Cultural Cohesion (56 page)

Nixon might have got out of Vietnam straight away if he had thought it was the difficult thing to do. But the liberal opposition to the war convinced him that quitting was the easy thing to do, and he made a fetish of doing the difficult thing instead of the easy one. If the whole world begged Nixon to do the easy thing he would do the difficult one, every time. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the strength of Nixon's convictions. He thought he was saving the world from communism. He was probably right to believe that for Communists peace is never an end, only a means. He was certainly right to be untrusting. But he never understood that there was such a thing as handing the moral advantage to the other side. He thought that the other side was too immoral for that to be possible.

Kissinger thought the same way. As Nixon's National Security Adviser Kissinger was the man in charge of strategic brainwaves. It would be easy now for Nixon to blame Kissinger. More damagingly for them both, he approves of everything Kissinger did. There are successes to record: détente was probably the right move, which Nixon carried through patiently, without weakness. The Middle East policy was realistic in an area of competing unrealities. But Nixon still seems to think that the toppling of Allende was some kind of triumph, by which the Red Sandwich was undermined. The Red Sandwich was the device by which communism, squeezing inwards from Cuba and Chile, would capture the whole of South America. The Red Sandwich had to be foiled. Innocent Chileans have gone through the torments of the damned because Nixon and Kissinger thought that a sandwich had to be stopped from closing in on a continent.

It would have been better for everyone, capitalists included, if Nixon had burdened Allende with help. The best that can be said for such catastrophic initiatives is that they did not originate with Nixon. Eisenhower turned down Castro's requests for aid. The same sort of mistake goes all the way back to the repudiation of the Dixie Mission. Nixon's proudest boast is that he reopened the doors to China. He forgets to say that he started out as a fervent advocate of the policy which closed them.

So in foreign affairs Nixon didn't show quite the clear vision that he thinks he did. He still seems to think that the invasion of Cambodia was a “complete success.” Right up to the final debacle, he and Kissinger understood everything about the war in Vietnam except what mattered. “As Kissinger saw the situation, we were up against a paradoxical situation in which North Vietnam, which had in effect lost the war, was acting as if it had won; while South Vietnam, which had effectively won the war, was acting as if it had lost.” If that was indeed how Kissinger saw things, then he was seeing them backward. (Apart from a few such local outbreaks, incidentally, the word “situation” is kept under tight control.)

Meanwhile, as Nixon tells it, the liberals and radicals were wrecking the country. On page 471 he argues that the depredations of the Weathermen were sufficient reason for stepping up the activities of the intelligence agencies. Reference is made to the FBI's long history of black-bag jobs in defence of liberty. The reasoning is specious, since Nixon is really out to justify the existence of the Plumbers, who were not a government agency but a private army. On page 496 he is to be found “keeping the pressure on the people around me . . . to get information about what the other side was doing,” the other side being the Democrats. He admits that he overstepped the mark, but blurs the importance of the mark he overstepped. He was in fact subverting the Constitution of the United States, which is framed not so much for democracy as against the tyrant, and declares that a Presidential party shall not be formed. “At least, unlike previous administrations,” he says on page 781, “we hadn't used the FBI.” But at least the FBI is to some extent accountable for its actions. Nixon's personal fact-gathering unit was accountable to nobody—not even, apparently, to Nixon.

Nixon persuasively argues that he knew nothing about the black-bag jobs in detail. There is no good reason to suppose that he did—what use is power if you can't leave the dirty work to subordinates? But plausibility evaporates when he tries to suggest that his ignorance was genuine rather than wilful. The first unmistakable evasion comes on page 514, when he addresses himself to the matter of the raid on Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. “I do not believe I was told about the break-in at the time.” Why isn't he certain? How could he forget?

Credibility slips further on page 638, which records the day—June 18, 1972—when Nixon, at ease on Key Biscayne, first hears about the Watergate caper. Haldeman tells Nixon that the FBI will have to go further than Miami if it wishes to trace the cash found on the burglars. Nixon tells us nothing of how he reacted to what Haldeman said. An eloquent silence, because what Haldeman was really saying was that the cash was laundered. Why would Nixon accept that information without question, unless he knew that the White House was bankrolling intelligence operations with funds meant to be untraceable even by government agencies?

