me a story, Dah,” begs little Gene, bored with his playthings.

The Senator, eyes tightly closed, says nothing.

“Dah,” insists the boy, shaking him. “Oh, Dah! Please tell me a story.”

Silence, immobility on Sen. Gore’s part.

“Dah, won’t you tell me a story?”

Silence.

Baby Gene regards his grandfather with interest, observes naively.

“Why do you keep your eyes closed? You can’t see anything anyway.”

Sen. Gore, amused, opens his blind eyes, begins sententiously:

“Once upon a time . . .”

Dah was a wonderful storyteller; he also made me pay back in full when I was six by getting me to read to him, which I did by the hour for several years.

Thomas Pryor Gore. He is seated in his heavy wood Mission rocking chair, now in my bedroom at Ravello. He listens as the secretary reads to him; the straight but rather small chin is held high while the head is slightly tilted to one side. The blind eyes are tight shut with concentration. He has a full head of cowlicked white hair, a rosy unlined face, and a large straight Anglo-Irish nose with the curious flaring Gore nostrils that most of us have inherited, including our young cousin who currently lives in vice-presidential obscurity, a sort of family ghost flickering dimly on prime-time television.

Dah is about five foot nine or ten; he stands very straight. He is well proportioned except for an astonishing stomach. A parabola begins at his rib cage and extends half a foot out in front of him before it abruptly rejoins the lower body. The stomach is hard as a rock. Dot would often touch it with wonder. “When you’re dead, I’m going to have this opened up. I’ve got to see what’s in there. It’s like iron, that stomach.” Now I am getting the same stomach, but much later in life, and thanks only to alcohol. Dah himself never drank until old age, when doctors prescribed two shots before dinner. Both of his brothers were alcoholic, in the best Confederate tradition. This meant that they functioned as lawyers all day, then, work done, they drank a great deal. So too, I fear, did Dot, to Dah’s distress. At dinner, she would begin to ramble in a story or slur her words, ending the meal by sneezing exactly five times and blowing her nose in the Irish linen napkin, to my mother’s fury. She lived to be the oldest of my four grandparents, dying in her eighties.

I have a newsreel of Dah from 1931, the year that he came back to the Senate. He is standing in front of the Capitol with another senator, also blind. Clearly, an unpolitical human interest story was on the producer’s mind. Gore’s voice is measured, precise, more southern than southwestern in accent, with an actor’s phrasing. Lyndon Johnson used to imitate him, unsuccessfully. The Gore style influenced at least two generations of regional politicians. Much of his effect depended on a sharp, sudden wit that could surprise a crowd into laughter, very like his friend and fellow Chautauqua speaker Mark Twain. It is said that Will Rogers, in performance, most resembled Gore. But I wouldn’t know. Although I often led Dah from his office onto the Senate floor, and even into the holy of holies, the Senate cloakroom, I never heard him make a speech. It was a family complaint that when he was due to make a major speech in the Senate, he would tell none of us in advance. We would only know about it from the newspapers the next day. There was, of course, no television then, and newsreel cameras were not allowed in the chamber. Dah ends the 1931 newsreel with an offhand “Nice to see you,” straight to camera. Early in his career, he liked to hold notes in his hand that he would pretend to consult in order to disguise the little known, at the time, fact that he was totally blind.

I still cannot get over the wonder of film. I have now seen and heard a man I’d not seen and heard for almost half a century; it is a sort of miracle, and a powerful aid to memory.

WE ARE SEATED ON THE PORCH—a sort of open loggia—at one end of the Rock Creek Park house. It is summer. The irises, in full bloom, have a heavy lemon smell. I am eating grapes that I’ve just picked in the arbor which separates porch from dilapidated slave cabin. Dah sits in his rocker. A woman journalist rattles away: How did he become blind? We have all told this particular story so many times that we can recite it without thinking. Eight years old. Throwing nails at a cow. Another boy’s nail misses. Hits Guv’s eye. Still has one good eye; partial, but fading, vision in the damaged eye. Age ten, appointed page to the Mississippi State Senate at Jackson. Boards in a state senator’s house. Son of house has a birthday. Guv brings him a gun. When you pull the trigger, a spike comes out. Doesn’t work. Guv holds it to his good eye to see what’s wrong. “Now I’m blind” were his first words after the spike found its target. The family wanted to put him in a school for the handicapped. No. I’m going to study law. How? Send someone to school with me, to read to me. A relative named Pittman went with him to the Lebanon School of Law in Tennessee. Gore learned to memorize what was read to him, including endless statistics. Learned to recognize people by their voices. Was not surprised when radar was developed in World War Two. “All blind people know about radar. You can feel the sound waves bounce off a wall up ahead of you. Gives you warning.”

Woman journalist has a tinkling laugh. Dah winces. “Is there any sound more dreadful than that of a woman’s laugh?” he would say. A mild misogynist, he was a true misanthrope, which the public never guessed as they gazed on his serene, kindly face with its crooked thin-lipped smile and the blind gray eyes—one was glass—that had a surprising amount of life to them, particularly when he was about to launch a devastating line.

