But as a writer he retained a fascination with power. Vidal decided against a political career and in doing so ‘fail to complete the “unfinished business” of his grandfather’s life by becoming president of the United States’. He later ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate in California. In 1962 he turned down the nomination for a New York Senate seat that he might well have won. He lost but put in a good performance in a traditionally Republican district. In 1960, Vidal ran as a Democrat for a New York Congressional seat, endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK. While Vidal’s literary career began early (his début novel, Williwaw, was published when he was twenty), a career in politics beckoned. He was able, when reviewers challenged the historical veracity of his novel Lincoln (1984) to cite his grandfather’s conversations with President Lincoln’s son Robert. As a child, he read to his blind senator grandfather and received a lesson in power. Vidal grew up, as he said in Screening History, ‘backstage’ to the ‘real world of real politics, in a very real Washington’. Jackie took over Vidal’s childhood bedroom at the Auchincloss estate and wore his old shirts riding. Later, Hugh remarried Janet Bouvier, and her daughter – the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – became Vidal’s stepsister. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather. His grandfather was a US senator his father served as Franklin D. American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power.
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