Word: vidal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This novel is the fifth installment of a burgeoning saga that might be called "The U.S. According to Gore." Vidal's ambitious retelling and revamping of American history began on a modest scale with Washington, D.C. (1967), a novel set in the middle of this century that mixed real and fictional people in a struggle for the nation's soul. Then came Burr (1973), a witty revisionist look at the Founding Fathers, as recorded by Aaron Burr's amanuensis and illegitimate son Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. In 1876 (1976), an older Schuyler returned home after years of self-imposed exile...
Empire can be understood with no knowledge of the four novels that precede it, but a number of nuances will be missed in the process. Vidal's version of American society from 1898 to 1906 comes heavily cross-referenced not only to the historical past but to his other books. For example, the fictional heroine, Caroline Sanford, is Charles Schuyler's granddaughter and thus linked to Burr and 1876; she has an affair with an equally fictional Congressman named James Burden Day, who will one day seek the presidency in Washington...
Stuck with the emptiness of a foregone conclusion, Vidal improvises diversions to fill in the space. One involves Caroline Sanford's battle with her half brother Blaise over their late father's $15 million estate. Temporarily blocked from her share, Caroline sells four Poussin paintings, buys a money-losing Washington newspaper, and spices it up with sensationalisms a la Hearst, the man whom Blaise admires as "something new and strange and potent." Hay muses, "The contest was now between the high- minded few, led by Roosevelt, and Hearst, the true inventor of the modern world. What Hearst arbitrarily decided...
...most striking of these, Vidal claims, is Teddy Roosevelt, who parlays ; the inflated Hearstian ballyhoo about his heroics on San Juan Hill into a political career that eventually, after McKinley's assassination in 1901, lands him in the White House. Empire is, to put it mildly, not kind to Roosevelt. Nearly all the characters extol his predecessor. Hay tells McKinley, "You may be tired, sir, but you've accomplished a great deal more than any President since Mr. Lincoln, and even he didn't acquire an empire for us, which you have done." Roosevelt, by contrast, is the "fat little...
...Rios Erenu, 56, who supported the trials. Alfonsin replaced Rios Erenu last week with former Inspector General Jose Segundo Dante Caridi, 56. The appointment, however, promptly led to renewed unrest at infantry garrisons in the northern provinces of Salta and Tucuman, where troops backed Training Institute Director General Augusto Vidal for the top military post. Said one insider: "The President was not about to show that the rebels could put up a nominee." Still, Caridi's appointment was part of a high-command housecleaning. General Fausto Gonzalez, who was said to be a rebel favorite, was named deputy chief...