Making McKinley Sexy

...Oscar Handlin, a Harvard historian, wrote in Muth in History that Vidal's Burr was simply a "poisonous portrayal of the early Republic in a fantastic tale of corruption, greed and sex" Other historians, such as Lawrence Goodwyn of Duke, call Vidal "our best chronicler of power...

...Really taking delight in Empire, or any historical novel, means having a certain faith in the author...

...But if you're like me, you'll probably be most enlightened by Vidal's portrayal of William McKinley...

...But Vidal usually stops them just before they derail history...

...His ambitions are relentless...

...He should skip the book tours, stop writing for popular magazines, and refuse interviews...

...Up to that point I had carefully avoided reading his outrageous Nation article accusing Norman Podhoretz of retaining "first loyalty" to Israel instead of being an "assimilated American" That may be Vidal's idea of irony— his editor Victor Navasky says it was—but he is so reckless and so offensive so much of the time that you cannot easily discern wit from idiocy...

...He's like some drunk who shows up mysteriously at your party, scarfs your cheese, drinks your booze, and keeps picking fights until you send him off in a cab...

...Few did...

...Based on what he does know, he devises a plausible interpretation...

...Everything...

...flexed its industrial and military muscles from Cuba to the Philippines...

...In an essay for Newsweek on the Iran-contra scandal, Vidal not only excoriates Oliver North, but the entire Marine Corps...

...and the Soviet Union to unite economically as white people to fight what he's called the "grimly determined asiatics ." I put the article down...

...Empire...

...In fact, it's Vidal-the-Scholar...

...Many outrageous lines in Empire turn out to be nearly exact quotes from the letters, diaries, and news accounts of the times...

...Elizabeths hospital for the mentally ill...

...And because of my frequent viewings of the musical "1776," I became convinced that John Adams tricked Thomas Jefferson into writing the Declaration of Independence by making sure the Virginian had lots of sex...

...So it was on the charge of regicide that Hearst was to be brought down at last...

...Despite its occasional misses, I can't help but think that Empire would be as good a read in the classroom as it is on the beach...

...Roosevelt is rendered a near-hysterical hypocrite, a "screeching owl," who rants about reform but does little...

...The brave, determined Theodore Roosevelt of David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback or the progressive of John Morton Blum's The Republican Roosevelt is ignored...

...Yet Vidal's novels are so well executed that you forget he's the same loon you just saw on "Dick Cavett ." The great irony of Vidal's writing is that his fiction is more truthful than his non-fiction...

...Schools do teach historical fiction, often assigning Shakespeare's Henry IV, for example...

...In Empire, Secretary of State John Hay, with some satisfaction, reports to Roosevelt that his staff has discovered Perdicaris is not an American citizen, so there is no need to send in the troops...

...Roosevelt threatened Morocco with war unless they released the American...

...I had no idea why he was so popular or how he behaved as president...

...Remarkably, he even deals sensitively with anti-semitism, having one sympathetic character support Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish officer convicted of treason by the French government in 1894...

...Before the New York media, Root blames Hearst's Yellow Journalism for McKinley's death, repeating the infamous quatrain penned by Ambrose Bierce, a Hearst-employed journalist, before McKinley's assassination...

...His McKinley is a cross between Buddha and Boss Tweed—reserved and religious, but also a political animal...

...In 1904, a Moroccan bandit named Raisuli abducted Ion H. Perdicaris, the son of a South Carolinian lady and a Greek...

...For him, the real battle is not to extend democracy across the globe, but to use the war to beat Joseph Pulitzer's New York World...

...I heard myself saying, aloud: Number four, in the light of numbers one through three, as I have just demonstrated, Your Honor—God, that is—we have no choice but to take all the islands and govern the people to the best of our ability, to educate and civilize them and to Christianize them—and in my sudden certitude, I knew that God was speaking to and through me, and that we would all of us do our best by them, or our fellow men for whom Christ also died...

...Most high schools teach history as an agreed-upon set of facts...

...Moreover, after many viewings of "Citizen Kane" I was certain William Randolph Hearst's childhood sled led to the sinking of the Maine...

...He gobbles newspapers around the country in part to build a political base...

...that would leave the impression that substantial numbers of Americans protested our overseas conquests...

...It's fine to have a particular historical interpretation...

...While pondering the annexation of the Philippines he visits Omaha, Nebraska, stronghold of his Democratic opponent William Jennings Bryan: " 'I'll beard him in his own town, and I'll persuade the folks to...

