VIDAL STATISTICS
Gore Vidal on Bush, Clinton and his cousin Al.
By Rob. Walton
Sixty six-year-old playwright, screenwriter, actor and best-selling-author Gore Vidal is becoming perhaps one of the hippest election-year voices in America.
With his role as an ineffectual liberal senator in Tim Robbins’ political satire Bob Roberts, currently in theatrical release, and his scandalously wicked revision of the Gospels in LIVE from Golgotha, just published, he’s a hot property. And a political hot potato.
I had the pleasure of speaking with the man of letters last month at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Jet-lagged and jittery from his flight from Italy, where he shares an isolated estate with his lover of 40 years, he was as witty and outspoken as his reputation.
Remarkably, the expatriate author’s background is in politics. His blind grandfather, Thomas Gore, was the first senator from Oklahoma, and his father served as director of Air Commerce in Frank1in Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet. At the age of 14, Eugene Vidal, Jr., adopted his grandfather’s last name as his first. In 1960, at the encouragement of longtime friend and neighbor Eleanor Roosevelt, Vidal ran for Congress in New York State (which he lost but received more votes than opponent John Kennedy). In 1982, he ran for office again, against Jerry Brown, unsuccessfully.
This year his younger cousin Al Gore, a senator from Tennessee, is running for vice president of the United States. Vidal has never met Gore, but he isn’t especially fond of his cousin.
“Clinton has charm, which will take him quite a long way,” he intones in an affected, almost British-sounding drawl which is peculiar to old money. “My cousin Albert has none, which is odd because the Gores are a very funny clan. He has no humor at all.”
Regardless, he feels that the wise pairing of two Southern statesmen will cinch the crucial Southern vote. But it’s no longer agriculture that empowers the South.
“Defense is the big thing down there, because we kept them in office forever, so they got seniority in Congress. They are chairmen of the committees. Somebody said Georgia was going to sink one day under all the armaments that senators in Georgia had ‘stacked on that poor red earth,” he jokes.
“It was always quite artificial, the South’s position anywhere in our system, other than when they seceded. The Roosevelt Coalition made absolutely no sense. Tammany Hall had absolutely nothing to do with Alfred E. Smith. On the one hand he was working for the black vote in the north and the other hand he was working for the pro-slavery people in the South. It was artificial, but the economy required that. It was Nixon’s wisdom to see that these ‘Party of God’ people in the South were very unhappy with the sexual revolution. They were unhappy with blacks getting uppity. Uppity women. They liked family values, is the new code word. It was an artificial thing. What Clinton did, by picking Gore, these are two good ol’ boys from the South. There’s no reason to vote for Bush and Quayle, particularly when they’re all on their ass, economically. So that artificial coalition is broken. I think this time the South will go to Clinton.”
George Bush is campaigning that the failures of his administration are a result of a do-nothing Democratic congress.
“There’s nobody on earth who believes that. Nobody’s interested in that line. The only line he’s got is to blame somebody else,” he continues in a slightly higher pitch. “Politics is nothing but repetition. They think that because Harry Truman won in 1948 running against the do-nothing Republican Congress, that he might win with it, but he won’t. He’s done nothing, either. Truman had a couple of very good points. Congress had done a number of things, particularly to farmers. He just concentrated on the Midwest, and Congress did mean the villain, the Republican villain.”
Despite the differences in the two parties, Vidal believes that, historically, Democrat and Republican are just different names for the same disease.
“Most people know that we don’t have two parties. We have only one party with two right wings. One called Republican and one called Democrat, and whether their congressman is a Republican or a Democrat doesn’t make a difference. They’re all in it together… We’re now thing about this year is for the first time it looks like we’re going to get two parties. The founding fathers never wanted them. John Adams denounced them as factions. The United States was not going to be a democracy, and it wasn’t going to be a monarchy. It was going to be an oligarchy for well-to-do white men. The rest of the country could pursue happiness until they dropped dead.”
