I Told You So Read online

  I TOLD YOU SO

  I TOLD YOU SO

  Gore Vidal

  Talks Politics

  Interviews with Jon Wiener

  COUNTERPOINT

  BERKELEY

  I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics

  Interviews with Jon Weiner

  This collection © 2012 Jon Wiener

  First published in the United States by OR Books New York, 2012.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Permissions included on page 143

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication is available

  ISBN 978-1-61902-212-6

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “ The four most beautiful words in our common language:

  I told you so.

  ”

  —Gore Vidal

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION Gore Vidal as a Talker

  1Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

  Royce Hall, UCLA

  April 28, 2007

  2Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities

  University of Southern California

  December 15, 2006

  3The 2000 Shadow Convention Radio Interview

  Plaza Hotel, New York City

  September 9, 2000

  4Radical History Review Interview

  Ravello, Italy

  July 12, 1988

  POSTSCRIPT Remembering Gore Vidal

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  Gore Vidal in conversation with Jon Wiener at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 28, 2007.

  INTRODUCTION

  Gore Vidal as a Talker

  Gore Vidal was a great talker as well as a great writer. Dick Cavett called him “the best talker since Oscar Wilde.” He talked a lot; if you Google “Gore Vidal interview,” you get 40,000 results. But what remains of those is mostly one-liners, quips and zingers, about Truman Capote, William F. Buckley and George Bush. This book offers Vidal in a more sustained mode of conversation: developing arguments, tracing connections between past and present, citing evidence. Of course he provides plenty of one-liners and zingers along the way.

  The four interviews here represent Gore talking about politics with me for different audiences: first, 2,000 enthusiastic fans at a book festival in Los Angeles; then sixty academics and writers at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities; then listeners at a left wing radio station in L.A.; and finally readers of the Radical History Review. These interviews cover a twenty-year span when he was at his best: we did the first in 1988 and the last in 2007. They are presented in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first.

  The 1988 Radical History Review (RHR) interview was where I first met Gore. It’s the most obscure—although after publication in the RHR it was excerpted in Harper’s “Readings” and in a collection of Vidal interviews. He may have been willing to do this one because he had a long-standing critique of the mainstream of the history profession and I think welcomed the chance to speak to younger “radical” historians who were sympathetic to his left-wing vision of the American past. And although the RHR had a tiny readership, it had been running a series of interviews that were significant and prestigious; Pantheon had already published a collection that included the RHR interviews with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, William Appleman Williams, and others with whom Vidal was no doubt familiar.

  In all our interviews I think he appreciated the opportunity talk seriously about things he really did care about: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and of course his own life in politics, as a commentator and as a candidate.

  Since I asked the questions, I got to bring up things I was interested in. Often we started with things that were going on at the time we spoke, and then moved back to American politics and history earlier in the 20th century. Thus in 1988 I asked him about his novel Empire, which had just been published; in the fall of 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush were running for president, and so was Ralph Nader, and Vidal’s play The Best Man was being revived on Broadway, so we talked about those; and so on.

  All four interviews have been condensed and edited. I have tried to eliminate repetition in Vidal’s answers, but not always in the questions, because one of the interesting things here is to see how Gore answered the same question differently for different audiences. For example, the question “What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you going?”: at the Book Festival in Los Angeles, with an audience of 2,000 fans, he answered “Rage.” At the Humanities Institute in Los Angeles, with an audience of sixty intellectuals and writers, he answered “Stupidity.” When asked who was the worst president, at the Book Festival he said “Bush;” at the Humanities Institute he said “Wilson”—and explained why.

  And sometimes Vidal would direct his answer away from my question, and return to a topic that was important to him. Thus he always talked about his grandfather, the blind senator from Oklahoma; about the “rough treatment” he had received from the New York Times book reviewers; his views of how FDR got us into WWII; and of course the American Empire and the National Security State—so these repetitions remain as evidence of his passions and interests.

  One thing is missing in these transcriptions: Vidal’s speaking voice. It was marvelous, and unmistakable. He did uncanny imitations of JFK, Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR, and of course he did a devastating Truman Capote. None of that is here, alas.

  Headnotes to each interview sketch out the particular settings and circumstances.

  —Jon Wiener, Los Angeles, September 2012

  1Los 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 nine
teen. 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,1 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 Defense2 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.3 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.4

  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.5 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 a
fter 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.