Serious, Mr. Vidal really was. Over the course of
the campaign, he repeatedly proved so by devouring Jerry Brown's political
lunch at a series of joint appearances and debates. Gore would convulse the
brighter bulbs, and genuinely perplex poor Jerry when he cited the Governor's
seven major campaigns in little over a decade as example of what he considered
a major shortcoming of American electoral politics; that, as Gore would repart;
"you never get a chance to think."
"If you sat Jerry Brown down and asked, why are you
running, are you mad?" Vidal queried one evening that summer in Ravello,
"I bet he would go absolutely blank." The proposition seemed to me true enough,
because, as Gore maintained, "you're not supposed to ask them why they run.
They run because it's a compulsion."
Fast-forward a quarter century. So many things
circa 2012 have changed beyond recognition. Include among these Gore
Vidal's departure from the world he loved so to hate at the exorbitant age of
86. No more will the roaring lion-of-the-left grumpily survey the acrid
fruits of American political life about which he has so long and so exquisitely
complained. Among that bitter harvest certainly count the latest turn in the career
of the now once again California Governor, the-one-and-the-same Jerry
Brown, against whose campaign mania Gore so long ago counseled. From his now
heavenly haunt, Gore must surely be amused " but only just the slightest
bit.
How different today's campaigns, including Jerry
Brown's latest successful race for Governor from Gore Vidal's 1982
Senatorial run. That campaign lived at a level of rollicking thoughtfulness as
dodo-dead as it was leagues beyond the expected campaign yuck and yack. Gore's
was one of those gaudy, effervescently liberal crusades, reminiscent of Adlai
Stevenson's runs for the Presidency, Gene McCarthy's 1968 "flower-power"
campaign and indeed Gore's own unsuccessful 1960 run for Congress from Duchess
County, New York. In that race, the titular head of the campaign was his friend
and mentor, the sublime Eleanor Roosevelt. It was Mrs. R. who instilled in
Vidal the upper-crusty, good-government notion that "one speaks to the people
to educate them."
Twenty-two years and a dozen books, screenplays and
collected essays later, Gore Vidal was once again testing that goo-goo
proposition, although few actually understood how precisely Gore fit the
founding fathers' model for a United States Senator. Raised in Washington D.C.,
the grandson of the sightless Democratic Senator from Oklahoma, Thomas P. Gore,
Gore Vidal had literally led the nation's most noteworthy blind politician on
and off the Senate floor. Through that familial, familiar lens, Vidal viewed
the upper Federal Chamber as the founders had; as a forum where the nations
wisest, most accomplished and secure could serve their Republic, impart
lifetime lessons and then, damn it, just go home.
Semi-stepbrother of Jacqueline Kennedy, a Camelot
intimate (at least until an-entirely-unclear-on-the-sexual-identity-concept
Robert F. Kennedy assaulted him for paying too much attention to Jackie), Vidal
had spent the intervening years thinking deeply and writing well about the
American polity. In 1982, however, it was once again impossible to ignore that
harping inner voice instructing him to do what he was seemingly born to do, run
for office.
For Vidal, the campaign compulsion grew more
onerous as it rolled along. "It's terrible for the character," he told
interviewers about the toll of campaigning. He would then wait that famously
precise quarter note beat before adding puckishly, "My own is deteriorating
right before your very eyes."
I didn't happen to think so, but someone who did
was a writer from the San Francisco Chronicle named Randy Shilts. Randy billed
himself as the nation's first openly Gay mainstream newspaper reporter, and
would soon gain fame as the author of "The Mayor of Castro Street," as well as
"And the Band Played On." The latter, a 1987 deconstruction of the ravaging
AIDs plague would ironically and tragically precurse Randy's own demise from
the disease.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
