Thomas Jefferson gets a caustic spraying of Vidalic acid in the historical novel Burr, where, through the eyes of his vice president and political rival Aaron Burr, the author of the Declaration of Independence appears as an eccentric, hypocritical and vindictive tyrantand that’s before Vidal mentions the curiously ginger-haired slaves at Monticello. In Vidal’s non-fiction Inventing a Nation, George Washington reigns as a pompous buffoon more concerned about the finances of his plantation than the young nation he’s siring. In Vidal’s literary universe, the gods descend from Rushmore and become pedestrianand it’s not hard to imagine a Larry Craig or Rod Blagojevich among them. In novels and non-fiction he savages the “founding fathers,” portraying them as real, contemporary, political and, above all, thoroughly corruptible. Gore Vidal, a self-described narrator of empire, seems to enjoy nothing more than puncturing sacrosanct American icons.
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