When Buckley fought Vidal
There are special moments in history when unlikely events come together and turn into symbols of their era. Looking back after five decades, it’s clear that this happened in the summer of 1968 when two intellectuals, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, took part in a public argument that millions of television viewers found weirdly comic and deeply arresting.
It began as an attempt to breathe life into the ABC network’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in Miami and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In those days CBS and NBC battled for first place in national news. ABC was a poor third — and, as people said at the time, if there had been four networks, then ABC would have come fourth.
The ABC producers set up a series of 10 debates, five during each convention, between the conservative Buckley and the liberal Vidal. Buckley created the National Review magazine, wrote a newspaper column and chaired a PBS discussion show. Vidal wrote novels, plays, Hollywood scripts and nimble, sometimes piercing essays.
Neither admired the other and together they turned out to be combustible. Their famous encounters have been brilliantly recalled in a documentary film, Best of Enemies, directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon. It’s now touring the festival circuit and shows up at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival on April 24 and 26.
A newsman introduced the first debate by saying Buckley and Vidal would “help us extract meaning” from the conventions. As it turned out, they did little of that. Vidal spoke mainly of Buckley, and after a while Buckley spoke mainly of Vidal. In the film they both appear to be narcissists, each encouraging the other’s self-obsession.
Buckley understood that politics had become a theatrical event. With his Yale-nourished intellect and his luxuriously opulent conversation, he was ready for it. Vidal had a heightened sense of drama and a sharp eye for the conflict that drama demands. Arrogant and self-amused, they both thought the occasion called for a supercilious tone.
The United States seemed to be falling apart in 1968. Opposition to the Vietnam War reached a new peak. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been killed in the last three months. As the Democrats met in Chicago, students fought truncheon-wielding police in streets filled with tear gas. It appeared the cops were rioting but Buckley said they were restrained. He claimed that electing Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate for president, would sentence America to four more years of “asphyxiation at the hands of liberalism.” Vidal said “the young, poor, black” would be against Richard Nixon, who had been nominated in Miami. “You’re going to have a revolution if you don’t give the people what they want.” He delivered that prediction with a certain relish.
Vidal came armed with quotations in which Buckley had implied that nuclear weapons could be used against North Vietnam. He did his best to turn Buckley’s defence of the Chicago police into a version of fascism. At that, Buckley exploded. His face contorted with hatred, he spat out his words: “Now listen you queer, you can’t call me a Nazi, or I’ll punch you in the face and you won’t get up.”
Queer? Well, Vidal declined to recognize standard sexual categories. In his 1968 comic novel, Myra Breckinridge, he depicted a man who is surgically transformed into a woman and then reverts to becoming a man. The disappearance of rigid rules of sexual conduct were implied in what Vidal wrote and said. He was the prophet of a sexual revolution that had to wait for the 21st century to be realized. Buckley, a traditional Roman Catholic, considered Myra Breckinridge shamefully pornographic, of interest only to “taxonomists of perversion.” In their debates he mentioned it as often as possible to prove Vidal’s crippled moral sense.
Studied today, the two debaters seem to be articulating the future of American rhetoric. In their scornful comments you can see the beginning of the unbridgeable chasm that now separates left and right in America. Their rebarbative insults were shocking in 1968 but not today. Their noisy but watchable struggle was the first hint that so-called “impartial” television was ending, to be replaced as by armies of predictable conservative and liberal opinion-mongers.
But if Best of Enemies helps explain the present, it also delivers a last gasp of the past. Buckley and Vidal were patrician intellectuals in speech and attitude. Their way of talking, both passionate and elegant, has since vanished from television and public discourse.