Before the Culture Wars, a Democratic senator and guns

[guntard]

Few activities provide me with as much pleasure as reading Gore Vidal's essays, novels and his two memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation, which I recently completed. He was friend, acquaintance or family to much of the US ruling class, back in the day, with a single thread of regret running through his memoirs being that he has quite unexpectedly outlived almost all the characters that appear in them.

I was amused, but not very surprised, to encounter this anecdote concerning Vidal, his step-brother-in-law JFK and Tennessee Williams (whom Vidal called the "Glorious Bird") in Palimpsest:

In 1958 I went down to Miami to meet Tennessee and the film producer Sam Spiegel. Would I write the screenplay for Suddenly, Last Summer? The Bird was manic that season and Sam more than usually devious . . .

When Jackie heard that we were in Miami, she asked us up to Palm Beach for lunch. The Bird had no idea who they were but took my word for it that Jack was running for president. We arrived an hour late. Jack was firing a rifle at a target on the lawn. He was not a very good shot; and I was as bad as he. The Bird casually took the rifle from him and shot three bull's-eyes, "Using only my blind eye," he cackled.

It is illustrated with a photo of Tennessee with the rifle, while Vidal and JFK look on (without any eye or ear protection):



Since this was prior to 1970, there is nothing really surprising about a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts shooting a rifle in his backyard not for any photo op political purpose but for simple recreation, a "sporting use" of firearms in which, incredibly, no animals are harmed. And we should be only a little more surprised that the flamboyant (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) playwright Tennessee Williams turns out to be a crack shot.

In those days, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts was much more likely to associate gun control with Jim Crow. Later, sadly, the respective leaderships of both parties latched onto gun control as a delightfully polarizing issue useful in separating the sheep from the goats, and of immense value in the emerging American Culture Wars.

Here's another photo for the road: