“I also came out for federal aid to education, a sign that I was a pro- or crypto- Red. The incumbent made much of this. He finally debated me in his county of Scoharie. The dairy interests were powerful in that section, and I had to learn, rather quickly, all about milk marketing orders, a subject far from my heart. As the milk producers were few though passionate—and rich—I responded to threats that they would do me in if milk was not properly subsidized by saying that I was essentially the consumers' candidate and consumers outnumber dairymen by a vast number. Then, innocently, I wondered aloud whether or not these subsidies were—well, socialist? If so, we had achieved socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”

--Gore Vidal on his 1960 run for U.S. Congress (NY-29th), in his memoir, Palimpsest, 1995. He lost, of course, but began a tradition of writers with a political bent (Mailer, Buckley, Mailer again, Vidal again) running for political office and losing. In this 1960 New York Times profile on the 34-year-old candidate, the newspaper or record describes Vidal as slender, sharp, sophisticated, and (and despite the publication of The City and the Pillar 13 years earlier) “a bachelor.”

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