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THIRTY-THREE

I now realize that I was brought up at the heart of aviation and, simultaneously, through my grandfather, at the then true heart of U.S. politics, the Senate. I lived much of my first seventeen years at Senator and Mrs. Gore’s Rock Creek Park house on Broad Branch Road, where I was more and more put to work as a reader to the Senator which I enjoyed, particularly when we were done with the Congressional Record and he would get me to reading Brann the Iconoclast, Robert Ingersoll, and other freethinkers and skeptics, as well as Mark Twain whose complete works were kept not in the attic library with several thousand other books but in the drawing room for a quick fix when “we” read after dinner and Mrs. Gore, relieved of her reading duties, could retreat to her upstairs sitting room and devour serials in Redbook and Ladies Home Companion. Neither the Senator nor I could understand what she saw in those stories but she had earned her free time or, as the Senator used to chuckle when any of us wearied while reading to him, “Both of Milton’s daughters are said to have gone blind reading to him.” We were led to believe that it was upon a very high altar indeed that we were being sacrificed. Between grandfather and father I inhabited two worlds, each fascinating to me. I was not interested in my father’s so-called legendary career as a jock but his life with Lindbergh and Earhart and the Wright brothers was magical. Also, the serenity of his nature was in benign contrast to my mother’s raging nature. I saw her as little as possible; unfortunately, she saw to it that I was not going to spend much time with the Gores or Gene after her marriage to Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, who, through his mother, a Jennings, was a Standard Oil heir. His oleaginous money kept me at schools farther and farther away from Rock Creek and the Gores as well as from Gene, now removed to New York City with a new wife and two new children. Later, when Nina had left Auchincloss, she married her air force general who died early of a blood disease, but by then I was in the army and Gene had been brevetted a major general in the air force to oversee the army’s development of new weapons, while his younger brother was a brigadier general in charge of an air force fighter wing stationed in Italy. Gene was distressed at not being given a more combatant role but a coronary thrombosis a few years earlier nearly kept him entirely out of the war. Through father, stepfather, uncle, I got to know, off duty, as it were, many of the great air commanders from Tooey Spaatz to General Doolittle to Pete Quesada to Nate Twining to Uzal G. Ent who took out the Ploesti oil fields (he was also a descendant of one of the original Siamese twins). Many of these generals were startlingly young even to my youthful eye. Like so many of the early fliers they were a race apart. They also tended to political conservatism—but then so did I, not to mention Jack Kennedy who was very much his father’s son. My enthusiasm for FDR only developed after the war due to exposure to Eleanor. But I was sometimes shocked to hear generals (not the ones noted above) talk about how easy it would be to get rid of Roosevelt through a military coup. Apparently we were fighting the wrong enemy. Stalin not Hitler was the threat. These bull sessions were pretty much just that, fueled by bourbon. After all, none of them was as eloquent as T. P. Gore in denouncing the president. But the Senator never dreamed of a military coup while Gene quite liked the president except for his propensity to lie even when there was no need to. Also, West Point trained its future officers to be accountable for their deeds, unlike presidents who tend cheerfully to outsource blame. When FDR insisted that the army pilots fly the mail despite his director of air commerce’s fierce resistance, the result was the death of many pilots as my father had predicted: “We are not trained for flying in all weather. I know. I’m one of them.” But FDR ordered the air force into action. After a number of disasters he called in Gene: “Well, Brother Vidal, we seem to have a problem.” This was the only time I ever heard Gene express disgust for the president. “I really liked that ‘we.’ ” But Gene was no politician; his fellow West Pointer Eisenhower was. When a similar disaster befell President Eisenhower he sent Jim Hagerty, his press aide, to take the blame for a presidential error. “But,” Hagerty whined, “after what I said yesterday to the press corps they’ll tear me apart.” “Better, my boy,” said the smiling Eisenhower, “you than me.”

That fliers are—or once were—temperamentally unlike other people is not unnatural. They operated above the earth in every sense. But while the first pilots were uncommonly brave and, often, uncommonly disdainful of us earthbound ants, as flight became more and more universal the differences were less sharp except now in the military where they are beginning to show up in odd ways. Even our slow-witted media is reporting recent problems at the Air Force Academy where Christian evangelicals are now raising hell in Heaven’s name by attacking non-Christians with unseemly fervor. Since all of us pay for that academy, and most of us are not Christian zealots, I keep thinking of those generals long ago speaking of the need to send Roosevelt home in order to fight Godless Communism. There now appears to be something potentially dangerous afoot in our military; troops that could very well heed a call to arms of a revolutionary sort.

