Gore Vidal - Empire

McKinley smiled. “Well, that’s the constitutional minimum, I suppose. Who was the last vice-president to be elected president when the president’s term was up?”

“Martin Van Buren,“ said Hay. “More than sixty years ago. Poor Teddy’s on the shelf, I’m afraid.”

Dawes laughed. “You know what Platt said when they asked him if he was coming to the inauguration? He said, ‘Yes. I feel it my duty to be present when Teddy takes the veil.’ ”

Hay’s own feeling toward Roosevelt, never entirely sympathetic, was now more hostile than not. In March, Lodge had risen in the Senate to denounce the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, using language similar to Roosevelt’s but adding the insufferable thesis that the treaty-making power was, essentially, the Senate’s preserve. Hay had then written out his resignation, and given it to the President at the end of the Cabinet meeting. McKinley had responded with charm and firmness. Hay was to remain until the end. They would fight side by side for virtue. Hay remained, as he knew all along that he would. Without good health, without office, there would be, simply, no life left. Also, he had enjoyed a considerable success with his marvellously imaginative approach to collapsing China. Hay had serenely announced, as the world’s policy, an “open door” approach to China. He had informed the relevant predatory nations that this was the only sensible course for them to pursue, and though the Russians and the Germans had been privately outraged, they were obliged to subscribe, if only by silence, to the cause of international virtue and restraint. Overnight, Hay had become a much applauded world statesman. Even Henry Adams praised his friend’s guile. The formula is meaningless, of course, the Porcupine had noted, but no less powerful for its lack of content. Hay regarded the “open door” as buying time until the United States was in a stronger position to exert its will on the Asian mainland. For the American press, the popular author of “Jim Bludso” had acted in a straightforward, decent, American way; he would, one editorial maintained, “Hole her nozzle agin the bank, ’til the last galoot’s ashore.” McKinley had read this editorial to the Cabinet, sonorously quoting “Jim Bludso.” Hay had felt his usual hatred for the poem that had made him famous.

Dawes asked for news of the disturbances in China. McKinley sighed; and turned to Hay, who said, “ ‘The righteous, harmonious fists’-better known as the Boxers-are pounding away. We’ve had no word out of Peking. Most of the foreign diplomats are in the grounds of the British legation.”

“Are they dead?” asked Dawes.

“I assume not.” It was Hay’s view that the Chinese zealots who had risen up to drive the foreigners out of China would be the first to tell the world if they had, indeed, been able to kill the various ambassadors who had taken refuge in Peking’s Tartar City. After all, that was the object of their desperate enterprise.

“This is very delicate.” McKinley pushed his chair farther away from the table so that now his back was to Dawes, the papal left profile to Hay, the eyes on the lighting fixtures, a new tangle of wires from the ceiling now able to incapacitate several Laocoöns and their sons. “Bryan will talk imperialism for the rest of the year, as he’s been talking all along…”

“Anything to get away from silver.” Dawes was the Administration’s authority on Bryan.

“Whatever.” McKinley had no personal interest in any of his opponents, which made him unlike any other politician that Hay had known. Even Lincoln enjoyed analyzing McClellan’s character. But McKinley was papal. He was, to himself, so securely right and in the place where he ought to be that he seemed hardly to notice those who tried to unseat him. In any case, he allowed the devoted, the impassioned, the-why not the word?-besotted Mark Hanna to lay about him, bloodily, in order to secure the McKinley throne.

“I think we are-home free on the Philippines issue.” McKinley gazed, without visible pleasure, at the tangle of electrical cords. “I speak only for the purposes of the election,” he added. He looked at Hay. The dark circles beneath the large eyes gave him the look of an owl in daytime, deceptively brilliant of eye, intensely staring, blind. “Judge Taft is a popular choice, I think.”

McKinley had gone to the Federal bench and appointed a circuit judge from Cincinnati-always Ohio, thought Hay, himself a beneficiary of that state’s political mastery of the union. Although Judge William Howard Taft had not been, as Taft himself had somewhat nervously put it, an imperialist, McKinley had persuaded him to take charge of the commission whose task would be to restore a degree of civilian rule to the archipelago, where the fighting continued to be fierce and Aguinaldo continued to assert his legitimacy as the first president of the Philippine republic, now supported, he had recently maintained from his jungle retreat, by the Democratic Party and its anti-imperialist leader Bryan. Bryan’s Marble Chamber work for the treaty in February of 1899 was apparently unknown to Aguinaldo.

“How do we keep from the press Judge Taft’s problems with General MacArthur?” Dawes was not supposed to know of Judge Taft’s reception in Manila on June 3 when the General-filled with proconsular self-satisfaction-refused to greet in person the commission. But the next day he had deigned to tell the commission that he regarded their existence as a reflection upon his regime and that, further, he disapproved of bringing any sort of civilian rule to the islands while a war was being fought.

Hay had been in favor of the immediate removal of MacArthur, an unsatisfactory if not entirely unsuccessful military commander. McKinley had murmured a few words, half to himself, in which the only word that Hay had heard clearly was “election,” while Root had said that he would be more than happy to explain to his insolent subordinate the meaning of civilian rule. Hay was reminded of Lincoln’s complaints about generals in the field who spoke with the authority of Caesar while performing with the incompetence of Crassus.

“We shall have to do something in China.” The Major looked more than ever like a Buddha.

“Surely, an ‘open door’ is more than enough.”

“Unfortunately, the Boxers have shut the door. We must open it again, Colonel Hay, or seem to. First, the Boxers.” The Buddha smiled, for no reason other than delight in the perfection of his enlightenment. “Then the Boers-”

“Yes, the Boers,” said Dawes, frowning. He was directly involved in the reelection of the candidate. China was far away; and the Boxers were exciting but exotic. As long as they did not kill any Americans, they would not affect the election one way or another. Even their evil genius, the sinister Dowager Empress, had her admirers in the popular press. But the Boers were a matter of immediate concern. German and Irish voters hated England. For them, the Boers were honest Dutch folk, fighting a war of independence against England. Therefore, all right-thinking Americans must be against England, except the intelligent ones, like Hay himself, who saw the Boers as primitive Christian fundamentalists at war with civilization in all its forms.

McKinley inclined to Hay’s view. But he needed the votes of the Irish and the Germans. Meanwhile, earlier in the spring, a delegation of Boers had appeared in Washington. Hay had received them with all the charm that he could simulate. Del had written him alarming reports from Pretoria. Apparently, England could lose the war. Hay’s earlier offer to mediate between the two sides was no longer possible. England would lose any mediation. McKinley had been willing to play the honest broker, but Hay persuaded him that between the Boers and the English, the United States needed England. He reminded the President of England’s support during the war with Spain, when Germany threatened to move against American forces in the Far East.