Word: vidal
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...Vidal compares himself with Mark Twain and Henry James, other writers who looked askance at American imperial expansion. He would have preferred to play a role in turning back this progress but instead became its disapproving chronicler. Regrets, he has a few, but he also takes comfort in the role that fate assigned him: "Writers have to tell the truth as they see it, and politicians must never give the game away." In his writing, the game goes on. -With reporting by Curtis Ellis/New York
Before the parties sucked all the spontaneity out of them, political conventions were the ultimate in reality TV : no-holds-barred, high stakes contests with an uncertain outcome and a huge national audience. This is the setting for Gore Vidal's "The Best Man," written 40 years ago yet still remarkably timely in its Broadway revival. Fighting for their party's presidential nomination are Secretary of State William Russell, a high-minded patrician liberal who believes politics is a process of educating people about the issues, and Senator Joe Cantwell, an expert at grabbing headlines with sensational investigations who will...
...Vidal did not tinker with or update his 1960 play for its current Broadway incarnation, preferring to offer it as a period piece, a reminder of a time when important decisions were actually made at political conventions. He says he still had some faith in the U.S. political system when he wrote "The Best Man," but no longer does. If he were to put the current situation onstage, "it would be set in a boardroom of something like ITT, General Electric. You'd watch the directors of this big company auditioning politicians, maybe actors. Maybe they'd go directly...
...Speaking before a preview performance last week, Vidal says he was inspired by the politics of 1960, when Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Hamlet, battled Young Turk Jack Kennedy for the party's presidential nomination. "You have a very noble and eloquent and witty man, a superior man, who is just a ditherer, to be blunt about it, up against a real political operator, on the order of Nixon. So we have a Stevensonian character and a Nixonian character. But they're not thinly disguised portraits, they're archetypes. Just for fun I made the political operator with a totally virtuous...
...Vidal knows politics first-hand. He grew up in Washington, D.C., where his grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as senator from Oklahoma; Vidal's father was FDR's director of air commerce. His stepsister was Jackie Kennedy, and through her he became a friend of Jack Kennedy. Vidal himself was an unsuccessful candidate for a congressional seat in 1960, a race in which he was endorsed by friend and neighbor Eleanor Roosevelt. Some of "The Best Man" came straight out of this background. "I showed the play to Jack [Kennedy] and he gave me a couple of lines," Vidal recalls...