Gore Vidal and the Unfinished American Revolution

thenation.com — Gore Vidal loved America in the way the best of the founders did. Indeed, he seemed at times, to be the last of their number — a fierce defender of the purest, most revolutionary of ideals at a time when the contemporary political class prattled on about constitutional principles they neither understood nor valued. Vidal, who has died at age 86, was a great man of letters: an author, playwright and National Book Award–winning essayist on the literature of his native land and the world. But I knew Gore as a political champion, who ran inspired campaigns for Congress, who demanded that presidents of both parties be held to account for high crimes and misdemeanors, who maintained a faith in democracy so deep and abiding that he called for a new constitutional convention to set right what was done wrong at Philadelphia and to realize the Jeffersonian requirement of revolutionary renewal.

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