“You must admit,” said the journalist, “that when you lose your sight, your other faculties develop. So there have to be compensations.”

“There are no compensations,” Dah said, grimly; particularly for someone whose greatest pleasure in life was reading. He was read to almost every minute of the day. Once Senate or legal work was out of the way, he turned to history, poetry, economics. He disliked novels. Dot, two secretaries, and, later, I were the principal readers. As our spirits would sometimes start to fail, he would observe, blithely, “Both Milton’s daughters went blind reading to him.”

He had, surprisingly, a gift for mathematics. At one point he had been offered a job at a university teaching mathematics, but “I couldn’t take a job like that. When I think of teaching in a school, I get this lonesome feeling.” After one of his political speeches in Texas, a group of Baptist elders approached him and offered him a fine church and house in Houston if he would become their minister. He thanked them and said that the offer was very fine indeed but he couldn’t take it as he didn’t believe in God. “Come now, Mr. Gore, that’s not the proposition we made you, is it?”

Dah had a curious position in the country, not unlike that of Helen Keller, a woman born deaf, mute, and blind. The response of each to calamity was a subject of great interest to the general public, and we children and grandchildren were treated not so much as descendants of just another politician but as the privileged heirs to an Inspirational Personage.

Politically, Gore always thought of himself as a member of the Party of the People even after he had been co-opted by the Democrats, whose more or less populist tribune, William Jennings Bryan, would three times be a losing candidate for president. Although not unalike politically, Gore and Bryan got on uneasily. At Denver in 1908, when Gore seconded the nomination of Bryan for president, he started the longest demonstration in the history of American conventions. Gore made, as they used to say, the eagle scream. I suppose the magic was entirely in his performance, because the text . . . Well, as he himself said, a successful speech must reflect the people’s mood at the time. He liked alliteration. “I prefer the strenuosity of Roosevelt to the sinuosity of Taft,” he would observe in 1912.

After the Denver convention, Gore and Bryan drove away from the hall together. An exuberant Bryan said, “You know, Senator, I ascribe my political success to just three things.” Dah would pause dramatically at this point in the telling. Then: “I’m afraid I don’t remember a word he said, but I do remember wondering why he thought he was a political success.”

I’ve just been reading a book about the lawyer Clarence Darrow and I’m surprised to note that when Darrow was defending two labor union officials accused of having blown up the Los Angeles Times building, who should show up in the courtroom but “Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, the famous blind U.S. Senator, friend of Darrow, who was in town on a lecture tour.” Plainly, populist Gore was showing solidarity with the cause of labor. As it turned out, the two labor leaders were guilty and Darrow himself was later put on trial for bribing two jurors. But that is another story.

In 1925, at the Scopes trial, Bryan and Darrow faced one another in a Tennessee village courtroom to argue about whether God created the world in a week or did life take a bit more time to evolve, as Darwin proposed. Bryan spoke for God; and won. Darrow spoke for evolution; and won because the educated minority of the country made a hero of him; and poor Bryan, made to look ridiculous, promptly died. Some thought it was humiliation at being out-argued by a great lawyer. Dot knew better: “Bryan was killed by chicken and rice and gravy. How that man could eat, and in all that heat, too!” Incidentally, a recent poll shows that only 9 percent of the American people believe in evolution. We should be able to do marvelously well in the second millennium.

Although Dot herself did not know how to cook, she knew how to train cooks, a Confederate art lost to the world, along with those black ladies from the Eastern Shore of Maryland who were born with no need to be taught anything about cooking. Dah’s standards, when it came to food, were high: “The only true ground for divorce against a wife is if she serves her husband store-bought bread.” We never knew there was such a thing. Spoon bread. Corn bread. Buttermilk biscuits. Honey from square waxy combs. “I only live for breakfast,” said Dot at the end, bedridden from stroke and Parkinson’s disease. “I love my dough.” I once asked her what the nineteenth century was like. “Oh, the food! It was so wonderful!”

The Gores were constantly struck by fate. Dot thought that Dah had been born under a maleficent star. After all, the odds are very much against losing an eye in an accident, but to lose two eyes in two separate accidents is positively Lloydsian. But fate had many more freakish misadventures in store for him.

According to family tradition, while practicing law in Corsicana, Texas, Gore boarded in a house where also lived a blind girl. She became pregnant, and the blind boarder was accused of seduction by the blind girl’s guardian. A shotgun was produced in the best tradition of Cavalleria Rusticana. Gore walked away. “Shoot,” he said, his back to the guardian, “but I’m not marrying her.” Thanks to the scandal, he lost a congressional election but won Dot; and together they moved on to the Indian territories, and glory.

At about the time Gore was visiting Clarence Darrow’s courtroom, he was himself about to be tried for rape. Dot thought that this bit of melodrama was far and away fate’s masterpiece. Although Gore was often helpful to the oil interests in the state, he was not paid off by them, unlike most of the delegation. Proof? He died a relatively poor man, something that no Oklahoma senator has ever done, particularly one who had, like Gore, written the original legislation for the depreciation of oil resources allowance that made the southwestern oilmen as rich as today’s Saudis and quite as unbearable.

