What Has Not Changed In Over 50 Years: Gore Vidal, Garry Wills, Nixon

 I was working on a post, getting distracted by an eruption of pain, when I ran across the first video below.

Garry Wills came to my attention during law school with his Inventing America. I kept reading him over the years, but not exhaustively. 

Gore Vidal, I have been reading since Burr, and have tried to read as much of him as I can.

Because of these two writers, I would not call myself either a liberal or a conservative. I would have called myself a cynic at one time. Today, I will call myself an ironist.

 Vidal and Wills do not meet in the video. Too bad, that would have been an interesting conversation in my opinion. 

I went looking for a possible meeting of the two. No luck. 

However, I thought that I would tack on some of what I did find. Both Wills and Vidal have faded over the years. Vidal is dead, but his work declined before then. Wills is in his nineties which makes him somewhat retired. 

The sad decline of Gore Vidal, America’s most acerbic writer and fearsome feuder (The Independent) does a very good job of summarizing his career (albeit it omits his playwrighting career).

But Vidal was much more than a talk-show star and literary gadfly. He deserves respect for his historical fiction. Vidal’s profound sense of America’s past was demonstrated in his Narratives of Empire novels – Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) – which, taken together, offer a coherent view of the nation’s decline. I would also highly recommend Essays, United States 1952-92, a deserved winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Some books, including his religious satire Live From Golgotha, are perhaps best forgotten. 

I did not like The Golden Age; Live From Golgotha, at least, has humor. Here is the conclusion:

Although it is only 13 years since Vidal left what he called “this ark of fools”, he already seems a polymath from a lost age, the sort of acerbic, insightful political commentator missing in a social media age of foghorn popular pundits such as Piers Morgan. But when all is said and done, fame is fleeting; Vidal’s desire to be remembered as the person who wrote the best sentences of his age was always doomed. At Harvard, according to Leslie Morris, the Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, the item that attracts the greatest attention is Vidal’s screenplay for the porn film Caligula – which he himself described as “easily one of the worst films ever made”.

Garry Wills at 90: The influential historian has become his own iconoclast (Chicago Tribune) performs a similar service for Wills.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

The closest I came to Wills and Vidal crossing paths is in Garry Wills says people are being taken in by the Buckley myth (HNN excerpting part of a New York Review of Books essay (which may be behind a paywall).

I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public. There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal. One of the broadcasts, which the documentary makes much light of, took place while police and protesters were battling in the streets of Chicago—and things were not going so well inside the TV studio either, since at one point Buckley said to Vidal, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” 

sch 5/6