It’s good to see a serious appraisal of Gore Vidal’s views about the
current state of the Banana Republic under our Maximum Leader and his cronies. Edward S.
Morgan, author of the highly praised biography, “Benjamin Franklin,”
and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, gives the lie to attacks like Ron Rosenbaum’s that have smeared Vidal as a nut
case.
In a tour d’horizon of eight of Vidal’s books — including historical portraits (“Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams,
Jefferson”), historical novels ( “Burr,” “Lincoln”) and polemical essays (“Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the
Cheney-Bush Junta,” “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How
We Got to Be So Hated”) — Morgan makes the case both for
Vidal’s sanity and the vitality of his arguments.
He concedes that Vidal
delivers his views “with the certitude we too easily associate with the paranoid; and they are so
relentlessly one-sided and accusatory, so far outside of what he calls RO, the ‘received opinion’ of
insiders, that he may seem not only anti-government but anti-American.”
Make no mistake, though, it is a charge that Vidal “rightly rejects,” and most
important, Morgan points out, “he advances none of [his views] without evidence.” Can we say
the same for our Maximum Leader?
