Mickey Mouse, Historian

[reprehensor]

(Gore Vidal had a run-in with the censorship division over at Disney. This happened in the mid-1990s. -r.)



snip

""It all began in the cold," as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. so famously
began his romantic historical novel A Thousand Days. Only my cold was
London, where, for Channel Four, I wrote and narrated three half-hour
programs on the American presidency, emphasizing the imperial aspects
latent in the office from the beginning, and ending, currently, with
our uneasy boast that we are the last great global power on
the...well, globe.

The programs were well received in Britain. The History Channel
bought the U.S. rights. In ninety-minute form it was to be shown just
before this summer's political conventions. But then, from the tiny
tentacle tip of The History Channel, synergy began to surge up the
ownership arm, through NBC to its longtime master General Electric;
then ever upward, to, presumably, the supreme mollusk, Mickey Mouse
himself, Lord of Anaheim. Lord Mouse, this program attacks General
Electric by name. Attacks American imperialism, which doesn't exist.
Bad-mouths all that we hold sacred. Oh, to have been a fly on the
castle wall when word arrived! The easy solution, as Anaheim's hero-
President, R.M. Nixon, might have said, would have been to kill the
program. But craftier minds were at work. We'll get some "experts"
like we do for those crappy historical movies and let them take care
of this Commie.

So it came to pass that, unknown to me, a G.E. panel was assembled;
it comprised two fly-weight journalists from television's Jurassic
Age (Roger Mudd, Sander Vanocur) and two professors, sure to be
hostile (one was my old friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., about whose
client, J.F.K., I am unkind, the other someone called Richard
Slotkin). I was not invited to defend myself, nor was anyone else. As
a spokesperson for The History Channel put it, "Vidal is so
opinionated that we had to have real experts on." The Nation's recent
warning about the danger of allowing the corporate few to make and
control mass opinion was about to be dramatized at my expense.

Fade in: Roger Mudd. He is grim. He wears, as it were, not so much
the black cap of the hanging judge as the symbol of his awful power,
Mickey Mouse ears. He describes my career with distaste. Weirdly, he
says I had "social ambitions at the Kennedy White House and sequitur] ran for Congress" but lost. Actually, I ran for Congress
before Kennedy got to the White House. Also, in upstate New York, I
got some 20,000 more votes than J.F.K. did as head of the ticket.
During my campaign, Bobby Kennedy came to see me at Saugerties
Landing. It was, appropriately, Halloween. "Why," he snarled, "don't
you ever mention the ticket?" "Because I want to win," I said,
imitating his awful accent. That started that feud."

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