Of course, Buckley did no such thing - he just threatened to. I remember one of my high-school English teachers, long before YouTube was around, talking about these debates, which he had seen as a kid, and recalling how Buckley had “decked” Vidal. The drama is all there, and it’s riveting. Listen to Buckley talk about Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge with such snide dismissal, it’s like his eyes are rolling their eyes. Listen to Vidal say the words “William Buckley, the distinguished thinker” with all the lilting, sing-song contempt of a playground taunt. Meanwhile, we have the glorious, glorious footage of the actual telecasts themselves. Smith as “suave, intelligent, mildly apprehensive … rehearsing with his lips the lines he would presently deliver.”) (My favorite detail: Buckley’s description of debate moderator Howard K. (At one point, a discussion of Buckley’s morality cuts to footage of him caddishly answering a young female questioner about miniskirts, then cuts to reveal that he’s up on a stage with Woody Allen.) Kelsey Grammer and John Lithgow read passages from the two men’s writing and reminiscences, creating what feels like alternating internal monologues - as if we’re trapped inside their heads. They’re generous with their archival footage, underlining and undercutting with wit and verve. Gordon and Neville’s film is slick, but not in a shallow way. “What kind of people should we be? Their real argument, in front of the public, is who is the better person?” “Their confrontation is about lifestyle,” we’re told. Each man’s very being outraged the other. Vidal saw in the chaos around him the signs of imminent, welcome revolution Buckley saw a rapidly decaying social order that threatened to ruin everything he held dear. Both men were despondent about the state of the country, but in opposite ways. No, they were clashing over something much more existential. It quickly became clear that Vidal and Buckley weren’t really locking horns over individual issues, nor were they arguing two different political philosophies. Then came what Hitchens calls “the cherry bomb that’s waiting to go off - and finally does”: On the night of the penultimate debate, Vidal, who’d been trying to get under Buckley’s skin the whole time, finally called his opponent a “crypto-Nazi.” Upon which Buckley called him a “queer” and threatened to “sock” him “in the goddamned mouth.” (I highly, highly recommend Jim Holt’s excellent article about the debates, published in New York Magazine this week.) The Buckley-Vidal debates made for great television, as the two started off spitting barely veiled invective at one another. “They really did despise each other.” Vidal prepared for the debates by actually hiring researchers to go over Buckley’s record and his writings he wanted to destroy the man, in part because he knew that Buckley, possibly the greatest debater of his time, wanted to destroy him. “There was nothing feigned about the mutual antipathy,” chimes in the late Christopher Hitchens. It was also brilliant, and conniving: Once asked if there was anybody he would never take a stage with, Buckley had said he’d refuse to go up with a Communist, or Gore Vidal. A novel idea at the time for television news. So ABC decided to let the flamboyant, unapologetic Vidal and Buckley - one a dapper left-wing bomb-thrower, the other the very backbone of arch-conservatism - debate the issues of the day. In 1968, the struggling ABC network, dead last behind CBS and NBC (“They’d be fourth, but there were only three,” quips one talking head), didn’t have the resources for the kind of convention coverage that their competitors did. The setup is simple, and beautiful - so simple and beautiful that I’m shocked nobody’s tried to make this movie until now. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. You might not expect, however, to find yourself weeping - for the state of the republic and the poisoned media landscape, for the decay of the American social contract. You might also enjoy the spectacle of two of the foremost intellectuals of their time coming very close to physically beating the crap out of each other. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s ten televised debates during the 1968 presidential conventions as an opportunity to bask in eloquent, pointed repartee.
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