Well, when I was asked to make it, I couldn't think of what I was going
to say and I racked my brain for months. Finally, it popped into my mind
that nobody, as far as I knew, had really confronted Gore Vidal and Fawn
Brodie about their two books, which I thought were pretty awful in many
ways. They have had huge sales and been favorably
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reviewed by some people, to my dismay. So, I told the chairman of the
board of William and Mary what I was thinking of doing and he was
delighted; he told the president and he was delighted. I got to work on
it; I think I worked on it for about a month. That's one of those
interludes when I wasn't writing much on my book. I consulted various
people, Dumas Malone, Julian Boyd, and Merrill Peterson, and got them to
comment on Brodie's book. All their comments were unfavorable. They had
not commented publicly to any extent. I convinced them that it was their
duty to come out and say what they thought about anything as distorted
as this which was giving people such perverted ideas of Jefferson's
career. Malone was the most hesitant because he felt that he would be
attacking another author in his field, but I agreed to put in the speech
that he was reluctant, and so he came through with an awfully good
statement including the one about graffiti, which I thought was about
the best thing that anybody said; to the effect that "anybody could
write graffiti on walls, anybody could write dirty words, but it was
shocking that they were so richly rewarded," which got him a brickbat
from Brodie in
Time. I'm sorry about that because I
didn't want to get him in that sort of a controversy. Well, I wrote the
thing and it was quite well received, I thought, by the audience. I got
a lot of letters from all over about it;
Time printed
a substantial extract and the William and Mary people sent it out to a
lot of different publications and apparently the AP and UP used some,
and the Richmond, Norfolk, Lynchburg, and Raleigh papers carried big
extracts. So, it got a fair
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and I got a huge lot of letters, most of which were entirely favorable.
There were some from history professors that said I had performed a
service. I never did hear from Brodie or Vidal. I don't know whether
they ever saw it. Brodie read what
Time had and
replied to that.
Time had a pretty good summary of
what I said about Jefferson but little about Washington.