Gore Vidal Dies - Another Great Human Is Gone at 86

[Adele Edisen]

It took up the entire page of this morning's edition, Peter.
Adele

The New York Times
August 2, 2012

Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer
By CHARLES McGRATH

Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003 after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said.

Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, put-down or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.

Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, "There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

Mr. Vidal was an occasional actor, appearing in animated form on "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy," in the movie version of his own play "The Best Man," and in the Tim Robbins movie "Bob Roberts," in which he played an aging, epicene version of himself. He was a more than occasional guest on talk shows, where his poise, wit, good looks and charm made him such a regular that Johnny Carson offered him a spot as a guest host of "The Tonight Show."

Television was a natural medium for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in his prose. "Gore is a man without an unconscious," his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: "I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."

Mr. Vidal loved conspiracy theories of all sorts, especially the ones he imagined himself at the center of, and he was a famous feuder; he engaged in celebrated on-screen wrangles with Mailer, Capote and William F. Buckley Jr. Mr. Vidal did not lightly suffer fools a category that for him comprised a vast swath of humanity, elected officials particularly and he was not a sentimentalist or a romantic. "Love is not my bag," he said.

By the time he was 25, he had already had more than 1,000 sexual encounters with both men and women, he boasted in his memoir "Palimpsest." Mr. Vidal tended toward what he called "same-sex sex," but frequently declared that human beings were inherently bisexual, and that labels like gay (a term he disliked) or straight were arbitrary and unhelpful. For 53 years, he had a live-in companion, Howard Austen, a former advertising executive, but the secret of their relationship, he often said, was that they did not sleep together.

Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist in theory, anyway but he was not convincing as one. Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.

A Child on the Senate Floor

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. was born on Oct. 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Eugene, had been an All-American football player and a track star and had returned as a flying instructor and assistant football coach. An aviation pioneer, Eugene Vidal Sr. went on to found three airlines, including one that became T.W.A. He was director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mr. Vidal's mother, Nina, was an actress and socialite and the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, a Democratic senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. Vidal, who once said he had grown up in "the House of Atreus," detested his mother, whom he frequently described as a bullying, self-pitying alcoholic. She and Mr. Vidal's father divorced in 1935, and she married Hugh D. Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis a connection that Mr. Vidal never tired of bringing up.

After her remarriage, Mr. Vidal lived with his mother at Merrywood, the Auchincloss family estate in Virginia, but his fondest memories were of the years the family spent at his maternal grandfather's sprawling home in the Rock Creek Park neighborhood of Washington. He loved to read to his grandfather, who was blind, and sometimes accompanied him onto the Senate floor. Mr. Vidal's lifelong interest in politics began to stir back then, and from his grandfather, an America Firster, he probably also inherited his unwavering isolationist beliefs.

Mr. Vidal attended St. Albans School in Washington, where he lopped off his Christian names and became simply Gore Vidal, which he considered more literary-sounding. Though he shunned sports himself, he formed an intense romantic and sexual friendship the most important of his life, he later said with Jimmie Trimble, one of the school's best athletes.

Trimble was his "ideal brother," his "other half," Mr. Vidal said, the only person with whom he ever felt wholeness. Jimmie's premature death at Iwo Jima in World War II at once sealed off their relationship in a glow of A. E. Housman-like early perfection, and seemingly made it impossible for Mr. Vidal ever to feel the same way about anyone else.

After leaving St. Albans in 1939, Mr. Vidal spent a year at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico before enrolling at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He contributed stories and poems to the Exeter literary magazine, but he was an indifferent student who excelled mostly at debating. A classmate, the writer John Knowles, later used him as the model for Brinker Hadley, the know-it-all conspiracy theorist in "A Separate Peace," his Exeter-based novel.

Mr. Vidal graduated from Exeter at 17 only by cheating on virtually every math exam, he later admitted and enlisted in the Army, becoming first mate on a freight supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. He began work on "Williwaw," a novel set on a troopship and published in 1946, while he was an associate editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton, a job he soon gave up. Written in a pared-down, Hemingway-like style, "Williwaw" (the title is a meteorological term for a sudden wind out of the mountains) won some admiring reviews but gave little clue to the kind of writer Mr. Vidal would become. Neither did his second book, "In a Yellow Wood" (1947), about a brokerage clerk and his wartime Italian mistress. Mr. Vidal later said it was so bad, he couldn't bear to reread it. He nevertheless became a glamorous young literary figure, pursued by Anaïs Nin and courted by Christopher Isherwood and Tennessee Williams.

