On December 21, 2005, writer Christine Smith asked Gore Vidal a deceptively simple question about priorities. His answer was characteristic in its economy.
“I have no priorities. I simply go on. I do what I think needs doing.”
The exchange came near the end of an extraordinary literary career, although Vidal still had years of writing and public commentary ahead of him. By then he had spent roughly six decades producing novels, essays, plays, screenplays, memoirs and political criticism. The National Book Foundation credits him with 23 novels, five plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and more than 200 essays. His collection United States: Essays 1952 to 1992 received the 1993 National Book Award for nonfiction.
Smith approached the conversation openly as an admirer. Her questions ranged widely, from writing and World War II to religion, chess, opera, American elections, Cuba, prisons, capital punishment, education and, finally, love and wisdom. The result was less a conventional literary interview than a compressed portrait of Vidal’s habits of mind.
Some of his political statements were assertions rather than established facts, and two decades of subsequent evidence now allow several of them to be placed in clearer context. That distinction matters. Vidal was speaking as an author and political critic, not delivering an official historical record.
What remains unmistakable is the voice: skeptical, concise, impatient with received wisdom and reluctant to make himself the center of the story.
A Writer Who Insisted He Was Not His Own Subject
When Smith asked Vidal to describe himself using three nouns and three adjectives, he declined the premise.
“As you must guess by now I am not my subject. I write and think about others.”
That answer fits a career frequently concerned with the collision between personality, history and political power.
Vidal was born in 1925 at West Point. His publisher records that he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, while still a teenager serving in the United States Army. It was published in 1946. He would eventually move across almost every major literary form, from historical novels and political essays to Broadway plays and Hollywood screenwriting.
Asked whether he needed a particular environment in which to write, Vidal stripped the answer of romanticism:
“I don’t think place has much to do with what I write. I need space for several thousand books of reference or history.”
The remark says something important about his working identity. Whatever the public image of Vidal as television provocateur or social figure, he presented writing as an activity built around reading, reference and intellectual accumulation.
World War II Became His Higher Education
Smith asked how Vidal had learned to convey personality, experience and emotional complexity so early in his career.
His answer was only two sentences:
“Instead of going to college I enlisted in the army during World War Two. That was educational.”
The biographical foundation is sound.
Vidal enlisted at 17. He later served aboard an Army freight and supply vessel in the Aleutian Islands, an experience that helped inspire Williwaw. In a later account of his wartime service, Vidal recalled becoming first mate of the FS 35, stationed in the Aleutians.
For Vidal, war therefore preceded the literary career rather than interrupting it. His first published novel emerged directly from what he had seen as a young serviceman.
That background also helps explain why American history, military power and political institutions remained recurring subjects throughout his writing.
“A Good Ear for the False Note”
Asked about courage and the willingness to speak publicly against prevailing opinion, Vidal responded:
“I think I have a good ear for the false note and feel obliged to draw attention to it. It also helps never having wanted to be popular.”
That posture became part of his public identity.
Vidal repeatedly challenged political, religious and cultural orthodoxies, sometimes with careful argument and sometimes with sweeping claims. He ran for political office himself, seeking a congressional seat in New York in 1960 and later competing in California’s 1982 Democratic primary for the United States Senate.
His skepticism also extended to religion.
Asked about monotheism, Vidal invoked Bertrand Russell and the classic philosophical problem of first causes. Asked whether any beliefs had disappointed him, he answered:
“Since I’m not much of a believer I’m seldom disappointed by or disillusioned at what others do or don’t do.”
Whether discussing theology or government, the recurrent impulse was the same: distrust the proposition that declares itself beyond questioning.
Chess, Italian Opera and Bette Davis
The interview becomes lighter when Smith turns from politics and belief to Vidal’s interests outside writing.
He confessed to playing chess “badly but often” and recalled his years in Rome, particularly performances of Donizetti and Rossini at the Rome Opera.
Then came cinema.
Asked what films could move him to tears, Vidal mentioned Bette Davis and referred to her starring in the first film he wrote for MGM.
That reference aligns with The Catered Affair, released by MGM in 1956. Vidal wrote the screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky’s television play, with Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie Reynolds and Barry Fitzgerald in leading roles. Turner Classic Movies and La Cinémathèque française both credit Vidal with the screenplay.
