CARR: Los Angeles – there’s no city like it. It’s a big slab of American economic, cultural and political power. It’s here that myths are made, stars born and politics mixes with celebrity. And it’s the home, perhaps the unlikely home, of America’s last and lonely dissident and radical.
Long before I entered State politics or became Premier of New South Wales, I was captivated by the history of the United States, by its scale, its romance, its colour, its humour and that led inevitably to the essays and novels of Gore Vidal. Nobody knows American history as he. Indeed, it is in his blood. He learnt about it at the knee of this grandfather, an influential US Senator. As a boy, Vidal walked barefoot across the floor of the US Senate. His novel “Lincoln”, may be the best single book on the 16th President.
Today at the age of eighty, he describes America as armed to the teeth, hostile to everyone and eager to strike pre-emptively. Well I don’t agree with everything he says, indeed I’m in Los Angeles to talk about the Australian-American alliance, but there’s nothing like a conversation with Vidal – in this case at his home in Hollywood.
CARR: Gore Vidal, thank you for being on Foreign Correspondent. I think it’s clear you’re charmed by some of the US Presidents, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in particular, but in writing about them you always notice the centralisation of power in Washington under their rule and the expansion of American power across the continent and then around the globe. You stand opposed to both. Are you a proud American isolationist?
GORE VIDAL: I don’t know that I’m particularly proud but I certainly am an isolationist in general but nobody knows what the word means. Isolationism is the line of George Washington, the line of John Quincy Adams, the main line of American foreign policy which is, Washington said you know - that is the General said - a nation should not have special enemies or special friends. Nations only have interests.
CARR: And how do you rate this President?
GORE VIDAL: Well it’s the worst in our history and it’s eerie. It makes you a real Manichaean to think that this could have happen to us and those of us who are immersed, marinated in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are horrified at what’s going on.
CARR: And it’s the worst because of the scale of the adventure overseas and the centralisation of power in the executive wing in Washington?
GORE VIDAL: Well also the deliberate dismantling of the Bill of Rights. You see we have no place to turn to. If you want to stop this juggernaut, well where do you go? Well normally we’d go to the judiciary, we’d go to the courts so you’d go to the appellate court. If that didn’t work you’d try the Supreme Court – all full of very right wing Bushites, so that won’t work. Or you would go to your congressman, your senator – he’s been paid for, or worse he’s waiting to be paid for, because he wants to run for president. So he’s useless. Go to the executive, the executive is a monster. Now for the first time in my life there is no place to turn. We’re in a cage and information from outside doesn’t get to us. So we’re cut off from information, we’re cut off from orderly democratic processes to protect ourselves and we are adrift.
CARR: For over thirty years, Gore Vidal wrote his books and essays from a house built on a cliff ledge at Ravello, along Italy’s pretty breathtaking Amalfi coast. Sharing it with long time partner Howard Austen, his image was angry critic sitting in judgment on his country from afar.
In reality, he never abandoned the United States and now with the death of his partner, he’s sold Ravello and lives in Hollywood. It’s here he holds court with friends and journalism and movies. Conversation? Nearly always politics.
As US Presidents expanded their nation’s power and produced the American century, Vidal’s been watching.
CARR: Now Gore, let’s go through some of the US Presidents. In your portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt, behind the charm you detect someone who wants a new deal, not just for America but for the whole world and part of that new deal is really breaking up the British Empire and opening the British Empire to American goods, making them American markets.
GORE VIDAL: Well that was to be first step yeah. He was more ambitious than that. I mean he was very anti-British. Poor Churchill never figured this out. This was no friend of England and toward the end, after Yalta, Roosevelt said you know you’re going to have to give up India and this, now the war is winding down, thus the Emperor spoke and Churchill says, and there are many witnesses to this scene, Churchill said well as quickly as that, it’s going to be chaos if we suddenly leave and Roosevelt said it has to be done. The colonial European empires have come to an end. This is the first ukase from the Emperor and Churchill said, "well what do you want me to do, get on my hind legs like your little dog Fowler?" And the Emperor said yes. That is how the world was transformed.
CARR: And then Franklin was followed by Harry Truman who you believed in the…
GORE VIDAL: Oh he to me was…
CARR: You especially dislike him don’t you?
GORE VIDAL: Very much.
CARR: He created the American security state in your view.
GORE VIDAL: National security state, he also militarised the country beginning of our huge debts for the military. He brought in loyalty oaths for everybody who worked in government from the Vice President down to the janitor in the Capitol.
