As their second nightly debate at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach got underway, Gore Vidal came out swinging, charging his opponent, William F. Buckley, with ideological inconsistency. Noting Buckley’s recent assertion that “the state…is the necessary instrument of our proximate deliverance,” Vidal wondered how the conservative intellectual and founder of the National Review could then endorse the presidential candidacy of the explicitly anti-government Ronald Reagan, when “in your slightly Latinate and inaccurate style, you do believe, as most of us do, that the state must have some responsibility for what happens in the country.” Buckley was ready for him. “I confess that anything complicated confuses Mr. Vidal,” he explained to the viewers at home. “He has difficulty reconciling even axiomatic positions concerning political philosophy.”
It’s a bittersweet exchange, like many that took place between the two over the course of the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. On the one hand, one does long for the days when popular public figures used terms like “axiomatic,” “Latinate” and “proximate deliverance.” On the other, as the enormously entertaining documentary Best of Enemies suggests, Vidal and Buckley’s tussle could be seen as the beginning of the end of rational political discourse. The issues, the candidates, even the conventions themselves were rendered tertiary to their mutual antipathy. The ratings, needless to say, were unprecedented.
Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s film, a favorite at this year’s Sundance (and more than a few years in the making, if the presence of the late—and profoundly overrated—Christopher Hitchens is any indication), concludes with a brief look forward to the toxic sophistry of Fox News et al., but wisely doesn’t hammer the point home. The focus is firmly on how these similarly white, well-heeled men of letters (the one a gay historical satirist, the other a Christian libertarian commentator) exemplified the Vietnam-era crisis of confidence. Well before Pat Buchanan’s notorious “culture wars” speech at the 1990 RNC, Vidal and Buckley became, for a brief moment on network TV, the ad hoc ambassadors for competing systems of moral values. As Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus observes at one point, their debates were debates over lifestyle.
Uninterrupted footage of the debates, which were broadcast live by ABC and moderated by ABC News functionary Howard Smith, form the foundation of Best of Enemies. Like the ABC execs who invited Vidal and Buckley on as part of their “unconventional convention coverage,” Gordon and Neville know better than to mess with perfection. Watching these titans clash would be easily worth the price of admission alone. The remainder of the film’s 88 minutes are devoted to leanly edited, conventional but polished context. Best of Enemies is as much a history of American politics as it is a history of TV, and speaks candidly to their symbiotic relationship. A smartly curated cast of scholars, industry professionals and media personalities prove equal company to Vidal and Buckley, whose prose is read aloud by John Lithgow and Kelsey Grammer, respectively. A linguistics professor is even enlisted to comment on what Buckley’s infamous final outburst—calling Vidal a “queer” after getting called a “crypto-Nazi” one time too many—would have signified to speakers of American English at the time.
Losing his iconic cool so spectacularly would come to haunt Buckley in his autumn years, but viewers ate it up, to ABC’s delight. The network historically trailed NBC and CBS—Frank Rich quips that if they had broadcast the Vietnam War, it would’ve been cancelled in 13 weeks—but all three fought to deliver eyes and ears to advertisers in the late 1960s. Programming skewed older and conservative, but young, educated urbanites spent more, so networks began shifting their crosshairs. The news was not immune to the changing tides, and ABC marketed itself as shaking up a system where, in the words of NPR’s Brooke Gladstone, “there were never any vowels at the ends of their names.” In a way, the Vidal-Buckley debates distilled this divide: Vidal was “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” to Buckley’s “Petticoat Junction.”
Of course, conflating Buckley with a cornball Western is more than a little unfair, and Best of Enemies labors to give him a fair shake, perhaps assuming the film’s audience would be more likely to share Vidal’s convictions. But the filmmakers defeat their purpose somewhat. Describing Buckley’s appearance on “The Jack Parr Program” following his inauspicious first night with Vidal, Tanenhaus extols his rhetorical skill. Parr was expecting the “troglodyte man of the right” he and Vidal had gleefully caricatured during a previous taping, but what he got instead was a “genius of debate.” Tanenhaus then repeats himself over a series of stills of Buckley speaking with Parr. Why not show the great debater in action?
Perhaps the evidence suggests otherwise. The film makes no mention of Buckley’s appearance three years earlier at Cambridge University, where he was asked to discuss Black integration with James Baldwin. Even if Baldwin hadn’t so thoroughly outwitted him, Buckley’s performance would have been a travesty: no gift for oration was able to save his woefully antediluvian views on American race relations. The portrayal is sympathetic, yet Buckley ultimately comes across as stuck on the wrong side of history, especially during third act speculation on his sexuality that rehearses the age-old trope of homophobia as repressed gay desire.
Vidal might have been on the side of progress, but the 1968 debates were neither man’s finest moment. The author of Myra Breckinridge actively courted hostility in the public arena, and while there’s something to be said for troubling the status quo with necessary provocation, the problem with gadflies is that the provocation often outweighs the necessity. For distinguished thinkers across the political spectrum to hash out ideas in good faith—the premise, if not always the actuality, of Buckley’s PBS program “The Firing Line”—was unquestionably in the public interest in such a volatile cultural climate. What ABC’s viewers got was a verbal fistfight elevated by high diction: great television, in other words. Not that today’s culture of the 24-hour news cycle, septic comments sections and buzzword-saturated crosstalk necessarily needed Vidal nor Buckley to usher them into being. One does wish, though, that at the very least, they could be a bit more eloquent about it.