Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson [Hardcover]

Gore Vidal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2003 | Series: Icons of America

Gore Vidal, one of the master stylists of American literature and an acute observer of American life and history, turns his literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the formidable trio of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In "Inventing a Nation", Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls and the salons of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and others. We come to know these men, their opinions of each other, their worries about money and their concerns about creating a viable democracy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this concise but hardly cohesive effort, the achievements of America's most venerable founding fathers-and a large supporting cast, including Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin-are eclipsed by their personal, psychological and political foibles. Our nation is often portrayed as a finished product, having been birthed by great thinkers and selfless patriots. Vidal illustrates that the new nation was, in fact, a messy, tenuous experiment, consistently teetering on the brink. Vidal sheds light on the shaky alliances, rivalries, egos, personal ambitions and political realities faced by the men who became the first three American presidents. Unfortunately, Vidal's greatest strength, his novelist's flair, runs amok here. At John Adams's inauguration, for example, Vidal asserts that Washington "won his last victory in the Mount Rushmore sweepstakes" by forcing Jefferson, the vice-president, to exit the hall before him, so Washington could claim the larger ovation. This is divined from a record that merely states, "Jefferson was obliged to leave the chamber first." Correspondence is used to support Vidal's acerbic appraisals, but without source notes, readers are left to wonder in what context the extracts were originally penned. Vidal's antipathy toward the "American Empire" and contempt for the American public drips thick from his sentences and shows up frequently in annoying parenthetical asides and interjected screeds. He sneers that the "majority" of Americans "don't know what the Electoral College is" and compares Truman to the bloody Roman tyrant Tiberius. This book was surely intended to be thought provoking. Unfortunately, it provokes more thought about its author than its subjects. Still, one has to appreciate the irony of a noted icon-smasher launching Yale's new American Icons series.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Much of Vidal's contempt for contemporary America may originate in his admiration of how the Founding Fathers handled human nature. At least the founders, Vidal seems to say in this sinuous essay, were not hypocrites disclaiming interest in power; rather, they made an honest attempt in the original Constitution to restrain what they saw as politicians' inevitable appetites for ambition and avarice. Long fascinated with the behind-the-scenes aspects of politics in the 1780s and 1790s, Vidal muses on Alexander Hamilton's machinations against John Adams and analyzes similar political sleights of hand by Jefferson, Aaron Burr, John Marshall, and James Madison. Along with these characteristically brilliant and acerbic reflections on power and personality, Vidal offers a generally positive portrayal of Washington, taking time to note how the Father of His Country looked with his wooden teeth. This entertaining and enlightening reappraisal of the founders is a must for buffs of American civilization and its discontents. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300101716
• ISBN-13: 978-0300101713
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #855,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

92 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vidal's Vivid Portrait Of The Nation's Nativity, November 3, 2003

By 

W. C HALL (Newport, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Hardcover)

This is a two-tiered ranking...five stars for Vidalphiles, and three stars for other readers. If you revel in Gore Vidal's witty, often acerbic take on our present-day society, you should find this book a delight. Otherwise, you will probably find it infuriating in places...but at least it's never tedious. On display throughout this book is Vidal's great gift to turn two-dimensional historic personages back into three-dimensional figures of flesh and blood.

Vidal's narrative opens in the fall of 1786 as George Washington prepares to accept the call to lead the constitutional convention. This is a Washington, though revered by his countrymen, who finds himself in serious financial straits. The steady flow of visitors to Mount Vernon is eroding his resources--and demands for money from his mother are making things worse. Of all the Founding Fathers, Vidal perhaps best succeeds in offering a vibrant portrait of this proud, sometimes vain man, always conscious of his unique position in the new nation, sometimes struggling with the mantle of leadership that has been placed on his shoulders but never turning away from it.

The subtitle of the book is "Washington, Adams, Jefferson," and while Adams also emerges as the stubborn, resolute leader who was fully aware of his place in Washington's shadow; and Jefferson lives and breathes as the restless, shambling, somewhat abstract and overtalkative intellectual he must have appeared to his contemporaries, other founders rise from these pages with equal vividness, some for relatively brief cameos, such as Franklin, and others who play larger roles, such as Hamilton.

But Washington is at the heart of this story, as he was at the difficult, sometimes tortured enterprise that was involved in building a new nation. By now, we seem to have moved past the vision of the founders as a group of divinely inspired men who were the 18th century counterpart of Moses, accepting the wisdom of the heavens writ large on stone tablets. Vidal vividly reminds us just how much these men, for all their great gifts, were often groping almost blindly while a combination of wisdom with generous portions of luck and circumstance allowed them to forge something that still inspires awe more than two centuries later.

