Robert Gordon, Morgan Neville (2015)
In 1968, ABC was the poor relation among US television networks, running a distant third behind the more closely competitive CBS and NBC. One of the contributors to the documentary Best of Enemies gives a clear idea of ABC’s reputation at the time, when he says that, in the pecking order, the network ‘would have been fourth – but there were only three’. In the hope of boosting viewing figures during that year’s American presidential election, ABC managed to sign up William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal for a series of ten debates, moderated by the highly experienced anchor Howard K Smith and aired live on each evening of the Republican and Democratic Conventions. The discussants were almost exact contemporaries (Vidal was born just a few weeks before Buckley in 1925); in terms of political and cultural creeds, they were polar opposites. Buckley, who founded the right-wing magazine National Review in 1955, was by now well known as the host of the current affairs show Firing Line, which began its more than thirty years on American television in 1966. Vidal had been a successful novelist since the late 1940s; he was also a dramatist and screenwriter. The succès de scandale of his Myra Breckinridge, published in February 1968, had further increased his public profile and his notoriety.
One of the few things the two men had in common was controversialist flair. This was no doubt a sizeable part of their appeal to the beleaguered ABC: the increasingly incendiary Buckley-Vidal confrontations helped the network substantially to increase its audience share. I gleaned this from a Google search after I’d watched Best of Enemies: one of the relative weaknesses of Robert Gordon’s and Morgan Neville’s film is the patchy information supplied about the debates themselves and public reaction to them at the time. For example, we’re told that ABC’s nightly broadcast from the Conventions ran for a total of ninety minutes but not what proportion of that time was given over to Buckley and Vidal. Buckley is grilled by Vidal during the Republican Convention in Miami Beach and the positions are reversed for the Democratic Convention in Chicago three weeks later: it’s asserted that Vidal came out well on top in the Miami debates yet this is far from clear from the excerpts shown.
In the penultimate debate, Buckley and Vidal, watched by an audience of around ten million, disputed the conduct of anti-Vietnam War protestors and the Chicago city police at the Democratic Convention – specifically the taking down by the police of a Viet Cong flag that the protestors had raised. Howard K Smith asked Vidal whether the protestors’ action was tantamount to raising a Nazi flag in America during World War II. When Vidal replied that people should always be free to express their views, Buckley insisted that others were no less free to ostracise people because of their views:
‘Buckley: [In World War II] some people were pro-Nazi and they were well treated by those who ostracised them – and I’m for ostracising people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care because you have no sense of identification with –
Vidal: The only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.
Buckley: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.’
That’s not quite verbatim – the pair don’t allow each other to get near to completing sentences and Howard Smith is making nervous attempts to calm things down (‘Now, gentlemen, let’s not call each other names …’) – but it’s the gist of it. Gordon’s and Neville’s sketchiness about other aspects of the debates may be the result of being too eager to get to this vituperative climax but the overeagerness is understandable, and not just because the exchange is still, nearly half a century on, sensational to watch and listen to. (Dick Cavett, interviewed in the film, puts it succinctly: ‘The network nearly shat’.) Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Best of Enemies is lukewarm chiefly because he finds that both Buckley and Vidal ‘teeter on the brink of the insufferable’. I felt the same for a while. The Nazi/queer namecalling is a pivotal moment in Best of Enemies, however, because it also proved a pivotal moment in the lives of the combatants. In the years that followed, the television debates resurfaced in the form of a 1969 Esquire article by Vidal. Buckley sued Esquire and Vidal for libel; Vidal countersued; the case ran and ran until Buckley (to Vidal’s disappointment, it seems) opted for an out of court settlement. In different ways, both men were wounded by what got said in their debate on 28 August 1968. As Gordon and Neville explore this and their subjects’ vulnerabilities emerge, Buckley and Vidal get to be somewhat less insufferable and, like Best of Enemies itself, considerably more interesting. The directors’ increasingly discursive approach eventually delivers an absorbing double biography. (I much preferred this film to Twenty Feet from Stardom, Morgan Neville’s Oscar-winning documentary of a couple of years ago.)
Buckley and Vidal had both sought political office earlier in the sixties. According to talking-head testimony in Best of Enemies, Vidal entertained serious expectations of a career in politics until, in 1960, he ran for Congress in upstate New York and lost. His biographer, Fred Kaplan, tells Gordon and Neville that Vidal ‘didn’t exactly have the common touch’ (although in 1960 he polled relatively well for a Democrat in a traditionally Republican district). Vidal was close to John F Kennedy and even closer to Jackie, to whom Vidal was sort-of related by marriage (they shared the same stepfather). A growing antipathy between him and Robert Kennedy, however, led to an estrangement before the end of JFK’s presidency. There’s a moment from the 1968 debates in Best of Enemies that’s perhaps even more startling than the later, more famous trading of abuse. This is when Buckley produces on air a handwritten letter, sent to him by Robert Kennedy shortly before his assassination, and reads its PS: ‘I have changed my platform for 1968 from “Let’s give blood to the Viet Cong” to “Let’s give Gore Vidal to the Viet Cong”.’ ‘Let me see that,’ replies a smiling, determinedly unperturbed but evidently shocked Vidal. William Buckley Jr had been, in the 1960s, a more maverick figure than Vidal in party political terms. In 1965, in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s heavy defeat by Lyndon Johnson in the previous autumn’s presidential election, Buckley entered the race for New York mayor as a representative of the Conservative Party: he aimed to take votes from the relatively liberal Republican candidate, John Lindsay, rather than from the Democrat, Abraham D Beame. Buckley didn’t expect victory: when asked what he would do if he did win, he famously replied, ‘Demand a recount’. In the longer term, he must have been pleased that his candidacy was clairvoyant: six years after winning the 1965 mayoral race, John Lindsay quit the Republicans for the Democrats.
