Virginia Trioli interviewed Gore Vidal in March for Lateline:
VIRGINIA TRIOLI, PRESENTER: Well now to our interview with a lion of American letters and Democratic politics, Gore Vidal.
He's agreed to speak to us, coincidentally, on the fifth anniversary of George Bush's ill-advised boasts of "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and as we know, the mission is in deep trouble, with the accomplishments quite dubious.
Gore Vidal, now 82, has penned a huge literary catalogue, which has seen him assay America's past, analyze its national psyche and constantly remind his country of its misadventures.
I spoke to him earlier today, when he joined us from his home in California.
Gore Vidal, welcome to Lateline.
GORE VIDAL, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, happy to be on such a line.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Gore Vidal, you've watched Democratic primaries for decades now: so just who do you think will be standing on the podium in Denver in just a couple of months time accepting the Democratic Party's nomination.
GORE VIDAL: It's almost a toss of a coin now. They set out to wreck Senator Obama and it's just been a royal mess all the way through. Of the two, I prefer her, in the sense that she knows more what she's doing. His mishandling of the Reverend whatever he's called doesn't bode well for a conduct of, you know, difficult negotiations. So, that is a mess.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: How do you account for this situation - this real mess - for the fact that these two very able candidates have been able to take part in this knock down, drag out contest? How do you explain that?
GORE VIDAL: Dare I say ambition? It is - she's quite experienced and I would feel contented with her as President. I don't know about him. He's inspiring, but then many people can do that. Even in a vacuum, they can inspire you, sort of. He doesn't know how rough it is. You know, all those things that she was saying about him, which everybody thought she was being mean-spirited and so on and exaggerating the perils of the Republican machine - she wasn't. These are dreadful people. You know, this isn't real politics. What you've got here is something - a war machine has been let loose on the world by Mr Bush and he's going to see to it that after he leaves office, the United States remains at war. And he set it up so that there'll be all kinds of things going wrong, all sorts of revenge to be taken. And I think, you know, what is it Tacitus said? "They made a desert and they called it peace."
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: The Democratic Party itself is charged with the very important task of knocking heads together, making this less of a mess, getting super delegates to pledge and the like. Why have they been seemingly standing on the corners, on the edges of this debate, ringing their hands?
GORE VIDAL: The Party machinery has not worked since 1945 which is when the United States conquered the world rather absent-mindedly, and we ended up with Japan, we ended up with Germany and we'd won everything there was worth winning in the world. Since then, there has been no plan, no brain to the party, Truman was the beginning of the end and he made - he started the Cold War. That's mostly his doing. And then you had a bunch of public relations people posing as the Republican Party.
As bad as the Party is, it's not really quite as bad as these people like Karl Rove, that you may have heard of out there in the Pacific, who was a man who understood how to smear people. He was a merchant of slime. So, everybody was somewhat wounded by his long stay as the counselor to George W. Bush. So, we are left with a kind of wrecked Republic. Bush saw to it, with his curious little Attorney General Mr Gonzalez. They left us with really no Bill of Rights any more, which means no Republic. And, we are sort of naked to the world now. And nothing can make any sense because everything is dislocated. Then they trot out McCain, a man who's only distinction is his plane was shot down. Well, many other people have had their plane shot down. He's introduced as a great hero and a great patriot. In a well run military - which we haven't had for quite some time, thanks to George Bush - in a well run military, he would have been court martialled for losing his plane and five years a prisoner, I'm weeping for him. Oh, God, how brave he was! Did he volunteer to be a prisoner? Who knows? He's a weird enough figure and all he can do is babble on and on a lot of nostrums that are just so dated. I mean, he sounds like cobwebs when he speaks.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: John McCain is of course the presumptive Republican candidate. If you're right, if after the toss of the coin, Hillary Clinton gets it, is she the one to beat John McCain?
GORE VIDAL: Oh yes. I think she could. She's more intelligent than he is. He is extremely stupid and he's a slow study - you can't teach him anything. I've heard recently him on the economy. Republicans, the far right, was much more intelligent, even than what he has to say today. He's talking early Herbert Hoover talk, which was not one of our triumphant Presidents domestically. Well he - there's nothing to him, but they know how to smear. We'll discover Osama is a, I don't know, a secret spy for - what he loves talking about is anti-Western militant Muslims on the march. They're coming, they're coming, they're coming. The favorite lie, which was begun by Bush and his vice-President, Cheney - the biggest lie of all - and most of our people believe if, because they have had little education and no media that they could trust: "If we don't fight 'em over there, we're gonna have to fight 'em here. He he he he." And you listen to this little mad man, he's like a yapping terrier, our President, and it is so unworthy of a serious people who once had a very serious republic and a rather serious empire, to have somebody like that aiming for the consulship? - No.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Gore Vidal, talk us through the intriguing class divide that seems to have opened up during the Democratic race, where in state after state, wealthier, better educated voters are actually flocking to Senator Obama, whereas poor, less educated voters seem to be siding with Hillary Clinton. How do we account for this and does it any of that surprise you?
