Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
I could hardly detail the mixture of feelings provoked by this essay by Christopher Hitchens about the madness into which Gore Vidal has slipped since 9/11. Hitchens and Vidal are in many ways quite similar -- both men of astonishing erudition and learning, possessed of greater knowledge about a wider range of issues than all but the tiniest percentage of the human race, both prodigiously gifted wordsmiths, both blessed with an arrogant iconoclastic nature that either attracts or repels depending on one's own preferences.
I was a huge fan of Gore Vidal as an essayist rather than a novelist (the only novel of his I ever read was Live from Golgotha, which was quite amusing if not exactly the weightiest tome he ever penned). For the second half of the 20th century, he was as close as we had to the great Mencken, who was America's finest essayist in my view.
Both men can be withering in their criticisms and are deadly with the intellectual insult and both can be absolutely incisive in their analysis on some issues. Which makes it all the more frustrating, I suppose, when they are each also inevitably so wrong-headed on other issues that you can scarcely believe the same person could be writing on the two subjects, one so purely reasoned and compelling and the other such obvious nonsense.
Hitchens, of course, has had some of his own problems after 9/11. Some of the positions he has taken, like his unqualified support for the war in Iraq -- which was always a bad idea, no matter the idealized and, I believe, entirely sincere motives that Hitchens had for supporting it -- are easy to object to. Others have been blown out of proportion by his worst critics.
But here he takes on Vidal's descent into the worst kind of conspiracy mongering after 9/11, which he believes Bush was in on from the start.
I was fortunate enough to know Gore a bit in those days. The price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included his pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn't quite belong. One was made aware, too, that he suspected Franklin Roosevelt of playing a dark hand in bringing on Pearl Harbor and still nurtured an admiration in his breast for the dashing Charles Lindbergh, leader of the American isolationist right in the 1930s. But these tics and eccentricities, which I did criticize in print, seemed more or less under control, and meanwhile he kept on saying things one wished one had said oneself. Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: "These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write." Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: "This is not at all bad, except as prose." He once said to me of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited "all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal." Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were "Joyce Carol Oates"? In an interview, he told me that his life's work was "making sentences." It would have been more acute to say that he made a career out of pronouncing them.However, if it's true even to any degree that we were all changed by September 11, 2001, it's probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant. If you look at his writings from that time, thrown together in a couple of cheap paperbacks entitled Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, you will find the more crass notions of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone being expressed in language that falls some distance short of the Wildean ideal. "Meanwhile, Media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind." To that "sentence," abysmal as it is in so many ways, Vidal put his name in November 2002. A small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan. (Not much sign of that, incidentally, not that the luckless Afghans mightn't welcome it.) For academic authority in this Grassy Knoll enterprise, Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced "the best, most balanced report" on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called "a small but reputable homeland publisher." Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his "Institute" a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called "Media Monitors Network" in association with "Tree of Life," whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing. And to think that there was once a time when Gore Vidal could summon Lincoln to the pages of a novel or dispute points of strategy with Henry Cabot Lodge ...
It became more and more difficult to speak to Vidal after this (and less fun too), but then I noticed something about his last volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, which brought his life story up to 2006. Though it contained a good ration of abuse directed at Bush and Cheney, it didn't make even a gesture to the wild-eyed and croaking stuff that Mr. Ahmed had been purveying. This meant one of two things: either Vidal didn't believe it any longer or he wasn't prepared to put such sorry, silly, sinister stuff in a volume published by Doubleday, read by his literary and intellectual peers, and dedicated to the late Barbara Epstein. The second interpretation, while slightly contemptible, would be better than nothing and certainly a good deal better than the first.
But I have now just finished reading a long interview conducted by Johann Hari of the London Independent (Hari being a fairly consecrated admirer of his) in which Vidal decides to go slumming again and to indulge the lowest in himself and in his followers. He openly says that the Bush administration was "probably" in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would "certainly fit them to a T"; that Timothy McVeigh was "a noble boy," no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war" by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as "a failure"; the country will soon take its place "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs"; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage--broken by "the madhouse"--after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be "the Yellow Man's burden," and Beijing will "have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport." Asian subjects never seem to bring out the finest in Vidal: he used to say it was Japan that was dominating the world economy, and that in the face of that other peril "there is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union." That was in 1986--not perhaps the ideal year to have proposed an embrace of Moscow, and certainly not as good a year as 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt did join forces with the U.S.S.R., against Japan and Nazi Germany, in a war that Vidal never ceases to say was (a) America's fault and (b) not worth fighting.
