GORE, PODDY AND MIDGE

Charles Glass examines a ferocious debate about the 'American empire' and Israel

Positano, Italy IN THE village of Ravello, a few miles form here, lives the most famous American expatriate resident of the Amalfi coast, Gore Vidal. He is engaged in moral com- bat with New York's literary-political establishment, and the earth vibrates from Manhattan to Amalfi with the blows struck. Vidal is a novelist, essayist, screen- writer and playwright, best known for his works of historical fiction, like Burr and 1876, and better forgotten for oddities like Myra Breckenridge. His Opponents, whom he derides as the `Lunts of the right wing', are Midge Decter and her husband, Nor- man Podhoretz.

Mrs Podhoretz heads a group modestly called 'The Committee for the Free World', and Mr Podhoretz edits Commen- tary magazine and wrote the book Making It. It is Mr Podhoretz who is capable of writing, as though in Ronald Reagan's America he were committing an act of courage, about 'the America of today, the America in which, as we now see it, the blessings of freedom and prosperity are greater than in any country known to human history'. Vidal believes Podhoretz is 'a silly billy'. Their dispute is forcing more New York intellectuals to declare their loyalties than the House Un- American Activites Committee was ever able to.

The conflict began in December last year, when Vidal spoke to an 'author's evening' to raise money for the writers' group PEN International. 'On September 16, 1985,' Vidal began, 'when the Com- merce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.' Whether Vid- al's thesis was right or not, the speech was a challenging vision of the rise and fall of empire. He said money power shifted from Paris to London after the French Revolu- tion and that London was succeeded in turn by New York in 1914. He claimed Britain, lacking sufficient resources, wanted America to share in running the world: 'In any case, we took on the job. We would supervise and civilise the lesser breeds. We would make money.'

America emerged from the ashes of world war two as the most powerful and least damaged belligerent. In order to maintain a general prosperity (and enor- mous wealth for the few), they [America's ruling class] decided that we would become the world's policeman, perennial shield against the Mongol tribes. . . . Thirty-five years later, they are still at it, making money, while the nation itself declined to 11th place in world per capita income, to 46th in literacy and so on, until last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt.' The new world financial capital, Vidal told his audience, was Tokyo. 'Now the long- feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we — the white race — have become the yellow man's burden. Let us hope he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.' He said the most powerful combined force on earth would soon be 'Japan's advanced technology with China's resourceful landmass'.

Vidal proceeded to discuss America's acquisition of empire at the turn of the last century, quoting Mark Twain on the con- quest of the Philippines, 'We cannot main- tain an empire in the Orient and maintain a republic in America.' He said the great political fact of the beginning of 'our disagreeable century' was the disintegra- tion of China, just as its reconstitution would be of its end. Vidal added that writers played no role in his survey be- cause, with notable exceptions like Upton Sinclair, they did not criticise power. In- stead, they constructed the ideology of empire, cold war and the 35-year-old arms race, for which is was 'necessary to have a fearsome enemy. Not since the invention of the Wizard of Oz have American publi- cists created anything quite so demented as the idea that the Soviet Union was a monolithic, omnipotent empire with tenta- cles everywhere on earth, intent on our destruction, which will surely take our place unless we imitate it with our war machine and its secret services.'

Vidal concluded with a proposal. Be- cause of nuclear weaponry, 'we now know that war is worse than useless. Therefore, the alliance of the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere [the US and USSR] will double the strength of each and give us, working together, an opportunity to survive, economically, in a highly central- ised Asiatic world.'

Press accounts of the speech concen- trated on the fact that Vidal and Norman Mailer, who was also at the dinner and reportedly agreed with Vidal's thesis, had become friends again after a period of mutual hostility. In December, Norman Podhoretz wrote in his syndicated column that Vidal, Mailer and most other Amer- ican writers were opposed `to the kind of country they imagine America has become in the past hundred years: oppressive and repressive both at home and abroad'. His column ignored the content of Vidal's speech.

The affair appeared to have ended until the Nation, a leftish New York weekly with a circulation of about 80,000, reprinted Vidal's speech in its issue of 11 January this year. This led to a response from Midge Decter in an obscure publication called Contentions. Her 2,000-word piece gave a fair summary of Vidal's speech, but she concluded, 'Well, one thing is clear in all this muddle: Mr Vidal does not like his country.'

Many months later, Vidal sat on the balcony of his house on the steep cliffs above Amalfi and the Mediterranean, saying that Decter's accusation was the final straw. He had already, in 1981, debated with the Podhoretzes in print on the subject of homosexuality, following publication of Decter's homophobic arti- cle, The Boys on the Beach'. He said Decter's charge was the sixth time the Podhoretzes had accused him in public of disliking his country, saying that 'they are now deciding who's a good American and who isn't'. 'I thought, well, all right, I'm going to call your bluff. Your primary loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. It never has been. It's the badges for Amer- icanism that drove me up the wall.'

