Burr
Coyne, Patricia
cat has been with us for ages and the present arrangement has worked out quite well. The Gb-80 really isn't us." Evidently, the hotel has offered no more encouragement to salesmen of...
...This rather alliterative entity--created, founded, and presumably patented by Rockefeller himself--plans to bless the nation over the next few years with studies of economic, social, political, and philosophical "trends," and has already lined up an impressive list of worthies to further its tasks...
...Julie Christie, Dustin Hoffman, or Peter Ustinov, of course--all of them regulars at the hotel ("and Gore Vidal, be sure and mention him because he loves to be mentioned," Mr...
...But in the end, it is Vidal who twists the facts for his own purposes, and not Burr...
...So where's the problem...
...The bar is tucked in a paneled recess just a few steps inside the hotel...
...I understand there is no cost or obligation involved...
...But Aaron Burr himself is an altogether different sort of fellow...
...When Jefferson runs he is a coward...
...He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and stared at himself in the mirror that arches above the cash register...
...No one can do anything right except Burr himself, and when Vidars research discloses Burr acting in a way that he, Vidal, criticizes in others, then it's only because Burr plays games and just doesn't give a fig...
...Webste~s tells us that "critical" means "crucial" or "indispensable for the weathering, solution, or overcoming of a crisis...
...It was a forbidding day...
...It all looked so good that when the elevator finally arrived I had decided to stick around and get some dinner...
...Letter T had disappeared, perhaps with the lady with the glasses on top of her head...
...And there had to be at least some minor degree of competence among our troops and their leaders to have beaten the British...
...Although Vidal is masterful at creating and inspiring a sense of Olympian contempt and superioritymin fact, that's what he's best at--and although he narrows historical incidents to achieve that end, there are times when he just can't bring it off...
...Like the Mohammdean, it climbs to its tower and makes strange noises and we below can only wait and pray...
...The room is paneled in oak...
...Mencken attributed his literary genius to long waits for the hotel lift...
...But this unruly historical fact is never mentioned in the novel, and instead Vidal sums up Jefferson's whole complex position on slavery by simply showing '2Vlassa Tom" rutting among the slave girls...
...He was, we are told, shifty, cowardly, fiatulently boring, a hypocritical and pathological liar who not only habitually cuckolded his friends but also beat his horse...
...I would relate more of this story, but brandy had dulled my perception...
...Contemptuous disregard functions, after all, as a sort of pornography for the impotent ego...
...And that purpose, we suspect, is to inculcate in the reader a strong revulsion for our country and the people who shaped it...
...The lobby, which an hour earlier was full of talk and people, had emptied of both...
...To obtain a copy of the current issue, merely return this coupon t o . . . THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW, 14 S. Bryn Mawr Avenue, Bryn Mawr, Pa..19010 Please send me the current issue of your iournal...
...I walked through the lobby to the elevator...
...then attempting to deal with crises in Vietnam, in race relations, and the cities...
...Edward Banfield's analysis, presented to a largely unappreciative academic community in his impressive 1968 work, The Unheavenly City, remains the most perceptive statement on this topic: "Although it is easy to exaggerate the importance, either for good or ill, of the measures that government has adopted or might adopt, there does appear to be a danger to the good health of the society in the tendency of the public to define so many situations as 'critical problems'--a definition that implies (1) that 'solutions' exist or can be found and (2) that unless they are found and applied at once, disaster will b e f a l l . . _9 . although there are many difficulties to be coped with, dilemmas to be faced, and afflictions to be endured, there are very few problems that can be s o l v e d . . , although much is seriously wrong . . . . No disaster 24 The Alternative May 1974...
...A few years ago, the world's only maker of the shades notified hilt...
...specifically, good scholars everywhere must resist the blandishments of the nefarious Irving Kristol, reliably reported to be distributing Rockefeller's largesse in an effort to recruit talent for the Commission...
...Now superciliousness must always be delicious in a way...
...A reappraisal of our ancestors is necessary and healthy," said another...
...My dowagers were putting on their furs for the ride to the Shubert Theater...
