Speaker Who are you? You said that your life has paralleled the history of the movies. In what way have you been influenced by films?
Speaker I suppose everybody’s been influenced by films. I started out with books, so I had a slight prehistory of the movies. But I was born in 1925 and talkies came in or about twenty four or five, six in and around, I saw some silent films as a small child.
Speaker Which I don’t particularly remember.
Speaker And so I was there with the early talkies and I watched the talkies develop and colored come in. And I was the magic age of 14 in the greatest year in the history of Hollywood, which was 1939.
Speaker And that was everything from Gone With the Wind to The Wizard of Oz, all the great movies, suddenly it was a miraculous year.
Speaker I saw everyone at the time that it open. So I kept tracking movies while constantly reading. Those who say, I don’t know how it’s going to affect later generations, I have to remind you how to read before I went to the movies, but I got on a Shakespeare kick when I was 10 years old and saw Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Rhinehart version made by MGM starring Mickey Rooney as Puck and Mickey Rooney promptly became my role model. And I wanted more than anything on earth to be not just a movie star, but to be Mickey Rooney, a child movie star. He posed as being 10 years old. And I fell for that studio. He was actually an old man of 14, which rather spoil the illusion when I found out that he really was old, but he was superb in it. And I immediately began to read Midsummer Night’s Dream, the text. There in these little funny green volumes with a very shiny cover, each of Shakespeare’s plays, and they were all in my grandfather’s attic in Rock Creek Park. So I just went straight through. By the time I was 17, I think I had read all of Shakespeare at least once. And now there’s a cause of movies triggering you to read. Now, presumably you have to know how to read. So somebody must torture, which often doesn’t happen to you must come from a house that has books in it, which is ninety nine point nine percent of American houses are bookless. But if all these things coincided once, movies were a great trigger to reading. I wanted to be an archeologist when I saw the mummy was Boris Karloff and I followed every Egyptian movie that they made. Eddie Cantor and Roman scandals, where he goes back into Roman times, got me interested in Rome. Meanwhile, I was reading stories from living in my grandfather’s library. So no matter how hokey these films were, when they dealt with the past with Rome, with Egypt simultaneously, they were an enormous trigger to the imagination, to someone reading had we had television in those days or even if radio had been more interesting than, say, to me, which it wasn’t. There might have been other diversions and I would have been less concentrated. But I had just movies on the one hand, which you only got to see one’s. So you really you looked at movies in those days in a way that nobody does now. It was, as I imagine, somebody who listened to Homer the first time do the Iliad or The Odyssey. You’re not only listening to the narrative unfold, you’re learning it because you’re never going to hear this guy again. And as much as you can absorb it, you absorb it. Well, one did that with a movie that was fascinating, particularly one that took place within history, which already interested me. You’d never see it again. I mean, they didn’t come back for reruns. There were no video cassettes. That was it was no TV, late night show. It came and it went. And it was just a memory to be revived by reading about the period. So one played off, the other one complimented the others. I would think that an awful lot of my reading in childhood and after was triggered by the movies I saw.
Speaker Going back to Mickey Rooney, you said, tell me somebody’s favorite actor when he was 10 and I’ll tell you who he is.
Speaker Yeah, that wasn’t bad, was it? So when you were 10, it was Mickey Rooney. But what was it about him that captured your imagination, Puck? He could fly. Well, I could fly to I took off and landed on an airplane at the age of 10, same age as I thought Mickey Rooney was in the movies. So I was a flyer and an airplane, but he did it all, girl, the Earth 40 times, whatever, that that great speech of his. And I like the idea of being able to fly without the nonsense of turning on the ignition, and he was magical and that woods near Athens was a magical place. And it just appealed to me. And he had the freedom of it, and I saw him in other movies and he was just as good, Tennessee Williams always said that Mickey Rooney was the best movie actor that ever lived. He could do anything. That he became sort of a joke because of his various marriages and mishaps, something else, again, he was a superb actor. So at least I picked a very good actor to emulate.
Speaker Well, maybe let’s talk about your flying your movie debut as a boy.
Speaker Well, it was Pathé News. And Floyd Bennett, I think he was called he had been in the world First World War, and he wore a patch over one eye and he was a famous newsreel commentator. And my father got him to cover. My father was director of Air Commerce, and he was always trying to promote new prototypes of airplanes, particularly planes that anybody could fly. So this was the Hamman flivver plane that was called. And to prove that anybody had a 10 year old boy could fly it, he got me out. I think it was at Bolling Field one Sunday. And there is the TV crew from Pathé News that four people. And he’d come into it, I’d fly an airplane was not that big a deal for me, but I wanted to be Mickey Rooney and he would start over. He kept saying he was a great con man, a real salesman, and he said, you want to be on the movie, you’re going to be in the movies. And of course, I immediately just dried up. I was terrified. But I barely got through my dialogue and I took off the plane, made a terrible bumpy landing, then I had to face the cameras. And say, my father was prompting me with the dialogue. And I suppose this is just as easy as flying, as riding a bicycle. I submit it is not as easy as riding a bicycle. You’ve got to do the ignition. You’ve got to switch on. You’ve got to move the rudder that you come in. And we got into sort of a hassle on. I’d love to find some of that film because they finally just cut it down to my bicycle line. And then I remember months later going to the Belasco Theatre, which was right off Lafayette Park in Washington. To see myself in the newsreel there I was, Mickey Rooney at last, and nobody paid any attention, but it must be thrilling for you. No, I wanted to girdle the earth in 40 minutes.
Speaker Oh, it wasn’t a TV movie, right? They were filming.
Speaker Yeah. Pathé News, Real Life, a copy of it downstairs.
Speaker OK.
Speaker So.
Speaker What about the movie The Prince of a Pauper?
Speaker Well, I had a thing about twins, one could argue that perhaps it was genetic. My grandmother, my favorite parent or grandparent, was born a twin that lost her twin at birth. So. I always felt that she needed something to compliment herself. Proof that she had a very early age marries a blind man. Who is obviously rising in the world, though, everybody warned her, you’re going to end up on a street corner begging, you know, but she ended up as the wife of a very powerful senator. And so she felt that she had turned out pretty well when he needed her. Because she had to be his eyes, so it wasn’t just a woman who made a lucky, good marriage, she had married somebody with a certain ability. She had one because she lost her twin and he had one because he lost his eyes in two different accidents, because he lost his eyes in two different accidents. And they complemented each other. Well, that fascinated me is a theme. And then I see the mock twins who starred in. The prints in the proper. And the one who played the prince corresponds with me every now and then he read Screening History, in which I discuss the effect of that movie on me. And out of the blue, he lives with his wife in California and retired. And we exchange letters every now and then.
Speaker I quiz him a lot what it’s like being a twin. One lives on one coast and one’s on the other coast, something goes wrong with one. The other has the same thing because they are identical twins.
Speaker And they’ll even go so far as to say, take a look at your little, have them look at your left kidney as I’m having a bit of a problem and they’ll find out. Yes, he’s about to have a bit of a problem. That they are so genetically like, well, that fascinated me.
Speaker Then I grew up with a boy in Washington who was killed in the Marines at the age of 18, and I felt as if I had lost a twin. So the whole theme of twins plus.
Speaker The blackest, darkest novel. In American literature is Pudd’nhead Wilson of Mark Twain. And that’s about twins said one’s black and one’s white or what is perceived to be black because he has a drop of black blood.
Speaker And born free ends of a slave and vice versa, it’s the darkest book ever written by an American, hence little known.
Speaker We’ll come back to this and talk about you mentioned. One of the things I thought was really interesting in terms of what you got out of the movies and how it related to your life, was was Henry the Eighth and how that reminded you of your grandfather?
Speaker Yes, it was a very wise speech to find in a popular movie. About my grandfather, I remember my grandfather’s lying more clearly than the actors line, but my grandfather always said, you’re in politics. Treat every friend as though he might become an enemy and every enemy that he might become a friend. So the second is easy to do. The first is that it’s difficult, but you learn it. And then he was very good on the subject of revenge. He said, I always said. And someone does mean injury.
Speaker I turn the other cheek. And I met her. And one day.
Speaker They put their head on the block.
Speaker And I get them.
Speaker So much for the treatment that Christine and the.
Speaker Your grandfather was an enormous influence.
Speaker Oh, indeed he was, indeed, can you tell us about him? Well.
Speaker I took it for granted that everybody lived in the house of a blind grandfather, you know, and what you see every day you take for granted. I used to like to go in when he was preparing himself for the day.
Speaker And he’d tell me stories, I forced him to tell me stories all the time, a story about a. Bunch of boys who lived in a tree in Mississippi and. And they lived on cornbread and how they lived and they scavenged around and they had adventures. And once I got he had his teeth out to plate. And finally, he loved to tell the story. I got very irritated. I said, you know, there’s too much static and you put the teeth back in, as you told me, this part of the story. So he dutifully put it straight back and I cut and static. He always listened to the radio.
Speaker So I was used to static was a word that was common in our household. And I’d play with his glass eye to keep a glass of water at night. And I’d play it was sort of sort of steel gray, which is the standard color for a gore. I and I don’t play around with it and sort of shoot marbles with it when he wasn’t looking and he was never looking and I’d hand it back and he would dunk it in the solution and then he’d pop it into a socket. The other I was real, but very cloudy tragedy was that he had a living optic nerve until he was in his 50s, but they didn’t know how to bring his sight back.
Speaker Now, of course, they could have done it immediately when the. Allegedly lost site.
Speaker But he didn’t allow that to.
Speaker No, he didn’t. Well, he was used to it, he was 10 by the time he was totally blind. And they wanted to send him off to.
Speaker School for the blind, and he says, I’m not going. I said, I’m going to be a senator.
Speaker How can you You’ve got to be a lawyer or something before you can do that, and you said I’m going to law school. So his father was a lawyer and county clerk of Webster County, which is in north central Mississippi, sent him through school with a boy cousin who had no money and those bright. So they paid for the cousin to read to him. And that’s how he got through what is the equivalent of high school and he went to Lebanon Law School, Cordell Hull, later, secretary of state, was in his class. And he got his law degree very early to. By 25, he was running for Congress in Mississippi, practicing law with his father and his two brothers. By the time he was 30, he was the leading lawyer of the family, his firm. He lost a very dirty election. In Mississippi and quit the state an absolute disgust and said, I’m not coming back till I’m a United States senator. And he has figured out not only was it a bad race for him, he was accused of being pro black, which in those days was fatal, but you had to wait forever. They don’t turn senators out in Mississippi, as we see with Trent Lott. They keep them on and on and on. You have to wait till somebody dies. And nothing like a seat in the Senate for immortality. So he went to Corsicana, Texas, the family, his father and brothers went with him and practice law. Got caught up in a. Shotgun wedding situation, he had made a blind girl pregnant, which is the trick of the week, a blind boy and a blind girl. Thank God nobody believed her side of the story except his mother. So he won the suit. And when she was she was a ward of the person who owned the boarding house where they stayed. The only person who believed the girl was my grandfather’s mother.
Speaker And she adopted her.
Speaker And took her in to her home, which was Mississippi, then my grandfather and his father and his two brothers lit out for the Indian territories, which my grandfather organized in about five years into the state of Oklahoma and got himself elected first senator in 1987. And served 37.
Speaker That woman, half the time she did it and it died.
Speaker That was a deep family secret I didn’t discover until a few years ago and somebody. Send me court records.
Speaker It seems as though your grandparents doted on you.