To get himself off the wall, and into the mud, Vidal responded in the 22 March issue of the Nation with an article entitled, 'The Empire Lovers Strike Back', This transformed a skirmish about the Amer- ican empire into a rhetorical war about American support for Israel, dual loyalties and accusations of Vidal's anti-semitism. 'Poor Midge,' Vidal wrote. 'Of course I like my country. After all, I'm its current biographer. But now that we're levelling with each other, I've got to tell you I don't much like your country, which is Israel.' Vidal referred to Podhoretz as 'Poddy', a nickname Poddy may have to endure for the rest of his life. He ridiculed the two Podhoretzes as 'that wonderful, wacky couple' and as stalwarts of the 'Israel fifth column'. He wrote that the real reason they disliked his proposal to end the cold war was because Israel, as an anti-Soviet outpost in the Arab world, would have no further claim on American money and arms. 'Over the years,' Vidal charged, 'Poddy has, like his employers, the Amer- ican Jewish Committee [publishers of Commentary], moved from those liberal positions traditionally adopted by Amer- ican Jews (and me) to the far right of American politics. The reason is simple. In order to get Treasury money for Israel (last year $3 billion), .pro-Israel lobbyists must see to it that America's "the Russians are coming" squads are in place. . .

Vidal recounted a conversation he and Podhoretz had had in 1960. Podhoretz said that the American Civil War, about which Vidal was then writing a play, was as irrelevant to him as the War (sic) of the Roses. 'I realised then,' Vidal wrote, 'that he was not planning to become an "assimi- lated American", to use the old-fashioned teminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda for Israel — a country they don't seem eager to live in.'

Turning to Decter, Vidal wrote, 'But then, like most of our Israeli fifth col- umnists, Midge isn't interested in what the goyim were up to before Ellis Island.'

Norman Podhoretz fired the next salvo in the form of a short, humourless column on 8 May filled with phrases like, 'a murderous poison', 'the most blatantly anti-semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II', `vile accusations', and 'the incredibly impudent statement that Jews born in the United States are only living here on sufferance'. Podhoretz's show of wounded pride was reminiscent of an outburst of the late, lamented mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley: 'They have cruci- fied me. They have villified me. They have even criticised me!' Podhoretz's was an angry piece, by an angry man: 'Vidal's every word is drenched in hatred of Jews, whom in the best traditions of anti-semitic thinking he portrays as all-powerful con- spirators manipulating "us" to further their own nefarious purposes.'

Podhoretz admitted he had asked many of his friends and acquaintances to de- nounce Vidal, but most had refrained. His call for Vidal to be excommunicated from America's secular priesthood was taken up almost immediately and enthusiastically by Irving Howe of Dissent and Martin Peretz of the New Republic. Howe called Vidal's anti-Podhoretz article 'a racist diatribe' and said Vidal was reviving the "yellow peril nativism" that has a long tradition in America'. 'At stake,' he told his readers, 'is whether people holding neo- conservative views about Israel are to be branded "fifth columnists" in a liberal magazine.' Peretz's New Republic conde- mned Vidal's 'brazen racist hate' and his 'reactionary nativism', adding 'his hatred is not just for the Jewish state but for Jews' and that Vidal was 'ready for the funny farm'.

The New Republic and Dissent quoted this passage from Vidal, with the italicised passage below deleted in both publica- tions: . . . for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don't band together, we are going to end up as farmers — or, worse, mere entertainment — for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.

It is possible one publication simply copied the passage from the other without reading the original, or it may be that the phrase 'with many well deserved enemies' lent the statement a meaning with which neither Dissent nor the New Republic wished to confuse their readers.

One of the few to speak up for Vidal, more or less, was Edwin M. Yoder in the Washington Post on 23 May, when he wrote that the Vidal–Podhoretz con- troversy was more than 'another parochial jihad among the New York literati'. 'Vidal more than once says or implies that as arch supporters of Israel, the Podhoretzes are ipso facto more interested in Israel than in this country. The charge is unfair and mischievous, but anti-semitic? Surely not.' Yoder then turned on Podhoretz: `By advertising his flip attitude to the Amer- ican past, Podhoretz asked for Vidal's mocking response.'

Divisions within the intellectual elite were growing: Tom Wicker of the New York Times and Roger Wilkins of the Institute for Policy Studies appeared to be with Vidal; Geoffrey Stokes of the Village Voice was with the Podhoretzes. More were to be counted, but Vidal was not seeking endorsement the way Podhoretz was. If anything, he discouraged it.

In his PEN speech which began the war of words, Vidal had criticised American writers who 'are paid by universities, and it is not wise to be thought critical of a garrison state which spends so much money on campuses'. The charge was not new, but it helped to explain the context in which the Great Gore-Poddy Debate was taking place. Harvard awarded an honor- ary doctorate a century and half ago to Lewis Cass, a scholar-politician who pro- vided the intellectual justification for the forced removal of American Indians from their homes in the east.

