Over the last year I have been reading the essays of Gore Vidal, and he has proved to be one of America's finest essayists and a voice of reason in regard to politics and public policy. He is also an authority/reliable source in many areas. He served in WWII and wrote his first novel while doing so. He comes form a political background; his grandfather, blind Senator T.P. Gore, brought him up. He is related to Eleanor Roosevelt and was friendly with JFK. He ran for Congress in New York in 1960 and came in second in the California democratic primary in 1982. Furthermore, his father served as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under FDR, which gave him insight into the forming of airlines and access to Charles Lindberg. He wrote his first novel at the age of 20 and has subsequently written 23 other novels, most of them historical novels in which he did significant research to get the details just right. He has numerous interesting insights into the lives of other writers as well as being capable of writing compelling book chat. He has also written for TV and the movies, as a result knows a lot of famous Hollywood movers and shakers. His heroes (John Quincy Adams, FDR, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Bowles, Edmund Wilson, Charles Lindberg) and villains (Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, the CIA) are vividly drawn and expertly judged throughout.
My sojourn started with United States, the 1993 Winner of the National Book Award, it covers the years from 1952 until 1992. I am hesitant to recommend this tome that weighs in at 1295 pages and is the size of a reference book, but does seem all but indispensable, because it has many excellent and interesting essays. It is divided into three sections: state of the art (literature), state of the union (politics), and state of being (personal responses to people and events, not to mention movies and children's books). Not a light book to take on the train, this tome took me the better part of a year to finish, but was well worth it.
Subsequently, The Last Empire, is a more reasonable recommendation, it weighs in at a reasonable 465 pages in a pocketbook edition. It is also more recent in its essays, so perhaps of more interest to general readers since it covers the years 1993-2000. He makes some interesting predictions, which unfortunately have come true:
(On the CIA and terrorism): "We have neither the money nor the brains to monitor every country on earth, which means, alas, that if some evil dictator in Madagascar wants to nuke or biologically degrade Washington, D.C., there?s not much we can do about it. Certainly the CIA, as now constituted, would be the last to know of his intention, though perhaps the first to get the good of his foul plot."
"With Extreme Prejudice"
The Nation
5 June 1995
(About George W. Bush's election to the presidency):"With bad luck (and adventures), Chancellor Cheney will rule. A former Secretary of Defense, he has said that too little money now goes to the Pentagon even though last year it received 51 percent of the discretionary budget. Expect a small war or two in order to keep military appropriations flowing. There will also be tax relief for the very rich."
"Democratic Vistas"
The Nation
8/15 January 2000
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