Speaker Well, if you got a blind man who insists on being read to 24 hours a day and you have a child who likes to read, who can read and likes to read aloud, they better dote on me. I was my grandmother couldn’t go out to a Tea Party unless she knew I’d be there to read to him. So he and I were quite happy. He listening and me reading. And she quite happy to escape every now and then one of his favorite jokes would be after you were worn out and your voice was starting to go. And he said, you know, Milton’s daughters both went blind reading to him and he would chuckle at the thought of blind Milton’s blind daughter’s.
Speaker How do you think he would describe you as a child?
Speaker So he read well and was extremely precocious about language. I was learning an awful lot of languages, I was learning to sound the syllables that confronted me. I mean, I was doing the Congressional Record. I was doing he was chairman of the Banking Committee and involved in a lot of sort of funny money plans, as all the Southerners were and. So I know I was about the only 10 year old who knew about bipedalism. And I just learned an awful lot through that. He loved history and poetry. So I read a lot of poetry. We read a lot of Ingersol and Brown the Iconoclast, these were two satiric writers, both free thinkers, which is polite for atheists. And my grandfather was an atheist. Which he had to keep hidden as he was a senator from the heart of the Bible Belt. He never lied about religion, on the other hand, he never let on, so nobody knew that Senator Gore did not. Believe in our own little Lord Jesus. I had another atheist politician in the family on my father’s side who was ended up as mayor of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and officially he was, I think, a Lutheran, and he married a Vidal and Vidal’s or Episcopalian, having given up Catholicism the second they set foot on North American soil. And they were married and in a small town in South Dakota where or in Sioux Falls, it’s a fair sized city. So what are you going to do about the religious thing, the differences between you and his honor? The mayor said, well, we’ve solved it one Sunday. We don’t go to my church, and the next Sunday we don’t go to her church.
Speaker How did it come to be that you were spent so much time with your grandparents?
Speaker Well, my father quit the army. He was instructor in aeronautics at West Point. I was born in 25 and 26. He just he was born he was the first lieutenant. He didn’t want to be a military man for his whole career. There were no wars coming up. He felt no sense of duty, really, that involved his talents, which were as a flyer and for aviation. Suddenly, new air lines were cropping up all over the country and he wanted to get into that business, so he resigned from the army. Came with my mother to her father, Senator Gore’s house in Rock Creek Park. And the senator was doing quite well, this is true in 1926, by 1929, he lost everything in the crash but still had the big house in Rock Creek Park. So we camped out there pretty much for my first 10 years during which my father founded two airlines. One was called TNT, which later became TBWA and another was called the Ludington line, which ran from what did about four flights a day from Washington, Philadelphia, New York and back. That later became Eastern Airlines. So my father and then later he founded with Amelia Earhart Northeast Airlines, which never made a penny but ran for about 30 years. The other two he lost submerges. Soon as you had an airline that was really viable, the inventor of it, the creator of it, was got rid of. And the lawyers came in, the bankers came, and then they would merge it with two or three other airlines, much the way the conglomerates are doing today with everything. And the creative person was always got rid of first, which in my father’s case was himself, but he had no interest in money. And when he lost one airline, you go out and start another one. Anyway, I lived with the Gores until my mother married Auchincloss. And I was 10 or 11 then. And we moved across the river to marry one. And I was. Live there officially till I was about 16 and she divorced him, but I was generally away at school during those years.
Speaker What do you mean when you say that you were brought up in the House of Atrius?
Speaker Well, it was a house full of can you use the phrase and then explain it?
Speaker I wrote somewhere that. I often felt that I had been brought up in the house of Atreus. That was due to having. Clytemnestra for a mother. And she was a she was an alcoholic, which does not make for good temper. Or easy relations with anybody. And she was but she had enormous charm, but she was raging frustrated figure. And Mr. Auchincloss is a very nice but rather weak man, not up to her mettle. My father was far too dominant for her and he wouldn’t quarrel. All she wanted was quarrell.
Speaker She couldn’t have figured it out.
Speaker She was very candid about her private life to me as a kid, particularly in her cubs, she couldn’t really have orgasm without a fight. She had to have a ferocious fight. And then whenever she. Menstruated, she was going to a kind of terrible decline, and I think she had hemorrhages, he all kinds of problems due to her sexual psycho. Which were not made much better by change of life, by which time I had changed mothers, as it were, and no longer saw and I’m told she was just as ferocious to the end, and where she was there was terrible, terrible, violent scenes and rages and. She had two children by Auchincloss, and the daughter got knocked around a great deal by her mother and she was sort of a savage. And that was enough for me to refer to at least that household with the unhappy name of Mary Wood was indeed my house of Atreus.
Speaker You wrote that. Well, how do you think that that environment affected your imagination?
Speaker Well, I don’t know. No, Imagineer, I don’t think that would affect what you suggest would be my imagination and imagination works by itself, and I don’t think it’s much influenced by by external events.
Speaker It’s an internal arrangement. What it did for me was.
Speaker I was very quick to understand what other people were all about, and I a curious. And she was very articulate, even no matter how drunk she got, she expressed herself very well. She had the Gore gift of phrase. So I learned everything about a marriage of a sexual nature and even more important of a financial nature and. By the time I mean, when I got off to boarding school and properly speaking to Exeter say. I felt that my classmates were like little children, I thought I’d gone, reverted to kindergarten, I knew things about the grown up world they never even suspected. And I figured that I would have to be very cautious and diplomatic in dealing with them because their attitudes seem to me so childish. And so unprepared for reality, even though not everybody was going to have a house of Atreus in his life. Enough of them would experience bad times. And I thought these of these kids are very well prepared for life in the way that you are with a blind senator for a grandfather and mad woman, for a mother and.
Speaker A lot of violence going on.
Speaker When she couldn’t get your father to fight with her, would she pick fights with you?
Speaker No. Yes, anybody? I mean, she was ecumenical when it came to rage. Could go in any direction.
Speaker You wrote that the life of the imagination became more and more intense as the reality about me became more unendurable.
Speaker I suppose.
Speaker Well, certainly it was it it had the aspect of a refuge that you must remember I was writing all this time, I never stopped writing from the time I was seven, eight, nine, mostly poetry, but I was already trying prose. So it was it was an alternative to daily life is writing. Didn’t I didn’t was not much of an autobiographical writer, curiously enough, and never became one really, except for my. SAT down to write a memoir where I obliged myself to do it, but by and large, I don’t write novels that are thinly disguised versions of myself and what happened last summer.
Speaker Right, another thing you watch, I think, is.
Speaker Really great. That is one means of escape, I had developed a vivid inner life with a number of fictional because much anyone that’s true and I last. Can you say that back to me in your.
Speaker Well, you do develop.
Speaker If you are a natural storyteller. And you’re living in a story that you don’t enjoy, which was life with mother, life in the house of Atreus, you do tend to rely upon the narratives that you tell yourself. And I had always had about four or five serials going in my head with myself as central to those stories. And if things got particularly unendurable in my surroundings, then I would.
Speaker Sort of.
Speaker It would be like fuel on my inner narrative’s and drive them. So I was making it narratives that were far more real to me than my surroundings were.
Speaker And that obviously was a plus.
Speaker You did you spend a lot of time alone as a child as much as I could.
Speaker Yeah. My mother belonged to the school that you should get out and play with the other boys as well, the other boys bored me. By and large, except for Jimmy Trimble. And he was interesting because we were so like and so unlike. What I was he was not in what he was not I was and each knew that the other was a balance for him. He was the greatest athlete in the school. And I was. The greatest writer in school, because I was the only writer in the school that I know of in our class, but. He knew I was doing this interesting and I was reading some of his letters to his girlfriend from the Pacific and he was talking about what he had been offered contracts with the Washington senators and with New York Giants at 17. And he graduated, Max would send him to college. Keep them out of the war and then he would. Take his choice. Well, he does have to decide first which team he’d be with. And in one of the letters, he’s looking forward to the future and he said, you’ve got to face it. He wrote this girl, you know, you’re going to be married to a professional athlete. And this isn’t, from what I can tell, a very easy life, it’s moving around and. But there’s no way that I’m not going to be. But he said it will end one day when when the army always referred to the army because he was an extraordinary picture. And so they are going to go one day and. I think I’ll be a writer. And that was the transference of me to him that he thought, well, if he does that, I can do that. I, however, never had the arm.
Speaker How old were you when you met Jimmy Kimmel? No, tell me.
Speaker Yes, and, well, we’re in the same class at the scene and I saw him there, I didn’t get to know him until he moved into the dormitory. For the lower school bell. Although I was only a 30 minute drive from the school my mother visited with. Her private life at marriage would only be one of the witnesses out of the way. So I was sent to board in the school. Which at first I thought was pretty dreary and then arrives in the. In the dormitory and then, of course, it was paradise, I hated going home. Very often he would often come back to marry would with a. So we were, what, 13 last time I saw when we were 17 and. Two years later, he was dead.
Speaker But tell me about the first year when you first got to know him and how your friendship developed and what you saw in him, what he saw.
Speaker You know, we were so uncannily different in our interest. And so, like in our temperaments. I was exactly one week older than he I was born on the 3rd of October, he was for the 10th. And the likeness was startling. And what was the likeness, what is the likeness between a would be poet and what is already considered the greatest athlete that Washington ever produced schoolboy athlete? And it was that each of us at the time we were 12 or 13 was what he was. We knew what we were. He was a great athlete and I was going to be a writer. No, everybody else is trying to say, well, I don’t know, I may go to law school, I don’t know, my father’s in medicine and everybody is rambling around, nobody knows what to do. Schools never taught anything of interest to anybody. So you weren’t going to be helped by your classes. But here were two boys who were already grown up posing as 13, 14, 15 year olds. The pose is hard to do sometimes. And I was talking to one of the teachers still surviving. Remember that we had a headmaster called Albert Hall, Lucas Canon of the Cathedral of Washington.
Speaker And he’s a very pompous Anglican, a very high Anglican priest. He was so jealous of Trimbole.
Speaker Trimble’s name would be in the papers at least once a week, headlines and the Reverend Albert Hall. Lucas was never mentioned. And it was very demure, but he was constantly sabotaging Jimmy, according to this teacher who told me about it years later, that he just became very tense at the mention of the star that he had on his. Loic. So when your friendship to love, who knows what that means? I don’t know.
Speaker But you’ve described him as being your other half, in a sense.
Speaker Yes. Well, to say another half is literally how it was conceived. How it evolved on my side, I assume on his side, I never speak for other people’s emotions because you could never know them.
Speaker But you certainly know what you feel, and that was indeed a fact.
Speaker But the separation began, my mother decided that I had to go off to Los Alamos, a school in New Mexico later became the place where the atom bomb was developed. And everybody rode his own horse, that kind of thing, and it was. She will get the somebody to tell her about a school meeting that we pulled out of wherever I was and put into that school. I couldn’t stand that. And so I got out of there and went to Exter, which I quite liked for three years, and then graduated in June of 2003. And in July, I enlisted in the Army and he may know I was safe. He was graduated from St. Auburn and I think he agreed to go with the Washington senators and it set him up at Duke. And he would have been safe from the war and an education and had a career. After four years of Duke, only, he became patriotic, his boys did then and joined the Marines.
Speaker And they managed to. Kill off a great deal of our generation. Through sheer boneheaded strategy.
Speaker You saw him once before that, though, right?
Speaker Yeah, Christmas of Christmas, New Year’s season of. 43 to 44, I guess it was, and we had a final meeting.
Speaker But you had no way of knowing that that was going to be the last meeting.
Speaker No, no. Well, we. Our generation was the greatest generation, as we have dubbed by television.
Speaker We were.