In 1948 Mr. Vidal published "The City and the Pillar," which was dedicated to J. T. (Jimmie Trimble). It is what would now be called a coming-out story, about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually discovers that he is homosexual. By today's standards it is tame and discreet, but at the time it caused a scandal and was denounced as corrupt and pornographic. Mr. Vidal later claimed that the literary and critical establishment, The New York Times especially, had blacklisted him because of the book, and he may have been right. He had such trouble getting subsequent novels reviewed that he turned to writing mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then, for a time, gave up novel-writing altogether. To make a living he concentrated on writing for television, then for the stage and the movies.

Politics Onstage, and for Real

Work was plentiful. He wrote for most of the shows that presented hourlong original dramas in the 1950s, including "Studio One," "Philco Television Playhouse" and "Goodyear Playhouse." He became so adept, he could knock off an adaptation in a weekend and an original play in a week or two. He turned "Visit to a Small Planet," his 1955 television drama about an alien who comes to earth to study the art of war, into a Broadway play. His most successful play was "The Best Man," about two contenders for the presidential nomination. It ran for 520 performances on Broadway before it, too, became a well-received film, in 1964, with a cast headed by Henry Fonda and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. It was revived on Broadway in 2000 and is now being revived there again as "Gore Vidal's The Best Man."

Mr. Vidal's reputation as a script doctor was such that in 1956 MGM hired him as a contract writer; among other projects he helped rewrite the screenplay of "Ben-Hur," though he was denied an official credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams's play "Suddenly, Last Summer."

By the end of the '50s, though, Mr. Vidal, at last financially secure, had wearied of Hollywood and turned to politics. He had purchased Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion in Dutchess County, N.Y., and it became his headquarters for his 1960 run for Congress. He was encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, a neighbor who had become a friend and adviser.

The 29th Congressional District was a Republican stronghold, and though Mr. Vidal, running as Eugene Gore on a platform that included taxing the wealthy, lost, he received more votes in running for the seat than any Democrat in 50 years. And he never tired of pointing out he did better in the district than the Democratic presidential candidate that year, John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Vidal also returned to writing novels in the '60s and published three books in fairly quick succession: "Julian" (1964), "Washington, D.C." (1967) and "Myra Breckinridge" (1968). "Julian," which some critics still consider Mr. Vidal's best, was a painstakingly researched historical novel about the fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to convert Christians back to paganism. (Mr. Vidal himself never had much use for religion, Christianity especially, which he once called "intrinsically funny.") "Washington, D.C." was a political novel set in the 1940s. "Myra Breckinridge," Mr. Vidal's own favorite among his books, was a campy black comedy about a male homosexual who has sexual reassignment surgery. (A 1970 film version, with Raquel Welch and Mae West, proved to be a disaster.)

Perhaps without intending it, Mr. Vidal had set a pattern. In the years to come he found his greatest successes with historical novels, notably what became known as his American Chronicles: "Washington, D.C.," "Burr" (1973), "1876" (1976), "Lincoln" (1984), "Empire (1987),"Hollywood" (1990) and "The Golden Age" (2000).

He turned out to have a gift for this kind of writing. These novels were learned and scrupulously based on fact, but also witty and contemporary-feeling, full of gossip and shrewd asides. Harold Bloom wrote that Mr. Vidal's imagination of American politics "is so powerful as to compel awe." Writing in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said, "Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with."

But Mr. Vidal also persisted in writing books like "Myron" (1974), a sequel to "Myra," and "Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal" (1992), which were clearly meant as provocations. "Live From Golgotha," for example, rewrites the Gospels, with Saint Paul as a huckster and pederast and Jesus a buffoon. John Rechy said of it in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, "If God exists and Jesus is his son, then Gore Vidal is going to hell."

In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal's ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection "The Second American Revolution" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection, "United States: Essays 1952-1992," R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was "so good that we cannot do without him," adding, "He is a treasure of state."

