Gore Vidal Revisited – Iconoclast Interview
With the recent passing of author and activist Gore Vidal, The Lone Star Iconoclast has decided to reprint an interview it conducted with him that was published on Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2006.
Vidal had just published a new book, Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006 and the title of the Iconoclast interview, conducted by its publisher, W. Leon Smith, was entitled “Gore Vidal: Point to Point Provocateur.”
The interview is preceded below by a lead-up that describes Gore Vidal’s influences in politics and in his writing:
GORE VIDAL: POINT TO POINT PROVOCATEUR
AUSTIN — Gore Vidal — the inimitable raconteur, essayist, novelist, playwright, historian, critic, and screenwriter — was in public conversation with Maureen Dowd at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 29, as part of the Texas Book Festival, where his new book, “Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006,” that is due in bookstores Nov. 7 was highlighted. Published by Doubleday, the memoir is a sequel to his acclaimed, bestselling “Palimpsest.”
Noted in several venues, from literature to politics to entertainment, Vidal is considered an American icon.
In “Point to Point,” Vidal ranges freely over his life experiences with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his.
The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II.
He says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since “Palimpsest,” I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.”
From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal, in “Point to Point,” travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics, and international society where he has cut a broad swath. Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages are Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Paul Newman, Johnny Carson, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Princess Margaret, Elia Kazan, Francis Ford Coppola, Grace Kelly, Paul Bowles…and the list goes on.
According to Doubleday, some of the book’s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Auster, and the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.
“Point to Point Navigation” is a summing-up of Gore Vidal’s time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative and thoroughly moving, notes his publisher. It is an important addition, and in some sense a capstone, to the canon of his works.
Always in the political limelight, Vidal’s latest crusades involve bringing the Bush Administration to justice. He suggests that Americans “are now governed by a junta of Oil-Pentagon men…both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and so on” based on that group’s endeavors to control the oil of Central Asia.
He says that, regarding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, of which American intelligence warned was coming, for the neoconservatives, this politically justified the plans that the Administration already had in August 2001 for invading Afghanistan the following October. Vidal is critical of the intercept failures by Norad, which, he says, would deserve “a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in.”
Last week, on the Alex Jones Show, Vidal said that he was certain that the Bush Administration had “let it happen on purpose,” noting that the head of the Pakistani ISI bankrolling the hijackers had also met with U.S. government officials during the week before and on the morning of 9/11. Of this, he said, “What made no sense is that CNN wouldn’t follow up on why the fighter planes had not been scrambled and gone up to stop the hijacking – that’s the law of the land. You don’t need the President to order you. You don’t need a general – those are your instructions. I know. My father wrote them.”
Eugene Luther Vidal was born in West Point, N.Y., the son of Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina Gore, at the U.S. Military Academy where his father was an aeronautics instructor. Vidal later adopted as his name the surname of his maternal grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, the Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
Raised in Washington, D.C., young Gore Vidal read aloud to his blind grandfather and was his guide, which gained him access to the corridors of power and shaped his political principles. During the 20th Century, Vidal wrote 22 novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than 200 essays, and the critically lauded memoir, “Palimpsest.” Vidal’s “United States” (Essays 1952-92) won the 1993 National Book Award. Vidal lives in Beverly Hills, Calif.
He perhaps best known for his historical novels, cutting-edge screenplays, and political activism, which included his candidacy for Congress in 1960, the same year John F. Kennedy won the presidency. That year, Vidal ran as a Democratic candidate in the solidly Republican district along the Hudson River in upstate New York, losing the election but receiving the most votes of any Democrat in 50 years in that district. Twenty-two years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate, finishing second to incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown in California’s 1982 Democratic primary election.
In some circles, he is best known for his “debates” with William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1968, when ABC News hired the two as politcal analysts for the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. The on-air battles of the two witty, sarcastic men of letters who resided on opposite poles of the political spectrum are legend, and eventually erupted in an exchange in which Vidal called Buckley a “pro-crypto Nazi” and Buckley lividly countered “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddman face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Lately, Vidal is serving as a member of the advisory board of the World Can’t Wait organization, which demands the impeachment of George W. Bush, and the charging of his administration with crimes against humanity
Vidal recently celebrated his 81st birthday and consented to an interview with W. Leon Smith, publisher of The Lone Star Iconoclast:
……………….
