The Last Empire (36 page)

A five-year stint at the Nashville
Tennessean
taught him a great deal about how newspapers work, and about publicity. Meanwhile, he took part in his father’s various livestock and tobacco dealings. Later he was to share, most publicly at a convention, the guilt he still felt because he had once grown and sold the poisonous leaf that had struck down a beloved sister in her youth. He ceased to traffic with the murderous weed, prayed for forgiveness. He promptly had to face what friends call the “Gore jinx.” The speech—the work of Marty Peretz?—wetted every eye, including the speaker’s. Actually, Al had somehow forced himself to continue in the tobacco business for quite some time after her death. Plainly, the cigarette burned more brightly than the bush on the hard road to Damascus.

The Gore jinx becomes operative whenever Al is inclined, as Sam Goldwyn used to say, to geld the lily. All politicians do this, of course. But Al’s air of solemn righteousness sets him up every time for a pratfall, including the astonishing assertion that he and his bride had inspired Erich Segal to write
Love Story
in their common Harvard days. Segal is a brilliant classicist, whose
Roman Laughter
, a study of Plautus, I highly recommend; he sharply denied any connection. Pratfall. Al should have stayed in the family and said that
Myra Breckinridge
had been inspired by the magic couple.

Lily gelding is a harmless activity and, perhaps, a necessity for someone fearful of being thought too young for the presidency in 1988. Al also portrayed himself as a home builder, the developer of a subdivision; actually, others did the work, while he and his father were fairly inactive partners. But Al did make a packet by reselling some of his father’s farm after he had first bought it with a Federal Farm Credit System low-interest loan of the sort usually made to finance farmers’ crops. Profit to one side, he gelds lilies in order to create an image of himself as farmer, home builder, warrior, relentless crime reporter who sent to jail corrupt officials (they didn’t go to jail), and so on. But then, as a member of the House who served with him observed, “Around here he’s what we call a ‘glory boy.’ He gets to the House and starts running for the Senate. Gets to the Senate and starts running for the White House. There’s no time left to do any of the real work
the rest of us have to do.”

Four terms in the House, then to the Senate in 1984. After four years of the Senate, at the age of thirty-nine, Al is ready for the presidency. During the primaries, family lines crossed. Senator David Boren of Oklahoma told me that the more Al stumped T. P. Gore’s state, the closer the family connection became: “By the end, you’d have thought he was your nephew.” Save for the Peretz connection, a nephew to be proud of, by and large. In politics, credit is taken, if not given, for just about anything admirable or popular at the moment: anything that can’t immediately be checked on, that is. The Al Gore résumé is wondrously virtuous, if slightly short on achieved specifics.

T. P. Gore used to say that the most fervent prayer of any politician was “Would that my opponent had written a book!” In 1992 Al did just that.
Earth in the Balance
was the ominous title of his hostage to fortune.
Ecology and the Human Spirit
was the subtitle, while, under that, “ ‘A powerful summons for the politics of life and hope’—Bill Moyers.” In the introduction, the author says that he has for “more than twenty-five years . . . [been] in search of a true understanding of the global ecological crisis and how it can be resolved.” All right, so it was not exactly twenty-five years. How about twenty-four? Certainly, the book is solidly researched; the prose as resolutely dull as its author’s speeches; the conclusions obvious to nearly everyone who has given the matter thought, except, ironically, the great sources of pollution and warming, Corporate America, without whose money and media no one can be elected president. But then, when Al
wrote the book, he had taken himself out of the ’92 presidential race, never thinking that, within a year, he would be Clinton’s vice president and that his “antibusiness” tract would outrage
The Wall Street Journal
’s fellow polluter-travelers. Since no good deed goes unpunished, one suspects this will convince Al that his unique moment of reasonable altruism is not going to go unpunished and perhaps he’d better go back to endorsing such military-procurement programs as the MX, the Trident D-5, etc. Meanwhile, the Gore jinx again surfaced when the book’s greatest fan proved to be the Unabomber.