Now, here is the family’s version of what happened:

An oil company wanted to expropriate Indian land. They appealed to Congress. Gore took the Indian side. The oilmen offered him money to change his vote. Without naming names, he announced to the Senate that he had been offered a bribe. I believe this was the first and perhaps last time that any senator broke one of the most powerful unwritten rules of the club. The resulting storm in the press did not scare off his tempters. Again, they threatened him, not a wise move in dealing with a man of so fierce and righteous a temper. He said that now he would charge them by name with bribery. So they played the “badger game” on him.

A woman rang Gore’s office to say that she was a constituent and that she would like to propose her son for an appointment to West Point. She was not able to come to the Capitol, but could he stop by her hotel on his way home? He did, in the company of his secretary, Roy Thompson. In the lobby, she proposed that the Senator and she go to the less crowded mezzanine. Unaccompanied by Roy, she led Gore into her hotel room, where she started to scream and tear off her clothes. By prearrangement, a pair of detectives arrived, shouting, “We’ve got you!”

The threat of exposure was thought to be quite enough to get the Senator to cooperate. But he refused. Charges were brought against him. The newspaper scandal was enormous. Since the defendant may pick the venue of his trial, he, most daringly, chose to be tried in the capital of his state, Oklahoma City. Gore seemed certain to lose until the appearance of a surprise witness, a lady from Boston who had been at the window of a room opposite the one in which the rabid badger had been loosed, and she had seen and heard the woman tear at her own dress, had watched the detectives rush in. Gore was acquitted. But, as Dot said grimly, “All our lives, just as things start going well for us, something awful happens and we have to begin all over again.”

PALIMPSEST TIME. Although I have pretty much kept to my system of recording only what a faulty memory recalls (and the written—equally faulty?—memories and biographies of others), I did send away to the University of Oklahoma at Norman for the various accounts of T. P. Gore’s alleged “indecent assault” on one Mrs. Minnie E. Bond in the Winston Hotel during March 1913, at Washington City. Minnie wanted $50,000 damages for the agony that she had undergone. Gore said he would not “treat or retreat,” and opted to stand trial in Oklahoma City.

On February 19, 1914, the jury took ten minutes to exonerate the Senator. The family’s version of events was, more or less, that of the press of the day. Now the story begins to diverge. Minnie had come to Washington to ask Senator Gore to appoint her husband internal revenue collector for the state. On three occasions he said no. She asked to see him yet again; he told her to come to his office, but she said that she would prefer that he come to her hotel. He did, with his secretary-escort, one of Dot’s brothers.

As the downstairs parlors were full, Minnie led the Senator upstairs to what proved to be the bedroom of a Mr. Jacobs; she then tore her clothes and gave what the newspapers said was a loud “squawk.” Jacobs and two other “witnesses,” conveniently stationed nearby, rushed in. Gore had been framed.

But reading the press accounts (I think I shall avoid the actual transcripts of the trial if they exist), I wonder why Dot’s brother Harry Kay didn’t go upstairs with him. But then I always wondered how on earth Dah managed sex. A blind man can’t go into a bar and, with a glance, find a partner. In the course of the trial, the prosecution came up with a number of instances where Dah had allegedly made advances to women, but none of the women ever stepped forward. The fact that he always had a brother-in-law or a man secretary as escort meant that he would have to rely on them for any arrangements which he might have made with women, not to mention guiding him to the men’s room in a strange city.

Nevertheless, there are odd discrepancies between the family version and what I have been reading. The famous surprise testimony of “the lady from Boston” who had witnessed the whole thing from her hotel window opposite the one where the “rape” was supposed to have occurred is entirely absent from the story. The jury simply said there was “insufficient evidence” to condemn Gore, and no one took seriously the stories of the three politically interested witnesses. It would seem that the actual reason for the frame-up involved an attorney named J. F. McMurray, who had involved himself in the transfer of some Indian lands and then sued the tribes for $3 million in fees. Gore took the side of the Indians. McMurray did not get his money; hence, revenge in the generous form of Mrs. Minnie E. Bond.

All this was par for the course in the frontier politics of the day. But more disturbing to me was the plaintiff’s investigation of the blind girl and Gore in Corsicana, Texas, some twenty years earlier. The family story was that in 1895, the twenty-five-year-old Gore was practicing law with father and brothers in Corsicana. Gore was also the Party of the People’s candidate for the House of Representatives. He took music lessons from a young blind girl, the ward of a local couple. The “music lessons” sound truly far-fetched. Gore was tone-deaf. Every time the national anthem was played, he invariably said, “Now, there’s a catchy tune.”