At one point in the film, we hear Gore Vidal describe the television camera as ‘this ghastly thing’. Like much of what he had to say, this biting of the hand that was feeding him at the time is self-consciously épatant but it’s better value, I found, than his serious political insights. It would have been ironic, of course, if the ‘ghastly thing’ that secured Vidal longevity as a small-screen celebrity had also stymied his prospects of personal political success. As Fred Kaplan suggests, Vidal’s nonchalant, patrician manner can’t have helped him as an aspiring popular politician but there are clips in Best of Enemies that indicate his limitations went deeper: he comes over as both woolly and hollow when he talks as the champion of blacks and the working class (he implies these are wholly distinct constituencies). Vidal may be more important in American cultural history as a proponent, chiefly through his fiction, of various forms of sexual expression: one of the contributors to Best of Enemies describes him as an unsung hero of the gay rights movement. (Although he liked to reject the concepts of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ as labels, Vidal wasn’t averse to suggesting that the homophobia of the man who called him a queer on live television was a reflection of Buckley’s repressed homosexuality.) As a political partisan, Buckley is the more compelling of the pair, at least on the evidence of this film. His urging of the Republicans, during their Convention in Miami, to play the law and order card as strongly as possible is, from his point of view, dramatically vindicated by what happens in Chicago later in the month. He’s also advantaged in Best of Enemies by some of those speaking on his behalf. Neil Buckley is a vivid interviewee: the face, the manic light in the eyes, the vicious tang of much of what he says – all recall big brother. Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley’s authorised biographer, makes the striking claim that the fault lines in American politics that still persist today were defined in the 1968 presidential election. Since this is at least arguably true, it gives considerable retrospective substance to the Buckley-Vidal debates.
Needless to say, Buckley’s and Vidal’s fallibility as political candidates didn’t at all diminish their intellectual self-confidence as political commentators. Their unrelenting, over-practised wit is mostly resistible but I did enjoy a clip in Best of Enemies in which Buckley is taking questions from an audience, someone asks if the fact that he’s always sitting down means that he can’t think on his feet, and the sedentary Buckley’s instant response is, ‘It’s hard to stand up when you’re carrying the weight of what I know’. (Where the voices of the two men aren’t available to accompany their words, these are read in the film by Kelsey Grammer (Buckley) and John Lithgow (Vidal).) Best of Enemies lives up to its title: among its strongest elements is the enduring intensity of the antagonists’ mutual hatred. This isn’t a case of two people with diametrically opposed views finding, in spite of their chasmal differences of opinion, likeable or admirable qualities in the other. Although they both enjoy playing to the camera, you never get the sense that the enmity is worked up for show: it’s the very thin layer of bantering affability – what the late Christopher Hitchens describes in the film as a ‘rictus of loathing’ – that’s contrived. Buckley and Vidal are only pretending that their disputes are a super-civilised game, and the feud persisted even unto death. In 2008, Vidal, clearly relieved to be able to have the last word, penned a bilious obituary of Buckley, including a message to the deceased – ‘RIP, WFB – in hell’. The atheist Gore Vidal must have taken added pleasure in wishing this fate worse than death on an adversary who, in life, had been a practising Catholic.
The narrative of Best of Enemies develops twin arcs of elegy: the increasingly melancholy presence of the aging Buckley and Vidal is complemented by a larger regret for what some of those interviewed, and perhaps the film-makers themselves, see as a vanished golden age of public broadcasting – a time when families sat down together to watch the same programmes and engage with the major issues of the day. One of the contributors to the film asks how it was possible for intellectuals like Buckley and Vidal to draw television viewers when intellectual talk was supposedly anathema to the mass audience. This is followed by theorising about the pair’s extraordinary understanding of how television worked but I’m not sure their popularity is such a mystery: plenty of people like watching a punch-up and a hyper-articulate, polysyllabic verbal punch-up must have had distinctive appeal. The epilogue to Best of Enemies includes a clip of Vidal opining that people didn’t really listen to what was being said in the debates; and this chimes with a reference that Buckley makes to an inherent tension between ‘the highly viewable and the highly illuminating’. The two men’s strictures about the medium have the effect of qualifying the film’s nostalgia for what television used to be. Yet the spectacle of William Buckley and Gore Vidal, infuriating and alienating as they often are, somehow substantiates that nostalgia.
14 September 2015