...Even the most casual student of history, for instance, remembers that Thomas Jefferson attempted to write an antislavery clause into the Declaration of Independence...
...And it's heady stuff, this business of setting ourselves up as intrinsically superior to national leaders, of gleefully reducing them to somewhere beneath our own level (a different thing altogether from disagreeing with their policies or even deciding they're a pack of damned rascals...
...If we have read Vidal's other writings, we realize that something interesting is happening here...
...But the have been putting them through college...
...National Priorities in the Decade Ahead In Defense of Conformity Modern Man in a Metaphysical Wasteland Power and Values in the Nuclear Age In God's Own Good Time The Supreme Court from Taft to Warren Capitalism versus Socialism The Urban Crisis Revisited The Hydra of Marxism John Locke as Authoritarian Moral Rights and the Law On Debate and Existence unuon _9 _9 no an |! no i alnu n nlu u e ao || _9 _9 on _9 _9 _9 on _9 _9 _9 u oaln |o ao _9 un...
...An antique Chinese porcelein lamp shone gently to my right...
...like a ginger terrier at his heels frisked the young impertinent aide [Hamilton...
...Burr is our number-one best selling novel, and as anyone who is at all interested knows by now, it tells the story of Aaron Burr (1756-1836), Thomas Jefferson's first vice president--the fellow who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and later got himself charged with treason...
...His seeming shift to the Right disturbed them, but they had invested so much time and ink over the last twelve years arguing that Rockefeller alone could save the Republicans from disaster that his recent positions were at least partially forgiven as necessary concessions to the many backward among his party...
...It should--you've heard it all before...
...Sound familiar...
...So woould my the lobby on the arms of men who might acquaintances, the dowagers...
...But Burr/Vidal will have none of it...
...Well, the answer is quite simple_9 No one cares about how Rockefeller runs for President--the problem is just the whole silly idea that America should start scouting around for a bunch of "critical choices" to make...
...Margaret Case Harriman, the daughter of one-time Algonquin owner Frank Case, wrote that H.L...
...I checked my watch (it was 11:00 P.M...
...The budget of this little enterprize is estimated at around $20 million, including $1 million each fron Nelson and brother Laurance, and almost including, on White House recommendation, $1 million from the national treasury...
...The celebrations were invariably sober, owing to the high price of beer...
...T/me and Newsweek, while advancing no novel themes about creeping conservatism in the groves of academe, were nonetheless torn by Rockefeller's latest move...
...But I do...
...The hotel placed a final order and seven extra pieces are packed away upstairs...
...If we can learn absolute contempt for our ancestors, it is no problem at all to learn absolute contempt for our peers...
...Well, the Vidal types would tell us that all ~ forms of pornography are healthy...
...But healthy...
...And besides he had huge high buttocks and besoms like a woman...
...George Washington, for instance, was mean, stupid, dull, incompetent, and nastily cunning...
...A graduate student I knew used to drink beer at the Blue Bar (which even then wasn't blue, except for a few cocktail tables) to celebrate anything that resembled literary success...
...Nor are the novel's lesser figures dealt with more kindly: Adams, Monroe, Lafayette--a pack of ludicrous bumblers...
...Oh, I know I shouldn't--they've been here for 60 or 70 years...
...and signed my check...
...Burr is urbane, witty, detached, standing apart from it all and laughing at those puny little figures of American history, scampering about, trying to run a country...
...There is room for six on stools at the bar and for a dozen more along a winding leather couch...
...I followed the son of a bitch halfway around the world...
...Unfortunately, though, the crisis mentality is not just a harmless diversion that sells newspapers while giving good Americans something to be concerned about...
...Burr is loaded with warped writing...
...19010 _9 (215) LAwrence 5-7501 . . . . . . . . . . . . Yale Brazen Roger Freeman Henry, Hazlitt Will Herberg William R. Kintner Russell Kirk James McClellan Ludwig van Mises Robert A. Nisbet Gerhart Niemeyer Leo Strauss Ernest van den Haag Eric Voegelin CONTRIBUTORS TO PREVIOUS ISSUES: Is Government the Source of Monopoly...
...and guests still wait for the single, man-steered Algonquin elevator...
