His mother sent him to boarding school at 15 and, upon graduation from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1943, he joined the Army. His parents divorced before his 10th birthday and he grew up in Washington DC, largely at the house of his grandfather, the senator. His mother was the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma. Vidal was born Octoin the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY, where his father then worked as the school’s first aeronautics instructor. Gore Vidal, 86, died Tuesday after a long career in politics and literature that took him from DC to Minnesota to Italy to Los Angeles, and back again. Bachmann is rather the sort of figure-attractive, politically powerful, opinionated, and stridently ignorant-who might fit in well in Duluth, Vidal’s 1983 satirical, surreal, science fiction novel loosely based on the Minnesota city. Look, a woman becomes Republican ideologue wacko because she doesn’t want to deal with real history.

A better scenario couldn’t have been invented by Vidal himself. Burr, while a novel, was heavily researched and essentially historically accurate. I don’t think I’m a Democrat.”Īnd so she became a Republican. I looked out the window and I said, “You know what? I think I must be a Republican. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, ‘You know what? What he’s writing about, this mocking of people that I revere - I knew that that was not representative of my country.Īnd at that point I put the book down and I laughed. Until I was reading this snotty novel called ‘Burr,’ by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. Michele Bachmann, the intense Republican Congressional member from Minnesota then running for president, explained an important moment in her political development:

Washington dc by gore vidal