By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 7, 2001; Page C01

Gore Vidal has some questions for Timothy McVeigh.

A puffed-up-and-proud-of-it writer, Vidal, 75, is one of five people selected by McVeigh to witness his execution on May 16.

Reached at his home yesterday in Ravello, Italy, Vidal said he didn't want to talk about McVeigh's macabre invitation, which has upset relatives of McVeigh's victims in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. "Don't you think you should wait for my Vanity Fair article?" he asked. He is planning to watch McVeigh, 33, die and to write about it for the magazine.

Asked if he is concerned about looking vulturous or receiving negative popular criticism, Vidal replied: "I've never been concerned about public opinion."

The author -- best known for historical novels such as "Burr," about Aaron Burr, and outrageous fiction such as "Myra Breckinridge," about a transsexual -- struck up a correspondence with McVeigh after Vidal's story "The War at Home" appeared in Vanity Fair magazine in November 1998. The correspondence, he said, consisted of three or four letters apiece.

In the article, Vidal had argued that the Bill of Rights was under attack by the federal government as it waged "spurious wars against drugs and terrorism." Deep in the story, Vidal opined that McVeigh, a veteran of Persian Gulf War, suffered "from an exaggerated sense of justice" and that in Oklahoma City "he went to war pretty much on his own."

Despite criticism of his accepting McVeigh's invitation, Vidal said yesterday in the phone interview, "It's clear that, one, I am against the death penalty; two, I'm against the arbitrary killing of innocent people; and, three, I'm against the killing of innocent men and women at Waco and Ruby Ridge."

Vidal said he would leave it to his questioner to remind readers of the federal government's 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex. -- which left 80 people dead, including 22 children -- and its 1992 raid at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the FBI killed the wife and child of separatist Randy Weaver. After all, Vidal told the reporter, you live in "the United States of Amnesia."

"I had hoped to go out and interview him," Vidal said of McVeigh. "I'm not a journalist. I haven't interviewed anyone since Barry Goldwater in 1964." But last month Attorney General John Ashcroft decreed that inmates on death row cannot give face-to-face interviews.

Such a decision "was worthy of the Third Reich," Vidal complained. "How this can come out of the head of an attorney general who is a nobody is beyond me. It seems unconstitutional."

He and McVeigh "share many ideas in common," he said, but stressed: "I'm not, not, not talking about taking revenge on innocent people. Especially Oklahomans because they are the children of my grandfather's constituents."

Vidal's grandfather, Thomas Gore, was a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Until he was 10, Vidal lived in his grandfather's home on Rock Creek Park, a house that is now the Malaysian Embassy. He recalled reading aloud to the elder Gore because the senator was blind. Gore Vidal said that though he never went to college, he did receive a great education at the feet of his grandfather.

Vidal, a veteran of World War II, also pointed out that he is a member of "the greatest generation."

McVeigh, Vidal said, is "very very bright." His spelling, his punctuation, his grammar "are perfect." And he "quotes, from memory, H.L. Mencken," Vidal said. "He is a junkie of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

As for his crime, McVeigh "knows what he did."

Vidal hoped to write a "summing up" story. Though he isn't allowed to meet McVeigh in person, Vidal said he was told he can speak to him for 15 minutes on the telephone. Owing to a deep dislike of telephony, Vidal hopes that McVeigh will use a fax instead. "I sent him a number of questions," Vidal said, "which I'm not going to tell you."

He would reveal one: He asked McVeigh why he chose to bomb a place "where innocents would be killed?"

"I guess he's going to write out his answers," Vidal said. "It may well be posthumously that I will hear from him."

The faxed exchange will serve "in lieu of a kind of wrap-up of our mysterious three-year relationship."

Vidal said, "He is a very superior sort of young man."