I find this all very sad. Vidal is a man of such enormous talents that it is painful to watch him fall so far so fast. I choose to chalk it up to old age and remember instead his past brilliance and wit.
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Comments
Ed, I share your general sentiment toward Vidal (both the Good Gore and the Bad Gore), but this is nothing new, and predates 9/11. I remember reading Vidal's account of his pen palship with Timothy McVeigh and thinking "WTF!?!?" - and that was in the 1990s.
This is not to say that he didn't have some good points about McVeigh. His criticism of the government's eagerness to conclude that the buck for the attack stopped with two psychopathic individuals was insightful; there are parallels between "lone evil psychopaths" and the later "evil Muslim extremists who hate us for our freedoms". But what Vidal did was the equivalent of a shrink who sleeps with his patients - he went so far trying to understand the terrorist that he ended up liking him.
Posted by: bullfighter | January 15, 2010 9:48 AM
The lessons we should learn regarding both Vidal and Hitchens are similar.
Both have enormous talent.
Both have enormous egos.
Both seem to react to success not by first learning more and advancing their new knowledge but instead as license to provide private musings in areas they have not done adequate research nor do they seem to think it important to consider the best counter-arguments to their positions (perhaps with the exception of Hitchen's debates on God where the quality of his arguments are developing).
The last book of Vidal's I read was pretty much phoned-in, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. I got the sense while I was reading this book that Vidal was merely looking to scam some poor editor out of some money where he leveraged his name and reputation with no intentions of actually earning his pay. Inventing appeared to have been derived not from research but rather the musings of the founders as they currently existed in Vidal's head (much of which was quickly discredited). The great Vidal delivered us American manna direct from his vast godlike intellect to us mere peons who should be grateful he wasted his time on us. The only reason I finished it was how brief it was.
If I require an example of a sloppy-thinker from the Left, Mr. Vidal quickly springs to mind. Thank goodness he's an outlier rather than representative.
Posted by: Michael Heath | January 15, 2010 9:55 AM
I am also a huge admirer of Mr. Vidal, but I have caught myself shaking my head on more than one occasion at some of what he says. This should be a lesson to all of us who pride ourselves on our rationality to root out the bugaboos that threaten to overwhelm our thinking.
Posted by: Brian Drake | January 15, 2010 10:01 AM
I got to meet Hitchens very briefly at the end of the Intelligence Sqaured debate about whether the Catholic church was a force for good.
I told him how much I admired the intellectual and physical courage he displayed by by testing his assertion that waterboarding was not torture, and then publicly admit that he was wrong.
If the world had more people with Hitchens' integrity, it would be a better place.
Posted by: Steve | January 15, 2010 10:38 AM
It brings to mind the human trait I find most interesting, intriguing, and infuriating, cognitive dissonance. It always amazes me when people I respect hold views that are demonstrably false but intrude on their world view.
I find myself constantly questioning my own conclusions to prevent falling into the same trap.
Posted by: HeartlessB | January 15, 2010 10:39 AM
I haven't read any of Vidal's books or essays, so my opinion is not all that informed; but he's starting to seem like Ayn Rand in that the more I hear him praised, the less I think of him. Ed praises his brilliance, but the only examples he offers are a few very short one-line insults. Meanwhile, I've long been hearing of opinions of his that are nothing short of racist: he hates Israel and questions the patriotism of those who support it, and he's overtly called for some sort of grand alliance of white nations against those "grimly efficient" Orientals who are (or were, back in the '80s) taking all our jobs. He seems to have long been one of those Americans who took reasonable criticism of US actions to unreasonable extremes of hatred and lumpen-snobbish disdain for those poor stupid sheeple who aren't as literary as he is. (It's easy to exult at other Americans paying the price for their stupidity when you're insulated from the same consequences.) Quite frankly, his trooferism and his liking for racists like McVeigh and Lindbergh aren't much of a stretch for him, and aren't even surprising.
I remember his famous public spat with paleo-neocon blowhard Norman Podheretz: all it did was get him extra attention ("Most Famous Literary Food-Fight of All Time!!!"), while being totally ineffective in discrediting Poddy's Rambo-wannabee horseshit. Vidal really seemed like the kind of "man of letters" or "famous person" who had to pick a fight with someone just to get his own name stuck to that of some other "famous person."
