I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with Jon Wiener
128
I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with Jon Wiener
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Overview
Gore Vidal, one of America's foremost essayists, screenwriters, and novelists, died July 31, 2012. He was, in addition, a terrific conversationalist. Dick Cavett once described him as "the best talker since Oscar Wilde." And Vidal was never more eloquent, or caustic, than when let loose on his favorite topic, the history and politics of the United States.
This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long–time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate.
The interviews cover a twenty–year span, from 1988 to 2008, when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America's place in the world, are all on full display. And, of course, it being Gore Vidal, an ample sprinkling of gloriously acerbic one–liners is also provided.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619022126 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation and a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, and Professors, Politics and Pop, and the editor (with Tom Hayden) of Conspiracy in the Streets.
Hometown:
La Rondinaia, a villa in Ravello, Italy; and Los Angeles, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
October 3, 1925Place of Birth:
West Point, New YorkEducation:
Attended St. Albans. Graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, 1943. No college.Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Royce Hall, UCLA April 28, 2007
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is a huge and wonderful annual event. More than 100,000 came to the UCLA campus in 2007, and one of the biggest attractions was Gore Vidal. He appeared onstage in the biggest theater on campus, historic Royce Hall, with 2,000 seats. The event had been sold out almost as soon as tickets became available, and the standby line went around the building.
Six months earlier his memoir Point to Point Navigation had been published to unanimously strong reviews. And of course for the previous six years Vidal had been a biting critic of George W. Bush and his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in another year the Democrats would have a chance to replace him.
Vidal arrived onstage, to prolonged applause from an enthusiastic audience, in a wheelchair pushed by a young man.
Vidal: Let me introduce the one pushing my wheelchair: my godson from France. They come in useful as they get older.
Q. Speaking of godchildren, you write in Point to Point Navigation that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon asked you to be the godfather of their new baby — and what was your answer?
A. Well, a little sob — and then: "always a godfather, never a god." [laughter]
Q. We are at a university, so I thought I would start by asking: why didn't you go to college? You may be the only person here in Royce Hall who didn't go to college.
A. I graduated from Exeter, and I was aimed at going to Harvard. Instead I enlisted in the army in 1943, and when I got out, in '46, I thought "I've spent all my life in institutions that I loathe, including my service in the Army of the United States." I thought, "Shall I go for another four years?" My first book was already being published, I was an old man of nineteen. I said "I'm going to be told how to write by somebody at Harvard." I said, "This is too great a risk."
But I did go there to lecture, this was about '47 or '48. There was a big audience, and many of them were my classmates from Exeter, who were over-age juniors and seniors in what looked to be their mid-forties. I came out cheerily, as is my wont, and I've never felt such hatred radiating. They'd all predicted my total failure, because I was not to go to Harvard and meet a publisher or an agent — which is, I think, why they went.
Q. You write in Point to Point Navigation that you were "once a famous novelist." I must disagree — you are a famous novelist. Look at this reception today.
A. "Famous novelist" — the adjective doesn't go with the noun. It's like being a famous speedboat designer: you can be a successful one, you can make a living out of it, but you're not famous. Fame is what the literary world was like before Mailer and I got into it. You had had people who were known all over the world, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I think we lost a lot of the audience for our team. Not "we" specifically. But the audience diminished in my lifetime.
Q. Your new memoir is titled Point to Point Navigation. Please explain the title.
A. I was first mate on an army boat up in the Aleutian Islands, and we had compasses, but we had no radar. This was '45, '46, and we couldn't set a course. We never saw the sun, or the moon, or stars. We just went point to point. And usually you would get an Aleut sailor, get him to pledge to the ship, and he would know the whole coastline. We would go past this island and that island, to Chernovsky Point, where we were to dock.
I thought, "This is highly descriptive of my last forty years." Without a compass I'm just guessing, point by point. And as I remember points, I record them, for the future edification of others. It is one way of writing, one way of navigating. I wouldn't say it's the best, but you do what you can with what you've got. As the wise Secretary of Defense said, "You fight the war with what you've got." Can you imagine something more insulting to everybody in the military? "They're no good, you know, but what can I do about it — I'm the head of a pharmaceutical company." I guess he's back with that now, selling aspirin over cost.
Q. You wrote a series of novels about American history. You called the series "Narratives of Empire." The books were Burr, Lincoln, Washington DC, 1876, Empire, which was on the 1890s, Hollywood, on the twenties, and The Golden Age, on America during and after World War II. It's hard to think of another writer who has written the entire history of his country this way.
A. I left out the Mexican War, and I'm going back to it: Henry Clay, President Polk, and our attack on Mexico, which didn't go down very well down there, as they return now to their stolen lands. [applause]
Q. The Mexican War was the one for which Thoreau went to jail in protest. Our anti-war protest tradition goes back that far.