Mr. Vidal's essays were literary, resurrecting the works of forgotten writers like Dawn Powell and William Dean Howells, and also political, taking on issues like sexuality and cultural mores. The form suited him ideally: he could be learned, funny, stylish, show-offy and incisive all at once. Even Jason Epstein, Mr. Vidal's longtime editor at Random House, once admitted that he preferred the essays to the novels, calling Mr. Vidal "an American version of Montaigne."

"I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist," Mr. Epstein wrote, "that he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn't subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist."

Vidal vs. Buckley (and Mailer)

Success did not mellow Mr. Vidal. In 1968, while covering the Democratic National Convention on television, he called William F. Buckley a "crypto-Nazi." Buckley responded by calling Mr. Vidal a "queer," and the two were in court for years. In a 1971 essay he compared Norman Mailer to Charles Manson, and a few months later Mailer head-butted him in the green room while the two were waiting to appear on the Dick Cavett show. They then took their quarrel on the air in a memorable exchange that ended with Mr. Cavett's telling Mailer to take a piece of paper on the table in front of them and "fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine." In 1975 he sued Truman Capote for libel after Capote wrote that Mr. Vidal had been thrown out of the Kennedy White House. Mr. Vidal won a grudging apology.

Some of his political positions were similarly quarrelsome and provocative. Mr. Vidal was an outspoken critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and once called Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, and his wife, the journalist Midge Decter, "Israeli fifth columnists." In the 1990s he wrote sympathetically about Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he wrote an essay for Vanity Fair arguing that America had brought the attacks upon itself by maintaining imperialist foreign policies. In another essay, for The Independent, he compared the attacks to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, arguing that both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush knew of them in advance and exploited them to advance their agendas.

As for literature, it was more or less over, he declared more than once, and he had reached a point where he no longer much cared. He became a sort of connoisseur of decline, in fact. America is "rotting away at a funereal pace," he told The Times of London in 2009. "We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together."

In 2003 Mr. Vidal and his companion, Mr. Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow's Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in "Point to Point Navigation," his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, "Didn't it go by awfully fast?"

"Of course it had," Mr. Vidal wrote. "We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals." Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.

Besides his nephew, Burr Steers, Mr. Vidal's survivors include his sister, Nina Gore Auchincloss Straight.

After Mr. Austen's death, Mr. Vidal lived alone in declining health himself. He was increasingly troubled by a knee injury he suffered in the war, and used a wheelchair to get around.

In November 2009 he made a rare public appearance to attend the National Book Awards in New York, where he was given a lifetime achievement award. He had evidently not prepared any remarks, and instead delivered a meandering impromptu speech that was sometimes funny and sometimes a little hard to follow. At one point he even seemed to speak fondly of Buckley, his old nemesis. It sounded like a summing up.

"Such fun, such fun," he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2012

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a television appearance during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist. It also described incorrectly Mr. Vidal's connection with former Vice President Al Gore. Although Mr. Vidal frequently referred jokingly to Mr. Gore as his cousin, they were not related. And Mr. Vidal's relationship with his longtime live-in companion, Howard Austen, was also described incorrectly. According to Mr. Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest," they had sex the night they met, but did not sleep together after they began living together. It was not true that they never had sex.

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks Adele, Good Obit, but still waiting for one from some good writer of his political viewpoint.

Here are some of the articles he wrote in the Nation.

[Keith Millea]

Gore Vidal could take one of those banal sit-coms and turn it into a profound statement of truth.

Check it out below........

[Peter Lemkin]

GORE VIDAL: The United States is not a normal country. We are underwe're a homeland now, under military surveillance and military control. The president asked the Congress right after 9/11 not to conduct a major investigation, "as it might deter our search for terrorism, wherever it may be in the world." So Congress obediently rolled over.

There wasI remember Pearl Harbor. I was a kid then. And within three years of it, I had enlisted in the Army. That's what we did in those days. We did not go off to the Texas air force and hide.