At times Vidal looks like he's trying to be a pseudo-liberal Ayn Rand: blustering, boorish, self-important, pissing on the people he pretends to champion, churning out bloated volumes to cement his Great Writer cred, and trying to hog attention by being self-consciously "outrageous" and "iconoclastic" without having all that much to say. His fifteen minutes ran out long ago, and if being a troofer doesn't give him the umpteenth extension he wants, he'll probably become a birfer as well.
Posted by: Raging Bee | January 15, 2010 10:53 AM
Gore Vidal also believed that the published diary of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot Gov. George Wallace, was a hoax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Assassin%27s_Diary
Posted by: Will E. | January 15, 2010 10:59 AM
Why is it so difficult for people to accept, much less expect, human shortcomings and contradictions in one's idols? It's like the people who are angry, scandalized and/or personally insulted at the recent revelations about Tiger Woods and Mark McGwire. Vidal and Hitchens are, indeed, brilliant--but does that make them immune from lapses into stupid (or any other human fault)? No, and it's naive to expect otherwise.
Posted by: gary l. day | January 15, 2010 11:15 AM
Gary Day @ 8,
I think you miss the point of our criticisms. At the end of the day Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers of all time, regardless of his sexual picadillos. His record matches his reputation.
What some of us are arguing here is that Mr. Vidal's ability to recently and currently market himself as a brand worthy of our consideration far exceeds the quality of his recent and current work product (with some examples of failures going back prior to the recent as well). Some of us believe Mr. Hitchens risks the same results where I think many in this forum are rooting for his deserved future success by hoping Hitchens will consider Vidal's actual legacy a teachable moment for himself in what not to do.
Posted by: Michael Heath | January 15, 2010 11:30 AM
This should be a lesson to all of us who pride ourselves on our rationality to root out the bugaboos that threaten to overwhelm our thinking.
@Brian Drake: very well said!
Posted by: Kristine | January 15, 2010 12:05 PM
Re: Michael Heath @2, observation on enormous talent and enormous egos.
I think there is a tendency of people exhibiting those two characteristics to also have paranoid traits, and it is probably well-documented that paranoid traits get worse with age. So Vidal's geriatric obsession with conspiracy theories is probably not too surprising.
Also, there is plenty of evidence that the first intellectual faculty that goes with old age is self-control, which is why arrogant people (and arrogance combined with actual erudition and sharpness can be an admirable quality) often become outright assholes.
Hitchens may be saved from that fate by the population-control effects of ethanol.
Posted by: bullfighter | January 15, 2010 12:08 PM
"I told him how much I admired the intellectual and physical courage he displayed by by testing his assertion that waterboarding was not torture, and then publicly admit that he was wrong."
I'm still baffled that it requires any amount of courage to admit one is wrong.
Posted by: Katharine | January 15, 2010 12:39 PM
It happened to Dennis Miller and Ed Koch as well. Ed's never come back.
Posted by: e-sabbath | January 15, 2010 1:05 PM
Katharine #8
I'm still baffled that it requires any amount of courage to admit one is wrong.
I know that I do it all the time too, but how often do you see a public figure do it? I am a scientist, a field where we are meant to constantly challenge our own assumptions, and where being wrong happens to most of us most of the time. I am keenly aware that many, if not most, scientists allow pride to prevent them from seeing the merits of another's arguments. Admitting a mistake is an example of intellectual integrity (if not actual courage) - if you find it easy, it is only because you possess an unusual degree of such integrity.
Moreover, Hitchens didn't just allow another to present evidence, then admit his mistake - he actively went in search of it himself. Given the very real physical danger presented by stressing an aging alcoholic's body that way, this becomes an example of intellectual integrity and physical courage.
Posted by: Steve | January 15, 2010 1:42 PM
Hitchens I'm not so sure is such a fine fellow as folks around here might be inclined to think. It seems to me he has a distressing tendency to agree with whomever is picking up his bartab.
Vidal was an inspiration to me, but his writing has gradually taken on a creepy edge to it going back as far as the controversy surrounding Lincoln, when his hatred of modern America began to emerge.
In many ways he has become more and more sympathetic to the nativists & agrarians of the 19th century.
To some extent his snobbery always had a bit of this in it, but it used to be balanced with a tolerance, decency and common sense that has now more or less disappeared.