VIDAL: I’m the only author that you’ve spoken to in America, I am sure, who has read all of Brann The Iconoclast. I was brought up on it.
ICONOCLAST: We named our publication after his publication. We don’t necessarily agree with him politically on some things, but it was a very interesting era back then.
VIDAL: These were the types of authors I grew up reading because Senator Gore, my grandfather, was a great iconoclast. Although he was a senator from the Bible Belt, the Bible Belt never figured out that he was not with them.
ICONOCLAST: I have enjoyed reading your books and the movies based on your plays.I have seen the movie version of your play The Best Man many many times. To me it is a classic, one of the great political dramas with Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson.
VIDAL: That’s funny. I just watched it for the first time in some time.
ICONOCLAST: I think it’s really interesting with the backroom negotiations that go on. I’m sure things have changed somewhat since then.
VIDAL: It’s all who’s collected the most money now — and buys the most ads on television.
ICONOCLAST: When you wrote the play about 45 years ago, did you envision that we were headed for the politics of today?
VIDAL: Yes.
ICONOCLAST: When it comes to this administration attempting to destroy the Constitution, I take it personally, as do most of our readers. In writing your many historical novels, you have likely spent considerable time in the minds of many of our founders, and with that process likely have a feel as to how they would look upon America today. What do you think their take on it would be?
VIDAL: Benjamin Franklin, as usual, was the most prescient. In 1787 when asked to comment on the Constitution he said he did not like it but favored an immediate ratification because the republic was in need of good governance which this flawed work would provide us until it, too, failed as had so many other attempts due to “the corruption of the people.” Old Ben knew his countrymen and never feared a hard truth. Jefferson thought the Constitution should be reviewed and revised every 30 years or so. Madison, his practical friend, said how on earth can we accustom the people to the rule of law if they know that everything can be changed next year? But these are details; in great matters, such as habeas corpus, they took Magna Carta as foundation stones for our systems of law and of the republic that rests upon them. As I write, a sometime resident of Crawford has smashed in the foundations of our republic and chaos will ensue. The post 9/11 coup d’etat is now in full control of the state through corrupted elections and the joyous dismantling of the Bill of Rights.
ICONOCLAST: The World Can’t Wait has impeachment written all over it. If the Nov. 7 elections take place and if a true net vote can survive electronic voting machine theft, and if today’s polls hold steady among our generally apathetic and fickle populace, do you think Congress will move swiftly to engage investigations into 9/11 and all the atrocities that followed?
VIDAL: I have several times noted the direction in which way the country might go. If the state will allow Democrats to organize the House of Representatives then acts of impeachment of the little president will be in order ditto for several other members of the junta that has wrecked our military and the U.S. dollar for which it stands.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think the U.S. is on the verge of becoming a third-world country?
VIDAL: With luck we will take our modest place between Argentina and Brazil, our only compensation a great soccer team.
ICONOCLAST: From the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower forward, is there an administration that could be described as the tipping point that put us into the position we are today?
VIDAL: No; the end of the republic dates from Harry S—for nothing—Truman. FDR had come to terms with Stalin; then died. As of 1940 the Depression had returned, causing FDR, eager for war, to put $8 billion into rearming the U.S. At a Keynesian stroke, unemployment ended. Happy Days (and war) were here again. At Potsdam the green new president Truman met Stalin, to talk him into helping us defeat Japan. But a sudden message from the War Department told him the atomic bomb was ready for use. Aware that with the end of the war effort the Depression was apt to return, Truman decided to replace Hitler and Nazi-ism with Stalin and Communism. Told by Senator Vandenberg that if he wanted to spend a fortune on a second war paid for by Congress, “You’re going to have to scare the hell out of the American people,” which he did with cries of “the Russians are coming!” which they were not. They had lost twenty million people in the war. But thus began the series of fantastic lies that the military industrial complex and its control of media still deafen us with. Where Truman was stupid in good faith, the current junta is stupid in the worst possible way, hoovering up our tax money while plotting to sell off Social Security.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think the administration is using Buckley Jr.’s playbook from 1968, where he advocated a pre-emptive strike against Red China? It is almost like déjà vu, with stark similarities between Iraq and Vietnam, the same arguments being retold today, Buckley’s father into Texas oil, and a raging debate between “law and order” and “law and justice,” and the disenfranchisement of blacks.
