Best of Enemies

A film on the debates between William Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, is a fascinating study into the prevalent political mood in America and the yearning of a fast-evolving media setup to articulate it

In 1968, William Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal sparred on ABC News during the Republican and Democratic conventions held to select the candidates for the election. (Richard Nixon won the Republican ticket and ultimately the Presidency.) At the time, ABC News was the lowest ranked among network news channels and its executives hoped that the debates would be fiery enough to ensure a boost to the channel’s ratings.

In event, they surpassed that goal. Buckley was a noted conservative thinker whose interview series, Firing Line, had earned a reputation for its thoughtful analysis of conservative thought. As editor of National Review, he had the ear of the leading lights of the Republican Party, including the gentleman who would go on to become President a decade later, Ronald Reagan.

Vidal was Buckley’s exact ideological opposite. A liberal, he advocated open sexual mores, most controversially in his scandalous satire, Myra Breckinridge, about a transsexual who passes his days indulging in all manner of sexual perversion. A deep critic of the then ongoing war in Vietnam, he believed that the Republican Party’s ideas would ruin a nation that was already teetering on the edge of downfall.

Best of Enemies, a 2015 film on the debates between the two men and which is now streaming on Netflix, is a fascinating study into the prevalent political mood in America and the yearning of a fast-evolving media setup to articulate it. The deaths of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr had galvanised the left, while the right was aghast at what it saw as the collapse of the values that had long kept America together.

Both Buckley and Vidal were suave, well-spoken men whose unscripted utterances for a live audience, ABC had hoped, would not just raise ratings but also usher a new template for sophisticated punditry on television. For the most part, the men stuck to this promise. They were civil, smiled as they took down their opponent, and in spite of their differences, seemed to speak with the conviction that both had the best interests of America at heart.

Vidal’s primary argument — which curiously has a resonance with Donald Trump’s pitch in last year’s election — was that American democracy had been hijacked by elites who did not care for the plight of the poor and the minorities. Buckley retorted that America could not risk indulging liberal pieties when it faced a grievous challenge from Communism, most notably in what was to eventually turn into a protracted disaster in Vietnam.

It is the August 28 debate right before the Democratic Convention in Chicago that is the film’s focus. Protestors and police had clashed in Chicago — and right from the word go, Buckley and Vidal assumed opposing positions. Vidal supported the protestors’ right to assembly, while Buckley painted the fracas as a law and order issue. At one point, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley shot back by calling Vidal “queer”.

The clip, watched by millions, was a first for many reasons. “Queer” was a term of abuse at the time, and Buckley had never been known to get personal in his debates.

Media historians have debated why he lost his cool so uncharacteristically. One explanation is that Buckley was a conservative by first principles — minimum government, focus on family and tradition, and a strong military — and detested any association with Nazism. Vidal’s barb, made humorously as always, provoked something and unleashed what the late Christopher Hitchens calls in the film a “rictus of loathing” on Buckley’s face.

The film is at its finest in its last half hour when it discusses the aftermath of this controversy. Buckley never lived down the humiliation of his action, and the film suggests his distress was more private than public — years later, when he was asked about the event, he still struggled to find the words to describe the cause of his outburst. He and Vidal did take up the matter in a subsequent print debate in Esquire but that, instead of resolving matters, only ended in a suit that was ultimately settled out of court.

Vidal, on the other hand, delighted in disagreement and seemed to have taken the remark in his stride. He did not forgive Buckley though, and wrote a scathing obituary after Buckley’s death in 2008. Even so, one gets the impression from the film that he missed those youthful sparring matches in his dotage. (He passed away in 2012.) For a man who thrived on intellectual debate, the loss of a constituency was a harder cross to bear than fading memories of slights.

For all that though, the offending clip seems almost quaint against the backdrop of today’s media setup, with multiple panelists slanging one another and little by way of illumination emerging at the debate’s conclusion. Even as Buckley and Vidal pioneered a format that has since been imitated around the world, the more enduring lesson from their debate is how personally we take our politics and that no amount of discretion relating to public appearance or private etiquette can finally prevent our merging the two.

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