Gore Vidal: ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’

[Paul Rigby]

A national treasure.

Remember the right-wing campaign to depict the Kennedys as harbouring a distinctly dynastic ambition? Guess who threw his elegant weight behind it?

C'mon, Myra, snap out of it: hero-worship is for fools and the personally ambitious. You're neither!

The Washington Daily News, 7 March 1963, p.27

Bobby Kennedy in ‘68

By Richard Starnes

I am obliged to Gore Vidal, a playwright of considerable talent, a politician of some passing competence, and a philosopher of no account at all, for brushing aside the shadows that obscure the political future and, of course, by extension the future of us all.

Writing in this month’s Esquire, Mr. Vidal quickly disposes of 1964. President Kennedy is home free in ’64 and thus the election next year isn’t worth one of Dr. Gallup’s worn-out clip boards.

But 1968 – now there is a magazine-length essay that is another shade of green. What the ordained soothsayer can descry in that year can scarce bear repeating in the presence of nursing mums, particularly nursing mums.
Mr. Vidal (himself a liberal, altho not lactescent at this time) finds that the Democratic nominee will be Bobby Kennedy. He finds further that the candidacy of Bobby seems doomed to succeed. He isn’t happy about the prospect, altho he appears to believe Mr. Kennedy I (the first) is/was/will be counted a good President. I am inclined to agree with him on that score, just as I tend to share his view that Bobby would be a disaster in the job.

What troubles me, however, is Mr. Vidal’s certitude. He concedes that it is always possible a winter-book candidate might have the poor judgment to die between now and 1968, a misfortune that would probably disqualify anyone. He also suggests the possibility there might be no election in 1968 if, say, all of us let Mr. Kennedy – no, no, not THAT one, THIS one – down and lost a war. But otherwise, if I read Mr. Vidal correctly, Bobby is all but fated to succeed his big brother in the White House.

Mr. Vidal writes, as all good essayists write, in a forceful, not to say headlong, style that admits to no uneasy doubts in the reader’s mind. The trick is to write something like, “in six years Hubert Humphrey will be 57” – a sentence which surely proves the author a man of integrity and some ability to foresee the future – and then to follow it with some assumptions too broad for leaping except by the most sure-footed.

The biggest flaw in Mr. Vidal’s argument is his assumption that John Kennedy will exercise his vast power to install Bobby as his successor.

It is at least debatable. Mr. Vidal cites frailties in Bobby Kennedy that might well disqualify him for the job he seeks (come to think of it, there’s another broad jump; Vidal just THINKS Bobby wants to be top banana).

It is only reasonable to assume that John knows a lot more about Bobby than even Gore Vidal knows. Is he going to risk the place in history he will by then have earned (don’t worry, if we’re still alive, he’ll have earned it) by handing the job on to his pushy kid brother?

If he does, he’ll qualify himself in the history books as a man more interested in creating a family dynasty than in keeping alive our frail experiment in self-government. And there is nothing in his record to date that suggests he is such a person.