Note: This review also appears in roughly the same form on my political blog, The Think 3 Institue.
Over the weekend I finally caught up with Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon's documentary The Best of Enemies,
an account of the ABC-TV debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and
Gore Vidal during the 1968 national party conventions and the way they
supposedly changed the face of TV journalism. This film is a
coincidental companion piece to Kevin M. Schultz's book about Buckley and Norman Mailer, which
I read last summer and reviewed on my political blog. All we need now is a chronicle of the literary and
cultural feud between Mailer and Vidal, buy it's easy enough to read
what the participants wrote on the subject. While the Buckley-Mailer was
a lament for the quality of intellectual debate, including some
capacity for convergence, that passed when Mailer and Buckley died, Best of Enemies
ironically blames two supremely erudite men for the coarsening of
political opinion in the mass media. While the film strikes a nearly
neutral tone politically, it seems to place the majority of blame for
what happened and what would come on Vidal, who was hired by ABC as
Buckley's antagonist after Buckley had told them he didn't want to be in
a room with the man. Vidal is presented as more determined to carry out
a hatchet-job on Buckley than in debating the issues at play in the
conventions. The loathing was mutual and seemed to coarsen both of them.
We see clips of Vidal debating other people and his voice, always as
affected as Buckley's, comes across as more natural and spontaneous than
it did in 1968, when he adopted a more stentorian voice as if in parody
of Buckley, if not in self-parody, and seemed determined to use
pre-planned zingers than in actually engaging with anything Buckley
said. His main objective was to get under Buckley's skin, and in an
example of "propaganda of the deed," get Buckley to expose what Vidal
assumed to be a conservative's true nature.
Of course,
this is exactly what happened, to what the film claims was Buckley's
lifelong mortification. While all the debates were filmed in color, apparently only a black-and-white print survives of this most infamous one. Here it is complete, as uploaded to YouTube by MetrazolElectricity.
What's interesting is what triggered it:
challenged by moderator Howard K. Smith to compare the raising of a
Vietcong flag by Chicago protesters to the flying of a Nazi flag in this
country during World War II, Vidal answered that the closest thing to a
"pro or crypto-Nazi" he could see was Buckley. That provoked Buckley to call
Vidal a "queer" and threaten to "sock him in the goddamn face." At the
time, Buckley said this was an inexcusable insult because he had fought
the Nazis as an infantry soldier, a detail Vidal denied. But the
filmmakers told us earlier that conservatives of Buckley's generation
fiercely resented the "Nazi" label that liberals and leftists applied to
them, not least because, obviously enough, their ideal government was
quite far from Nazi notions of the state and leadership. From our
vantage, Buckley's resentment only dates him, since we've reached a
point where no one takes this N-word seriously and it's actually a
premise almost universally accepted that using it (of the H-word)
disqualifies you from any internet debate. Did Vidal begin that dilution
of this N-word or did time really do that damage? It matters little to
the film, which probably resonates more months after its theatrical
release now that we've seen a presidential campaign driven almost
entirely by insults, though even Donald Trump has not yet threatened to
punch his rivals in the face, despite Jeb Bush's increasing efforts in
that direction.
Buckley said after the debates -- I
don't know whether Vidal ever confirmed or denied it -- that after their
most contentious encounter Vidal whispered to him that they'd given ABC
its money's worth. The best thing Best of Enemies does -- the
worst is to reduce the debates to fragmentary sound-bites that emphasize the snark and bile; it would have been more
illuminating to show at least one complete -- is restore the
Buckley-Vidal feud to its part in ABC News's controversial and initially
reviled plan to minimize its convention coverage -- the other major
networks will still going gavel-to-gavel -- and replace reporting to a
great extent with commentary. ABC offered "unconventional convention
coverage" and, so the film argues, Buckley and Vidal delivered the
goods, goosing up the third network's ratings as their feud and the
protests in Chicago heated up. This led to other news programs adopting
point-counterpoint features, and from there the film draws a line
straight to Crossfire and all the arguments we hear on TV today.
While the film's own commentators see the environment today as a
reflection of increased political and ideological self-segregation,
leaving people unable to truly talk to each other in the sense of
seeking common ground, Buckley and Vidal were of the same social class
and sounded equally like stereotypical snobs, so it can't be argued that
theirs were two different worlds, unless you believe sexual preference
crucial. I can imagine modern audiences thinking both men fake, unable
to imagine that theirs were anyone's natural speaking voices, and some
of the documentary's talking heads argue that neither man could have
become a celebrity today talking the way they did. Norman Mailer talked
somewhat similarly, reflecting an Ivy League education in spite of a
more modest background, and it probably tells us more about this moment
in American history than it does about any of these three men that they
could be so eloquent yet so crude in many ways. Vidal drove Buckley to
threaten violence and Mailer to actual violence, and boasted of his own
capacity for hatred, while Mailer was quite capable of violence on his
own and Buckley was in many ways a vicious reactionary. I concede that
all three were far smarter than today's opinionators -- any one of them
might have been smarter than this generation combined -- but they all
succumbed to some malign spirit of the age instead of transcending it.
They can't be blamed for that cultural change, but I suppose they can be
blamed for making that new partisan coarseness sound intellectually
respectable, and for encouraging others with more spite than wit that
they could do likewise. If anything, they pointed the way toward the
uselessness of political eloquence and the equation of insult and truth that threatens to prevail today.
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