Gore Vidal was our American Cicero.

He valiantly stood as our golden shield of republican virtue against the brassy sword of empire yielded by plutocratic militarists and their vulgar plebeians.

He was the national conscience, unrelenting in reminding the citizenry of its lost historical memory in this "United States of Amnesia."

Something great has gone out of the world with his passing.

In the noble tradition of his stoic grandfather, Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, Vidal eloquently spoke truth in the face of power. When in 1933, FDR confiscated the people's gold, Thomas Gore said, "Why that's just plain stealing, isn't it Mr. President?" Vidal confronted every presidential rogue administration, from Truman to Obama, with the same damning admonition concerning our essential rights and liberties, confiscated by the National Security State.

As our most distinguished man of letters, he produced a body of work unequaled in breadth and scope.

In his Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, which joined his earlier, Palimpsest: A Memoir, Vidal, with characteristic grace and acerbic poignancy, summed up his life, loves, tragedies, and triumphs – and that of the reckless, feckless civilization he saw dying before his fading eyes.

Once a rather conventional left-liberal critic of the American duopoly, Vidal, in the late 1980s, metamorphed into a quixotic gentleman of the Old Right. As with his literary predecessor Albert Jay Nock, author of The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, later-day expatriate Vidal lived much of his life abroad. This made him a more disinterested and reflective observer of the foibles and follies of American civilization.

And like his paleolibertarian forebear Garet Garrett, author of The People's Pottage, Gore Vidal, in his brilliant essays and historical novels, cataloged the death of the American Republic and the rise of the Anglo-American imperial colossus, from the salad days of Teddy Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes, to the Tofu era of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Through it all, Gore Vidal remained a man of incorruptible character, conviction, and principle.