Posted by: Oran Kelley | January 15, 2010 2:53 PM
If you are to read any book by Gore Vidal, read his "Lincoln", a brilliant evocation of Washington in the Civil War years.
It gives a view of Lincoln from a leftish perspective, based a lot on Edmund Wilson, not the real man but a well-honed and defensible historical characterization. The book more or less takes the viewpoint of Lincoln's young secretary, John Hayes (a real person who became Secretary of State). Another viewpoint is that of one of the co-conspirators of John Wilkes Booth.
The book is part of a rough trilogy of US historical novels - "Burr" and "1876" were the others, neither of which I have bothered reading. Possibly, "Lincoln" was when Vidal's genius peaked. The only other book of his I have read was his "Julian" about the last pagan Roman Emperor, an example of Vidal's bias towards history's losers (like Aaron Burr). The book was ok but not great.
Posted by: toby | January 15, 2010 3:09 PM
Oran @15:
I'm not going to speak for others around here, but I tend to think of Christopher Hitchens in somewhat the same light as I do Karen Armstrong or Fred Clark -- while there are fundamental differences between their beliefs and mine, they're still much closer allies than they are opponents. Hitchens is a prime example of how someone who may be on an entirely different stretch of the ideological spectrum can still be a valid part of the debate -- after all, anyone willing to go through with something as traumatizing as waterboarding to prove a point and admit they were wrong about it is to be respected, even if they don't change their mind about whether it should be used or not. At least he's willing to put his money (or bucket) where his mouth is, unlike the legions of chickenhawks that set Iraq policy during the Bush administration.
Posted by: Brian X | January 15, 2010 3:24 PM
Actually, I don't believe Hitchens ever said waterboarding was not torture. That isn't why he agreed to undergo it. It was that Mancow guy who swore it wasn't torture and then had it done and changed his mind.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | January 15, 2010 3:30 PM
Hitchens is one of those guys that's fun to watch, especially if he's on your side, but I don't really take most of what he says seriously.
He's extremely effective in debates, though.
Posted by: James Sweet | January 15, 2010 3:57 PM
Katharine @12---
I think it takes more and more courage to admit one is wrong. These days, we fetishise "accountability"--- admitting you're wrong opens you up to punishment (say, loss of job, funding, or professional standing) and opens you up as well to never being taken seriously again. After all, you were wrong once... The old Latin tag about false in one thing, false in all gets re-phrased to be 'wrong once, wrong always'.
In a world where all-too-many debates are overheated, and where everyone is all-too-willing to ascribe bad motives to opponents, saying "Sorry, I was wrong" lays one open to accusations of betraying one's supporters and, more often than not, outright lying about at least one of the positions you've taken.
Posted by: DesertHedgehog | January 15, 2010 4:42 PM
Uh, no, not even close. (Comments like that show how intellectually circumscribed you are.) I love what Michael Moorcock wrote re: the parasite Gore Vidal in his article Epic Pooh:
"...and there is nobody more risible than the provincial American literary snob - Gore Vidal being the most developed example..."
Posted by: Milesius | January 15, 2010 5:02 PM
Milesius: you may be right about "the provincial American literary snob," but that has nothing to do with Vidal's intellect. A person can be an insecure attention-hogging pretentious snob without being uneducated.
Posted by: Raging Bee | January 15, 2010 5:34 PM
Hitchens is all blowing style, raging over a vast hollow of no substance.
I can't remember where I saw it, but I saw a thing with Hitchens, Dennett, and someone else. And Hitchens was just utterly ridiculous. He would try to stay Astounding, Profound Things, and just came off as a total twit in the face of real intellect.
Posted by: Anonsters | January 15, 2010 7:37 PM
Vidal took time on election night 08 to baffle British television viewers (which had the effect of rousing me out of a doze on the sofa at 4.45am GMT):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD0p-wfCARk
I liked his novel Creation very much, although a scholar of Zoroastrianism I mentioned this to snorted. Palimpsest was also a good read, as he seems to have met just about everyone. Shame some of his anecdotes have to be taken with a pinch of salt, though, such as the gay subtext to Ben-Hur he supposedly added and which was kept secret from Charlton Heston.
Posted by: Bartholomew | January 15, 2010 7:58 PM
Vidal had his moments, then lost the plot.
Let's be clear about Hitchens. For a time he was both a brilliant writer and journalist - his critiques of the Reaganites in the 1980's and Clinton in the 1990's were often spot on, and a delight to read. The guy has a handle on the language that is enviable, at least to me.