I realized the country has totally changed, that the government is not responsive to the people, either in protecting us from something like 9/11, which they should have done, could have done, did not do, and then, when it did happen, to investigate, investigate, investigate. So I wrote two little books, one called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which I try to go into the why Osama bin Laden, if it were he, or whoever it was, why it was done. And I wrote another one, Dreaming War, on why we were not protected at 9/11, which ordinarily would have led to the impeachment of the president of the United States who had allowed it to happen. They said they had no information. Since then, every day the New York Times prints another mountain of people who said they had warned the government, they had warned the government. President Putin of Russia, he had warned us. President Mubarak of Egypt, he had warned us. Three members of Mossad claim that they had come to the United States to warn us that sometime in September something unpleasant might come out of the sky in our direction. Were we defended? No, we were not defended. Has this ever been investigated? No, it hasn't. There was some attempt at the midterm election. There was a pro forma committee in Congress, which has done nothing thus far. What are we? Three years later. This is shameful.

The media, which is controlled by the great conglomerates, which control the political system, has done an atrocious job of reporting, though sometimes good stories get in. I've worn my eyes out studying the Wall Street Journal, which despite its dreadful editorial policies, is a pretty good newspaper of record, which the New York Times is not. If you read the Wall Street Journal very carefully, you can pretty much figure out what happened that day.

At the time of the first hijacking, according to law, FAA, it is mandatory, within four minutes of a hijacking, fighter planes from the nearest airbase, military base, go up to scramble. That means go up and force the plane down, find out who they are, find out what's happening. For one hour and 50 minutes, I think it was, no fighter plane went up. During that hour and 20 minutes, we lost the two towers and one side of the Pentagon. Why didn't they go up? No description from the government. No excuse. A lot of mumbling stories, which were then retracted, and new stories replaced them. That, to me, was the end of the republic.

We no longer had a Congress which would ask questions, which it was supposedin place to do, of the executive. We have a commander-in-chief who likes strutting around in military uniform, which no previous commander-in-chief ever did, as they're supposed to be civilians keeping charge of the military. This thing is surrealistic now, and it is getting nastier and nastier as we are more and more kept in the dark about those things which most affect us, which are war and peace, prosperity and poverty. These are the main things that a government should look after and we, the people, should be told about. We have been told nothing. And every voice is silent.

So I wrote two little books, which were then noticed by people who like to look at the internet, and then a few hundred thousand people have bought them. And I don't come out with conspiracy theories. I never became a journalist. I'm a historian. Because journalists give you their opinions and pretend they're facts. I don't give you my opinions, because they may be valuable to my mother, but they are of no value to anybody else. They may be of value to me. But I give the facts as I find them, and I list them. And they're quite deadly.

This government is culpable of, if nothing less, negligence. Why were we not protected? With all the air bases, fighter planes, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, not one of them went aloft while the hijackings took place. Finally, two from Otis Field in Massachusetts arrived at the Twin Towers, I think at the time the second one was hit. If anybody had been thinking, they would have gone on to Washington to try and prevent the attack on the Pentagon. They went back to Otis, back to Massachusetts. So I ask these questions, which Congress should ask, does not ask, which the press should ask, but it's too frightened. It's a reign of terror now.

[Peter Lemkin]

"We Are The Patriots," by Gore Vidal. The Nation, June 2, 2003:

I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanityKorea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last centuryand I lived through three-quarters of itwe still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nationof we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peacedemonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded. During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam, replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to fulfill.

So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the government from presidency to Congress to, most ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the means have always been there. It took the higher greed and other interests to make this coup d'état work.

It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement that most school history books omit his key words.

Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might, he said, provide good government in the short term.

There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush Administration. Think, finally, of the electoral college, a piece of dubious, antidemocratic machinery that Franklin doubtless saw as a source of deepest corruption and subsequent mischief for the Republic, as happened not only in 1876 but in 2000.

Franklin's prophecy came true in December 2000, when the Supreme Court bulldozed its way through the Constitution in order to select as its President the loser in the election of that year. Despotism is now securely in the saddle. The old Republic is a shadow of itself, and we now stand in the glare of a nuclear world empire with a government that sees as its true enemy "we the people," deprived of our electoral franchise. War is the usual aim of despots, and serial warfare is what we are going to get unlesswith help from well-wishers in new old Europe and from ourselves, awake at lastwe can persuade this peculiar Administration that they are acting entirely on their vicious own, and against all our history.

The other night on CNN I brought the admirable Aaron Brown to a full stop, not, this time, with Franklin but with John Quincy Adams, who said in 1821, on the subject of our fighting to liberate Greece from Turkey, the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." If the United States took up all foreign affairs, "she might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit," her own soul.

