The Golden Age by Gore Vidal Page A

eyes set in a round face; ingratiating smile punctuated by a Lincolnesque mole; only an exaggerated amount of jowl attached to a square Prussian jaw suggested that its owner was no stranger to fiery waters; he was also very much what was politely known as a lady’s man if all—or even some—of the rumorsthat Tim had heard were true. Willkie was exactly Tim’s age, forty-eight. He was also ten years older than his closest rival, Thomas E. Dewey. The Grand Old Party was uncommonly rich in boys this season while all the Democratic leaders were visibly aging, their famous faces etiolated from too much exposure to too many flashbulbs.
    “I hate this shit.” Willkie’s Indiana accent was as countrified as his haircut.
    “Campaigning?”
    Willkie held up his speech. “No. Having to
read
a speech. I’ve never been able to. Never. I warned Mike. But … oh, this is Russell Davenport, Mr. Farrell.” Willkie was not yet a professional politician but he had all the right instincts: he had got Tim’s name right. Davenport was tall and rather opulent-looking, as befitted the editor of a magazine called
Fortune
. “The speech,” he said in a grave cultured voice, befitting the secretary of state in a Willkie Cabinet, “is very good.”
    Tim moved around the curtain. He had told his crew to take their cue from the CBS director, who was now holding up five fingers—each one a second—as Stassen plunged into his peroration, filling the airwaves with his vision of a golden America, of a joyous future with freedom and democracy for absolutely everyone in the Republican Party.
    Beside Tim, Willkie took a deep breath; then, on exhalation, he whispered, “Oh, shit,” again, and as the applause began and Stassen stood back from the lectern, the bearlike Wendell Willkie lumbered firmly into Stassen’s place. He was not, Tim noted, in the least nervous. Even Roosevelt’s hands sometimes shook but the smiling Willkie, as he now sailed into American history, seemed quite aware of an audience that plainly liked what they saw. But they did not like what they then heard. Willkie read as badly as he had predicted. The agreeable croak of his voice, so unlike the usual politician’s mellow sales pitch, started early to go wrong as he missed words, split sentences in two, stumbled from line to line.
    Tim wondered how anyone could have thought that this blunderer might begin to compete with the master in the White House whose vast depths of benign insincerity could never be entirely plumbed by any mere mortal.
    Willkie’s glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose by the time the CBS director made the throat-cutting gesture that signaled the end of the torture. “I thank you,” snarled Willkie.
    “We’re off the air,” said the CBS director, his back to the stage. The soundmen gathered up their equipment. The audience applauded perfunctorily while rising to escape the overheated hall not to mention the dire speaker. In the wings opposite, the Cowles brothers were talking intently to Stassen, who was shaking his thick pink boyish head.
    But Willkie, instead of leaving the stage, removed his glasses, took off his jacket, and draped it over the lectern. Then he picked up his speech and hurled it out over the audience. As the offending pages floated in the air, he stretched his arms wide like a bear coming out of hibernation. “Well, that’s that, ladies and gentlemen. As you could hear, that was all spinach. Now that we’re off the air we can really talk.” He stepped back from the lectern while the astonished audience sat down.
    Tim waved to his cameraman to keep recording.
    “So I can talk straight to you without all that damn fine language I have to use for radio.”
    “Thanks, Wendell,” said Davenport, sourly.
    “
Your
language?” Tim was amused.
    “Yes. So, now what is he going to do? He has no text and the wire services are all out there.”
    They didn’t have long to wait. Willkie began to prowl the stage from left