RIP GORE VIDAL

yeah, one of umpteen times class whore America lost her innicence yadda yadda

Yikes. I want to quote a line from Sweet Smell of Success, but I won't.

no really, there was a mournful "ppl watching Dallas '63 on the store window TV" scene when I saw The Wanderers recently, and I nearly yelled "Spare me."

was Malcolm X a cookie full of arsenic?

you wanna be up high where the air is balmy

It's a Gore Vidal thread, I don't want to sidetrack it, but I would hardly know where to begin disputing this. Maybe start with the PBS Warhol biography, the part that describes how the assassination affected him, and then go from there.

the key word with Warhol is "affect"

my favorite opening to a vidal essay:

Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert Hoover was dead. The heart and mind of a nation stopped.

hahaha

Mr Veedle: "Andy Warhol is the only genius I've met with an IQ of 60."

really clem, you picked the wrong thread to cluck over ppl being poisonous.

Last word I'll say on the matter, promise. The segment I'm thinking about starts at 1:47:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljlHbHL8KUo

No, I don't expect that this will be worth anything to you. But "I don't know what this means" is a very good question, even though it's not a question.

GV on JFK:

"Jack Kennedy... was a good friend—-witty, sharp, and very smart. I would rather be with him than practically anybody now alive. But what did he do for us in a thousand days? He invades Cuba, fucks up, and brings the world close to a nuclear collision over the so-called missiles down there in Cuba. Deplorable."

(btw, he said Teddy's legacy "was nothing," which I disagree with)

KLOMAN: What kind of president would Bobby Kennedy have been?

VIDAL: Pretty sinister. A little Machiavellian. Not Machiavellian, he was Savonarola, he was highly moral, obsessed, vengeance. Jack had a funny story about him. Nobody could stand him, they put up with him because of John. And somebody came up to Jack and was complaining about Bobby's behavior. And Jack says (slipping into a hauntingly good Kennedy impersonation): "Look, you've got to remember, Bobby's a policeman, he's gotta arrest somebody. If he hasn't arrested somebody, he'll go home at night and he'll arrest Rose."

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.'

thankfully he's still an odious shit in the new Caro volume.

doesn't come off too well in Nixonland either.

(it took me 11-1/2 months to read)

at the same time we're in no position to tell black liberals that they have no right to their affection for the buck-toothed Savonarola once he converted to liberalism in the late sixties though.

still need to read nixonland. nixon's inspired more great books than any other politician, hasn't he? 'the selling of the president,' the HST campaign book, jonathan schell's stuff, 'nixon agonistes.'

and, yes, Vidal's views on the Kennedyklan were so ossified that he couldn't recognize poor dumb Teddy as the greatest liberal of the last forty years.

RFK converted to liberalism in his last 6-12 months!

At least Bobby hated LBJ for all the right reasons.

LBJ had the advantage: he hated RFK and himself for the right (and left) reasons.

J.D. you should read nixonland and then start a thread about it! it's great. i think it took me 11 1/2 months, too.

i think i will! need to read his goldwater book too.

Of the two, I thought the Goldwater book was even better.

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.