Fifty years later, academics whose seats of learning were endowed by railway mil- lionaires and robber barons had become social Darwinists, explaining a moral uni- verse in which the strong had a duty to crush the weak. Today, they talk of 'con- taining' tiny Nicaragua. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in one of his few poems,

And in the end the age was handed The sort of shit that it demanded.

Within this context, Israel has received special intellectual treatment. Noam Chomsky, branded a 'self-hating Jew' by Podhoretz for his criticism of Israeli poli- cies, wrote in his book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palesti- nians (Pluto Press, 1983), The truth of the matter is that Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in main- stream journalism and scholarship, consis- tent with its unique role as a beneficiary of other forms of American support. . . . Can one imagine that any other country could carry out terrorist bombings of US installa- tions 'or attack a US ship killing or wound- ing 100 men with complete immunity. • (Israeli intelligence agents detonated bombs in US Information Offices in Bagh- dad in 1951 (Lure of Zion, Al Saqi Books, 1986) and in Egypt in 1954 (Spymasters of Israel, Macmillan, 1980). Israeli warplanes bombed the unarmed USS Liberty in 1967 (Assault on the Liberty, Random House, 1979). Chomsky wrote before Israeli agents were convicted last year of spying on the US and before this year's accusa- tions that Israel attempted to steal Amer- ican aerial reconaissance technology.) The editor of the Nation, Victor Navas- ky, whom Podhoretz had also accused of being a self-hating Jew, wrote that 'when a Gentile criticises Israel or raises fun- damental questions about its connection to American Jewry he or she is often said to be anti-semitic; when a Jew does so he or she is said to be self-hating.' Two Amer- ican Jewish anti-Zionists told me that while they agreed with Vidal that the Podhoretzes were Israeli lobbyists, they found the tone of Vidal's second article anti-semitic. But, one of them was quick to add, the pundits who were so concerned about Vidal's alleged anti-semitism had ignored completely the anti-semitism of American Protestant fundamentalists, be- cause they support Israel, and the appoint- ment of the conservative William Rehn- quist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Rehnquist had signed a covenant excluding resale or rental of a house he bought in Vermont in 1974 to 'Hebrews'. When this became public knowledge dur- ing recent Senate hearings, neither the Podhoretzes nor their defenders accused Justice Rehnquist of anti-semitism.) Simi- larly, those who condemn Vidal raised not a sound of protest when John Vorster, who had been interned as a Nazi during the second world war, went as South African Prime Minister to lay a wreath at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. The Podhoretzes' detractors maintain they use anti-semitism as a stick to beat down opponents, even when the accusation is unfair, and avoid using it against allies, even when it is not.

In Ravello, Vidal affected surprise that the controversy had turned so deadly serious. He said his attack on Podhoretz and Decter `was meant to be a scoffing piece about this, to me, demented couple. When I think of Poddy and Midge, I start to chuckle. I'm without any malice about them. I just think they're silly. How they've carved out this funny little place for themselves, and they think it's so impor- tant, is just to me wildly funny.' He rejected the anti-semitism charge made against him by Podhoretz and Martin Peretz; and he said that Podhoretz had been 'desperate for me to write for him all through the Sixties, at a time when I was a virulent anti-semite. Why did he want me to write for Commentary?' (Vidal wrote an article for Commentary, characteristically entitled, `Literary Gangsters'.) Although he clearly enjoyed the fight, and the literary gossip that came with it, Vidal said he regretted the discussion about the future of the United States had become a debate about Israel. `I don't give a God damn what other countries do,' he said. 'If Israel wants to kill the first-born, that's their business. I would disapprove of it. My business is that $6 or $7 billion that could go for American agriculture or education are being wasted on propping up this highly militaristic country that feels free to strike at anybody, any time, any- where . . .

'The point where they could get me,' he said, adding an admonition, 'and give me credit for having given it to you, so you don't take credit for having thought of this all by yourself, is, what do I really think of the nation-state?. And what do I think about loyalty to nation-states? I think the nation-state is a menace.' Vidal summed up his feelings in words which sounded like those of an old Roman senator in the age of the Caesars, 'I hate the American empire, and I love the old republic.'

Vidal seems comfortable in Ravello, a beautiful village called 'Rebello' by its traditional rulers below in Amalfi in tribute to the village's many revolts. He can luxuriate in the warm weather, his vineyards and gardens, a majestic view and a tranquil atmosphere in which to write. I told him one writer in the Washington Times, who accused him of being a high- living Tory masquerading as a socialist, challenged him to live in the socialist republic of his choice. Where, I asked, would that be? Without a second's hesita- tion, he answered, 'It would be the United States, and I would go back and live there, permanently.' There seems little danger Vidal will soon abandon his house in Ravello, where he is writing what he hopes will be the final chapter of the Great Debate, to live in the American Socialist Republic.