Gore Vidal - Empire

“I wish, Cabot, I could be as certain as you are…” said Adams.

“About everything?” Lodge was amused and slightly, thought Hay, patronizing. Hay had observed the phenomenon before: when the pupil has surpassed-or thinks he has-his teacher.

“No. I have never wished for senatorial certitude.” Adams was dry. “That is beyond me. I’m always uncertain.”

“You were certainly certain that the Spanish must be driven out of Cuba,” began Lodge; to be stopped by Adams, who suddenly raised a pale small poodle-like paw.

“That was different. The only important contribution that my family ever made to the United States was the invention of the doctrine that is known by President Monroe’s name. The Western Hemisphere must be free of European influence, and the Cuba Libre movement was the last act-the completion-of my grandfather’s doctrine. Now, in the large sense, Spain is gone from our hemisphere, along with the French and for all intents and purposes, the British. The Caribbean is ours forever. But for us to end up with vast holdings in the Pacific, that strikes me as potentially dangerous, as more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve sailed the South Seas…”

“Old gold,” murmured Hay, the phrase Adams had used to describe the entrancing native women of Polynesia.

Adams affected not to hear. “Now you want us to take over a hostile population, made up of worthless Malay types, and Roman Catholics, as well. I thought you had enough of those in Boston without taking on another ten million or so.”

Lodge was airy. “Well, unlike the ones in Boston, we won’t let your worthless Malays vote, at least not in Massachusetts elections. And they’re not hostile, at least not the ones who matter, the people of property, who want us to stay.”

“Those are the tame cats, the ones who liked the Spanish. But all the rest follow this young man Aguinaldo, and they want independence.” Adams tugged at his beard, which was a white version of Lodge’s beard as Hay’s beard was a grizzled compromise. Hay was touched that a relatively young politician should want to emulate his elders when modern politics now required clean-shaven men like McKinley and Hanna, or the moustachioed Roosevelt. What did beards imply? he wondered. The early Roman emperors, like the early presidents, were clean-shaven; then decadence-and beards; then Christianity and the clean-shaven Constantine. Was McKinley to be a religious leader, as well as imperial consolidator?

Hay gave the latest news of Emilio Aguinaldo, whose troops had fought with Admiral Dewey on condition that once the Spaniards were gone there would be an independent Philippine-or Visayan-republic. But McKinley’s change of heart had put an end to that dream. Now Aguinaldo’s troops-mostly from the Tagal tribe-had occupied the Spanish forts. Aguinaldo had also occupied Iloilo, the capital of Panay province. Thus far, neither side had been eager to begin hostilities. “But this can’t last much longer,” said Hay, completing his tour of the archipelago’s horizon as viewed from the State Department. Elsewhere in Mullett’s wedding cake of a building, Hay knew that the War Department was contemplating games that he knew nothing of; and did not want to know about.

“Obviously some sort of incident now would get us our two-thirds vote.” Lodge sat in the armchair opposite Adams and adopted the same meditative pose as his old professor-and editor. After Lodge had graduated from Harvard, Adams had hired his former student to be an assistant editor of the North American Review , with one standing instruction: when editing historians, strike out all superfluous words, particularly adjectives. Hay had always envied Adams’s continence in the matter of English prose. Adams wrote like a Roman, with an urgent war to report; Hay’s prose simply idled, waiting for a joke to turn up.

“We had-you had-the two-thirds vote two weeks ago.” Adams scowled. “Then the whole thing was frittered away. How I wish Don Cameron was still in the Senate…”

“And La Dona across the square,” Hay added. Without Lizzie Cameron, Adams was incomplete. But the Camerons were wintering in Paris; and Adams was more than usually irritable and restless in Washington.

For once, Lodge did not make an excuse or, rather, more characteristically, blame someone else for the erosion of support in a Senate where the Republicans not only had a majority but he himself was the guiding spirit of the Foreign Affairs Committee. “I’ve never seen so much pressure brought to bear, never heard senators give so many positively crazed reasons for not doing the obvious. Anyway, we now have help from Mr. Bryan. Or Colonel Bryan, as he calls himself…”

“And who does not, who can?” said Hay, himself a major in the Civil War, who had never fought because he was Lincoln’s secretary. Then, the war won without his participation, he was brevetted lieutenant colonel; hence, always and forever, he was Colonel Hay just as the President was always Major McKinley. But the President had actually seen action under his mentor, Ohio’s politician-general Rutherford B. Hayes, whose own mentor had been yet another politician-general, James Garfield, and Hay’s dear friend, as well. When General Garfield, the golden, had been elected president, he had offered Colonel Hay the position of private secretary; but Hay had gently declined. He could not be in middle age what he had been in youth. Now, of course, all the political generals from Grant to Garfield were dead; the colonels were on the shelf; and the majors had come into their own. After them, no more military-titled politicians. Yet every American war had bred at least one president. Who, Hay wondered, would the splendid little war-oh, fatuous phrase!-bring forth? Adams favored General Miles, the brother-in-law of his beloved Lizzie Cameron. Lodge had already declared that Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila was equal to Nelson’s at Aboukir. But of course Lodge would support McKinley, who would be reelected; and so there would be no splendid little war-hero president in the foreseeable future.

Hay caught himself daydreaming; and not listening. In his youth, he could do both. What was Lodge talking about? “He holds court in the Marble Room back of the Senate. They come in, one by one, to get their instructions. He’s like the pope.” Bryan. Colonel Bryan was in town to persuade the Democratic senators to support the treaty on patriotic grounds; then, the treaty passed, they would support a separate resolution to the effect that, in due course, the Philippines would be given their independence. Hay decided that Bryan was probably clever. If imperialism proved to be as popular as McKinley sensed it was in St. Louis, Bryan could enter the next presidential race as one who had joined the army and then favored the treaty and temporary annexation; but if imperialism, for some reason, should not be popular, he was on record as favoring the independence of the Philippines while the Major was now firmly for annexation. “He’s also like the pope in that he is not a gentleman.” Lodge could not resist the double thrust. Hay, who had not begun life as a gentleman by Lodge’s standards, had become one; so much so, in fact, that he, unlike Lodge, never saw any need to use the dangerous word in any context. Politicians, no matter how patrician their birth, were a vulgar infantile lot. “We should be grateful to him, of course, wild man that he is. Because if the treaty passes…”

“No ‘if,’ please.” Hay refused to envisage the treaty’s failure.

“It’s going to be close, Mr. Hay, very close. But Bryan’s changing votes. I’m changing votes, I think, and…”

“And Mark Hanna’s buying one or two,” said Adams. “Such is the way of our world.”