Gore Vidal: America's eloquent wasp

By Bob Chaundy of the BBC's News Profiles Unit

With the American election campaign nearing its climax, who better than Gore Vidal to give it not only some historical perspective and analysis, but also the benefit of his notoriously acid wit?

"How can you elect someone who can't even read or write?", he protests, alluding to George W Bush's dyslexia.

This is the same man who described Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art", and Andy Warhol as "a genius with the IQ of a moron".

With his blind grandfather, Senator Thomas Pyor Gore

Gore Vidal knows more than a little about the American political system. His grandfather was a senator and co-founder of the state of Oklahoma and his father, a Secretary of Aviation under President Franklin D Roosevelt.

With his high political and social connections, he has observed the political scene for more than 50 years and even ran for Congress himself in 1960. Jackie Kennedy was his step-sister.

The author is currently launching the seventh and last of his series of American historical novels that, to some reviewers, has set new intellectual and artistic standards for the genre.

He's about as left-wing as your Queen Mother

Gore Vidal on Al Gore

They have also established him in the top rank of social satirists.

The series, which centres around one family, began with the Revolution and ends, in his new book, The Golden Age, in the 1940s.

In it, he begins with revelations - fact not fiction he maintains - that Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan into bombing America in 1940.

Having failed to persuade the American people to come to the aid of their beleaguered allies in Europe, his means of provocation was to deny Japan the oil and the scrap metal it needed to produce weapons for its defence industries.

With step-sister, Jackie Kennedy

According to Vidal, Roosevelt was a shrewd manipulator of public opinion, aided by his adoption of a low-key radio style which signalled the death of political oratory.

He sees this as yet another symptom of a general decline which has resulted in the corruption of America's political process.

"Bush and Gore don't represent the people, they represent corporate America", he says. "Cousin Gore [he is Vidal's eighth cousin] is about as left-wing as your Queen Mother", he told the BBC.

Gore Vidal identified before any other what he has dubbed "the National Security State", a United States that prepares constantly for war while preaching peace in order to reap the commercial gains that huge defence spending produces.

Never have sex with friends

Gore Vidal

"51% of the budget goes to the Pentagon for procurement, and there is no enemy", he exclaims.

Many of these views have been adopted by the presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who is currently polling as much as 8% in some states.

Yet, according to the Washington Post's Tom Reed, Gore Vidal's utterances are not taken too seriously by the broad public: "He's an entertaining and articulate loud-mouth, but nobody pays much attention to him as a political commentator."

Perhaps that is because Gore Vidal's almost insatiable desire to shock sees him shooting his mouth off, however eloquently, about all manner of subjects aside from party politics.

Gore Vidal, disenchanted with modern American politics

As early as 1948, his book The City and the Pillar, took a clinical look into his homosexuality. Some bookshops refused to stock it. "Never have sex with a friend," has become one of his most famous mantras.

His belligerent sense of honour deems that he "cannot not hit back if provoked, with a swift, preferably terminal response". This aspect of his personality has involved him in numerous literary feuds and even physical scraps.

Norman Mailer once hit him on the head with a glass before a talk-show. And the right-wing American writer, William F Buckley, threatened to punch him in the face after an exchange of insults on prime-time television.

But just as Gore Vidal's greatest achievement has been, through his literary chronicles, to bring to life America's past, his acerbic wit and eloquent discourse bring a refreshing colour to an often drab present.