Gore Vidal: The devil's advocate

By DAVID USBORNE

The execution of the Oklahoma City bomber, delayed and now reconfirmed, has spawned a bizarre literary collaboration between a killer with "an exaggerated sense of justice" and America's spikiest intellectual.

Gore Vidal gets cross when people accuse him of disloyalty. They only say it, he thinks, because he lives for a large part of the year at La Rondinaia, a spectacular villa perched on a cliff above Italy's Amalfi Coast. "I am there, but only to write. This is something that the media, particularly the right-wing press, has to say to make me seem like I'm unamerican," he recently complained.

Whether Vidal cares or not about what people think of him is a puzzle. As an essayist, novelist and world-class wit, he has dazzled with his writing, erudition, his embrace of history, and his unyielding honesty.

Vidal, who shares La Rondinaia with his partner of 40 years, Howard Austen, has shied from almost nothing, including sharing stories of his loves and lusts with other males. Yet friends describe the maestro, as all his Italian neighbours invariably address him, as a thin-skinned and vulnerable 75-year-old.

"Gore Vidal is brilliant writer who needs to be told constantly how brilliant he is," Erica Jong said last year.

The targets of Vidal's intellectual wrath have included many individuals. He has famously sparred with Norman Mailer and William Buckley. (When Buckley called him a "pinko queer" on live TV, Gore countered: "I will always treat Bill Buckley like the great lady he is.") He has kissed and made up with most of them, but not yet really with his other bete noire - the country that gave him his posh pedigree and his very privileged launch in life.

If, perhaps, there is an American aristocracy it includes Vidal. The son of Eugene Vidal and Nina Gore (from whom he became estranged when he was 32 because of her ferocious drinking), he was largely raised by his blind grandfather, T.P. Gore, a senator from Oklahoma, in a Washington DC mansion that is now the Malaysian embassy.

Relatives included Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who became a step-sister. He is also, of course, a distant cousin of a certain Albert Gore, the not-quite US president. (It is a job that Vidal, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in New York state in 1960, has sometimes coveted.)

Yet his disappointment with America and its political system is famous. Last year Vidal found himself the toast of Broadway after the opening of a revival of The Best Man, his 1960 play about nasty backroom back-stabbing at a party convention, which, most critics agreed, seemed entirely up-to-date even now.

He has frequently shared his opinion that democracy in America is a lie, as it is not the politicians who govern the people, because they are mere puppets of faceless executives in corporate boardrooms. He has said that, were he to update the play now, he would probably set it in a management suite of, say, General Electric.

More gravely, he posits that it is America's hunger for weapons of war that keeps it ticking. And he excoriates the Government for imperial expansionism abroad and obsessively poking about in people's private lives at home.

In his latest venture, Vidal let it be known that he will show up at the US correctional institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, for the execution, now set for June 11, of Timothy McVeigh.

He was summoned by the condemned man himself as one of five witnesses he is allowed to invite to be present at his execution.

The invitation arose from letters exchanged between the two after Vidal wrote a piece in Vanity Fair about the bombing. It betrayed some sliver of admiration, if not for the act of terrorism itself - the blast killed 168 people - then for the motivation.

McVeigh, Vidal wrote, "suffered from an exaggerated sense of justice" and "went to war pretty much on his own."

McVeigh was specifically protesting the raids by the US Government in 1993 on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas - which left 80 people dead, including 22 children - and in 1992 at Ruby Ridge, Idaho - where FBI snipers killed the wife and child of the separatist Randy Weaver. Those were events that had also disgusted Vidal.

When Vidal accepted the invitation it triggered a tsunami of opprobrium. Nothing, in the view of his critics, could more compellingly confirm him as being a traitor than this show of support for the monstrous McVeigh.

He may not have helped himself in some of the comments he made to the media. "We've exchanged several letters," Vidal told The Oklahoman. "He's very intelligent. He's not insane. The boy's got a sense of justice. That's what attracted me to him."

Commenting on McVeigh's anger over the assault at Waco, ordered by the former attorney general Janet Reno, he said: "The guy's got a case - you don't send the FBI to kill women and children."

Vidal has been at pains to denounce what McVeigh actually did. He said in one letter to McVeigh that instead he should have blown up FBI headquarters in Washington, an ugly place after all, at the dead of night when it was empty. "Do I approve of it?" he asked of the bombing. "Of course I don't," evoking his grandfather's past as the state's senator. "These are my people."

Vidal, who is suffering from age-related diabetes, could be forgiven for hoping for a more peaceful life. Assuming McVeigh is indeed dispatched sometime soon, the novelist should probably lie low with his partner Austen - the relationship, we have been told, has never been sexual - and wait for it all to blow over. He still hopes, after all, to return to the US one day.

More likely, his need to be honest whatever the fallout will take over. Vidal is meant to be writing about what he sees at the execution for Vanity Fair, and he has also speculated out loud about making a film about McVeigh.

As well as 24 novels, historical and fictional, from Burr, Lincoln, The Last Empire and, most recently, The Golden Age, Vidal has written countless essays, plays and screenplays. There is furniture from the set of Ben Hur, which he wrote, in La Rondinaia still.



Eugene Luther Gore Vidal jun, to give the gentleman his full name, also gave us his autobiography, Palimpsest, in 1995, packed with aphorisms, put-downs ("Malcolm Muggeridge, a bright fool") and anecdotes about famous friends he has had, from Princess Margaret to Jack Kerouac and Jack Kennedy.

Whereas JFK, apparently, never once fell in love, Vidal did. He met his "other half," Jimmy Trimble, while at St Albans private school in Washington as a teenager.

The romance was cruelly ended, however, when Trimble died during the raid on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. Vidal says he has had much sex, but no real love ever since.

"Writers have to tell the truth as they see it," he once commented, "and politicians must never give the game away."

There has been no sin in confessing to some communion of disgust with Timothy McVeigh.

But if the current furore complicates or prolongs the process of his reconciliation with the country that begat him, that would be a shame.

- INDEPENDENT