Gore Vidal

I've not yet read a book by Gore Vidal. Should I start with a novel? Or nonfiction? What title do you suggest?
I once read a short play in a high school English class. I know it was by Gore Vidal, and it was about a guy who came to this town and claimed to be either an alien or from the future (?). He said he was there to take over the world, but at the end, someone else from his time/place came and took him away, telling everyone he was crazy. Does anyone know the name of this play?
Help finding out the name of a Gore Vidal play?
I read a novel called Lincoln by Gore Vidal and wanted to find out how accurate historically it was so I read Ms Goodwin's book and found it to be a wonderfully accessible book about our greatest President. Has anyone read it? Has anyone read both books? Very interested in opinions.
Has anyone read Cabinet of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris K Goodwin?
i dont understand what this paragraph is saying! at all! This is a startling notion to the current generation of Americans who reflect on our system of public education which has made the Bill of Rights, literally, unacceptable to a majority of high school graduates (see the annual Purdue reports) who now from the "silent majority' --a phrase which that underestimated wit Richard Nixon took from Homer who used it to describe the dead. the artical is called Drugs: Case for Legalizing Marijuana by Gore Vidal and thats what its about (i think, it confuses me)
Drugs by Gore Vidal What do you think? Why his thesis is incorrect. Opinion.?
I recently wrote a paper where my in-paper MLA citations had commas in them. For example, if I was citing Gore Vidal page 30 I wrote (Vidal, 30) My teacher said this was incorrect as it should have been (Vidal 30) with no comma after the author's name. After looking it up I found the guidelines and the examples did not have any commas. However, there was no rule stating that commas were incorrect. Because of these commas in all my citations my teacher said the whole thing was wrong and gave me a zero even though it was obvious this was just a small mistake. I feel the zero I received is unjustified and I tried to reason with the instructor but she claimed she was correct and if I was in college the paper would be thrown out (which I think is a load of B.S.). Is there any shred of wiggle room with this comma issue. I haven't yet found any source that explicitly states there should be no comma so I'm hoping I still can prove my point. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This zero is going to kill my overall grade. Thanks
In-Paper MLA Citations Issue?
What do you think of Gore Vidal, one of the greatest American novelist? I love his style of writing, acutely sharp wit, incredibly intelligent dialogue, subtle sarcasm, and much more What do YOU think of his writing style? Have you read any of his book? If so, which one is your favorite? What do you think of "Julian"; that's my absolute favorite novel
A "NON - TWILIGHT" Question?
I have to read a novel for Composition 2 and I have this list of authors to choose from. Margaret Atwood Jane Austen Saul Bellow Thomas Berger Charlotte Bronte Emily Bronte John Cheever Kate Chopin Joseph Conrad James Fenimore Cooper Stephen Crane Charles Dickens E.L. Doctorow John Dos Passos Theodore Dreiser George Eliot (Marian Evans) Louise Erdrich Ralph Ellison William Faulkner F. Scott Fitzgerald Graham Greene Thomas Hardy Nathaniel Hawthorne Ernest Hemingway Zora Neale Hurston John Irving Henry James James Joyce D.H. Lawrence Bernard Malamud Herman Melville N. Scott Momaday Toni Morrison Iris Murdoch Frank Norris Joyce Carol Oates Flannery O’Connor Walker Percy Edgar Allan Poe Katherine Anne Porter Philip Roth Sir Walter Scott Mary Shelley John Steinbeck William Styron Amy Tan W.M. Thackeray Jean Toomer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) John Updike Gore Vidal Kurt Vonnegut Alice Walker Robert Penn Warren Evelyn Waugh Eudora Welty Edith Wharton Thomas Wolfe Tom Wolfe Virginia Woolf Richard Wright Ive looked through every single author trying to find one that I could actually enjoy reading, but nothing ever pops up for me. I like adventure books that are not extremely wordy or that sound like they are from the 18th century. Most of the authors I have found have written books that sound like that, and I know I would fall asleep after the first page if I got those books. Please point me in the right direction!
So I have to read a novel from this list of authors.?
Does anybody else agree with the following statement? FOX only SEEMS to lean to the right because we are so used to getting ALL of our news from the far left that when we hear just straight news, without a liberal spin, we don't recognize it as being just straight news. If you ever watch FOX, they bash both sides, and if there's a conservative on the show it's ALWAYS balanced with a liberal. You're just not used to seeing democrats getting bashed from the media so you assume it's biased towards conservatives. If you bring up Bill O'Reilly....he is NOT a news caster, he is a political commentator just like Glenn Beck, William F. Buckley, Jr., Tucker Carlson , James Carville, Alan Colmes , Lou Dobbs, Maureen Dowd, Nancy Grace, Sean Hannity, Bob Herbert, Ezra Klein, William Kristol, Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Frank Rich, William Safire, Joe Scarborough, Mark Steyn, and Gore Vidal.
