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Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates copyright © 2015 by The Devault-Graves Agency, LLC. The transcriptions and edits of the eleven debates contained in Buckley vs. Vidal are copyright © 2015 by The Devault-Graves Agency, LLC. The video and content of the eleven debates that are the basis for Buckley vs. Vidal are copyright © 1968 by ABC News and are published here with permissions from ABC News. “Introduction” by Robert Gordon copyright © 2015 by Robert Gordon. All photographs are courtesy of the Library of Congress, LOOK magazine collection.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher. 

Print Edition ISBN: 978-1-942531-12-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-942531-11-1

Cover design: Martina Voriskova

Title page design: Martina Voriskova

Table of Contents

Introduction by Robert Gordon

Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida

Debate One, two days prior to convention, August 3, 1968

Debate Two, one day prior to convention, August 4, 1968

Debate Three, first day of convention, August 5, 1968

Debate Four, second day of convention, August 6, 1968

Debate Five (Part One), third day of convention, August 7, 1968

Debate Five (Part Two), third day of convention, August 7, 1968

Debate Six, fourth and final day of convention, August 8, 1968

Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois

Debate Seven, two days prior to convention, August 24, 1968

Debate Eight, one day prior to convention, August 25, 1968

Debate Nine, second day of convention, August 27, 1968

Debate Ten, third day of convention, August 28, 1968

Debate Eleven, fourth and final day of convention, August 29, 1968

INTRODUCTION

by Robert Gordon

They came loaded for bear. William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, representing the political poles in America, sat in front of the ABC News cameras in 1968 and, though hired to discuss the events of each party’s political conventions and their path toward their presidential tickets, these men each arrived with the intention of taking down the other. For the good of the nation.

During the summer 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, the United States was in turmoil, the chasm between youth culture and the establishment widening as the war in Vietnam dragged on, killing kids, killing civilians, killing hope. In March of that year, two weeks after the My Lai Massacre, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated two months later. Riots raged across the United States, in cities large and small. Major publications gave serious consideration to the possibility of a new U.S. civil war.

Unlike now, the conventions were not a stage play with the outcomes decided. In 1968, neither party went in with a clear candidate. Actual politics would be conducted.

For the previous several conventions, the three television networks had made it their journalistic duty to cover the proceedings “gavel-to-gavel,” meaning from late afternoon until whenever business was concluded, usually before midnight, but, if there were a floor fight, well into the night.

Of the three networks — there were only three then, plus the precursor to PBS — ABC was a distant third. It had been founded later, was less funded, had fewer affiliates. It had neither the resources nor the personalities to draw viewership and, in ’68, the ABC network chiefs decided they couldn’t afford gavel-to-gavel coverage. It wasn’t that live coverage was expensive; rather, they needed the income that their primetime programming would generate. While NBC and CBS would broadcast political speeches, ABC offered instead The Flying Nun, Bewitched, Batman, and Land of the Giants (giving a new meaning to TV as escapism). Then, after its regular nightly news, ABC would offer 90 minutes of what it termed “unconventional convention coverage,” a five-segment nightly summation of the day. They’d open with a synopsis of the day’s events and close with an update. In between was “Correspondents’ Caucus,” a roundtable discussion from the leading ABC reporters; “Closeup,” an in-depth analysis of the day’s major events, and “A Second Look,” which featured Buckley and Vidal and was described in a press release: “William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal will ‘discuss,’ in their usually irreverent fashion, the men and issues. Astute and articulate observers of the political scene, the conservative Buckley and outspoken liberal Vidal are expected to disagree occasionally.”

ABC was ridiculed by news organizations from all media for forsaking its journalistic responsibility, but the results of their desperate measure surprised everyone.

Both Buckley and Vidal had already developed large public personae, including a renowned dislike for each other. Their first confrontation had been in print in 1961, a series of Associated Press columns, each presenting opposing sides on current affairs. Then in 1962 Vidal, already a favorite guest of TV talk show host Jack Paar, made fun of Buckley and National Review for rejecting Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra, which called on Catholics to embrace social progress. Buckley learned of this televised insult as he was departing the country and he left a telegram with his office to send to Paar that, according to Buckley, included the line: PLEASE INFORM GORE VIDAL THAT NEITHER I NOR MY FAMILY IS DISPOSED TO RECEIVE LESSONS IN MORALITY FROM A PINK QUEER. His office did not send it and instead Buckley demanded time for a response, garnering his first national TV appearance. There he surprised Paar by speaking intelligently and precisely from a conservative viewpoint when Paar was expecting the prejudiced and crude talk associated with the John Birch Society, the group that had long emblematized the political right. But Buckley had been actively re-branding the conservatives, distancing the movement from what he called “the kooks and the anti-Semites,” positioning himself as a spokesman for a thoughtful, reasoned political stance. Buckley handled himself well on television and, like Vidal, understood the power of the medium to reach into broad swaths of America personally, with a message undiluted.

