Christopher Lydon Interviews... "Bah Humbug," by the way, from Gore Vidal Gore Vidal walks with a cane these days. His compensation at a joint reading in Provincetown not long ago was discovering that ancient nemesis Norman Mailer gets around on two canes. Great entertainer and great complainer, Vidal is a grimly erudite old comic who still fills the house, and whose repartee is not all repertoire. In our conversation in Cambridge, which I offer as a Christmas bon-bon , I asked him, as the novelist of Empire , whether the plunge in these Bush years from republic to empire was now irreversible. "Well," Vidal replied, "I think Gibbon would say: no. It's highly reversible. And try to step aside when the Capitol falls on you. Ours will go as the others have gone." Harry Truman's Cold War was the beginning of the end of our Great Republic, in the Vidal litanythe "Russians are coming" campaign when Truman and Dean Acheson knew that the Russians weren't going anywhere. "Senator Vandenberg told Truman: 'if you want this buildup because "the Russians are coming," you're going to have to frighten the American people to death or you're not going to get any money out of Congress.' Truman said: 'I'll take care of that,' and he did!" Gore Vidal can't be taken straight, but it's hard as well to shake his scathing contempt. His heroes in | |
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