I cannot tell what is true and what is not true in the deposition of one S. P. Render. But the story is hair-raising. In 1914, Render found the blind girl in Galveston, Texas, where she was giving music lessons and living in genteel poverty. The Gores had, she told Render, thrown her out years earlier. As for the pregnancy, Gore was responsible. “I was engaged to [him] and I loved him as well as a child—for I was at that time, in heart, a child, in mind a child . . . but I did not submit to him of my own free will. He overpowered me and I could do nothing.” When she told him she was pregnant, he plied her with medicines, saying that “the fever” must break. When this failed to make her abort, “some little instrument” was used. Mr. Render says that Gore was put on trial—(who was the plaintiff?)—for seduction and abortion, criminal offenses in Texas. Just before the trial, the blind girl told Render that Gore came to her and begged her to answer no questions at the trial on the ground that she would not only destroy his career but also the lives of his “aged” parents, who had never harmed anyone. Finally, she concedes. “‘The little one is gone—you could not shield him and you have done all you can against me’ and I said, ‘If you promise me you will be a better man . . . I will accede to your wishes, I don’t see any good that could come in me doing otherwise;’ and then I was almost immediately conducted into the courtroom. I followed out his wishes as far as I could . . .” Render adds that Gore, as a lawyer, knew that no court in Texas would send to prison a blind girl who refused to answer questions of the court.

In the Bond case, the judge ruled that any previous adventures of either plaintiff or defendant could not be admitted as evidence. Was Gore guilty? In the Bond case, most unlikely. It was too obvious a political trap. In the blind girl case, he was indeed guilty, as his brother Ellis said after my 1960 television play The Indestructible Mr. Gore, in which I followed the family line, to Dot’s dread until she saw the actual program, which delighted her. Ellis sourly noted that not only was Guv guilty as charged but that he got their parents to take the girl as part of a deal made with her. I now understand why he resisted all biographers as well as publishers interested in memoirs. “My life,” he said to me, “is a dull one and there is so much that I cannot tell.”

I have just learned from a Mississippi relative that two years after the program aired, during the war between Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and me, Bobby sent a request to the county clerk in Eupora, asking for details of the Senator’s life. The clerk, loyal to his own, threw the request in the wastebasket. Had he not, there would now be on the bookshelves of the republic The Thousand Lecherous Days of T. P. Gore, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

DURING THE INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC OF 1918, Dah nearly died; and never entirely recovered his strength. He was also about to die of diabetes when, like the now legendary lady from Boston, Fate saved him—for more torments? Insulin was invented and so, more or less in the normal course, he died of a stroke from high blood pressure in 1949, age seventy-eight, while joking with Dot at breakfast. The two of them had a merry private language, immediately discarded when others intruded, and he would assume a cool gravitas while she would be gracious lady of the house.

Gore’s personal triumph over blindness had become so powerful a myth in his own time that his actual political career was somewhat occluded, while his intellectual powers and wit, though duly acknowledged, were hardly treasured by the folk he represented, much less by Americans at large. There is no first-rate biography of him, thanks largely to Dot’s carelessness with papers. In the attic at Rock Creek, most of his archives were strewn over the floor or stacked in trunks and broken boxes. Unable to see this mess, he probably didn’t realize that his history was being erased through sloth.

In the absence of primary texts, the Woodrow Wilson biographers seem not to have got much out of him. A. S. Link regards him as a political manipulator and not much more. But biographers of prophets tend to be proprietary of their great men, and Gore was always there to say no to ambitious transgression whether in the name of the Republic, the common man, or the Almighty.

Bryan’s nomination in 1908 had, predictably, ensured a Republican victory. But as a leading populist-Democrat in the Senate, Gore was now ready for a winner. He began to engineer an alliance between the populists of the South and Southwest and the big-city bosses of the East. The result was the nomination of Woodrow Wilson, a one-term New Jersey governor who had sworn faithfully to serve the local bosses; then, more in sorrow than in anger, he double-crossed them. Wilson’s subsequent alliance with Bryan and Gore was a necessity for him and a convenience for them. The tribunes of South and West, of farm and factory, had their permanent base in Congress; the White House was simply a pleasant extra.

Gore ran Wilson’s campaign out of Chicago. When the Republican vote was split between Taft and Roosevelt, the truly eloquent, if not entirely sound of mind, Wilson was elected president. Bryan was made secretary of state. Later, when it became clear that Wilson was maneuvering the United States into the First World War, Bryan honorably resigned. I’ve always thought him of far more consequence than historians now do. They remember his ignominious end at the “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, not to mention the three defeats for president. But I think of him—like Gore in the early days—as a literally popular voice raised against the bold, crude ownership of the nation, and a resolute enemy to the end, like Gore, of those wars that the ownership never ceases to wage against what it takes to be enemies of its financial system.

In the Senate, Gore was expected to forward Wilson’s ambitious domestic program, which he did, enthusiastically, even though the two had personally fallen out after the election, when the Senate was in the process of “organizing” itself—that is, selecting various officers and setting up legislative procedures. The all-important post of secretary to the Senate had not yet been filled. Wilson sent for Gore, on an urgent matter. “I would like,” said Wilson, “for the Senate to appoint my brother, Joseph, secretary. He is highly qualified and . . .”

