Gore Vidal died July 31. In 2005, I interviewed him for my weekly TV-radio show Hot Talk. We had first met years before at a dinner party at Marc Raskin's house in Washington, DC, where I had watched him monopolize the conversation by verbally destroying the head of a major museum. "He's a phony, you can smell it," explained Vidal later as the reason for his ferocity.
"And he does so little for the public's benefit. He thinks only of each exhibit in his museum as another notch on his career gun a typical Washington bureaucrat. I despise them."
In the TV interview he showed his loathing again, this time for the people who ran the country, not a museum. "The Founding Fathers feared kings and tyrants, so they made it clear in the Constitution that no one man can declare war; only Congress. We've had many wars after World War II: Congress has not declared one of them."
The man who wrote Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and "Dreaming War: The Bush-Cheney Junta" excelled at essay writing, but became better known as America's historical novelist and play and screen writer. His script for The Best Man, a fine movie, is currently re-running on Broadway.
