Jew World Order

Vidal was uncomfortable with the literary and political establishment, and the
feeling was mutual. Beyond an honorary National Book Award in 2009, he won
few major writing prizes, lost both times he ran for office and initially
declined membership into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joking
that he already belonged to the Diners Club. (He was eventually admitted, in
1999).

But he was widely admired as an independent thinker – in the tradition of Mark
Twain and HL Mencken – about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked
to call it, “the birds and the bees.” He picked apart politicians,
living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to
Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three
saddest words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates.”
(The happiest words: “I told you so”).

The author “meant everything to me when I was learning how to write and
learning how to read,” Dave Eggers said at the 2009 National Book
Awards ceremony, when he and Vidal received honorary citations. “His
words, his intellect, his activism, his ability and willingness to always
speak up and hold his government accountable, especially, has been so
inspiring to me I can’t articulate it.” Ralph Ellison labelled him a “campy
patrician.”

Vidal had an old-fashioned belief in honour, but a modern will to live as he
pleased. He wrote in the memoir “Palimpsest” that he had more than
1,000 “sexual encounters,” nothing special, he added, compared to
the pursuits of such peers as John F. Kennedy and Tennessee Williams.

Vidal was fond of drink and alleged that he had sampled every major drug,
once. He never married and for decades shared a scenic villa in Ravello,
Italy, with companion Howard Auster.

Vidal would say that his decision to live abroad damaged his literary
reputation in the United States. In print and in person, he was a shameless
name dropper, but what names! John and Jacqueline Kennedy. Hillary Clinton.
Tennessee Williams. Mick Jagger. Orson Welles. Frank Sinatra. Marlon Brando.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.

Vidal dined with Welles in Los Angeles, lunched with the Kennedys in Florida,
clowned with the Newmans in Connecticut, drove wildly around Rome with a
nearsighted Williams and escorted Jagger on a sightseeing tour along the
Italian coast. He campaigned with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He
butted heads, literally, with Mailer. He helped director William Wyler with
the script for “Ben-Hur.” He made guest appearances on everything
from “The Simpsons” to “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

Vidal formed his most unusual bond with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The two exchanged letters after Vidal’s 1998 article in Vanity Fair on “the
shredding” of the Bill of Rights and their friendship inspired Edmund
White’s play “Terre Haute.”

“He’s very intelligent. He’s not insane,” Vidal said of McVeigh in
a 2001 interview.

Vidal also bewildered his fans by saying the Bush administration likely had
advance knowledge of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; that McVeigh was
no more a killer than Dwight Eisenhower, and that the U.S. would eventually
be subservient to China, “The Yellow Man’s Burden.”

Christopher Hitchens, who once regarded Vidal as a modern Oscar Wilde,
lamented in a 2010 Vanity Fair essay that Vidal’s recent comments suffered
from an “utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire
absence of any wit or profundity.” Years earlier, Saul Bellow stated
that “a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things
Gore says.”

A longtime critic of American militarism, Vidal was, ironically, born at the
United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, his father’s alma
mater. Vidal grew up in a political family. His grandfather, Thomas Pryor
Gore, was a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. His father, Gene Vidal, served
briefly in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and was an early
expert on aviation. Aviator Amelia Earhart was a family friend and reported
lover of Gene Vidal.

Vidal was a learned, but primarily self-educated man. Classrooms bored him. He
graduated from the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, but then enlisted in the
Army and never went to college. His first book, the war novel “Williwaw,”
was written while he was in the service and published when he was just 20.

The New York Times’ Orville Prescott praised Vidal as a “canny observer”
and “Williwaw” as a “good start toward more substantial
accomplishments.” But “The City and the Pillar,” his third
book, apparently changed Prescott’s mind. Published in 1948, the novel’s
straightforward story about two male lovers was virtually unheard of at the
time and Vidal claimed that Prescott swore he would never review his books
again. (The critic relented in 1964, calling Vidal’s “Julian” a
novel “disgusting enough to sicken many of his readers”). “City
and the Pillar” was dedicated to “J.T.,” Jimmie Trimble, a
boarding school classmate killed during the war whom Vidal would cite as the
great love of his life.

Unable to make a living from fiction, at least when identified as “Gore
Vidal,” he wrote a trio of mystery novels in the 1950s under the pen
name “Edgar Box” and also wrote fiction as “Katherine Everard”
and “Cameron Kay.” He became a playwright, too, writing for the
theatre and television. The political drama “The Best Man” was
later made into a movie, starring Henry Fonda, was revived on Broadway in
2000 and again in 2012. Paul Newman starred in “The Left-Handed Gun,”
a film adaptation of Vidal’s “The Death of Billy the Kid.”