VIDAL: I think the junta is basically too chicken, thank heaven, to follow Buckley’s lunatic politics but…
ICONOCLAST: You have long been a strong advocate of free speech. In one of the provocative debates you had with Buckley, you said, “We have the right according to the Constitution of freedom of peaceful assembly,” and “It is no violation of the law to freely demonstrate,” referring to attacks by police at the DNC in Chicago in 1968. How at risk is freedom of speech today?
VIDAL: Censorship is fairly rigid now but we’ve seen nothing yet.
ICONOCLAST: One of the editors of The Iconoclast, Don Fisher, wanted me to ask you why you just didn’t punch out Buckley when he began making personal attacks on you in order to avoid the issues being discussed. Or was his falling into your trap enough?
VIDAL: Tell your editor that, re: Buckley, I have never struck a lady.
ICONOCLAST: There is a new documentary out this year. The US vs. John Lennon, in which you appear. Do you have any additional thoughts about Lennon that aren’t in the film?
VIDAL: I thought my summing up said all that I meant: Vis a vis the Feds’ desperate attempts to arrest and deport Lennon were in character: J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon, like our present junta, represent death while Lennon stood for life.
……….
Here are some highlights from “Point to Point Navigation”:
Amelia Earhart: “My father’s widow, Kit, told me that she had come across a letter Amelia had written Gene after she had had an accident in California. While her Lockheed Electra plane was being repaired, she’d written an anguished letter all about some sort of emotional problem that she was having. I asked if a name had been mentioned. ‘Oh, it was so long ago, I forget.” I asked Kit if the problem was with a man or a woman. My conventional stepmother frowned at this impropriety. ‘A man, of course.’ ‘So what did you do with the letter?’ ‘I tore it up, naturally. After all, it was no one’s business but hers.’ So there was the final mystery that might have explained what happened. Gene had often speculated that she had deliberately crashed the place. ‘She was going through a bad time with G.P…’”
Johnny Carson: “John was the only political satirist regularly allowed for thirty years on that television time which is known to be prime and so he was able to influence the way the people at large thought about many things that were often unexamined in the media until he put his satiric spin to them…He once told me that he could predict the winner of any approaching presidential election by the reactions to certain jokes he’d tell to the live audiences at his Burbank studio. He’d make amiable fun—at least it seemed amiable—of the entire field but all the time that sharp ear was listening carefully to the laughter and, even more attentively, to the silences. He read this microcosm of the American people like a barometer.”
Jack and Jackie Kennedy: “With the help of Mrs. Roosevelt I had come up with an alternative to military conscription: voluntary service at home or abroad in such places where help was needed. I got such a good response from the district that I passed the proposition on to Jack who adopted it. Once president, it became the Peace Corps headed by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver.”
“…Howard and I took the lift down to the [Ritz Carleton’s] lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood… to Howard’s horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, ‘Bye-bye’ and vanished…”
Grace Kelly: “[Princess] Grace and I chatted about distant romantic Hollywood, not that she pined for her days of glory. I did ask her once, why, at the peak of her career, she had quit to become, in effect, the doyenne of an amusement park. Her answer was to the point. ‘You know about the studio’s makeup call?…Well, my makeup call was still pretty late because I was still very young. But I have a tendency to put on weight. When I do, my call is earlier. On my last picture, it was…’ she frowned at the thought of the dawn’s early light which one day she would have to face as had Loretta Young and Joan Crawford and a host of stars of yesteryear some of whom were obliged to report to makeup before sunrise. ‘It was the sudden change in my makeup call that decided me it was time to go before I absolutely had to.’”
Great Garbo: “Not only did she like to talk about the old days but she wanted to know what MGM was like so many years later. She also had a number of ribald stories that she enjoyed telling and retelling.”
