Profound silliness from eminent historian: Watch Edmund Morgan slobber over Gore Vidal's jackboots, if you have the stomach for it. It contains such pungent admiring sighs as "Vidal is an unreconstructed son of the South"; says of allegations by Vidal that FDR encouraged the attack on Pearl Harbor and Truman began the Cold War that "Though he advances none of them without evidence, he delivers them with the certitude we too easily associate with the paranoia"; and concludes that Vidal's latest rant feels as if "Vidal had us with him in easy chairs by the fireside, as he chats about familiar friends and the things they have done."

Oh, buh-ruh-thaaaaahhh. For someone who admires Morgan as much as I do, it is an appalling farrago. Tautologies, special pleading, Uriah Heepish blather, fawning admiration--it is miserable stuff coming from the man who is probably the Greatest Living American Historian. He still is, I guess; but just barely.