Gore listened, astonished. Finally, he said that he never thought he would have to remind so eminent a historian as the author of Constitutional Government in the United States that the legislative and executive branches of the government were forever equal and forever separate and that for the executive to have his own brother, as an executive spy, in the councils of the legislature would make a perfect hash of the separation of powers.

“Wilson never forgave me for that.” Dah is in his rocking chair, cracking peanuts, lap covered with their shells; the bushy white hair is in an interesting tangle. “Of course, he was the sort of man who got uneasy if you ever raised your eyes higher than the third button on his waistcoat. As for me”—the crooked smile. “Well, whenever there’s a Republican president, I’m a Democrat, and when there’s a Democratic one, I’m out of step.” He sounded more amused than sad. As a politician, he was a lone wolf. I suppose, at heart, he was more Whig than populist and no conservative at all, at least in the current sense of the word—one who serves unquestioningly the wealthy interests that control American life while parroting official cant of the “better dead than Red” sort. He particularly loathed Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase “age of the common man.”

“There was never such an age and never will be and it goes beyond the limits of necessary demagoguery to pretend that there could even be such a thing.” He also disliked Lincoln’s rhetoric. “Was there ever a fraud greater than this government of, by, and for the people?” He threw back his head, the voice rose: “What people, which people? When he made that speech, almost half the American people had said that the government of the North was not of, by, or for them. So then Lincoln, after making a bloody war against the South, has the effrontery to say that this precious principle, which he would not extend to the southern people, was the one for which the war had been fought. Well, he did say this at a graveyard for northern soldiers. I suppose that was appropriate.” If I got anything from Dah, it was the ability to detect the false notes in those arias that our shepherds lull their sheep with.

I always found him noblest when he put his career at risk for some overriding principle. He thought that no foreign war was worth the life of any American. Neither do I. When the Oklahoma City chamber of commerce ordered him to vote for war in 1917, he wired them, “How many of your members are of draft age?” He was defeated in 1920. But he was reelected in 1930, on the same principles, he liked to say, that had defeated him a decade earlier. The comeback was a dim affair. “I remember asking a political friend, just before I entered the race, what was the mood of the people nowadays, and he said, ‘They’re a lot harder to tickle now.’”

I used to sit on the floor of the attic, reading newspaper cuttings from every period of his life. I recall a particularly savage attack on him in 1930, mocking his “hoary jokes,” along with a photograph of the Rock Creek Park house, supposedly built with the tainted oil money of one Doheney. Out of office, Gore had written a legal brief for the oilman. When Doheney went to prison, for the Teapot Dome oil field scandal, my father took Gore, very nervous indeed, to the prison cell. Why they met, I don’t know. But the fact that he had been briefly, while out of office, a lawyer to the master of corruption earned T. P. Gore the sobriquet “Teapot Gore.” Such is the nature of reputation: The religious man is known to be an atheist; the generous man is called mean. Some years ago an actress told me that everyone knew that Noël Coward liked to eat shit. I was horrified. I knew Coward well. He was as fastidious about sex as everything else. When I saw her recently, she said, “I’ve never forgotten what you told me about Noël Coward, that he liked to eat shit.” Thus I have been transformed into the source of a truly sick invention that will be grist to the satanic mills of Capotes as yet unborn.

Courage was Gore’s most notable trait. But then his great-grandfather had been a Methodist preacher of such somber fire and will that he was known as “Rock” Gore. On the demerit side, Dah did not think that government money should go to anybody if he could help it. “When I first came to the Senate, there were still pensioned widows from the war of 1812. Give someone a pension and you create a Methuselah.” Coldly, he refused the request of a delegation of the blind for government aid. He had been able to make his way, he told them, and so could they. This was disingenuous. “When I was young, cheese and crackers was one word to me,” he used to say, emphasizing his poverty. Bored with this repetition, I am said to have responded, at the age of six or so, “Well, ice cream and cake are one word to me.”

Actually, the Gores were well-to-do for their time and place. He was born in 1870, among the ruins of Walthall, Mississippi. Yet even then, when the university degree was the principal dividing line between lawyers, teachers, divines and the redneck peasantry, most of the Gore clan was educated.

Not long ago, I visited the house where he was born, set in lush green chigger-ridden countryside. There is a large parlor with a fireplace from whose wooden mantelpiece he had detached a sliver. “I was here,” said the old woman who owns the house today, “when the Senator came home. You know he had said when he left Mississippi that he would never come back unless he could came back as a United States senator. Well, he was true to his word. Everyone was very excited. Then he came out here and asked my father if he could have a piece off the old mantel.”

Through the middle of the house there is a covered open-ended breezeway, a traditional means in the South of cooling a house, as what air there is sweeps through, providing some relief during the equatorial summers. I stood in the small bedroom where Gore was born; felt nothing. Then I went over to the courthouse, where his father had been chancery clerk, and I sat on the same steps where his father had sat all one day in 1861, trying to decide whether or not to join his brothers and friends in a Mississippi rifle company. The Gores were Unionists, and if they had lived across the nearby border in Tennessee, they would have fought for the Union. As it was, reluctantly they fought for one another rather than for slavery, which they despised, or for the ill-starred Confederacy.