GORE VIDAL: No, we're a class ridden country. Just because we are not as bad as the mother country doesn't mean we're not pretty bad when we got onto that. Wicked, as they might say in class. No, it's a society based on Mammon, of course, based on money, but money is very important and that's what people dream about. That's what they think about. That's how they measure themselves and their own worth and that of their competition.
Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing. Then he gets trapped by these slime merchants of the Republican Party. That's all they do. But they want more Government contracts, they want war. Think of all the money that is accumulating now just from the oil. That is being collected and sold sensibly by Iraq, as it belongs to them. And now, suddenly, the Iraqi Government, instead of being beggar with a tin cup, is rich. Well, don't think Cheney and his friends with Haliburton company aren't going to get that money. He went over at a time when they were holding serious political talks in Baghdad. And his visit was to ensure that one thing that they would agree to when we left the country, they would agree to putting on the open market their oil. This meant there'd be a special deal whereby the vice-Presidents company was gonna get his hands, their hands on it. All the oil. It was to be ours. We fought a war for this. Well, we didn't win the war and we have no right to it.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Do you think Bill Clinton has been a plus or minus in Hillary Clinton's campaign?
GORE VIDAL: He's a plus - without him she wouldn't be a candidate. He's a political master. Even now, when he gets out there, he knows how to touch the public mood. He's a great natural politician and the public memory of him is fond. The Clinton administration - I mean, we have the slime merchants who will go on and on and on about sex, presumably because they've never had any, and they'll throw that at him, but, no, he's history now. And she's very lucky to have him around.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Well, there's been some criticism that he hasn't adjusted well to this very gaff-centric campaign. A media that focuses on the gaffs and on when he might raise his voice or lose his temper - that's what goes to air and that's seen as a distraction and not helpful for Hillary Clinton. What do you think?
GORE VIDAL: Viewers get used to it. I mean, every voice is now raised, particularly when the Presidency is to be the prize at the end. And he's behaved very cleverly. He's got her all sorts of support that she would not have had otherwise. She turned out to be an extremely good practitioner of politics. Including she even knows how to smear too, which is not attractive, but ... . We're not looking for attractiveness, we're looking for a competent President and I would trust her over Obama because I know nothing about him and nor do we have a chance. Look at these debates. Look at what CNN is dumping on us. You can't get any information about anybody because nobody's allowed to talk. They're too busy interrupting with outrageous news. And now we have a the latest pew poll, stuff like that. Everything, as they say, in Washington is process and nothing is material. Well, we're getting a lot of process, and anyway we've lost the Republic. It's gonna take two generations to get back what has been discarded and shredded by the Bush Administration - at least two generations.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: But, Gore Vidal, Senator Barak Obama has spent a great deal of time trying to tell us about himself. He's committed himself to print, written a book, he gave just recently one of the most important speeches given on race in US history. Surely we know enough about him by now to form a view on whether he'd be a good candidate or not.
GORE VIDAL: Well, if you're not listening, you're not going to pay much attention to what he has to say. Yes, that was a great speech he did on race and it had absolutely no effect here. Hardly anybody spoke about it. Now, if we had people who were interested in anything, I'm talking about journalists now - who are only interested in how much money somebody has raised: where did it come from? - then we're gonna get private life. And now, we're the most religious nation on earth - that's why we kill so easily. We're sending people to heaven. And because we are now terribly, terribly religious in a sense that no proper American ever was when I was young - I was in the Second World War. I never heard a religious word out of anybody, nor a patriotic one. They accepted the fact that our politicians were generally rather low grade and that we just had to live with them and hope that things would evolve better post-war.
Then we got Bush.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Gore Vidal, do you see that anything significant will change in America with a Democrat in the White House.
GORE VIDAL: Well, it'll be very tough because whatever happens, we ran out of money. We're set for another war. There are contingency plans for dealing with Iran and so on. I don't think we have the capacity for it, as stupid as the new group may well be, I don't know. There's a - it isn't going to work.
If we get a Democrat - these parties never meant anything, it's very hard for me to interpret that for foreigners. It was a game that was played at home. It's king of the castle, it's called. Who's gonna be that? And then it got really sordid and this was after every great war, starting with the revolution, indeed, and then with the civil war, World War I, World War II, there've been periods of extraordinary corruption because all the money is going to Washington to buy guns and all the propaganda is going to get the people excited so don't fight 'em over there, you're gonna have to fight 'em here. And the people are just, I mean, they're like half-wits. They pretend they believe it. After a while, they realize they're being lied to, yet again. So, you can be optimistic or you can't be. It depends on whatever the weather, the zeitgeist is. Otherwise, our game is pretty much up.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Gore Vidal, a great pleasure having you on Lateline. Thanks so much.
GORE VIDAL: Well, you're very welcome.
