THIRTY-THREE
I now realize that I was brought up at the heart of aviation and, simultaneously, through my grandfather, at the then true heart of U.S. politics, the Senate. I lived much of my first seventeen years at Senator and Mrs. Gore’s Rock Creek Park house on Broad Branch Road, where I was more and more put to work as a reader to the Senator which I enjoyed, particularly when we were done with the Congressional Record and he would get me to reading Brann the Iconoclast, Robert Ingersoll, and other freethinkers and skeptics, as well as Mark Twain whose complete works were kept not in the attic library with several thousand other books but in the drawing room for a quick fix when “we” read after dinner and Mrs. Gore, relieved of her reading duties, could retreat to her upstairs sitting room and devour serials in Redbook and Ladies Home Companion. Neither the Senator nor I could understand what she saw in those stories but she had earned her free time or, as the Senator used to chuckle when any of us wearied while reading to him, “Both of Milton’s daughters are said to have gone blind reading to him.” We were led to believe that it was upon a very high altar indeed that we were being sacrificed. Between grandfather and father I inhabited two worlds, each fascinating to me. I was not interested in my father’s so-called legendary career as a jock but his life with Lindbergh and Earhart and the Wright brothers was magical. Also, the serenity of his nature was in benign contrast to my mother’s raging nature. I saw her as little as possible; unfortunately, she saw to it that I was not going to spend much time with the Gores or Gene after her marriage to Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, who, through his mother, a Jennings, was a Standard Oil heir. His oleaginous money kept me at schools farther and farther away from Rock Creek and the Gores as well as from Gene, now removed to New York City with a new wife and two new children. Later, when Nina had left Auchincloss, she married her air force general who died early of a blood disease, but by then I was in the army and Gene had been brevetted a major general in the air force to oversee the army’s development of new weapons, while his younger brother was a brigadier general in charge of an air force fighter wing stationed in Italy. Gene was distressed at not being given a more combatant role but a coronary thrombosis a few years earlier nearly kept him entirely out of the war. Through father, stepfather, uncle, I got to know, off duty, as it were, many of the great air commanders from Tooey Spaatz to General Doolittle to Pete Quesada to Nate Twining to Uzal G. Ent who took out the Ploesti oil fields (he was also a descendant of one of the original Siamese twins). Many of these generals were startlingly young even to my youthful eye. Like so many of the early fliers they were a race apart. They also tended to political conservatism—but then so did I, not to mention Jack Kennedy who was very much his father’s son. My enthusiasm for FDR only developed after the war due to exposure to Eleanor. But I was sometimes shocked to hear generals (not the ones noted above) talk about how easy it would be to get rid of Roosevelt through a military coup. Apparently we were fighting the wrong enemy. Stalin not Hitler was the threat. These bull sessions were pretty much just that, fueled by bourbon. After all, none of them was as eloquent as T. P. Gore in denouncing the president. But the Senator never dreamed of a military coup while Gene quite liked the president except for his propensity to lie even when there was no need to. Also, West Point trained its future officers to be accountable for their deeds, unlike presidents who tend cheerfully to outsource blame. When FDR insisted that the army pilots fly the mail despite his director of air commerce’s fierce resistance, the result was the death of many pilots as my father had predicted: “We are not trained for flying in all weather. I know. I’m one of them.” But FDR ordered the air force into action. After a number of disasters he called in Gene: “Well, Brother Vidal, we seem to have a problem.” This was the only time I ever heard Gene express disgust for the president. “I really liked that ‘we.’ ” But Gene was no politician; his fellow West Pointer Eisenhower was. When a similar disaster befell President Eisenhower he sent Jim Hagerty, his press aide, to take the blame for a presidential error. “But,” Hagerty whined, “after what I said yesterday to the press corps they’ll tear me apart.” “Better, my boy,” said the smiling Eisenhower, “you than me.”
That fliers are—or once were—temperamentally unlike other people is not unnatural. They operated above the earth in every sense. But while the first pilots were uncommonly brave and, often, uncommonly disdainful of us earthbound ants, as flight became more and more universal the differences were less sharp except now in the military where they are beginning to show up in odd ways. Even our slow-witted media is reporting recent problems at the Air Force Academy where Christian evangelicals are now raising hell in Heaven’s name by attacking non-Christians with unseemly fervor. Since all of us pay for that academy, and most of us are not Christian zealots, I keep thinking of those generals long ago speaking of the need to send Roosevelt home in order to fight Godless Communism. There now appears to be something potentially dangerous afoot in our military; troops that could very well heed a call to arms of a revolutionary sort.
Between air cadets who are being indoctrinated as Christian soldiers proceeding ever onward and disgusted army reservists vanishing without leave from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the resignations of high-ranking senior officers, our military has been demoralized by the oil-and-gas junta that has seized the government provoking—what? During the Second War Curtis LeMay, commanding general of the B-29s that finished off Japan, was also a voice demanding that we must always be quick to bomb disobedient peoples back into the Stone Age, yet, to his credit, he was one of the senior commanders who begged President Truman not to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (On the ground that his 20th Air Force had already leveled Japan and he did not want his triumphant devastation obscured by last-minute novelties?)
Gene’s younger brother was a charming South Dakota Republican as was, indeed, Gene himself. Although Pick, as General Vidal was known, very much shared the sense of difference that existed between airmen and land-men he was pretty much apolitical except that, postwar, he had bonded with another airman, Barry Goldwater, paladin of far right America. I cannot say I grasped much of this at the time. As, briefly, the “boy pilot,” I was a sort of mascot of the fliers as I had been mascot of the Army football team of 1925 which had gone down to serious defeat, no doubt on orders from the sky god.
Pick and Goldwater often flew together once Goldwater became a junior Senator from Arizona and Pick was posted to Washington. Both were brigadier generals in the Air Force Reserve.
The year after I ran for Congress and was labeled a “liberal” because I thought we should recognize the existence of Red China as there seemed to be so many people living there (this is irony), Ralph Graves, editor of Life magazine, asked me if I would interview what looked like the next Republican candidate for president against Jack Kennedy in 1964. This meant a lot of reading of speeches on my part but I thought, why not? Goldwater assumed that as the nephew of his friend I’d be friendly even though our chat would be billed as a conversation between a conservative and a liberal. Hard to imagine today such a piece being allowed in what was then perhaps the largest-circulation magazine in the country and devoted, as was its owner, to an ever-expanding American empire and the Christianization of China.