2
ALTHOUGH WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST had been requested to enter the White House from the south side, where private visitors came and went, the great man ordered his chauffeur to drive up the main driveway to the north portico, to the general consternation of the police. Then, slowly, like some huge bear of the sort that the President liked to shoot in quantity while roaring about the necessity of the preservation of wildlife, Hearst entered the main hall of the house which he would never, short of an armed revolution, occupy. Apprehensively, the chief usher received him.
“Tell the President that I am here.” Hearst did not bother to identify himself. He took off his coat, and let it fall, quite aware that someone would catch it before it touched the floor; and an usher did.
“Come this way, Mr. Hearst.” The chief usher led Hearst to the west wing. When told to wait in the secretary’s office, Hearst opened the door to the empty Cabinet room, and took his place at the head of the table. The secretary’s shock was silent; but profound.
Hearst sat back in the chair of state, and shut his eyes, like a man exhausted in a noble cause. He was home. But not for long. As usual, noise preceded the Chief Magistrate. “Delighted you’re here! Bully!” The President was now at the door to the Cabinet room. Hearst opened his eyes, and gravely nodded his head in greeting. For a moment, Roosevelt appeared uncertain what next to do. Then he shut the door behind him. There would be no witnesses to what might follow.
Slowly, majestically, Hearst got to his feet. As the two men shook hands, Hearst deliberately pulled Roosevelt toward him so that the President was obliged to stare straight up into the air at the taller man. “You wanted to see me?” Hearst inquired, as if bestowing a huge favor on a junior editor.
“Indeed. Indeed. We have so much to talk about.” Although Hearst stood between the President and the presidential chair, the tubby but sturdy Roosevelt simply charged the chair, knocking Hearst to one side in the process. Most royally, Roosevelt seated himself; and said, with smooth condescension, “Sit there. On my right. Mr. Root’s chair.”
Hearst’s smile was thinner than usual. “I’d fear some terrible contagion if I were to sit in the chair of so notorious a liar.”
Roosevelt’s face was now dark red; and the smile a snarl. “I’ve never known Mr. Root to lie.”
“Then you’ve had a lot less experience with lawyers than I’d suspected.” Hearst pulled an armchair from its place at center table, putting a considerable distance between himself and the President.
“Root spoke for me in Utica.” Roosevelt was flat.
“Well, I didn’t think he was speaking on oath to God. Of course, he spoke for you when he accused me of McKinley’s murder.”
The conversation was, plainly, not going where Roosevelt had intended. “Your press incited-incites-violence and class hatred. Do you deny that?”
“I don’t deny or affirm anything. Do you understand that? I’m here at your request, Roosevelt. Personally, I have no wish to see you at all, anywhere, ever-unless, of course, we share the same quarters in hell. So I must warn you, no one says ‘Do you deny’ to me, in my country.”
“Your country, is it?” Roosevelt’s falsetto had deepened to a mellifluous alto. “When did you buy it?”
“In 1898, when I made war with Spain, and won it. All my doing, that was, and none of yours. Ever since then, the country’s gone pretty much the way I’ve wanted it to go, and you’ve gone right along, too, because you had to.”
“You exaggerate your importance, Mr. Hearst.”
“You understand nothing, Mr. Roosevelt.”
“I understand this much. You, the owner-no, no, the father of the country, couldn’t get the Democrats to nominate you for president even in a year when there was no chance of their winning. How do you explain that?”
Hearst’s pale close-set eyes were now directed straight at Roosevelt; the effect was cyclopean, intimidating. “First, I’d say it makes no difference at all who sits in that chair of yours. The country is run by the trusts, as you like to remind us. They’ve bought everything and everyone, including you. They can’t buy me. I’m rich. So I’m free to do as I please, and you’re not. In general, I go along with them, simply to keep the people docile, for now. I do that through the press. Now you’re just an office-holder. Soon you’ll move out of here, and that’s the end of you. But I go on and on, describing the world we live in, which then becomes what I say it is. Long after no one knows the difference between you and Chester A. Arthur, I’ll still be here.” Hearst’s smile was frosty. “But if they do remember who you are, it’ll be because I’ve decided to remind them, by telling them, maybe, how I made you up in the first place, in Cuba.”
“You have raised, Mr. Hearst, the Fourth Estate to a level quite unheard of in any time…”
“I know I have. And for once you’ve got it right. I have placed the press above everything else, except maybe money, and even when it comes to money, I can usually make the market rise or fall. When I made-invented, I should say-the war with Spain, all of it fiction to begin with, I saw to it that the war would be a real one at the end, and it was. For better or worse, we took over a real empire from the Caribbean to the shores of China. Now, in the process, a lot of small fry like you and Dewey benefited. I’m afraid I couldn’t control the thing once I set it in motion. No one could. I was also stuck with the fact that once you start a war you have to have heroes. So you-of all people-came bustling along, and I told the editors, ‘All right. Build him up.’ So that’s how a second-rate New York politician, wandering around Kettle Hill, blind as a bat and just about as effective, got turned into a war hero. But you sure knew how to cash in. I’ll hand you that. Of all my inventions you certainly leapt off the page of the Journal, and into the White House. Not like poor dumb Dewey, who just stayed there in cold print until he ended up wrapped around the fish at Fulton’s Market.”
Hearst sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. Eyes on the ceiling fan. “When I saw what my invention could do, I decided to get elected, too. I wanted to show how I could take on the people who own the country that I-yes, that I helped invent-and win. Well, I was obliged to pay the inventor’s price. I was-I am-resented and feared by the rich, who love you. I could never get money out of Standard Oil the way you could. So in the long-no, short-run it’s who pays the most who wins these silly elections. But you and your sort won’t hold on forever. The future’s with the common man, and there are a whole lot more of him than there are of you…”
“Or you.” Roosevelt stared at the painting of Lincoln on the opposite wall, the melancholy face looking at something outside the frame. “Well, Mr. Hearst, I was aware of your pretensions as a publisher, but I never realized that you are the sole inventor of us all.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t put it so grandly.” Hearst was mild. “I just make up this country pretty much as it happens to be at the moment. That’s hardly major work, though you should thank me, since you’re the principal beneficiary of what I’ve been doing.”
Roosevelt arranged several statute books on the table. “What do you know about me and Mr. Archbold?“
“Standard Oil helped finance your last campaign. Everyone knows that.”
“Have you any proof that I asked for the money?”
“The asking was done by Hanna, Quay, Penrose. You only hint.”
“Mr. Archbold is an old friend of mine.” Roosevelt started to say more; but then did not.
Hearst’s voice was dreamy. “I am going to drive many men from public life. I am also going to expose you as the hypocrite you are.”