The Last Empire (34 page)

I shall give myself the last word here, as I did in 1992 when I predicted that Clinton would beat Bush, as he will beat Dole in 1996, barring the detonation of some rustic honey wagon in his path. “Clinton’s greatest asset,” I wrote then, “is a perfect lack of principle. With a bit of luck, he will be capable, out of a simple starry-eyed opportunism, to postpone our collapse. After all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was equally unprincipled.” My ironic compliments were, of course, misunderstood in media-land, where I was accused of calling both FDR and Clinton crooks, which they were—and are—but no more than any other politicians in a society whose elections are as corrupt as ours. Actually, I was paying each the high compliment of being a nonideological pragmatist, unlike the true believer, who will destroy the world or, failing that, brings us Auschwitz or the Great Depression. What is needed in a time of class and race wars is a quick-witted, devious, soothing leader, always
sufficiently nimble to stay a step or two ahead of a polity that, if it is going anywhere, is heading down the economic scale, jettisoning, in its dizzy progress, our sacred “inalienable rights.”

Finally, no matter how great Clinton’s plurality or majority,
he
now knows, even if we don’t, that he will not be allowed to do much of anything at home. He doesn’t find economics as boring as Nixon did, because he knows more about such things. But Clinton might find it wise, once reelected, to reverse some of the astonishing notions that he has recently put forward in order to preempt reactionary opponents.

I ended my piece in 1992 with “We must wish Clinton luck. After all, if he fails,
he
will be the last president.” Many thought this melodramatic—the office will go on, even if the country should find its eventual niche somewhere between Argentina and Brazil. But I meant “last” in the sense that if the half of the people who now don’t vote are joined by too many more, then the high office is itself irrelevant, something that Clinton sensed when he declared, in a fit of pique, that despite the new Republican Congress of 1994, the president is
not
irrelevant, which means the thought is very much in his mind.

Meanwhile, let us give Clinton his proper due. Lincoln to one side, he does better funerals than any American president in our increasingly murderous history. This is no small thing. After all, who would care about Pericles today had he not given a sublime funeral oration—as reported by General Thucydides, Retired—in which he reminded the Athenians that an empire like theirs, no matter how larcenously acquired, is a very dangerous thing to let go? Ditto now, as Perot would say.

GQ

October 1996

* 
H
ONORABLE
A
LBERT
A. G
ORE,
J
UNIOR

Like so many southerners or half-southerners, I have never much cared for the fictions of William Faulkner. But where others find shocking, and I find life-enhancing, his use of that emblematic corncob in
Sanctuary
, I am put off by the
familiarity
of his work. I seem to know all his stories in advance, twice-told tales, you might say. I also dislike the ornate imprecision, to put it mildly, of his style, which involves the misuse of gorgeous-sounding words—“euphemistic” for “euphonious” and vice versa, while the Bible’s “Suffer the little children” Faulkner takes to be Bronze Age child abuse and not seventeenth-century “Allow the little children.” But I am not his editor and stylist, as Suzanne Pleshette so vividly introduced herself to the great American author Youngblood Hawke in that great, eponymous—or was it euphemistic?—film of yesteryear.

But, personally, I liked Faulkner, and we had a true connection. He came from Oxford, Mississippi, and his mythical Yoknapatawpha County takes in parts of Chickasaw and Webster counties, founded by the Gore family, among others, in the 1840s. Faulkner knew many of the Gores of his time and spoke fondly of my great-aunt Mary Gore Wyatt, who taught him—or was it Stark Young?—Latin. In 1954 I adapted two Faulkner short stories for live TV. After
Smoke
and
Barn Burning
were aired, Faulkner congratulated me in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. “I don’t have the television,” he said, “but relations do, and they liked those shows very much.” We chatted about kin. What else sustains individuals in a somewhat wild part of the world, never entirely benign to the human? Hence the importance of kin, family, clan. The clans have always been the integuments that hold together southern communities. They are often vast in numbers and intricate in their workings.

Once a year, the Gore clan gathers, often in a town like Calhoun City (founded by T. T. Gore, born 1776). In 1990 I attended Gore Day in the town of Houston, not far from Elvis Presley’s capital city of Tupelo, where I arrived by plane from New York via Nashville with a BBC TV crew: A documentary was being done on my life and times, and as I had never visited Mississippi, where my mother’s father, who had brought me up, was born, it was thought that . . . Well, I’m not sure I had any idea what to expect.