“I suddenly detected this year…,” he shifts gears for an anecdote. “Out of the blue I got a call from New Hampshire from Jerry Brown. I hadn’t seen Jerry since ’82 when we ran against each other. He read a piece of mine in The Nation called “Time For a People’s Convention.” I want to go back to Philadelphia and have a new Constitution. Jefferson thought you should do it every thirty years. That’s a bit much, but certainly once every 200 years is not being hasty…. Jerry was very taken with that, and he asked me if I would come up there and help him. I said, ‘No way,’ but I would send him bulletins from time to time. Including one: ‘Find a place and dramatize the necessity for conversion from war to peace.’ And he did in Connecticut with that submarine, Sea WoIf. And he said to the workers who were about to be laid off, ‘You don’t have to be fired. We can use this technology to make bullet trains’ He carried Connecticut….
“If you took the Philadelphia option, you could begin to do certain things like putting the Executive back in his cage, restraining the Supreme Court from putting religious values into the laws of the land. But watching Jerry and Buchanan in the primaries, I suddenly realized the country is dividing, and there are now two parties. One is the party of God. The other is the party of man. Well feminists don’t like that, you say the party of humanity. This is very, very clear. Bush is desperately trying to hang on to the party of God because that’s all he’s got. That’s hence his support of the abortion, the flag, the prayer in the school, all the nonsense that they go in for. Plus, the party of God, in my view, is the party of pure hatred of everybody and everything. But they exist.”
How so?
“Because God has told them that black people are the children of Ham and so forever damned. That the Jews are forever guilty of killing our little lord Jesus, proving no good deed goes unpunished. That God hates the faggots, hates drugs, it hates this, it hates this. You can put together a hell of a party with hatred. That’s what most people feel most of the time. Buchanan ran as the would-be head of his party. Jerry ran as the rationalist party of man, which is the party of Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, keeping the government not only off our backs, but off our fronts. Suddenly it became very clear that a division was being made, and a real division, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was Civil War at some point between these two. There’s intense feeling…. They are very irrational. They are getting dangerous, and they are the most radical group that I’ve ever seen in the United States. They’re just waiting for a kick in the ass, and I’d be very happy to be one of those who delivered it.”
In the movie Bob Roberts, the incumbent senator’s bid for re-election is sabotaged by the ratings-conscious media, hungry for scandal and sound bites. Vidal’s novel LIVE from Golgotha raises the issue of what happens to history and news when you don’t challenge what you are being told. But distortion of the truth is nothing new to American politics.
“It’s always been an aspect of show business, politics. Abraham Lincoln was the first sort of calculated image maker. All that log cabin nonsense, that was true, but the rail splitting, he never split a rail. He was a railroad lawyer. It certainly gets crazier, due to the invention of television. ’52 was the first TV convention, really, in which television dominated, and suddenly the delegates realized they weren’t there to do anything but be extras.
“And the candidates themselves were of no great importance. What really mattered was making way for the TV crews. Now you have a situation in which hundreds of millions of dollars must be spent on ads and so on, which makes what has always been kind of a phony game into something ridiculous. The 30-second spot. Wasn’t there somebody out in Montana who got to be senator and they showed him on a white horse? And they said ‘Wallach for tomorrow.’ It was a beautiful ad. Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mormon Tabernacle Choir underneath the voice. He got elected.”
In Vidal’s world nothing is sacred. Not even grandmotherly first lady Barbara Bush.
“I don’t know her, but I’ll tell you a funny story that you must tell nobody except your readers, otherwise keep it entirely to yourself.” He leans forward and whispers, “A friend of mine, a famous liberal journalist, spent years attacking Richard Nixon. And as often happens, someone you keep attacking you become rather fond of. And even Nixon got rather fond of the journalist. So in recent years they buried the hatchet, and occasionally they had lunch. Well, after Bush was nominated the first time, my friend called Nixon and said ‘Let’s have lunch.’ They had lunch. He said. ‘What do you think of Bush?’ Nixon, who if nothing else understands politics, said, ‘There’s really nothing there at all. He just moved from job to job and made no great impression, and he really never accomplished anything or represented anything.’ But he said. ‘Barbara is something else. Now she’s really vindictive.’ That’s the highest praise from Richard Nixon.”
So who will get elected in November?
“Clinton/Gore. I would prefer Gore Vidal, but this is an imperfect world.”
There’s no way Bush can win again?
“Unless they can establish that Clinton is an active, not a passive but an active, necrophile and show him actually coming out of a mortuary with a smile or going into one with an intense look on his face. I don’t see how they could win. No president who presides over an economy as bad as this one has ever been returned. It just is not possible.”