Speaker Most of us are fairly convinced we’d probably be killed.
Speaker Particularly those of us who went in at 17. Which meant that you were insufficiently trained, the group that I went in with was supposed to be a special group at VMI to be trained to be engineers, something for which I had no talent. And I wanted languages for the allied military government after the war, but. And whoever the engineer is, will the army dissolve the program, having enticed hundreds of thousands of 17 year olds into this program? They dissolve the program and throw them straight into the infantry and to the Battle of the Bulge in which a large percentage of my class BMI was just slaughtered. They hadn’t been sufficiently trained to survive. So the bad faith with which the army acted toward its greatest generation, I sometimes think the greatest generation of chumps that ever lived was brutal. But then I was brought up in Washington, and I have always known for the first time I ever talked seriously to Senator Gore that the American government always acts in bad faith toward everyone, particularly its own people. Once you go in knowing that you’re nothing surprises you.
Speaker At what point in your life did you realize that Jimmie Trimble was so seriously important to you?
Speaker Well, I don’t know that he was reviewing my life. I realized, yes, he was, but I didn’t it didn’t happen until I wrote Palimpsest. And the pieces start to come together, and then I realized that indeed was a major part of my life. But had I not done a review of the whole thing, I’m not somebody who sits back and thinks about memory lane.
Speaker I startle somebody by saying once that there is not one moment in my life that I would like to relive.
Speaker No. I move forward and I don’t go backwards.
Speaker Well, let’s go back a little now.
Speaker And.
Speaker If you say just now, you said that you really liked it, but you’ve also written about how cruel it was that they were, you said that it was a good training ground for every kind of warfare.
Speaker Oh, yes, we can take.
Speaker Well, Exeter was a pretty brutal and merciless world, there are no rules, they would say proudly, until they’re broken.
Speaker And for just some silly infraction, you’d be on the train to Boston the next morning. They cut people out so quickly. And they did the old gleeful number as the first class assembles. In chapel, look to your left, look to your right. At least one, maybe two on either side of you will not be here by graduation. They took great pride in that. I would come from a much tougher world than Exeter ever dreamed of, just thought they were putting on airs. I could teach them about toughness if they really wanted to know what the great brutal world was like. So I never took them very seriously. They were attempts made to throw me out. My grades were generally terrible and because I was bored. I had one or two good teachers and I learned a lot from them, but never in the classroom. It was just picking their brains and talking to them, and I preferred them. To the other boys, by and large. And I learned a great deal from certain two of them. And the other boys, they’re like is drawn to like the literary crowd. I ran with we put out a rule, we put out a little magazine and we wrote for it. And there were lots of fights over what should be included and not included. Usual stuff. But I liked it because it was large and you could sort of have any kind of life you wanted there, 700 of us. And that gave you a lot of freedom in a school with 70 people, which is what I was at Los Alamos. It’s incestuous. Everybody’s getting on your nerves.
Speaker And everybody’s watching, and it was kind of a.
Speaker Rather bad family environment as extras, just like the real world, and if you could manage it there, you would have no trouble managing real life. In fact, I found a real life rather easy after Xander.
Speaker Tell me about the debating society.
Speaker Well, there were three of them, you know, there were three debating societies and I ended up president of the oldest one called the Golden Branch, and there was an extra Senate and there was another one called Henry Sole.
Speaker And I like that because although I was writing all the time and publishing occasionally in the school magazine. I was headed for politics, and, of course, it was the great debate was going on in America first, and I was the head of America first Xterra and the school was 90 percent for intervention on the side of England. So we isolationists had a hard time of it there, but it meant a lot of debating and a real debating. This is the last time the United States was ever allowed to have a debate about anything. Was over whether to get into the Second World War.
Speaker And the country was split over this and families were split and it was an obsession with all of us which side where you want. And so it made a real polemicist out of me and I had signs of it already, but it really made me one.
Speaker And the debating society is, of course, one of our forums. In which to engage on this debate and curiously enough, since then with Pearl Harbor, that was the end of that. Since Pearl Harbor, we fought nearly 100 wars, hot, cold tempered. Not one was ever declared, not one was ever debated. Nothing has ever been put to the people about anything. People have just been exempted from decision making involving themselves. Harry Truman didn’t dare ask the people for a declaration of war or Korea. He had to sneak in under the United Nations banner, all the other wars, Vietnam, nobody there until Lyndon Johnson faked the Tonkin Bay attack, which never took place and got a sort of act of Congress out of it. Approval. I have watched in my lifetime in my youth, I was very much involved in public affairs because of my family and my own inclination, my own interest. I don’t find anybody, any adults now in America have any interest in anything except how the Nasdaq is going in and are they going to make some money out of the Dow Jones? They don’t care about Kosovo, they don’t care about anything we could we could blow up picking tomorrow or Beijing, as they now call it, and half the Americans would say, where’s that again? You know, that’s Afghanistan, isn’t it? To watch the exclusion of the people from the democracy, as we call it, wasn’t quite won, but it was getting close, has been a tragic aspect of my life.
Speaker It is so unlike my grandfather’s world.
Speaker I wanted to I thought it was wonderful when you were talking. I think it was a screening history that.
Speaker Well, I guess I was just struck by how much your life, both by growing up backstage, as you talked about, you know, Washington as well as the trip to Europe, how much your life intersected with these really extraordinary moments of the history that, you know, the time you lived. And maybe if we start, but if you could.
Speaker Tell me about the growing up in Washington and how as part of the ruling class in that way.
Speaker No, know, you learned an awful lot, and particularly I would lead my grandfather. He usually had a sign page boys, two senators with weaknesses. Like blindness, but often he would use me as its page and I would leave him on the floor of the Senate and that’s there’s an empty chair near him. I’d sit there, the debates. And take him into the cloakroom where the real politics went on, where their senators would get together and plot. And I was very much aware that I was in the engine room of the republic. And with Roosevelt on one hand as a villain in my grandfather’s eyes, even though he was a Democrat and something of a hero in my father’s eyes, because he was director of air commerce for Franklin Roosevelt. So I had two ongoing views of the president, one negative, one affirmative. And there he was, you know, central to the city, central to the country at the end, central to the world, I first saw him in March.
Speaker 33 when he drove down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol after he had been inaugurated. And we had rented rooms in the. In a hotel, Willard Hotel.
Speaker About the third or fourth floors, what the people did in those days to watch the parade, you rent a suite and you all get together and everybody got drunk and there was an open car waving his hat had great huge had much larger than usual, had rather pink.
Speaker I’m very jaunty.
Speaker And four years later, I sat with my father in the pigeon droppings of the Commerce Department outside, we got out of the windows in my father’s office as director of air commerce, and he had just quit. So he was not involved in the inauguration, but we sat among the pigeon droppings with these Greek columns on either side of us and that was FDR again, open waving that. And he was such a presence. And one knew this was the center of the world, I’ve been reading some very funny stuff about the Golden Age, my last book, why he takes he thinks Washington is the center of the world. And I wrote to the Times the in London with some full English reviewer had said that said he and the Washingtonians think that. I said, well, they think that they are the center of the world and they are. And I think I’m at the center of the world as a Washingtonian and I am. And you are not. You’re on the periphery. You’re part of our empire. And a not very important part of it, and I also did this with an Australian critic who was just, you know, I thought the Japanese were a vicious, subhuman people who had blown us up at Pearl Harbor because they’re so evil, not knowing that we had go to them into it. President Roosevelt needed a war against so that he could fight to help England against Hitler. And the only way he could do it was through the back door to get the Japanese to attack us, which meant that the Germans would then declare war on us, et cetera, et cetera. I watched us and, of course, in my lifetime move from. A great but rather enclosed isolationist power. With all the money in the world, we became the center of the world financial apparatus in 1914 when England ran out of money and the money power moved from London to New York. So we were already number one. But we were by and large, the country was 80 percent isolationist and we didn’t want to go back to war in Europe again. That was the background for me, being the head of America first exer.
Speaker So this was the grand debate. Are we to become the world empire, which we knew we could do?
Speaker Or.
Speaker Do we mind our own business and try to achieve a civilization? Unfortunately, we picked Empire and so we ended up thanks to Roosevelt. And getting us into the Japanese and the German war, we end up as victorious against both of those powers with the rest of the world pretty much in ruins. And we we alone are the number one power economically and domestically. And we neglected to create a civilization to go with it by 1950, when Truman militarized the country, we ended up with bases everywhere on Earth. And those schools, the people know health care. So we have a great global empire with nuclear weapons. And no life for 80 percent of the citizens, nothing at all, they’re on their own. Well, I would have I would have reversed it, so that has been the ongoing drama of my 75 years as I lived through it all. And I had, as you pointed out, the luck to have intersected with history itself, not only watching Roosevelt, also from the lawn of the White House, I went there to roll eggs on Easter. But in 39, I watched Neville Chamberlain leave Downing Street to go to parliament to say that war is at hand, that was the first of September and the third of September war was declared on the 4th of September. I was in a ship out of Liverpool headed across the Irish Sea, past the ruins of the half sunk sister ship of the ship that I was on, which had been torpedoed by the Germans first ship to be torpedoed. Earlier that year and 39, I watched Mussolini a couple of times in the piazza, and even it’s also an attempt to Kalakala a room. I watched Daladier, the prime minister of France, on the 14th of July, ride through the streets of Paris surrounded by not tanks, cavalry. I think it even went through my mind and this is really more appropriate for a movie like Gunga Din than it is for all quiet on the Western Front. And it proved to be closer to Gunga Din as France caved in very quickly.
Speaker Tell me about it. Tell us about seamlessly.
Speaker Well, I was with a bunch of schoolboys from St. Orbanes, we were official children. One was the son of Hamilton Fish, who was the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, a great isolationist. And a couple of other official boys and two masters from school, and we were in a box similar to a railed off place and in the ruins of the baths of Caracalla, and then there was a stage in front of us, an orchestra and more people back there. And Mussolini was over to our left wearing a white uniform. Very preoccupied, I’ve looked at what was going on that day, and he’d been receiving some very unpleasant orders from Hitler and didn’t know quite how to respond to them. And he lasted for the first act and then he got up to go down on stage and salute the audience. I was overwhelmed by the amount of perfume that he was wearing as he went by the hot August night.
Speaker And I thought that was rather decadent and. The opera was Turandot, the first time I ever saw that.
Speaker And then with with Neville Chamberlain, the response of the crowd, Noel Chamberlain over there, there were the boys from St. Orbanes, about six of us by then, counting the two masters and their wives.
Speaker There was a crowd, I don’t suppose more than 40 people in Downing Street. A couple of policemen when he came out and a very small man with tiny head. And it looked terribly nervous. He was carrying some sort of a briefcase. And he wore one of those wing collars and they had the stringy neck with a big Adam’s apple and a Beaky nose. And very furtive. He was kept looking to the left and right, I suppose he thought they might be stoning him because he was he had promised peace in our time when he came back from Munich and here they were. In no time at all. Getting ready to declare war on Germany. And as he came out and the car was waiting for him, somebody opens the door and he moves very tentatively toward the door of the car. And the people standing there when.
Speaker I’ve never heard that sound before or since you read novels about this side. Well, I don’t know what a sigh is like. I’ve never heard a sigh in my life. People don’t sigh. They call for their burst into tears. They do make noises, but they don’t sigh this crowd side.
Speaker Here we go again.
