I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with Jon Wiener

by Gore Vidal, Jon Wiener (Editor)

Overview

“I exist to say, ‘No, that isn’t the way it is,’ or ‘What you believe to be true is not true for the following reasons.’ I am a master of the obvious. I mean, if there’s a hole in the road, I will, viciously, outrageously, say there’s a hole in the road and if you don’t fill it in you’ll break the axle of your car. One is not loved for being helpful.”

Gore Vidal, one of America’s foremost essayists, screenwriters, and novelists, died July 31, 2012. He was, in addition, a terrific conversationalist. Dick Cavett once described him as “the best talker since Oscar Wilde.” And Vidal was never more eloquent, or caustic, than when let loose on his favorite topic, the history and politics of the United States.

This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate.

The interviews cover a twenty-year span, from 1988 to 2008, when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America’s place in the world, are all on full display. And, of course, it being Gore Vidal, an ample sprinkling of gloriously acerbic one-liners is also provided.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619021747
Publisher:	Counterpoint Press
Publication date:	03/26/2013
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was the author of numerous novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and essays. A winner of the National Book Award, he was also a tireless political activist and, running as Democratic candidate for Congress in upstate New York, received more votes for that district than any Democrat in a half-century.

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation and a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America , Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files , and Professors, Politics and Pop , and the editor (with Tom Hayden) of Conspiracy in the Streets.

Hometown:

La Rondinaia, a villa in Ravello, Italy; and Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

October 3, 1925

Place of Birth:

West Point, New York

Education:

Attended St. Albans. Graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, 1943. No college.

Editorial Reviews

Vidal, who died in 2012, never lacked for a pointed bon mot; his prolific output included novels, plays, essays, and memoirs. In this enjoyable but slight volume, Wiener (How We Forgot the Cold War), a contributing editor to the Nation and a radio host, presents four extended interviews he conducted with Vidal between 1988 and 2007. The conversations focus on politics, both in the context of Vidal’s historical fiction and in real life, including his campaigns for Congress in 1960 and 1982. Among other topics, Vidal discusses his Washington, D.C., upbringing and his grandfather, a senator from Oklahoma; theories about Lincoln and F.D.R.; his take on populism and party politics; and his assessment of the Bushes and the Gores. Though Vidal remains piquantly opinionated, the book serves more as an aperitif than a meal. For the uninitiated, it will surely whet the appetite to read Vidal’s novels, or to find essays that more fully explicate his political positions. Wiener also frustratingly repeats questions, with the intent of providing us with different answers from Vidal at different times and to different audiences, but a more expansive approach might have served the volume better. And, as Wiener himself notes wistfully, one also does yearn for the distinctive sound and cadence of Vidal’s mesmerizing voice. Agent: John Oakes. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics

"One need not share Vidal’s often contentious political preoccupations to welcome this return of Vidal’s inimitably confident, never remotely tentative “voice.” Essential for libraries where Vidal’s novels and nonfiction are popular." — Booklist

From the Publisher

These transcripts of four interviews with the late man of letters offer some provocative volleys but cover the same ground too often and don't show Vidal fully amplifying his ideas. Nation contributor Wiener (History/Univ. of California, Irvine; How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, 2012, etc.) promises that the book "offers Vidal in a more sustained mode of conversation: developing arguments, tracing connections between past and present, citing evidence. Of course he provides plenty of one-liners and zingers along the way." The zingers have more staying power, whether he's identifying John F. Kennedy ("a friend of mine,") as "a flippant figure of no depth" and "a mistake as a president" or dismissing generations of the Bush clan as "the most negligible family in the country." The two shorter and more recent (2007 and 2006) interviews that begin the book were public performances in Los Angeles, with questions from the audience as well. The earlier and more substantial ones are from a radio interview in 2000 and a 1988 print piece in Radical History Review. Much is made throughout of Vidal's historical fiction, particularly Empire (1987), his once scandalous Myra Breckinridge (1968) and his best-known play, The Best Man (1960). His sympathetic interviewer never questions his subject's assertions, whether he's claiming that this country has "the worst educational system for the average citizen, for the non-rich, in the world" or charging that the culture in general and the New York Times in particular had it out for him following an early novel about gay life. He also believed that Franklin Roosevelt had advance warning of Pearl Harbor and that Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks and could have stopped them. Missing the voice and presence of a man who could be an outrageously entertaining speaker, these transcripts fail to match the depth of his writing, as well.

Kirkus Reviews