Should we be allowed in 2004 to hold a presidential election here in the homeland, I suspect we shall realize that the only regime change that need concern our regained spiritor soulis in Washington.

President Adams is long since dead. And we have now been in the empire business since 1898: We had promised to give the Filipinos their independence from Spain. Then we changed our mind, killing some 200,000 of them in the process of Americanizing them.

A few years ago there was a significant exchange between then-General Colin Powell and then-statesperson Madeleine Albright. Like so many civilians, she was eager to use our troops against our enemies: What's the point of having all this military and not using it? He said, They are not toy soldiers. But in the interest of fighting Communism for so long, we did spend trillions of dollars, until we are now in danger of sinking beneath the weight of so much weaponry.

Therefore, I suppose it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a new generation would get the bright idea, Why not stop fooling around with diplomacy and treaties and coalitions and just use our military power to give orders to the rest of the world? A year or two ago, a pair of neoconservatives put forward this exact notion. I respondedin printthat if we did so, we would have perpetual war for perpetual peace. Which is not good for business. Then the Cheney-Bush junta seized power. Although primarily interested in oil reserves, they liked the idea of playing soldiers too.

Last September Congress received from the Administration a document called the National Security Strategy of the United States. As the historian Joseph Stromberg observed, "It must be read to be believed." The doctrine preaches the desirability of the United States becomingto use Adams's wordsdictatress of the world. It also assumes that the President and his lieutenants are morally entitled to govern the planet. It declares that our "best defense is a good offense." The doctrine of preemption is next declared: "As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." Doubtless, General Ashcroft is now in Utah arresting every Mormon male before he can kidnap eight young girls for potential wives.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. But Congress surrendered that great power to the President in 1950 and has never taken it back.

As former Senator Alan Simpson said so cheerily on TV the other evening, "The Commander in Chief of the military will decide what the cause is. It won't be the American people." So in great matters we are not guided by law but by faith in the President, whose powerful Christian beliefs preach that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

In response to things not seen, the USA Patriot Act was rushed through Congress and signed forty-five days after 9/11. We are expected to believe that its carefully crafted 342 pages were written in that short time. Actually, it reads like a continuation of Clinton's post-Oklahoma City antiterrorist act. The Patriot Act makes it possible for government agents to break into anyone's home when they are away, conduct a search and keep the citizen indefinitely from finding out that a warrant was issued. They can oblige librarians to tell them what books anyone has withdrawn. If the librarian refuses, he or she can be criminally charged. They can also collect your credit reports and other sensitive information without judicial approval or the citizen's consent.

Finally, all this unconstitutional activity need not have the slightest connection with terrorism. Early in February, the Justice Department leaked Patriot Act II, known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, dated January 9, 2003. A Congress that did not properly debate the first act will doubtless be steamrolled by this lawless expansion.

Some provisions: If an American citizen has been accused of supporting an organization labeled as terrorist by the government, he can be deprived of his citizenship even if he had no idea the organization had a link to terrorists. Provision in Act II is also made for more searches and wiretaps without warrant as well as secret arrests (Section 201). In case a citizen tries to fight back in order to retain the citizenship he or she was born with, those federal agents who conduct illegal surveillance with the blessing of high Administration officials are immune from legal action. A native-born American deprived of citizenship would, presumably, be deported, just as, today, a foreign-born person can be deported. Also, according to a recent ruling of a federal court, this new power of the Attorney General is not susceptible to judicial review. Since the American who has had his citizenship taken away cannot, of course, get a passport, the thoughtful devisers of Domestic Security Enhancement authorize the Attorney General to deport him "to any country or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government." Difficult cases with no possible place to go can be held indefinitely.

Where under Patriot Act I only foreigners were denied due process of law as well as subject to arbitrary deportation, Patriot Act II now includes American citizens in the same category, thus eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights.

Our greatest historian, Charles Beard, wrote in 1939:

The destiny of Europe and Asia has not been committed, under God, to the keeping of the United States; and only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power, or a desire to escape from our domestic perils and obligations could possibly make us suppose that Providence has appointed us his chosen people for the pacification of the earth.

Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.