Speaker Well, as war clouds gathered. Suddenly, my mother got active and she went to Codelco. Or maybe some new wells have a secretary of state, she didn’t bother with clerks ever. She would go to the top. And she said, my child is over there now as young Hamilton Fish and some other boys from St. Orbanes, and we’ve got to find a way to get them out of there. They’re in Italy. And immediately, the embassy was alerted. Ambassador William Phillips, and they got us on what was the last train before they shut the border between Italy and France, and now I found it very exciting. It was it was like a movie, but I’d seen a lot of better movies in my day than this one that I was in. You know, just you packed quickly. You got on a hot train and there was no air conditioning in those days. And we got to the border. And that was the first time I had really noticed fascism, you saw guys running around in black shirts and so on in Rome, and for they generally they certainly stayed out of the way of the tourists and it wasn’t any great bother. And then, of course, you can see Mussolini on his balcony haranguing the people. Not as funny as Jack Oakie was in Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator. So I felt that I was in an inferior movie in the Second World War. To be frank, I’d seen a lot better pictures, but it did get interesting and a little bit scary as we approached Ventimiglia, I suppose it was up near the border when the Blackshirts, the fascist police came through to look at our passports. American passports for those interested in trivia, were maroon colored back in 1939, and we produced our passports and they pretended to stare at them and scowl and carry on. And luckily, I think Hammie had a diplomatic one which had a gold line around it. And I had something rather written in mind to say that I was an official child. So we were. Let through without any problem, whether others were stopped, I don’t know. I was not in that movie. It was a different one.
Speaker Then.
Speaker Well, I was taken aback, to say the least, where I realized that I might well be in a first rate movie was after leaving Liverpool.
Speaker On Antonia was the ship.
Speaker We had been told that the senior the sister ship had been sunk either that day or the previous day. Not many lives lost, but some and it hadn’t totally sunk and there was still boats going out to pick up survivors. And we were out there in the Irish Sea. Sort of off to. Starbound. Of this half sunk ship. And there were these frightened looking tourists getting into a rowboat, really, I guess, and being rode to shore. And I thought, well, this this is promising. This is promising. And we did think a bit about being because they had been torpedoed and it was expected that we probably would be, too. So the captain did a zigzag across the North Atlantic. I mean, we ended up in Greenland, we ended up in Iceland. We ended up in Newfoundland. We came in finally through Canadian waters. I forget what it’s called back up Newfoundland, but there’s a whole sort of estuary. And so we didn’t go down the coast because you boats were out. We went inland and tragically, the ship had run out of chocolate, which caused consternation to the boys from St Orbanes. In fact, they ran out of everything. And we were finally allowed to drink grenadine. They thought that would be the least painful for our boys stomachs. Now, some of those got hold of harder stuff than that. So in a slight alcoholic days, we arrived in freedom’s land after crossing the Atlantic in wartime. And my hair, which was I was bright blond when I was a boy. Was dark brown when I arrived. It’s amazed everybody but boys here do change during adolescence and but I was sent off to the barber’s, it was quite long and I’ll never forget the astonishment of the barber. Because being an all-American boy, aside from standing briefly under a shower, I would never think to wash my hair. You’ve never seen so much darkness come out of my hair. And I rose from the from the base and. A golden blonde again.
Speaker That was my war and that was in the. Atlantic.
Speaker One thing I did, you said that I liked about the that incident.
Speaker That you couldn’t imagine yourself a real life victim since your true life was that of a spectator at the drama of others and. That your and your empathy aroused only by their additional sufferings.
Speaker Yes, I think there was something in there that. I certainly didn’t think I was going to be a victim on that trip. I mean, this was for me to judge as a movie and the train ride wasn’t that good. A boat ride started out like a pretty good picture, but it ended with me in the basement of the Mayflower Hotel, having my hair washed, which is not very dramatic. I didn’t I didn’t identify with these events, but I was fascinated by them. As a constant reader and also moviegoer would be fascinated by. However, by the time that I enlisted in the Army, I was quite aware that I was now the hero of what could be a fatal movie. And I became thoughtful.
Speaker You mentioned the word empathy. You’ve said that in what in what way did. Did you develop the sense of empathy through the movies?
Speaker No, I think you do it through reading here as well. I think more through reading you have a longer time to dwell on an incident. The movie is just rush by. And maybe maybe you get caught up in it and maybe you don’t. You can read, read and reread and recreate and recreate. I think empathy is more apt to come out of literature than is apt to come off the screen.
Speaker Oh, but let’s jump back to Rome for a moment. It’s not back to the unwashed hair. And your first what was your first impression of Rome?
Speaker Oh, I was it was a dream come true. That was. Everything in my life had prepared me for room. All my reading, quite a few movies had been placed there. Last days of Pompeii had been very impressed by that.
Speaker I felt I was home.
Speaker And I just couldn’t get enough of it and I would stay behind and everybody would go off back if we stayed at the hotel, Flora and I was always finds an excuse not to go back with, which drove the Masters crazy because they were always fearful they’d lose one of us and I’d stay on in the form. Which in those days was not as cleaned up as it is now. It was full of bushes, weeds I picked up the most beautiful woman had about that big, perfectly carved, obviously broken off of bas-relief. And I’m afraid I hid it in my pocket and of course, one of the masters of made me put it back. I said, well, it’s just lying there. If I don’t take it, somebody else will take it. He said, yes, but you’re not supposed to take it. So I’ve thought about that head for 50 years. You know, that was mine. Why? I let him take it away, I don’t know. But the whole city was just. Magical for me, and I knew a lot about the classical period, I didn’t know anything about the Renaissance period. But so obviously, the beauty of it, you know, the palaces and so on, I didn’t really learn that until the 1960s when I moved there to.
Speaker Right, Julian and Creation, then I got. Captured by the Renaissance and by. No Romanian company.
Speaker But standing in the forum, you had read so many stories and could you could you imagine what what it would have looked like?
Speaker Oh, sure. And I’ve read the guidebooks very carefully. Medicare is what we use in those days and.
Speaker I was amazed at how small the rostrum was, where they got up to make speeches. Originally, it was right in front of the Senate, you came out of the Senate and there steps going down to the ground level of the.
Speaker But you could also go out and step on a platform which ran pretty much the length of the steps of the Curia, as the Senate is called, and you go out there and be a crowd, not much of one, because it was so crowded with statues and buildings. You think of Mark Anthony addressing thousands, well, it must have been hundreds because it wasn’t any room in there. Everything was built up and then it had been moved off to the side near the arch of Septimius Severus, where it now is. So you go up there and visualize what it must have been like when. Caesar was murdered, Caesar was actually murdered over and trust they were not interested in er the company’s future as a glove shop. Which was built with the vestibule of the theater of Pompeii was and they found pretty much the exact spot where Caesar was stabbed. So if you want to buy a pair of gloves, you can go and see or Julius Caesar met his end because they were repairing the Senate that day at the Senate building. And so the Senate met in the theater of Pompeii.
Speaker Well, I was filled with all that, even at 13, 14. So I was home.
Speaker And then you made it your home and I made it my home.
Speaker Years later, when one could argue that that’s my other home was real, home is Washington, D.C., which was busy imitating room. I always felt that it just didn’t quite cut the mustard, you know, and it seemed like Disneyland before there was a Disneyland. My grandfather used to say he hated all public spending and nothing in the 30s, all those Greek temples, archives, buildings, Supreme Court building, all of those were going up. And I watched them go up and he and I used to take walks and I’d have to describe for now, what now? What are they doing over there? Well, I got six columns and big bronze door, and he always signs they’ll make the most wonderful ruins he saw. Washington, D.C. is just another Rome shattered to pieces. Little did he know that we would bring it on ourselves.
Speaker I am now seized by the mantle of prophecy.
Speaker Would you like to break for lunch now? Keep going.
Speaker Well, a bit. What time is it?
Speaker It’s one 15. No.
Speaker Five minutes. OK. I don’t want to. The other thing that I loved reading about.
Speaker Was and you’ve got you touched on this about.
Speaker He talked about growing up in Washington as being like backstage politically and how he used a wonderful example about Henry Moore at your family table rehearsing and then later seeing and, you know, that was a calculated performance, if you could tell us that.
Speaker And.
Speaker How that would have contributed, perhaps, to your knowledge? It is not what things are that matters so much as how they are perceived.
Speaker Well, the showbiz aspect of the Senate is senators in my youth were great national figures. Movie stars were very, very big in those days and college athletes were very big. My father had been one of those.
Speaker And then there was the Senate, so there were sort of three orders of celebrity in the land, the senators gave very good value and they were wonderful actors and each was had his own act and No.
Speaker Two were really alike.
Speaker And the best of all was Huey Long from Louisiana, and he and my grandfather were great friends and he’d come to the house and he would just start talking and you couldn’t stop him and he would just be talking about, I got to tell you this, what I am and this is my vision. I want you to hear my vision for America. And I’m going to say to that son of a bitch, Roosevelt, I’m going to get his head and he will be doing this at the breakfast table at the Gores.
Speaker And my grandfather and daughter listening to him and I was fascinated by it. Then you go down to the Senate and you hear the same speech he’d been rehearsing for us and they used the filibuster. I think my grandfather lasted as long as I think he filibustered for something like 30 hours, which is very difficult because you had to have means of relieving yourself during the debate without leaving the floor. Otherwise you’d lose your place.
Speaker So they wore contraptions so that they could service themselves as they spoke. And Huey was just wonderful. He would win. He never ran out of talk, but he would end up giving recipes. You know, he’d done all the American history he could remember. And he’s now let me tell you how to make pot liquor, you know, not how to make pot liquor here than anybody in the Senate knows how we do in Louisiana. You don’t know how to do it. Now, I’m going to tell you how you start with pot liquor. Now, I want you to visualize.
Speaker Now you visualize the whole country is listening to this guy and he’s trying to slow down some legislation by holding up the floor. And he’d get a pretty good recipe for pot, liquor or whatever it was he was going to instruct you in. So that was fun, I can’t say I was ever allowed in on a great strategy meetings when they were out to destroy the New Deal. Ironically, I became a great new dealer as time passed through my friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt years later. But I was in a nest of anti new dealers with my grandfather and the others. Here are was something else, it was a potential, I don’t know, dictator, but in the name of the people, he really wanted to spread the wealth around. And he had a lot of notions, not all of them crazy either. And to this day, his family thinks that Roosevelt had him killed.
Speaker Ask any long.
Speaker So in a way.
Speaker Both by growing up in the senator’s house and do you feel like you were groomed? To be a politician?
Speaker No, I mean, there was no grooming, sounds like it was deliberate and there was coercion. There wasn’t any. I just wanted to be. Most sons of politicians, grandsons. Are too frightened of it and they’re too awed by their fathers and grandfathers and they don’t feel they’re up to it. Or they don’t want the responsibility or they can’t take the heat. I mean. Your press is terrible. If you’re an active politician, you will never read anything very pleasant about yourself again. Or if you do, it’ll be counterbalanced by 10 attacks, so you have to be very tough to want to do that.
Speaker But I picked up on it and I did want to do that.
Speaker And being pretty well grounded in American history by my grandfather, who was born in 1870, and he certainly was able to tell me about the administration of President Grant and reconstruction in the south.
Speaker So I had a good background in the history of the country. But I was born a writer, and so I keep saying you can’t do both.
Speaker So would you say that you were that you were born into the ruling class?
Speaker Well, they certainly were ruling in the sense that a senator does rule, at least in those days, they had great power. There had been a war between Senate and between Congress and the executive. It always goes on.
