The menopause of empire.

• Author: Vidal, Gore
• Position: Postwar American foreign policy

Before we get down to the really serious stuff about Monica and Kathleen, I plan just a little foreplay here about the origins of the American empire and the meaning of the Cold War, how it started, who started it, who benefited. The twentieth century and the second Christian millennium are heading hand in hand for the exit. Personally, I thought they'd never go without taking us with them.

We all know that centuries and millennia are just arbitrary markings--a bit like the bookkeeping at Paramount Pictures. But symbolically, they mean a lot. This goes particularly for the one indisposable--or does the President say indispensable?--nation on Earth, and the last self-styled global empire, loaded down with nukes, bases, and debts.

I have now lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted in the Army of the United States at seventeen, went to the Pacific, did nothing useful--I was just there, as Richard M. Nixon says, when the bombs were falling. Actually, the bombs were not really falling on either one of us. I was writing a novel, and he was making a fortune playing poker.

Now, suddenly, it's 1998. Last year, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Also, more ominously, last July 26 was the fiftieth anniversary of the National Security Act that, without any national debate or the people's consent, replaced the old American republic with a national security state very much in the global empire business. Let us get into the time machine.

It is the ides of August 1945. Germany and Japan have surrendered, and some thirteen million Americans are headed home. Home turned out to be a sort of fairground where fireworks go off, and the band plays "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," and an endlessly enticing fun house flings open its doors, and we file through. We enjoy halls and mirrors where everyone is comically distorted, ride through all the various tunnels of love, and take scary tours of horror chambers, where skeletons and cobwebs and bats push past us. And suitably chilled and thrilled, we're ready for the exit and everyday life.

But, to the consternation of some and the apparent indifference of the rest, we were never really allowed to leave the fun house. It has become a permanent part of our world, as were those goblins sitting under the apple tree.

Officially, the United States was at peace. Much of Europe and most of Japan were in ruins, often literally, certainly economically. We alone had all our cities and a sort of booming economy--sort of, because it depended on war production and there was, as far as anyone could tell, no war in the offing. Briefly, the arts flourished. It looked like it was going to be a golden age. The Glass Menagerie was staged, Copland's Appalachian Spring was played, a film called The Lost Weekend--not a bad title for what we'd gone through--won an Academy Award. And the as-yet-unexiled Richard Wright published the much-admired work Black Boy, while Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was banned for obscenity in parts of the country, though it would be allowed out today in Washington.

Quaintly, each city had at least three or four daily newspapers, while New York, as befitted the world's capital, had seventeen newspapers. But a novelty, television, had begun to appear in household after household, its cold, gray, distorting eye relentlessly projecting a fun house view of the world.

Those who followed the ugly new minted word "media" began to note that often while watching television we kept fading in and out of the chamber of horrors. Our ally in the recent war, Uncle Joe Stalin, as the Accidental President Harry S. Truman called him, was growing horns and fangs that dripped blood. On Earth we were the only great unruined power with atomic weapons, and we were somehow at terrible risk.

Why? How?

The trouble appeared to be over Germany, which on February 11, 1945, had been split at the Yalta Summit meeting into four zones--American, Soviet, British, and French. As the Russians had done the most fighting and suffered the greatest losses, it was agreed that they should have an early crack at reparations from Germany to the extent of $20 billion.

At a later meeting at Potsdam, the new President Truman, with Stalin and Churchill, reconfirmed Yalta and opted for the unification of Germany under the four victorious powers. But something had happened between the euphoria of Yalta and the edginess of Potsdam.

As the meeting progressed, the atom bomb was tried out successfully in a New Mexico desert. We were now able to incinerate Japan, or the Soviets for that matter, and we no longer needed Russia's help to defeat Japan. We started to renege on our...