Dick Morris, the political spin master whose sex life caused him to depart the as yet uncongenial Clinton White House, has written, thus far, the best account of how presidential politics work today. He is particularly intrigued by the Clinton-Gore relationship. “Gore is the single person in the world whose advice the president most values. He sees Gore as a junior president. . . . When he wants a clear-eyed assessment, he turns to Gore, as he does when he wants something really important handled really well.” Yet it was Al who helped bring aboard Leon Panetta as chief of staff: a fatal choice, because when the hard times came, Panetta was one of the first to turn on Clinton. Was this a setup? One almost hopes, out of sheer dramatic imagination, that the deliberately colorless Gore may yet turn out to be Iago, secretly planting handkerchiefs all round the West Wing. Certainly, he has placed a number of his own people in places of power. But he has also, thus far, living up to his own
book, done his best to preserve the environmental-protection programs.

About the 1995 battle over the budget, Morris makes an in-teresting observation: “A more subtle difference existed between Clinton and Gore. Both wanted a deal [with the congressional Republicans]. But Clinton wanted a compromise, whereas Gore wanted a deal that all but completely protected his priorities: the environment, technology, and so forth. Gore is more interested in specifics than in themes.” This is an important distinction that goes to the heart of American practical politics. By and large, the great presidents have been thematic. FDR never mastered the specifics of anything. But he had a genius for getting across to the electorate his general view of where the country should be going and who should make what deal—New Deal, even—to get us all there. FDR possessed what Bush so memorably disdained as “the vision thing.” But Al has a graduate student’s need to pile up specifics for a good grade. Like Carter, he dotes on facts, figures, blueprints of how to build
that tree house. Certainly, it is a sign of seriousness and goodwill that he works on environmental matters not only on TV but behind closed doors; yet it is also a sign of tactical weakness that he has Jimmy Carter’s fascination with endless technical detail, more fitting for someone aspiring to a safe berth in Harvard’s American Civilization department than the presidency. FDR was the first to admit that he often stumbled. I may not, he once said, always get a hit each time I come up to bat. . . . But he had a buoyancy that was contagious. When one thing failed, he’d quickly try another. An over-attention to each tree and not to the forest that contains it could be the fatal flaw in the character of a miniaturist President Gore, whose mind is convergent—only connect things—while the great presidents know that nothing on earth or in politics really connects and that the quick, divergent mentality is the one that best adapts and moves ahead.

In order to be reelected in 1996, the Clinton-Gore administration adopted a series of right-wing Republican, even protofascist, programs, with lots more prisons, death penalties, harassment of the poor, cries of terrorism, and, implicitly, control by government over the citizenry, as the Unabomber duly noted. As one sees these politics evolve in Morris’s narrative, one realizes that no one in the White House is thinking about much of anything other than, somehow, finessing the other party, which is slightly more in thrall to the Christian right and somewhat better funded by corporate America than are the Democrats. It is a somber narrative, particularly if one has been studying, as I have, the Bill of Rights lately. But we are now trapped in the rapid erosion of an ever more alien system, currently further skewed by all the atrocious law that Kenneth W. Starr has managed to squeeze from a brain-dead Supreme Court, where only its prince of darkness, Scalia, betrays an inkling of common sense about the harm
being done our judicial system as lawyer-client and president-adviser protocols are overthrown in ill-written and worse-conceived judgments.

In 1883 Congress passed a law preventing city and courthouse machines from obliging those on the public payroll to kick back at election time—a sort of tithing to raise money for an election or, perhaps, just riotous living: an evening at Delmonico’s with Boss Tweed. Virtue outlawed this practice, officially. Now Janet Reno of Waco ponders a special counsel to investigate Albert Jr., among others, for making calls to raise soft money from a public building, the White House, instead of from a cellular phone in the Lafayette Park convenience parlor. I consulted, in a vision, the Heavenly Campaign Manager of the Gores. He was dismissive. “If they try making something of that, what about Dole and Gingrich telephoning from Capitol Hill?”

I wondered about the Buddhist fundraiser for Albert Jr. “Forget it. Even the Bush family’s Heavenly Campaign Manager—dyslexic, by the way—says there’s no mileage in it.”

“What about Clinton and Monica? Will that rub off on Albert Jr.?”

“If Clinton goes before 2000—not much chance, I’d say—Al’s in place to run as a sitting president. Anyway, once Bill’s gone, end of sex story. You see, Al is sexproof. Designed never to lust in the Oval Office or even in his heart, and—the Beauty Part—no one lusts for him. Oh, we’re looking after—really looking after—the family this time.” As the vision started to fade, I was bemused to note that our family’s Heavenly Campaign Manager is wearing a saffron robe. A
Buddhist
campaign manager?
Shantih shantih shantih.