Speaker There had been a period in history when everything was the executive that happens during wartime. And obviously, Lincoln was our first great dictator and he suspended habeas corpus, he got rid of the Bill of Rights, it did extraordinary things, but he dies. The war is over. Then there was a placid period in which the Congress reasserted itself and the presidents were weak, that changed with Theodore Roosevelt, who was an activist president. So the war between Congress and Theodore Roosevelt began. Which culminated in Woodrow Wilson and the First World War, where the executive again took charge and the Senate began to fade a bit. Then the Senate, largely due at certain points to my grandfather, reasserted itself as being numero uno after Wilson and they rejected his League of Nations and he died a wretched invalid, still in office. Then there was a quiet times when I grew up, I was born in the in the. Regime of Calvin Coolidge. And the Senate was riding high, so people like my grandfather really were great powers in the land and they knew it. And then came FDR and he outsmarted everybody and he had the Senate just jumping through hoops and hence the bitterness of the old time senators like my grandfather was a president who didn’t know his place and then suddenly realized he was going to get us into a world war as his master, Woodrow Wilson, had done. And I found him evil.
Speaker So ruling class, the ruling class basically was was the Senate and what the House.
Speaker And obviously, you know the judiciary a bit.
Speaker Stuart Hughes is a very good historian at Harvard, I think of what I used to know him slightly, and he was the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, who was chief justice of the United States. When I was a boy candidate for president and Hughes wrote toward the end of his life.
Speaker He said, I was once a member. A family that was once very famous in the United States. Everybody knew Charles Evans Hughes with the beard, he looked like Jupiter. And suddenly, 30 years later, his grandson is writing. I once belonged.
Speaker So sic transit Gloria Monori is the name of the game.
Speaker Instead of current dreams can be relied on, he has never been born.
Speaker He describes, I think I have a memory of being born. I don’t pride myself on this memory, but it’s. It would explain a lifelong claustrophobia. I was born in the cadet hospital at West Point. And my mother had stayed over Saturday to watch the game and I began to arrive. Probably to avoid the game that she wanted to see, my father was an instructor in aeronautics and he was football coach. So it was his team. Anyway, I ended up in the cadet hospital where the officer of the day. Major Snyder, who had not delivered a baby since he had been an intern years before and cadet’s by and large, don’t have babies on the post. So there I was being delivered by him. And it should have been a cesarean section and he didn’t know what to do. My mother’s policies are now. And I got thoroughly squashed coming out. And I have a recurrent I used to have I don’t seem to have it anymore, but for many years recurrent dream that I’m sort of facing, there’s light at the end of some kind of a tunnel up ahead. And I’m trying to get through and I’m stuck. And it is the claustrophobic dream of all time. And I am pushing my way out to the light and then I wake up or. Or shift to something equally appalling in the dream line. So. I assume that is a birth dream because when I met. Major Snyder, who became Major General Snyder. And he was surgeon general of the army and private physician to President Eisenhower, and I was asked of the White House ordered to the White House by West Point.
Speaker To write a speech for Eisenhower about integration, and I said I’m on the other side said.
Speaker This is West Point and we blow, it’s like a family, and if the commander in chief wants here you go. So I went there and the speech went straight downstairs to have a serious my first meeting with General Snyder since he delivered me. And I said, what about the back of my head, it’s a wonder you’re alive. Your mother is a damn fool. You should have gone to a proper hospital cadet hospital for a baby that’s asking for trouble. This is the same Major General Snyder who when Eisenhower was having his heart attack, his wife rang him very disturbed. And he said, Mamie, it’s only gas. And he nearly lost a great president. And squashed my head.
Speaker There was an incident in the involving the pipeline and you’ve got your head. My understanding of that was the beginning of claustrophobia.
Speaker You know, that had it’s kind of exciting side to it as one of those cribs are high and I was already able to stand up and walk around and I had stuck my head between the bars and of course, I couldn’t withdraw it. So I got stuck and I yelled up a storm and my grandmother was in her house. She came up and liberated me. It’s just it’s my first vivid memory of her. And I suppose first one of the first memories of anything. So the problem always was that my head was a bit in advance of the universe that I was inhabiting.
Speaker There was one small step, you were with your grandfather in Washington riding in the back of movie. It was the bonus where rock was thrown in the window between the two.
Speaker Well, it was the my first confrontation with real politics as opposed to.
Speaker Senators conspiring my first knowledge that one day.
Speaker You see, we were all this was 1930. Hoover was still president, so it’s been 31 or to the veterans of the First World War felt that they had been badly dealt with. And they marched on Washington and they said they wanted a bonus, which they’d been idly promised at one point for having served in the First World War at the height of the Depression. Everybody’s unemployed, so they march on Washington to ask for their bonus, hence the nickname for them, the bonus. The bonuses have come to town and they came by the thousands. And it really and we were all still shaking from 1917 from the Russian Revolution, not to mention there was still vestigial memories of the French Revolution. And it can’t happen here. It was always an American feeling, but this was the first time I realized that it could happen here. And everybody’s terrified. And immediately, Congress went into session to decide whether to give them the bonus, they had settled outside of town on the edge of town and the Anacostia Flats just now all black and equally unpleasant as it was when the bonus army was encamped there. So President Hoover calls on General MacArthur and his aide, Major Eisenhower, to call out the troops. To protect the city from this invasion and Bonar’s didn’t mean anything to me, I thought these were skeletons like Halloween, you know, those jointed cardboard skeletons I used to have. So I’d rather alarmed a bunch of skeletons and marched on the city. Well, I drove to the Senate with my grandfather and sat in the back of the car with him in. They’re the Bonar’s were lined up and it was nothing but ordinary men and. Rather poor clothing, and they didn’t look terribly well fed. But they were generally they were hostile, they were not friendly, but I mean, they had no weapons or any. But they recognize Senator Gore as we drove by, all the traffic had been slowed down and we were headed for the Senate side of the Capitol and suddenly crash Iraq came through the back window of the car, which was down. And landed between my grandfather and me. And all he said was just. Put up the window. But I was well and truly traumatized, too strong a word, but I was warned. That one day those. Who felt that they should have more than the rulers of the United States that granted them in the way of jobs or rewards for having fought in wars out of which they got nothing? That one day they will overthrow this government and I think that they may be closer now than it was back in 2001 or to. But it is quite true, and I said the Roosevelts presence as president after Hoover saved the country from revolution. So from that day to this were the Boehner I, I can hear the sound of that rock landing on the back seat of the car. And realizing this is will happen again.
Speaker Did your grandfather try to explain? Yeah, he was against.
Speaker I remember that he was blinded 10. His family had some money. They were prosperous by Southern standards, so they could send him to law school with a cousin to read to him, but. He got to the Senate at the age of 37, all by himself with no great money, with nothing behind him. And he saw a man with two eyes in a country like the United States, I still believe this country, great opportunity for everybody. He would always say they can see. So what do you think it’s like for somebody who can’t see anything? But I’ve survived, and they damn well should, too. It was very Darwinian, rather rather cruel. But that’s the way people were in those days or some people. No, I knew just what it was about, and I thought they shouldn’t have a bonus since that’s what I was told. Now I see why not. That’s a small price to pay to get them to go home. Then General MacArthur opens fire and they go out to Anacostia and they burn down the shacks that they’ve built. And I think a couple of babies died of smoke inhalation. I mean, it was a mess. And and people talk about, oh, United States, everybody’s so happy, everybody’s so rich and so on. And about seven years old, I realized they were not happy and they were not rich.
Speaker And they had come to town. And we were scared.
Speaker Well, the Japanese had attacked the United States, and you see in those days we believed in the United States, we, the people. In fact, we the people thought it was our country, since that is what the slogan of the United States is, all all power resides and we the people in Congress assembled, we the people had been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. We didn’t know that the attack had been provoked by President Roosevelt. We now know that. And I’ve just written a book about it called The Golden Age, which has caused much furor because we’re still trying to lie about what actually happened December 7th, 1941. So when your country is attacked, you enlist in the army. You didn’t think twice about it. The army, acting as we eventually discovered in perfect bad faith, said that if you entered at 17, I graduated from Exeter, which is like a high school in June, and in July, I enlisted and had a special training program. Which after three or four months, they dissolved and threw us all into the infantry, I was able to signal what is known as the WPA, the West Point Protective Association. And I get myself into the Air Force, into army boats, which ended and I ended up in the Aleutian Islands as first mate of a ship, my fellow teenagers who had enlisted at 17 were had practically no basic training and no basic skills and were shipped off to this famous Battle of the Bulge. And they were literally decimated.
Speaker So much for the good faith of the American army. But why did I enlist? That’s what you did do.
Speaker Far more exceptional be somebody who didn’t, you know, I knew the only person I can think of that I knew didn’t was was the poet Robert Lowell, who I think was a genuine conscientious objector that was considered a fairground, but is also considered rather slightly shady.
Speaker What happens to them when and where?
Speaker Well, as soon as I got our ship, was it stationed at Chinaski Bay on the island of Unalaska? And we had a we had a weekly run, sometimes more often from Chinaski Bay to Dutch Harbor, which was the sort of capital of the chain where we’d pick up supplies and passengers. We had 20 man crew and take them back to Tennessee Bay or further along the island of Cumnock. And if you’re an officer, you have a long watch in port. And sometimes it being generally at sea or maybe four hours at night time and four the eight hours, and you can’t really sleep, you’re not supposed to.
Speaker And so I wrote a book. Not a storm at sea.
Speaker Having never experienced a civil war will or miss the Indian word for a great wind that comes down out of them, out of the mountains and very scary they are. I’ve been on the edges of World War II and are actually in one such as I described. When I use that as a kind of unifying theme for what proved to be my first published book after six or seven aborted attempts.
Speaker The introduction you said that the precision of style and reflected in your attention. What was that?
Speaker I don’t remember I don’t remember writing.
Speaker I don’t remember what I meant. The inattention was largely because they needed it was suddenly a great shortage of officers. The army had a larger fleet in numbers, not not in Freidrich, but then the Navy had thousands of little boats, particularly in the Pacific, north and south.
Speaker Well.
Speaker I hadn’t had enough experience, I studied the book of navigation and passed the exam. No one had enough experience unless you were an old sailor from the Bering Sea. I mean, you could never. You would never say, of course, you never saw the stars. It’s always clouded over. It was we did point to point navigation and every point look like every other point, just a bit of rock sticking out in the sea. And the inattention was simply terror, that I was going to wreck the ship when I was on in charge. And then at night time and I would be sitting there on duty and and it was my watch, I relieved myself by writing this book, imagining that the worst that happened, negative magic, if I can imagine it, it won’t happen to prove that it didn’t happen. The book did.
Speaker Also in this author’s note, you said you started and then abandoned the book.
Speaker You were full of self contempt because you can never finish anything, you know. Why were you having trouble finding the things you started?
Speaker I had trouble. Nature had intervened. I got hit by it wasn’t much of a wave. But if you fell into the Bering Sea at that time of year. I think you were dead in three minutes. Well, you got yourself thoroughly wet, as I did out on deck. Doing my first mate duties, I was semi frozen and I came down rheumatoid arthritis. And this kept me quite busy and I hadn’t realized how bad it was, I was wasn’t frozen, but I was it was a trauma shock. Hypothermia. And I remember. To this day, this is my law gym experience. We were putting into port a Dutch harbor and the first mate is out in the bow. In charge of the spring line, which is the first line that you used to attach yourself to the war. And then Stern comes around, and by then the skipper is on duty and you’re looking after the deck, so the spring line was duly attached and I had thrown it aboard onto the wharf. And the next move is just to go and jump from side of the ship onto the wharf.
Speaker Distance of maybe three feet and I couldn’t jump.
