Mourning a non-existent golden age: Best of Enemies

No one was reading Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. in their wrathful dotage. This man, after 9-11 a warmonger who now bought the idea of making the world safe for kleptocracy, published a devastating analysis of Vidal as crackpot — the man whom Vidal had anointed his dauphin. Buckley’s ebb was even more ignominious. Regarded as a funny uncle with an un-talent for the gauche Latinate around which he enclosed a many-toothed grin, he lived long enough to oppose the second Iraq War and have passengers on the National Review cruise make crazy signs behind his back. Although Best of Enemies lingers too briefly on this autumnal period that’s closer to a harsh winter, the footage of these once wonderful men, rude in their athleticism (Buckley would jump off boats like a pasha off an elephant), reduced to heaving white-whiskered ruin, does underscore the similarities between them that Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s interviewees persist on reminding the audience about. This crisp little documentary doesn’t linger on what 1968’s Buckley-Vidal debates portended. The debates weren’t the End of an Era; they were the Beginning of the End.

At a time when the big three networks aired entire political conventions as a matter of course, ABC’s decision to foil their abridged coverage with commentary by Buckley and Vidal smacked of desperation, not courage. “The joke was that if you really wanted to end the Vietnam War, put it on ABC and in thirteen weeks it would be cancelled,” says one of the film’s talking heads. The network was so, as they say, cash poor that the stage collapsed after the first debate — a warning from the gods? The other sign that matters would not proceed in the usual ways: Buckley, refreshed and ruddy after a boat trip to Cozumel, had not done any homework before the debate. He didn’t know that Vidal had hired a researcher (he even scribbled drafts of the zingers he’d air). In that first debate in Miami Beach, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan enthralled delegates with tales — one so determined to be energetic that it’s stiff, the other as relaxed as a dirty joke told on a porch — about the collapse of America, Buckley is off his game from the start, stunned by Vidal’s remark about the GOP’s being “a political party based almost entirely upon human greed.” Howard K. Smith, the putative moderator, ladles reassurances as if they were mashed potatoes. And there’s nine debates to go.

The (in)famous exchange — crypto-Nazi! queer! stay plastered — doesn’t occur until Buckley and Vidal have moved from Miami Beach to Chicago, where protesters waving Viet Cong flags and middle fingers provide the ideal material for Buckley’s construction of high moral indignation. This is when the structural conventionality of Best of Enemies starts to erode its good will. As I pointed out, I’m glad the documentary doesn’t mourn the disappearance of polysyllabic slurs on television, but it also gratifies the audience’s worst instincts. Gordon and Neville don’t explain the significance of Vidal and Buckley’s ideas beyond Wikipedia topic sentences and the fact of their privilege; there’s a shot of a row of Vidal’s hardcover spines that’s supposed to be impressive. The documentary shows two smart guys who hated each other, period. By cutting from debate excerpts to the likes of Eric Alterman and James Wolcott explaining What It Means, they assume I don’t want anything but yuks at a person’s expense and my applauding myself for catching Vidal and Buckley’s cultural references. Lamenting how television reduces ideas into images, Best of Enemies also endorses the reduction.

In Miami, Buckley says:

Mr. Vidal, I have no doubt that there is somebody in Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village who considers that your caricature is fetching. I don’t. I was invited here, and am prepared, to try to talk about the Republican convention. But I maintain that it’s very difficult to do so when you have somebody like this, who will speak in such burps. And he likes to be naughty.

Had Best of Enemies argued that Buckley and Vidal were facile propagandists and expert performers never above the ad hominem or playing to the galleys, I would’ve accepted the premise: at least it’s a point of view (I happen to share it). But the movie endorses Vidal without making clear why it should, unless I’m supposed to accept that Vidal “won” because Buckley called him a queer in front of ten million viewers.  About the worst thing you could call someone on national television, John McWhorter reminds us; my audience, modern and liberal, chuckled. I didn’t like how Gordon and Neville take Vidal at his word and dangle the possibility of Buckley’s queerness; my audience clucked. The movie doesn’t even try to make sense of Vidal’s coy allusions to his own sexuality; he disliked labels, his friends aver, so you better take it and like it. Would it have been so outré to say about a paladin who lived with another man for more than forty years and picked up thousands of young men that he was gay? Vidal’s dead. He can’t sue now.

Indifferent to its own shallowness, Best of Enemies is like a man who explains how Fritos are developed in a lab, details the preparation of chemicals that reproduce the sensation of munching on a corn-like substance, and shakes the open bag under my nose. The firmest proof of how Buckley-Vidal presaged “Crossfire” and “The O’Reilly Factor” is the existence of Best of Enemies.