Review article on Gore Vidal.
Vidal's posthumous intimacy with his subject has not affected his personal judgment, reflected only in the last sentence of the novel when he places in the mouth of John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary, the chilling conviction "that Lincoln, in some mysterious fashion, had willed his own murder as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done by giving so bloody and absolute a rebirth to his nation." The novel has only subliminally prepared us for a Lincoln whose achievement was as terrible as it was great. But this, I think, had already become Vidal's own view, excluded from any direct statement of it by his novelist's faithfulness to his characters. He has no hesitation in expressing it in essays. Lincoln, he wrote in these pages in 1993, "preserved the Union by destroying it."
..He does not say why he esteems Jefferson and not Jackson, but probably for the same reason that he thinks Lincoln's salvation of the Union a terrible thing. Jefferson was an early proponent of the right of a state to nullify acts of the United States Congress, the right that Jackson temporarily defeated and Lincoln destroyed.
In essays and speeches over the past twenty or thirty years Vidal has rung the changes on the little good the despotic government Lincoln made possible has done at home and the messes it has made abroad. His view, reiterated continually, is that our government, however popularly elected, represents only the large corporations that control it, as they control the media, through which they persuade the voters to support only two parties, conservative and reactionary. Wars fill their coffers, so at their behest the government levies heavy taxes for the purpose of waging unprovoked and undeclared wars: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace lists almost two hundred from 1945 to 2001.
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR took the central power Lincoln had created and used it to build a global empire. FDR deliberately instigated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so that he could bring an unwilling people into the Second World War. When the Japanese signaled their willingness to surrender, Truman hurried to drop the bomb on them in order to secure our power in Asia. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, then turned the United States at home into a security state with the National Security Act of 1947 and the Security Council Memorandum number 68 of 1950.
Vidal is enlisting himself on the side of the Founding Fathers, identifying himself with the popular esteem of them. He intends, I think, nothing controversial in his account, either of men or of events. But the recital of the Founders' views and achievements offers him the opportunity to invite his readers to recognize the present violation of everything they stood for. And that indeed is the apparent purpose of the book.