I stayed with a cousin, Dr. Ed Gore, a fourth-generation M.D. who heads a large clinic. He is younger than I, with a grown son by his first wife and a bright blond ten- or eleven-year-old son, Blake, by a second wife. The TV crew noted that Blake looked like me at ten. But then the Gore genes are strong, making for large noses and ears and, in many, chinoiserie-style eyes, more gray than blue. Blake certainly had inherited the Gore sharpness of tongue. When one of my Brit companions made some remark about the recent film
Mississippi Burning
, not the most tactful allusion, the older Gores looked puzzled. Why, no, they hadn’t seen it. . . . Blake roared with laughter: “You never heard so much fussin’ going on round here as when that picture came out.” If there is an uncomfortable truth to be told, at least one Gore can always be counted on to bear sardonic witness. The clan is far-flung now, from one end of the country to the other. Even so, two or three hundred saw fit to gather
together to meet, with wives and kin, on a Sunday in Houston in Chickasaw County, which once belonged (all of it, they claim) to our ancestor T. T. Gore, who had bought a considerable chunk of land from the Chickasaw tribe in the 1840s. Earlier, the Indians had been driven west to Mississippi by Andrew Jackson, and then, later, they would, with a dozen other tribes, be transferred to their own territory in what is now Oklahoma, whose first senator proved to be my grandfather, brought up near Houston in nearby Webster County.

Ironies abound, historical and human, in the story of our clan. One irony is that T. T. Gore, in a sense, dispossessed the Indians of their Mississippi land while his great-grandson, T. P. Gore, by establishing the state of Oklahoma in 1907, confined them to reservations on bad land that, when oil was discovered, inspired the federal government to dispossess them yet again. Late in life, T. P. Gore would try to make amends.

“We pick the cousins we want to acknowledge, and we sort of let the others drop,” a Gore lady confided to me at the reunion. I was borderline acceptable. Word of my atheism (like that of my grandfather) had not spread too far. Many of the Gores I met in Houston are born-again; all are believers. For the most part they belong to the professional classes: lawyers, politicians, preachers, teachers, military men. Curiously, none was in trade. Back of them, of course, were generations of farmers and rude mechanicals from the British Isles who came to Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century (a “Thomas Gore, Gentleman” was a lost colonist at Jamestown). The eighteenth-century Gores, pursuing land, moved on to South Carolina, then to Pickens, Alabama, and, finally, to Mississippi, in the 1840s.

Faulkner, in his novels, dwells lovingly on the class divisions of his not-so-mythical county. There were the aristos, called Sartoris (naturally, he, in his Harris tweed jacket, was a Sartoris), while the educated professional class, the Stevenses, were the Gores. Finally, there was the white trash, the pullulating Snopeses, ever breeding, ever multiplying, ever, ah, inheriting all earth itself, so many little foxes forever chomping on the voluptuous vulpine sour grapes of Sartoris and Stevens. “Of course,” said one old lady, “Bill himself wasn’t so much. After all, this is redneck country. There aren’t—never were—many negroes and certainly no great plantations like they have—or had—down in the Delta.
Those
were the folks who had the mansions with the columns and all the wealth, most of which got lost in the war. Bourbons, we call them. They ran the state for years through the Democratic Party, which our family started to oppose in the 1880s, when your great-grandfather
and his people, over in Emory and Eupora and Walthall, helped organize the Party of the People—populists, they were called—and when T.P. ran for the legislature, he ran as a populist. He was in his early twenties and lost in a dirty election that was the making of him, because he skedaddled out of here for Corsicana, Texas, with his father and brothers, to practice law, and then on to the territories, where, practically single-handed, he invented Oklahoma as a state.” I don’t think that Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray would like so much credit to go to Senator Thomas Pryor Gore—but then we are in Gore country now.

When T. P. Gore left Mississippi on the last day of December, 1895, he was twenty-five, and he vowed he would never return until he was a U.S. senator. He kept his vow. Eighteen years later, Senator Gore was back in Mississippi, a national figure who had played a considerable part (to his everlasting regret) in the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912 and again in 1916. I should note that due to two separate accidents, he was blind from the age of ten, yet got through law school with a cousin—yet again—who read to him.

