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

[Magda Hassan]

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

Posted on Apr 11, 2009

youtube.com
The whip-smart and ever-sly Gore Vidal visited “Real Time” on Friday, giving his historical and sometimes hysterically funny take on the state of the United States. He also revisited a few key moments from his personal history, illustrated by some priceless archival footage found by Bill Maher’s crack research team. Is it too soon to make an Amelia Earhart joke? It’s not too late to make one about Sarah Palin, apparently.
YouTube:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQvleH7P0...r_embedded

Part 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qyCXY8OO...r_embedded
Part 3:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71bodwU1e...r_embedded

[Myra Bronstein]

Possibly my favorite person in the world.

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...gore+vidal

[Peter Lemkin]

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. -Gore Vidal

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. Gore Vidal

I'm a born-again atheist. -Gore Vidal

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn. -Gore Vidal

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -Gore Vidal

One of so many great interviews with Vidal HERE.

[Myra Bronstein]

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. -Gore Vidal

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. Gore Vidal

I'm a born-again atheist. -Gore Vidal

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn. -Gore Vidal

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -Gore Vidal

One of so many great interviews with Vidal HERE.

A national treasure. I was actually lucky enough to meet the man. Went to an appearance of his in a huge theater, which he easily filled, about four years ago.

Afterward there was a long line for a book signing and I got to talk to him. He was incredibly sweet and gracious. Whereas he had his crusty demeanor on stage and rarely smiled (though he always has that twinkle in his eye when he says something clever; he knows he's hilarious), he was warm and approachable and sunny and smiling and communicative with people in line. I never expected him to be such a sweetie.

I told him he ruined my life 'cause when I was a kid people called me Myra Breckinridge. He laughed at that, very quick on the uptake; he listens well which impressed me immensely. He doesn't just talk, he listens.

Just a darling man. And the person I most wanted to meet. But it's risky to meet heros; they can--and usually do--disappoint. He did not disappoint.

[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.

[Myra Bronstein]

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.

Interesting blurb Paul, thanks for posting it. But anyone who knows Vidal probably knows he has long hated Bobby Kennedy with the red hot intensity of a thousand suns. They had a notorious falling out in the White House and supposedly Bobby booted Gore out and Gore has spent every subsequent decade trashing Bobby. Therefore the subject of the Kennedy's is one on which that he can't entirely be trusted because his wounded ego is in the way.

I even mentioned that very fact a while back in this thread: http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ore+vidal: "Gore is Jackie's cousin and consequently the subject of the Kennedys is the only one that I take with a grain of salt with Gore, because he hates Bobby so much for an altercation they had. I think it keeps him from being as open minded as he normally is on the subject of President Kennedy--his worth and his legacy."

Gore is only human and sometimes his feelings taint his perception. That is not the same as being intellectually dishonest or corrupt or evil. If you go back and read that other thread however you'll see that Gore does not let his hatred of Bobby cloud his vision of the JFK conspiracy:


"But let’s return to the F.B.I. conspiracy to cover up its crimes at Waco. Senator Danforth is an honorable man, but then, so was Chief Justice Earl Warren, and the findings of his eponymous commission on the events at Dallas did not, it is said, ever entirely convince even him."

...In March 1993, McVeigh drove from Arizona to Waco, Texas, in order to observe firsthand the federal siege. Along with other protesters, he was duly photographed by the F.B.I. During the siege the cultists were entertained with 24-hour ear-shattering tapes (Nancy Sinatra: "These boots are made for walkin’/And that’s just what they’ll do/One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you") as well as the recorded shrieks of dying rabbits, reminiscent of the first George Bush’s undeclared war on Panama, which after several similar concerts outside the Vatican Embassy yielded up the master drug criminal (and former C.I.A. agent) Noriega, who had taken refuge there. Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit it will be repeated over and over again. Oswald? Conspiracy? Studio laughter.

TV-watcher have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. "Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?" A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators – whether in the F.B.I. or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco – are up to. It is also a sure way of keeping information from the public. The function, alas, of Corporate Media."
http://www.geocities.com/gorevidal3000/tim.htm


However, I find the ongoing talk of the Kennedy "dynasty" infuriating, and it's interesting to see that Gore had a role in the genesis of it even if he is just being catty. That dynasty crap is classic propaganda. Do we ever hear it said about the Bush Klan? I don't. Yet they steal election after election year after year.

Regarding hero worship, that's an interesting subject because it's such a human tendency, yet such a juvenile one. And worst of all it's one that is so often manipulated by the evil types who know psychology and know that the people crave a savior. So while it's very human it's also a flaw to exploit.

Still Gore Vidal remains my hero. He's a deserving hero. He's made a career out of discovering and spreading the truth, he's entertaining as hell, and he called CIA hack William F. Buckley a "crypto-fascist" to his smarmy bloated little face on national TV. Those are bona fide hero qualifications.

[Linda Minor]

[quote=Paul Rigby]
I even mentioned that very fact a while back in this thread: http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ore+vidal: "Gore is Jackie's cousin and consequently the subject of the Kennedys is the only one that I take with a grain of salt with Gore, because he hates Bobby so much for an altercation they had. I think it keeps him from being as open minded as he normally is on the subject of President Kennedy--his worth and his legacy."