A. Indeed it does. It is interesting today how few writers in their prime, as opposed to us octogenarians, spoke out against the terrible recent events in the Middle East — the Bush wars. James Wolcott is a clever writer for Vanity Fair. He wrote an interesting piece that said the only literary voices that have been raised against Iraq and Afghanistan are three veterans of World War II, all over 80: Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and me. And I thought, that was strange. We had already undergone a pretty awful war. I think we were more sensitive than somebody who had served underground in the Texas Air Force.
Q. I wanted to stick with your fiction a little bit longer. The last of your Narratives of Empire series was titled The Golden Age. Do you really think the United States had a golden age?
A. It could have had, were it not for Harry Truman and the Korean War. I got out of the Army in '46, and suddenly all of the arts in the United States had taken off — arts that we never would have known about, like ballet. Suddenly there we were, with the ballet theater. It was a very exciting time, music was at its best, with people like Bernstein and Copeland. In the theater we had Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. And the novelists were not all that bad either.
My generation had been through the Depression, and then World War II. We were far from being the greatest generation, but we had certainly gone through the most tribulation. Then it was over, and I remember thinking as I got out of a bus near Times Square, "Well we don't have to do that again. We've had our war." Little knowing what time would yield.
All the arts were booming. It was just the most exciting time. New York was the center of the world — the center for painting, which it had never been before. There were things which had never been accessible to us which we suddenly became masters of, because there was all this energy left over from the war. I think a lot of us who had not gone to college had time to get going in the arts, which is what you should be doing at that age. So everything was glittering. Even TV, which was brand new and was loathed by many, but we thought something good might come out of it. And something did: live television drama, which was often "better than Broadway."
So here we were, right on the edge of a golden age, prepared to make a civilization, something the United States has never done. We were all dressed up with nowhere to go. Then in 1950, Harry Truman was looking forward to the Cold War, with a new enemy: Communism. He gets us into a disastrous war with Korea, which we promptly lose. And we have been at war ever since, and it has not done our character much good, and it hasn't been good for business either, except for Wall Street. That's what I say to the golden age. It was there, in ovum, but you have to sit on the egg, not step on it.
Q. You introduced the term "the America Empire" to journalism — not very popular at first, but now it seems indispensible.
A. Time magazine attacked me for a book of essays, saying, "He is the kind of essayist who refers to the American Empire." The whole magazine was shuddering with horror at what I'd said. A Brit came up with this one: "There is no American empire. We had an empire in England, naturally, naturally we did, but you don't have one at all. What have you got? You've got Guam!" [laughter]
I said, "Yeah, but we've got Japan, and we've got Western Europe, and as much of Africa as we want, and as much of Latin America as we want." We had it all. And to see how this mess could be made in six years is beyond my ability to suspend belief. To have lost everything, and now the dollar too? At least we always had that to hang on to.
Q. 1968 was an exciting year in American politics and culture, and part of 1968 was Myra Breckinridge. In 1968 we got Nixon, and in 1968 we got Myra. It was a bestseller. I found a quote from Harold Bloom, "Myra Breckinridge seems to have fixed the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neo-pornography never can go." My question is, how did you write that book? Where did Myra come from?
A. I don't know. I didn't invent cellophane, which I've always loved as an invention, but my father brought a big container of it home from Dupont. I was about eight or so, and I said, "What's it for?" He said, "Nobody knows, but isn't it beautiful?"
I think Myra is a bit the same. It came to me in Rome, when I was walking down an alley. Suddenly I hear this voice, booming in my ear: "Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess." And I thought, "What is that?" This is the way a lot of comedy writing comes: you hear a voice, and you don't know what it means. So I went on writing, and writing, and writing, and I was halfway through the book before I realized that Myra had been a man. Clever maker of fictional characters that I am, I thought no woman would sound like this.
Q. This year will be the 100th anniversary of the election of your grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, to the Senate. He was a populist, a supporter of William Jennings Bryan. I learned from Point to Point Navigation that he was at war with Wall Street and the moneyed interests. Do you think there is a place for anyone like your grandfather in today's politics?
A. I'm auditioning.
[laughter]
I think the Populist tradition has never died, and I think after Populism the next step was the New Deal, which is very much alive, I think, in people's psyche — the notion that you must do something for the people, or you don't really have a country. And, I do notice, we're losing more and more of the country. Don't you find it amazing? Where are the great voices? The Walter Lippmanns we had, at least in my youth, good journalists, wise men — where are their counterparts now when Habeas Corpus was released from the canon? Habeas Corpus, that's like the Magna Carta — one of the few good things England left us when they made their departure. And it's gone. Due process — where is that? The notion of the jury, which seems to get more and more corrupted, as it's used as a government weapon to get rid of political parties that you do not enjoy. No, we are in danger of not having a country. We certainly aren't having a republic.