Although the Gores have—and had—many of the usual prejudices typical of their time and region, the marked absence of slave owners in the family meant that when the Civil War came, they were what they called “patriots”: They were against secession, as were their cousins across the nearby state line of Tennessee. This presented T.P.’s father, Thomas Madison Gore, age twenty-four in 1861, with a terrible choice. Should he go fight for his state against the union that the Gores had helped create in 1776, or should he turn his back on his immediate kin and go join like-minded cousins in nearby eastern Tennessee, which, most famously, did not secede?

With camera crew, I went to the Webster County courthouse, where Thomas Madison had spent all of one day agonizing on the steps. The building is large and imposing—and practically alone in the wilderness all about it. Nearby is the one-room schoolhouse where my grandfather had learned to read and write until his own light was switched off.

I sat on the steps where Thomas Madison had sat. Described to the camera how one can be torn between duty to the clan and to the nation. Described how, in the end, the clan usually wins. He chose to fight with his two brothers for Mississippi. One brother was killed, and Thomas Madison was wounded and taken captive not far from home at Shiloh. “As far as I know,” he would say years later, when he had settled in as chancery clerk of Webster County (in the same building on whose steps he had agonized as a youth), “I am the only Confederate soldier who never rose above the rank of corporal. Somehow the others all got to be majors and colonels.” It should be noted that one of his brothers, too young to fight, was Albert Cox Gore, who after the war graduated from the Memphis Medical College in Tennessee.

I have been told so many times how Thomas Pryor Gore and Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., are related that I have permanently forgotten and must again ask the cousinage or check various biographies (fifth cousins, I have just been told again). T. P. Gore was the clan’s great man for the first half of the twentieth century. We never claimed our Tennessee relations as kin because we had hardly heard of them until Albert Sr. came to the House of Representatives in 1939, age 31. He had been born in 1907, the year T. P. Gore came to the Senate, age thirty-seven. I remember sometime around 1940 my grandfather’s telling me that he had been sitting in the Senate cloakroom “and this young man comes up to me and says, ‘You know, you look just like my father.’ ” It was the new congressman from Tennessee—and they did look alike. They also knew how they were related.

There was nothing sufficiently witty or unpleasant that Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of President Theodore, did not have to say of her cousin President Franklin, who was, I believe, the same relation to President Theodore as the current vice president is to me. Once I teased her when she was going on about Franklin, whom she called “the Feather Duster”—“the sort of person you never asked to the dinner but only to come in after.” “So,” I asked, “why were you always so down on him?” Alice’s gray-yellow eyes blinked as she revealed the huge, snaggled Roosevelt teeth in a thin-lipped smile. “We were the President Roosevelts, and then along comes these Hyde Park nobodies, and suddenly they were the President Roosevelts, forever and ever. The fact that Eleanor was my first cousin didn’t help, either. And, oh, she was so noble! So sickeningly noble. But to tell the truth, I’m afraid that our feelings were nothing more than outraged vanity.”
This, in a milder way, was rather my family’s view when Albert Sr. went to the Senate in 1952 and became
the
Senator Gore (T.P. had died in 1949).

I seem to have mislaid Gore Day. In honor of me, a dozen hymns were sung, and four Gore preachers spoke the Word, and I was duly drenched—drowned—in the Blood of the Lamb. A few days later, in Jackson, I asked Eudora Welty if this was usual. “Well,” she said, “it was a Sunday, and there’s not much else to do up there in the country. Of course, I’m from the city. But I did go to school with girls from all over the state, and you could spot where they were from just by the way they looked and talked. We always thought your upstate cousins were a bit on the simple side, while the Delta girls—oh my!—they were
fast
! Even though we all wore uniforms, they
did
things to theirs.”

Significantly, Senator Albert Gore, Jr., due to come, as always, to the reunion of the cousinage, bowed out at the last minute, “because of a fund-raiser,” he said. But, I was told, this too was in honor of me. I was not only a notorious radical in politics but I had recently written a book about a man still deeply resented in the state, Abraham Lincoln. Even so, the cousinage did not like being stood up for a fund-raiser, that central activity of
fin de siècle
American politics and, perhaps, young Albert’s Achilles’ heel. I have always avoided him on the ground that one day plausible deniability will be useful to each of us. But I had known Albert Sr. slightly. Once, at a convention, shortly after I’d run for Congress, we were interviewed together on television. When asked the usual questions about how we were related, Albert Sr. said, “Fourth cousins, I think, but if he’d been elected, it would have been a lot closer than that.”