It is a pity that so little is understood today about American isolationism. It is accepted that “hyphenate-Americans,” newly arrived from suicidal old Europe, would not want to go back to the continent that they had so recently fled to fight for their new rulers’ investments. But less understood is how old Americans clung so tenaciously to the Washingtonian precept that nations have interests, not friends or enemies, and that wars far from home will, in time, erode the state. Finally, rather more mystically, there was the idea of American exceptionalism. We were intended to be like no other country: We were neo–Noble Savages. More to the point, we had territories so vast that without immigration we could never have filled them up with the descendants of the 3 million residents of the Republic of 1789. So much did we want to keep ourselves to ourselves that John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state to James Monroe, invented the Monroe Doctrine, denying any European power a foothold anywhere in our hemisphere while swearing a great oath that we would never meddle in European politics, much less wars. Wilson abrogated that doctrine in 1917.

Of course, from the beginning, we were twice-cursed in our garden of Eden—first, with the peculiar institution of slavery; then, with the systematic dispossession of the original Mongol population, known fancifully as Indians. Ironically, after the Gores had become prosperous in northern Mississippi during the 1840s by taking over what had been Chickasaw land, T. P. Gore went west to the territories to which the Chickasaws had been removed, and in effect, by creating Oklahoma, he helped rob them of their land a second time. Also ironically—guiltily?—he tended to take the side of the Indians in their losing disputes with the government over the stolen lands. From 1936 to 1949, he worked as an attorney for the Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes, and some years after his death, they finally won a judgment against the federal government, Gore’s ultimate atonement to the people that we had dispossessed.

The spirit of Harry of the West, as Henry Clay was known, was the spirit of the border people from Clay to Lincoln to Gore. “Internal improvements” were what interested these rustic paladins. When imperialist President Polk gave us the Mexican War, which in turn gave us what is now one third of the United States, including California, Congressman Lincoln denounced him (Lieutenant U. S. Grant did, too) on the ground that we were behaving like a predatory European power. We were supposed to create our unique Arcadia without border raids on other countries. We certainly needed no more land. Wasn’t the Monroe Doctrine our holy text?—along with the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed as a universal human given the right not only to pursue happiness but the implicit right to separate from an onerous foreign master.

Gore came out of the border world. He represented the ruined farmers of the Civil War, who would later be victimized by eastern financiers, playing casino with the price of cotton. “Seven-cent cotton” was one of the first phrases I can remember hearing.

In due course, Bryan and Gore and the other liberals—today called conservatives or nativists or worse—reached out to labor, organized or not. Hence, Gore’s mysterious appearance in Darrow’s courtroom, where union labor was on trial. The Civil War that had brought ruin to the South had also awakened all sorts of energies that led to new alliances. In effect, the Party of the People took over the Democratic party, and despite the presence of the big-city bosses, who at least represented the working man, unionized or not, the party was for the working people at large in a way that the Republicans could not be, since they tended to agree with Alexander Hamilton that the rich were wiser and better than the poor and so ought to be allowed to rule the country and do business without popular interference. Conflicts between the two sides continue to this day. But for Gore and the other populists, the imperialism of the two Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson—Polk, too, earlier—was a terrible distraction from our destiny, which was the perfection of our own unusual if not, in the end, particularly “exceptional” society.

I sit with Dah in the living room of his flat in Crescent Place, just across the street from the stately house of Agnes and Eugene Meyer, owners of The Washington Post, that official voice of empire. The Rock Creek Park house was sold in the war: impossible to heat. I am still in uniform, a warrant officer back from the Aleutians. Dah rocks in his Mission chair. Discusses my political career and what he calls “the New Mexico option,” because “Oklahoma is too volatile.” He always winced at the thought of his Bible-loving constituency. “Of course, you were born in New York. Why not take advantage of that? Why not get yourself a district in the city? You pay Tammany Hall your first year’s salary and, except for city matters, they leave you alone.” I thought this a dead end.

Then we talked of the past. He had got into the habit of answering my long, questioning letters with long ones of his own. I thought that his to me were lost in the war when my mother threw out all my clothes, books, and papers, on the sensible ground that, like Jimmie, I’d not be coming back. But apparently Dah kept not only my letters but carbons of his own to me. Excerpts have been published in World Literature Today, by one Marvin J. La Hood, who found the collection at a university library.

It is nice to hear Dah’s voice again; disconcerting to hear my own, a sort of schoolboy Machiavelli with, alas, a non-Machiavellian fury to be in the right, like my politically martyred grandfather. Apparently, the Senator wrote me an eleven-page disquisition on Roosevelt’s character, not quoted in full. But I can guess its gist. Like his fifth cousin Teddy and his former commander in chief Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt had always been eager to play an imperial role on the world scene. To make internal improvements in a country like the United States was as difficult then as it is now.

