POLITICAL BOOKS
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By Michael Nelson, September 8, 2015
POLisci: Buckley-Vidal Then, Fox and MSNBC Now
Remember novelizations? A hit movie like "Star Wars" would come out, and somebody would turn the script into a
novel—the opposite of the traditional route by which a book such as "The Godfather"or "All the President’s Men"
became a movie.
"Buckley vs. Vidal" is of the same genus as novelizations, if not of the same species. At Sundance in January, out
came the hit documentary "Best of Enemies" about the eleven debates ABC News aired between William F.
Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions. Buckley was founder-editor of
National Review, the magazine that during the fifties and sixties blended the various stands of conservatism into
one fabric and provided intellectual heft for the movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election as president
in 1980. Vidal was a successful writer of racy (at the time) literary novels and the author of a highly successful
play and movie about political conventions, "The Best Man". Both had run for office and lost: Vidal as a
Democratic candidate for Congress in 1960 and Buckley as the Conservative Party nominee for mayor of New
York City in 1965. (If elected, Buckley said, he would “demand a recount.”) Both famously wielded their midAtlantic accents and massive vocabularies as intellectual rapiers on multiple television talk shows.
Now comes the book, featuring the complete transcripts of the Buckley-Vidal debates.
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What makes "Buckley vs. Vidal" different from other movie tie-ins is that it is not only a product of "Best of
Enemies", but was in a sense its inspiration. In 2009 Tom Graves, an English professor at Memphis’s LemoyneOwen College and later the cofounder of the Memphis-based Devault-Graves publishing house, screened a hard-tofind video of the debates at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Robert Gordon, who had helped produce
documentary films with Hollywood director Morgan Neville on Johnny Cash and other musical subjects, was in the
audience. Gordon saw the potential for a movie and recruited Neville, whose "20 Feet from Stardom" won last
year’s best documentary Oscar, as co-director. Best of Enemies was off and running, reaching theaters all over the
country this summer and fall.
The film mixes excerpts from the debates with interviews of talk show host Dick Cavett, Buckley’s brother Reid,
Vidal’s friend Matt Tyrnauer, the late writer Christopher Hitchens, various TV news executives, and others. What
drew these figures to the project was that they regard the acid exchanges between Buckley and Vidal—of a kind
unheard of in the three-network era in which the competition for mass audiences included viewers of all political
stripes—as the precursor to the now-standard cable news shout fests. The difference between then and now is that
cable channels make money by narrow casting to a defined constituency, not broadcasting to a mass audience.
Today liberals watch MSNBC and conservatives watch Fox, but in 1968 everyone still watched ABC, CBS, and
NBC because in the pre-cable era that’s all that was on.
To be sure, not many current talk shows end up with one panelist calling the other a “pro- or crypto-Nazi” (as
Vidal did Buckley in their penultimate debate) and the other responding (as Buckley did): “Listen, you queer, stop
calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamned face.” In 1968, less than a quarter-century after World
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War II, “crypto-Nazi” was an even harsher–sounding epithet than it would be today. Similarly, at a time when
homosexuality was still stigmatized even by the medical profession, “queer” was a more damning personal charge
but a less politically incorrect one.
On the other hand, no current political slugfests feature the sort of erudition that Buckley and Vidal displayed.
That’s the value of having the transcripts in "Buckley vs. Vidal". For some reason, no one is listed as the book’s
editor but Graves clearly did the bulk of the work, with help from fellow publisher Darrin Devault.
The 1968 conventions offered high drama of a kind that no longer exists at national party gatherings. The
Republicans met first, with former vice president Richard Nixon doing his best to fend off challenges from Gov.
Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and the new kid on the political block, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.
Less doubt about who the nominee would be marked the Democratic convention because Vice President Hubert H.
Humphrey’s main challenger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York, was assassinated in June. But the convention
did not lack for suspense. Opposition to Humphrey’s support for the Vietnam War was loud and intense both in the
hall and, in violent clashes with the police, in the streets of Chicago.
Nor did RFK go unmentioned by Buckley and Vidal, the latter a Jackie Kennedy step-brother who had fallen out
with the family. In their ninth debate, Buckley offered a handwritten letter from Kennedy with the following PS:
“I have changed my platform for 1968 from ‘Let’s give blood to the Vietcong’ to ‘Let’s give Gore Vidal to the
Vietcong.’” After examining the letter, Vidal dismissed it: “What a very curious handwriting. It also slants up, a
sign of a manic-depressive.”
I promised erudition. Here are a couple examples:
On August 8, the day after Nixon’s nomination:
Vidal: I was very struck after he was nominated last night, this is a moment that should be of
inspiration to the country. It’s rather a great thing to be nominated for president. Nixon did
something I’ve never seen a presidential new nominee do. He talked about the technique of how he
got the nomination, about how after [the] Oregon [primary] he thought it was set,...and I kept
waiting for an “all right now, you are the nominee of a major party. Say something to us.” You
know, inspire us...
Buckley: Well, I think that this is naïve and that Mr. Vidal, as a novelist, ought to recognize that
when artists relax, they tend to talk the least about their achievements. If you talk to Maria Callas
after she has made an enormous impression at the Metropolitan Opera singing a title role, she isn’t
likely to say to you, “Do you want to know how I practiced to hit that high E?” She is likely on the
other hand to speak about, oh, her costume or her rehearsal or something.
On August 27, the second day of the Democratic convention:
Howard K. Smith (ABC’s anchor and the debates’ moderator): The Democrats are in favor of law
and justice where the Republicans are in favor of law and order. Is there any distinction?
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Buckley: There is a metaphysical distinction which I’m sure has not been observed by the people who
formulated the policies. A state as defined in the liberal idea is not a state which accepts justice as its
primary goal for the reason that elementary distinctions were made millennia ago between the city of
God and the city of Man. Granted the rhetoric of the Democratic Party sometimes seems to give us
the impression that it is ushering in the city of God, except that God is unconstitutional...The
Republican emphasis on law and order is, in my judgment, perhaps for accidental reasons, in closer
congruity to the limited aspirations of a constitution of a free republic.
Vidal: I think Mr. Buckley has fairly stated, as usual, the viewpoint of the Daughters of the American
Revolution. In actual fact the Democratic Party is a little bit ahead of the Republican Party on this
issue. The metaphysical point, as Mr. Buckley would say, is between what do you think about having
a strong federal government as opposed to a strong local government? and this is a legitimate and a
continuing debate. I would only give you this reminder: That without a strong federal government no
school would have even begun to be integrated in the South.
Buckley-Vidal then, Fox and MSNBC now. As Cicero said (and as either Buckley or Vidal might have), “O
tempora! O mores!”
POLici is a new Cook Political Report feature providing our subscribers with fresh perspectives on American
political trends by a panel of highly regarded political scientists.
Senior Contributing Editor and Book Editor Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at
Rhodes College, a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and a Fellow at Southern
Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History.
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