For the rest of the book, Nixon gives a convincing impersonation of a man standing on a landslide. As his world collapses, his prose attains the authentic poise of deep grief. But the remorse is all about the cover-up, not the crime. Just as Nixon always did the difficult thing instead of the easy thing, so he always accepted the responsibility but refused the blame. He takes the responsibility for the cover-up: his subordinates started it, but in order to protect them he allowed it to go on. He doesn't take the blame. Still less, then, does he take the blame for the crime itself. To the end of the line, the most he will admit to is an error of judgement. His aides sinned through an excess of zeal. His own sin was to let them do it.

“If I had indeed been the knowing Watergate conspirator that I was charged as being,” he says on page 902, “I would have recognized in 1973 that the tapes contained conversations that would be fatally damaging.” It ought to be a strong point. Unfortunately Nixon has by this time already made it clear that the main reason he considered himself guiltless was that circumstances had made extraordinary measures legitimate. He had done what he thought necessary with such self-righteousness that the possibility of ever being called to account hadn't entered his head.

Nixon's book is one long act of self-justification. To a remarkable degree the attempt succeeds. At the end his enemies are plausibly made to sound hysterical victims of what he calls “liberal chic.” The House Judiciary Committee produced 7,000 pages of evidence against Nixon, but most people now would have trouble being precise about what he did wrong. The media caught Watergate fever. Rumours that he had lined his pockets assumed the status of common knowledge. He almost certainly didn't. He would never have risked losing the Presidency for the sake of personal enrichment. He lost it because he went on feeling hunted even after he was home and dry.

A House Committee created him and a Senate Committee destroyed him. Under a different system Nixon's talents might have flourished and his drawbacks been nullified. Men just as devious warm the front benches on either side of the House of Commons. The strangest thing is that none of it was necessary. He could have pulled out of the war straight away. Failing that, he could have resisted the liberal opposition by constitutional means. But to a fatal extent he was still the man he had always been. “The Presidency is not a finishing school,” he says memorably on page 1,078. “It is a magnifying glass.” Judging by his own case, he is only half right. The job did in fact bring out the best in him. But it also magnified the worst. Even as their President, he still felt that the liberals and intellectuals had an unfair advantage. So he tried to preserve his power by extreme means, and if he had not first resigned he would surely have been impeached for it.

The book is well enough done to establish Nixon as a tragic figure and turn the tide of sympathy. It might even put him on the comeback trail. But we ought to keep our heads. The real tragic figures are all in Chile, Vietnam and Cambodia. It is ridiculous to class Nixon with the great villains of modern history, but not so ridiculous to be more angry with him than with them. He should have known better. Nobody sane expects Russia or China to be bound by scruple. The Russians and Chinese, says Nixon—as if their endorsement supported his case—couldn't understand what the Watergate fuss was all about. Of course they ­couldn't. They have forgotten what freedom feels like. A state in which power does not perpetuate itself has become unimaginable to them.

In certain crucial respects Nixon forgot what America is supposed to mean. Yet the virtues of this book prove that in other respects he didn't. Even now that he has lost everything, he has difficulty seeing himself from the outside. But whatever havoc he might have played with his country's institutions, in these pages he does not betray its free spirit. The book is like a soap opera, yet the central character emerges as a human being. They were right to throw him down. Here is proof that they were not entirely wrong to raise him up in the first place.

New Statesman
, 1978; later included in

From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

POSTSCRIPT

Time and the archives can make a monkey out of the amateur political commentator. Hiss was guilty. It was a fact written down in Moscow, but until it came to light there was a terrific urge among the liberal-minded all over the world to believe him innocent, simply because his prosecutor had been Nixon. Never an object of love, Nixon's name, by the time this piece was written, was mud: deep mud, poisoned mud, the mud of the Mekong Delta. As the quondam witch-finder burned in the same fire he himself had once helped to light, the smoke got in the eyes of the spectators. It was a kind of aerosol myopia. Not only must Nixon be guilty of any crime he had ever been accused of, he must be guilty of any crime Caligula had been accused of as well. But for those capable of retaining an historic memory, Stalin's rap sheet remained all his own. More by instinct than judgement, I left room for the remote possibility that Nixon might have been right about Hiss all along, and that what had been reprehensible about the prosecution had been its methods. They were in transparent violation of the Constitution. People were always ready to think that about anything Nixon had ever done. It was a safe assumption. But they couldn't have it both ways. If it was Nixon who subverted the American system of justice, then the American system of justice must be worthy of esteem, and, by extension, so must America itself. At a time when the Vietnam disaster was still fresh in the minds of all, it was unfashionable to hold the view that a nation which could get rid of its chief executive on a point of principle might have something fundamentally admirable about it when compared with nations in which the chief executive could get rid of large sections of the population at the stroke of a pen. (The victorious Ho Chi Minh was already engaged in that very activity.) In pursuit of the point, I should have noted that the Supreme Court, though Nixon had done his best to stack it, handed down the decision that finally dished him—the decision that ruled his tapes into evidence. When Gerald Ford said, “Our Constitution works,” he was talking something better than hot air.

