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Vidal is willing to present rumor as fact, which is not an unpardonable sin for a novelist. One that come to mind is his portrayal of John Hay as an opium head in his novel Lincoln. We don't know his source(s) for that, unless he revealed it in a later interview. We do know (this is from memory so I could be wrong), from other interviews, that he had relatives in Washington society in the period so he probably had access to the rumor mills of those days.
As far as Waco goes, I don't know who started the fire but I do know that the whole matter reeks of unacknowledged incompetence, which has opened the door to a lot of speculation and apparently to the murders in Ok city.
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