Between air cadets who are being indoctrinated as Christian soldiers proceeding ever onward and disgusted army reservists vanishing without leave from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the resignations of high-ranking senior officers, our military has been demoralized by the oil-and-gas junta that has seized the government provoking—what? During the Second War Curtis LeMay, commanding general of the B-29s that finished off Japan, was also a voice demanding that we must always be quick to bomb disobedient peoples back into the Stone Age, yet, to his credit, he was one of the senior commanders who begged President Truman not to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (On the ground that his 20th Air Force had already leveled Japan and he did not want his triumphant devastation obscured by last-minute novelties?)

Gene’s younger brother was a charming South Dakota Republican as was, indeed, Gene himself. Although Pick, as General Vidal was known, very much shared the sense of difference that existed between airmen and land-men he was pretty much apolitical except that, postwar, he had bonded with another airman, Barry Goldwater, paladin of far right America. I cannot say I grasped much of this at the time. As, briefly, the “boy pilot,” I was a sort of mascot of the fliers as I had been mascot of the Army football team of 1925 which had gone down to serious defeat, no doubt on orders from the sky god.

Pick and Goldwater often flew together once Goldwater became a junior Senator from Arizona and Pick was posted to Washington. Both were brigadier generals in the Air Force Reserve.

The year after I ran for Congress and was labeled a “liberal” because I thought we should recognize the existence of Red China as there seemed to be so many people living there (this is irony), Ralph Graves, editor of Life magazine, asked me if I would interview what looked like the next Republican candidate for president against Jack Kennedy in 1964. This meant a lot of reading of speeches on my part but I thought, why not? Goldwater assumed that as the nephew of his friend I’d be friendly even though our chat would be billed as a conversation between a conservative and a liberal. Hard to imagine today such a piece being allowed in what was then perhaps the largest-circulation magazine in the country and devoted, as was its owner, to an ever-expanding American empire and the Christianization of China.

Although I had written in many different genres I had never been a journalist; this meant that I had never been obliged to interview anyone. My uncle thought I would like Barry. I did. But my odd foreboding about those who fly in the wild blue yonder was becoming almost as great as was my fear of those Christians who hanker after that eternal life where Jesus wants them as sunbeams to light the way for the rest of us.

I met Goldwater in his fourth-floor Senate office. I found him a politician of some grace and skill who at that moment was studying the political sky for omens. Would his moment come in the presidential election of 1964 or 1968 or never? There was some evidence that this year he was a divided man, uncertain how to proceed. Camelot was still under construction as we chatted in his office. But the foundations of that future magical kingdom were already shadowed by Kennedy’s unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and by Khrushchev’s Berlin Wall. Also, for Goldwater to get the Republican nomination for president in 1964 he would have to take on such powerful “moderate” figures as Nelson Rockefeller.

I took longhand notes. Since Goldwater at his desk was backlit, I described his eyes as dark when fans later wrote me they were blue. He came across as a straightforward unpolished man who held many cranky views which the voters sometimes guiltily identified with but would probably not vote for. Now, as I write, the Cheney-Bush junta is reenacting the Goldwater agendum. I wrote in Life how “Goldwater, reluctantly, realizes that Social Security is here to stay—it is too late to take it away—but he thinks the program should be voluntary and certainly not enlarged to include medical care for the aged or anything else. He favors breaking off diplomatic relations with the Russians; he wants to present them wherever possible with a take-it-or-leave-it, peace or war attitude. He noted sadly that when conservative true believers in the Republican Party come to nominate a candidate for president they invariably choose a liberal or moderate candidate.” So I proposed: “Why not start a third party?” He was brisk. “If I thought it would work, I might. But I don’t know. Third parties never get off the ground in this country…For one thing conservatism is pretty divided…No. A political party can only start around a strong individual.” He looked past me at the bust of Lincoln on the mantelpiece; his jaw set. “Like Lincoln.” Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed my piece. “For me he’s the dream Republican candidate, while Nelson Rockefeller could be trouble.”

I ended my piece with Cicero’s warning to a fellow political adventurer, in a falling year of the Roman republic: “I am sure you understand the political situation into which you have…no, not stumbled but stepped; for it was by deliberate choice and by no accident that you flung your tribunate into the very crisis of things; and I doubt not that you reflect how potent in politics is opportunity, how shifting the phases, how incalculable the issue of events, how easily swayed are men’s predilections, what pitfalls there are and what insincerity in life.” When this was published June 9, 1961, Henry Luce complimented the editor on its brilliance, adding, “I never again want to see a piece like that in Life.” I gather he never did. Goldwater fans were angry because when I had noted that as a public-relations man for his family’s department store, he had also invented a line of men’s boxer shorts decorated with red ants.