...Steven Waldman is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...It's a little like the doctors in Woody Allen's "Sleeper" who attempted to clone an entire body from a single nose...

...He limits his work to the powerful, not dealing with how most citizens behaved or why...

...I must confess that the reason I love Gore Vidal's novels is that I share his appetite for historical morsels like these that appear in his latest, Empire.* His books are peppered with anecdotes that are as fun as they are revealing...

...Since both Blaise and Caroline Sanford are journalists, they have an excuse to be recording historical events and asking questions...

...Vidal shows how disinformation and exaggerations can change history every bit as effectively as fact...

...He is no Dickens...

...If it seems farfetched that elections might be steered by lies, remember the "Canuck Letter" that did in Edmund Muskie's 1972 presidential campaign...

...You lose the great strength of historical novels: the feeling that You Are There...

...Hearst is elected to Congress, makes a strong run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and almost wins the governorship of New York...

...As they become increasingly important in the lives of the real people, it starts to feel like one of those science fiction movies in which timetravelling adventurers alter the course of history by stepping in front of assassins' bullets...

...He went on to call on the U.S...

...it doesn't make his Cantos any less powerful...

...Although Empire takes place at the turn of the century, a traumatic period of mass immigration and industrialization, those forces are rarely mentioned...

...Historical novelists must explain the forces of history without disrupting the narrative flow, but that's difficult to pull off...

...he cuts deals with Tammany Hall in New York, after having railed against it for years...

...Roosevelt suddenly began to click his teeth rapidly, alarmingly...

...he buys letters hinting that Standard Oil influenced Hearst's enemy Teddy Roosevelt...

...In other genres, the author's credibility is of secondary importance...

...Add to this Vidal's notorious histrionics, like his squabbling with Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, and you're pretty fed up...

...The work becomes distracting, leaving one wondering what's real and what isn't...

...Roosevelt, panicking about the upcoming Republican convention, is apoplectic: "This ruins everything...

...Cloning a nose Much of Empire is devoted to the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, a time when the U.S...

...Much is made of the Perclicaris incident, so memorably portrayed in "The Wind and the Lion," starring Sean Connery, Brian Keith, and Candice Bergen...

...If the author doesn't do that, the thrill is gone...

...That's why Gore Vidal ought to shut up...

...Even the exercise of distinguishing fact from interpretation could be fruitful, forcing students not just to determine whether Roosevelt took the nomination on the first ballot but also whether he should be considered a progressive or a scoundrel...

...Instead of skipping past tidbits like these, Vidal underlines them, reiterating a great truth about history: it unfolds not according to the careful reasoning of statesmen but through the deeds of teeth-clicking egotists like Roosevelt and religiously political (or politically religious) men like McKinley...

...by Steven Waldman Say, did you know that President McKinley would casually drop a silk handkerchief over his wife's head during dinner parties when she had an epileptic seizure...

...Or that Theodore Roosevelt became vice president largely because the New York Republican boss wanted the pesky governor out of his state...

...Most of the exclamation points in the book are used up in Roosevelt diatribes...

...That passage sounds like Vidal-the-Crank ascribing the fate of nations to insomniac ramblings...

...McKinley's actual words were very similar...

...Through Vidal, students could confront different views of the world...

...But the Yellow Journalism that propels him ultimately topples him...

...Vidal's Henry Adams throws tantrums about the "refuse of the Mediterranean, the detritus of Mitteleuropa, and the Jews, the Jews . ." Sounds like Vidal...

...For years, I assumed Abraham Lincoln was a naive pacifist because of one "Star Trek" episode in which the former president, allied with a great Vulcan hero against Genghis Kahn and some furry-faced alien, innocently blundered into the villains' trap...

...Good reason, it is speeding here To stretch McKinley on his bier...

...Blaise marveled at the exactness with which Roosevelt, using Root for knife, struck the lethal blow...

...Roosevelt's strategy for gaining the vice presidential nomination becomes clear because Blaise Sanford, trying to cover the 1904 convention, asks a veteran political reporter to explain what's going on...

...Just about all I could remember of him was that he was assassinated by some anarchist (or was it a disappointed office seeker...

...with a difficult-to-pronounce last name...

...Students could join the fray...

...After a Kentucky governor had been killed, Bierce had written: The bullet that pierced Goebel's breast Cannot be found in all the west...

...historians do it all the time...

...Random House, $22.50...

