In the midst of a change in executives at that network, Vidal recalled, rights were secured, but the project wasn't pushed ahead. Norman had a fight with CBS, so we went to NBC.' Norman Lear and I were going to produce it for CBS. Now, the contempt for the television audience in that line is unbelievable. 'The woman in charge of programming at ABC - I forget her name or I would tell you - said categorically the American people are not interested in a miniseries on Abraham Lincoln. In its first incarnation, 'Gore Vidal's Lincoln' was a six-hour miniseries. But Vidal was tuned in to the possibilities of that format too. I must have done 100 plays between 19 - adaptations, originals, hours, half-hours.'Īll of that was before the miniseries. 'I came out of live television - alive,' he said. You also have the making of a best-selling novel, Lincoln, and an NBC mini-series, 'Gore Vidal's Lincoln,' tonight and Monday at 9. Throw in a trip to see Raymond Massey in the 1940 film 'Abe Lincoln in Illinois' and Vidal's conviction that he was the greatest of the presidents, and you have the making of a lifelong interest, if not obsession.

Gore went back far enough to be acquainted with Robert Lincoln, the oldest son of the 16th president. 'It's a ghost town to me now,' said Vidal. And so is his grandfather, whom Vidal obviously revered and who knew Lincoln's oldest son. 'I watched FDR's inaugural from there,' he recalled.īut Lincoln, whom Vidal holds as the greatest of the presidents, is gone. 'That's my grandfather's office,' he said, counting up from the first floor and singling out the second window on the right. In Vidal's grandfather's day, a federal building stood across Pennsylvania as it does now. In Lincoln's day, the view would have included grazing animals and a canal that served as a garbage dump. Vidal looked out across Pennsylvania Avenue. Gore Vidal was having lunch at the Willard Hotel, Abraham Lincoln's first stop and hideout after he slipped into town to assume the presidency.

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