Page 28 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Media
moderator Howard K. Smith stuttered out “Let’s—let’s not call names,” but too late:
Buckley: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi...
Smith: Let’s stop... Let’s...
Buckley: ...or I’ll sock you in the goddamn
face...
Vidal: Oh, Bill, you’re so extraordinary! Smith: Gentlemen, let’s stop calling names... Buckley: ...and you’ll stay plastered.
The filmmakers contend that the significance of the Buckley-Vidal flamewar is that it taught the networks to value supercharged ideological debate over straight news coverage. The Buckley-Vidal debates vaulted ABC over its rivals; no network carried gavel-to-gav- el coverage of a political convention ever again. The winning formula, as Dick Cavett puts it in the film, became “Get Mr. Pro and Mr. Con, have them argue, and that’s enlightenment, that’s punditry.” There’s a straight line, in this view, from Buckley-Vidal to to- day’s cable news shoutfests.
But the would-be pundits we see on television now are dumber and duller than Buckley and Vidal ever were. They’re likelier to sprout wings than to invoke Pericles, as Vidal did in warning against the overexten- sion of empire, or to flaunt whatever sesquipedalian
vocabulary they might possess, as Buckley did at ev- ery opportunity.
Indeed, the Buckley-Vidal debate still seems unique for its sheer emotionalism and the odd quasi-sexual dynamics noticed by some contemporary observ- ers. At one point Vidal referred to National Review as a magazine whose name would not pass his lips, to which Buckley responded, “We know that you like nothing to sully your lips.” “You will eat it first,” Vidal replied with a smirk. God knows what the 10 million viewers watching the debate made of that exchange. And Buckley’s infamous outburst was a rare televised example of loss of control, of the sort that some people seek out in auto races or certain types of pornography.
Buckley almost never lost his cool and rarely re- sorted to personal insult. In fact, he made very few permanent enemies; his geniality, like Ronald Rea- gan’s, was key to his political success. The debates haunted Buckley, and he even tendered Vidal an apol- ogy in a long essay he wrote about them, while Vidal reveled in having “left the bleeding corpse of William F. Buckley Jr. on the floor of a convention hall in Chi- cago” and mounted a photoset of the debates above his bathtub like a safari pelt. In the end, the episode on which “Best of Enemies” pivots was an anomaly in Buckley’s long career. It makes for compelling view- ing, but ultimately it was a moment of sound and fury, signifying less than the filmmakers think.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal in “Best of Enemies,” a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
28 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015