With Gore Vidal, the jabs and the political zingers fly

Gore Vidal was true to form today during his Book Festival chat with Jane Smiley.

First he jabbed at the late neoconservative William Buckley by slyly hoping that "it wasn't too hot" in Buckley's final resting place. Then he jabbed at himself a bit. "I’m in a chair you see, and I have a cane," he hollered to the audience.

And with that, he veered into a long story about how one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's young aides panicked when the president's wheelchair jammed. Not sure what to do, the frightened aide quickly pushed the president into a room used to store carbon copy paper. FDR later quipped, according to Vidal: "I don’t fear assassination, no. I guess I’m the first president to be filed."

The heat-weary crowd that packed the auditorium at Royce Hall responded with hollers during the hour-and-a half discussion peppered with non sequiturs and political zingers. The 82-year-old Vidal looked every inch as weathered as his photos on the back of books from "Lincoln" to "The City and the Pillar" to "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace." Still, he looked dapper in a navy-blue linen shirt and matching blazer.

Moderator Smiley called Vidal a man who has been reviled in every town he’s lived in, with his pronouncements about an "imperial presidency" that has "become the unfortunate lay of the land" in the post-World War II world. "Once you smash the Constitution, there's absolutely nothing to fall back on," he said.

He was asked whether he saw any future in a third party as a realistic option for America. "That requires too much thinking," Vidal quipped, concluding that he only hoped it could happen.

Smiley asked Vidal about a statement in which he called the United States a country where a dictatorship was "implicit in our beginnings." "Has no one read the Federalist Papers?" he responded. Then he invoked the words of the country's forefathers, who he said implicitly knew that "cursed is a nation that has a standing army."

Toward the end of the session, Vidal talked about movies too. He said he hated the film "There Will Be Blood." "How could a book called 'Oil' be turned into a bloody murder?" Vidal said. "I guess two more generations of kids can get out of reading Upton Sinclair." And then he just rolled his eyes.

-- Shazia Haq

Photo: Gore Vidal with the L.A. Philharmonic last year. Credit: Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times