Burr by Gore Vidal
Liked It As A Teenager, And Really Like It As An Adult
An extraordinarily intelligent and entertaining novel!
NEWSWEEK
Brilliantly realized, enormously readable, Gore Vidals #1 best seller paints
a fascinating portrait of Aaron Burr, who lived out his long life partly as a
suspected traitor and partly as one of the most heroic and colorful of the
founding fathers.
A fictional memoir based on actual facts, BURR describes the early
struggles and endless intrigues of the United States. Vidal writes with so
much drama and vigor that history comes alive, and the concerns of a new
nation read like todays headlines.
Personal Review: Burr by Gore Vidal
I finished this book slightly before midnight, December 31, 2008, making it
the last book I finished in the year, as well as one of the best. The book
starts slowly, but as it gets to Burr's "Memoirs" it quickly picks up steam
and remains utterly fascinating until the very end.
In his Narratives of Empire series Gore Vidal has provided us with a
novelistic recounting of American political history from the Revolution to
World War II. In each of the seven novels in the sequence -- BURR,
LINCOLN, 1876, EMPIRE, HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON D.C., and THE

GOLDEN AGE -- the fictitious Charles Schuyler or one of his descendents
plays a conspicuous role, except for LINCOLN, where Schuyler appears
only in cameo. This provides a moderately neutral point of view for the
events in the novels.
The choice of Aaron Burr as the focus for Vidal's account of both the Age
of Jackson and the Revolution and early republic was inspired. Of the
major figures in our nation's founding, he is both the most reviled and the
least deified. The other founders have largely been reduced to statues.
We tend to view Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe,
Hamilton, Randolph, Marshall, and the others more as figures in a diorama
than as historical figures who were members of factions and parties or
creatures of flesh and blood. Vidal uses Burr as a way to get back to the
Founders before they had become statues. Burr treats many of our most
revered figures as either Buffoons or villains.
If you have read a great deal of history dealing with the period, nearly
everything that Burr recounts will be recognized as accurate, such as
George Washington's stunning aloofness and his rather massive rear end
(according to contemporaries its magnitude has been muted in the
paintings made from life). I have always regarded Washington as
overrated both as a president (his major achievement is that he declined to
be named emperor) and a field general, so Burr's diatribes against
Washington I found delightful. I also have found Jefferson to be one of if
not the most perplexing figures in American history, filled with both
marvelous and horrifying opinions on a host of subjects. And a paradox if
ever there was one. Along with Madison, whom he inspired, Jefferson
theoretically did as much for civil rights as any person in American history,
yet as Vidal so ably displays, he constantly as president sought to
abrogate the civil rights of others. And no president in U. S. history, not
even Bush or Nixon or Lincoln (when he suspended habeas corpus), was
more the enemy of the judiciary than Jefferson. Indeed, the book shows
admirably the great struggle between Jefferson and Marshall, easily one of
the most important fights in American history. Thankfully Marshall beat
Jefferson at nearly every point, permanently establishing an independent
judiciary and making it separate from both the legislative and executive
branches (Jefferson sought to make it deeply subservient to both). (In this
regard, let me recommend a nice book detailing the struggles between
Jefferson and Marshall, John F. Simon's What Kind of Nation: Thomas
Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States.
I honestly believe that Marshall did as much to create the United States as
we know it as did Madison or Lincoln. I don't always agree with the
decisions of the courts, especially the current ultra-rightwing Supreme
Court, but I nonetheless delighted that the court system exists
independently of political control by the president or the congress.)
This novel did a better job of making the political struggles of the period
come alive better than any of the history books on the period that I have
read. I have read many accounts of the Age of Federalism and the

emergence of the Republican party (interestingly, the Federalists later
became the Whigs and after that the present Republican party, while the
Republicans under Jackson and Van Buren became the Democratic party,
which is why Jefferson is often considered the founder of the Democratic
party), but the issues have never been made so clear to me before. Vidal
is also able to bring alive the struggle between personalities. He is also
able to bring home how different these men were from us today. Though
Jefferson is thought of as the great defender of democracy against Adams
and Hamilton, who were the defenders of a privileged elite (though Adams
was terrified of economic elites and was convinced that the greatest
danger to the country lay with hereditary wealth, which is why he, along
with the other Founders, was strongly in favor of very large estate taxes,
so that great fortunes could not be passed along from one generation to
another), he believed in slavery (though he thought it evil and had vague
hopes that it would end someday) and did not believe in extending the vote
beyond landowners or to women. It is also very difficult to map the
Founders on today's understanding of liberal and conservative. Jefferson
is considered a liberal and Adams a conservative, but Adams had a wealth
of political opinions that make him sound like sound like a socialist while
Jefferson thought that an empowered central government, seen today by
liberals as crucial to social and economic justice, was inherently evil.
Hamilton, considered one of the most conservative political figures in
American history, on the other hand, believed in a powerful federal
government. The point is, if you are either a conservative or a liberal, you
can find points of agreement or disagreement with any of the Founders.
Conservatives can even find much to admire in someone as liberal as
Benjamin Franklin.
I do not think that reading Gore Vidal can replace the reading of history.
But there is much to be said for good fictional accounts. BURR does not
precisely represent Vidal's own political views. If you have read his essays
or seen him interviewed on television, you probably know that he is an
unrepentant liberal Democrat. But he is not doctrinaire. Most of the New
Dealers were passionate fans of Andrew Jackson (largely due to Arthur
Schlesinger Jr.'s highly influential THE AGE OF JACKSON, in which
Jackson comes across like an antebellum FDR). Vidal isn't nearly so
much of a fan of Jackson. And as he points out in the novel's postscript,
he like Jefferson rather more than Burr does. This is what a good novelist
can do: create characters that possess opinions that are not consistent
with one's own. Charles Schuyler is not a time-traveling Gore Vidal. I
have read both Gore Vidal's LINCOLN and Doris Kearns Goodwin's TEAM
OF RIVALS, and I must confess that I took more away from Vidal's book
than from Goodwin's (they are absolutely not in historical conflict with one
another, but Vidal's was written well before hers and showed brilliantly how
Lincoln employed the "team of rivals" concept before she popularized the
expression). Let me add here how impressive Vidal's knowledge of history
is. He has clearly and obviously read deeply in American history.

I have now read the first two books in the Narrative of Empire sequence,
though not in chronological order. I plan on starting off the New Year by
reading the other five books in the series. I hope I enjoy them as much
and learn as much as I have from the first two.
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