...Anspach is entirely right...
...All credit goes to the French...
...Time passes quickly at the Blue Bar...
...Waiters appea, red, vanished, and then reappeared, summoned by table-mounted brass bells...
...Indeed, a number of people, including this author, can contemplate that possibility with considerably more equanimity and even confidence than seemed possible in 1968_9 Nevertheless, there is one unfortunate aspect of the Rockefeller effort to this date which the media have not, and probably will not, mention--namely, the nature of the candidate's latest vehicle for keeping himself in the public eye...
...When I took my place at the bar that night, a man in a gray sharkskin suit, red shirt, and suede vest was talking to the bartender...
...The Commission on Critical Choices is merely one of the latest products...
...He spoke with grudging admiration of a thief who had stolen a large sum of money...
...This self-portraiture inevitably results in distortion...
...The hotel must specially commission each new lobby chair...
...Vice President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger are there, ex offic/o, joining such names as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Clare Booth Luce, nuclear physicist Edward Teller, and former Miss America and I've Got A Secret panelist Bess Myerson (currently doing good deeds for consumers...
...Not so, insists Vidal...
...P a t r i c i a Coyne The Public Policy P l e a s e Pass t h e C r i s e s by Peter J. Rusthoven LAST DECEMBER, with appropriate fanfare and publicity, Nelson A. Rockefeller resigned his lifetime job as Governor of New York to become chairman of something called the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans...
...But Jefferson comes off even worse...
...Anspach that it was going out of business...
...The business of Burr is to debunk national R iew Burr by Gore Vidal Random House $8.95 leaders, and Vidal's theme is that they've always been rotten...
...But the only thing that saved the student from banl~uptcy was his heavy hand with prose and the attendant scarcity of his triumphs...
...It is sent FREE to students and teachers who request it...
...People who sit in the lobby of the Hotel Algonquin look interesting...
...Not until the first British troops had st~ted up the hill did he and his family agai~n take to their heels...
...In fact, he seems to feel that Aaron Burr was about the only good thing that happened to young America...
...and so on, ad nauseum, with the current stops being Watergate, the "crisis of confidence in government," and the ever popular energy shortage...
...Vidal, we realize somewhere during the first quarter of the book, is portraying in Aaron Burr exactly the kind of man he would like to be--the kind of man he probably thinks he is...
...When voices don't gang up on it, the refrigerating equipment behind the bar sends up a soothing hum...
...Neither did the buxom middle-aged woman off yonder, who wore her glasses propped up on top of her head...
...True, big-name committees never seem to accomplish much...
...In short, crisis mongering, one of the biggest growth stocks of the last decade, is still very active on the political exchange...
...All this, of course, is part of the grand political game, and as such is quite legitimate...
...The snow had stopped and begun to melt...
...The room had filled with buffet clients, clutching their evening's Play Bills...
...By now it has settled heavily over the countryside, and Burr is the sort of book that our more breathless critics would call "breathtakingly contemporary...
...Modern tastes have also robbed the Algonquin of commercially produced furniture...
...If I could use only one word to describe the lobby, it would be 'civilized.' The room is warm and sophisticated, too, of course, but I suppose that all that is understood when you say civilized...
...Not surprisingly, most of the publicity surrounding the creation of the Commission centered on its possible use as a springboard for Rockefeller's fourth bid for the Republican presidential nomination...
...National Review, for example, was wary of Rockefeller's past...
...Vidal has never attempted to conceal his antipathy for America...
...There is no effort at all to expand Burr's one-dimensional view of himself, to show him in the round...
...I refer, of course, to the Commission on Critical Choices itself...
...Madison was "good," if a bit foolish, and Marshall is redeemed by his hatred for his cousin, Jefferson...
...He might have been shown as pathetic as he must in real life have been, and we could still have ended by liking him and sympathizing with him...
...Evidently, the hotel has offered no more encouragement to salesmen of artificial flowers, contemporary furniture, or selfservice elevators...
...Now what, one might well ask, can possibly be wrong with Rocky's Commission...
...Snow swirled down Fortyfourth Street, driving before it hats, newspapers, and theater-goers...
