If Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was well-suited for the pieties of the Obama years, then the anti-Hamilton, Gore Vidal’s Burr, was even more auspiciously timed. The 1973 novel came out not just as the Bicentennial was approaching but while the Watergate hearings were underway: a great moment for a tale that treats the Founding as a time of grimy scandal. Add the fact that the book is immensely entertaining, and it’s no surprise it was a smash hit.
The story zigzags between the USA’s early days and the 1830s, when a newspaperman (working for the proto-libertarian journalist William Leggett) pumps an aging Aaron Burr for information. We thus get to see the Founding through the eyes of the least popular Founding Father. Both Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians have reasons to hate Burr, after all: He tried to snatch the presidency from the first group’s idol, and he literally killed the hero of the second group. And then a treason trial wrecked the rest of his reputation.
Vidal was thus free to be as iconoclastic as he pleased. Given Burr’s infamy, even the most reverent reader wouldn’t mind if an author was frank about his flaws. And if the rest of the Founders come across poorly too—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington all have feet of clay here—well, we’re seeing them through Burr’s eyes, right? “All in all,” Vidal noted in an afterword, “I think rather more highly of Jefferson than Burr does.” But he didn’t let that spoil the fun.