Speaker My my knees locked. Now, whether it was panic or whether something had really seriously gone wrong, I don’t know. And then I had a big row with the skipper over it, and I said, well, I don’t think I can make this jump.
Speaker He said, well, you better.
Speaker Have somebody to take a look at it, we had and they took X-ray and they found silicone chips, whatever they are, the things that you get when you have arthritis had started in my knees. But I probably could have made the jump. But I was afraid I couldn’t complete the jump and then I would be in the water. This does not make for a bowl first mate. So I was put in the hospital and Anchorage sent to Birmingham General Hospital and when I was told I could get a pension, but they were going to keep me in another two years as a mess. Officer at Camp Gordon Johnson and Apalachicola, Florida, I said, just let me out. The war was over by that. And they said, all right, you served some duty down there and you’ll be got out. So I went down there and was Miss Officer with 50 Italian prisoners and 50 German prisoners of war. So we no longer had kitchen police. There’s no more Capi. Everybody is very happy about that. And I had 100 of these kids looking after the mess hall. And then you are officer of Day and I took over the headquarters one night. All alone, everything’s all lit up in thousands of typewriters, and I had been unable to continue with Willow because I was in and out of hospital. And I had gone to see Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff, wonderful movie, still, I find quite good and. There was a storm warning out of the Gulf, and I’m all alone with all these typewriters and I just went over and I started typing and I finished with their.
Speaker So whether it was the storm, hypothermia or Boris Karloff, we will never know.
Speaker Willow, I was one of the first American war chronologically.
Speaker Yes, what were some of the others? Well, the first one out was a Walk in the Sun by Harry Browne, poet. Very good writer. We became friends later, turned into quite a good movie directed by Lewis Milestone, and then came John Hersey’s a bell for a. I think it was called. Commercial fiction. And then came I was published in 46, those tours a year or so before me in 47 came, the best was called the Gallery by John Horn Burns about Naples or here the Galeria and about how this frozen Irishman in the army comes to life in the gallery. Italy has thawed him out and the wars thaw him out. And he’s having sort of a nervous breakdown there. And the allies have just taken Naples. And I think it’s a beautiful book.
Speaker But. It’s been raised with so much else.
Speaker What about that, Norman Norman came in 48 simultaneously with the city and the pillar, which is my third book, and I never got through his. It was very long, I thought was clever that he’s picked the Pacific to write about. Because the First World War obviously took place in Europe, so they wrote about Europe, but the Pacific was basically Morency was a race war. For one thing, it was the yellow people against white people. And we were all trained to be racists. That was our indoctrination. So it had all sorts of resonances as a war which a power war on the continent of Europe didn’t have, and Norrland got a lot of that quite right.
Speaker But he he didn’t really interests me after all. He owed a good deal to Malraux and that man’s fate, I think it was, yes, bringing the body down the mountain when I got to that, I thought, well, I think I’ve read this. Then in 52 came from here to eternity, which I could never get through. And that’s it for now is.
Speaker Thin red line.
Speaker Why was your boss were in the office of war was an irresistible subject, particularly for a young man?
Speaker Well, it’s obviously one of the interesting pursuits of the human race or else we wouldn’t have had so much of it. Also, what else are you going to write about you’re. I was 19 when I finished the war. I was hardly ready to do a definitive analysis of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal in the Senate. I waited until the Golden Age in Washington, D.C. to do those books. I didn’t know enough to do them. So you write about which is your most immediate experience and being first made of a ship was.
Speaker Evans.
Speaker Strange phrases and jingles often came to words, you know.
Speaker You know, as I’m as old as gold is cold. Well, you know, we were all going crazy up there.
Speaker There were.
Speaker There are no women at all and not even nurses, I guess you got in the mainland Anchorage and so out on the chain as we call the island. There was no life of any kind, and you were stuck with 20 men on a ship and you got on each other’s nerves beyond belief. There’s one guy who hated the way he combed his hair, he just kept calling it and come, he is Norwegian, it was long blond hair and he kept combing it. There were times I really thought if I took a match and set fire to it, you know, at least he wouldn’t be able to comb it anymore for a while, you start going mad. We had nothing but Ravens and foxes is were really only indigenous population. The Indians had all been moved out. Well, the foxes didn’t come our way very much with the Ravens were all over the place. They were pretty tame, a huge birds. And there are a lot of guys. We just take them into the heart and talk to them. But I talked to a raven and talked to your buddies, and by then you were really thinking seriously about killing them just to get rid of their presence and the monotony and the fact that. At that level of society, which I didn’t know much about, I mean, this was these were the people of the country and without any education, any curiosity, and the vocabularies were so limited. Smitty, the cook who figures in the book, I mean, he had about four phrases and he was native born American, we had a lot of Indians who spoke limited English, but they had a good reason since it wasn’t their first language, but. Oh, no, it was you really know what would boredom is and then you start to know what obsession is and what works. And Willow, I think still somebody sent me a PhD thesis on it. Somebody really studied it, found a lot more in the book than I ever did, but that it really was an obsessive book. And what this sort of isolation does to people, I mean, there’s a murder in it that everybody, everybody else who does the murder and they decide it’s just too much trouble, do anything about it. So I was hailed as the first existential. American novelist was hailed as the first existential American novel. And I hadn’t even read Sarge at the time, and I was quite pleased with my new adjective.
Speaker I I grew up racing sailboats and we know things right, reading the water and there you read the water. Mm hmm. We were a lot of descriptions of water.
Speaker That’s about all. You saw the water in the sky. I mean, to this day. Second, I’m up right here on the divine coast of Amalfi. First thing I check is the direction of the wind. And I can figure out what today is going to be like, even with universal global warming. You have a pretty good idea if if you awaken to an east wind or a west wind.
Speaker Not to mention the north wind, which is really cold. Comes from Russia.
Speaker Did the sea have an effect on the.
Speaker Well, it throws the mind in on itself, and it’s no accident that so many writers have come out of the sea with Conrad is the most famous one. Jack, London, I mean, it is conducive to meditation to. As I say, to obsession. You start to think the same thoughts over and over again. One of my characters, Evans, is constantly doing jingles. He’s constantly rhyming things in his head. And he doesn’t like he’s not going to be a writer. He’s not going to be a poet, but his brain is beginning to feed upon itself. I think I wrote somewhere that the unfed brain devours itself. Well, we certainly weren’t being fed much of anything except each other, and we were sick of that diet.
Speaker Mark, you spoke and you wrote in the screening history that writing Washington, D.C. started you in writing this cycle of books, The Chronicles, and you said that you dreamed the republic’s history. In what way is the history of the republic a family affair?
Speaker Well, because my mother’s family, the Gores, have been here since the 17th century. And a direct ancestor of mine fought in the revolution and one of the family stories was that he got lost in the woods. And we’re so famished, we killed and ate a black snake. And that story has come down right to this very moment, it’s not very interesting, but he did eat a black snake, which was his principal memory of the revolution, which has the ring of truth to it.
Speaker And we were the Gores and I started out in Maryland, we owned most of what is now Washington, D.C..
Speaker And then George Washington came, and when they moved the capital from Philadelphia to make a new capital near his home in Monticello, when they moved the capital from Philadelphia to close to his home at Mt. Vernon, Washington made an offer that the Gores could not resist and bought up their farm, which is where the White House now is up most of Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill. And then we headed west west in those days to Alabama and Mississippi.
Speaker So we ended up in northern Mississippi.
Speaker And at one point, we owned the better part, two counties, Chickasaw County in Webster County. Indians were displaced by President Andrew Jackson by then. And in due course, my grandfather founded the state of Oklahoma, probably the last state to be so founded by really one person. And at the time of the Civil War, we were although in northern Mississippi, we were unionist’s. Patriots, as the family call themselves, after we’d helped create the United States, it served various offices in the state and some in the federal government, and we were against secession. But in the long run, we stayed and fought. My great grandfather with his brothers and in due course, he was wounded and taken captive a child of our family. That branch of it, my mother’s branch, were intimately, totally involved in the history of the country.
Speaker Politically, as recently as the election of the year 2000.
Speaker So brilliantly resolved by the Supreme Court.
Speaker It’s a family that’s a family affair, the Beatles arrived late the same year as the Kennedys, 1848. For different reasons, the Kennedys were on the move from Ireland.
Speaker We were on the move from Veraldi are from northern Italy and from Switzerland, which was at one point or one province of Romano Raksha, and we went out to Wisconsin, which the nickname for Wisconsin in 1848 was Wisconsin, because it was filled with Swiss people, German speaking people. And my great great grandfather was the I believe, the only person to have gone into the Swiss cheese business in Racine, Wisconsin, and failed, which took some doing.
Speaker But then his grandsons to two of them, my father and my uncle. Immediately went to West Point and became involved with the American military.
Speaker And my father founded two or three airlines.
Speaker So we were always involved in the history of the country, even the late comers like the Beadle’s. And the early comers like the 17th century Gaus. So if I started with Washington, D.C., I was in a sense, wasn’t writing so much about my family, but as I wrote about a lot of our houses, very wood, which is the model for Loro House in Washington, D.C. and in the Golden Age. Senator Gore is House in Rock Creek Park now, the Malaysian embassy, where I spent my first 10 years as sort of a model for Senator James Byrd and this House. I used a lot of real geography, but not so many real people. There are echoes of events from my life and obviously since I first moved to Washington when I was about two months old, three months old in 1925. That has been the center of my family’s world and my world. I don’t want you to become the center of the global empire, which is today.
Speaker So how could it not be a family affair?
Speaker But I didn’t think when I wrote Washington, D.C., that was about 1966 or seven, that I would suddenly get so curious.
Speaker Who were we where do we come from? We I mean, what we call Americans and what we call Americans are so many different things. There are Native Americans of Mongol extraction. Black Americans who were brought against their will to be slaves, there are. Middle Europe, north Italians like the Middle East, and they’re the Gores who are Anglo Irish tribally, where nothing and religiously were mixed up. Imperially, I think we had something in common, but I was going to have to find out, wasn’t that. I started a media race with Franklin Roosevelt getting ready to run again for president and the second war is on. And we suddenly have an emperor on our hands. He got elected to a third term, something no one had ever done before. He was going to get us into the Second World War or die in the attempt and he got us in. And out of that, whether one approves of the war or not, out of that came our primacy in the world. So as I was completing Washington, D.C., and there is Franklin Roosevelt in the background, I thought to myself one day I really should put him in the foreground. And put my fictional people off to one side as sort of a Greek chorus. Then maybe I better go for the back. And in the family, my stepfather, Mr. Auchincloss mother, was a Jenning’s and her father had been a partner of John D. Rockefeller and her I forget what it was but her one of her great uncles. Was a relative, was a burr from Connecticut, so they were related to the brothers. And I knew all along from within the family that Brad had a bad rap. He had taken on his two main enemies were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Well, he picked his enemies so well that he erased himself from American history. So I thought I think I’ll focus on Burr because he has a very different view of the founding fathers, of which he is one to. And that carried me then to Burr, having done Washington, D.C., the sixth out of seven books. That I go back to what is chronologically the first. And that was burred, which goes from the revolution up to about 18, 36. And then I began, I would tell the story through a family not unlike my own, the family that mixes in politics. And is in a position to know very often what is really happening as opposed to what is supposed to be happening.
Speaker Right, let’s go right to Bernthal.
Speaker She had a wonderful phrase. I don’t have a right, but I mean, so you have to correct that.
Speaker I think it was in the end the golden age. I forget which book where you said you had this.
Speaker You called it a right angle over the screen of history, a right angle.
Speaker I come across it. I wrote it down. Yeah. Why did you write a novel instead of a biography?
