While he saw the value of devolving power from the capital to the provinces, Vidal maintained an independent liberal’s skepticism of my decentralism, asserting that “if a state, exercising its rights, should wish to execute all spinsters over 40 (my father’s dream!), then a Power Higher”-presumably a Bill of Rights-enforcing federal government-“must protect the minority from the majority.” I tried to get him to run in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, but he demurred: “If I had the energy, I’d make Huey Long seem like Robt Alphonso Taft-But too much sand’s slipped through the hourglass.” Left-right rumblings against the empire heartened him: “They are terrified that anti-imperials will get together and revive America First, no bad rallying cry.” “As always, the unconsulted people are cowardly isolationists,” mused Gore as yet another of our endless wars began. It was as if Henry Adams had fallen for William Jennings Bryan. Gore’s “favorite US pol (in my lifetime, that is)” was Huey Long, who had promised to make General Smedley “War is a Racket” Butler his Secretary of (Anti?) War. Amused by Schlesinger’s surprisingly evenhanded review of one of my books, Vidal wrote, “As no bandwagon is complete without ‘there is this pendulum’ clinging to its buckboard, you seem to have launched a juggernaut out of Batavia.” Not exactly. On a Sunday afternoon of torrential rains and crashing thunder (sound effects supplied by the Almighty in winking tribute to the anti-theist Vidal), I sat down and read through the sheaf of letters constituting our long epistolary friendship.Įach missive arrived in a pale blue envelope bearing the return address “La Rondinaia/Ravello (Salerno)/Italy.” His tone was often light self-mockery, unless the subject was, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Gore Vidal was explicator, dramatist, and even avatar of these American currents-which have no place in the dreary humorless social-democratic textbook history that bores our children and suffocates our discourse. So many healthy springs once fed our politics: they were rural, populist, patrician, pacifist, libertarian, anti-monopolist, prairie socialist, Main Street isolationist. This land was made for you and me? Of course it was.
Debs, America and its protagonists were his. From Aaron Burr and Daniel Shays to Eugene V. Gore Vidal’s favorite subject was his country. Plus it would have appealed to Gore’s fair vanity. Well, why not? Edwin Stanton’s grandiloquent sendoff for the martyred Lincoln applies to Gore Vidal, author of the best fictive treatment our 16th president is ever likely to get.
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