Free Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal

peace with a world where Communism was said to be, thanks to the media’s shrill warnings, triumphantly on the march everywhere. Although Eisenhower, the general, did not believe that the Soviets were a threat to the United States, he did see them as posing a danger to that commercial free world that we held so dear and so, secretly, he instructed the CIA to overthrow the freely elected Iranian government of Mossadegh who had wanted to tax “our” British oil supply; then the CIA was ordered to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala because United Fruit did not want to pay any tax at all on “our” bananas that they harvested and sold elsewhere. I’d written a novel about this,
Dark Green, Bright Red
, but in the general blackout of my work it vanished until Castro appeared on the scene and the book was hailed as “prophetic.” During the campaign for Congress I reluctantly gave an interview to
The New York Times
, knowing I was being set up because the
Times
did not cover mid-Hudson elections. The interviewer could not stop giggling as he kept repeating, “I know nothing about politics.” With the help of Mrs. Roosevelt I had come up with an alternative to military conscription: voluntary service at home or abroad in such places where help was needed. I got such a good response from the district that I passed the proposition on to Jack who adopted it. Once president, it became the Peace Corps headed by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver. The
Times
interview ignored all real issues except for the one that was supposed to be death to a candidate: recognition at the United Nations of Red China. I found that even the conservative electorate of the mid-Hudson valley were puzzled that we had no relations with the world’s most populous country. But Henry Luce, Lord of
Time
,
Life
, and
Fortune
magazines, believed that the great mission of the United States was the Christianization of China. This meant that anyone who favored recognition of their vile regime was promptly smeared as pro-Communist.
    In the end, I carried the cities of Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Beacon, Hudson, and Catskill but the McKinley rural vote determined the election. I did get more votes for Congress than Jack got for president, which was satisfying—to me. Jack liked to say that the two humiliations of 1960 were my getting 20,000 votes more than he in upstate New York and Senator Claiborne Pell getting a million more than he in Rhode Island.
    Later, he congratulated me on my luck: “Hell, you would have hated the House. I did. It’s a can of worms.” Joe Hawkins was now eager for me to enter the Senate race against Jack Javits, a Democrat at heart, who wisely ran as a Republican. But he was unbeatable that year. If I’d wanted a serious career in politics I would have run again in 1964 and joined the other worms in the can. But
Julian
had been followed by
Washington, D.C.
and then by
Myra Breckinridge
and I was, as they say, back. By 1982 I had sold the house on the Hudson and got interested in California politics.

THIRTEEN

    In the twenty-two years since the race for Congress the American political landscape had entirely changed. Issues, never a strong suit in our politics, were seldom alluded to. Only money—who had raised how much and from whom—interested the media, and the politicians. Senator Cranston explained the facts of the new politics to me. “Say you’re elected to a six-year term as senator. Say you would like to be elected to a second term. Unless you sell out to one of the great lobbies, you will be obliged to raise ten thousand dollars each week for every week of your first term. That’s 312 weeks.” This explains why so many senators are now funded by corporate America. Lately, I gather, the Internet has made fund-raising somewhat easier and less corrupt but it is a great burden for anyone who would like to be useful to be obliged to ring up strangers and ask them for money to run for office. It was not