The Last Empire (57 page)

One candidate was deemed a liar because he exaggerated. He never actually said that he alone had invented the Internet, but he implied that he might have had more to do with its early inception than he had. Worse, he said that his mother-in-law’s medicine cost more than his dog’s identical medicine, when he had—I’ve already forgotten which—either no mother-in-law or no dog. By now the Republic was reeling. The vileness of it all! Could we entrust so false a figure to hold in his hand war’s arrows, peace’s laurel? All in all, the two to three billion dollars that the election cost the generous 1 percent through its corporate paymasters was, by all reckoning, the most profoundly irrelevant in a political history which seems determined to make a monkey of Darwin while exalting the creationist point of view, Manichaean version.

Today’s sermon is from Montaigne: “Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying, we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. . . . Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up.”

But our subject is not the people, those quadrennial spear-carriers, but the two paladins, one of whom will presently be entrusted with the terrible swift nuclear sword, thus becoming the greatest goodest nation that ever was robustly incarnate.

“We are a nation based on Truth,” the Republican managers of the impeachment of sex-fibber President Clinton constantly reminded us, unaware that his constituents were, perversely, rallying round him. Pleased, no doubt, by the metaphysics of his “What is
is
?” After all, what is truth, as a Roman bureaucrat once rather absently put it. Yet . . .

“Yet” is the nicest of words in English when logically, non-pregnantly used. The American global empire rests on a number of breathtaking presidential lies that our court historians seldom dare question. It would seem that the Hitler team got it about right when it comes to human credulity: the greater the lie, the more apt it is to be believed. The price of the perhaps nonexistent dog’s medicine is not going to go unchallenged, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s deliberate provocation of the Japanese, in order to force them into attacking us and thus bring us into the Second World War, is simply not admissible. Contemporary journalism’s first law, “What ought not to be true is not true,” is swiftly backed up by those who write the “history” stories to be used in schools. Happily, I have lived long enough to indulge in the four most beautiful words in the English language: “I told you so.”

In
Burr
(1973), I relit, as it were, the image of that demonized figure, Aaron Burr. In passing, I duly noted that his chief demonizer, the admirable-in-most-things, save a tendency toward hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson, had lived connubially with a slave girl, Sally Hemings, by whom he had a number of children, kept on as slaves. Dumas Malone, the leading Jefferson biographer of the day, denounced my portrait of Jefferson as “subversive,” because, as he put it, no gentleman could have had sexual relations with a slave and, since Mr. Jefferson was the greatest gentleman of that era, he could not have . . . On such false syllogisms are national myths set. Recent testing shows that many of Hemings’s descendants contain the golden DNA of Jefferson himself. Loyalists say that it was an idiot nephew who fathered Sally’s children. How? Since Jefferson and Sally lived pretty much as man and wife at Monticello, the idea of the nephew, banjo in hand, making his way up the hill to the house,
time and again, to get laid by Jefferson’s companion boggles the mind. So much for a great lie that court historians and other propagandists insist that Americans believe. Why is it so grimly important? Since the relationship between black and white is still the most delicate of subjects for Americans, Jefferson must be marble-pure and so outside his own great formulation and invitation to the peoples of all the world: the pursuit of happiness.

That was yesterday. Today, any scrutiny of the three powerful myths which Americans and their helpers in other lands are obliged to accept will set off fire alarms. In
The Golden Age
(largely covering the years 1940–50 as viewed from Washington, D.C., by our rulers), I make three cases involving presidential whoppers. One, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose domestic policies—the New Deal—I admire) deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking us at Pearl Harbor. Why? As of 1940, he wanted us in the war against Hitler, but 80 percent of the American people wanted no European war of any kind after the disappointments of 1917. He could do nothing to budge an isolationist electorate. Luckily for him (and perhaps the world), Japan had a military agreement with Germany and Italy. For several years, Japan had been engaged in an imperial mission to conquer China. Secretly, FDR began a series of provocations to goad the Japanese into what turned out to be an attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor, thus
making inevitable our prompt, wholehearted entry into the Second World War. There is a vast literature on this subject, beginning as early as 1941 with Charles A. Beard’s
President Roosevelt and the Coming of War
and continuing to the current
Day of Deceit
by Robert B. Stinnett, now being argued about in the U.S. Stinnett gives the most detailed account of the steps toward war initiated by FDR, including the November 26, 1941, ultimatum to Japan, ordering them out of China while insisting they renounce their pact with the Axis powers; this left Japan with no alternative but war, the object of the exercise.

