The Last Empire (59 page)

Authors: Gore Vidal

BOOK: The Last Empire

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Next, Charles Lindbergh, my “other questionable hero,” is dragged in, so that we can be told, with righteous anger, how “his isolationism was
de facto
an instrument of Axis policy.” Surely James the Latinist means
ad hoc
in a sentence admittedly quite as meaningless as that tom-tom pounding you you you. He does admit that “Lindbergh did loyal service [in the war] and even shot down a Japanese plane but [one] can’t help wondering about the American planes he shot down with his mouth”; moral outrage is now in high gear—pass me the sick bag, Alice, or whatever that splendid gel was called. In real life, Lindbergh was sent by FDR to take a look at the German air force and plane production. Lindbergh was sufficiently alarmed by what he saw to urge increased American production of aircraft for war, particularly the B-17. He was, of course, an isolationist, and so was reflective of a majority of the American people before Pearl Harbor.

Then, alas, we hear that “Ambassador Joseph Grew, alas, won’t do for a hero either.” Plainly my world contained no heroes. Although Grew was much admired for his brilliance and probity by those of us who had relations with him, the great Canberra moralist tells us that he was worse than an anti-Semite, he was a snob. Could it be that this terrible flaw in his character encouraged the war party in Tokyo to attack the United States? But Mr. James—again alas—never connects his enticing dots. Actually, Grew’s problem as a diplomat was that he tried to maintain the peace between Japan and the U.S., when his President had other plans which involved maneuvering the Japanese into striking the first blow so that we could go to war. But then James always dodges the great unanswered question: unless provoked by us,
why did the Japanese attack?
He waffles a bit about their desire for “unopposed expansion.” To where? Chicago?

Finally, a rhetorical question to me. If I had been told in 1945 that we had a weapon “so devastating that it could end that . . . war in a week,” what would I have said? Well, none of us was consulted. But we were, most of us, highly in favor of using the Bomb. On the other hand, had we been told that the war could have been concluded as of May 1945, I would have gone to work for the impeachment of a President who had wasted so many lives and destroyed so many cities in his power game with the Soviet Union which led, inexorably, to a half-century of unnecessary Cold War. I am also bemused that a witness so all-knowing, if not knowledgeable, as Clive James, still doesn’t understand what happened to him, to all of us, for most of our lives.

The Times Literary Supplement

15 December 2000

*
The New York Review of Books
, November 5, 1987.

*
“The Fruits of the MLA: I. Their Wedding Journey” (
The New York Review,
September 26, 1968); “II. Mark Twain” (October 10, 1968).

*
Sinclair Lewis: An American Life
(McGraw-Hill, 1961).

*
Guy Cardwell,
The Man Who Was Mark Twain
(Yale University Press, 1991). This oddly repellent work might have been more accurately—and more modestly—called
The Mark Twain Nobody Else Knows
.

*
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt.

*
As the G. W. Bush presidency begins, it looks as if Clinton
was
the last president, while his successor is more in the imperial Japanese mode, feeble Mikado to Cheney’s all-powerful shogunate rooted in the Pentagon.

*
The
Vanity Fair
issue of December 1999 featured photographs of all the leaders as well as this text.

*
Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency.

*
Yes, there are different figures for 1992 and now for 2000 and 2001. But the trend is the same: taxes on corporate profits ever down, on individuals ever up. Now the shogunate of Cheney begins. Mikado Bush attends to the tea ceremony.

*
A good chunk of Utah oil land was sold off in 1996.

**
In the election of 1996, a billion dollars apiece was spent by Clinton and Dole. In 2000, Gore and Bush spent nearly $3 billion between them.

*
As of 2000,
USA Today
reports on its front page that 6.6 million adults (3 percent of the adult population) are in prison or “correction.” No other society has ever done so deadly a thing to its people and on such a scale.

*
Italics added 2000.

*
When this piece was published in Russia, a number of enthusiasts elected me honorary president of the north.

*
This was written for
Vanity Fair
before the November 7, 2000, presidential election.

*
Repeated with the following message to the troops: And so Mr. President, elected by the Supreme Court (5–4), has now, in addition to a vice-president who was a former secretary of defense, appointed another former defense secretary to his old post as well as a general to be secretary of state; thus the pass was sold.

*
It should be remembered that J. Q. Adams complained of Thomas Jefferson’s “large stories.” Example? Jefferson claimed to have learned Spanish in nineteen days aboard a transatlantic ship.