Gore Vidal (6 page)

When she became pregnant in early 1925, the decision to leave the fortress on the Hudson was an easy one. They had been there almost three years. Bored as an Army wife, Nina must have anticipated she would be even more bored (and burdened) as the mother of an Army brat. And they needed more than Army pay. Also, Gene's enthusiasm was turning to commercial aviation, a new industry that would require its dreamers, planners,
administrators, heroes, some of whom would become rich and famous. That Gene actually wanted to be a father is doubtful. For his career and his pocketbook, the timing was inconvenient. Probably the news came as a surprise. Nina, who may have seen her pregnancy as a ticket back to civilization, gave birth to an eight-pound boy at the Cadet Hospital at 11 A.M., Saturday, October 3, 1925. Major Howard Snyder, later to become the White House physician to President Eisenhower, was the first to hold the healthy child. A month later, with their one-month-old infant, Nina and Gene moved from West Point to the nation's capital. They were to stay temporarily with her parents at the Gores' newly built house in Rock Creek Park. The baby's cradle there was a chest of drawers. Gene had resigned from the Army. Nina was thrilled to be back in town.

“If
recurrent dreams
can be relied on,” Gore Vidal recalled, “I … have a memory of being born. I am in a narrow 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.” In
The Season of Comfort
, an autobiographical novel of his early adulthood, he dramatized his mother's pain and the child's birth struggle. “The child was partly born; it seemed reluctant to leave the darkness of the womb. But she would scream now. She would scream until she had thrown this thing out of her, until she had dragged her child into the light the living saw.” His earliest vivid memory is of having his head stuck between the slats of a playpen in his bedroom at his grandparents' house, the beginning of his lifelong claustrophobia. His grandmother, who came in response to his screams, immediately freed him. He later remembered it as if the playpen were a prison and his much-loved grandmother his liberator. His mother was, as usual, someplace else, an emotional as well as a physical location. Though she later boasted she had breast-fed him to the age of one, she also thought it great fun to tell people
that she never stopped smoking while the baby nursed. “She could draw a funny picture of her dutifully breast-feeding me while talking to people with ash like Vesuvius on my head,” Gore Vidal recalled. She did not mind people seeing her body. She would hold court even on the toilet seat, with the bathroom door open. Hers was never a household in which the body was private. Partly it was because she had imbibed child-raising theories that advocated naturalness, parents and children seeing one another naked. She was, though, proud of her body and challenged her parents and the general puritan world with her amused indifference to their inhibitions. She was never indifferent to herself, to her claims to attention, admiration, and privilege.

For Gore, childhood was imprisonment, victimization. Later he was to see its drama as his attempt to leave it behind as quickly as possible. At best, parents and children spoke a different language, had different assumptions. Their interests usually diverged. At worst, they were enemies. Dependency, he was to conclude later, inevitably meant abuse. Parents, families, schools were like the slats of the playpen, the prison-house of the world, the incarcerating narrow pelvis twisting and forcing the child to take on the contours imposed by circumstances. The most unavoidable victimization was mortality itself. Not unexpectedly, his baby pictures show a seemingly happy, well-fed boy, with an inquisitive look and the possibility if not the fact of a smile. This was a resilient child. The bureau drawer at his grandfather's house was probably a cozy place to be. His mother breast-fed him successfully, though one year seemed enough. Easily bored, keenly concerned about keeping her figure, she quickly resumed her social life, turning him over to the bottle and nannies. Gene, who soon took the family westward to the University of Oregon, where he briefly served as head football coach, had on his mind the challenge of life and career after the Army. Still in demand as an athlete, he played professional football that year. But one football season at Eugene, Oregon, was enough. He was soon looking at other possibilities, particularly commercial aviation. It too would keep him on the move. Father and son were Big Gene and Little Gene. Big Gene had no hesitation leaving wife and child at the home of his in-laws, who, despite wondering how all this was going to turn out, found their son-in-law charming and likable. He was easy to have around. So too was Little Gene, whom his grandmother immediately adored. Nina Belle Gore, though, could have readily done without her daughter. When she was at home, there was never peace in the
house. The boy himself was a pleasure, and his grandfather, when it became clear that Little Gene might be parked with them for long periods, began to make plans for him.

The Senator was in that worst of all places for a professional politician, out of office. Stubbornly independent, he had come to Washington in 1907 at the age of thirty-seven. Over the years he had never stopped learning things that interested him, especially monetary policy, trade, agriculture, and oil. He had become wise and sometimes cynical about the ways of Washington. About the damned human race he had begun to say that if there were any other, he would join it. In his heart and in some of his politics, he was still a grassroots populist and a fiercely aggressive individualist. At the Democratic convention of 1908, in Denver, he had made a brief but brilliant speech, though he had not been on the program and had been called on to speak extemporaneously during a lull. His speech had turned the convention to William Jennings Bryan. The Senator knew whom he favored and what he himself stood for. He believed in basic truths about money, work, nature, and human nature. Any nation or politician who denied them would, in the end, be decisively corrected. When root issues were at stake, he never varied, a combination of principle and stubbornness that verged on but never quite became arrogance. “‘
After I nominated
[Bryan] at Denver,'” he later remarked to his grandson, “‘we rode back to the hotel in the same carriage and he turned to me and said, “You know, I base my political success on just three things.”' The old man paused for dramatic effect. ‘What were they?'” his grandson asked. “‘I've completely forgotten,' he said. ‘But I do remember wondering why he thought he was a success.'” After a truncated initial term, having drawn the short straw when Oklahoma entered the Union, he was reelected for a full term and, in 1914, elected again. Even in the faction-ridden, backstabbing politics of Oklahoma, he had proved a success. Like his state, he held conservative views on economics and civil rights. He supported both small farmers and the emerging oil industry, and became the key figure in the creation of soil-conservation legislation and the oil-depletion allowance. Known for his integrity, he was both a flinty campaigner and an unbribable politician who lived exclusively on his salary. To some his blindness seemed an affliction that had raised him above ordinary limitations, a sign of integrity.