CARR: Isn’t it an iron law of history that big economic powers become big military powers, something we’re perhaps seeing with China at the present time. Isn’t it simply inevitable that America’s going to be exerting clout to protect its trade routes and investments around the world?
GORE VIDAL: Well that used to be known as balance of power but we did it through diplomacy generally and buying off foreign governments, paying for leaders, occasionally killing one like Lumumba in the Congo if we didn’t like them we did something about it. We were just a shadow of England. I mean it’s exactly what the Brits had been doing and they were all for us taking the Hawaiian Islands, taking Samoa, moving ever closer and eventually taking the Philippines which gets us to the coast of Asia.
CARR: Australia’s got a, got a special perspective on this because in 1942 we faced the real prospect of a Japanese invasion and fortunately America was engaged in the region because of the Philippines.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: And it was a lucky stroke for us. Australians have got a more benign view of America’s world clout than you as an all-purpose American critic would have.
GORE VIDAL: Well I would suppose that it was nice when you get attacked by Japan that the United States, just with all its wealth, forget our military prowess we had all that money, which Hitler never took into account. So to have an older brother to your east who could enter the lists on your side, is benign.
CARR: We’re grateful to the American taxpayers for picking up a lot of Australia’s defence expenditure. I mean without that American insurance policy, Australia would have to spend a lot more on our continental defences.
GORE VIDAL: Yeah the only down payment you made was Alice Springs.
CARR: The American bases?
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: The American communications bases, yes.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: Which rendered us, for a while at least, a nuclear target.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: Enchanted with politics, Gore Vidal flirted with the idea of his own political career. In 1960 he stood, unsuccessfully, for the US Congress. Related by marriage to Jackie Kennedy, he had the support of JFK but Hollywood and movies are a big part of Vidal. In 1955, Vidal had begun work as a screen writer for MGM. He took me to the film lot now owned by Sony Pictures.
Here in 1958 he co-wrote the screenplay of Ben Hur, a piece of Roman history from someone ever ready to chart America’s decline and fall.
So that’s where you wrote Ben Hur?
GORE VIDAL: It was right in that office there and just down the corridor was the producer of the film, with all these mock ups of Roman galleys and sea battles and so on. These were great toys you know we had to play with. And we had a general errand boy that you’d call for if you wanted to have your script delivered to the producers down the hall and that was Jack Nicholson and we all knew that Jack was reading the scripts as he hurried along the corridors to deliver them. He was a very quick reader so he ended up knowing everything MGM was making.
CARR: The movies spell out the myths of the American people. They’re a great propaganda machine.
GORE VIDAL: Of course they are and have been used deliberately by political administrations from 1912 on. Woodrow Wilson was running for President for the first time in 1912, then when World War 1 began, it was very unpopular with the American people so he got a guy called George Creel, who was a great advertising genius, to popularise the war and he came out here to make sure that they would make movies about the terrible Hun and this became the co-equal capital of the United States.
CARR: Gore Vidal has always seen Hollywood and politics as mixed up in the same magic and there’s a long history of actors using their celebrity status to protest and criticise, particularly the current Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.
MICHAEL MOORE AT OSCARS: We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. We are against this war Mr Bush!
CARR: It’s curious that the great... the actors who’ve emerged as politicians have been right-wingers – Reagan, Schwarzenegger – so much for Hollywood as a centre of Liberal dissent.
GORE VIDAL: Well it was never much of a centre of liberal dissent.
CARR: Mischievously, Vidal takes credit for Ronald Reagan’s move into politics because in 1960 he rejected him as the lead in his Broadway play “The Best Man”.
GORE VIDAL: He was a wonderful actor - as he demonstrated in office - but he could not suggest remotely an intellectual which is what I needed for that character. Poor Reagan had to just go on and be Governor of California and President.
CARR: Body builder turned actor turned Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger has also followed the Reagan template.
GORE VIDAL: I don’t think anybody thought it would work as well as it did the first time around cause he’s not very gifted as a speaker or as a public personality but I think we’ve probably seen probably the last of him. We’ll find another one. The woods are full OF Schwarzeneggers.
CARR: Why is the American Progressive Movement that once enchanted my generation of American watchers, just so weak?
