Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Gore Vidal
May 2002     ISBN: 156025405X

The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays (until now deemed too controversial to publish in the US), the centerpiece of which is a commentary on the events of September 11 and Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Vidal challenges the comforting consensus that these were simply the acts of "evil-doers."

Vidal writes in his preface, "We consumers don't need to be told the why of anything. Certainly those of us who are in the why-business have a difficult time in getting through the corporate-sponsored American media, so I thought it useful to describe here the various provocations on our side that drove both bin Laden and McVeigh to such terrible acts."

"Gore Vidal is not subtle. The acerbic and pugnacious writer and thinker is the kind of person who draws extreme reactions. There are those enamored of Vidal's jaundiced view of the US government, military, and law enforcement establishment. And there are those who consider him an extremist and apologist for criminals and terrorists. Vidal's latest collection of essays undoubtedly will reaffirm each camp's position on the prolific novelist, essayist, and playwright.... It was a bestseller in Italy, where Vidal lives. Yet, given this nation's still raw emotions over Sept. 11, the book might receive a chillier reception here. In an essay that focuses on Sept. 11, Vidal, in eloquent, sharp-witted, and knowledgeable prose, ruminates on the causes and consequences of the terrorist attacks orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden."

--Boston Globe

"It is impossible to conceive of a time when Vidal shouldn't be read--and published. But what you can read this for is as much for its terrible revelations about an aging ego as for its dire enlightenment about what is indeed a frightening period in so many ways."

--Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than 200 essays and a memoir. The Times Literary Supplement (UK) noted that Vidal's United States (Essays 1952-1992) is "one of the great American books of the twentieth century." It won the 1993 National Book Award.