Speaker I don’t really admire the art of biography. I’m addicted to them. I like to read them. We have this is a great period for biography. We’ve got a number of very good biographers. And without them, I couldn’t have written my narratives of empires. What I call the series the word Chronicle, which is kind of a klutzy word, was thought up by a publisher.
Speaker Eventually I’ll get rid of it. But these I call them narratives of Empire because that’s what the story is, how we became a world empire in 200 years. The trick of the week, really. And that’s what this series is about, how thought out it was, how accidental it was, how lucky it was. Unlucky for others maybe. So what was the question? Well, I asked why not?
Speaker No, I think we have talked about that the other day.
Speaker Well, no, it’s a biography of her is just a biography of her. Where’s where’s the interest in that? The story of a family not unlike my own, in which I can weave in my own experiences and my own views, as well as those of others who might have known along the way who have strong opinions, it’s much richer to do it.
Speaker The pity is that the historical novel has been so disdain for so long. And in many ways, quite rightly, it’s been a junkie, writers write historical novels that is common knowledge and common misapprehension until really George Eliot began to write morality tracks for the lower classes to keep them from committing adultery and becoming alcoholics and so on. The Biedermeier novels, as I call in the novels of everyday folks doing everyday things. Everything was historical, for God’s sake, what is Escalus, what is Sophocles, what is your Lippard is writing about kings and great events in the history of their country, the history of the stories of their gods. On the DONTAE, there again is heaven and hell and the great figures of history who get in one or the other or in between, what is Shakespeare, but nothing but a series of narratives about the history of this little island. And the history is extremely fascinating here. In 200 years, we created a world empire out of a really interesting mix of people, many of whom were considered the refugees of Europe and other continents. And yet somehow something about coming together in this place gave us energy. And we just opened new doors, sometimes deliberately and sometimes not understanding what we were doing. That, to me, is a story why it has not been done by anyone else. I don’t know. I picked it as a novel. I’ve seen historians try to do it and most of them don’t succeed there. We have wonderful historians who get parts of it. William Appleman Williams is a great one on the American empire specifically, but he has to approach it formally through foreign relations and how we’ve made this treaty in that treaty and so on. And he’s a wonderful writer. But you don’t get a coherent picture of it. Charles Abian at least came up with the notion that the founding fathers had profit in view and created a constitution in which only white men of property could do well. He grasped that, which is one of our big secrets that we tried to keep from the rest of the world. People like Richard Hofstadter, whom I admire very much good with the paranoid style, he gets a lot of the games we play politically. There is no sense of. Nobody has written a Washington, D.C. novel, I read a list of Washington, D.C. novels and I didn’t appear on it. I don’t know what people think it is that I do it, but I seem not to be writing history and I seem not to be writing what should be novels which are about divorce and who gets custody of the children. Important things. And yet I have done nothing but one vast in seven volumes of Washington novel about who’s in the White House, who’s achieved power, who has gone out and who has created a war with Spain, as did Teddy Roosevelt, to give us a Pacific empire. And another Roosevelt provokes the Japanese into attacking us Pearl Harbor, which gives us all of the Pacific and the island of Japan as a dependency, as a conquered province, which it is as we speak. And all of Europe is now under our control. They get hysterical when you tell them that, and I remind them how many bases England’s got 10 American bases, military bases as we speak in those small islands.
Speaker Well, how did this happen? Well, I found that through BRX himself, who was always at an angle, oblique angle to the pieties of the founding fathers, he was on to them and he was a very witty man, witty writer, left good deal in the way of notes and journals. He was on to the hypocrisy of people like Jefferson. It was not that Jefferson was not a wise and sometimes good man and God knows eloquent Declaration of Independence is probably the great paper of the 18th century.
Speaker But he fooled himself about everything. The Louisiana Purchase. He buys something that’s about the size of Russia and pretends he can have a little democracy going on where you can’t win with an empire of that size. So Burr is there is my first voice saying, well, no, it’s not really like that. And Jefferson was not that sort of person. He had other things in view of the pursuit of happiness for, let us say, the lesser breeds as he regarded Native Americans and blacks.
Speaker So I start with that and I move on to. I go from that to Lincoln, which is kind of a deviation, but without the Civil War and Lincoln, nothing makes any sense. Only one member of my family. Ends up in Lincoln in a minor role. He, in turn, marries the daughter of the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr, and that’s my family that runs straight through to the golden age and they marry different people and we go through five generations. Which brings us to the present day. Well, during this time, the country is changing. The family is changing. We are forever at war. And we always it’s always other people are very evil and they just attack us for no reason at all. And we have to fight back reluctantly.
Speaker Well, there was a pattern for Empire, which I didn’t understand when I began. These narratives.
Speaker And by the time I got to the last one, the golden age, it all starts to come together. I see that from the beginning that this was an inexorable pattern. That it was the nature of the beast particularly. We have to bring up the delicate subject of race, but particularly the Anglo Irish and Scots, Irish.
Speaker Who are an aggressive breed, as the world keeps noting, whenever we look at Ireland, we see that something awful is going on there and they’re feuding. Well, it was that breed when one of our presidents have been from Ulster and he is a Protestant Irish, I mean, as can be, and very, very tough and aggressive. Well, when you have people like Andrew Jackson or even I think Woodrow Wilson was one of that breed, you’ve got a very tough leadership. Mr. John Updike, a writer, I’m I cannot say that I much care for. As he used to be the mayor for my taste, he really believes in the sanctity of marriage and divorce remains and he did a memoir was very interesting. He’s a he’s of German extraction, I suppose. Must have been Catholic. At least at the beginning, and he’s talking about being from Pennsylvania with the Pennsylvania Dutch, which were from the from the Rhine Valley, he said we stayed put in the same villages.
Speaker We arrived in the 17th, 18th century. And you go to the cemeteries and there the families are.
Speaker We just stay there, work. The land got planted. A new group came. We didn’t have the energy to move on, and then is he who brings up my theme, it was the Scots Irish and he didn’t know about the Anglo Irish, which is the cause of it. It’s their restlessness and they just kept moving west. I just knows the cause. They had to keep moving whenever there was word that there was land in Alabama, Pickens, Alabama, the Gores right out of South Carolina to grab that land. Then when Mississippi, when we Jackson got rid of the Indians there, we zoomed up to the northern part of the state where the Chickasaw tribe had been and bought them out and drove them out. And at one point, we owned, I think it was two counties.
Speaker The irony of ironies, the Chickasaw is had been moved to Indian territories, so my grandfather, the Gores having already occupied Chickasaw, that moves to Oklahoma. And puts the Chickasaw us on reservations, takes all their land away from them, then when we found out there’s oil in the reservations, we get them off the reservations and steal the oil. Bad faith, I would say it was was our great weapon in Empire Building, but I suspect we could make the same comment of the Romans.
Speaker So. You skipped to Lincoln.
Speaker What role does Lincoln play in the transformation of the public to an empire?
Speaker Well, Lincoln was more of Lincoln replace the republic. We had many a loose confederation of states. Part of our mythology and this sort of thing that drove Arenberg crazy and drives me crazy, oh, you see, he fought the Civil War to free the slaves in the South. Well, he didn’t fight to free the slaves. He didn’t care. He said, if I can save the union was what he cared about, he didn’t want the union breaking up and he didn’t want the South seceding in the South was seceding right and left, starting with South Carolina. And he threatened me. He said, you can’t go. And they said, why not? We came together of our own free will to form a more perfect union, a republic. And now is the time for us to part.
Speaker Try and stop this.
Speaker And Lincoln said not a word. Lincoln said, If I can preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, I shall do so, though I don’t have the power. If I can preserve the union by freeing some of the slaves and not others, I will do so. If I can preserve the union by freeing no slaves, I will free none. That’s how good an abolitionist he was. In the end, he freed the ones in the South as military necessity, which was just cause turmoil in the Confederacy, which was staggering under the powers of the North. But what he did, he made himself a dictator. He suspended habeas corpus. He shut down newspapers. He imprisoned anybody. He felt like it without due process of law. He became more and more furious and more and more stern. And the extreme measures that he took to smash the south to pieces so that this would never happen again. And he succeeded.
Speaker And that is why the most moving lines are in his second inaugural address is reporting to the nation. And it’s four years after the recession had begun, after it first become president. And he said, you know, I have to paraphrase it, but he said the matters of war and peace. Were decided not by me, but by others. He says in so many words, I begged you to stay in the union and you would not. Then he brings up slavery is a bad thing, which because he was now in the business of freeing the slaves. And he said there were those who preferred.
Speaker To earn their living through the sweat of others.
Speaker And there were those opposed. And the not have become an issue, but it did.
Speaker And so the choice was the choice of others, not mine.
Speaker And then the war came. And that is the voice of Cesar.
Speaker You asked for it, you got it, I got a brand new country, and he had predicted himself when he was about 29 and a young legislator in Springfield, Illinois. He made a speech to the young men’s Lyceum.
Speaker And he’s not talking about power. It’s an unknown legislator, and he said, you know. He’s very nice about George Washington, the founders of the country, but. He said, will this be enough? For the ambitious man. A man of the race, of the lion and of the eagle simply to occupy the presidential chair, which others have occupied.
Speaker Or will he not seek new fields?
Speaker In which he will shine.
Speaker Might not his ambition lead him?
Speaker To free all the slaves or enslave all men. He will not be content to be mere successor, and there is Lincoln warning us against Lincoln.
Speaker Because he wasn’t going to just succeed in the chair of George Washington, there was going to be a great marble throne and that was Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker Do you think he was the most ambitious president?
Speaker Well, how do you measure ambition?
Speaker I don’t know. Maybe Millard Fillmore might have been more ambitious. He just did less about it. I would say he accomplished he accomplished an impossible task.
Speaker He smashed up the old republic, reinvented it as a highly centralized, militaristic state, which we still are brought down states rights, minimized them, centralized everything. We ended. We were the most powerful military nation on Earth by the by 1865 Bismarck, from Germany, Napoleon, the third. We were sending observers to watch the terrible new weapons that we had developed. We developed the first iron ships and battleships that had ever been put to sea. We reinvented war and we killed more people in one day than they ever have been killed in one day, I think that was it. Cold, hard, cold Spring Harbor. General Grant.
Speaker Tell me about looking at the contents of Lincoln’s pockets of the Library of Congress.
Speaker And can I remind you to look at me a little more than you are? Because we just we just we want to be looking in this direction.
Speaker Wonderful stories.
Speaker Well, I went to the Library of Congress, I was invited to do sort of a commercial for them. They were doing a document, TV documentary on it. And they brought out a death mask, a life mask, brother of Lincoln. Rather startling, this tiny, tiny face, it looks like he had such a big head, but that was all hair and beard and probably why he grew the beard, which you can’t see.
Speaker The beard has been taped over and the hair is taped over. So all you get is really his features and his little.
Speaker Sort of vulpine, like a little foxes face. Very weary, with terrible lines and sharp pointed nose. And he. Everybody thinks it’s a death mask, and it was only it was done about two months before he was murdered. Then they had the contents of his pockets on the night that he was shot at Ford’s Theater. And there were his glasses, it’s the same pair that he is wearing reading the second inaugural address.
Speaker With malice toward none, charity toward all that speech.
Speaker So I just picked them up and I put them on, I put Lincoln’s glasses on to the curator, was gasping and trying to get them out of my hands without breaking them.