GORE VIDAL: Well it’s dead because there are not... the people aren’t educated now and I’m talking about the top people too. We live in a sort of bubble with laughing gas being pumped in all the time – everybody envies us cause we’re so fat and pink and rosy. Bad people want to kill us and there’s a kind of.. they just work on a national paranoia.
CARR: How would Hillary Clinton go as the Democratic standard bearer in the next election?
GORE VIDAL: Well she’s got a lot of baggage as they say. You must remember they’ve had eight.. twelve, what is it years since they became.. Bill became President, to smear her which is just daily at every level, particularly among the more ignorant Americans. White men by and large are the most ignorant it seems. She made a very funny remark when they were studying the polls to see where she was strong and weak in New York State and they discovered that she was really weakest with white men and she was debating with all these pollsters and psephologists and she said... they said why do you think that is, Mrs Clinton? She said well I’ve been told, I don’t know if it’s true, that I remind too many of them of their first wife.
CARR: If you had been President at the moment of the September 11 attacks, how would you have reacted? What would your address to Congress have consisted of?
GORE VIDAL: I have just spoken to the head of Interpol and we are asking for the arrest of these people, we have some of their names. We will have more later. They are criminals. I wouldn’t ask for a declaration of war because there’s no country involved.
CARR: Would you have taken out the Taliban bases in Afghanistan which had harboured these people?
GORE VIDAL: No we could, we could help out the Interpol. If Interpol hasn’t got the men or the means of doing it, yes we would cooperate with them. Send the FBI over and do some dirty tricks. Not above that but no it was, it’s a police action which should have been kept at that. After all it’s Osama Bin Laden and eleven Saudi Arabians so what did we do? We smash up Afghanistan and Iraq and now we’re threatening Iran and don’t think we’re not going to try something there which will just be ghastly for us because we’re on a losing wicket here. We have less and less power and less and less money.
CARR: In other words the American military machine is fully stretched in Iraq, it can’t take on any more ventures?
GORE VIDAL: It has reached entropy.
CARR: And with your knowledge of history, you’ve seen what happens to empires in the past, do you see the same rules at work here? And if so how advanced are they?
GORE VIDAL: Well we’ll end up somewhere between Argentina and Brazil with at least a good soccer team. That’ll be about it.
CARR: Thank you.
In his 81st year, still at his desk, sometime in post-Vidal America, we’ll know whether we are witnessing and living through what Vidal has described as the fall of the “last empire”.
Long before I entered State politics or became Premier of New South Wales, I was captivated by the history of the United States, by its scale, its romance, its colour, its humour and that led inevitably to the essays and novels of Gore Vidal. Nobody knows American history as he. Indeed, it is in his blood. He learnt about it at the knee of this grandfather, an influential US Senator. As a boy, Vidal walked barefoot across the floor of the US Senate. His novel “Lincoln”, may be the best single book on the 16th President.
Today at the age of eighty, he describes America as armed to the teeth, hostile to everyone and eager to strike pre-emptively. Well I don’t agree with everything he says, indeed I’m in Los Angeles to talk about the Australian-American alliance, but there’s nothing like a conversation with Vidal – in this case at his home in Hollywood.
CARR: Gore Vidal, thank you for being on Foreign Correspondent. I think it’s clear you’re charmed by some of the US Presidents, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in particular, but in writing about them you always notice the centralisation of power in Washington under their rule and the expansion of American power across the continent and then around the globe. You stand opposed to both. Are you a proud American isolationist?
GORE VIDAL: I don’t know that I’m particularly proud but I certainly am an isolationist in general but nobody knows what the word means. Isolationism is the line of George Washington, the line of John Quincy Adams, the main line of American foreign policy which is, Washington said you know - that is the General said - a nation should not have special enemies or special friends. Nations only have interests.
CARR: And how do you rate this President?
GORE VIDAL: Well it’s the worst in our history and it’s eerie. It makes you a real Manichaean to think that this could have happen to us and those of us who are immersed, marinated in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, are horrified at what’s going on.
CARR: And it’s the worst because of the scale of the adventure overseas and the centralisation of power in the executive wing in Washington?
GORE VIDAL: Well also the deliberate dismantling of the Bill of Rights. You see we have no place to turn to. If you want to stop this juggernaut, well where do you go? Well normally we’d go to the judiciary, we’d go to the courts so you’d go to the appellate court. If that didn’t work you’d try the Supreme Court – all full of very right wing Bushites, so that won’t work. Or you would go to your congressman, your senator – he’s been paid for, or worse he’s waiting to be paid for, because he wants to run for president. So he’s useless. Go to the executive, the executive is a monster. Now for the first time in my life there is no place to turn. We’re in a cage and information from outside doesn’t get to us. So we’re cut off from information, we’re cut off from orderly democratic processes to protect ourselves and we are adrift.
