March 19, 1988 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/10/gore-vidal-proposals-to-improve-u...
Vidal was born in West Point, New York, the only child of Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895--1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903--1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy, where his father was the first aeronautics instructor, and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater. According to "West Point and the Third Loyalty", an article Vidal wrote for The New York Review of Books (October 18, 1973), he later decided to be called Gore in honor of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
Vidal's father, a West Point all-American quarterback who was director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933--37) in the Roosevelt administration, was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots and, according to biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line, which merged with others and became Eastern Airlines, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, which became TWA), and Northeast Airlines, which he founded with Earhart, as well as the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).
Gore Vidal's mother was an actress and socialite who made her Broadway debut in Sign of the Leopard in 1928. She married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. in 1922 and divorced him in 1935. She later married twice more; one husband, Hugh D. Auchincloss, was later the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and, according to Gore Vidal, she had "a long off-and-on affair" with actor Clark Gable. She was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.
Vidal had four half-siblings from his parents' later marriages (the Rev. Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal Hewitt, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers Straight) and four stepbrothers from his mother's third marriage to Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, who died in 1943, ten months after marrying Vidal's mother. Vidal's nephew Burr Steers is a writer and film director, and nephew Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963--1995) was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum.
Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School and then St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, his grandson read aloud to him and was his guide. The senator's isolationism contributed a major principle of his grandson's political philosophy, which is critical of foreign and domestic policies shaped by American imperialism. In 1943, on graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the U.S. Army Reserve serving in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where he served as master of an Army freight and supply boat.
Vidal has had affairs with both men and women. The novelist Anaïs Nin claimed an involvement with Vidal in her memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin but Vidal denied it in his memoir Palimpsest. Vidal has also discussed having dalliances with people such as actress Diana Lynn, and has alluded to the possibility that he may have a daughter. He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward, before she married Paul Newman; after eloping, the couple shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles for a short time. In 1950, he met his long-term partner Howard Austen.
During the latter part of the twentieth century Vidal divided his time between Italy and California. In 2003, he sold his 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian Villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest), and moved to Los Angeles. Austen died in November 2003 and, in February 2005, was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
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10:19
Gore Vidal: Proposals to Improve the U.S. Government (4/4) (1988)by thefilmarchive1,683 views
7:35 "...make...announcement about every member of the house...senate...how many defense establishments...in his/her district & how much money...getting from them, which would explain to the people at large why...voted the way s/he did, & then...start cutting back...that's the 1st move..."
7:57 "...get rid of the CIA...something no democratic society should sustain...those secret socieities..."
poodlesusan 11 months ago
His criticisms of the American educational system are well-taken. This nation isn't dumb, it's just really ignorant--there is a huge discrepancy in the quality of education between private and public schools, and it's something we need to correct or we will continue to be an embarrassment.
Aaronthegreatest 1 year ago
makes me sad when i see the issues of today were told before my birth. and a 30% voting rate let it continue.
maj1kninja07 1 year ago
Wikipedia has info on Vidal if you do not know his background.
davidperi 1 year ago
Gore expressing how Chernobyl's effect on him in Italy manifested with some cloudy weather and sinuses is pretty silly.
SmelOdies 1 year ago