Gore Vidal

Finished Gore Vidal's Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, just in time for the Fourth. This is Vidal's irreverent and - he thinks - witty take on the founding of the United States. I have mixed feelings about the book.

This is a genuine history. Someone who knows absolutely nothing of the establishment and the early years of the US and its founding fathers can gain this knowledge in a relatively succinct fashion by reading Vidal. I admit that my own expertise in our early history is not nearly as thorough as it should be, so while I was familiar with the general outline of the events and the major personalities that shaped them, I learned more than a few new things. The first was Daniel Shays' rebellion of 1787. Somehow, all my history classes missed it, or else my memory is much worse than I realize. Was Shays America's first socialist? Why not - Vidal traces Franklin Roosevelt's later usurpation of the government prerogative to Shays.

More significantly, according to Vidal, Jefferson believed in a "living constitution," which to him meant rewriting the laws of the land roughly every twenty years or so. Apparently he was the only one of the major players of the day who thought this was a good idea, or else we'd be living in a very different place today. There are a few others.

What jumped out at me the most, however, was Vidal's insistence on focusing on the negative qualities of the founding fathers. None come out as particularly likable or often even respectable from under Vidal's pen, though he does end up pretty well redeeming Washington by the end, and Jefferson's villainy is minuscule compared to that of, say, Hamilton. I understand the motivation - Vidal is trying to cut them back down to size, to remind us that they were humans, too, that the Olympian status we ascribe to them today came much later, through the fog of our early history. And not only that, but they were politicians, as scheming and conniving as the best ones today, and the arguably greater social civility of the era went only so far. This is reasonable, and even admirable, in its intent - anyone made into a god ought to be unmade in short order - but Vidal ends up sounding distastefully cynical doing it. Every contemporary account he chooses and every letter he quotes relentlessly points to the wickedness of the person being described.

In addition, Vidal makes his own political biases obvious. Far too obvious for anything attempting to be an impartial history. His condemnation of the Electoral College is right on the money. Finding Franklin's prediction of a "despotic government" embodied in the current Bush administration - ok, maybe. But Vidal can be positively Naderesque in his politics: [Jefferson] makes no reference to these... lobbyists, to use a current word for those who profit from unpatriotic activities undertaken for domestic and foreign masters [p. 95].

Vidal can't resist indulging his narcissism and ends with an account of a conversation he claims to have had with John F. Kennedy about the founding fathers in Hyannis in 1961 (after beating him at backgammon, he doesn't fail to point out). The account is supposed to illustrate the superior intelligence and statecraft of Washington et. al. as compared to leaders of Kennedy's and, by extension, our, age. But all it ends up doing is showing Vidal for what he is - intelligent, frequently insightful, and a crack writer, but also a relentlessly pompous ass. Just like his heroes.