Vidal also worked in Hollywood, writing the script for “Suddenly Last
Summer,” based on Williams play and starring Elizabeth Taylor, and
adding a subtle homoerotic context to “Ben-Hur.” The author
himself later appeared in a documentary about gays in Hollywood, “The
Celluloid Closet.” His acting credits included “Gattaca,” “With
Honors” and Tim Robbins’ political satire, “Bob Roberts.”

Although happy to see and be seen, Vidal saw himself foremost as a man of
letters. He wrote a series of acclaimed and provocative historical novels,
including “Julian,” “Burr” and “Lincoln.” His
1974 essay on Italo Calvino in The New York Review of Books helped introduce
the Italian writer to American audiences. A 1987 essay on Dawn Powell helped
restore the then-forgotten author’s reputation and bring her books back in
print. Fans welcomed his polished, conversational essays or his annual “State
of the Union” reports for the liberal weekly “The Nation.”

He adored the wisdom of Montaigne, the imagination of Calvino, the erudition
and insight of Henry James and Edith Wharton. He detested Thomas Pynchon,
John Barth and other authors of “teachers’ novels.” He once
likened Mailer’s views on women to those of Charles Manson. (From this the
headbutting incident ensued, backstage at “The Dick Cavett Show.”)
He derided Buckley, on television, as a “crypto Nazi.” He called
The New York Times the “Typhoid Mary of American journalism,”
labelled Ronald Reagan “The Acting President” and identified
Reagan’s wife, Nancy, as a social climber “born with a silver ladder in
her hand.”

In the 1960s, Vidal increased his involvement in politics. In 1960, he was the
Democratic candidate for Congress in an upstate New York district, but was
defeated despite Ms. Roosevelt’s active support and a campaign appearance by
Truman. (In 1982, Vidal came in second in the California Democratic
senatorial primary). In consolation, he noted that he did receive more votes
in his district in 1960 than did the man at the top of the Democratic
ticket, John F. Kennedy.

Thanks to his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom he shared a
stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, he became a supporter and associate of
President Kennedy, and wrote a newspaper profile on him soon after his
election. With tragic foresight, Vidal called the job of the presidency “literally
killing” and worried that “Kennedy may very well not survive.”

Before long, however, he and the Kennedys were estranged, touched off by a
personal feud between Vidal and Robert F. Kennedy apparently sparked by a
few too many drinks at a White House party. By 1967, the author was an open
critic, portraying the Kennedys as cold and manipulative in the essay “The
Holy Family.” Vidal’s politics moved ever to the left and he eventually
disdained both major parties as “property” parties – even as he
couldn’t help noting that Hillary Clinton had visited him in Ravello.

Meanwhile, he was again writing fiction. In 1968, he published his most
inventive novel, “Myra Breckenridge,” a comic best seller about a
transsexual movie star. The year before, with “Washington, D.C.,”
Vidal began the cycle of historical works that peaked in 1984 with “Lincoln.”

The novel was not universally praised, with some scholars objecting to Vidal’s
unawed portrayal of the president. The author defended his research,
including suggestions that the president had syphilis, and called his
critics “scholar-squirrels,” more interested in academic status
than in serious history. But “Lincoln” stands as his most notable
and sympathetic work of historical fiction, vetted and admired by a leading
Lincoln biographer, David Herbert Donald, and even cited by the conservative
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as a favourite book. Gingrich’s praise
was contrasted by fellow conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann, who alleged she
was so put off by Vidal’s “Burr” that she switched party
affiliation from Democrat to Republican.

In recent years, Vidal wrote the novel “The Smithsonian Institution”
and the nonfiction best sellers “Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace”
and “Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta.” A
second memoir, “Point to Point Navigation,” came out in 2006. In
2009, “Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare” featured pictures
of Vidal with Newman, Jagger, Johnny Carson, Jack Nicholson and Bruce
Springsteen.

Vidal and Austen chose cemetery plots in Washington, D.C., between Jimmie
Trimble and one of Vidal’s literary heroes, Henry Adams. But age and illness
did not bring Vidal closer to God. Wheelchair-bound in his 80s and saddened
by the death of Austen and many peers and close friends, the impious author
still looked to no existence beyond this one.

“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives
on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge,” he once wrote, “all
the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here.
Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in
all.”