Gore Vidal (88 page)

In April the British
Sunday Telegraph
had published Gore's portrait of Kennedy, and in June
Life
carried his interview-profile of Barry Goldwater. Kennedy had good reason to expect Goldwater to be his Republican opponent in 1964, though he and Gore also talked, as Kennedy regularly did, about Nelson Rockefeller, who he feared would be more formidable. He had no doubt he could defeat Goldwater, whom he liked. Gore's casually devastating “Barry Goldwater: A Chat” is as much about the art of politics and the desire for power as about the likable Arizonan. “To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize,” Vidal had written. Insufficiently dodgeful, whatever his ideology, Goldwater was unlikely to defeat any artful politician. If the essay is condescending, its condescension is inseparable from its combination of the personal voice and the authoritative view. Goldwater, as he speaks for himself with laudable honesty, provides in his own words perfect examples for the essay's main point. In “John Kennedy: A Translation for the English,” Vidal noted that Kennedy's “face is heavily lined for his age” and that his smile “is charming even when it is simulated for the public.” The candid touches effectively strengthen an essay whose portrait of the pragmatic Kennedy translates into the archetype of the artful politician—sly, crafty, improvisational, aware of the conventions, intellectually “dogged rather than brilliant … icily objective in crisis,” perceptive about what the moment will permit and what the moment requires. His youthful energy, Vidal surmised, might indeed provide our civilization with a second and last chance to stir itself out of its torpor. Written immediately before the Bay of Pigs, it is a cautious portrait. The prospects are there, but the verdict is still out. To what extent Kennedy would become a Cold War warrior Vidal did not fully anticipate. The Bay of Pigs episode itself was hardly decisive, and transcriptions would later make clear that Kennedy had
chosen the least confrontational of the proposed responses to the Soviet threat.

In and out of the Kennedy house at Hyannisport for much of that week in August, Vidal had various casual conversations with the President, a shorthand record of which he made at the first opportunity, for him an unusual practice. Years later he made effective use of his notes in his memoir. Jack and he gossiped, dined, played backgammon, talked politics at length. Gore admired the President's pragmatic intelligence, his powers of cold analysis, his self-serving ruthlessness. And it was a change and a delight to have a President who actually read books, who was interested in being knowledgeable and well informed. Gore saw the promise, the possibility, of such talent being put to national service on behalf of desirable changes. What he had begun to fear, quite tentatively, was Kennedy as heir of the foreign policy of Truman and Eisenhower. Thoroughly anti-Communist himself, Vidal feared anti-Communism as the excuse for excessive militarism, for potentially self-destructive commitments abroad. Khrushchev and tension over Berlin were very much in the air. Reservists were being called up. Gore and Arthur Schlesinger, who had become a full-time presidential adviser and who was very worried about the Berlin crisis, compared notes about the President's mood. Bobby Kennedy came by numbers of times from his nearby house. Once the brothers went into a corner of the room, bending their heads together secretively over a letter from John McCloy about Russian-American tension. Less hawkish in private than in public, Jack seemed to agree with Jackie's comment, “
Yes, it would be better
to be red than dead, not maybe for oneself, but for the children.” When the subject of his personal security came up, the President, who believed that a resolute assassin could always find his target and who had told Gore an ironic story of how a British prime minister had been electrocuted by a telephone after he thought he had been safeguarded against a threatened assassination attempt, expressed his resigned stoicism. To Gore's mind, Jack had already so often narrowly escaped death because of ill health that he had been conditioned to have no confidence in having a long life.

Fortunately, there were also lighter subjects to discuss. Hughdie and Janet were a favorite topic, the dreaded in-laws, one of whom bored, the other tongue-lashed you to death. When Gore told Jack that he had in mind to position the President as a conservative in an article he intended to write to counter an article called “The Future of Liberalism” by one of Gore's
ambitious ultraconservative contemporaries, William F. Buckley, Jr., who had recently surfaced as a propagandist for the far right, Kennedy touchily objected. “Just talk to Eisenhower if you want to meet a real conservative,” he said. The most Hollywood-involved of American Presidents until Ronald Reagan, Kennedy pumped Gore about movies, theaters, starlets. They discussed Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
. Kennedy liked Gore's view that Fellini's movie, exploiting Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, pretended that “this was decadence when it was only life as it is lived,” and Jackie complained that her mother-in-law frequently reminded her that all the movies Jackie liked were on the Catholic Church's proscribed Index. Though the presidential couple took this all rather lightly, Bobby did not. Gore noticed that the conversation was always serious when the more puritanical, rigidly Catholic younger brother was present. Clearly, Bobby had not forgotten Gore's refusal to push harder for the national ticket during his congressional campaign. Unlike his brother, the Attorney General wore his grudges on his sleeve, and also unlike Jack, he had an uninflected sense of moral standards. Uncomfortable with those who were not straight arrows, he disapproved of Gore, whose sexual interests were beyond his comprehension or tolerance. Undoubtedly he believed that homosexuality was moral depravity, an illness of the soul that needed to be cured or damned. Salvation was at issue. When he walked into a room that contained Gore, one could feel his almost palpable antagonism. That he and Bobby did not like one another was of little consequence. They were publicly cordial. When Gore (with Eleanor Roosevelt) recommended Joe Hawkins for a position in the Justice Department, Bobby assured Gore “he will be given every consideration.”

