If only we had won in California… InsideOut Chats with Gore
Vidal
By Owen Lipstein
Recently we sat down with Gore Vidal—author of 25-plus
novels, eight plays, numerous screenplays, and more than 200 essays—who was at
once elegiac, vital, and ornery. It’s clear that Vidal thinks we're all going
to hell in a handbasket —but he had us laughing at the same time.
INSIDEOUT: Have you been to the Hudson Valley recently?
Gore Vidal: A year or so ago.
IO: Did you visit [your former home] Edgewater?
GV: Yes, I was invited, so I came up to look at it.
IO: Was it a good experience for you?
GV: Well, I don't like the new owner's taste in furniture.
But it is a museum.
IO: You were in Washington, D.C., as a young boy, when the
Bonus Army camped out on Capitol Hill and had to be dispersed by force. You say
there was talk of a revolution then. Could a real revolution happen here and
now?
GV: Oh, much more apt to happen. We still had a sane
government in those days, and we still had the Constitution and habeas corpus
and all sorts of luxuries which are now gone, and I think that any demagogue
could probably arouse quite a lot of resistance to the government—a government
by corporation for corporations and manned by thugs.
IO: What's going to happen in Iraq over the next two years?
GV: I'm very disturbed, because politicians are always
repetitive; whatever worked, they'll try again. The only time the little fellow
was ever popular, or thought he was, was after 9/11. The world's sympathy was
with us. And then he invents a war and says [imitating Bush]: 'Got them over there.
Over there, fightin' [terrorism] here.' Nonsense. But you know [politicians]
think that [Americans] are as stupid as they are, to be blunt about it. And the
people do get the point; they are rather helpless. It seems that all of the
checks and balances of our history have been set to one side, so that one
little gang could actually run the country and wreck two other countries who
have done us no harm and could do us no harm. Normally, in a sane country, with
a non-corrupt media, they would have been dismissed by now, but we're not like
that. The money decides who will be elected, and the people have pretty much
been ignored.
IO: Can the Democrats possibly lose the next election?
GV: They tend to win these elections, but they don't tend to
take the oath of office. As long as there is a Supreme Court that's been had in
one sense or another, the three branches of government will be absolutely lined
up against the idea of the republic itself. You know, when presidential
elections get stolen with such ease, you really don't have a republic anymore.
My fear is that the little loony is going to bomb Iran—because it worked once
before, when he bombed Iraq for no reason at all, and ditto in Afghanistan, and
he'll do it a third time.
IO: And what do you think will happen then?
GV: Washington will probably be blown up. We have powerful
enemies, and we're not a powerful country anymore. I spent three years in the
Army. The Army has been wasted by these people, by Rumsfelds. Service is
policed in the Middle East, since they're not trained to [be a power]. So we've
lost our military powers, and we are dead broke. And we go from there. We go
out of history, I suspect.
IO: Whose memoirs do you admire? Who has been successful in
this genre, besides yourself?
GV: I admire Montaigne a great deal.
IO: Anybody in recent time?
GV: Henry Adams. George Santayana.
IO: But these were men of a different caliber, learning, and
age.
GV: So much the worse for us.
IO: Has anyone from The New York Times ever apologized to
you for basically putting you out of print [for a novel involving gay men] when
you started out?
GV: Well, they pretended to apologize.
IO: So you've named names about censoring reviewers, and no one
has responded?
GV: Well the Times doesn't [respond]; that's how they get
away with being The New York Times. They've poisoned a great many wells in
their day.
IO: Do you regret having to go into TV and movies because
you couldn't, as you say, make money writing novels?
GV: Well, I would rather have been writing novels. And I
could have, you know -I had England. Nice thing about the English language—you
get both countries.
IO: You wonder how the English managed to have such literate
prime ministers who can actually field questions from a variety of sources,
from a kid to a 60-year-old, yet we've seemed, at least recently, to elect
quite a few who can barely put words together. How do you explain that?
GV: Well, you know, we’re still a peasant country that did
not develop a civilization. We have a way of life—that is how we describe
ourselves—which we think is No. 1 in the world, but foreigners think it's
pretty god-awful. It's just because all those Mexicans want to come live here
that we think we are the center of the Earth, paradise for other people, but we’re
not. We’re held in great contempt by most of Europe as being ignorant and
boastful and foolish.
IO: Throughout Point to Point Navigation, the events of
Dallas seem to haunt you. You support the premise of the Lamar Waldron/ Thom
Hartmann book Ultimate Sacrifice [which describes the Kennedy administration
plot to assassinate Castro—dubbed C-Day in the book—and how that plan was
penetrated by three Mafia godfathers who were being vigorously pursued by Bobby
Kennedy; these crime bosses used parts of the Castro plan to arrange for the
assassination of JFK himself in a way that would prevent a thorough
investigation].
GV: Well, I'd also heard about some of this over time.
IO: Why would John Kennedy do something as risky as to
consider the assassination of Castro after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs? He
was supposed to have learned something from that, to have been smarter and more
mature.
