In the early aughts, thanks to my then position as editor at large of this publication, I found myself in the middle of the last great feud in Gore Vidal’s long, august line of literary battles. Erudite and waspish, and routinely referred to in his lifetime as “America’s greatest man of letters,” Vidal, who would have turned 100 on October 3, 2025, had a breadth of achievement as a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, occasional politician, and TV talk show personality, one that has no equivalent—and likely never will—in American culture. He was also known for his rollicking public spats with fellow midcentury literary icons. He’d crossed swords, most famously, with William F. Buckley Jr., Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote, and had either sued, been sued by, or threatened to sue each of them. One of Vidal’s most quoted aphorisms came from a period of self-realization: “After a certain point in life, litigation replaces sex.”
Each of Vidal’s feuds was the fodder for many column inches in the era’s gossip pages, contributing to the notoriety and infamy of all involved. Not to discount entirely the validity of the causes of these contretemps—Buckley, after all, had called him “you queer” and threatened to punch in his “goddamn face” on national television during one of their infamous ABC News debates at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—but the attention they brought surely was part of the point. Now, early in the 21st century, when the literary feud was long out of vogue, it was time for an ultimate heavyweight fight. This final opponent was another contributor to Vanity Fair, the columnist Christopher Hitchens, who had been one of Vidal’s dearest friends.
I was Vidal’s editor at VF, becoming his close friend and literary executor, and it was, in fact, Hitchens who introduced me to Vidal. We were all close enough to call one another by nicknames: Vidal unfailingly called Hitchens Hitchypoo or Poo, for short. Hitchens and I called Vidal Maestro. I was Matteo. But Hitchens, to his delight, had a second pet name bestowed by Vidal: Dauphin. And this name was to be the root cause of a disastrous, soon-to-be-very-public breakup.
On the back cover of the hard copy version of his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens includes, at the very bottom, a blurb from Vidal: “I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.” The quotation is x-ed out in red, with “no, CH” scrawled next to it in a facsimile of Hitchens’s handwriting. A diabolically clever bit of dual-action self-promotion and goading on Hitchens’s part, it let him bask in the glow of Vidal’s approval while tweaking the nose of the great man of letters who now looked askance at him after his sudden lurch to the right in the wake of 9/11. They were both fearless, silver-tongued polemicists, part of a species of mid-to-late-20th-century celebrity that is almost extinct: the public intellectual. When they were showering each other with praise, Hitchens observed that Vidal “had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones.”
Both had once been ideologically aligned, at least roughly: Hitchens the caviar Trotskyite, and Vidal the FDR-style “traitor to his class” liberal. But to Vidal, Hitchens’s embrace of the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crossed the line. “He’s gone mad, our Poo,” Vidal told his biographer Jay Parini in 2010. Even worse, Hitchens turned his fire on the Maestro himself, in the 2010 Vanity Fair piece headlined “Vidal Loco,” which claimed Vidal was buying into left-wing post-9/11 conspiracy theories. I was caught in the middle—Vidal would phone from his home in Ravello, Italy, sighing, “What has happened to the Poo?” while Hitchens, whenever we spoke, would, through me, take Vidal’s temperature on his new neocon politics. The betrayal cut deep. After all, Vidal’s career in politics and polemical writing—he was, even to his critics, the greatest essayist of his time—had always been rooted in a relentless critique of imperialism, creeping authoritarianism, the erosion of the Bill of Rights, the rise of the national security state, and the oligarchic tendencies of the political class. He could not endorse Hitchens’s embrace of the very forces he had spent a lifetime opposing, and the Dauphin title was duly stripped. There was, too, a subcutaneous aspect: Hitchens’s fame was ascendant, outstripping that of the Maestro, 24 years his senior. Vidal could never truly anoint a successor, since that would imply that Vidal might one day no longer exist. (He died at 86 in 2012; Hitchens predeceased him in 2011 at 62.) I once tried to console Hitchens by reminding him of one of Vidal’s most famous quips: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
What has happened to Gore Vidal, the witty, tough-minded subversive of American letters, the 20th century’s only possible answer to Oscar Wilde?
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Vidal could be thin-skinned, and no one could do august like he did; someone once remarked that being in his presence was “like being in the room with an institution.” When he filled out VF’s Proust Questionnaire, his answer to “What is your greatest fear?” was “Elevation to the papacy.” He liked to joke that his role in American life was akin to Queen Elizabeth II’s role in the UK: “to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn.” His essay collection United States, which won the 1993 National Book Award for nonfiction, is a cinder-block-size volume that contains some of the sharpest political writing of the late 20th century. Rarely read or cited today, his essays uncannily predict the fractures, erosions, and dangers that define the current surrealist political landscape—what he called, with characteristic bluntness, “the decline of the American empire.” At the time, his portentous statements could sound exaggerated, but in retrospect they seem eerily prophetic. He could perceive like no one else (except, perhaps, for Noam Chomsky) that the seeds of the slide away from liberal democracy were already germinating.