...Some of it is familiar turf: William Randolph Hearst's Yellow Journalism, Teddy Roosevelt's international ambitions...

...you hope the author will sort out the two and that the history will be largely accurate...

...And Blaise is a top aide to Hearst throughout most of the book...

...Through the lens of two fictional characters, Caroline Sanford, a newspaper publisher, and her brother Blaise, who works for William Randolph Hearst, we watch the titans of the period struggle with themselves and the issues confronting an Empire...

...Vidal's history is largely accurate, but it's not complete...

...But Vidal does what historical novelists have done since Herodotus, "the father of history...

...It would be fun and educational—as long as you keep the kids out of his Nation articles...

...But they are taught as literature, not history...

...and the powerful few were obliged to respond to his inventions...

...Throughout Empire Hearst struggles to be a protagonist, not just a storyteller...

...But when you pick up a historical novel you know it's a mix of fact and fiction...

...As for the danger of poisoning innocent minds with falsehoods, the very process of separating fact from fiction could be part of the assignment, an exercise a good deal more stimulating than memorizing dates...

...Hearst, for instance, tends not to listen to Blaise...

...They can do themselves only harm ." Hearst as assassin Even in a book about empire, Vidal devotes much attention to the role of history and storytelling in our lives...

...Or that President McKinley prevented William Jennings Bryan from campaigning in 1898 by refusing to grant him a discharge from the Army...

...The screeching owl As Vidal explores shabby journalism, he also uses it as an elegant literary device...

...Sadly, most Americans agreed with Roosevelt, who quips here, "We can do them only good...

...But Vidal also fails to show the qualities that, for better or worse, got Roosevelt very far, very fast...

...Vidal's gift is that he breathes life into this non-descript, black-andwhitephoto of a president...

...This goes for Hearst, too...

...He explains that, to help Roosevelt, the New York delegation voted against him so he wouldn't be seen as a pawn of the state bosses...

...I had counted on a powerful telegram to wake up the convention, the country, the world, to the fact that no American citizen anywhere on earth can be harmed without a bloody reprisal and now some fool clerk in your office comes up with this . . . this nonsense...

...Peter Mooney provided research assistance for this article...

...Ultimately Blaise and Caroline have the same effect Walter Cronkite did when he interviewed some warrior in the middle of a Napoleonic battle during the "You Are There" shows: they are recognized by the greats of history but don't affect their actions...

...Vidal's treatment of Teddy Roosevelt is less skilled...

...Vidal takes facts and spins them into a fully formed body and personality...

...Caroline, for example, contemplates publishing the letters in her newspaper accusing many politicians, including Roosevelt, of being in the pockets of Standard Oil...

...This is well understood by Vidal's Hearst, who is obsessed with changing history, not just publishing it...

...I think God answered me the other night," he said...

...Vidal's novels are certainly more interesting than the history textbooks I read in high school, and they do a better job of unraveling history as well...

...What Hearst arbitrarily decided was news was news...

...Vidal, of course, didn't know everything McKinley thought or said...

...Occasionally, Blaise and Caroline come perilously close to tripping over the historical furniture...

...Vidal, though, is not so blinded by cynicism as to provide a large cast of anti-imperialist characters...

...Vidal is the Hugh Sidey of novelists—chronicling the leaders, the presidents, the power brokers, and the wealthy...

...There is historical evidence for most of those contentions, but that's just one side of Roosevelt...

...Shortly before I began Empire, I made the mistake of picking up a Washington Post profile of Vidal in which he explained how the world is run by a cabal of bankers and publishers...

...So what if the poet Ezra Pound spent the last years of his life in Washington's St...

...He opposes imperialism until he senses its popularity...

...The president paused...

...Fearing Hearst, Roosevelt dispatches Elihu Root, his secretary of war, to New York shortly before the gubernatorial election...

...That's important, especially for couch potatoes like me who have spent more time with TV Guide than with Richard Hofstadtar...

...We fact-checked several points in the book, including those opening anecdotes, and found that Vidal hadn't made anything up...

...After explaining to God the various policy options: God answered me...

...he was like a machine, thought Blaise, wondering how on earth he could describe, in mere words, so odd a creature...

...Under Roosevelt's orders, Hay sends off a telegram: "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead" The Republican convention is suitably awakened...

...To welcome the annexation of the Philippines?' " 'I'll see what I find there first!' " In the end, of course, he takes the Philippines—not with congressional authorization, but, with the approval of a higher authority...