The second great myth was that Harry Truman, FDR’s successor, dropped his two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because he feared that a million American lives would be lost in an invasion (that was the lie he told at the time). Admiral Nimitz, on the spot in the Pacific, and General Eisenhower, brooding elsewhere, disagreed: the Japanese had already lost the war, they said. No nuclear bombs, no invasion was needed; besides, the Japanese had been trying to surrender since the May 1945 devastation of Tokyo by U.S. B-29 bombers.

The third great myth was that the Soviets began the Cold War because, driven by the power-mad would-be world conqueror, Stalin, they divided Germany, forcing us to create the West German republic, and then, when Stalin viciously denied us access to our section of Berlin (still under four-power rule as determined at Yalta), we defied him with an airlift. He backed down, foiled in his invasion of France, his crossing of the Atlantic, and so on.

These are three very great myths which most historians of the period knew to be myths but which court historians, particularly those with salaries that are paid by universities with federal grants for research and development, either play down or flatly deny.

David Hume tells us that the Many are kept in order by the Few through Opinion.
The New York Times
in the U.S. is the Opinion-maker of the Few for some of the Many; so when the paper draws the line, as it were, other papers in other lands take heed and toe it. In
The Golden Age
, I revealed, tactfully I thought, life in Washington during the decade from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor to the Cold War and Korea. No one needs to know any history at all to follow the story. Even so, one American reviewer was upset that I did not know how “dumbed-down” (his phrase) Americans were, and how dare I mention people that they had never heard of, such as Harry Hopkins?

But I am a fairly experienced narrator, and each character is, painlessly I hope, explained in context. Unfortunately, the new pop wisdom is that you must only write about what the readers already know about, which, in this case at least, would be an untrue story.

The New York Times
hired a British journalist, once associated with
The New Republic
, a far-right paper unfavorable to me (it is a propagandist for Israel’s Likudite faction, much as
The Washington Times
supports the line of its proprietor, Korea’s Dr. Sun Moon). The hired journalist knew nothing of the period I was writing about. He quotes an aria from Herbert Hoover which he thinks I made up, when, as always with the historical figures that I quote, I only record what they are said to have said.

Hoover regarded, rightly or wrongly, FDR as in the same totalitarian mold as he saw Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin: “You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts.” Our best modern historian, William Appleman Williams, in
Some Presidents: Wilson to Nixon
(1972), noted that it was Hoover’s intuition that, in the first third of the twentieth century, the virus of totalitarian government was abroad in the world, and that Hitler in his demonic way and Stalin in his deadly bureaucratic way and FDR in his relatively melioristic way were each responding to a common Zeitgeist.

For a right-wing hired hand this should have been a profound analysis, but the reviewer fails to grasp it. He also ignores Hoover’s astonishing aside: “What this country needs is a great poem.” Most damaging to the integrity of my narrative (and the historians I relied on), the reviewer declares, without evidence, that . . . But let me quote from a letter by the historian Kai Bird which, to my amazement,
The New York Times
published (usually they suppress anything too critical of themselves or their Opinion-makers):

Twice the reviewer dismisses as “silly” Vidal’s assertion that Harry Truman’s use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was unnecessary because Japan had been trying for some months to surrender.

Such assertions are neither silly nor . . . a product of Vidal’s “cranky politics.” Rather Vidal has cleverly drawn on a rich and scholarly literature published in the last decade to remind his readers that much of what orthodox court historians have written about the Cold War was simply wrong. With regard to Hiroshima, perhaps Vidal had in mind Truman’s July 18, 1945, handwritten diary reference to a “telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace.”