In a 1982 essay for The Nation, “The Second American Revolution,” Vidal warned that the United States was already ceasing to function as a representative republic. Power, he argued, had passed to a “national security state”—a permanent government of corporate elites, defense contractors, and intelligence agencies whose true purpose was not to defend citizens but to preserve their own dominance. He labeled this class “the owners” and described how secrecy was used to insulate them from scrutiny. What sounded strident then now reads as prophecy: corporate power entrenched, surveillance normalized, endless war—“perpetual war for perpetual peace,” as he called it—made the norm.
In “The State of the Union” (Esquire, 1975), Vidal pressed the point further, describing how a permanent government of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and corporate elites had usurped real power from elected officials. Congress and the presidency, he wrote, had become stage props for an oligarchic system that operated in secret and served only itself. Again, what sounded melodramatic to some at the time now feels like plain description: the normalization of secrecy, surveillance, and politics beholden to the military industrial/tech complex. Read today, the essay is less a warning than it is a map of how the republic slipped into its current crisis, though the term deep state, similar to what he identified, has been weaponized by the right to further demagogue the issues.
Vidal returned to these themes in “The War at Home,” the first VF essay of his I edited. He warned that the country was coming apart not just from imperial overreach of what he liked to call the Cheney-Bush oil-and-gas junta, but also from neglect at home. He saw a nation of people dispossessed, farmers forsaken, workers abandoned, pointing to those left behind by the new economy and a political class (in both parties) deaf to their grievances. “[T]here are vast areas, like rural America, that are an unmapped ultima Thule to those who own the corporations that own the media that spend billions of dollars to take polls in order to elect their lawyers to high office,” he wrote. He predicted that popular resentment would not remain latent—that it would be harnessed by demagogues who spoke in the language of populism while advancing the interests of entrenched power. At the time, critics waved it off: Vidal being Vidal. Today it reads as a forecast of the politics of grievance and resentment that would fuel the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
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One morning, soon after “The War at Home” was published, I arrived at the magazine’s offices, and my assistant, Marc Goodman, told me there was a letter on my desk that I should look at right away. Many pages, handwritten in tiny script on yellow lined paper, it was from the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, with a return address of the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. There was a Post-it on the first page: “Hey Matt, please pass this on to Gore. —Tim.” It was duly faxed to Ravello. Vidal called, aglow. McVeigh had been studying the Bill of Rights while on death row and reading a lot of Gore Vidal. The two started a correspondence about their mutual interest in the erosion of the Bill of Rights, which became the basis for another essay, “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh.” In that piece, later selected for the 2022 edition of The Best American Essays, Vidal set out not to excuse McVeigh’s atrocity—he was careful to note that nothing could justify the killing of 168 people, including 19 children in the day care center of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—but to place the bomber’s fury in a wider American context. He argued that McVeigh’s rage over Waco (a federal siege ending in the deaths of 82 people) and Ruby Ridge (a raid in Idaho that left three dead), along with his distrust of an unaccountable federal government, reflected a deep alienation shared by millions, especially neglected rural and working-class Americans. The reception was explosive: Critics accused Vidal of giving a platform to a mass murderer, even as he stressed that he did not condone the bombing and insisted that McVeigh’s mindset revealed the sickness of the republic. McVeigh, who invited Vidal to witness his execution in June 2001, became a kind of dark mirror to Vidal’s analysis. Vidal made plans to attend the death by lethal injection but canceled at the last minute. “He’s a harbinger,” Vidal told me. I was not sure I completely believed him at the time, but that harbinger now looks an awful lot like one foreshadowing the arrival of Trump and the MAGA movement, which have been very effective at channeling the same grievances into political power. That brings to mind another Vidal line: “The four most beautiful words in the English language, ‘I told you so.’”
The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh
Gore Vidal’s 1998 Vanity Fair essay on the erosion of the U.S. Bill of Rights caused McVeigh to begin a three-year correspondence with Vidal, prompting an examination of certain evidence that points to darker truths-a conspiracy willfully ignored by F.B.I. investigators, and a possible cover-up by a government waging a secret war on the liberty of its citizens.