Senator T.P. Gore was elected in 1907 from the newly created state of Oklahoma. He had written a constitution for the state, and he was elected their first Senator. I come across a lot of people who think as he did. I went all through West Virginia not long ago, from Morgantown to Charles Town, speaking. It was like going back to my youth, because I was brought up in Virginia, in the eastern part, beyond Tidewater, so it was like a time warp — like being back in the thirties. Same people, same accents, same preoccupations. Perhaps our savior will come from Morgantown, West Virginia.
Q. So, your grandfather was in the Senate, and the grandfather of George W. Bush was in the Senate …
A. Very different. Very different people.
Q. Prescott Bush, Senator from Connecticut in the fifties.
A. Yes, he was Senator from J.P. Morgan. He was a creature of the House of Morgan. And Brown Brothers, which was a spin-off of the House of Morgan, was where a lot of Bush-ite mischief was done. May I tell you, Prescott Bush didn't figure at all in those days. He was unknown.
Q. So, we had Prescott Bush, the grandfather, who I guess now would now be called a liberal Republican; then we had George H. W. Bush, who would be more of a Nixon Republican; and now we have George W. Bush. Is there any historical trend here?
A. I don't think they are a dynasty we need bother with. I don't see much future for them. It's going to take four or five years to recover from this administration — to get the Constitution back, to get the legal codes back. They've done a lot of damage for a sort of nothing family.
Q. I wonder how you rank Bush 43 among the presidents. The Washington Post did a poll among historians asking who is the worst president, and it was sort of divided. Some said Bush 43, a lot said Nixon, one said Polk, for the Mexican War, one said Buchanan for not avoiding or anticipating the Civil War. What's your ranking of Bush among the worst presidents?
A. He wins. And now every day we see his victory dance on television.
Q. In the past decade you've been relatively critical of Al Gore, who is some sort of relative of yours, I'm not sure. I wonder what you think of the Al Gore of today, the Academy Award winner.
A. This is an invention that I've been critical of him. Quite the contrary. I think that Arianna Huffington, on this very stage, said, "Oh, you said such awful things about Al Gore." I said, "I don't say awful things about members of my family," and I was sorry about the way his election was hijacked in the year 2000. I think he should have fought a little harder, that was my only criticism. I now think that he is the only candidate now who has a real theme, which is the planet.
Q. Now that we've considered Al Gore's candidacy for the Presidency, of course I have to ask you about what you think of the other leaders of our opposition party: Hillary, Obama, John Edwards.
A. Oh splendid, all splendid. Look, anything to get rid of this Bush gang.
[applause]
Q. Anything else you'd like to say about Hillary?
A. I like her. She said something interesting when she was getting ready to run for Senator in New York — my own private advice was to go to Illinois and become Governor. Chicago is a much better city, I think, to launch yourself from. Anyway, she was going through where she was popular. She was most unpopular among white men with some property. She was asking, "What have I done to them?" And she kept on with some of her advisors, I am told — I didn't get this firsthand. And she was told, "It is because you remind them of their first wife." [laughter]
Q. Let's talk about Iraq for a second. With all the emphasis on the stupidity of Bush's war, and of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Paul Bremer, the implication is that if we had more troops there, if we had people running this war who understood the Middle East, if we hadn't had these Republican ideologues running the reconstruction, we could have succeeded in building "a democratic Iraq." I wonder what you think about that.
A. First you would have had to have had a democratic war, in which the people have something to say. We didn't have anything to say.
We had no business fighting in Iraq. It was only though a series of lies that the war got as far as it did in Congress. It was all nonsense. What we do is relentlessly search for enemies; we've been doing it now for many, many years, but it's never been so highly developed as with this gang.
The point is that we should not have gone to war. This is no business of ours. I love the last minute idea of, "Oh, we are going to bring democracy to Iraq!" "It's a fledgling democracy," says the little fellow. What a fledgling! It looks more like a goose to me — one gently cooking and simmering.
I'm beginning to have a theory. I wrote a play in 1962, based on one by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, about Romulus the Great, the last Roman emperor. He had become an Emperor in order to destroy the Roman Empire, because it had been immoral and bloodthirsty. He had become Emperor for one purpose — to destroy Rome and its armies. I think we've gotanother one. I think the little fellow, instinctively, knew he was never going to measure up to a real president like Roosevelt, or even to his father. So he has wrecked everything that he touches.
To wreck the United Nations, he gets Mr. Bolton to go there, who hates it and wants to destroy it. Look at what he does with the army: he gets a pharmaceutical freak to play warlord of the Pentagon, and that just doesn't work. "Heck of a job, Brownie." He gets people who don't know how to save a city from a flood. Whatever he does is a mess. Now that takes mind — and probably a plan.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Told You So"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Jon Wiener.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION Gore Vidal as a Talker,
1 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Royce Hall, UCLA April 28, 2007,
2 Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities University of Southern California December 15, 2006,
3 The 2000 Shadow Convention Radio Interview Plaza Hotel, New York City September 9, 2000,
4 Radical History Review Interview Ravello, Italy July 12, 1988,
POSTSCRIPT Remembering Gore Vidal,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
NOTES,