CARR: For over thirty years, Gore Vidal wrote his books and essays from a house built on a cliff ledge at Ravello, along Italy’s pretty breathtaking Amalfi coast. Sharing it with long time partner Howard Austen, his image was angry critic sitting in judgment on his country from afar.
In reality, he never abandoned the United States and now with the death of his partner, he’s sold Ravello and lives in Hollywood. It’s here he holds court with friends and journalism and movies. Conversation? Nearly always politics.
As US Presidents expanded their nation’s power and produced the American century, Vidal’s been watching.
CARR: Now Gore, let’s go through some of the US Presidents. In your portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt, behind the charm you detect someone who wants a new deal, not just for America but for the whole world and part of that new deal is really breaking up the British Empire and opening the British Empire to American goods, making them American markets.
GORE VIDAL: Well that was to be first step yeah. He was more ambitious than that. I mean he was very anti-British. Poor Churchill never figured this out. This was no friend of England and toward the end, after Yalta, Roosevelt said you know you’re going to have to give up India and this, now the war is winding down, thus the Emperor spoke and Churchill says, and there are many witnesses to this scene, Churchill said well as quickly as that, it’s going to be chaos if we suddenly leave and Roosevelt said it has to be done. The colonial European empires have come to an end. This is the first ukase from the Emperor and Churchill said, "well what do you want me to do, get on my hind legs like your little dog Fowler?" And the Emperor said yes. That is how the world was transformed.
CARR: And then Franklin was followed by Harry Truman who you believed in the…
GORE VIDAL: Oh he to me was…
CARR: You especially dislike him don’t you?
GORE VIDAL: Very much.
CARR: He created the American security state in your view.
GORE VIDAL: National security state, he also militarised the country beginning of our huge debts for the military. He brought in loyalty oaths for everybody who worked in government from the Vice President down to the janitor in the Capitol.
CARR: Isn’t it an iron law of history that big economic powers become big military powers, something we’re perhaps seeing with China at the present time. Isn’t it simply inevitable that America’s going to be exerting clout to protect its trade routes and investments around the world?
GORE VIDAL: Well that used to be known as balance of power but we did it through diplomacy generally and buying off foreign governments, paying for leaders, occasionally killing one like Lumumba in the Congo if we didn’t like them we did something about it. We were just a shadow of England. I mean it’s exactly what the Brits had been doing and they were all for us taking the Hawaiian Islands, taking Samoa, moving ever closer and eventually taking the Philippines which gets us to the coast of Asia.
CARR: Australia’s got a, got a special perspective on this because in 1942 we faced the real prospect of a Japanese invasion and fortunately America was engaged in the region because of the Philippines.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: And it was a lucky stroke for us. Australians have got a more benign view of America’s world clout than you as an all-purpose American critic would have.
GORE VIDAL: Well I would suppose that it was nice when you get attacked by Japan that the United States, just with all its wealth, forget our military prowess we had all that money, which Hitler never took into account. So to have an older brother to your east who could enter the lists on your side, is benign.
CARR: We’re grateful to the American taxpayers for picking up a lot of Australia’s defence expenditure. I mean without that American insurance policy, Australia would have to spend a lot more on our continental defences.
GORE VIDAL: Yeah the only down payment you made was Alice Springs.
CARR: The American bases?
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: The American communications bases, yes.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: Which rendered us, for a while at least, a nuclear target.
GORE VIDAL: Yes.
CARR: Enchanted with politics, Gore Vidal flirted with the idea of his own political career. In 1960 he stood, unsuccessfully, for the US Congress. Related by marriage to Jackie Kennedy, he had the support of JFK but Hollywood and movies are a big part of Vidal. In 1955, Vidal had begun work as a screen writer for MGM. He took me to the film lot now owned by Sony Pictures.
Here in 1958 he co-wrote the screenplay of Ben Hur, a piece of Roman history from someone ever ready to chart America’s decline and fall.
So that’s where you wrote Ben Hur?
