This is a transcript of Gore Vidals's March 12 interview on Dateline, SBS TV Australia.

MARK DAVIS: Gore Vidal, welcome to Dateline.

GORE VIDAL: Happy to have crossed the dateline down under.

MARK DAVIS: In the past few years, you have shifted from being a novelist to principally an essayist or, in your own words 'a pamphleteer'. It's almost the reverse of most writers' careers. Why the shift for you?

GORE VIDAL: Why the shift in the United States of America, which has obliged me --since I've spent most of my life marinated in the history of my country and I'm so alarmed by what is happening with our global empire, and our wars against the rest of the world, it is time for me to take political action. And I think anybody who has the position, has a platform, must do so. It's also a family tradition.

My grandfather lost his seat in the Senate because he opposed going into the First World War. And he won it back 10 years later on exactly the same set of speeches that he'd lost it.