It’s Literally Wednesday: Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012)
Dave | August 1, 2012Gore Vidal, who died yesterday at the age of 86, was perhaps the last of the great writers of the 20th century whose oversized personality was perhaps better known that his writing. Along with authors like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, more people probably watched Vidal on television than read any of his essays, fiction, or plays. (He also wrote teleplays and screenplays.)
Vidal’s maternal grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, one of the first two U.S. senators from the new state of Oklahoma. He was also blind. Eugene Vidal Sr., his father, was an aviation pioneer who is said to have had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. His stepfather would later become the stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. He attended Sidwell Friends, St. Albans, and Exeter. Following service in WWII (which even men of privilege did back then), Vidal became a writer and never looked back.
Perhaps the height of his fame — which he always seemed to relish — came in his 1968 debates with William F. Buckley, Jr.
The United States was at war in Vietnam and at war against itself — largely along generational lines. Following the Tet Offensive, CBS News’ Walter Cronkite, the conscience of our nation, editorialized at the end of one broadcast that “… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of Vietnam] will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, followed by Bobby Kennedy. Riots erupted and cities burned. Students took over campuses from Howard to Columbia. Many protests turned violent — police killed three students and injured 28 others after opening fire into a crowd in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Violent crime was in a steep ascent, with the national murder rate eventually peaking at twice what it is today. The Beatles traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment and released the nuanced single, “Revolution,” on the B-side of “Hey Jude” (their biggest seller).
In this environment, ABC News hired Vidal and Buckley to provide commentary at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Both men were incredibly expressive and eloquent, displaying a quick wit and obvious disdain for the other. At its crescendo, Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley called Vidal a queer. (Buckley once held white supremacist views that he later retracted. Vidal was openly bisexual, which was extremely rare for that time.) That exchange can be seen here:
I was never a big fan of Gore Vidal’s historical fiction and rarely read his essays. Perhaps his most lasting impression won’t be his written works, but rather that of his personality. Vidal’s many television appearances were memorable, but none more than this.
This Week
Dr. Otis Brawley, author of How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America, Saturday, August 4th at 2:00 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, 409 John Wesley Dobbs Avenue, Atlanta 30312, adults only.
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We saw the current revival of The Best Man on Broadway in May. What a smart and witty piece of entertainment, and it still resonated after 50 years. And that cast! Michael McKean, Eric McCormack, John Laroquette, James Earl Jones, Candace Bergen, and Angela Lansbury. Holy moly.
Thanks for posting the YouTube clip. I watched that live in 68 and along with everyone in the room, I was shocked when it looked as though these two would start fighting in front of the camera. How on earth did the U.S. survive 1968!?
I must disagree with your statement that William Buckley was a white supremacist. I have read in National Review many times that Buckley defended segregation from a states rights perspective but was never a racist. I believe that from the late 60s, he condemned segregation and apologized for his earlier defense of it.
Watching the clip again after all these years reminds me about how important he was to the conservative movement. He deserves the same recognition that Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II receive for ending the Cold War and the demise of communism.
As for Gore Vidal, all I can say is RIP.
Dave didn’t state Buckley was a white supremacist. He wrote that “Buckley once held white supremacist views that he later retracted.”
Perhaps we should make room for the possibility that the National Review is not the most objective or historically accurate source regarding Mr. Buckley’s intellectual journey.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3406
A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.
A 1960 National Review editorial supported South Africa’s white minority rule (4/23/60): “The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.” In a 1961 National Review column about colonialism—which the magazine once called “that brilliantly conceived structure” (William F. Buckley, John Judis)–Buckley explained that “black Africans” left alone “tend to revert to savagery.” The same year, in a speech to the group Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley called citizens of the Congo “semi-savages” (National Review, 9/9/61).
National Review editors condemned the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham Church that killed four children, but because it “set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically,” the editors wondered “whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro” (Chicago Reader, 8/26/05).
Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that “chaos” and “mobocratic rule” might follow if “the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.” In his 1969 column “On Negro Inferiority” (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as “massive” and “apparently authoritative” academic racist Arthur Jensen’s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.
No question Buckley was a racist, and any “change”in view was probably due to self-interest and the desire not to be lumped in with a bunch of yahoos. Buckley was like many other privileged white males; he liked his comfortable chair and wanted to remain seated in it.
If I recall correctly, Buckley made an argument along the lines of: white people are more advanced — the NAACP, by virtue of its name, states that black people need advancement — and therefore a local white minority had a proper role in ruling over a black majority. One could finesse this by stating that Buckley did not claim that whites were inherently superior. At any rate, he later did renounce his earlier statements. Buckley was a towering intellectual figure, even if he wasn’t always right.
I watched the Buckley-Vidal debates with my parents. At the time I thought that this was normal sophisticated political discourse. While it wasn’t exactly civil, it was very serious and, as it turned out, very rare.
Wow, we are still talking past each other today in a very similar manner to this 1968 clip !
The sides are so entrenched…then, and now.
Read Vidal’s “Burr” a number of years ago, and still remember how much I enjoyed it. It was an often humorous look at our founding fathers (and their foibles), especially the somewhat unflattering, but very human, descriptions of George Washington.
I never realized how handsome Vidal was.
I’ve always laughed at the punchline to this story about Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. From The Telegraph: His (Mailer’s) finest altercation was arguably with Gore Vidal, though. Vidal described Mailer’s work, The Prisoner of Sex, to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to serial killer, Charles Manson. Mailer reciprocated in 1971 by head-butting Vidal in the green room of the Dick Cavett Show. Six years later, Mailer threw a drink at Vidal and punched him. Prostrate on the carpet, Vidal managed to utter the immortal line: “as usual, words fail him,” a comeback that’s gone down in history. Still, the pair grew tired of fighting and reconciled in 1985.
They had finally outlived their testosterone levels.