Speaker But I was going to look through Lincoln’s glasses. Well, I don’t know if the glass must have changed because it was like looking through Michae. It was very total glaze. He was must have been terribly far sighted because he needed them for reading, which meant that his regular eyes couldn’t read texts very easily. He had in his pocket a couple of editorials, a couple of good reviews that he had got lately from across the country. He had a ten dollar Confederate bill that he had picked up in the streets of Richmond, he’d been in Richmond a week or two before, which is the Confederate capital. And then they had and then he had a knife he liked to whittle all the time, there was his pocket knife. And then they also produce the Bible on which he had sworn to uphold the Constitution and it was brand new, never been opened. So I open that to the consternation of the curator, because, you see, it was a brand new 1865 Bible they had to send out for it. Lincoln was not a believer in our Lord Jesus, though he certainly believed in Almighty God. At the end, Almighty God gets into every speech his last term. So I opened all the pages, stuck together, and it was just I had never been over and they just kept as sacred relic. And it was important to know that because when they asked him. By what? Right.
Speaker Do you deny the South?
Speaker Right, to withdraw from a union in which they have voluntarily joined and now voluntarily wanted to leave. He couldn’t think of an argument because there was none.
Speaker So he said, because I have an oath.
Speaker Sworn and registered in heaven. To preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Is quite true, it really. That was his rationale, so the little red Bible I was holding in my hand, which he put his ad, that was his justification.
Speaker For and the war came.
Speaker I love the way that you used varying perspectives to give us the portrait of seeing him through Mary Todd’s eyes, seeing you through the young Charlie Hayes on.
Speaker And.
Speaker I also and I liked.
Speaker I mean, every flips, you know, know call audiocassette.
Speaker Someone recently was, you know, doing a study of depression and.
Speaker But he was seriously chronically depressed. Everybody was upset because I brought up the fact that he had told his law partner that he had had syphilis. In his late 20s and at a difficult time, being cured of it. And had to go to and he didn’t dare go to a Springfield doctor because they’d all talk, so they went to Cincinnati. But was he cured or not? And the cure then was Mercury. Well. This was such an unsavory thing, everybody was horrified that I had mentioned this, but since his law partner had written about it, I thought it’s common knowledge. It was necessary because his melancholy and these swings and moods and sometimes moments of real madness conform with mercury poisoning. He also took a laxative called Blue Mass and blue mass contained mercury. And finally, over the years, he himself figured out that there was something wrong with him and actually got it down to the pills, the blue mass, by then he was not being cured for syphilis, but he was taking constipation pills and he really said how much better he felt when he stopped taking them. So the melancholy, I think, was medically induced as so much is that we are not told about until we’re dead.
Speaker I also love the way he seemed. So indecisive and then all of a sudden you realize but how he seemed to be totally on top of the game.
Speaker Well, David Herbert Donald, who’s probably the greatest living authority on Lincoln. Made the point I think he uses as a title for his last book on Lincoln. From a letter of legalese that I have not couldn’t control events, events have controlled me. And don’t think that that is more of a clue to his character than I do, I think he controlled events as much as he could. No one can control events totally because nobody knows what’s going to happen next. The true politician.
Speaker Waites.
Speaker And it’s never precipitated and you you have to keep waiting for the right moment to strike and to respond. So the great politicians are. Always accused of dithering Franklin Roosevelt. I have this in the golden age and this is from life. He was talking to President Roosevelt, talking to a friend of mine about going the necessity to go to war to save England, but 80 percent of the American people did not want to go and fight in Europe. And Roosevelt is trying to persuade them to go and is having a very difficult time of it. And Roosevelt said something interesting. He said, you know, the only way that you can get me to do something that I don’t want to do or I feel that I cannot do.
Speaker You must force me and, well, how do we force the president? He said, you have a newspaper. Accuse me of cowardice or refusal to respond to history cuse me and then he said, you know, there’s a word I’ve always liked and I never see it anymore, accuse me of being pusillanimous. So pusillanimous made its way into the newspapers and nobody knew it came from Roosevelt or the journalists, and he got his wish, he saw the world and finally he got to his war.
Speaker I had the feeling that history was almost a character throughout the narrative.
Speaker Oh, by the end, of course, it’s about nothing but history. As all my characters sort of. I am some suggested somewhat by. By The Tempest, Prospero finally seeing all of his creations as he breaks his magic stick. And I have Aaron Burr sort of returns in the last scene of. What is real, what is and are these fictional characters real well, their real to themselves, if they have selves real to me when I contemplate them.
Speaker They will be real to a reader. At a certain level, so what’s what?
Speaker And is it not all perhaps a dream?
Speaker Buddhists would say that.
Speaker So you just it’s so indeterminate. And one of my problem with the academics is they really believe that such things as facts, as truth. There are what I call agreed upon facts, we all agree that George Washington was born in February, he could well have been born in March. But nobody’s going to take the time to worry about it, as far as we can tell. We’ve got the right date for his birth. John? Hey, I have the two standard biographies of John Hay, who was secretary to Lincoln, and later secretary of state to McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker The two standard biographies have had him born on a different day. Well, what am I to do with that when all of my sources disagree and nobody’s ever thought it of interest to straighten it out?
Speaker You’re already dealing in such on such quicksand when you come to history that Americans, I would say a primary American trait is hypocrisy about everything. If you can’t be good, be careful and if the truth will get you in trouble, lie and keep on lying. This is very much in our nature. In fact, there was a study by two researchers called The Day America Told the Truth. And over 90 percent of the people interviewed admitted to being habitual liars. Well, they’re going to be the people who talk to the historians that they’re going to tell you all kinds of stories. That is why in the long run, it might be that a somewhat history minded.
Speaker Novelist.
Speaker Who is quick to to figure out motives of characters might be better at reconstructing historical action than somebody who’s just reading the latest monographs that came out of a close reading of the Springfield Gazette in which practically every story is untrue. But since it’s an original source, they say it has to be true.
Speaker Well, going back to what you were just talking about, dream and reality and the ending of of the golden age, the concept of parallel universe comes out. Could you tell me about that and how you use that so wonderfully and in that last chapter?
Speaker Well, I use the parallel universe head on in a book called the Smithsonian Institution, written just before the Golden Age. In which I withdraw from death. Somebody who is going to be killed and rearranged by stepping into a parallel universe, and I did I read an awful lot of physics for that book. And it’s it’s theoretically possible, practically, I should think, impossible, but it’s good for a. For a narrative, a fictional narrative. So having already worked it out, how it might happen.
Speaker I then at the very end, my central character.
Speaker Who you might say is kind of a stand in for me, though, we’re very different, we’re the same age we were both brought up in Washington and we’re meeting here in this house.
Speaker A year ago, right after the millennium.
Speaker And we are sort of reviewing our life and times and as we do so.
Speaker Everything starts to get unreal because I am, after all, I am the writer. And he’s my character, and he may think I’m his character, but we don’t know what he’s writing, but we know what I am. And so I begin and we have a TV director. Who really is Aaron Burr? Come back again and he said something to the effect, I said, you are Aaron Burr and you said if that’s what you want me to be. Of course.
Speaker I said, what will you do this time? I always said it won’t it won’t be political. There’s something else that is going to happen to the human race. Something much bigger. Anything a politician might do. But he doesn’t say and I don’t say the last sentence of the book.
Speaker Gives an indication of what it might be in the last sentence of the Golden Age is exactly the last sentence of Washington, D.C.. Bringing those two books together.
Speaker Well, I thought it was really fascinating that you started the first book you wrote was Washington, D.C. The last book you wrote of the Empire series Narratives was The Golden Age, and you covered the same period of time. Was it interesting? It was very interesting to me because I read them in chronological order of not how you wrote the book, but their time period in the book. So I read Washington, D.C., second to last. And then Goldney. I was reading that same period of time with some of the same characters and some North Carolina. Sanford isn’t there in Washington, D.C. and she’s very much there, although she has her extraordinary in D.C., which is one of my favorites. In the Golden Age and Peter Sanford, who was, I guess, your someone stand in that, it must have been very interesting for you to write The Golden Age. It’s like it’s like a it’s almost like another level of reality. You’re dealing with some of the, you know, and and the same events. But playing it’s almost like a variation on theme.
Speaker Well, to do to go back to the central situation and the fictional characters of Washington, D.C..
Speaker I did it because I felt that what’s really interesting, which I left out of that, were the great historical figures. So more center stage is Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace.
Speaker And.
Speaker I put the historical figures at center stage and then my fictional ones observe them and they they do what they do, but you see the things that they were doing that you don’t see what they did. You can observe the fictional characters.
Speaker In the Golden Age. Pursuing their lives, as they did in Washington, D.C., with the same major events shadowing them. But the emphasis is totally changes on something else. So all those scenes where they don’t appear in Washington, D.C., you now get them in the golden age, so you get a double narrative. Because you always wonder, I mean, what did Madame Bovary really do that day when she went to the chemist’s in Ruaha and did she stop off the place where they were and she was going to buy a hat? And could she have had a conversation with a certain person that might have been very revelatory? These are the alternatives to what you you make decisions when you write a novel or write anything. What to tell, what not to tell. So I’m deciding to tell more things, to show more about people. As well as put under the bright lights, the great historical figures, so that you really get to know Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins and you watch them govern the world by the end. So that’s the progression there, and it’s just it’s just like making movies, it’s reverse angle shots.
Speaker I’m going to go back to work and then.
Speaker One thing you said, you know, the democracy was not intended for someone says that. Berlind drooly into the Ashie grade. None of us, not even Jefferson, foresaw this democracy. I suspect it will be a bad thing if it was not intended.
Speaker What was New Republic was intended. And a republic is simply an organization. It was model more or less on the Roman Republic priest Caesar. One thing we did not want was a dictator, and so we promptly got one in 1861 with Lincoln. And we’ve had several since, but by and large, we didn’t want the dictatorship of one person, we didn’t want monarchy and we did not want democracy, that was people were terrified of that. So the Senate was founded in order, the House of Representatives was to be the one that represented the people like the House of Commons in England. And all the crazies could get there and pass all the legislation on Earth and but the Senate had to OK it and that it was it was really I think it was George Washington describing the role of the Senate. At first, nobody knew what it was there for it. He said, well, it’s like the saucer. That you pour your tea into the Kool-Aid. And he said, we need a time to cool after the heat of the House of Representatives. The Supreme Court is now totally out of control, but thanks to Marbury vs. Madison. Chief Justice John Marshall gave the court the right of judicial review of acts of Congress, which is totally unconstitutional. It’s nowhere in the Constitution. But he put that in a decision which they didn’t act upon for 20, 30 years, by which time it had solidified, and the court suddenly finds itself a major player able to strike down acts of Congress, which would have been regarded by the founders as Harris blasphemy, because all authority is not in the Supreme Court. All authority was with we the people. We, the people, is the general rubric by which our government is formed. However, some people are more equal than others. It did not mean that everybody had equal rights. At the beginning, you had to have so much property, you had to be a free man, white man. And you had to have a certain amount of property before you could vote for House of Representatives.
Speaker In turn, they chose the Senate or the state legislators chose the Senate.
Speaker And the presidency was chosen by an electoral college, which we’ve just been through that. Anything that complicated, anything to slow it down, anything to keep the people from ruling, so that’s what Bush is talking about. We don’t want majority rule because the majority does stupid things.
Speaker And yet we don’t want a dictator, even no matter how wise, we don’t want him to tell us how to do things, nor would we trust the Senate, you know, with 50, 100 whatever members to have sufficient wisdom to govern for us. Hence, the checks and balances house can go crazy over here.
Speaker The Senate says, OK, quickly cool over there. The court after Marbury vs. Jack Madison says, well, we don’t think that conforms with the Fourth Amendment.