I always thought Dah somewhat invidious whenever he discussed the ever-more imperial trappings of the presidency and the blaze of world publicity, which, from Wilson’s triumph at Versailles to Bush’s vomiting in the lap of the Japanese prime minister, was the outward and visible sign of our imperium’s military glory and economic primacy. But all that is now quickly fading away and one can see how quaintly prescient we were over fifty years ago.

The correspondence begins on March 9, 1940. I am at the Los Alamos Ranch School, in Otowi, New Mexico. Apparently, I’ve been reading about the First World War and Gore’s ambivalent maneuverings in the Senate.

Gore explains his “resolution [that] warned American citizens not to exercise the right to travel on the armed ships of a belligerent. . . . I introduced that resolution two or three days after the celebrated Sunrise Conference which is now ‘historic’ . . . I thought then that we were speeding headlong into war—as we were.” For someone brought up in the wreckage of the Civil War, any foreign war seemed like perfect folly. For someone who detested the country’s ruling class, the idea of a war that would be profitable only to the Rockefellers and to the Morgans was insupportable. Certainly, those who actually fought the war would not do well out of it. But then they never do. From one of Jimmie Trimble’s last letters to his mother from Iwo Jima: “After the war, we won’t receive any credit for having been out here. It’s the smart guy who stays in the States earning money. I’m not even getting much self-satisfaction by telling myself that I’m at least doing my part, for peace of mind does no good if anything happens.” Three weeks later something happened. When I wrote in a memorial issue of Newsweek about the war and Jimmie’s death, letters from ex-marines began to arrive. They are still in a rage at what was done to them, not to mention all the dead.

Dah’s letters also contain exhortations for me to get better grades. This is a constant refrain throughout my school days. I was thought to be reasonably intelligent by the various schools that I attended; certainly, I was often more widely—if eccentrically—read than many of my teachers, which was not saying much; unfortunately for me—and irritatingly for them—I have never been so bored, before or since, as I was by the courses that I was obliged to take and pass. For an energetic mind, with a passion to know everything, to be confined to translating from the Latin that dismal miniaturist Cornelius Nepos was exquisite torture, particularly when I was being denied, at least in class, Suetonius, Juvenal, Tacitus—and Livy, whom I had read at seven, in English. Worse, what passed for education in those days involved the memorizing of everything from Latin subjunctive verbs to mathematical theorems. Outside reading was not encouraged; neither was thought.

Dah has duly noted my ambition but fears that I will turn out like my mother and her brother, indolent Washington types who believed implicitly in the Law of the Lobbyist: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

“The power to excel is not the same as the desire to excel,” he writes me. “You know, a west Texas jackrabbit has a habit of running on three feet until pressed by the hounds, then he puts down his fourth foot and runs off and leaves them.” Dah wants to see my fourth foot in action. I suppose I wanted to see the hounds first.

Dah’s socialist impulses eroded with time. He had wanted to nationalize the railroads when he helped write the constitution of the state of Oklahoma, and I believe that this virtuous proposal is still in the text. But despite his expertise on banking and currency in the Senate, he detested Maynard Keynes without quite understanding him. He grasped, reluctantly, tax and spend in bad economic times, but he never took in the other side to Keynesianism: Try to make money in good times and in the classic marketplace.

In the letters, Dah deeply dislikes Roosevelt both personally and politically. “He worships at the shrine of Power and Popularity.” There is now, he notes, almost $50 billion of national debt, hardly a “Star Wars” price tag for what was meant to be a New Deal for those millions of people undone by a vast depression. The worst hit, as Dah had prophesied, were the veterans of that war for Wilson’s greater personal glory. I had always thought Gore’s concentration on one man’s vanity too petty a motivation for the American role in the events of 1914–17. But when I came to study Wilson at Versailles, blithely carving up the Austro- Hungarian empire, I could understand why this ignorant would-be Metternich drove Dr. Freud so mad that he felt obliged to publish a libelous “psychoanalysis” of Wilson, without having met him, of course. Although Freud’s analysis is nearly as demented as Wilson’s imperial—even messianic—behavior, he does echo Gore’s original analysis of a prim American schoolteacher whose ignorant self-esteem never faltered. As I write, Wilson’s handiwork is now exploding in what proved to be his dottiest invention, Yugoslavia.

Senator Gore was obliged to observe three American caesars in action. In his youth, there was Theodore Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War, followed by the bloody conquest and subjugation of the Philippines. When Gore came to the Senate at thirty-seven, Roosevelt was still president, and an anathema to a tribune of the farmers and workers. Then, twice, Gore helped elect Wilson president. From the start, there had been a vague understanding between them that the egregious Marshall be replaced as vice president in the second term by Gore, but, as of 1916, relationships were so bad between Wilson and Gore that the Senator decided to sit out the election. When it became obvious that Wilson was going to lose, Gore got a desperate call from the White House. The election would be determined by California. Gore was popular in California. Would he stump the state? Gore made one condition: The slogan must be “He kept us out of war” and, presumably, “he” would do the same in the second term. Gore barnstormed California. Then he wired the White House the exact margin by which Wilson would carry the state. That night Wilson’s opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, went to bed as president of the United States. But the next morning California was heard from and Gore’s predicted plurality reversed the election. Wilson was president; and the war came.

