Gore Vidal
Man on a High Horse
Gore Vidal wielded a sharp nib and was keen to skewer his rivals with it. He was unapologetic about a mean streak that ran through his erudition. “Beneath my cold exterior,” he warned, “once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
The scion of an upper-crust and politically engaged family, Vidal made an unsuccessful bid as a young man in 1960 for a Democratic congressional seat in New York. He tried again in 1982, by now a celebrated author, this time in a race for the United States Senate, pitting himself against California’s lame-duck governor, Jerry Brown, “Governor Moonbeam.” Moonbeam wasn’t Vidal’s invention; Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko came up with that sobriquet. But it appealed to Vidal’s sardonic side during his party’s primary campaign, given that his Republican challengers were already nicknamed “Big Mo” and “Piccolo Pete.” That’s Maureen Reagan, the then-president’s daughter, and San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Moreover, Vidal had a craving to discredit the outgoing Republican senator from California, S.I. Hayakawa, “Samurai Sam.”
Vidal sought a larger and more immediate audience than he could reach as a writer, even one who regularly appeared on the late-night TV talk show circuit. Unless he joined the fray as a candidate, he believed he would be portrayed as an outspoken interloper at best or an intellectual gadfly at worst…
