Robert Ludlum's Randolph Gates

In the past I have consistently described Robert Ludlum as a centrist politically and I stand by that. Still, reading his intensely charged '70s-era novels like The Matlock Paper, and Trevayne, and The Chancellor Manuscript I got the sense that as he grappled with the sturm und drang of America in the years after Watergate and Vietnam he felt his centrism being tested to the point that he seemed to be wondering if the radicals centrists conventionally dismiss weren't right after all about "the System"--and that his books were the more interesting for it. Thrillers they were first and foremost, but, for all the melodramatics of incident and prose, they were thrillers that ultimately came from an engagement serious enough, with matters serious enough, that orthodoxy's easy answers simply would not do.

It seemed to me that Ludlum's books after those years never again displayed that edge. Still, as Ludlum's introduction to the 1988 edition of Trevayne made clear, his outlook hadn't changed, while one of the more pleasant surprises I got rereading the Jason Bourne sequels was the way that something of that edge did at times crop up in these relatively conventional action-adventures, at times in ways they had not before. After all, even in the '70s Ludlum displayed a great deal of respect for credentials and position as indicative of the Establishment's people being "the best and brightest"--by and large, "brilliant" (even when they proved to be vile villains). But with the character of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum we see a . . . different view.

Those who know of him conventionally think of law professor and attorney Gates as "brilliant" in the same manner, but this is less a matter of substance than style. As his own former law professor, once respected but reduced by circumstance to acting the part of his henchman, remarked, Gates was "not really one of the brightest, just someone who uses language to make himself appear bright," and is helped in this by his physical advantages and carefully cultivated manner (great height, the theatrical training the wealthy wife he strategically married as a younger man when he was a nobody of few prospects but great ambition purchased for him as an aid to his oratory, and the way that "correct clothes" and age have endowed him with the appearance of "an eminence grise of some royal court where kings . . . deferred to his wisdom")--and of course, by the fact that it is useful for certain powerful interests to have him thought bright and brilliant. The legal arguments of the pseudo-bright, "unprofound fellow," however "unoriginal" and "medieval" in his old professor's knowing eyes, have been of service to the powerful--the man first coming to the attention of the financial community as a fighter against antitrust law in what we today would think of as the beginnings of the great neoliberal backlash when, as Ludlum put it, "the crust of the benevolent Great Society began to crack," providing "respectability" to the dreams of the "financial manipulators" of "merger and consolidation . . . buy out, take over and sell off" as he more broadly helped them fight for a nation in which "privacy is obsolete, free thought suspended by censorship, the rich get richer, and for the poorest . . . the beginnings of potential life . . . have to be abandoned in order to survive." (Indeed, said professor does not hesitate to use the word "whore" to refer to him later.)

The presentation of the R. Gateses of the world as banality-spewing mediocrities only passed off as brilliant because of shabby trickery, and because those to whom they sell themselves find it useful to have them deemed so, had me saying "Finally, he got it right!" And while Gates' part in the plot is relatively minor, the character and the subplot centering on him is one of the book's more inspired bits, which in its satirical and comedic aspects, and its touch of visceral reality that lent the narrative some verisimilitude and heft as well as wit, did its part to make the Jason Bourne threequel at its best something more than a mere shoot 'em up.