Gore Vidal’s vast panorama of American history—a series of seven novels, the “American Chronicles,” ranging in time from the Revolution (Burr) to the period from 1939-1954 (Washington, D.C. and The Golden Age)—utilized the author’s considerable skills as a writer of fiction to dramatize historical truth. As a documentary codicil to that series, Inventing a Nation projects the same storyline—America’s long road to empire—on a smaller screen.

With a novelist’s eye for character and the telling detail, Gore Vidal takes us on a brisk ride through early American history as seen through the eyes of the Founders. Much is packed into this short book, yet it is never dense. We get portraits not just of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson as advertised in the title, but also James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and that “one true exotic” among America’s inventors, Alexander Hamilton, the lean and hungry Cassius of the Revolution.

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Vidal establishes his own stance early on in his portrait of George Mason, the Virginia planter and proto-libertarian author of the Bill of Rights. Mason opposed slavery and when the Constitutional Convention avoided resolving the issue—and delayed those crucial amendments—Mason campaigned against ratification. “Then,” writes Vidal, “once the republic was in place, he refused to serve as one of his state’s senators. He has few political heirs.”

Without doubt Vidal considers this lack a sign of degeneracy. Nostalgia permeates this volume: the prose has an elegiac ring to it, alternately angry and sad, combative and resigned. More than once Vidal cites Franklin’s grim endorsement of the Constitution, in which the 87-year-old elder statesman of the Revolution predicted that “this is likely to be administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

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The exhortation against “passionate attachments” and antipathies in foreign policy was originally authored by Hamilton, but Washington, we learn, elaborated on this theme more expansively and definitively, flatly stating that “nothing is more essential than that antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments should be avoided.” Of the two, Vidal is quick to note, “Washington’s version is most applicable to our Union today as the great combine of military, media, religious mania, and lust for oil has overthrown those safeguards that the first three presidents, for all their disagreements, were as one in wishing to preserve, protect, and defend.”

Like Franklin, Vidal greatly fears the corruption of the people that is the first and fatal symptom of the imperial disease. Yet his often fatalistic despair, in its sheer poignancy, may do more than he thought possible to reverse the trend. At one point, Vidal seems to attribute the decline of our old Republic to “the second law of thermodynamics (everything is always running down).” Yet this cannot be entirely true as long as Vidal’s work is widely read and appreciated.