restore the republic

Gore Vidal died; and so articles about him drenching the internet. 

I haven't read any of Gore Vidal's books.  Reading the critics, it sounds like Burr would be the one to start with, & his essays.

I always heard of Gore Vidal when I was a little child growing up.  I must have heard it at home; I'm pretty sure they didn't tell us about Gore Vidal in elementary school....

--------------------------- [excerpt, Interview with Gore Vidal, 1992, by Terry Gross on NPR]--------------  GROSS: Savage, let's go with savage, OK, savage, acid. Acid?


VIDAL: I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.

GROSS: OK, so is it - is it a contradiction for someone who is patrician to be savage at the same time?

VIDAL: Patricians can be savage. I think what you're trying to say is: Why should a member of the ruling class question the ruling class?

GROSS: There you go.

VIDAL: That's it.

(LAUGHTER)

VIDAL: Because no reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

GROSS: This is great. So you think, like, the noblesse oblige, as it applies to you, is to kind of help stir up revolution.


(LAUGHTER)

VIDAL: Well, I didn't say that, you said that, but if - revolution - it's a dissolution is what's coming, and I would like to see it in an orderly way, and I'd like to restore. I'm a true reactionary. Like all patricians, I'd like to restore the original republic, which we lost 40 years ago when Harry Truman imposed the national security state on us, which has kept us at war, hot or cold, for almost half a century, and it's got us $4 trillion into debt.

Well, now to point that out is to be outrageous, vicious, vitriolic because I'm taking on the entire ruling class of the country, which has decided in the corporate boardrooms that this is the way we were going to live all those years.

GROSS: I must, for better or worse, pursue this patrician line of questioning one step further. One of your more famous television appearances was in 1968, when you and William Buckley, also a patrician...

VIDAL: Not by my measurement.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: OK, well, you were both on as commentators during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and you were commentators for ABC. And you called Buckley a crypto-fascist, and do you remember what he said to you?

VIDAL: No, but I remember laughing at him, and he was climbing the wall.

GROSS: OK, what Buckley said after you called him a crypto-fascist, he said: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-fascist, or I'll sock you in the g-damned face, and you'll stay plastered. Did you and Buckley have words off the air after your go-around on the air?

VIDAL: No, I never spoke to him again.

GROSS: You've said that your upbringing was in a way very similar to George Bush's, although you certainly see the world very differently. What were the similarities in your upbringing?

VIDAL: Well, he's the son of a senator; I'm the grandson of a senator. My father was in the Cabinet. We're both Washington children, government children, both politically ambitious. I was at Exeter; he was at Andover. He's a year older than I am. When I was 17, I enlisted in the Army; when he was 18, he enlisted in the Navy. And we were both in the Second World War. So we've had parallel lives.

-----------------------------
... VIDAL:  I have a questioning mind. I was born a writer; he was born somebody who wants to be appointed to political office and then eventually elected to political office.


I was intrigued and drawn to that, it was the family business, but after all, I wrote my first novel when I was 19 in the Pacific, and I've supported myself as a writer since I was 20. Also, you can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.

Now these are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

GROSS: Gore Vidal, recorded in 1992. He died Tuesday at the age of 86. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

[National Public Radio.  personal and noncommercial]

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