I don't think Gore and Jackie were cousins, but Gore's mother was married to, and divorced from, Hugh D. Auchincloss before Jackie's mother married him.

http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/aubert-austen.html
Auchincloss, Hugh Dudley (1897-1976) — also known as Hugh D. Auchincloss — of Fairfax, Va. Born in Newport, Newport County, R.I., August 28, 1897. Son of Hugh Dudley Auchincloss and Emma Brewster (Jennings) Auchincloss; married 1935 to Nina Gore Vidal (daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore); married 1942 to Janet Norton (Lee) Bouvier (1907-1989) (mother-in-law of John Fitzgerald Kennedy); father of Hugh Dudley Auchincloss III. Republican. Lawyer; alternate delegate to Republican National Convention from Virginia, 1940. Died in Washington, D.C., November 20, 1976. Interment at Island Cemetery, Newport, R.I.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people...23769.html

A LITTLE HELP FOR JACK KENNEDY

I read somewhere how odd it was that although I ran for public office twice I have never really written about either race or, indeed, why I ran. Well, part of the why of 1960 was Jack Kennedy who had married Jackie whose mother had taken the place of my mother as Mrs Hugh Dudley Auchincloss. After my mother and I had moved out of Auchincloss' Virginia house Jackie's mother and sister moved in while my half brother and half sister became Jackie's stepbrother and stepsister. So many divorces and remarriages in our interconnected family have made for numerous weird connections as well as non-connections: I have four stepbrothers, sons of my mother's last husband, General Olds: I have not only never met them but I don't even know their names. Oh, what a tangled web is woven when divorcées conceive.

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, decided to throw the convention open in order to choose a vice-presidential candidate. Jack, the junior senator from Massachusetts, placed himself at centre stage, battling with Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with a record for fighting crime. When Jack lost, I wrote him a note congratulating him on not being Stevenson's running mate since that eloquent figure was clearly not going to beat Eisenhower; and did not.

As Jack began his long campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, I decided to help out with a play called The Best Man whose successful run on Broadway did him no harm. Some years later, I wrote another political play, An Evening with Richard Nixon: in this case my Nixon character, wonderfully played by George Irving, spoke only Nixon's actual recorded words; this decision to use his actual words as recorded over the years cost me more money in research than I was ever to make out of the play. But with Irving as Nixon the result was wildly comic because Nixon seemed to have no conscious mind. He said whatever was milling about in his overwrought subconscious. In speeches he often turned to Pat, his wife, loyally seated nearby, and, shaking his finger at her, he would intone, "We here in America can no longer stand pat." The producer, an old friend, suddenly succumbed to a fit of megalomania: instead of opening at a small theatre like the Booth where my Visit to a Small Planet had done so well, he opened Nixon at the Shubert, a vast theatre that only something the size of Oklahoma!, the musical - or indeed the state - could ever have filled. Needless to say, as always, in Nixon land, there were death threats for many of us, while The New York Times outdid itself by headlining the review "A play for radical liberals", certain death for a Broadway play. Actually the play was a sharp preview of Watergate, already unfolding in the wings. A dance critic, Clive Barnes, reviewed the play which had done well with tryout audiences. Clive conceded that it was very funny but, by the third paragraph, he knew that he was supposed to attack and did. I think his exact line was: "Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our President." I ran into him not long after and told him, kindly, that in Clive's native England one might refer to "Our" Queen but in the US we never say Our President. The best aspect of the play was a sort of limbo to which George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK have been assigned, quarrelling with each other as they watch with wonder Nixon's inexorable rise to the presidency. As it turned out, aside from revivals, that was to be my last new play on Broadway, made memorable by a young actress who played several different parts. In due course, I became godfather to one of Susan Sarandon's sons by Tim Robbins. Yes: I did say: Always a godfather, never a god....

On October 3 1975 I turned 50, an event that I wanted to keep secret. I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time's ruthless one-way passage. But that year friends decided to do something and Kathleen Tynan, second wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan, and my old friend Diana Phipps decided to give a party in London where over the years I had come to know more people than anywhere else. A club with a good cook was the site. Howard and I flew to London and stayed not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz. I remember I had letters to answer and so the morning of the 3rd I was up early answering them in longhand. Then Howard and I took the lift down to the lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood. First, the IRS went after my father with a long pointless audit. Then I heard from Mississippi that someone from Bobby's Justice Department had been snooping around trying to dig up scandal about Senator Gore while several court journalists were always available to think up items about me. I never blamed Jackie for taking his side in a complicated unbecoming row but her contribution was that we had not known each other until a chance encounter at a horse show, the last place I would ever be found unless it was after dinner at the White House when Jackie dragged Jack and me there. With that in mind, to Howard's horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, "Bye-bye" and vanished into Piccadilly....

[Dawn Meredith]

I saw Vidal on Real Time Friday night and he has always been a favorite of mine too but when the subject of JFK came up he disappointed me. Said that JFK was a bad president, citing Bay of Pigs and Missile crises. I came away from that viewing with the thought that he knew nothing about the truth about the murder of JFK. Which surprised me.

Dawn

[Myra Bronstein]

I saw Vidal on Real Time Friday night and he has always been a favorite of mine too but when the subject of JFK came up he disappointed me. Said that JFK was a bad president, citing Bay of Pigs and Missile crises. I came away from that viewing with the thought that he knew nothing about the truth about the murder of JFK. Which surprised me.

Dawn

Yup, he is completely unfair about President Kennedy, and worse than that he's innacurate. It disappoints me too, but it no longer surprises me because he's quite consistent about it. He holds a grudge, at least that's my take on it.