Liberal Mainstream Media & FOX...........?
Here are my first additions: Have any to add? Alec Baldwin Ani DiFranco Barbra Streisand Cher Chrissie Hynde Danny Glover Dave Matthews David Clennon Dixie Chicks Dustin Hoffman Ed Asner Ed Harris Edward Norton Eric Roberts George Carlin George Clooney Gore Vidal Harry Belafonte Jane Fonda Janeane Garofalo Jennifer Aniston Jessica Lange John Cusack Joy Behar Julia Roberts Larry Hagman Madonna Martin Scorsese Martin Sheen Michael Moore Mike Farrell Oliver Stone Pearl Jam Richard Gere Robert Altman Robin Williams Sandra Bernhard Sandy Duncan Sean Penn Spike Lee Susan Sarandon Tim Robbins Viggo Mortensen Whoopi Goldberg Woody HarrelsonI know George Carlin is dead. There are many more teetering on the edge of being on the list.Has nothing to do with Obama. This has been going on long before him. As a matter of fact, I am 40 years old, never watched Hannah Montana once and am probably more educated than you. All of these people have spewed anti-American bile publicly over the last 15 years and are unrepentant for it. Actors pretend to be something they're not for a living. So, why does that give them any creedance with the public?

• Gore Vidal (pronounced /ˌɡɔər vɪˈdɑːl/ or /vɪˈdæl/) (born October 3, 1925) is an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, short story writer, actor and politician. Early in his career he wrote the ground-breaking The City and the Pillar (1948), which outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. By such actions as his voluminous essays and a public debate with William F. Buckley Jr., Vidal has long been known as one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the 20th century.
• Vidal was born Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. in West Point, New York, the only child of Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903–1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the first aeronautics instructor, and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater. According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for The New York Review of Books (October 18, 1973), he decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
• Vidal's father, a West Point all-American quarterback who was director of Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. She took Gore when he was 10 or 11 years old to the Army-Navy game at West Point and they read her poetry during the game. Gore Vidal called her a good poet and also wanted his father to marry Amelia. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).
• Gore Vidal's mother was an actress and socialite who made her Broadway debut in Sign of the Leopard in 1928. She married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. in 1922 and divorced him in 1935. She later married twice more; one husband was later the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Hugh D. Auchincloss and, according to Gore Vidal, she had "a long off-and-on affair" with actor Clark Gable. She was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.
• Vidal had four half-siblings from his parents' later marriages (the Rev. Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal Hewitt, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers Straight) and four stepbrothers from his mother's third marriage to Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, who died in 1943, ten months after marrying Vidal's mother. Vidal's nephew Burr Steers is a writer and film director, and nephew Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995) was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum.
• Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School, then St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, as a boy his namesake read aloud to him and was his guide. The senator's steadfast isolationism contributed a major principle of his grandson's political philosophy, which is critical of foreign and domestic policies shaped by American imperialism. In 1943, on graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the U.S. Army Reserve serving in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where he served as master of an Army freight and supply boat.
• Vidal has had affairs with both men and women. He was once in a relationship with bisexual novelist Anaïs Nin, as documented in her memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin; however, Vidal himself dismissed the idea of a romantic connection with her in his own autobiography Palimpsest. Vidal has also discussed having dalliances with people such as actress Diana Lynn, and has alluded to the possibility that he may have an illegitimate daughter. He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, before she married Paul Newman; after eloping, the couple shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time. In 1950, he met his long-term partner Howard Austen.
• During the latter part of the twentieth century, Vidal divided his time between Italy and California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest), and moved to Los Angeles. Austen died in November 2003 and, in February 2005, was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
• Vidal, whom a Newsweek critic has called "the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson", began his writing career at nineteen, with the publication of the military novel Williwaw, based upon his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel was successful and chronologically the first of the war novels about World War II. A few years later, The City and the Pillar caused a furor for its dispassionate presentation of homosexuality. The New York Times refused to review his next five books. The novel was dedicated to "J.T."
• After a magazine published rumors about J.T.'s identity, Vidal confirmed they were the initials of his St. Albans-era love, James "Jimmie" Trimble III, killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on June 1, 1945; later saying Trimble was the only person he had ever loved. Subsequently he wrote plays, films, and television series. Two plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were both Broadway and film successes. In the early 1950s he also wrote under the pseudonym "Edgar Box", producing three mystery novels featuring public relations man "Peter Cutler Sargeant II".