Despite political differences, the two men seemed cut from the same cloth: their mid-Atlantic speaking accents were haughty, their demeanors were aloof, they exuded breeding and education. However, for each, these airs had been cultured; they were not born into the Eastern establishment, and didn’t have the usual New England prep school backgrounds (though each did attend elite academies, Buckley at Andover and Vidal at Exeter). Vidal came from Oklahoma and Tennessee stock and was raised in the U.S. Senate where his blind grandfather served, developing a political education by reading aloud to him the Congressional Record and other necessary documents. Buckley’s family was wealthy, but nouveau, their Catholicism keeping them outside the WASPish circle of their neighboring Connecticut bluebloods. Tutored from an early age, Buckley went on to Yale while Vidal opted not to pursue college — each angling for his own route of attack on the culture’s dominant forces. Vidal published his first book in 1946 but became an enfant terrible with The City and the Pillar in 1948, a novel that dealt unapologetically and sympathetically with a homosexual protagonist. Buckley published his first book three years later, God and Man at Yale, a controversial attack on an institution that he proclaimed was leaning too far left, promulgating communism, and attacking religion. Their positions staked, we can look back and see these polar opposites being slowly drawn toward each other.

As outsiders with atypical establishmentarian backgrounds, they were comfortable moving to television at a time when the boob tube was still disparaged as déclassé. On September 23, 1962, they appeared together on the David Susskind program, a tete-a-tete that proved them equally matched for wit, though polarized in world views. Apparently neither felt like they’d completed what they set out to do at that meeting and they appeared again with Susskind on July 15, 1964 from the San Francisco Republican National Convention. There, the sparring continued, an undercurrent of loathing gradually surfacing, and afterward Buckley informed Vidal he wanted to never see him again, the rare statement from Buckley with which Vidal could agree.

Enter ABC and 1968. As the press release reveals, ABC knew that bringing the two together could create friction and that the sparks could attract more viewers. In fact, when Buckley was hired, they asked him, perhaps slyly, whom he’d like as an opponent from the liberal side, and then asked him for names he’d prefer not to debate. Buckley, as he later recounted in Esquire, said that as a matter of principle he’d not debate a communist, and also not Gore Vidal “because I had had unpleasant experiences with him in the past and did not trust him.” Vidal, who also claims he was hired first, says he asked not to face Buckley because he didn’t want to lend him any credibility or create opportunity for him to spread his message. Nonetheless, each assented when he learned who his opponent would be, drawn no doubt by the power of the national audience he’d have and also, significantly, by the $10,000 fee (approximately $70,000 in 2015 currency). Their tasks also included filming commentaries inserted into the newscasts prior to the conventions and appearing in November on election night.

Coverage began two days prior to each convention. Within minutes of their first conversation, these high-minded individuals took the low road. After Vidal contemns the Republicans as the party of greed, Buckley turns personal, assaulting Vidal and his most recent novel, Myra Breckinridge, which Vidal once described as about “a man who becomes a woman who becomes a man” — scandalous for its time and quickly a bestseller. Though Buckley was first in shifting from the political to the personal, Vidal had come prepared to do just that, having hired researchers to create a dossier on Buckley and pre-scripting pages of insults to hurl at his opponent. (My favorite is describing Buckley as “the Marie Antoinette of the right-wing.”) Buckley, who had opened a dossier on Vidal in 1965, makes frequent insinuations about Vidal’s homosexuality, saying in the first debate, “We know your tendency is to be feline, Mr. Vidal.”

These dialogues, ostensibly political commentary, wound up being much more personal because each saw in the other, as Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus has said, “a kind of exaggerated image of his own anxious version of himself.” Like a dark funhouse mirror, what if the public sees me as I see my opponent? If Buckley reviled Vidal’s pansexuality as a perversity that would dissolve the stability of God, country, and family, Vidal saw Buckley as a shill for corporate greed whose erudite rhetoric cloaked the mechanisms of exploitation and impoverishment. More than morally or ideologically offensive, each perceived his opponent as a beacon for danger, a determined, imminent threat intent on taking down the nation.

