The Last Empire Quotes

“As for our Ouija-board Supreme Court, it would be nice if they would take time off from holding séances with the long-dead founders, whose original intent so puzzles them, and actually examine what the founders wrought, the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Many years ago, there used to be something called ‘conflict of interest.’ No longer, I’m afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn’t agreeing with you. He’s just listening to you.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“No reason to have any particular enemy, though, who knows, if sufficiently goaded, Russia might again be persuaded to play Great Satan in our somewhat dusty chamber of horrors.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“one on offer in his time, earning himself what he regarded as the supreme accolade from a Virginia congressman, who found him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery.” Adams’s last days were very much like the last days of anyone old. He suffered a stroke. He weakened. But he continued to go to the House. On February 21, 1848, he cast his last vote, a “no” in regard to the war upon Mexico. He motioned to the chair that he would like to speak. As he rose, he staggered. Another member caught him before he hit the floor. He was carried into the Speaker’s private chamber. For two days, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Then, on February 23rd: “This is the last of earth,” he was heard to murmur. “I am composed.” Final words. Articulate to the end.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“She was intelligent but not clever; drawn”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“aware that the war with Japan is essentially a race war. Who will dominate the Pacific and Asia, the white or the yellow race? As of June 1944, race hatred was the fuel to our war against Japan, as I witnessed firsthand in the Pacific. Yet Franklin, Daisy reports, is already looking ahead: In regard to the Far East in general which means the yellow race, which is far more numerous than the white, it will be to the advantage of the white race to be friends with them & work in cooperation with them, rather than make enemies of them & have them eventually use all the machines of western civilization to overrun & conquer the white race.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“while the Spanish Philippines became our first Asian real estate and the inspiration for close to a century now of disastrous American adventures in that part of the world.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Also, between 1939 and 1941, he was the chief voice raised against U.S. intervention in the Second World War. In a notorious speech at Des Moines in 1941, he identified America’s three interventionist groups: the Roosevelt administration, the Jews, and the British. Although the country was deeply isolationist, the interventionists were very resourceful, and Lindbergh was promptly attacked as a pro-Nazi anti-Semite when he was no more than a classic Midwestern isolationist, reflective of a majority of the country.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“It was not until November 25, 1996, that an American academic, Thomas E. Mahl, researching Britain’s various secret service archives, came across the Williams file. He has now published Desperate Deception, as full a story as we are ever apt to get of “British Covert Operations in the United States 1939–44.” Although media and schools condition Americans to start giggling at the mention of the word “conspiracy,” there are, at any moment, all sorts of conspiracies crisscrossing our spacious skies and amber fields of grain, and of them all in this century, the largest, most intricate and finally most successful was that of the British to get us into the Second World War.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“There was indeed a vast conspiracy to maneuver an essentially isolationist country into war. There was also a dedicated conspiracy to destroy Lindbergh’s reputation as hero.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“north of Cuba slavery was not only legal but a triumphant way of life in the Southern states of a republic whose most eloquent founder had proclaimed that “all men are created equal”—except, as is so often the case in an imperfect world, those who are not. But by 1839 organized opposition to slavery was mounting in the North of the United States, to such an extent that, in twenty years, there would be a fiery disunion of South from North, and civil war. The case of the young rice farmer from Sierra Leone proved to be the first significant shot in that war.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“He became the permanent scourge of what he called the “slaveocracy.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“After Harvard, J.Q.A. listlessly tried the law. But he found his true métier as a polemicist. Under various newspaper pseudonyms, he supported George Washington’s general policy of neutrality in regard to other nations. Washington’s celebrated—and long ignored—farewell to the nation, warning against passionate friendships and enmities with foreign powers, was influenced by letters that he (and Alexander Hamilton) had read from J.Q.A., whom he had made minister to The Hague.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Tiberius Caesar”—Adams supported Jefferson whenever he thought him right, particularly in regard to the 1807 embargo on American products to England and France, a retaliation for their wartime restrictions on United States trade. Since New England lived by trade with Europe, J.Q.A.’s support of the embargo so infuriated Massachusetts that he was forced out of the Senate before his term was up. But Jefferson’s successor, Madison, made him the first U.S. minister to Russia, and then sent him to Ghent to negotiate the end of the War of 1812, and on to London as minister, where he stayed until he became Secretary of State to the new President, Monroe, for whom he drafted what is still known (even if it is no longer in force) as the Monroe Doctrine.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“higher Jurisdiction.” As for slavery, he thought it “an outrage upon the goodness of God.” One difference between then—so foreign to us—and now is the extent to which Christians actually believed in the Christian God. Where our politicians oscillate between hypocrisy and bigoted religiosity, they had, for better or worse, religion, something that takes a lot of Einfühlen for us to grasp. Needless to say, in 1846 J.Q.A. found morally reprehensible the American invasion of Mexico that would give us the Southwest and California.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into rearming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our—well, cozy unremitting war?”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“But like every good American, Truman knew he hated Communism. He also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing. No one seemed quite sure. Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism—imported by comical German immigrants with noses always in books—was an ominous specter, calculated to derange a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care, and other Devil’s work still being fiercely resisted a century and a half later.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“postwar managers: if you want to avoid depression, spend money on war. No one told them that the same money spent on the country’s infrastructure would have saved us debt, grief, blood.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“At one point, Ferrell notes that Truman actually gave thought to the sufferings of women and children should we go nuclear in Korea. As for Truman’s original decision to use two atomic bombs on Japan, most now agree that a single demonstration would have been quite enough to cause a Japanese surrender while making an attractive crater lake out of what had been Mount Fujiyama’s peak.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“agent Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, had come into his splendid own, fingering better actors.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress to proclaim what would be known as the Truman Doctrine, in which he targeted our ally of two years earlier as the enemy. The subject at hand was a civil war in Greece, supposedly directed by the Soviet. We could not tolerate this as, suddenly, “the policy of the United States [is] to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” Thus,”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“and so his secretary of state, Acheson, was told to wait until February 1949, after the election, to present to Congress our changeover from a Western Hemisphere republic to an imperial European polity, symmetrically balanced by our Asian empire, centered on occupied Japan and, in due course, its tigerish pendant, the ASEAN alliance.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“as Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, merrily observed, “In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical ‘average American citizen’ put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. . . . It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret “bipartisan” government is best for what, after all, is—or should be—a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Divide Germany 1944–49) is a masterful survey of an empire—sometimes blindly, sometimes brilliantly—assembling itself by turning first its allies and then its enemies like Germany, Italy, Japan into client states, permanently subject to our military and economic diktat.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“able to incinerate Japan—or the Soviet, for that matter—and so we no longer needed Russian help to defeat Japan. We started to renege on our agreements with Stalin, particularly reparations from Germany. We also quietly shelved the notion, agreed upon at Yalta, of a united Germany under four-power control. Our aim now was to unite the three Western zones of Germany and integrate them into our Western Europe, restoring, in the process, the German economy—hence, fewer reparations. Then, as of May 1946, we began to rearm Germany. Stalin went ape at this betrayal. The Cold War was on.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

“Today’s centrifugal forces in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia he anticipated in Patriotic Gore where, through his portraits of various leaders in our Civil War, he shows how people, in order to free themselves of an overcentralized state, are more than willing, and most tragically, to shed patriotic gore.”
― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000