In 1913–14 he had a close call. It occurred in a Washington Hotel room, where an attractive Oklahoma lady, who had a constituent's petition, accused him of sexually accosting her. He might or might not have put his arm around her. A lapse in judgment or some attraction to excitement resulted in his allowing himself to be alone with her. Why he went to her hotel rather than have her come to his office is unclear. Her confederates, who had entrapped him, burst into the bedroom, which he later claimed he had been told was a parlor. Perhaps they knew about the blind girl he had impregnated two decades earlier. The conspirators were all Oklahomans interested in patronage and money. The plot had been masterminded and financed by a vengeful Oklahoma lawyer, whose claim for $3 million in fees for legal services to Oklahoma Indians the Senator had squashed. The other participants were enemies who saw an opportunity. Senator Gore responded with varying combinations of defiance and conciliation. He declined to pay them off, partly because he did not have the money, mostly because he knew the people to whom he would make the payoff would then publicly reveal it as evidence of his guilt. When his accusers attempted to sue him in Washington, he succeeded in thwarting them. Less successful in Oklahoma, where he was sued for $50,000 damages “for an
alleged attack
upon Mrs. Minnie E. Bond,” he denied the charges. The trial, in Oklahoma City in February 1914, was a sensational melodrama with potentially serious consequences, a Victorian sex and power scandal whetted by the public's interest, whether he were guilty or not, in knowing how a blind man manages sexual escapades. Fortunately, the judge ruled inadmissible anything about Gore's life previous to this incident. Public opinion was mostly on his side in what the newspapers called “The Foul Plot Against Gore.” The jury stayed out for less than three minutes. “Senator Gore and his wife stood immediately in front of the jury box,” where they had been sitting throughout the hearing. When the foreman stated that the judgment was for the defendant, the courtroom erupted into cheers, “bedlam broke loose among the crowd.” Mrs. Gore cried.

He had an even higher price to pay in 1920. He was defeated for reelection mostly because he had opposed America entering World War I. In 1912, with the election of a Democratic President, his star had shone brightly. He had campaigned vigorously for Woodrow Wilson. With the Senate mostly dominated by powerful Republicans, Wilson needed the support of the Senator from Oklahoma with a strong populist base who was
widely admired for his legislative abilities. Gore saw the possibility for higher office, maybe ultimately the presidency. Though they were not essentially a compatible couple, Wilson and Gore danced together for a while. In 1914 Gore opposed American involvement in the war in Europe. So too did Wilson, publicly pledged to neutrality. In the closely contested election of 1916, Gore, whose hope to be nominated as Wilson's running mate had been disappointed, at first hardly campaigned; the relationship had cooled considerably. But Wilson soon seemed a likely loser, and in response to a desperate call from the White House, Gore agreed to go to California, where his populism and his South/Southwestern background made him a congenial figure. He campaigned vigorously and had good reason to believe that without his help the President would have lost California and consequently the White House. Naturally, their relationship worsened thereafter: Wilson was not pleased to be indebted to Gore. In fact, the President and his Anglophile supporters, who increasingly favored American intervention in Europe, soon came to hate the Oklahoma senator. From the depths of his personality, his principles, and his populist roots, Gore violently opposed the shedding of American blood on behalf of what he believed were corrupt, undemocratic European regimes. His voice was constantly heard in the Senate and throughout the land. A severe, almost mortal, bout of influenza diminished his energy but not his antiwar persistence.

When, in 1917, America entered the conflict, Gore voted for every bill in support of American armed forces while denouncing America's participation in the war itself. Principle overcame expediency. A man who did not easily make friends now made many enemies. Wilson denounced
him
. When war fever swept the country, some of his supporters and all of his enemies in Oklahoma could not or would not distinguish between his support of American armed forces and opposition to the war. Aware he was in trouble, he did not realize how seriously until, during his 1920 primary reelection campaign, his opponents made the eagle scream. Gore was unpatriotic. Gore had supported the enemy. Gore had betrayed his country. Gore was a traitor. He neither retreated nor apologized. He believed he had been both honorable and right. But it soon became clear that when the new term began he would be out of office. “He wrote himself out of the main script all his career,” his grandson later remarked, “taking unpopular stands, telling people to go fuck themselves if they didn't like what he was doing…. The
Chamber of Commerce [in Oklahoma] sent him a telegram saying if he didn't support a declaration of war they'd see to it that he'd be defeated in the next election. He wired back, ‘How many members of the Chamber of Commerce are of draft age?' He was a coalition of one. It was really his enchantment of the people, which was very powerful, that kept him in office. He was their voice. But if you go against a sudden tidal wave of feeling …” At the last session of the old Senate he hid in his desk a note stating when he believed he would return—in six or at the most twelve years—as authentication of his belief that he would be back, determined he would again become an active member of that exclusive club. In the meantime he settled for and settled down to the comparatively dull Washington life of a temporary ex-senator and a brilliant orator. He needed to earn a living. Oratory and the law had always been his bread and butter. His expertise in monetary policy and in oil depletion brought him clients for whom he felt he could lobby honorably. For the first time in his life he started to make money beyond his necessary expenses, much of which he used to purchase three acres of land in Rock Creek Park, at 1500 Broad Branch Road, on which he built a handsome house of gray-yellow Baltimore stone. He was the first Gore since the seventeenth century to own property in Washington. Secluded, almost rural, enveloped in woods and sunlight, the house was only a short drive to the Capitol whose dome could be seen from nearby heights.