...Besides, Rockefeller has lined up some very talented people...
...The thief had fled to Brazil and then to Europe before returning to New York '%o face it voluntarily," the man in sharkskin said...
...When it comes down again we go about our business as usual...
...Hamilton is silly, a precocious and childlike hothead, born illegitimate and basically a fool...
...T)elicious fun," wrote one of the country's most prestigious critics of Burr...
...Keeps junior faculty off the streets_9 And even if Rockefeller is using it to run for President againmwell, there are a lot worse ways to run for that office (or haven't you been reading the Washington Post lately...
...But this is not the case...
...I ought to know," he added with a little smile...
...Waiters hovered over candle-lit tables loaded with silver chafing dishes...
...It was 6:00 P.M...
...K] IF THERE IS SUCH a thing as woman's intuition, Gore Vidal has it in abundance...
...We could have been made to see Burr as he must have been at the time of the narrative, a defeated, philosophically embittered aging man, realizing that he would go down in history not for his accomplishments--there were none rebut for his failures, his only defense being to patronize the people who really created our nation...
...The bartender guessed that the thief was pretty smart...
...And it's the business of a novel like Burr to encourage this attitude...
...This prospect was greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm or dismay, depending on whom one read...
...Anspach decided...
...After noting that Rockefeller had yet to apologize for his sorry role in the Attica incident, they warned academia not to allow itself to be bought off by the suddenly conservative Rockefeller...
...And this, I think, would titillate Vidal mightily...
...He squinted into his cigarette smoke...
...The lobby's chairs, sofas, and lamps might have been plucked from the living room of someone's one-eyed aunt...
...A pewter chandelier, depicting the majesty of eighteenth-century British sea power, dispenses quiet light...
...Why...
...Namu Address City State Zip School Student Faculty ALT 5/74 The Alternative May 1974 23 to remember that those standards still do operate...
...There is plenty of time for contemplation in between...
...We get most of this assessment of American history from Burr himself, as he tells it to a young and adoring law clerk...
...Helps unemployment, doesn't it...
...I belong to the company of deep thinkers who daily congregate and wait for the Algonquin elevator," the sage of Baltimore deadpanned...
...And I suppose that if we allow ourselves to experience it, it can be titillating indeed...
...n on _9 nu u| _9 uo ammm ooo@ _9 _9 wo @o _9 _9 _9 _9 m01aw au@ _9 wi@o _9 _9 _9 _9 @o _9 @am momm _9 _9 _9 _9 _9 _9 _9 oaao ml w THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW is published quarterly by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., a non-profit, non-political educational organization...
...but if Rockefeller wants to spend a lot of money hiring a lot of people to make a lot of studies, where's the harm...
...When he stays, he's a dawdler...
...what was left had already assumed the brownish hue of discarded chewing tobacco...
...pausing, in the wake of serious national "failure," to subject our "value systems" to "critical and searching reevaluation" before we 'treexamined and rearranged our priorities...
...Madison and Marshall are the only figures of the period who do at all well...
...Two dowagers sat in Victorian wing chairs and talked of horses and tax accountants...
...moving from there to "establish priorities...
...Burr was brave and cool on the battlefield, the only one with the vision to see that the whole revolution was childish, not power hungry like the rest...
...Anspach said)--would look interesting in the lobby of the Port clinging to their lashes, walked through Authority Bus Terminal...
...and this latest quest for the big prize may even prove successful...
...Burr, with his foppishly waspish view of the rest of humanity, his distaste for conventional morality and his almost desperate desire to show that morality to be fraudulent, his delight in meddling around mischievously with affairs of statemBurr bears a striking resemblance to Vidal himself...
...every chair in the lobby has survived a dozen fads in interior decorating...
...I read and eavesdropped that evening in an open English armchair, "Hepplewhite in feeling," as a friend later noted...
...Whether they exude that quality themselves or absorb it from the paneling has never been explained...
...If you've always secretly yearned to think of Jefferson as one of history's primary villains, you'll have to read the novel...
...It's comforting THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW A Journal of Scho]nrskip and Opinion 14 South Bryn Ma~r Avenue _9 Bryn Mawr, Pa...
