As Jack began his long campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, I decided to help out with a play called The Best Man whose successful run on Broadway did him no harm. Some years later, I wrote another political play, An Evening with Richard Nixon: in this case my Nixon character, wonderfully played by George Irving, spoke only Nixon’s actual recorded words; this decision to use his actual words as recorded over the years cost me more money in research than I was ever to make out of the play. But with Irving as Nixon the result was wildly comic because Nixon seemed to have no conscious mind. He said whatever was milling about in his overwrought subconscious. In speeches he often turned to Pat, his wife, loyally seated nearby, and, shaking his finger at her, he would intone, “We here in America can no longer stand pat.” The producer, an old friend, suddenly succumbed to a fit of megalomania: instead of opening at a small theater like the Booth where my Visit to a Small Planet had done so well, he opened Nixon at the Shubert, a vast theater that only something the size of Oklahoma!, the musical—or indeed the state—could ever have filled. Needless to say, as always, in Nixon land, there were death threats for many of us, while The New York Times outdid itself by headlining the review: “A play for radical liberals,” certain death for a Broadway play. Actually the play was a sharp preview of Watergate, already unfolding in the wings. A dance critic, Clive Barnes reviewed the play which had done well with tryout audiences. Clive conceded that it was very funny but, by the third paragraph, he knew that he was supposed to attack and did. I think his exact line was: “Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our president.” I ran into him not long after and told him, kindly, that in Clive’s native England one might refer to “Our” Queen but in the U.S. we never say Our President. The best aspect of the play was a sort of limbo to which George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and JFK have been assigned, quarreling with each other as they watch with wonder Nixon’s inexorable rise to the presidency. As it turned out, aside from revivals, that was to be my last new play on Broadway, made memorable by a young actress who played several different parts. In due course, I became godfather to one of Susan Sarandon’s sons by Tim Robbins. Yes: I did say, Always a godfather, never a god.
George Irving (the star), Claire Bloom, and I at the New York opening of An Evening with Richard Nixon.
TWELVE
As early as 1959 Judge Joe Hawkins from Poughkeepsie wanted me to run for Congress. Joe was a blue-eyed Irishman with a lively Greek wife. Joe liked show business; he also knew that, thanks to television, I was known to the five counties of the district: Dutchess, Ulster, Greene, Columbia, and Scoharie. Joe was Democratic chairman of Dutchess, the largest county which perversely prided itself on how it had always voted resolutely against its most famous resident Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, held sway at Valkill Cottage while the Roosevelt main house was being turned into a museum and the president himself lay buried nearby in the roosevelt, Dutch for rose garden.
In 1960 Eleanor wanted Adlai Stevenson to be our candidate again. She disliked Jack because she detested his father nor was she enthralled by Jack’s friendship with the Red Scare monger Senator Joe McCarthy. She was dubious about me, too; the increasingly conservative Senator Gore was not a favorite of the Roosevelts. Eleanor did like my father because he was close to Amelia Earhart for whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found disconcerting. Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights together all around the country, just the two of them, communing with the wind and the stars. Although my father maintained that his long relationship with Amelia was simply professional, his sister, while snooping around his bachelor flat in the Anchorage, a small residential hotel on Connecticut Avenue, found in the bathroom a silver-backed hairbrush with the initials A.E. and reddish blond strands of her curly hair in the brush. As a child I longed for Amelia to be my stepmother but nothing came of it. We used to show each other poems that we had written.
In 1960 Jack persuaded FDR Jr., Walter Reuther, and me to be envoys to Mrs. Roosevelt and get her to support Jack for president. We failed: at the Los Angeles convention she was for Stevenson to the end. Once nominated, Jack flew into Hyde Park to woo her. Since Eleanor was nothing if not a realist, she promptly became a partisan. After the election, she sometimes gave me advice to give to him. The first was: “He must get a voice coach. He talks too fast. People can’t follow what he’s saying.” She told me how she herself had had a wonderful coach. Then she gave her sudden high giggle and flashed her Rooseveltian tombstone teeth so like her uncle Theodore’s. “Yes, I know my voice is still rather dreadful but it was ever so much worse.” She also thought the Kennedy children were in luck. “They will still be so young after eight years in the White House which is no place”—and she frowned grimly—“for young people to be brought up in, where they are flattered and tempted by all sorts of the wrong people.” I know that my father was not pleased that young Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, was going around saying that Gene Vidal was his man in the first administration “and so if you wanted an airline route…”
I was not present at this meeting between JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt, disguised as a Sherman tank, but I heard from each fairly similar stories! Jack looks uncommonly nervous as she encourages him to be like Uncle Theodore and FDR. This was 1961, he has just been elected president. Dallas is two years ahead of him. She died in 1962. R.I.P.
Politics. What was the 1960 race about? Overall, the election of 1960 was largely about appearances—literally. In the television debate between Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy did not look too young as his handlers feared while, sweating on camera and looking ill-shaven, Nixon did not appeal to many viewers. The only substantive issue of their joint appearance were two islands off China’s shore, Quemoy and Matsu, and were these barren lumps a significant part of the free world to be defended to the death by the United States or simply ignored as they had been throughout history and so hardly worth a third world war. Since Kennedy looked handsome on camera, he won the debates. But tricky Dick Nixon did get one up on Jack. After they shook hands before the debate, Nixon suddenly scowled and pointed his finger accusingly at Jack, making for a stern winning picture of what Adlai Stevenson liked to refer to as Richard the Black Hearted.
Quemoy and Matsu were promptly forgotten and Jack squeaked through to victory, thanks to Chicago’s Mayor Daley’s sly way with election returns. The country was also being told that we were—all of us—looking for a new generation of young vigorous leaders born in the twentieth century. Dutifully, we pretended that we were. Certainly President Eisenhower did not inspire those of us allegedly eager for new frontiers to cross. In retrospect, Eisenhower managed to keep the peace with a world where Communism was said to be, thanks to the media’s shrill warnings, triumphantly on the march everywhere. Although Eisenhower, the general, did not believe that the Soviets were a threat to the United States, he did see them as posing a danger to that commercial free world that we held so dear and so, secretly, he instructed the CIA to overthrow the freely elected Iranian government of Mossadegh who had wanted to tax “our” British oil supply; then the CIA was ordered to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala because United Fruit did not want to pay any tax at all on “our” bananas that they harvested and sold elsewhere. I’d written a novel about this, Dark Green, Bright Red, but in the general blackout of my work it vanished until Castro appeared on the scene and the book was hailed as “prophetic.” During the campaign for Congress I reluctantly gave an interview to The New York Times, knowing I was being set up because the Times did not cover mid-Hudson elections. The interviewer could not stop giggling as he kept repeating, “I know nothing about politics.” With the help of Mrs. Roosevelt I had come up with an alternative to military conscription: voluntary service at home or abroad in such places where help was needed. I got such a good response from the district that I passed the proposition on to Jack who adopted it. Once president, it became the Peace Corps headed by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver. The Times interview ignored all real issues except for the one that was supposed to be death to a candidate: recognition at the United Nations of Red China. I found that even the conservative electorate of the mid-Hudson valley were puzzled that we had no relations with the world’s most populous country. But Henry Luce, Lord of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, believed that the great mission of the United States was the Christianization of China. This meant that anyone who favored recognition of their vile regime was promptly smeared as pro-Communist.