Free The Golden Age by Gore Vidal

again? I often coin memorable phrases. Actually, we got quite a lot out of that war. We got Prohibition and Al Capone and Brother Wilson’s war on the Bill of Rights, and then—the main feature—the Depression! Pretty good I’d say for a few months over in France during the off-season. You’re giving the isolationists a break, I hope?”
    “I have to. For a movie like this to work it can’t be one-sided. Can’t
look
to be one-sided.”
    “I love fair play!”
Cuneo did a surprisingly accurate imitation of the President’s voice at its most richly ecclesiastical.
    Tim laughed in spite of himself. “Will he run this November?”
    “Well, if all goes as planned, yes, he’ll run for a third term and he’ll win.”
    “All
what
has been planned?”
    “First, we’ll have to take a good look at Hitler’s astrological chart for 1940. Our astrologist is busy working on it even as you and I do the Mayflower special breakfast tour of the world’s horizon. After all, Hitler can still be killed. We’ve even got a man standing by to do the deed. No Hitler no war, or maybe no war. And no war means Franklin will go home to Hyde Park, to his stamp collection, along with Judge Sam Rosenman, who will then write his memoirs for him, with some help from Harry Hopkins if he lives that long.”
    “But suppose Hitler survives?”
    “He’ll probably conquer most of Europe. I can’t think why he wants to. Imagine governing France! No one’s been able to do that since Napoleon, and he only did it by conquering Europe, for all of five minutes. Anyway, if England’s attacked, Franklin will do what no president’s ever done. He’ll run for a third term so as to save the world for freedom and democracy, not to mention for this and for that.” Cuneo was, Tim thought, a bit too blithe in the face of so much catastrophic history.
    “So he’s already planning to run?”
    “If there’s war, yes. It’s all in a speech I wrote that was delivered July twenty-fifth, 1938, at Traverse City, Michigan, by Governor Frank Murphy. ‘Without Roosevelt in 1940,’ he trumpeted my notes, ‘we will be unprepared when Hitler invades—as he means to—the Western Hemisphere.’ Oh, it was a great speech. Played well in the press. Of course, poor Frank Murphy lost the election, but you can’t have everything, can you?”
    Tim had already written down the date and place and the name. Currently, Frank Murphy was a Roosevelt appointee to the Supreme Court. Was Cuneo lying? Or, more to the point, when exactly did he lie and when did he tell the truth?
    “You should talk to Jim Farley. By the way, I’m legal counselor to the Democratic Party. Farley’s sort of my boss, and he’s running hard for the nomination. Roosevelt’s convinced him he won’t run. Franklin does like to raise people’s hopes. Keep everybody off-guard. Farley, of course, would be hopeless as president.”
    Tim knew, as everyone did, that the postmaster general and patronage dispenser would be a particularly hopeless candidate because he was an Irish Catholic from the hated city of New York and nothing had changed in the nation since Al Smith, another New York Catholic, had gone down to a dismal defeat in 1928, thus propelling FDR into the governorship of New York, and subsequent glory. Cuneo mentioned one or two Democratic rivals Tim might want to talk to. Then he signed the check for their breakfast.
    “Not long ago, Walter Winchell came to town and he wanted to meet Drew Pearson. Two historic figures, you know. After all, theircombined newspaper circulation reaches just about everyone on earth, or so the two boys like to think. Anyway, as their mutual legal adviser, I invited them here one morning, to my regular table. This table. Drew was nervous. Walter was full of jokes. Then I tactfully crept away. Well, the next day when I came in for breakfast, George here …” Cuneo gave the smiling waiter the signed bill. “… says, ‘Mr. Cuneo, you never saw such a