Or this August 3, 1945, item from the diary of Walter Brown:

Brown notes a meeting with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Admiral W. D. Leahy, and Truman at which all three agreed, “Japs looking for peace.” . . . But Truman wanted to drop the bomb; and did. Why? To frighten Stalin, a suitable enemy for the U.S. as it was about to metamorphose from an untidy republic into a national security state at “perpetual war,” in Charles A. Beard’s phrase, “for perpetual peace.”

I fear that the
TLS
review of
The Golden Age
battened on the inaccuracies of the
New York Times
review; your reviewer is plainly an American neoconservative who enjoys crude reversals of categories. The American hard Right has no known interest in the people at large, and a reverence for the 1 percent that pays for their journals and think tanks. He refers to my “universally contemptuous Leftism” which involves “sneering in its disregard for ‘the lower orders . . . the rather shadowy American people.’ ” This is the oldest trick in bad book-reviewing. A novelist writes: “ ‘I hate America,’ shrieked the Communist spy.” This will become, for the dishonest book-reviewer, “At one point, the author even confesses that he hates America.” But I know of no “Leftist” (define) who sneers at the people, while no populist could. Rather I concentrate on what has been done to the people by the 1 percent through its mastery of the national
wealth and made-in-the-house, as it were, Opinion. Your reviewer even misunderstands my own sharp conclusion that an era ended, happily in my view, when the traditional American servant class ceased to exist, thanks to the 13 million of us in the armed services and the full employment of women in the Second World War. That some of my sillier grandees mourn this state of affairs is a part of the social comedy of the narrative, admittedly not of quite so high an order as the inadvertent comedy of Rightists affecting unrequited passion for Demos.

The final myth is that Stalin started the Cold War by dividing Germany into two sections, while trying to drive us out of our sector of Berlin. I’ll quote the best authority, thus far, on what Truman was up to after Potsdam when he met Stalin, who, after Yalta, had expected to live in some sort of reasonable balance with the U.S. Here is Carolyn Eisenberg in
Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949
(1996):

With the inception of the Berlin blockade, President Truman articulated a simple story that featured the Russians trampling the wartime agreements in their ruthless grab for the former German capital. The President did not explain that the United States had [unilaterally—my adverb] abandoned Yalta and Potsdam, that it was pushing the formation of a Western German state against the misgivings of many Europeans and that the Soviets had launched the blockade to prevent partition.

This great lie remains with us today. Please no letters about the horrors of the Gulag, Stalin’s mistreatment of the buffer states, and so on. Our subject is the serious distortions of the truth on our side and why, unless they are straightened out, we are forever doomed to thrash about in a permanent uncomprehending fog. Good morning, Vietnam!

The attitude towards truth on the part of Truman’s administration was best expressed by his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in the memoir
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
(1969). It was Acheson who launched the global empire on February 27, 1947. Place: Cabinet Room of the White House. Present: Truman, Secretary of State Marshall, Under Secretary Acheson, a half-dozen Congressional leaders. The British had, yet again, run out of money. They could not honor their agreements to keep Greece tethered to freedom. Could we take over? Although Stalin had warned the Greek Communists that their country was in the U.S. sphere and they should therefore expect no aid from him, Truman wanted a military buildup. We had to stand tall. But Marshall failed to convince the Congressional leaders. Acheson, a superb corporate lawyer and a most witty man, leaped into the breach. He was impassioned. The free world stood at the brink. Yes, at Armageddon. Should the Russians occupy Greece and then Turkey,
three con-tinents would be at risk. He used the evergreen homely metaphor of how one rotten apple in a barrel could . . . Finally, were we not the heirs of the Roman Empire? Was not the Soviet Union our Carthage? Had not our Punic Wars begun? We dared not lose. “America has no choice. We must act now to protect our security . . . to protect freedom itself.” It was then agreed that if Truman addressed the country in these terms and scared the hell out of the American people, Congress would finance what has turned out to be a half-century of Cold War, costing, thus far, some $7.1 trillion.