• In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. In 1959, director William Wyler needed script doctors to re-write the Ben-Hur script, originally written by Karl Tunberg. Vidal collaborated with Christopher Fry, reworking the screenplay on condition that MGM release him from the last two years of his contract. Producer Sam Zimbalist's death complicated the screenwriting credit. The Screen Writers Guild resolved the matter by listing Tunberg as sole screenwriter, denying credit to both Vidal and Fry. This decision was based on the WGA screenwriting credit system which favors original authors. Vidal later claimed in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet that in order to explain the animosity between Ben-Hur and Messala, he had inserted a gay subtext suggesting that the two had had a prior relationship, but that actor Charlton Heston was oblivious. Heston denied that Vidal contributed significantly to the script.
• In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three novels. The first, Julian (1964) dealt with the apostate Roman emperor, while the second, Washington, D.C. (1967) focused on a political family during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.
• Vidal's third novel in the '60s was the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968), a variation on familiar Vidalian themes of sex, gender, and popular culture. In the novel, Vidal showcased his love of the American films of the '30s and '40s, and he resurrected interest in the careers of the forgotten players of the time including, for example, the late Richard Cromwell, who, he wrote, "was so satisfyingly tortured in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer."
• After the staging of the plays, Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the publications of the novel Two Sisters (1970), Vidal focused on essays and two distinct strains in his fiction. The first strain comprises novels dealing with American history, specifically with the nature of national politics. Critic Harold Bloom wrote, "Vidal's imagination of American politics...is so powerful as to compel awe." This series' Narratives of Empire titles include Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), The Golden Age (2000), and another excursion into the ancient world Creation (1981, published in expanded form 2002).
• The second strain consists of the comedic "satirical inventions": Myron (1974, a sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), Live from Golgotha: the Gospel according to Gore Vidal (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).
• Vidal occasionally returned to scriptwriting cinema and television, including the television movie Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer and the mini-series Lincoln. He also wrote the original draft for the controversial film Caligula, but later had his name removed because director Tinto Brass and actor Malcolm McDowell re-wrote the script, changing the tone and themes significantly. The producers later made an attempt to salvage some of Vidal's vision in the film's post-production.
• Vidal is — at least in the U.S. — even more respected as an essayist than as a novelist. The critic John Keates praised him as "[the twentieth] century's finest essayist." Even an occasionally hostile critic like Martin Amis admits, "Essays are what he is good at...[h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."
• For six decades, Gore Vidal has applied himself to a wide variety of sociopolitical, sexual, historical, and literary themes. In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled Armageddon?, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America. He pilloried the incumbent president Ronald Reagan as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, United States (1952–1992), the citation noting: "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist." A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is The Last Empire. Since then, he has published such self-described "pamphlets" as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also wrote an historical essay about the U.S.'s founding fathers, Inventing A Nation. In 1995, he published a memoir Palimpsest, and in 2006 its follow-up volume, Point to Point Navigation. Earlier that year, Vidal also published Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.
• Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of same-sex relations in such books as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation. Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, a representative sampling of his views, contains literary and cultural essays. Focusing on, in his view, the anti-sexual heritage of Judeo-Christianity, irrational and destructive sex laws, feminism, heterosexism, homophobia, gay liberation and pornography, the essays frequently return to a favorite Vidal motif: the fluidity of sexual identity. Vidal argues that "although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled." In repudiating what he sees as rigid, narrow moralism, Vidal argues that "sex is a continuum" made up of "different phases along life’s way" and thus "everyone is potentially bisexual." He explains that "the human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about." Therefore, "there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." Given the diversity of human desire, Vidal resists any effort to categorize him as exclusively "homosexual"—either as writer or human being—and instead celebrates this polymorphous eroticism as natural and inevitable.
• In 2005, Jay Parini was appointed as Vidal's literary executor.
• In the 1960s, Vidal moved to Italy; he was cast as himself in Federico Fellini's film Roma. In 1992, Vidal appeared in the film Bob Roberts (starring Tim Robbins) and has appeared in other films, notably Gattaca, With Honors, and Igby Goes Down. Vidal has voiced himself on both The Simpsons and Family Guy and appeared on the Da Ali G Show. On his 2007 lecture tour, Vidal claimed that the core idea for the film Night at the Museum was suggested by one of his novels (presumably The Smithsonian Institution).
• Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections with the Democratic Party: his mother, Nina, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., who later was stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Gore Vidal is a fifth cousin of Jimmy Carter, and a distant cousin of Al Gore.
• As a political activist, in 1960, Gore Vidal was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress (running as Eugene Gore), losing an election in New York's 29th congressional district, a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River, encompassing all of Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Schoharie, and Ulster Counties to J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57% to 43%. Campaigning with a slogan of "You'll get more with Gore", he received the most votes any Democrat in 50 years received in that particular district. Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward; the latter two, longtime friends of Vidal's, campaigned for him and spoke on his behalf.
