His father and grandfather held high political office and he is related to Al Gore, the Democratic candidate who in fact won the last presidential elections and was cheated of victory by the manoeuvres of the Bush camp.
In Vidal’s opinion, “the [American] Republic ended in 1950. Since then we have had an imperial system.” What are the chief characteristics of this system? First, the USA intervenes in an aggressive way in every part of the world. According to his researches, since 1950, the USA has waged at least 300 wars in different parts of the globe. Yet, although the Constitution stipulates that any war must be approved by Congress, not one of these conflicts has been so approved. In fact, the last time an American president sought and obtained congressional approval for a war was in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Vidal points out something that has been long known to us, but has never been admitted, namely that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.
Vidal then explains how President Truman got the USA involved in the Korean War (“which we lost”) by presenting it as a “police operation” that did not require the approval of Congress. Instead he referred it to - the United Nations! The US military aggression in Korea took place under the banner of the UN - like many subsequent adventures, up to Kosovo.
Vidal speaks with a smile, but in the words of my countryman Dylan Thomas, his smile is as sweet as a razor. He points out that the much-vaunted American freedom is largely fictional: three percent of the population is either in gaol or on parole, connected up by electric devices to the prison administration. There is very little real freedom. Freedom of the press? “The press and the media are owned and controlled by ‘our corporate masters’. I’ve never seen the media so tightly controlled as now. They control all the flow of information, so that the great majority of Americans do not know what is going on.”
What about living standards in the USA? “Eighty percent of Americans have been falling behind since 1973. That is the date they usually cite for the oil crisis. Nowadays a husband and wife make less money than the husband alone made at that time. On the other hand, some people have become fabulously rich. One percent owns everything - like the CEOs who now seem to be queuing up to go to gaol! Under them there is a further twenty percent who support the Empire. These are the lawyers, the journalists, politicians and bankers and so on. The one percent hires the twenty percent.”
Gore Vidal has had recent personal experience of American “press freedom”. When after September 11 he wrote an article pointing out that the USA had brought this on itself, building up bin Laden and the Taliban against Russia. The article was not published by any US paper or magazine, including the supposedly “left wing” The Nation, for which Vidal has contributed articles for half a century.
No matter how imperfect or incomplete Gore Vidal’s analysis is, it is not really the point. The point that was underlined by Andrew Marr, a respected British political commentator (and certainly no Marxist) is this: How does it happen that America’s greatest living writer [Marr’s words] did not find it possible to get his opinions printed in the USA?
In the end, his book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, was published in the USA, but then, as he remarked wryly, it got worse. Not a single paper was prepared to review the book. There was no publicity and no advertisements were accepted. As a well-known public figure and broadcaster, he received seven invitations to appear on different television programmes. Five of these were soon cancelled. CNN had invited him to debate his views, but the programme was cancelled half an hour before it was due to commence. The instructions evidently came from the top level in Washington.
And what are Gore Vidal’s conclusions? “Our liberation from this system will come about as a result of an economic collapse,” he asserts. “This is inevitable, on the basis of the colossal debts we have been building up. This must lead to monetary breakdown at some stage. The writing is on the wall.”
Most interesting is the little detail that must have come from his family connections. “During the second world war, there were 13 million of us young boys in the armed forces. In 1945, Roosevelt’s son said to him: ‘You realise that the only trade these kids know is how to kill. If things are like they were after the Civil War or after World War One, when unemployed veterans marched on Washington, it will mean big trouble. If they come home and find there are no jobs, they’re going to tear the place to pieces!’” On that basis Roosevelt introduced the reform of the social security system that Gore Vidal (in a slight exaggeration) claims to have transformed the class structure of America.
At the end of the day, Gore Vidal has not abandoned the standpoint of the social class from whence he came. At heart, he remains the American patrician, giving Cassandra-like advice to his class on how to save itself from impending disaster. And just as the Trojans paid no attention to Cassandra, whom they believed to be insane, so the American ruling class regard people like Gore Vidal as troublesome eccentrics, to be ignored or subjected to a conspiracy of silence.
The fact is, as Gore Vidal is the first to point out, America is already ruled by a dictatorship - the dictatorship of Money, of the “corporate masters” who take all the real decisions while giving the masses the illusion of democracy. But democracy in America, as in Britain and elsewhere in the West, is only a sham, a hollow shell.
Gore Vidal has the merit that he has understood the hypocrisy that underlies this pretence, and the vicious, exploitative and aggressive character of US imperialism. He has also grasped the fact that this colossus has feet of clay. He appeals to the American ruling class to withdraw from its foreign interventions. He realises that America is in the process of overreaching itself just as the Roman Empire overreached itself.
In effect, his recipe is to put the clock back about 200 years, to return America to its pristine roots of Republicanism. He thus ends up in a posture that is both conservative and utopian. Being an extremely intelligent man, he must know in his heart that there is no question of going back, and that what he is putting forward as a solution is no solution at all. This is the real reason for the layer of irony that lays heavily on his speech. After all, irony stems from the contradiction between what ought to be and what is.
The America of the big banks and monopolies cannot be replaced by the world of the small farmer. Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson are long dead and cannot be revived by daydreaming - even the kind of eloquent daydreaming of a brilliant writer. The only class that can overthrow the “corporate masters” and abolish the dictatorship of big business is the American working class.