Oldie but goodie: Gore Vidal Vs Wm F Buckley Jr

A debate for the ages, due mostly not to the debate per se but to Buckley’s smash-hit comeback line, which I’ll get to anon.

Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport

Note: link refers to a NYT article, yes, but safe nonetheless; it's actually to the archive.is repro of the original, so as to evade the NYT's famously-ineffectual paywall. Onwards.

Before partisan panels, split-screen shoutfests and brash personalities became ubiquitous on cable news, there were two men who despised each other sitting side by side on a drab soundstage, debating politics in prime time during the presidential nominating conventions of 1968. There were Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.

Literary aristocrats and ideological foes, Vidal and Buckley attracted millions of viewers to what, at the time, was a highly irregular experiment: the spectacle of two brilliant minds slugging it out — once, almost literally — on live television. It was witty, erudite and ultimately vicious, an early intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news.

What transpired would alter both men’s lives — and, as a new documentary argues, help change the course of how the American political media reports the news. “Best of Enemies,” which opens July 31, makes the case that their on-screen feuding opened the floodgates for today’s opinionated, conflict-driven coverage.

The film might have been a sober lesson in the erosion of our civic discourse, timed to the start of yet another 24/7 presidential campaign. But its directors, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, present their ideas with a wide scope, exploring the rivalry between their subjects and evoking an era when public intellectuals like Vidal appeared on “Playboy After Dark” and magazine editors like Buckley, the founder of National Review, ran for mayor of New York. (He lost.)

Not the debate, he didn’t. The only thing anyone remembers about the damned thing at all is Buckley’s deathless riposte to the always-annoying, über-effete, drunken shitlib swish Vidal, after he’d archly referred to Buckley as a “crypto-Nazi” for the umpteenth time:

On a night of riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, Buckley and Vidal had their own climactic on-air clash. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” prompting a reaction that still stuns.

“Now listen, you queer,” Buckley replied, “stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” He was nearly out of his chair, inches from Vidal, his face, as Christopher Hitchens recalls in the film, “a rictus of loathing.”

As well he might have been, as well any self-respecting Real American might have in his place. Buckley regretted the incident deeply forever afterwards—mostly, one strongly suspects, for the way he had allowed a shitlib ass-pirate non-entity like Gore fucking Vidal goad him into a total loss of composure and self-restraint on live Teewee. Certainly, it wouldn’t have been because of any insufficiency of pugnacity or willingness to beard a shitlib in his network-TV den on Buckley’s part. Thankfully, all available evidence before or since that debate readily confirms that the man just wasn’t built that way.

Though his legend has been tarnished somewhat in recent years thanks to the way his creation, National Review magazine, has been betrayed by its present-day stewards, that isn’t in any way the fault of Buckley himself; the purblind fools currently running Bill Buckley’s noble legacy into the ground have to stand up to that charge on their own lightweight hook. The man single-handedly kept a practically-moribund conservative movement viable, breathing life into the corpse so it could carry on into whatever future it might ever have had. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that, without the foundation laid years before by one Wm F Buckley Jr, there would never have been a President Ronald Wilson Reagan to look back on in nostalgic admiration.

William F Buckley, much like the US Constitution he so revered, didn’t fail us. WE failed HIM, to our everlasting regret and disgrace.

That 2015 film, “Best Of Enemies,” went on to be reimagined as a Broadway play a few years later, which itself was revived for a London run in late 2022. Just guess what “updates” were made to “freshen things up" a bit for the contemporary taste. Go on, guess. I dares yuh. In a slight breach of etiquette and going right for the throat, I triple dog dares yuh.

This is a poster for the new Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Jr. play called “Best of Enemies.” To my best recollection, neither man was black. pic.twitter.com/pmFuj8hynJ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray)

May 8, 2023

Still haven’t figured out a way to have Twitter embeds show up here, but you can click the above link to view it (alternatively, you can also view it at the CF Mothershippe). From what I've been able to ascertain via some most cursory DDG'ing around, somewhat to my surprise the above Nee-grow is portraying Buckley, as the final parting insult to the now long-since departed great man. I assumed he would've been cast as Vidal, the better to portray him as the poor, innocent victim of De White Man's racist, homophobic hatred back in that 1968 debate. It would’ve been an easy two-fer for Libtards, a real gimme of a move. But meh, who can even begin to comprehend the way those diseased minds work anymore.