The detail is revealing because it connects several versions of Vidal that are sometimes treated separately: the novelist, the Hollywood writer, the expatriate immersed in European culture and the political essayist.
They were all working at once.
When the Interview Turned to the 2004 Election
The conversation became markedly more confrontational when Smith asked about American politics and the coming 2008 presidential election.
Vidal described the political system as corrupt and referred specifically to What Went Wrong in Ohio, the report associated with Representative John Conyers and the disputed administration of Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote.
The report was real. It originated with the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee after Conyers, then its ranking Democrat, requested an investigation into reported irregularities in Ohio. The report documented allegations and problems involving voting administration, long lines, provisional ballots, machine performance and other election procedures. It was entered into the Congressional Record in January 2005.
Other official work also found genuine election administration problems. A subsequent Government Accountability Office review documented voting technology failures and administrative issues during the 2004 election, including an Ohio machine malfunction that temporarily recorded approximately 3,900 extra votes for one presidential candidate.
Those facts do not, however, establish Vidal’s broader claim that American elections were routinely “rigged.”
The certified 2004 result gave President George W. Bush 286 electoral votes to John Kerry’s 251, with one Minnesota elector voting for John Edwards for president. Ohio’s electoral votes were formally challenged when Congress met to count the vote, but the Senate rejected the objection 74 to 1 and the House rejected it 267 to 31. The Ohio electoral votes were counted.
The historically supportable distinction is therefore important: serious election administration concerns were investigated and debated, but Vidal’s larger characterization was his political conclusion, not a finding established by the official electoral record.
Was Postponing the 2004 Election Really Discussed?
Vidal also said there had been serious discussion within the Bush administration about not holding the 2004 election if the country faced a terrorist attack.
There was, in fact, a real debate about this possibility, although the circumstances were more limited than his phrasing suggests.
Following fears that terrorists might attempt to disrupt the election, the Department of Homeland Security passed a request to the Justice Department to examine the legal questions surrounding a potential postponement. Congressional Research Service analysis later documented that the Justice Department had considered the issue of federal authority. Administration officials subsequently emphasized that the election would proceed as scheduled.
The legal analysis was also significant: the executive branch did not possess independent authority to change the date of a federal election. Congress held relevant constitutional and statutory authority.
So Vidal was correct that postponement had been discussed as a contingency. The available record does not support interpreting that discussion as an established plan by the Bush administration to cancel the election.
Vidal’s Economic Warning Needs a Small but Important Correction
Asked what Americans dissatisfied with the Bush administration could do, Vidal invoked an economic warning that he attributed to the International Monetary Fund.
He said the IMF had described the United States as “careening toward insolvency.”
The underlying fiscal warning was real, but the quotation appears to have been attributed too directly.
An IMF study published in January 2004 warned that the federal budget was poorly prepared for the retirement of the baby boom generation and discussed the long term insolvency problems of Social Security and Medicare. It cautioned that deficits and debt could rise unsustainably without reform.
The memorable “careening toward insolvency” wording was popularized by financier and former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson when he summarized the IMF warning in his 2004 book Running on Empty. The phrase should therefore not be treated as a verbatim IMF institutional quotation.
That distinction changes the attribution, not the existence of the fiscal concern.
Vidal Saw the Internet as Abundant but Unreliable
Asked why Americans could remain poorly informed when the internet made so much information available, Vidal focused on a problem that sounds strikingly contemporary:
“The problem with the internet is that, yes, everything seems to be out there but how much is reliable?”
He then connected that concern to his broader distrust of American media.
His accusation that major media organizations functioned largely as propaganda reflected his political viewpoint. But the narrower observation about information abundance and source reliability has only grown more relevant as digital publishing, social media and algorithmic distribution have expanded.
Vidal’s question was not whether information existed.
It was whether citizens knew how to judge it.
Cuba and a Claim That Requires a Clear Historical Boundary
On United States relations with Cuba, Vidal gave a concise policy opinion:
“We should have normalized relations with Cuba after the missile crisis.”
Ten years after this interview, part of what Vidal advocated eventually occurred. The United States and Cuba formally restored diplomatic relations on July 20, 2015, and reopened embassies after a break that had lasted more than five decades.