...You have to be smart to steal $280 million, buddy," the other replied...
...Christian Century noted much the same factors as National Review, and also saw the Commission as an adjunct to a presidential bid, However, the editors of that worthy journal saw Rockefeller's recent activities as an expedient and deplorable change for the man who once fought so well and bravely against the twin evils of Goldwater and Nixon...
...The tempo was unexpectedly fast, a parody on the clock's stately presence...
...At the approach of the British army, Governor Jefferson fled to Monticello, leaving the state without administration...
...but after noting his always-sound position on defense, his support for Nixon on Vietnam, his stand during the Attica prison riots, and his recent crackdowns on welfare and drug abuse, they concluded that the Commission might help make the governor a serious candidate "for the first time...
...Rockefeller, after all, remains a figure of import in both national and Republican circles...
...He did want to be king of Mexico, but apparently that's not the same thing...
...Still, there are other standards, operating even today, measured against which Burr and its author would be considered unusually pale and unhealthy...
...Besides, it sounded like the kind of thing that leads to the White House...
...I worry about these lamps," the young man far to my right, in wire frame glasses and a white pullover sweater emblazoned with the letter "T" did himself no harm sitting here...
...This last was killed because some viewed the proposal as an indirect subsidy to a Rockefeller presidential bid...
...And by those standards, Burr is a robust novel...
...And this conclusion is not at all farfetched...
...Fur-swathed women in high leather boots, snow still hotel manager, Andrew A. Anspach, confessed to me the next day...
...And if Vidal had not had his own peculiar ax to grind, he might have created a truly memorable character...
...he decorous relationship with his wife Martha," we are told by Burr, who narrates a good deal of the plot, "was simply an alliance between properties, and typical of Washington's ambition, of his cold serpent nature...
...Posts that rise from floor to ceiling are also paneled, and on them are mounted lights shaded by curved, opaque glass...
...Despite this setback, however, Rockefeller's Commission gives every promise of leading a rich, full, famous, and eventually verbose life, as it sets to work outlining "critical choices" for us all...
...I was sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin not long ago, drinking beer and perusing the morning's T/mes...
...Fresh orchids grace the lobby and rose buds beam at guests over breakfast...
...The portrait of Washington is acidly etched in sharp bitchy tones, the relationship between the General and Hamilton coyly hinted at: '~rhe slow solemn general 22 The Alternative May 1974 waddled with dignity through the camp...
...We've been playing this particular game since the early sixties, starting with "an agenda for the nation...
...At Monticello he dawdled, thought only of how to transport his books to safety...
...There was simply no way of knowing when this novel was conceived that events --the disgrace of a vice president, the culpability of a whole gang of former officials of a national administration--would evoke an obligatory snicker when any prominent political figure of any period was mentioned...
...I was selected by the Senate to respond to the presidential address . . . some elevated nonsense (fear of the Indian tribes was that session's c r i s i s ) . . . " Had Burr been depicted as a distorter of reality merely to serve his own purposes, then this could have been a fine novel, for Vidal writes with unusual verve and competence, and he is superb at creating the sort of setting that dramatizes the mood of the period...
...Thus, their stories about the Commission continued in the chummy "Rocky" vein first adopted in the late fifties---but speculated cattily that the million-dollar gifts of Nelson and his brother might be viewed as violations of new federal laws setting $50,000 limits on family contributions to presidential efforts...
...A "crisis," in turn, is '`the decisive moment" or "an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs...
...The lobby suggests a fine men's club that was redone by a sensible woman...
...it's very fashionable just now to feel superior to those floundering little wretches we see scurrying around Washington...
...A black spot on our history...
...He is a flat character, and the whole thrust of the book is to depict Burr as hero and the others as incompetent fools, knaves, and villains...
...Civilized," Mr...
...It was ten minutes past seven...
...Thirsty, and hungry only for more voices, I repaired to the Blue Bar...
...A grandfather's clock struck the hour at a brisk allegro vivace...
...The Algonquin elevator is the muezzin of Forty-fourth street...
...The germ of the mood was there a few years back...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
