The Heat of the Sun

substituting theory for fact, copiousness for judgement, and jargon for good English. His readers were few.
    When I checked the school history books, I was relieved to see that the Pinkerton affair rated a cryptic mention, if any: hardly a story for the eyes of youth. By now I thought of it as my
story, and was by no means keen for it to be sniffed at and snickered over by those who could never understand it as I did. The whole business seemed buried as deep as the Teapot Dome scandal (that
catastrophic blight on the reputation of President Harding), the Kellogg–Briand Pact or the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
    Then came Burl Blakey’s novel The Senator (New York: Viking, 1974). Of a piece with Mr Blakey’s other productions, this roman-à-clef of sex and corruption
amongst America’s ruling classes was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and New York Times number one bestseller. There is little point in castigating Mr Blakey. He is a force of
nature: one is only surprised that in his several careers as gambler, deep-sea fisherman, and lover of starlets and models, he should find time to produce his eight-hundred-page epics. The movie,
starring Hayden Granger, Rosalind Magenta, and a floppy-haired Curtis Kincaid, Jr (complete with purplish contact lenses) as the half-Japanese B. F. Pinkerton II, became the decade’s biggest
box office draw.
    Today, there can be no hope that the Pinkerton affair will be forgotten. Perhaps there never was. When a man in high office dies we are always a little alarmed, as if we had expected death to
tread lightly around those elevated above the common fray. When his death is violent and trailing skeins of scandal, our alarm becomes excitement and can hardly be held in check. Had Benjamin
Franklin Pinkerton been an obscure figure his fate would have been shocking enough, but that so bleak a destiny should envelop a man so eminent lifted it to proportions of classical tragedy. What
was the senator but the Great Man, brought low by his fatal flaw? A textbook case, out of A. C. Bradley!
    He could have been president. Three times he put himself forward for the Democratic nomination: in 1920, when he lost, by a whisker, to James M. Cox; in 1928, when he lost (to the party’s
later regret) to Alfred E. Smith; in 1932, when he lost, decisively this time, to Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were those who said that the senator never fulfilled his potential, and yet, while
failing to attain the highest office, still he became a significant architect of national affairs. In the Wilson years it was Senator Pinkerton who laid the foundations for American policy in the
Philippines; during the Republican hegemony of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, he remained a prominent figure; but it was under Roosevelt that he came into his own, playing a key role in foreign
policy as America moved towards the Second World War. Many remember Senator Pinkerton advocating internment of Japanese Americans. The part he played in the Manhattan Project has been documented
extensively. By the end he was one of President Truman’s closest advisers, and in the view of many it was the senator, more than any other man, who swayed Truman towards dropping atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
    The Pinkerton affair could be considered under many angles. The Manville connection was a story in itself. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, son of an hotelier from Atlantic City, hardly seemed cut
out for his exalted station. That he owed it to a fortunate marriage was never in doubt. The world might never have heard of B. F. Pinkerton had it not been for his father-in-law, the long-serving
Senator Cassius Cornelius Manville (Democrat, New York), who saw in the handsome naval officer a substitute for the son he had lost in the Cuban campaign of 1898. The Manvilles, that great East
Coast political family, hardly knew what a viper they took to their breasts in the young lieutenant from the USS Abraham Lincoln . Later, many would ask what sort of woman Kate Pinkerton
(née Manville) must have been: a woman not only apprised from the first of her husband’s dubious past, but one who connived for so long to conceal it, even taking the child of his
previous union as her own. Later, she must have wondered if the boy’s Japanese mother achieved in death the victory she had been denied in life.
    But I fear I slip into the tones of Mrs Vetch.
    Naturally, much coverage was devoted to the provenance and peculiar history of