As Andrew Ferguson pointed out in The Weekly Standard: "The most puzzling thing about the career of Gore Vidal . . . was the reverence in which he was held by people who might have known better . . ." Andrew went on to point out some of the things about which Vidal was notoriously wrong, which in sum, came to practically everything. Finally, he examined Vidal's clashes with Bill Buckley, and summed up with: "Buckley's views were safely on the rightward edge of the American popular consensus; Vidal's were shared by a tiny minority -- cranks and ignoramuses in Hollywood, Manhattan, Northwest Washington, D.C., various college towns, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho."
Seems to me Andrew pretty much summed up the situation.