Since there is no earthly reason for Albert Jr. to be president, by the same happy logic there is no unearthly reason for him not to be. But should, by some mishap, the mandate of heaven not come to Albert A. Gore Jr., the next generation of Gores is bound to succeed, and I am now putting my money on the future president Blake Gore of Houston, Mississippi, who will initiate a golden age not too long after A.D. 2050.

GQ

December 1998

* 
K
OPKIND

Most establishment American journalists tend to be like their writing, and so, duly warned by the tinkle of so many leper-bells, one avoids their company. On the other hand, after reading from beginning to end
The Thirty Years’ Wars
, I realized why it was that I so liked Andrew Kopkind and always read his bulletins from the political front, which were also, endearingly, bulletins from his own life as well, which ended much too soon last October.

Born in 1935, Andy was a decade my junior. Since we were like-minded in so many ways that decade should not have made much difference, but it did in the sense that he was always somewhat exotic to me. The Sixties never meant much to me but they were everything to someone his age. I was—and am—the Forties–Fifties, shaped by the second war and Dr. Kinsey, “radicalized” by Korea and Joe McCarthy. Even so, the slight sense of strangeness I felt about him and his generation only made his take on matters of mutual interest attractively aslant.

To read what Kopkind calls
Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965–1994
is to be given a deliberately eccentric tour of the American empire’s slow deterioration as well as that of its mirror-image on the chilly steppes which so perversely cracked from side to side—seven years’ bad luck (and maybe seven more) as my grandmother used to say. I say eccentric because I always thought that I had first met Andy at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, but now I read that he had only touched base there for a moment or two. Then, before Mayor Daley could shout Sheeney! at Senator Ribicoff, Andy had gone to the real action: Czechoslovakia, where he observed the Russian invasion and Dubcek’s fall. While I was anticipating with excited horror Nixon’s coming victory, Andy was writing from Prague: “One of these days—when the ‘German problem’ is solved—the Czechs will find a new way out of the Soviet sphere and others will follow. Beyond
that, Russia has discredited leftist parties and the left in general for years to come. And within the Warsaw Pact countries, and perhaps even in Russia, Czechoslovakia has already become an embryonic ‘Vietnam.’ ” It took twenty years for Andy to be proved right, during which time he did his best to shore up “the left” in our own essentially apolitical land.

A generality about the sort of journalist Kopkind was. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the breed, he did not go in for Opinions, the daily ashen bread of the Sunday TV zoo and of those columnists who appear in such papers as
Time
and
Newsweek
, recycling the sort of mindless received opinion that dissolves before one’s eyes into its original constituent parts—blurred ink, glossy paper. He had opinions, of course, but he didn’t offer them until he had first proved, through detail, his reasons for holding them. Most American journalists who “do” politics cannot resist getting to know the Players. Walter Lippmann was typical of an earlier generation, the disinterested wise man who remained aloof, chiseling great thoughts on marble columns. Actually a casual trawl through FDR’s library at Hyde Park shows how eager Walter was for White House invitations and interviews. At least today’s media chorus are all openly bought as they rush to White House to help with a speech, then
off to newsroom to praise their own work, then onto television where now they condescend—no doubt, rightly—to mere senators and Cabinet members. Who can forget, a few elections ago, the egregious Phil Donahue wagging a minatory finger in the faces of a clutch of presidential candidates? This is no way to keep separate first and fourth estate, but then, in so tight and collusive a system, it is to no one’s real interest to draw a line.

Happily, Andy did not collude, he drew a line: kept his eye steadily on the obscure who might or might not be making a revolution in the national consciousness if not in the streets. How to explain him? He started life in conventional middle-class New Haven. Father, a Republican District Attorney. There was Yale nearby, the Vatican of reactionary politics not to mention nursing mother to OSS and CIA. But Andy had the good luck to have, as he put it, a “commie pinko rabbi.” He avoided Yale; went to Cornell as a pre-med student. Like me, he was exposed young to the
New Statesman
, a paper that once had the power not only to enlighten but to convert the susceptible to socialism. Medicine was abandoned for writing; then two and a half years at the London School of Economics, trying to be a “classy” English journalist. Then home for a stint at
Time
magazine at the height of its “unleash Chiang” mania.