The Last Empire (43 page)

Puerifoy picked another military man to represent the interests of company and empire. Since then, Guatemala has been a slaughterground, very bright red indeed against the darkest imperial green. Later, it was discovered that Arbenz had no communist connections, but the “disinformation” had been so thorough that few Americans knew to what extent they had been lied to by a government that had now put itself above law and, rather worse, beyond reason.

Incidentally, I note that the disinformation still goes on. In the April 9
New York Times
(a “recovering” newspaper in recent years), one Clifford Krauss airily says that Guatemala’s Indians have been regularly screwed for 400 years, so what else is new? He gives a tendentious history of the country—purest Langley boilerplate, circa 1955—but omits the crucial 1931–44 dictatorship of Jorge Ubico.

I must say I find it disconcerting to read in 1995 that “by surrounding himself with Communist Party advisers, accepting arms from Czechoslovakia and building a port to compete with United Fruit’s facilities, Arbenz challenged the United States at the height of the cold war.” God, to think that such evil ever walked the Central American night! “President Eisenhower’s CIA organized a Guatemalan [
sic
] invasion force and bombed Guatemala City in 1954.”

Dark Green
,
Bright Red
was just reissued in England. Reviewing it in the
Evening Standard
, the journalist Patrick Skene Catling writes, “I wish I had read this prophetic work of fiction before my first visit to Guatemala in 1954. Gore Vidal would have helped me to understand how John Peurifoy . . . was able to take me up to the roof of his embassy to watch . . . the air raids without anxiety, because he and the CIA knew exactly where the bombs were going to fall.”

A final note—of bemusement, I suppose. I was at school with Nathaniel Davis, who was our Ambassador in Chile at the time of Allende’s overthrow. A couple of years later Davis was Ambassador to Switzerland and we had lunch at the Berne embassy. I expressed outrage at our country’s role in the matter of Chile. Davis “explained”
his
role. Then he asked, “Do you take the line that the United States should never intervene in the affairs of another country?” I said that unless an invasion was being mounted against us in Mexico, no, we should never intervene. Davis, a thoughtful man, thought; then he said, “Well, it would be nice in diplomacy, or in life, if one could ever start from a point of innocence.” To which I suppose the only answer is to say—Go! Plunge ever deeper, com-mit more crimes to erase those already committed, and repeat with Macbeth, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The Nation

5 June 1995

* 
W
ITH
E
XTREME
P
REJUDICE

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution requires government agencies to submit their budgets at regular intervals to Congress for review. Neither the CIA nor the DIA does this.
*
Occasionally, at the dark of the moon, they will send someone up to the Hill to disinform Congress, and that’s that. After all, to explain what they actually do with the money that they get would be a breach of national security, the overall rubric that protects so many of them from criminal indictments. Although most Americans now think that the CIA was created at Valley Forge by General Washington, this unaccountable spy service was invented less than half a century ago, and since that time we have been systematically misinformed about the rest of the world for domestic policy reasons (remember Russia’s outstanding economic surge in 1980?). Intelligence is an empty concept unless directly related to action. In a war, knowledge of the enemy’s troop movements is all-important. In peacetime, random intelligence-gathering
is meaningless, when not sinister.

Since our rulers have figured that one out, they have done their best to make sure that we shall never be at peace; hence, the necessity of tracking enemies—mostly imaginary ones, as the Pentagon recently revealed in its wonderfully wild scenarios for future wars. Since Communism’s ultimate crime against humanity was to go out of business, we now have no universal war to conduct except the one against drugs (more than $20 billion was wasted last year on this crusade). As there is now no longer sufficient money for any of these “wars,” there is no longer a rationale for so many secret services unless the Feds really come out of the closet and declare war on the American people, the ultimate solution: after all, one contingency plan in Ollie North’s notebook suggested that in a time of crisis, dusky-hued Americans should be sequestered.