GORE VIDAL: It was right in that office there and just down the corridor was the producer of the film, with all these mock ups of Roman galleys and sea battles and so on. These were great toys you know we had to play with. And we had a general errand boy that you’d call for if you wanted to have your script delivered to the producers down the hall and that was Jack Nicholson and we all knew that Jack was reading the scripts as he hurried along the corridors to deliver them. He was a very quick reader so he ended up knowing everything MGM was making.
CARR: The movies spell out the myths of the American people. They’re a great propaganda machine.
GORE VIDAL: Of course they are and have been used deliberately by political administrations from 1912 on. Woodrow Wilson was running for President for the first time in 1912, then when World War 1 began, it was very unpopular with the American people so he got a guy called George Creel, who was a great advertising genius, to popularise the war and he came out here to make sure that they would make movies about the terrible Hun and this became the co-equal capital of the United States.
CARR: Gore Vidal has always seen Hollywood and politics as mixed up in the same magic and there’s a long history of actors using their celebrity status to protest and criticise, particularly the current Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.
MICHAEL MOORE AT OSCARS: We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. We are against this war Mr Bush!
CARR: It’s curious that the great... the actors who’ve emerged as politicians have been right-wingers – Reagan, Schwarzenegger – so much for Hollywood as a centre of Liberal dissent.
GORE VIDAL: Well it was never much of a centre of liberal dissent.
CARR: Mischievously, Vidal takes credit for Ronald Reagan’s move into politics because in 1960 he rejected him as the lead in his Broadway play “The Best Man”.
GORE VIDAL: He was a wonderful actor - as he demonstrated in office - but he could not suggest remotely an intellectual which is what I needed for that character. Poor Reagan had to just go on and be Governor of California and President.
CARR: Body builder turned actor turned Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger has also followed the Reagan template.
GORE VIDAL: I don’t think anybody thought it would work as well as it did the first time around cause he’s not very gifted as a speaker or as a public personality but I think we’ve probably seen probably the last of him. We’ll find another one. The woods are full OF Schwarzeneggers.
CARR: Why is the American Progressive Movement that once enchanted my generation of American watchers, just so weak?
GORE VIDAL: Well it’s dead because there are not... the people aren’t educated now and I’m talking about the top people too. We live in a sort of bubble with laughing gas being pumped in all the time – everybody envies us cause we’re so fat and pink and rosy. Bad people want to kill us and there’s a kind of.. they just work on a national paranoia.
CARR: How would Hillary Clinton go as the Democratic standard bearer in the next election?
GORE VIDAL: Well she’s got a lot of baggage as they say. You must remember they’ve had eight.. twelve, what is it years since they became.. Bill became President, to smear her which is just daily at every level, particularly among the more ignorant Americans. White men by and large are the most ignorant it seems. She made a very funny remark when they were studying the polls to see where she was strong and weak in New York State and they discovered that she was really weakest with white men and she was debating with all these pollsters and psephologists and she said... they said why do you think that is, Mrs Clinton? She said well I’ve been told, I don’t know if it’s true, that I remind too many of them of their first wife.
CARR: If you had been President at the moment of the September 11 attacks, how would you have reacted? What would your address to Congress have consisted of?
GORE VIDAL: I have just spoken to the head of Interpol and we are asking for the arrest of these people, we have some of their names. We will have more later. They are criminals. I wouldn’t ask for a declaration of war because there’s no country involved.
CARR: Would you have taken out the Taliban bases in Afghanistan which had harboured these people?
GORE VIDAL: No we could, we could help out the Interpol. If Interpol hasn’t got the men or the means of doing it, yes we would cooperate with them. Send the FBI over and do some dirty tricks. Not above that but no it was, it’s a police action which should have been kept at that. After all it’s Osama Bin Laden and eleven Saudi Arabians so what did we do? We smash up Afghanistan and Iraq and now we’re threatening Iran and don’t think we’re not going to try something there which will just be ghastly for us because we’re on a losing wicket here. We have less and less power and less and less money.
CARR: In other words the American military machine is fully stretched in Iraq, it can’t take on any more ventures?
GORE VIDAL: It has reached entropy.
CARR: And with your knowledge of history, you’ve seen what happens to empires in the past, do you see the same rules at work here? And if so how advanced are they?
GORE VIDAL: Well we’ll end up somewhere between Argentina and Brazil with at least a good soccer team. That’ll be about it.
CARR: Thank you.
In his 81st year, still at his desk, sometime in post-Vidal America, we’ll know whether we are witnessing and living through what Vidal has described as the fall of the “last empire”.