Page 26 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Media
Buckley Against Vidal
They were “Best of Enemies”—and eerily similar.
by GEOFFREY KABASERVICE
“Do you care to read the context or shall I cram it down
your throat?”
Context matters in the coruscating new doc- umentary “Best of Enemies.” Why should today’s moviegoers care about a long-ago televised clash of political debaters? Be-
cause the debaters in question happened to be Wil- liam F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, two of the most articulate intellectual exponents of the political right and left, and because their clash would have enduring repercussions for the combatants and, arguably, for the nature of media commentary ever since.
In the summer of 1968, ABC News, desperate to change its cellar-dwelling status in the television ratings, abandoned the time-honored format of continuous coverage of the Republican and Demo- cratic presidential conventions. Instead, the network would air a nightly hour-and-a-half series of high- lights anchored by a debate between opposing public intellectuals. ABC paid Buckley and Vidal $10,000 apiece to appear in 10 debates, split between the GOP convention in Miami Beach and the Demo- cratic convention in Chicago.
In choosing Buckley and Vidal, ABC was aiming for maximal controversy. For one thing, the ideological distance between the two men was considerably great- er than the distance between the two parties in those days. Buckley was the founder of the modern conserva- tive movement, which regarded the Republican Party much as pirates would regard a merchant ship to be boarded, while the bestselling novelist Vidal by 1968 had come to identify with the radical left that viewed the Democratic Party as one more establishment to be
overthrown. And both men, though they seldom met in person, loathed each other.
Vidal saw Buckley as an anti-democratic reaction- ary pushing the country toward destruction, a danger to the Republic whom Vidal had a responsibility to stop. Buckley for his part was appalled by Vidal. He wasn’t so much threatened by his debate partner’s open bisexuality—his wife’s best friends tended to be gay men—or Vidal’s extreme left-wing political po- sitions, which he thought predictable. But Buckley viewed Vidal’s multimillion-selling novel Myra Breck- enridge, with its transsexual heroine and celebration of polymorphic perversion, as genuinely corrosive. It was a “crazed” assault, he wrote, on “traditional, hu- mane sexual morality: on the family as the matrix of society: on the survival of heroism, on the very idea of heroism.” Buckley considered Vidal “the devil,” in the words of Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan: “He rep- resented everything that was going to moral hell, that was degenerative about the country.”
And yet, as the documentary emphasizes, both men were in many ways curiously alike. Both were wealthy, erudite, prep school trained and classically educated society fixtures with languid lockjaw ac- cents, who seemed to embody the WASP upper class. Yet in fact both were outsiders and critics of that es- tablishment—Buckley because of his conservatism and his father’s Texas frontier origins, Vidal because of his sexuality and iconoclastic instincts—in an era of centrist consensus.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author, most recently, of
Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.
— William F. Buckley Jr.
26 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015