Dah turns on the radio news. He prefers right-wing commentators like Fulton Louis, Jr. He did not live long enough to realize just how conservative a president Roosevelt was at home or how much a radical imperialist he was abroad, breaking up the colonial empires of our allies as well as those of our enemies and, like metal filings to a magnet, attracting their fragments to us. But in the forties, all that Gore can see is the vast amount of debt—so puny compared to what the truly radical Reagan was to give us.

“These debts,” Dah writes me, “constitute a first lien, a first mortgage on every dollar’s worth of private property. . . . However, all this is not the most fatal defect in the New Deal: it has spoiled the character and the morals, spoiled the souls of millions of our people. I have always thought that self-respect is the sheer anchor of human character. As long as it holds, there is hope. When it breaks there is no hope, there is nothing left.” Thus speaks the Protestant conscience, not to mention, alas, Herbert Hoover.

I have always regarded Roosevelt’s improvisations in a kindlier light. It was the Depression brought on by the higher capitalism that denied people work, and Roosevelt was there, no matter how opportunistically, to get the people, as well as the capitalists, through bad times. But there is indeed a terrible truth in Gore’s observations on the necessity of self-respect—of individual autonomy. In order to exclude the black minority from American society, the white majority decided to pay them off with welfare, thus seeing to it that there would be no “anchor” for many black families for many generations. No wonder so many are now choosing the fire this time as the ultimate “self-respect.”

“Those crowds,” he begins, turning off Fulton Lewis, Jr. Amos ’n’ Andy would soon be on, his favorite comedy, swarming with politically incorrect “Negro” stereotypes. “Those crowds that Wilson saw in Europe.” He shakes his head; the white hair is now all on end as two cowlicks meet, and Dot will soon have to start unsnarling and combing them straight. “I suppose any man’s head would be turned by them. Now Roosevelt has gone to Yalta. At least there won’t be any crowds. But he’ll be just like Wilson. He won the war, and he’ll make the peace, or so he thinks. But Churchill and Stalin will be too smart for him. Just as Lloyd George and Clemenceau were too smart for Wilson. Then there’s the fact he’s dying, which doesn’t help matters. . . .”

It is curious how everyone knows everything in Washington while the people of the country, at least in those days, know nothing about their rulers. Until television, our capital was always rather like the secret Kremlin in its Stalinist glory days. We all knew, but the public did not, that Crown Princess Martha of Norway, the president’s last love, had moved into the White House and that Missy Le Hand, maîtresse en titre and secretary, moved out and died of a broken heart. When Roosevelt, in front of the newsreel cameras, presented the crown princess with a warship, our nomenklatura whispered, “How like him! Most men give their mistress diamonds. But not our czar. He gives her a destroyer.”

From Dah’s letter to me on my fifteenth birthday: “I compare or contrast your opportunities now with mine when I was your age and I all but envy you. I lived thirty miles from the railroad and attended a school which ran about four or five months a year—in a building 30 by 50 there was no fifth dimension.” Nevertheless, by then, he had freed himself of that religion which was—and still is—a terrible blight in his part of the world. At nine or ten, told that if he had faith he could fly, he attached cornstalks to his arms and climbed out onto the roof of a barn and took off, to fly around the world. He broke his collarbone. Later, when his father decided to abandon the family Methodism for the Campbellite variant of fundamentalism, the family was ordered to choose its brand. The mother stayed as she was. Two children became Campbellites, for Father’s sake. Gore turned atheist, a daring thing to do then—and now—in Mississippi. On the other hand, he did not let it be generally known that he was a nonbeliever; if he had, he could not have had a political career. A conundrum that he liked. “Can God, the all-powerful, do anything?”

“Yea! Yea!”

“No, He can’t.”

“What can’t He do?”

“Can’t make a year-old heifer in a minute.”

“’Course He can. Why, in just a minute, there it is.”

“Yes, but no matter how big that heifer is, it’s still only a minute old and not a year.”

In November 1942, I write him: “I can see now why you aren’t in the Senate. It surprises me that people had enough sense to keep you for as long as they did. When I start running I am going to call spades, spades, fools, fools, New Dealers, Jack asses, and I shall be beaten by a comfortable majority.” Professor La Hood finds this prophetic but notes that in 1964, had I run again for the House of Representatives, I would have been elected.

From Antigua, I write Dah about my new friend, the president of the Guatemalan Congress: “They respect men of learning here and don’t try to reduce them to the lowest possible common denominator.”

Dah is amused: “I particularly enjoyed the last paragraph, where you mentioned the fact that in certain localities you have to appear genial and a little half-witted in order to woo the omnipotent public.”