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Editing Vidal was an adventure on many fronts. In the lush days of Condé Nast’s bottomless expense accounts and budgets, lavish gifts were the norm when a star writer turned in a big piece. Vidal drank gin by the gallon (to wash down the Macallan 12), so once I sent a case of Bombay Sapphire to Ravello. Turns out the gin had to be driven 170 miles from Rome. The fax machine soon spat out a page with his scrawl: “Mother’s milk arrived with trucker’s compliments.” There were other contributor perks. He could only write his essays on vintage portable Olivetti Lettera typewriters (novels were composed in long hand on legal pads). The Olivettis were getting harder to repair, so my assistant found a trove of them and ordered the lot. We kept about a half dozen in the office to FedEx to Italy for stuck keys and other technological emergencies. Once, when Vidal was on deadline and staying in his usual suite at The Plaza in Manhattan, an Olivetti was messengered over for him. He and I got back from a long, wet dinner at the restaurant Daniel, and he sat down to write while I was still there. I was amazed to see that he composed those long, intricate essays using one finger, pecking out a single letter at a time. A typist was hired to create a final draft from the messy, marked-up Olivetti typescripts, and he never dropped a stitch in his copy. He was probably the only writer in the history of the magazine allowed by the revered copy chief, Peter Devine, to invent a word. It was the adverb sickenly, a short version of sickeningly, that Devine let slide, saying, “After all, it’s Gore Vidal.”
As Vidal and I grew closer, I made trips to Ravello to visit him and his companion of more than 40 years, Howard Austen. They lived at La Rondinaia, a vast four-level villa built into the side of a sheer cliff and surrounded by terraced gardens, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The world came to Vidal in Ravello. In the guest rooms there were silver-framed photos of famous previous occupants: Johnny and Joanna Carson, Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev. When Hillary Clinton paid a visit in 1994, La Repubblica’s headline was “Lady Clinton nel Paradiso di Vidal.” It was there that the Maestro could read and write with the distractions of the modern world kept at a safe distance, while Austen dealt with all quotidian matters. An admirer of his paternal grandfather, the populist Oklahoma senator T.P. Gore, a man of the 19th and early 20th century, Vidal identified more with those pretech times. I think it helped him conjure the distant pasts of his historical novels, which were meticulously researched and scrawled out on yellow legal pads. (His book 1876 landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1976, but Burr and Lincoln are his two masterpieces of the genre.) His only nod to the digital age was his fax machine, which made sending manuscripts a breeze. He called his hi-fi “the victrola” and hadn’t driven a car in decades. He walked the stairs and terraces of the Amalfi Coast daily, which I think contributed to his relative longevity, despite levels of alcohol consumption that were hard to reconcile with such a staggeringly prolific career. He prided himself on never drinking on the job. While staying with him, I noted that he worked regular hours, reading and writing in his book-lined studio overlooking the sea from 10 a.m. until lunch. He then went back to work until, as he said, “the shadows grow long”—cocktail hour—about 5 p.m. He pronounced to me once that his doctor told him he had “a perfect liver.” And true, it never gave out. When his feuding rival of the ’60s and ’70s, Truman Capote—who Vidal frequently claimed did drink while working—died at the home of Joanne Carson, one of his “swans,” in 1984, Vidal’s infamous response was, “Good career move.” Their fractious relationship blossomed into a lawsuit in 1975. Thereafter, Vidal dismissed Capote with the line, “I saw him only once again, in 1968, when, without my glasses, I mistook him for a small ottoman, and sat down on him.”
In his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest—a sociopolitical atlas of the second half of the 20th century and a majestic, score-settling epic—Vidal rehashed the other great feuds that punctuated his career, long before Hitchypoo landed on these shores. Among them was his long-running battle with Norman Mailer, which flared across decades in print, on television, and even in physical altercations. Mailer once headbutted Vidal in a greenroom at The Dick Cavett Show, only to be met with Vidal’s rejoinder: “As usual, words fail Norman Mailer.” During the show, a drunken Mailer hurled insults, while Vidal, with Cavett on his side, fended him off with icy calm and won over the studio audience. They officially made peace in a 1991 Esquire feature, which began: “For nearly twenty years, they jabbed and slugged and said mean things. Mailer: ‘Liar…hypocrite…you pollute the intellectual rivers…’ Vidal: ‘Henry Miller…Norman Mailer…Charles Manson…a logical progression.’ This winter, at the Plaza Hotel, on a blustering afternoon, their epic feud ends in a clinch—not to say an embrace.” One is wistful for a time when magazines breathlessly covered the contretemps of titans such as these, rather than the latest Kardashian to join the ranks of billionaires.