I saw Goldwater several times after our 1961 interview. Once at the Cow Palace in San Francisco when he was nominated for president. Southwestern U.S. had converged on that elegant city. Lady golfers with dangerous-looking tans led his claque. They were also in place to keep the immoral New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller from being nominated. When Nelson tried to speak to the convention they howled him down. Had he not notoriously got rid of his old wife in favor of a younger woman who had been married to one of his employees? For some reason this act of droit de seigneur caused them to shriek like banshees in unison as they shouted their fearsome epithet for him: “Lover!” He fled the stage. Meanwhile cowboy-style Southwestern males wearing alligator boots and Stetson hats were busy chasing the television anchorpersons from the convention floor and back up to their control rooms high above the convention. Since I was covering the convention for Westinghouse I too joined in the flight which somehow drove Huntley and Brinkley and the rest of us through an endless kitchen. Apparently, the rich had had it. They weren’t going to take the likes of us anymore. They also were in no mood to respect their former president, Eisenhower, who was nearly booed down until the crowd finally got a look at his scarlet face and raging eyes. One furious look from the ancient lion shut them all up. He said something and then turned his back on a people he’d never much cared for.

Before I abandoned the convention I chatted with a Mr. White in charge of Goldwater’s press. With me were Norman Mailer and Douglas Kiker. All that I can recall of what any of us said was when Mr. White referred, apropos some recent poll, to “the whiny American people.” This was a truly up-front campaign. Which made it possible, forty years later, for us to enjoy so many recent radical events as well as wild preemptive wars, despite our whines. Some years ago at the Los Angeles airport, as I walked down a corridor toward the baggage area, I saw a very old wispy man pushing a sort of cart with a suitcase on top of it. There was Barry Goldwater, quite alone. The trumpets had ceased. Oddly I was not yet done with the family. In 1982, curious to see what was going on in the political world, I entered the Democratic California primary for U.S. Senate. There were nine contestants led by the sitting governor Jerry Brown. After two terms as governor and an attempt or two at the presidency Jerry was weak while the other candidates, a mayor of Fresno, a state legislator from Orange County were not formidable. On the Republican side it was agreed by all that the senatorial candidate would be Barry Goldwater Junior, a member of the House of Representatives. The name was still magic in ultraconservative circles.

San Francisco: We were in the Cow Palace commenting upon the Republican Convention for Westinghouse. From left to right: historian Allan Nevins, someone from Westinghouse TV, myself, and Marc Connelly, a cheerful playwright whose bald pate had recently been dented when a chair in Manhattan fell on him from above. At the moment the convention delegates are safely behind us. Later we were chased through a labyrinth of kitchens along with other TV worthies thought to be hostile to the candidate from the Southwest, Barry Goldwater.

I spent a year campaigning up and down a state that was larger than most first-world nations. The part of politics that most politicians often hate I liked the most: the crowds, and hearing new things. Unfortunately, the first thing press and pollsters want to know is how much money have you raised? Since I am not able to ask people for money, I had to admit very little. More to the point, I could not say that if I wanted to I could use my own money which was more than enough to win a Senate seat that year. I was counting on two things: Brown was weak and was bound to lose if not in the primary in the general election, while Barry Goldwater Junior was thought to be nothing more than a brand name. During the primary period he and I made appearances at a few candidate meetings. I remember going downstairs with him in an elevator. The press had been making fun of him. He appealed to me: “I don’t think I’m so dumb, do you?” “No dumber than the rest,” I reassured him. Then one day, quite suddenly, he took himself out of the race and his place as Republican front-runner was taken by a powerful politician, Pete Wilson, the mayor of San Diego. I might beat Brown but I could not beat Wilson considering all the money behind him. From that moment on I simply went through the motions. Finally, in the field of nine, I came in second with half a million votes. The last I heard of the campaign was seeing Wilson on TV saying: “Jerry Brown wouldn’t debate Gore Vidal but he’ll debate me.” I never bothered to find out if this memorable confrontation ever took place. Wilson won the Senate seat in order to become governor, an inscrutable choice unless you scrutinize what was actually happening. In subsequent years Jerry and I became political allies. I helped him with speeches when he ran for president against Clinton. Some years before he had entered, at the last minute, a presidential primary against Carter. Suddenly he was winning state after state. Finally, when he won Maryland, thought to be Carter territory, nothing more happened. “Why,” I asked him later, “didn’t you go on to the end?” “Because it was already too late. I’d entered the race too late.”

“You knew you couldn’t win the nomination when you started?”

“Yes. I knew all along.” Jerry has an odd crooked smile which he suddenly deployed. “Do you think I’m neurotic?” he asked, much amused.

Now he is running for state attorney general. “It’s the only job where you can actually do something useful. My father always said it was the one time he was really happy in politics. The governorship is just endless photo ops,” he added.

And so highly suitable for professional actors. Democracy!