And Nixon's book was something better than casuist apologetics. It gave me a taste for American political memoirs, biographies and professional commentaries that I have pursued ever since: a vast subsidiary literature that can make it very easy to feel like an outsider. I went through all the collected commentaries of Elizabeth Drew as if they were episodes of
The West Wing
on DVD, and never ceased to marvel at how a journalist could be on such a sure footing with the elected politicians. But once again, the insider pays a penalty. Inexorably infected by glamour and power, the American political pundit is apt to persuade himself that he is part of the government. Walter Lippmann practically was. In 1918 he drafted most of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and as America's next war approached he personally invented the destroyers-for-bases deal that opened the way for Lend-Lease and Britain's salvation from Hitler. In Britain there have always been knowledgeable political journalists, but only on the understanding that they could never wield such influence. If they could, they would lose their reputations as writers. (Lippmann's reputation as a stylist was undeserved, but he was certainly thought of as some kind of writer: the resolute drabness of his prose was taken for distinction.) It's a different way of thinking about power and reputation, although one must sometimes strive to remind oneself that it is a preferable one. There are many reasons to envy Bob Woodward. His prose style isn't among them, but it must be a confidence booster to know that your books, before they are even published, are read with nervous attention in the White House, on the Hill, in Foggy Bottom and at Lang­ley. To have attained such a position must help Woodward to bury the nagging awareness of the fluke of fate that sent him to court on the very day the Watergate burglars were drawn up on parade like the Beagle Boys in the Scrooge McDuck comic books. Woodward was just an ordinary reporter, but in America there are few limits set to personal destiny, and eventually, on the way up, he would pass the President on his way down. The piquancy of their intersecting trajectories is lessened if we deny Nixon his status as a man of substance. While he remained alive, that status was still hard to assert. I count myself lucky to have found the nerve, or perhaps retained the naivety, to assert it.

2003

34

HARD-CORE GORE

Matters of Fact and of Fiction:
Essays 1973–1976
by Gore Vidal

Nobody dissents from marking Gore Vidal high as an essayist, not even those—especially not those—who would like to mark him low as a novelist. His
Collected Essays 1952–1972
was rightly greeted with all the superlatives going. Since one doesn't have to read far in this new volume before realizing that the old volume has been fully lived up to and in some respects even surpassed, it becomes necessary either to wheel out the previous superlatives all over again or else to think up some new ones. Rejecting both courses, this reviewer intends to pick nits and make gratuitous observations on the author's character, in the hope of maintaining some measure of critical independence. Gore Vidal is so dauntingly good at the literary essay that he is likely to arouse in other practitioners an inclination to take up a different line of work. That, however, would be an excessive reaction. He isn't omniscient, infallible or effortlessly stylish—he just knows a lot, possesses an unusual amount of common sense and writes scrupulously lucid prose. There is no need to deify the man just because he can string a few thoughts together. As I shall now reveal, he has toenails of clay.

Always courageous about unfolding himself, Vidal sometimes overcooks it. He is without false modesty but not beyond poor-mouthing himself to improve a point. “The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of . . .” But wait a minute. It might remain a necessary task to point out that the nuttier film buffs are no more than licensed illiterates: the ability to carry out a semiotic analysis of a Nicholas Ray movie is undoubtedly no compensation for being incapable of parsing a simple sentence. But some of those bad movies were, after all, quite good. Vidal himself had his name writ large on both
The Left-Handed Gun
and
The Best Man
, neither of which is likely to be forgotten. It suits his purposes, however, to pretend that he was a dedicated candy-butcher. He wants to be thought of as part of the hardbitten Hollywood that produced the adage: “Shit has its own integrity.”