GV: Well, he wasn't. I think a lot of that could be answered
by the medicine he was taking. He was on everything.
IO: So he had this feeling of power, that anything was possible
and he could win all bets?
GV: I think it was something like that, yes. He had no
adrenal function, and so to give him one, they regularly put sort of a pellet
on his hip which would keep him going for a month or two, which gives you a
strange high, I'm told.
IO: If, as you hypothesize, after the first shot Jackie had
reacted more quickly and brought her husband out of the range of fire, if
Kennedy had lived, how do you imagine history would have been different?
GV: Well, he would have gone on to win the '64 election, and
I don't think he would have done another adventure like C-Day.
IO: So he might have been a good president if he had just
gotten shot in the neck?
GV: Yes.
IO: What do you think the most powerful man in the world was
imagining after the first shot? I mean, he had six very long seconds. Do you
think he knew who had done this to him? Do you think he was conscious of some
of the faults of his life?
GV: No. I think when you're hit by a bullet you think just
about the bullet. And what it has done to you. And are you going to die?
IO: In effect, you maintain, the assassination was
indirectly Bobby's fault for trying to be popular in the war on the Mafia, for
breaking a family truce that was set up in 1960 and at the same time involving
them in the attempted coup. Do you find people resisting that concept?
GV: I haven't taken a poll.
IO: When you look at the sadness Bobby showed after the
fact—it was above and beyond.
GV: He was wandering around Washington weeping all day long.
Their people were very disturbed.
IO: Did you have any compassion for him?
GV: No.
IO : Jackie does not come off terrifically in your book. She’s
not head over heels in love with Jack, she marries him mostly for the money. If
she loves anyone it was Bobby, and if she’d been a little bit more alert she
could have saved Jack. Nevermind the fact that she was a little more than rude
to you in the elevator. Am I missing anything?
GV: No, it’s the other way around. I turned my back on her
in the elevator.
IO: In your book, you describe writing a letter to a bunch
of people in the Kennedy cadre and writing letters to President Kennedy himself
about what he should do. One of them was to go to the moon. The other thing was
your idea that ultimately became the Peace Corps. Do you feel you are
unappreciated in history?
GV: No. As Groucho Marx used to say, "What's history
done for me?"
IO: At this stage in your life, what are the things you're
proudest of over time?
GV: That I used time. Most people don't use it properly.
IO: It's amazing to see how much you've written and how many
diverse places you've been. You've had a very big life. Who are your heroes?
GV: Well. I think I made it very clear about Montaigne. I
sometimes imitate him deliberately to see if I can do what he does. He was the
inventor of the essay as we know it. And a lot of people can write essays
today, but mixing in the past, he'll take a theme from Cicero on dance and
extrapolate it to his immediate experience, and in the course of it he writes
an essay for the eyes of others to read one day [in the future], including them
in the great conversation.
IO: You admire your grandfather, Senator Gore from Oklahoma?
GV: Well, he was unaffected by the money-money-money
culture. He couldn't be a senator today because he couldn't go around asking
people for money. The only money he ever got for a campaign offering was when
he was standing on a street corner in Lawton, Okla. The election was coming up
and he didn't have enough money to pay for the flyers to send out, and a man
came up and said, 'Hello. Mr. Gore, how are you? I have something for you,"
and put $1,000 in his hand. I wouldn't believe this story if it were told by a
member of the Bush family, but for Mr. Gore that was quite something.
IO: In your book you say it's easier to sustain long-term
relationships when sex isn't involved, and almost impossible when it is. It
seems like a conviction on your part. Could you expand on that?
GV: Nothing more to say on it. You've just said it.
IO: Did you enjoy running for congressman here?
GV: Oh, yes. I like audiences and crowds. You learn an awful
lot. I ran for the Senate out here in California largely to get to know the
state better.
IO: I wish more people could think of it that way.
GV: They might have stayed tourists, you mean.
IO: You said that your generation was the last that felt
absolutely committed to go to war, or felt obligated to honor their country's
call to duty.
GV: Obligation was more the point! We weren't delighted
about going to war. And we knew it was pretty fake. But everybody thinks in the
Second World War that we wanted to fight to get rid of Hitler Well, it was
Roosevelt's genius to realize that Hitler was something new under the sun and
we had probably better engage him at some point, but 80 percent of the American
people didn't want to go into World War II. This was 1940. I enlisted in 1943,
which was after Pearl Harbor.
IO: You speak of so many people in your life, whether it be
Johnny Carson, Tennessee Williams... your list of brilliant portraits and
friends. What are the things that give you the most pleasure these days?
GV: Hmmm... watching Bush's numbers fall. I'm orgasmic with
delight.
IO: Do you think he's mentally unstable, or just stupid?
GV: Both.
IO: Do you hold his parents accountable, or AA, or just his
own complete lack of education? How do we get a Bush?
GV: I don't know how he got through those schools he
allegedly went to. The family probably paid off teachers and so on to keep him
on the roster. But I don’t speculate on his psyche.
IO: May we reproduce your book cover in this interview?
GV: Oh, sure. Steal it.