From the time of the inauguration through much of 1961, Gore was invited a few times to the White House. When Jackie returned from her Paris trip, she sent him an inscribed copy of the more flattering photograph: “For Gore, who makes it impossible to look this serious, with affection, Jackie Kennedy.” With some pride, he displayed it in a place of honor at Edgewater. After all, he had known her before her husband had, and she had come to him for advice about a career when she was an unknown. Going upstairs to the family's private quarters at the White House for dinner one evening, what most struck him was the smell of frying onions, the quotidian even in high places. Not that he was not proud to be at the White House. On one occasion, he called Roy Thompson, T. P. Gore's last secretary, who had known him as a boy, simply to tell him where he was calling from, both
a boastful and a nostalgic bow in the direction of his grandfather. The White House connection had its attractions, though he was feeling increasingly edgy about his own political career, leaning more and more to the notion that he ought to get out entirely and return full-time to writing. Yet he still kept open his options in the 29th District and even the possibility of the Senate. When he received an official letter in September requesting that he agree to be appointed to the President's Advisory Council on the Arts for the National Cultural Center, he perfunctorily accepted, partly because it seemed easier than explaining a declination, though he had no intention of attending the committee's meetings.

In early November 1961 he was busy in New York with rehearsals of
Romulus
. There seemed little reason to be optimistic that the play would be as successful as
The Best Man
, let alone a success at all. The first act was tediously troublesome. Cyril Ritchard's comic flair for the outrageously campy did not convey the Roman emperor's serious side and the play's significant historical elements, including the analogy between the Roman and the American empires. Lyn Austin, who had not had the same tingle as she had had with
The Best Man
, was happy to have another of Roger Stevens's associates, Robert Whitehead, be the hands-on producer. Though he had not yet faced it consciously, Gore sensed that his decision to adapt the Dürrenmatt play had been a mistake. Also, he would soon have to make up his mind whether to run for Congress again. Joe Hawkins pressed him for a decision, as ambivalent as Gore about whether it would be a good idea. The Senate seat came up again. For both, he had until late winter to decide. But the longer he waited, the less likely his chance of success. Maybe the best thing would be to chuck political life altogether. He had seen much during the first year of the Kennedy administration that had drawn home the disadvantages of political office. For the first time he admitted to himself that both holding political office and writing novels was untenable. At this point he received an invitation from the President and Mrs. Kennedy to attend a large dinner at the White House on November 11. As he went down to Washington for the grand dinner, he was not in the best of moods. Recently he had written for
Esquire
, for which he now did occasional political columns, about his outrage at the Justice Department's indifference to the FBI's disregard for civil liberties. Bobby Kennedy seemed either too much in sympathy with or too much under the thumb of the powerful FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. Gore had written directly to Bobby at the Justice Department
to complain about FBI coziness with the Ku Klux Klan. The Attorney General had responded with curt dismissiveness. Still, this was a celebratory evening. The Kennedy administration had come into power almost exactly one year before. It was the first major social dinner they were hosting, in honor of their glamorous Italian friends, the Agnellis, owners of Fiat, and, apparently, also in honor of the Radziwills, Jackie's sister Lee and her tenuously royal Polish businessman-husband. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., whom Gore knew through Eleanor and who represented the Agnelli business interests in America, was being rewarded for his early support of Kennedy by a White House dinner for his clients.