• From 1970 to 1972, Vidal was one of the chairmen of the People's Party, and with a half-million votes, he finished second to incumbent Governor Jerry Brown in California's 1982 Democratic primary election to the United States Senate. Vidal's Senate bid had the backing of liberal celebrities such as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The campaign was documented in the film, Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No directed by Gary Conklin.
• Although frequently identified with Democratic causes and personalities, Vidal wrote in the 1970s:
• There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
• Vidal's political views are usually characterized either as liberal or progressive. Despite this, Vidal has said "I think of myself as a conservative." Vidal has a protective, almost proprietary attitude toward his native land and its politics: "My family helped start [this country]", he has written, "and we've been in political life... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country." Vidal considers himself a "radical reformer" wanting to return to the "pure republicanism" of early America. At a 1999 lecture in Dublin, Vidal stated:
• As a prep school student, he was a supporter of the America First Committee. Unlike other America First Committee supporters, he continues in the opinion that the United States should not have entered World War II, though acknowledging material assistance to the Allies was a good idea. He has suggested that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack. During an interview in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight, Vidal claims that during the final months of World War II, the Japanese had tried to surrender to the United States, to no avail. He said, "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs." When the interviewer asked why, Vidal replied, "To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war."
• During domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh's imprisonment, Vidal corresponded with McVeigh and concluded that he bombed the federal building as retribution for the FBI's role in the 1993 Branch Davidian Compound massacre in Waco, Texas.
• Vidal is a member of the advisory board of the World Can't Wait organization, a left-wing organization seeking to repudiate the Bush administration's program, and advocating the impeachment of George W. Bush for war crimes.
• In 1997, Vidal was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.
• Vidal contributed an article to The Nation in which he expressed support for Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, citing him as "the most eloquent of the lot" and that Kucinich "is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain".
• In April 2009, Vidal accepted appointment to the position of honorary president of the American Humanist Association, succeeding Kurt Vonnegut.
• In 1968, ABC News hired Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. as political analysts of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions, predicting that television viewers would enjoy seeing two men of letters engage in on-air battle. As it turned out, verbal and nearly physical combat ensued. After days of mutual bickering, their debates devolved to vitriolic, ad hominem attacks. During discussions of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the men were arguing about Freedom of Speech in regards to American protestors displaying a Viet Cong flag when Vidal told Buckley to "shut up a minute" and, in response to Buckley's reference to "pro-Nazi" protestors, went on to say "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-Crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." The visibly livid Buckley replied
• After an interruption by anchor and facilitator Howard K. Smith, the men continued to discuss the topic in a less hostile manner.
• Later, in 1969, the feud was continued as Buckley further attacked Vidal in the lengthy essay, "On Experiencing Gore Vidal", published in the August 1969 issue of Esquire. The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth, an anthology of Buckley's writings of the time. In a key passage attacking Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality, Buckley wrote, "The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher."
• Vidal responded in the September 1969 issue of Esquire, variously characterizing Buckley as "anti-black", "anti-semitic", and a "warmonger". The presiding judge in Buckley's subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that "[t]he court must conclude that Vidal's comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable." However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel. Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckinridge as pornography.
• The court dismissed Vidal's counter-claim; Buckley settled for $115,000 in attorney's fees and an editorial statement from Esquire magazine that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertion. However, in a letter to Newsweek, the Esquire publisher stated that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them."
• As Vidal's biographer, Fred Kaplan, later commented, "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against Esquire... [t]he court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory.' It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory. [italics original.] The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses [not damages based on libel]... " ultimately, Vidal bore the cost of his own attorney's fees, estimated at $75,000.
• In 2003, this affair re-surfaced when Esquire published Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing, an anthology that included Vidal's essay. Buckley again sued for libel, and Esquire again settled for $55,000 in attorney's fees and $10,000 in personal damages to Buckley.
• After Buckley's death on February 27, 2008, Vidal summed up his impressions of his rival with the following obituary on March 20, 2008: "RIP WFB—in hell." In a June 15, 2008, interview with the New York Times, Vidal was asked by Deborah Solomon, "How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?"
• Vidal was strongly critical of the George W. Bush administration, listing it among administrations he considered to have either an explicit or implicit expansionist agenda.
• He claims that for several years the Bush administration and their associates have aimed to control the oil of Central Asia (after, in his view, gaining effective control of the oil of the Persian Gulf in 1991). Specifically regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vidal writes how such an attack, which American intelligence warned was coming, politically justified the plans that the administration already had in August 2001 for invading Afghanistan the following October.
• In October 2006, Vidal derided NORAD for its inability to intercept the hijacked aircraft on 9/11, which he asserted was the result of "stand down orders."
• He has claimed that the Bush administration has been the darkest period in the history of the United States.