I would suggest that the State Department return to its once-useful if dull task of supplying us with information about other countries so that we might know more about what they’d like to buy from us. The hysterical tracking down of nuclear weapons is useless. After all, we, or our treasured allies, have armed all the world to the teeth. We have neither the money nor the brains to monitor every country on earth, which means, alas, that if some evil dictator in Madagascar wants to nuke or biologically degrade Washington, D.C., there’s not much we can do about it. Certainly, the CIA, as now constituted, would be the last to know of his intention, though perhaps the first to get the good of his foul plot. I would abandon all the military-related secret services and I would keep the FBI on a tight leash—no more dirty tricks against those who dislike the way that we are governed, and no more dossiers on those of us who might be able to find a way out of the mess we are in, best personified by the
late J. Edgar Hoover and best memorialized by that Pennsylvania Avenue Babylonian fortress that still bears his infamous name.

The Nation

8 June 1992

* 
T
IME FOR A
P
EOPLE’S
C
ONVENTION

November 18, 1991. Despite jet lag, I find myself half-asleep, making a speech in a nineteenth-century auditorium in Pittsburgh. I stand behind a lectern at stage left, blinded by film and television lights. At stage right stands the youthful “Bob Roberts,” played by Tim Robbins, who is also the director and writer of this film (as yet untitled). We are fictional characters. I am the incumbent liberal Senator from Pennsylvania; he is the challenger. “Bob” is a self-made millionaire turned pop singer, now turned politician. He is a sort of David Duke but without the luggage of a lurid past. He will win the election.

I have a weird sense that I have done all this before. Certainly, the hall is familiar, even to the entire text of the Gettysburg Address in giant gold letters above the stage. Then I realize that “I” have been through all this some weeks earlier. Only I was Harris Wofford and “Bob Roberts” was Dick Thornburgh and they, too, spoke in the same hall. That time Wofford won: this time he—“I”—lose. Then as my peroration resounds, I realize that I have never actually been in Pittsburgh before and that my familiarity with the hall is because of CNN—or was it C-Span?

Once I had finished my work as supporting “actor,” I moved on to Dartmouth, where I spent a week in Hanover, New Hampshire, chatting with faculty and students. But, again, unreality kept breaking in. My first morning in Hanover, I looked out the bedroom window and for a moment I thought I was back at my old school, Exeter, from which I had graduated a half-century earlier, unless a recurrent nightmare runs true to course, in which case I did
not
graduate but have spent fifty dusty years trying, unsuccessfully, to make up a failed math test. Once awake, I found that my old friend
déjà vu
was back in town as a half-dozen hopeless presidential candidates were going through their quadrennial paces. In 1982 I had run against one of them, Jerry Brown, in California and lost a Senate primary election. Now he was making my old speeches. Should I warn him not to? No. Meanwhile, New Hampshire is in deep depression—shops out of business, banks failed, real estate belly-up, and everywhere the
newly unemployed, looking for work where there is none.

From Dartmouth to Miami, and a firsthand look at the collapse of Pan American in its capital city. Local television devoted a great deal of time to the 7,500 workers suddenly let go, while stunned passengers crowded the ticket counters in order to read the scribbled message: “All Pan Am flights canceled”—forever. I thought of the arrogant Juan Trippe, who had founded the airline at about the same time that my father was founding what was to become TWA, now also near bankruptcy. I am definitely dreaming, I decided, and drove on to Key West, which I had not seen since my last visit to Tennessee Williams, thirty years earlier. German and French families crowded Duval Street, taking advantage of the cheap (ever cheaper as I write) dollar. I felt like a ghost who has been granted a day’s visit to the future. I split for limbo, my home city of Washington, D.C., where I am due to address the National Press Club.

The usual efforts had been made to block my appearance but, as usual, they had failed. Apparently I am “outrageous,” a word never exactly defined, though—from what I can tell—it appears to mean that as I say what I think about our political system and as I think a lot more about it than any of our journalists who are paid to present an irreal picture of these bad times, I cause a degree of outrage if not, as I would hope, rage.