Arriving by car with Schlesinger and his wife and John Kenneth Galbraith, Gore anticipated an evening of ostensible glamour and real boredom. About a hundred fashionable guests in tuxedos and evening dresses. Elaborate White House hospitality in spaces small for the event. Music. Dancing. Dinner. Flashes of crystal catching light. A hum from dozens of indistinguishable voices. In the Red Room he unexpectedly found himself face to face with the Auchinclosses. Marriage to Nina had brought Hughdie access to a senator. Marriage to Janet had brought him to the White House. With his usual good manners Gore attempted to maneuver the encounter onto high ground. With characteristic quarrelsomeness Janet responded rebukingly to an elaborate compliment from Gore about how well she had performed as a stepmother to Gore's sister Nini. Why are you attacking your mother? Taken aback, Gore answered that he thought he had been complimenting Janet. Extricating himself as quickly as possible, he moved into the adjacent Blue Room. There was barely standing space. Groups of chairs, mostly occupied, were scattered around. He was delighted to see Jackie, seated amid other occupied chairs. Never quarrelsome, she could be counted on for her usual purring pleasantries. Since the chairs around her were taken, he squatted next to hers, steadying himself by placing his hand across the back of her straight-backed chair, his arm brushing her back and shoulders. Jackie seemed happy to see him. They chatted amiably. As she turned her head to talk to someone on her other side, Gore felt his hand being removed from behind the back of her chair and shoulder. Looking around and up, he saw Robert Kennedy, who then immediately walked to the door separating the Blue from the Red Room. Unaware of what had happened, Jackie continued her other conversation. Gore went immediately to Kennedy. It had seemed to him a personal attack, as if the Attorney
General were some high-toned puritan butler policing the room. “
Don't ever do
that again!” he said to Kennedy. “‘Fuck off, buddy boy,'” Gore recalls Kennedy responding, “to which one of America's most distinguished men of letters responded, ‘You fuck off, too.'” Since clearly he had the Attorney General's ear, Gore renewed the complaint he had outlined in his
Esquire
article about the FBI's acting in the South as an anti-civil-rights terrorist organization. Kennedy responded that it was none of his business. Gore said that as a writer he would make it his business. Kennedy answered that he was not much of a writer. Later, Gore heard that Kennedy claimed that Gore had said, “I'll get you!” No one had seen the encounter. No one else heard the dialogue.

Within minutes the two men separated. Gore fled into the Green Room, “not from Bobby but from a terrible bad karma in the air.” Before he could move across the room to Lee Radziwill, who had waved to him, Lem Billings, a Kennedy friend, suddenly confronted him with his disregard of the Council on the Arts. He had not gone to one meeting. Why did you accept, Billings wanted to know, if you weren't going to attend? Vidal's explanation did not satisfy Billings. Gore, for whom a social event was not an appropriate occasion for ironing out business disagreements, felt attacked by someone inexplicably quarrelsome at a time when the occasion required social pleasantries. Leaving Billings, he found himself at a table with Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's wife, and two other equally dull people, a tediousness that flowing champagne helped make tolerable. Everyone drank handsomely. After midnight, eager to leave, Gore signaled Schlesinger about departure. Schlesinger had found the evening tense. After only one year of the new administration, “
the mood
… was different,” Schlesinger wrote in his diary. “People were tired…. There was an undercurrent of edginess everywhere.” John Kenneth Galbraith's table, at which he had been seated with Eunice Shriver, Tish Baldrige (Jackie's social secretary), “and some lady who is doing the White House furniture,” had not been scintillating either. “A loud jazz band made a nerve-curdling but pleasant racket.” Gore tried to negotiate a taxi. A crowd of Secret Service men, ushers, and guests blocked the exit. It seemed sensible to wait for Schlesinger. The President came by. “‘You know, I'd like to wring your brother's neck,'” Gore said to him. “‘That's the White House. Don't worry,' Jack said. So I just sort of sat around, and Jack was off in a corner with a beautiful girl, having a chat.” Finally, hours after midnight, Schlesinger
got Gore, Galbraith, and George Plimpton into his car. Plimpton, whose years at Exeter overlapped with Gore's and who, as editor of
The Paris Review
, had been establishing a literary-social career in New York, had been thrilled by his White House evening. In the car Gore may have told them something about his encounter with Bobby. If the champagne had at first calmed him down, more of it inflamed him. Galbraith remembered nothing about that part of the conversation. He had had “
a great deal of
champagne” and remembered “telling Gore Vidal on the way home that Shakespeare was almost certainly better than he. Gore was mortally insulted but took it well.” The next morning Gore called Schlesinger to give his account of his confrontation with Bobby. Schlesinger recorded a version identical, except for some inconsequential phrasing, to what Gore told others then and afterward.