RIP GORE VIDAL

i find the cult of robert kennedy even more odious than any JFK sentimentalism -- the whole camelot thing has been pretty well discredited, but hard-nosed liberals will still get all weepy thinking of 'what could've been.'

I think this is still a thing thanks mainly to Hunter S. Thompson... at least when I read his campaign trail books he was always returning back to '68 and basically reiterating that Nixon was pure evil and RFK was pure good.

the new The Presidents Club shows Nixon's outsized influence on the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies.

i'm a gene mccarthy guy myself.

Anyone seen/read Vidal's play An Evening with Richard Nixon? I haven't.

i just started the perlstein goldwater book but it's so depressing i can't make much headway

mccarthy is a genuinely fascinating character to me, basically a lovable eccentric and underachiever who writes poetry in his spare time and who seems like the least likely person in the world to take on lyndon johnson -- lyndon johnson! -- and somehow he actually does it. then he gets permanently knocked out of the ring, first by RFK stealing his thunder, then by the assassination, then by daley's thugs in chicago beating up his still-loyal followers, and it's so traumatizing he basically quits his office and disappears, except that he also makes these half-hearted runs for president for like the next 20 years. so weird. there's a really haunting description of him in the HST book that has always stayed with me.

McCarthy and McGovern were two of the more literate men in public life.

clem and J.D, thanks for the Schell recommendation a couple years ago. Anyone who hasn't read it: do so!

I maybe mentioned owning it, but I haven't actually read it. I just finished a book within the past few months that presented McCarthy in a less than flattering light, and I've blanked out on what it was.

That queeny nihilist!

the last caro book has some fun anecdotes about rfk being a thuggish dick to everyone but it also subscribes fully to the A Change Came Over Him narrative (and says that throughout the missile crisis he was the one guy in the room urging jfk to be careful).

nixonland is the best book i've ever read about the 60s, prolly cuz its author was born in 69. gotta get some distance.

Until Obama writes his – oh wait.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Caro almost apologetic about believing in the transformation of Scrooge McKennedy?

he's more just kind of thin on it. that book seemed kinda thin in general really. i assume there'll be plenty more bobby vs lyndon stuff in vol 5, if we make it.

this interview is from The Decline, when the one-liners are more obviously canned (tho i do like, on albion, "this isn't a country; it's an american aircraft carrier", even tho i guess it's just an old joke of orwell's), the history sloppier, and the mcveigh defenses crabbier, but it's a really good and sad profile i thought. plus it has a great kicker. wrenching, even, is the word.

Corrections!

hence my confusion about him and the companion

you know i think vidal gets a pass just based on the time that wfb said that being gay was like being a drug addict and that being vidal was like being a drug pusher

I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified – when some were not. He looks coldly at me. "Okay – name one." Pearl Harbour, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

not that pearl harbor was 'justified' or anything, but the interviewer's stance here is ridiculously simple-minded. it's pretty well established that the roosevelt administration had done a lot to 'provoke' the japanese in the pacific prior to PH.

I guess you could say the US provoked Japan by objecting to their invading a bunch of countries?

imo they just took a long-ass time figuring out how to respond to adm perry

that's not entirely unserious, you could argue the us presence in the philippines, etc was a provocation

Confrontation between two great powers over sea lanes and trade was inevitable, which is not to say that FDR 'encouraged' the bombing.

vidal says that right after, no? about roosevelt's "taunting". i'm not entirely un-with him there but then i don't share his total objection to american entrance into ww2. even if yes obv it's what finally made us rome.

yeah, and aggressive imperialism was the only reason we were even in pearl harbor. still glad we won WW2 obv.

A difference between being relieved that the insane battle FDR fought with the isolationist GOP/southern Dems and giving orders that forced Japan to bomb Hawaii.

my favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

*the insane battle FDR fought with the isolationist GOP/southern Dems WAS OVER. I need water.

the point where he really does become just a crab is when he handwaves away soviet imperialism with "they had a whole continent to play with". (like um so do we gore.) it's not enough for him to know america's an empire; it apparently has to be the only empire. (which it is now, unless you're a chechyan or a tibetan or or or, but that's not the point.)

favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

Jefferson did by purchasing Louisiana.

dlh, I may send you Burr next.

i have it! was reading it this morning.

it's not enough for him to know america's an empire; it apparently has to be the only empire. (which it is now, unless you're a chechyan or a tibetan or or or, but that's not the point.)

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Thursday, 2 August 2012 22:32 (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not enough to be an empire; other empires must fail

anyone watched this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLyvszhFAC4

burr is cool clear fun as usual. i worry tho cuz my early american history is terrible; he can say whatever he wants and i have no choice but to believe it.

I'm not too sure about Jefferson's relationship with the parakeet.

I watched that '84 video last year... He reveals his all-time fave film in it, which Eric will enjoy.

laughed so hard at "now paaaaaaaaaaaat, let's work on our verrrrrbs here."

haha i stumbled on that clip a while back and that line almost made me fall off my chair.

Rep. Bachmann told TheDailyCaller.com: “I had been a Democrat and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign and I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers and all of the sudden it just occurred to me."

“I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican,’ because the Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel and that snotty, mocking attitude to me didn’t in any way reflect who we are as a nation.”

my favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

― the late great, Thursday, August 2, 2012 9:31 PM (8 minutes ago)

i was relieved to find that this theory is not really a major aspect of his lincoln novel, a few snarky bits of dialogue aside.

otm

xpost

John Hay in Lincoln's last graf: "...Lincoln, in some mysterious fashion, had willed his own murder as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done by giving so bloody and aboslute a rebirth to his nation."

Vidal is not an insufferable snob...He is just a big reader and intelligent. I mean yeah he is liberal and gay but that doesn't make him a snob but rather pretty awesome

MusicJew158 2 years ago

In Hitchens' (much more complimentary) Vidal essay from the nineties he recounts sitting in a green room with Newt Gingrich and a GOP apparatchik who was fuming over a Vidal column. Gingrich said he would not stand by and let the man who wrote the great Lincoln be insulted.

i got that theory out of "united states" (the essay collection)

i'm fuzzy on the details because it was about 10 years ago when i read it but it was basically just the whole "better as a confederation of states" line and hand-wringing about american empire (whether ruled from ca, ny, tx or dc)

in light of recent congressional deadlock it seems relevant but i don't think that's exactly what he was getting at at the time

lincoln really creates the (modern) u.s. in the novel; there isn't much editorializing about whether or not this is A Good Thing, which is really how i like my history, i guess.

great video. damn bummed about vidal. much love to myra breckenridge and duluth too. really singular guy.

still haven't read Duluth or Creation or Kalki.

i have never read any of his books, which is something rather rare for me— i'm like an encyclopedia of gay literature, or at least i feel like it sometimes

anyway, don't think i'm going to start now.