Gore Vidal: Is he a historian?

I have not been on the ball as much as I should this Fall, and I discovered that I had let a notable date slip past me. But then, so, I believe, did HNN’s editors. Nowhere in the last month weeks the Historians in the News Column pointed out that October 3, 2005 was Gore Vidal’s 80th birthday (see for example, Marc Cooper’s interview wiht Vidal in the November 7, 2005 THE NATION, “Gore Vidal, Octacontrarian” (Nation.)

At the risk of attracting scorn and brickbats, I would like to suggest that Vidal is one of our nation’s most significant historians, and that his historical writing deserves more intensive study by students of history.

In addition to Vidal's acerbic historical essays and book reviews, on subjects ranging from George Washington to the Amistad Mutiny to Richard Nixon, I would recommend study of his novels. Although I blush to confess how long it is since I read them, their impact remains strong on me. Vidal’s LINCOLN, for example, provides a well-researched and rounded picture of the character of Abraham Lincoln, his use of power, and his great political skill, and the ways in which he contributed to centralizing national power in Washington. His BURR is a wonderful portrait of Jacksonian America and the imperishability of American political trickery through journalistic scandal-mongering. In quite another way, JULIAN, a portrait of the late Roman Emperor Julian, is both witty and poignant in the ways it takes apart the Christian self-image of historical innocence amid Roman depravity, and shows how Christians pulled strings and not too gently maintained themselves in seats of power. I might mention in passing Vidal’s 1967 novel WASHINGTON, D.C. Although it is not such a rigorous historical study, it has a particular importance for me as the first mass-market work I ever saw to criticize the wartime removal and confinement of Japanese Americans.

I do not wish to leave people with the impression that I agree with all of Vidal’s historical judgments. The intense isolationism that he inherited from his Populist grandfather and hero, Oklahoma Senator T.P. Gore, and that continues to mark his view of the 20th century (Vidal has said that the first and only political organization of which he was ever a member was the America First Organization) tends to scant his view of reality. It is silly, in my view, to claim that Charles Lindbergh was a great national hero done in by the machinations of British propaganda. Still, even where I disagree, I find his ideas illuminate debate.