Vidal then went much further. He referred readers to Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann’s Ultimate Sacrifice and endorsed a theory linking organized crime figures involved in plots against Fidel Castro to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
That assertion should not be presented as established history.
Congressional investigations did confirm that the CIA had worked with organized crime figures in attempts to assassinate Castro during the early 1960s. That element of the history is documented. But the House Select Committee on Assassinations later reported that it had not found sufficient evidence that organized crime, as an organization, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, while acknowledging that it could not exclude the possibility of involvement by particular individuals.
The CIA and Mafia plots against Castro are historical fact. Vidal’s proposed connection between those plots and Kennedy’s murder remains a contested theory rather than an established conclusion.
On American Prisons, Vidal’s Number Was Substantially Correct
Vidal described the American prison system in uncompromising moral language and said that more than two million people were incarcerated.
The rhetoric was his. The number was accurate for the period.
At the end of 2005, nearly 2.2 million people were held in state and federal prisons or county and municipal jails, according to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. That was equivalent to approximately one in every 136 United States residents.
Contemporary international data also placed the United States at the top of global incarceration rates, with the 2005 World Prison Population List reporting approximately 714 prisoners per 100,000 people.
Vidal’s broader description of the system as “vengeful” and “torture” was an evaluative political and moral judgment, but the scale of incarceration behind his criticism was genuine.
His Death Penalty Claim Was More Certain Than the Evidence Allows
Vidal rejected capital punishment and said:
“The death penalty does not deter as is well known.”
His opposition to capital punishment was a personal political and moral position. The deterrence statement, however, was too categorical.
A major National Research Council review published in 2012 concluded that existing research was not capable of determining whether the death penalty increases homicide, decreases it or has no effect. The committee explicitly cautioned against using the available research to claim either deterrence or the absence of deterrence.
A more accurate formulation today is therefore that credible research has not established a reliable deterrent effect, but it also does not permit the stronger scientific conclusion that capital punishment has definitively been shown to have no deterrent effect.
That evidentiary distinction does not settle the moral or legal debate, which involves questions beyond deterrence.
Vidal’s Literacy Claim Also Went Too Far
Asked what America should become, Vidal turned immediately to education.
He said citizens should be able to read, do basic arithmetic and understand history, but he also suggested that a majority of Americans could not read.
The available data at the time do not support that claim.
Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, released in December 2005, found that roughly 14 percent of adults who could be tested performed at the Below Basic level in prose literacy. About 29 percent were at Basic, 44 percent at Intermediate and 13 percent at Proficient.
Low literacy was a substantial national problem. It was not accurate to say that most American adults were unable to read.
Vidal’s larger concern about civic education and knowledge of history was an argument about the quality of citizenship, not a statistic established by the literacy data.
The Advice of a Man Who Did Not Like Giving Advice
After discussions of war, literature, religion, elections, prisons and education, Smith asked what advice Vidal might give to people seeking truth and understanding.
His answer rejected the assignment:
“It is pointless to give advice and sometimes dangerous to take it.”
It is perhaps the most characteristically Vidal response in the interview. There is wit in it, but also consistency.
A writer who spent decades urging people to distrust received narratives was hardly going to end by supplying another one.
Smith then asked whether there was something she had failed to ask.
Vidal’s answer was brief:
“You’ve asked good questions.”
Wisdom, Love and One Unexpected Word
Smith saved the question she cared most about for the end.
How would Gore Vidal define wisdom and love?
His reply contained none of the provocation that had marked his political answers.
“Both Wisdom and Love can be defined by the same word: acceptance.”
It is difficult to compress a career as long and contentious as Vidal’s into one interview. The conversation contains his characteristic distrust of institutions, his literary self discipline, his wartime memories, his love of books and culture, and several political claims that require qualification when measured against the historical record.
Yet the final answer changes the register completely.
After a lifetime spent identifying what he considered false notes in politics, religion, history and public life, Vidal arrived at a surprisingly quiet word.
Not victory.
Not certainty.
Not agreement.
Acceptance.
And perhaps that is the most revealing contradiction in the conversation: the public skeptic who rarely stopped arguing could still imagine wisdom and love beginning at the point where argument ends.
