Gore Vidal’s and William F. Buckley’s political views were as diametrically opposed as they could be, but the two men shared one major characteristic: They were both insufferable narcissists.

That’s one of my main takeaways from “Best of Enemies,” an excellent documentary chronicling a series of television appearances by Vidal and Buckley during the 1968 Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. According to the film, someone at ABC News had the innovative [at the time] idea of putting the ultra-conservative Buckley—editor of the politically influential National Review—in a studio with Vidal—the best-selling author, screenwriter and liberal pundit—and having them debate the issues arising at each convention. The results were explosive—and they paved the way to much of what passes for political debate and news reporting today.

I wish I could say that I remember the series. I did, in fact, watch the 1968 conventions—mostly in horror, especially when the Democratic convention in Chicago devolved into a police riot against anti-war protesters. But I wasn’t watching ABC—no one watched ABC when CBS had Walter Cronkite and NBC had Huntley/Brinkley—so I missed the whole debacle within the debacle.

And If I ever did know about it, I had long ago forgotten the infamous low point, when Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-fascist on live tv, prompting Buckley to clench his fist, call Vidal a “queer,” and threaten to punch Vidal in the face right there..

That confrontation is the central image of “Best of Enemies.” But there’s a lot more, both in the lead-in to that moment and in the follow-up on its aftermath. Much of the documentary consists of contemporaneously filmed and videotaped news broadcasts of the day. I’m happy to report that the filmmakers do not seem to have remastered the tapes—so we see them much the way they appeared live on our tv’s—grainy, sometimes out of focus and static-y, and often clumsily produced. The result is a time-machine ride back to the way we actually saw things in 1968. [And the opportunity to name-check politicians and celebrities who appear in the background in some of the coverage. Everett Dirksen! Bob Dole! Muhammad Ali!]

Between the live broadcasts are interviews with people who were behind-the-scenes: a former president of ABC News, William Buckley’s seemingly nicer younger brother, a close friend of Vidal’s, and television-interviewer extraordinaire Dick Cavett. Their candid remarks bring to life the seething animosity between Vidal and Buckley, which endured long after their television series ended: Their mutual hatred was not staged, and not just a matter of radically different political philosophies—it was personal, and it showed.

In the debates themselves, both exemplified the worst traits of people who enjoy calling themselves intellectuals. They were pompous. They were condescending. They struck intellectual poses and rolled their eyes at each other’s statements. They spoke in the affected tones of the Eastern-elite class of the day.

Both came prepared to try to decimate the other, or to cause him to self-destruct. Vidal practiced his zingers with reporters before the debates. He gave Buckley’s magazine the Voldemort treatment: He refused to utter its name and claimed that he never read it. For his part, Buckley came armed to one of the debates with a surprise dirty trick apparently designed to completely unnerve Vidal: He produced what he purported to be a hand-written note from Robert Kennedy, in which Kennedy bad-mouthed Vidal [who was a close confidante of Jacqueline Kennedy]. Buckley’s move was in especially bad taste, considering that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated less than three months earlier.

In the end, the whole thing boiled down to a clash of giant egos. It was more about putting down the other guy, serving up the best one-liners and winning gotcha points than it was about which political philosophy was morally defensible and better for the country and its people. Their on-screen clashes turned out to be headline-makers that boosted ABC’s also-ran ratings. TV executives learned from Vidal and Buckley’s confrontations that giving obnoxious people air time was financially beneficial. The media’s war on substance had begun, or as one commenter in the film put it, it was the start of the tug-of-war between “illumination and viewability.”

I think we know who won.

The post “Best of Enemies:” 1968’s Buckley-Vidal debates, and how they helped spawn Trump appeared first on Occasional Planet.

He was considered anathema to progressives; the most conservative member of the Republican Party. The time was the 1960s, and his name was William F. Buckley. He was from New York State and was publisher of the National Review, the voice of the conservative movement.

As conservative as he was, he stayed within shouting distance of the mainstream of the Republican Party. In 1960, he helped his brother, Jim, win a U.S. Senate seat. Jim Buckley ran in the combined parties of the Republicans and the Conservatives (a unique characteristic of New York State where there are actually four parties). As conservative as he was, William Buckley took a firm stance against the extreme John Birch Society, an organization that in many ways was the forerunner of today’s Tea Party. As op-ed contributor David Welch wrote in the December 3, 2012 New York Times, “the Birch Society was an influential anti-Communist group whose members saw conspiracies everywhere they looked.” The biggest challenge that Buckley had with the Birch Society was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he took on the founder of the Birch Society, Robert Welch. “Birchers demanded that the government rid itself of supposed Communists — including, according its founder, Robert Welch (no relation, thank heaven, to the op-ed column in the Times), Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Sound familiar? Keep in mind that the Birch Society was founded shortly after the Joseph McCarthy Army hearings in the U.S. Senate, an exercise that was generally considered to be a false purging of supposed Communists in and out of the U.S. governmen,t including its military.

As David Welch further states,

Fast forward half a century. The modern-day Birchers are the Tea Party. By loudly espousing extreme rhetoric, yet holding untenable beliefs, they have run virtually unchallenged by the Republican leadership, aided by irresponsible radio talk-show hosts and right-wing pundits. While the Tea Party grew, respected moderate voices in the party were further pushed toward extinction. Republicans need a Buckley to bring us back.

While  in 2010, the Tea Party did support candidates  who captured offices at both the federal and state levels, their clout waned quite a bit in 2012. All too often, Tea Party candidates won primary elections and eliminated moderate Republicans who would have had far better chances of defeating the Democratic opponents in the general elections. Perhaps the best example was in Indiana, where Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock (a member of the so-called “rape caucus”) defeated moderate Richard Lugar in the primary race. Lugar had been the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a true scholar of international issues. He was one of the few Republicans to comfortably work with Democrats and promote bi-partisanship. Tea Partier Mourdock was soundly defeated in the general election by Democrat Joe Donnelly.

As David Welch says in the op-ed,

The absence of a Buckley-esque gatekeeper today has allowed extreme, untested candidates to take center stage and then commit predictable gaffes and issue moon-bat pronouncements. Democrats have used those statements to tarnish the Republican Party as anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-gay, anti-immigrant extremists. Buckley’s conservative pragmatism has been lost, along with the presidency and seats in Congress.

He calls for so-called moderates in the Republican Party to clean up the GOP:

Mr. Christie and Mr. [Jeb] Bush are ideally suited to drive extremists from the party. While some say Mr. Christie’s praise of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy hurt him politically, in fact it cemented his role as party truth-teller. In conjunction with his spirited defense of Sohail Mohammed, a State Superior Court judge who was absurdly attacked for allegedly wanting to impose Shariah law, Mr. Christie should be celebrated by sane people everywhere.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Christie best represent realistic, levelheaded conservatism. Both have crossed the aisle numerous times to the betterment of their states. Yet they enjoy sterling reputations in the party. This occurs when common sense trumps partisanship.

William F. Buckley, who died in 2008, demonstrated that true conservatives could define how far to the right their party could go without making their candidates unelectable or too distant from the mainstream so that it was difficult to take their ideas seriously. It may be coincidence, or it may be cause and effect, that upon his death,  the Tea Party was established and seized control of the right wing. Buckley was successful in silencing the John Birch Society; perhaps he could have done the same with the Tea Party.

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