As a Matter of Fact, Vidal rarely set out to write rubbish: he just got mixed up with a few pretentious projects that went sour. Summarizing, in the first of these essays, the Top Ten Best-Sellers, Vidal makes trash hilarious. But there is no need for him to pretend that he knows trash from the inside. He was always an outsider in that regard: the point he ought to make about himself is that he never had what it took to be a Hollywood hack. It was belief, not cynicism, that lured him to write screenplays. Even quite recently he was enthusiastically involved in a mammoth project called
Gore Vidal's Caligula
, once again delivering himself into the hands of those commercial forces which would ensure that the script ended up being written by Caligula's Gore Vidal.

Yet you can see what he is getting at. Invention, however fumbling, must always be preferred over aridity, however high-flown. In all the essays dealing with Matters of Fiction, Vidal is constantly to be seen paying unfeigned attention to the stories second-rate writers are trying to tell. His contempt is reserved for the would-be first-raters obsessed with technique. For the less exalted scribes honestly setting about their grinding chores, his sympathy is deep even if his wit is irrepressible. Quoting a passage from Herman Wouk, he adds: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” Taken out of context, this might seem a destructive crack, but when you read it in its proper place there is no reason to think that the first half of the sentence has been written for the sole purpose of making the second half funny.

If this were not a nit-picking exercise we would be bound to take notice of Vidal's exemplary industry. He has actually sat down and read, from front to back, the gigantic novels by John Barth and Thomas Pynchon for which the young professors make such claims. Having done so, he is in a position to give a specific voice to the general suspicion which the academic neo-theologians have aroused in the common reader's mind. Against their religious belief in The Novel, Vidal insists that there is no such thing—there are only novels. In this department, as in several others, Vidal is the natural heir of Edmund Wilson, whose
The Fruits of the MLA
was the opening salvo in the long campaign, which we will probably never see the end of, to rescue literature from its institutionalized interpreters.

But Wilson is not Vidal's only ancestor. Several cutting references to Dwight Macdonald are a poor reward for the man whose devastating essay “By Cozzens Possessed” (collected in
Against the American Grain
) was the immediate forerunner of everything Vidal has done in this particular field. It would be a good thing if Vidal, normally so forthcoming about his personal history, could be frank about where he considers himself to stand in relation to other American critical writers. In his introductory note to this book there is mention of Sainte-Beuve; in a recent interview given to the
New York Times
there was talk about Montaigne; but among recent essayists, now that Wilson is gone, Vidal seems to find the true critical temperament only among “a few elderly Englishmen.” Yet you have only to think of people like Macdonald or Mary McCarthy or Elizabeth Hardwick to see that if Vidal is
primus
it is only
inter pares
: there is an American critical tradition, going back to Mencken and beyond, which he is foolish to imagine can be disowned. This is the only respect in which Vidal seems shy of being an American, and by no coincidence it is the only respect in which he ever sounds provincial.

Otherwise his faults, like his virtues, are on a world scale. In the Matters of Fact, which occupy the second part of the book, the emphasis is on the corrupting influence of power and money. Born into the American ruling class, Vidal is as well placed as Louis Auchincloss (about whom he writes appreciatively) to criticize its behaviour. He is angrily amusing about West Point, Robert Moses, ITT, the Adams dynasty and the grand families in general. Indeed it is only about Tennessee Williams and Lord Longford that he is
un
angrily funny—for the most part his humour about Matters of Fact is sulphuric. There is no question of Vidal's sincerity in loathing what he calls the Property Party. On the other hand he is a trifle disingenuous in allowing us to suppose that all connections have been severed between himself and the ruling class. Certainly he remains on good terms with the ruling class of Britain—unless Princess Margaret has become as much of an intellectual exile from the British aristocracy as he has from the American.

As a Matter of Fact, Gore Vidal is a Beautiful Person who chooses his drawing rooms with care. He hobnobs with the rich and powerful. He hobnobs also with the talented, but they tend to be those among the talented who hobnob with the rich and powerful. He likes the rich and powerful as a class. He hates some of them as individuals and attacks them with an invective made all the more lacerating by inside knowledge. For that we can be grateful. But we can also wish that his honesty about his own interior workings might extend to his thirst for glamour. Speaking about Hollywood, he is an outsider who delights to pose as an insider. Speaking about the ruling class, he is an insider who delights to pose as an outsider. In reality he is just as active a social butterfly as his arch-enemy Truman Capote. But in Vidal's case the sin is venial, not mortal, since his writings remain comparatively unruffled by the social whirl, whereas Capote has become a sort of court dwarf, peddling a brand of thinly fictionalized tittle-tattle which is really sycophancy in disguise. Vidal reserves that sort of thing for after hours.