Washington's death in 1799 closes the book, and this is fitting, for it also marked the passing of the founders' era. If you can deal with (or agree with!) Vidal's assaults on our "national security state" of the present day, you should find this a vibrant, engaging read.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb and thoughtful, November 30, 2003

By 

"tcb_tcb" (New Have, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Hardcover)

Americans are lucky to have Gore Vidal. Few of our historians (or writers for that matter) have his education, his critical abilities, or his prose. This book is not a history of the early American republic, or postage stamp biographies of the principle players. Instead it's a look at how, pretty much from thin air, a functioning American government was created after the first attempt failed so miserably. From the horse trading at the Constitutional convention to John Marshall's Federalist Supreme Court (which gave us judicial review and saved us from a good deal of Jeffersonian excess), Vidal tells the story of the compromises and conflicts that turned the theoretical government of the Constitutional convention into a living entity.

The not so subtle underlying theme of this book is how perverted those institutions have become. Vidal is on record (and has been for more than 30 years) as believing that by 1950, five years after WW II, our generally evolving to a better version of the original republic was being hijacked by political and business forces intent on maintaining the country on a constant war footing. In the famous debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 he made almost precisely the same argument against the Vietnam war that he made against Gulf War II, the gist of which is that since neither Vietnam nor Iraq gathered armies in Mexico it is not the business of a decent republic to make mishcief inside their borders.

To spotlight some of those issues, Vidal points out at length how our nascent republic survived largely by avoiding war in Europe. He makes much of Washington's constant preaching of avoiding war (and also much of his incompetence in prosecuting one), notes Hamilton's constant saber rattling, as well as Jefferson's willingness to forgive the heads flying aobut during the excesses of the French Revolution. Another reviewer mentions Founding Brothers, certainly a good book to read, as superior to this one. I think Inventing a Nation is more overtly political, more critical of its subject matter, and funnier. Many people seem to dislike Vidal because he is honest about his subjects. I think he admires Jefferson greatly but can't keep from noting his majestic hypocrisies. He admires John Adams but still spotlights his vanity, occasional shortsightedness, his monarchial tendencies, and his temper.

I also think that Vidal is trying to leave crumbs for future generations to figure out just what went wrong in the second half of 20th century. Let's face it, we aren't likely to get 30 more books out of him, and this is one that shows how undemocratic our early republic was and by doing so offers many insights into how undemocratic it is becoming once again.

78 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Well written, but not worth it, November 19, 2003

By 

M. A Newman (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (Hardcover)

I have been thoroughly disappointed with everything that Gore Vidal has published since "The Golden Age" (and that was not him at his best). I have enjoyed his novels, chiefly "Julian," "Creation," "Burr," "Lincoln," "1876," and even "Empire" and Hollywood." I still recommend these books because of their wit, their invention, and their iconoclasm. I would also recommend his large collection of essays.

However, when it comes to this book praise is difficult. First of all, although it does cover much the same ground as "Burr," but a great deal of this work is spent dispensing gossip half truths and obscure quotations which really do not seem to amount to much other than iconoclasm for iconoclasm's sake. It seems that the only people who come off reasonably well in this book are Adams and Franklin (which is odd since they represented different views on life and future of America).

The other "founding fathers" are disparaged through and through. While I believe there is a place for these sorts of evaluations, I do believe that Vidal goes too far at times. The characterization of Hamilton as a "British agent" which he expresses in a somewhat peculiar fashion really is too much. Personally I dislike Hamilton, believing him to have been a positive menace after he left government service at the age of 40. However, I do not know of a reputatable historian who would support this claim by Vidal.

The reason that Franklin comes off so well is that Vidal has found a rather picquant and pessimistic quotation from "the sage of Philadelphia" expressing fear of the degeneration of the American republic. This obscure quotation is raked over throughout the book. For this service Franklin is praised, though I am not sure he would welcome it.

One gets the impression that there is a part of Gore Vidal who seems to believe that the US invented political corruption and this has been with us from the beginning. While the second part is true, this is a phenomenon which the US can not claim exclusive ownership. I think the failings that he delights in are failings that exist in politics and politicians regardless of the age and that one might have to grade these people on the curve or be left with no one worth considering "praise worthy" other than failures and nonentities for the simple reason that they never had the opportunity to be corrupt since they never held office or did anything important to begin with.

His main concern is a continuing sense of outrage over the election of 2000 and the "Bush Junta." I think that this has colored his ability to address issues related to the founding fathers in the book and it has has resulted in a greatly inferior product.

To be sure, the writing, the wit is still there, but there is also an annoying audacity much to the discredit of the book and its author.