There were affectionate sketches in the memoir as well: While touring Europe with Tennessee Williams, whom Vidal called “the Bird,” in 1948, Vidal was excited to land a dinner with Noël Coward. “We were served kidneys,” Vidal wrote, “which neither of us ate. Coward, whom we had just met, then proceeded to enact for us the entire story of his professional life, often springing up from the table to assault the piano as he brayed briskly the lyrics of past triumphs to my delight and Tennessee’s disgust. ‘He thinks,’ said the Bird as we vanished into the night, ‘that we don’t know who he is.’” Orson Welles drifted through the pages as a frequent lunch companion at LA’s 1970s hot spot Ma Maison, always desperate for money, and forever pitching implausible schemes to keep creditors at bay. Vidal recalled Paul Bowles, the expatriate writer-composer in Tangier, and Anaïs Nin, whose self-mythologizing amused him and inspired a satirical portrait in his novel Two Sisters. One of my favorite Vidal stories, about Eleanor Roosevelt, was always told with a brilliant impersonation of her high mid-Atlantic intonations. He had gone to visit the former first lady at her home, Val-Kill Cottage, near Hyde Park, New York. He knocked on the door; no one answered, but the door was ajar, so he walked in, and saw, in a powder room off the entry hall, her unmistakable tall silhouette standing over the toilet. He startled her, and she said, “Oh dear, now you know my secret.” He thought, Oh God, no… But then she backed away to reveal a spray of gladiolus arranged in the toilet bowl. “It does keep them fresh,” she said.
In the end, of all Vidal’s battles, the Buckley feud was the defining one—a lifelong preoccupation. Once, in Ravello, Vidal and I watched all 10 of the 1968 convention debates, which he had preserved on VHS. He couldn’t stop reliving it. As Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus observes in Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America: “The curious alchemy of the close-in camera and the microphone made Buckley and Vidal seem born for TV combat, mirror images of superior intellect, cutting wit, and comical disdain. Their mellifluous old-style transatlantic stage voices even sounded alike.” ABC, perpetually in last place, had hired them to add spice to its 1968 convention coverage. What it got instead was a template for the gladiatorial punditry that would come to define political television for decades.
On August 28, 1968, the day after the police riots on Michigan Avenue, the exchanges boiled over. What began as political commentary collapsed into bizarre, personal invective, with the encounter remaining one of the most famous moments in broadcast history. “Viewers across the country,” Tanenhaus writes, “…who had seen hours of what looked like anarchy in the streets of the country’s greatest heartland city—watched as Buckley, his face contorted with rage, and seemingly about to lunge up from his chair, spat out what would be for many the words remembered best in a life devoted to language, spoken and written…”
BUCKLEY: Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.
VIDAL: Oh, Bill.
BUCKLEY: Let Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism.
HOWARD K. SMITH, moderator: I beg you to…
“Queer,” Tanenhaus reports, “was the epithet Buckley had been using for years, almost any time Vidal’s name came up.” But here, he went further, feminizing Vidal by equating him with the transgender heroine of his then runaway bestseller. Turnabout is fair play, though; Vidal used to taunt Buckley by saying, “I based Myra Breckinridge on you.” And he called him “the Marie Antoinette of American politics.” Buckley’s wife, Pat, reportedly told the journalist Murray Kempton that “200 million Americans think William F. Buckley is a screaming homosexual.”
Tanenhaus quotes a friend of both men as saying, “Gore thought Bill was getting away with something.” Tanenhaus adds: “Getting away, that is, with concealing his own homosexuality and securing his respectable place in polite society by exposing the ‘subversions’ or ‘perversions’ of others.” Buckley’s attack came at Vidal’s greatest vulnerability, his refusal to remain silent about sexuality at a time when nearly everyone else did. In 1948 he had risked his career by publishing The City and the Pillar, often thought of as the first American novel with an unapologetically homosexual protagonist. The book got him blacklisted by much of the establishment press. He liked to say he spent the rest of his career fighting what he called “the heterosexual dictatorship”—the cultural order that forbade honest acknowledgment of homosexuality in public life. This made up a good deal of his beef with Buckley, who he thought was a hypocrite on this front, since Buckley’s magazine, the National Review, was, according to Tanenhaus’s biography, in the practice of, at times, exposing closeted gay men through “blind items.”
Watching the debates years later in Ravello, Vidal seemed half-delighted, half-wounded. Buckley had used homophobia to smear him in front of a national audience. I could see it still stung. Neither man would ever escape the shadow of that night. What followed was a rancorous postscript: dueling Esquire articles that rehashed the feud, and a lawsuit. In his cups, Vidal would roar his own counternarrative: “I was the butchest boy at Exeter. He’s the screeching queen!”
I think that Hitchens’s favorite Vidalism was, “Never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” Vidal lived long enough to see both activities—once his twin arenas of sport and fame—become more fraught, whether in the shadow of HIV/AIDS or the more lasting plague of premium cable. How he would have fared in the age of social media is a moot point. He just missed it, and surely this atomized world of self-promotion and fragmented attention could not have been for him. On network television, in the age of 50 million viewers all bathed in the same cathode light, he reigned: a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and Cavett, rarely slumming beneath The Merv Griffin Show. He was born at precisely the right time to exploit his unique talents—equal parts polemicist, satirist, blockbuster novelist, and grand provocateur. Timing, as Vidal’s great friend Norman Lear used to say, is everything.
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