Yet even with these nits picked, it must still be said that Vidal is an outstanding writer on political issues. “The State of the Union,” the last essay in the book, is so clear an account of what has been happening in America that it sounds commonplace, until you realize that every judgement in it has been hard won from personal experience. Only one of its assumptions rings false, and even there you can see his reasons. Vidal still assumes that any heterosexual man is a culturally repressed bisexual. This idea makes a good basis for polemical assault on sexual intolerance, but as a Matter of Fact it is Fiction. As it happens, I have met Gore Vidal in the flesh. The flesh looked immaculately preserved. In a room well supplied with beautiful and brilliant women, he was as beautiful as most and more brilliant than any. I was not impervious to his charm. But I examined myself in vain for any sign of physical excitement. He might say that I was repressing my true nature but the real reason was simpler. It was just that he was not a female.

Not even Gore Vidal is entirely without self-delusion. On the whole, though, he is among the most acute truth-tellers we possess. Certainly he is the most entertaining. The entertainment arises naturally from his style—that perfectly disciplined, perfectly liberated English which constitutes all by itself a decisive answer to the Hacks of Academe. Calling them “the unlearned learned teachers of English” and “the new barbarians, serenely restoring the Dark Ages,” he has only to quote their prose against his and the case is proved. A pity, then, that on page 260 there is a flagrant (well, all right: barely noticeable) grammatical error. “Journalists who know quite as much or more than I about American politics . . .” is not good grammar. There is an “as” missing. But the other 281 scintillating pages of error-free text go some way towards making up for its loss.

New Statesman
, 1977; later included in

From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

POSTSCRIPT

A quarter of a century has gone by but I would not now write any less enthusiastically about the virtues of Gore Vidal's easy-seeming fluency. Indeed there is one stricture that I would take back, or at least tone down. It was true that he had a thirst for glamour, but it was also true that he did his best to make sure it would not sap his strength. His self-exile in Ravello got him away from a too-constant presence in New York, Los Angeles and London. When he was in those places, he dined in grand company several nights a week. It was on just such a night that I first met him, and you couldn't count the countesses. Of the men, those he did not insult hung on his words, and those he did wanted to hang themselves afterwards. He was in demand like Talleyrand. Had he not banished himself for long periods of solitary concentration, he would have dined at the same altitude every night of the year. His powers of self-discipline were proved by both the volume of his work and its meticulous quality, and I was dense to allow otherwise. Had I been prescient, however, I could have suggested that a proclivity already noticeable might grow to a distortion. An off-shore base gave him the advantage of an outside view, but he valued his birthright as a scion of the American East Coast political elite too highly to let it go. In his later days this tenacious quirk has led to destructive effects: never on his style, but often on his message.

He is as sure as John Foster Dulles ever was that American power is decisive anywhere in the world. He warns us against it, but he takes it as a fact. In 2001 he wrote in the
Times Literary Supplement
to expound his conviction that the United States had tricked Japan into World War II. With great reluctance I opposed this view in the letters column of the same paper, and incurred his wrath by doing so. The sorcerer did not like to see the apprentice concocting spells of his own. But the apprentice had good reason. Born on the eve of the Pacific War, and in a country which might well have shared the fate of Nanking, I had cause to remember the devastation which was initiated by Imperial Japan for its own purposes, and with a strength that was all its own. The Japanese right wing is still a force, and likes nothing better than to hear illustrious figures from abroad promoting the seductive theory that the U.S. was entirely responsible for the whole event. With an eye to the future as much as to the past, the first duty of any Australian capable of getting his views on the subject published is to buttress liberal opinion in Japan, where the most elementary truths about Japan's Imperial adventure are still struggling to get into the school textbooks.

Admirably alert to the discrepancy between entrenched financial interest and democratic ideals, Vidal has always seen it as his first duty to warn America against itself, and hence the world against America. But the “hence” is suspect. There are things of this world that are decided without America's say-so—the September 11 attack was only the most spectacular—and to argue otherwise is to exemplify the very imperialism that he condemns. How well he condemns it, though. He sounds like an oracle even when he is wrong: the drawback of oracles.

2003