Federico Fellini: “Farther down the corridor from my office, Federico Fellini was preparing what would become La Dolce Vita. He was fascinated by our huge Hollywood production [of Ben Hur]. Several times we had lunch together in the commissary. Soon he was calling me Gorino and I was calling him Fred.
Tennessee Williams: “The Glorious Bird—the name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally, with him, too.”
Francis Ford Coppola: “I found Francis to be encyclopedic on anything that had to do with filmmaking. He was truly post-Gutenberg. Film was where it—all of it—was at…Recently, Francis told me that I had turned him onto wine which, in turn, led to his becoming one of the leading winemakers in the United States.”
Paul Newman: “Women sometimes behaved oddly when they saw [Paul]. Once when we were walking down Madison Avenue, a large young woman came toward us from the opposite direction: quickly, he tucked his chin into his collar to hide those arctic blue eyes. He also increased his pace. ‘Keep moving,’ he whispered as we passed her. Then there was a crash behind us. ‘Don’t look around,’ he said, looking around; then he broke into a run. ‘What happened”’ I asked. ‘She’s fainted,’ he said and leapt into a taxicab.”
Princess Margaret: PM spoke of the royal family with expectable reverence not unmixed with humor and the occasional surrealist note: ‘The Queen is uncommonly talented in ways that you might not suspect,’ she proclaimed. Suspecting nothing, I asked, ‘In what way?’ Well, she can put on a very heavy tiara while hurrying down a flight of stairs with no mirror.’”
Works By Gore Vidal
Essays, Non-Fiction
• Rocking the Boat (1963)
• Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)
• Sex, Death and Money (1969)
• Homage to Daniel Shays (1973)
• Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977)
• The Second American Revolution (1982)
• Armageddon? (1987)
• At Home (1988)
• A View From The Diner’s Club (1991)
• Screening History (1992)
• Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)
• United States: essays 1952–1992 (1993)
• Palimpsest: a memoir (1995)
• Virgin Islands (1997)
• The American Presidency (1998)
• Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999)
• The Last Empire: essays 1992–2000 (2001)
• Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002, (2002)
• Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunder’s Mouth Press, (2002)
• Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003)
• Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004)
• Point to Point Navigation : A Memoir (2006)
Plays
• Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
• The Best Man (1960)
• On the March to the Sea (1960-1961, 2004)
• Romulus (adapted from Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s play) (1962)
• Weekend (1968)
• Drawing Room Comedy (1970)
• An evening with Richard Nixon (1970)
• On the March to the Sea (2005)
Novels
• Williwaw (1946)
• In a Yellow Wood (1947)
• The City and the Pillar (1948)
• The Season of Comfort (1949)
• A Search for the King (1950)
• Dark Green, Bright Red (1950)
• The Judgment of Paris (1953)
• Messiah (1955)
• A Thirsty Evil (1956)
• Julian (1964)
• Washington, D.C. (1967)
• Myra Breckinridge (1968)
• Two Sisters (1970)
• Burr (1973)
• Myron (1975)
• 1876 (1976)
• Kalki (1978)
• Creation (1981)
• Duluth (1983)
• Lincoln (1984)
• Empire (1987)
• Hollywood (1989)
• Live from Golgotha: the Gospel according to Gore Vidal (1992)
• The Smithsonian Institution (1998)
• The Golden Age (2000)
• Clouds and Eclipses : The Collected Short Stories (2006)
Under Pseudonyms
• A Star’s Progress (aka Cry Shame!) (1950) as Katherine Everard
• Thieves Fall Out (1953) as Cameron Kay
• Death Before Bedtime (1953) as Edgar Box
• Death in the Fifth Position (1954) as Edgar Box
• Death Likes It Hot (1954) as Edgar Box
Appearances, Interviews
• The U.S. Versus John Lennon (2006 film)
• Why We Fight
• Gattaca (1997 film)
• Bob Roberts (1992 film)
• Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No (1982 documentary)
• Family Guy – “Mother Tucker” (2006 Animated TV episode)
• Da Ali G Show (2004 episode)
• Inside Deep Throat (2005 film)
