CHAPTER 1: Los Angles Times Festival of Books, 2007
1. “Aleut”: an indigenous person from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
2. The Secretary of Defense at the time was Donald Rumsfeld.
3. Vidal’s memory is wrong here: the piece was by Matt Tyrnauer: “America’s Writing Forces,” Vanity Fair, July 01, 2003.
4. George W. Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War to avoid combat.
5. William Jennings Bryan: Populist leader from Nebraska starting in the 1890s; three-time candidate for president as a Democrat: 1896, 1900, 1908.
6. The Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2007 was given to An Inconvenient Truth, about Al Gore’s campaign against global warming.
7. John R. Bolton: Bush’s ambassador to the UN, 2005–2006.
8. “Heck of a job, Brownie”: Bush praising his head of FEMA, Michael Brown, after New Orleans was flooded following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Brown resigned in disgrace, widely regarded as disastrously incompetent.
9. Vidal and Buckley famously debated as commentators on the 1968 Democratic convention for ABC-TV. When Vidal described Buckley as a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley replied “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
CHAPTER 2: Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, 2006
1. With Honors, 1994 film starring Joe Pesci and Brendan Fraser.
2. Paul Bowles, novelist best known for The Sheltering Sky.
3. Vidal’s Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
4. The Doors: 1991 film directed by Oliver Stone, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
5. Gore Vidal’s mother divorced his father in 1935 and married Hugh Auchincloss.
6. America First was the leading organization opposing US entry into World War II and one of the largest anti-war groups in American history. Founded in 1940, it closed after Pearl Harbor.
7. Norman Thomas: Socialist Party candidate for president; Burton K. Wheeler: US Senator from Montana, 1923–1947.
8. John Peurifoy: US Ambassador to Guatemala, 1953–54, during the CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz.
9. Guatemala was the classic “banana republic,” where the plantations of United Fruit grew bananas for the US market.
10. Carlos Castillo Armas, “president” of Guatemala put in power by the CIA, 1954–57, ruled as a dictator.
11. Song of Bernadette, a 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones as a 19th century French saint who saw visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes.
12. Richard Shickel, a member of the Humanities Institute—film critic and author of books on film.
13. Michael Lind, “He’s Only the Fifth Worst,” Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2006.
14. Kitty Kelley wrote best-selling bios of celebrities that were unauthorized. Her book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty was published in 2004.
15. The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany, constructed between 1959 and 1976 at a cost of $2 billion, was widely criticized for its vast size—almost 100 acres of government buildings—its lavish architecture and its displacement of working class neighborhoods.
CHAPTER 3: 2000 Shadow Convention Radio Interview
1. People’s Party: an anti-war party founded in 1971 which ran Dr. Spock for president in 1972.
2. William Inge: author of hit plays in the 1950s, notably Picnic in 1953.
3. Dawn Powell: novelist of the 1930s and 1940s, then forgotten; Vidal played a key role in reviving her work in the 1990s.
4. At the Yalta Conference, Feburary 1945, FDR and Churchill agreed with Stalin on the postwar structure of Europe—creating a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and dividing Germany into four occupation zones, to be governed by the US, the USSR, the British and the French.
5. Charles Beard: one of the founders of the history profession in the US, an opponent of US entry into WWII. Vidal published a book of his own using Beard’s phrase: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (New York: Nation Books, 2002).
6. “Bird”: Lady Bird Johnson, wife of LBJ.
7. Fluor Corporation: an international engineering and construction company working for the military and the oil industry, based on Irvine, CA.
8. Joe Lieberman: Democratic Senator from Connecticut, was nominated as the Democrats’ Vice-Presidential candidate in 2000.
9. Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised (New York: Vintage, 1980).
10. Vidal was speaking a year before 9/11.
11. Clinton had bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum after receiving erroneous intelligence that it was a terrorist bomb factory.
12. Vidal was speaking before election day in 2000.
13. Kenneth McKellar: US Senator from Tennesse, 1917–1953, a Democrat.
14. Richardson’s letter is quoted in Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 39.
CHAPTER 4: Radical History Review Interview, 1988
1. Washington Post, July 4, 1984. This interview was published originally as “The Scholar Squirrels and the National Security State,” Radical History Review 44 (Spring 1989), 108–37.
2. Spielberg had just made The Color Purple, based on the Alice Walker novel about African-American women in Depression America, and Empire of the Sun, based on J. G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel set in China—two relatively highbrow films praised by critics.
3. Jacob Javits: Republican Senator from New York, 1957–81.
4. Gore Vidal, 1876: A Novel (New York, 1976), 29–50.
5. “Vidal’s ‘Lincoln’: An Exchange,” New York Review, August 18, 1988, 66–69; reprinted in Vidal, At Home: Essays 1982–1988 (New York, 1988), 288–300.
6. LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study of Presidential Leadership (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1981).
7. Recently Eric Foner made an irrefutable case for the view that Lincoln’s views of slavery changed: The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010). The book won the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards.
8. Tom Watson, Populist racist congressman from Georgia in the 1890s: Huey P. Long, left-wing populist governor of Louisiana in the 1930s; considered a demagogue by many.
9. Fred Harris: Democratic Senator from Oklahoma from 1964–73; he ran in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1972 and 1976 on a platform emphasizing “economic democracy.”
10. America First was the leading organization opposing US entry into World War II and one of the largest anti-war groups in American history. Founded in 1940, it closed after Pearl Harbor.
11. Alice Roosevelt Longworth: the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, born in 1884, a powerful figure in Washington political and social circles and a famous wit.
12. Douglass Cater: an editor of The Reporter magazine, who covered Washington and national affairs.
13. At the convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” and the TV showed Chicago Mayor Daley shouting back, off-mike. Lip-readers analyzing the tape later reported Daley’s response: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker. Go home.” Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke up: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam 1963–75 (New York: 1985), 195–96.
14. Richard Poirer, “American Emperors,” New York Review, Sept. 24, 1987, 31–33.
15. “Letters,” New York Review, Apr, 28, 1988; reprinted in Vidal, At Home, 272–87.
16. Harold Bloom, ‘The Central Man,” New York Review, July 19,1984, 5–7.
17. Clark Clifford: lawyer and longtime advisor to Democratic presidents from Truman to Johnson, for whom he served as Secretary of Defense.
18. Tom Carson, “His Country, Right or Wrong,” Village Voice, Oct. 6, 1987, 53–55.
19. Gore Vidal, ‘The Empire Lovers Strike Back,” The Nation, March 22, 1986,350–53; reprinted in Vidal, At Home, 114–19.
20. Vidal, “Requiem for the American Empire,” The Nation, Jan. 11, 1986, 19; reprinted in Vidal, At Home, 105–14.
21. William Dean Howells, 1837–1920, “the Dean of American Letters,” author, critic, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was outraged by the Haymarket executions.
22. Vidal, ‘The Real Two-Party System,” in Vidal, The Second American Revolution, 244, 245.
23. Walter Clemons, “Gore Vidal’s Chronicles of America,” Newsweek, June 11,1984, 74–79.
24. Arthur Vandenberg: US Senator from Michigan, 1928–35; opponent of the New Deal.
25. Andrew Kopkind, ‘The Chore of Being Gore,” Interview, June 1988, p. 6264. Fernand Braudel was a French historian and one of the greatest, who developed the study of large-scale long-term structures of capitalism in history.
POSTSCRIPT
1. Published originally at TheNation.com, Aug. 1, 2012: www.thenation.com/blog/169182/remembering-gore-vidal. Reprinted with permission.