Page 27 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Both men had political aspirations that were cut short when they ran up against more skillful establish- ment politicians. Buckley lost to liberal Republican John Lindsay in the 1965 New York City mayoral race, even though he pointed the way toward the GOP future by attracting angry white ethnics from the city’s outer boroughs. Vidal came from a distinguished Democrat- ic political lineage—his grandfather was a senator from Oklahoma—and garnered his in-law John F. Kennedy’s endorsement in his 1960 New York congressional cam- paign. Unfortunately for his political career, he fell out with the Kennedy clan when he clashed with Bobby, whom he improbably regarded as a presidential rival.
Vidal’s 1960 play “The Best Man” (later made into a 1964 movie) epitomized the mid-century Democratic hope that the masses would recognize their proper ruler in a witty, progressive, Adlai Stevenson-esque patrician. (Similar liberal wish-fulfillment resurfaced decades later in the television miniseries “The West Wing,” and it must have been sweet vindication for Vidal when he was cast as a venerable Democratic senator in the 1992 film “Bob Roberts.”) As Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus observes in “The Best of Enemies,” Buckley and Vidal “were circling each other from very early on. Why? Partly because each one saw in the other a kind of exaggerated image of his own anxious version of himself.”
Buckley had told ABC that the one person he did not want to face on television in the 1968 debates was Gore Vidal. The reasons why quickly became appar- ent when Vidal attempted to take down Buckley, not only as a debater but as a human being.
While Buckley spent the week before
the debate sailing to Cozumel, Vidal
hired a researcher in the hopes of paint-
ing Buckley’s magazine National Review
as racist and anti-Semitic. Vidal even
prepared zingers to use against Buckley
that, the film reveals, he previewed with
reporters. The debates between the two men had little to do with the issues that surfaced at the party conven- tions but rather boiled down to vicious and extremely personal exchanges.
The film heralds each round of debate with a bell and a title card, and the pugilistic intensity with which Buckley and Vidal went at each other is still mes- merizing even at a remove of almost half a century. Tanenhaus isn’t exaggerating when he calls Buckley the greatest debater and Vidal the greatest talker of their generation. Both made use of the full amplitude of the English language, and part of the pleasure of the film is hearing Vidal mocking his opponent’s “slightly Latinate and inaccurate style” and Buckley riposting
“Such balderdash!”
The debates also took place at a moment of high
political drama, not long after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, with the Vietnam War raging, riots convulsing the nation’s cit- ies, and Chicago’s police force gassing and clubbing demonstrators outside the Democratic convention. “Best of Enemies” makes good use of a host of talking heads who provide historical context, including the late Christopher Hitchens, Buckley’s younger brother Reid, and former TV host Dick Cavett. And, as sev- eral of the commentators observe, the issues fought out in the 1968 elections prefigured our present-day political divisions over sexual morality, race relations, crime, police violence, income inequality, and Ameri- can imperialism.
The film does not, however, probe deeply into these matters. Neither did Buckley and Vidal in their debates, where they were more concerned with scoring points than learning anything from each other. Vidal scorn- fully dismissed Buckley’s suggestion that “freedom breeds inequality,” even though a similar proposition can be found in some of his own novels; Buckley at- tacked Vidal’s criticisms of the military campaign in Vietnam despite his own private reservations about the war. (“I am frankly delighted that you are 4F,” Buckley had written to a young friend in 1965, “inasmuch as I cannot see any purpose in joining the American Army at this moment. Some other war, perhaps.”) The film- makers generally play fair with both sides, with the conspicuous exception of one scene that seems to show
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 27
Tanenhaus isn’t exaggerating when he calls Buckley the greatest debater and Vidal the greatest talker of their generation.
Buckley laughing gleefully over his alleged contribu- tions to the persistence of racial segregation.
Tensions between the antagonists built up over the course of the conventions until finally erupting at the ninth debate, which took place after a night of clashes between police and protestors in Chicago. When Vi- dal compared Mayor Richard Daley’s city to a Soviet regime, Buckley objected to the attempt to “infer from individual and despicable acts of violence from Chica- go policemen a case for implicit totalitarianism in the American system.” The discussion degenerated from there until Vidal lashed out at Buckley with the insult that “As far as I am concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi that I can think of is yourself.” ABC