This is the third time in thirty years that I have talked to the press club. Before me, my father addressed the club; before him, my grandfather. In a way, this is a family affair, but lately the family’s hometown seems to have fallen apart. That morning I had strolled from the Willard Hotel toward the Capitol. Burnt-out buildings were just off Pennsylvania Avenue; burnt-out people were on the avenue—and elsewhere, too. It was like the spring of 1932, when jobless veterans of World War I marched by the thousands on the capital and made a camp at the Anacostia Flats. They wanted a bonus. On June 17, I drove with my grandfather to the Senate. They stoned his car. Ever since, I have always known that the famous “it” which can’t happen here will happen here, and last month as I walked through my home city, “it” seemed ever closer to hand, and we are now in a prerevolutionary time. Hence, the emphasis in the media on the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, or of anything
other than the breakdown, if not breakup, of the United States and its economy. Just now, a month later, I watched on television as angry workers stormed through the streets of what I took to be Moscow until CNN identified the city as New York and the workers as members of one of our few labor unions—construction workers, I think, protesting lack of work, hope.

Like a ghost—but this time from the future—I tried to explain to the press club what it is they do that they don’t know they do. I quote, yet again, David Hume: The Few are able to control the Many only through Opinion. In the eighteenth century, Opinion was dispensed from pulpit and schoolroom. Now the media are in place to give us Opinion that has been manufactured in the boardrooms of those corporations—once national, now international—that control our lives.

Naturally, this sounded to my audience like the old conspiracy theory. Later, I was asked if I actually thought that Kay Graham and Larry Tisch really told the news departments of
The Washington Post
and CBS what to tell us. I said, Yes, of course, they do on occasion, but in everyday practice they don’t need to give instructions because everyone who works for them thinks exactly alike on those economic issues that truly matter. I even mentioned the unmentionable, the ruling class. I noted that those members who were not going to inherit money are sent like Bush to Andover and me to Exeter—two schools for the relatively brainy. Those who will inherit money (e.g., the late Nelson Rockefeller) go to Groton or St. Paul’s, where, in order not to grow up to become dissolute wastrels, they will be taught useful hobbies, like stamp or people collecting. This sort of education ensures that everyone so educated will tend to think alike. The few who break ranks are—what else?—outrageous. In
any case, the indoctrination of the prep schools alone is usually quite enough to create a uniformity of ruling-class opinion when it comes to the rights of property. Since our corporate state is cynically democratic, there are always jobs available to middle-class careerists willing to play the game.

Almost forty years ago, I heard Secretary of State John Foster Dulles say that of course our foreign policy (as outlined in the then-secret National Security Council Memorandum 68) would lead to an arms race with the Soviet Union but that, as we were richer, they would cave in first. Dulles was right. They did. But he had not taken into account the economic cost to us or, worse, that in the process we would lose the old Republic and its Constitution, so revered by its current destroyers. Political decadence occurs when the forms that a state pretends to observe are known to be empty of all meaning. Who does not publicly worship the Constitution? Who, in practice, observes it at all? Congress has only two great powers under the Constitution: the power to declare war and the power of the purse. The first has been relinquished to the Executive; the second has drowned in a red sea.

The Supreme Court is no longer the Executive’s equal. Rather, it is the Executive’s tool. The White House’s open coaching of the unqualified Clarence Thomas for a place on the Court made it dramatically clear that the Court now acts as a nine-member legal council to the Executive, its principal function the validation of Executive decrees. The current Court has also displayed a startling dislike of the American people, and the joy with which the nine nullities chop away at our Bill of Rights is a marvel to behold. But then the hatred of those
inside
the fabled Beltway for those
outside
has now—what else?—created a true hatred on the part of the Many for the Few who govern them, or appear to govern, since the actual decision makers—and the paymasters—are beyond anyone’s reach, out there in the boardrooms of the world.

In the absence of true political debate, we have what I think of as the Sunday menagerie on television. Here journalists and politicians gaze at one another through the bars of received Opinion and chatter about “process,” a near-meaningless word in these parts. Recently I watched Richard Darman, the budget director, gabble to Messrs. Evans and Novak about the deficit. To my amazement, the defense budget was actually mentioned by Evans. Apparently the Brookings Institution had daringly suggested that if a few hundred dollars were cut, we would still be able to support with our swift nuclear sword the “democracy” of Tonga. But although the defense budget continues to be the cancer that is killing our body politic, it may not be dealt with at any length by the media, and Darman was swift to create the necessary diversion: “Entitlements!” he moaned right on cue. “If only we could get
them
on the table.” He shook his head in despair at the trillions of dollars that we
waste on free dentures and on the financing in luxury of profligate unwed mothers.