However, he completely lost his integrity after 9/11, choosing to back the lies of the Bush administration as it maneuvered us into a pointless and stupid war because Hitchens had his own agenda - the liberation of the Kurdish people. It was a noble agenda, at least until he chose to go on TV and back the Bushies to the hilt, knowing they were lying through their collective teeth. As long as it benefited the Kurds, Hitchens could care less about the rest of it - the hundreds of thousands of dead, the astonishing cost, the endlessness of it, the boost it has given to stateless terrorists.
For that, Hitchens will forever be suspect to me. It is one thing to advocate for the Kurds, quite another to act as mouthpiece for a band of criminals bent on war.
Posted by: Fallsroad | January 15, 2010 8:18 PM
I'm not going to speak for others around here, but I tend to think of Christopher Hitchens in somewhat the same light as I do Karen Armstrong or Fred Clark -- while there are fundamental differences between their beliefs and mine, they're still much closer allies than they are opponents. Hitchens is a prime example of how someone who may be on an entirely different stretch of the ideological spectrum can still be a valid part of the debate -- after all, anyone willing to go through with something as traumatizing as waterboarding to prove a point and admit they were wrong about it is to be respected, even if they don't change their mind about whether it should be used or not. At least he's willing to put his money (or bucket) where his mouth is, unlike the legions of chickenhawks that set Iraq policy during the Bush administration.
My issue with Hitchens isn't really one of disagreement, I substantially agree with him on most matters of principle. My issue with him is his willingness to depart from principle for personal reasons--his personal hatred of Clinton drove years of political analysis pieces; his closeness with neo-con circles and the Iraqi exile community drove his support for the 2003 adventure; and his closeness with his New Statesman chums has driven years of softball lit crit he's done. He always comes up with ex post fact justifications for whatever positions he assumes, but they're just the sort of jerry-rigged justifications he'd have scoffed at coming from someone else.
And frankly, I don't care if he's been waterboarded--he uses whatever credibility he gains in some very questionable ways, if you asked me. I don't think he's a man to be admired. Nor despised, I suppose.
Posted by: Oran Kelley | January 15, 2010 9:11 PM
I often enjoy reading Gore Vidal's essays, but I always thought he was an ideological nut. It is hardly surprising that he can be such a vicious critic - I don't believe he's ever said anything good about another author in his entire life. Sometimes I think it's such a pity that W.F. Buckley is no longer around to punch him.
Posted by: MadScientist | January 16, 2010 7:36 AM
A small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces either insinuated or asserted that the administration ... was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan. (Not much sign of that, incidentally, not that the luckless Afghans mightn't welcome it.)
Cheap shot: many other analysts (such as Ahmed Rashid) reached the same conclusion - and what competent capitalist would invest a nickel in the Afghanistan of 2010?
Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as "a failure"...
This seems to me to drive much anti-Vidal rhetoric: he offends the "USA!" cheerleaders and the mushy middle, in ways that leave even critics of quagmire imperialism little room for nuance or evasion. Nobody, even here, seems to want to discuss the pink elephant sprawled in the living room.
Which is not to say that I want to defend Vidal on all issues - like Hitchens, he's a fascinating mix of error and talent (Ed B, if you liked View from Golgotha, pls consider The Smithsonian Institution). But it bears mentioning, especially here, that his bold advocacy for uncloseted gay sexuality, as far back as the '50s, deserves serious respect regardless of all later embarrassments.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | January 16, 2010 11:42 AM
That's not true. Vidal was an avid supporter of Italo Calvino and Anthony Burgess, for instance. Also think he spoke well of Paul Bowles, Christopher Isherwood, Dawn Powell, Tennessee Williams, Edmund Wilson, E. Nesbit. He can be very cutting but isn't always negative.
Posted by: Oran Kelley | January 17, 2010 1:27 AM
I'd suggest that raging bee read some of Vidal's essays before commenting. I would also suggest that Vidal is the most perfect American stylist ever.
Posted by: lawguy | January 23, 2010 6:23 PM
Hitchens's assault on Gore Vidal is replete with misrepresentation, inaccuracy and vitriol.
Read me rejoinder to Hitchens in the Independent on Sunday, here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/nafeez/
Posted by: Nafeez Ahmed | February 7, 2010 9:47 AM