While Buckley’s gay-baiting is undeniable throughout these encounters, his history suggests that he was comfortable among gay men. Buckley and his wife Patricia entertained many gays at their New York and Connecticut homes; Patricia was a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many of their art-world friends were homosexual. Nonetheless, he focused on Vidal’s homosexuality as the avenue to express his animus.

However much these attacks anticipate the political television of today, they are also strikingly different. The sheer time allotted — fifteen uninterrupted minutes — is so unlike TV now, when commercial breaks are four or seven minutes apart, and when the moderator also wants to be a prominent personality. Howard K. Smith, the network’s host, is rarely seen, much less heard, and his directives are acknowledged but often dismissed. (Smith’s very first question is redirected by Buckley, who casually replies, “I think what you really mean to ask me … ”) And though both commentators wear earpieces it’s clear that there’s no producer shouting to them, “Get off this topic, the viewer numbers are going down.” Ask any commentator today about what they hear in their ear and you get a quick lesson in how televised political commentary is driven not by issues but by viewer responses, by ratings, by producers with their eyes on graphs of instant audience reactions.

Not unlike the way exposure to the natural elements destroys old paper and paintings, the national camera and its bright lights serve to degrade wit, erudition, and commitment to political thought. Before these debates were over — in the penultimate meeting, as if scripted by a Hollywood writer — Buckley and Vidal were reduced to schoolyard name-calling, an ugly ad hominem attack that had been brewing for years, that night after night the klieg lights had warmed until ready to serve. And even after returning for the final show, when they’d clearly been chastened, each answering the moderator and then sitting quietly while the other did the same, when their body language was like two inverted parentheses, each keeping as much of himself as far from the other as physically possible — Buckley and Vidal were not done with each other. Esquire magazine, a bastion of the American essay, invited Buckley to examine the course of events, leading to a recapitulation of the aggrievement that didn’t terminate it but rather perpetuated it, with Buckley acknowledging his bad behavior and concluding, “I herewith apologize to Gore Vidal,” though he’d just spent 10,000 words mostly justifying what he’d done. The attack couched as self-examination fooled no one, least of all Vidal, who seized the opportunity to submit his own take in the same magazine’s pages the following month. Unlike Buckley’s “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” Vidal made no bones about his angle, titling his piece, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.” Vidal focused on a decades-old Buckley family incident when several of Buckley’s siblings vandalized and defaced a church in their town because they’d heard their father, William F. Buckley Sr., an avowed anti-Semite, condemn the preacher’s wife, who’d sold property in their hometown to Jews. Bill Jr. was not involved in the incident, a fact not easily surmised from Vidal’s piece. That implication, along with insinuations about Buckley’s sexual proclivities, led to a lawsuit by Buckley against Vidal and against Esquire, then to a countersuit from Vidal, and further to the public digging at each other on TV talk shows and in print interviews. The angling for the upper hand, the attempts to finally destroy the other, dragged on for three years until finally Esquire found the legal fees no longer sustainable and settled with Buckley in a way that brought everything to a close. There was no victory over Vidal, though that did not stop Buckley from quickly declaring one, a move that assured their mutual and unending enmity.

After the 1968 conventions, the networks that ridiculed ABC adopted its format; none has presented gavel-to-gavel coverage since. And the ratings increase wrought by the increasingly acrimonious debates made the other networks arch their eyebrows and consider the revenue that argument afforded. By the 1970s, CBS instituted “Point-Counterpoint” on its 60 Minutes news magazine, pairing two opposing views in short segments. The sides delivered prepared remarks and didn’t engage, but the stark opposition was foregrounded and audiences liked to see the sly imprecations. (Saturday Night Live famously satirized the segment with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin.) Television formatting evolved toward shorter segments with increasingly vociferous moderators, producing more fireworks more frequently, ultimately forsaking the content — a professional wrestling match where success is judged by how angry or excited the audience becomes. Where Buckley and Vidal were a forest fire fueled by acres of old wood, today we surf channels between pieces of flash paper exploding — big flames, no content.

Provocation has replaced vocation. News has devolved to the ready quip, the soundbite that makes possible headline news that fosters the tweet: the whole story in 140 characters. The environment changed, making extinct the public intellectual and breeding the attractive, striking, and exuberant talking head who fearlessly ignores interesting and challenging conversation to always drive home the talking point. Buckley and Vidal meander and tarry, gamboling in their command of history, politics, economics, and literature, spending their five-dollar words like they’re at a penny slot machine. When was the last time you heard Pericles quoted on TV, or any philosopher ancient or modern? TV’s appeal to the lowest common denominator may not be news, but seeing and hearing these debates nearly five decades after they occurred is a stark and harsh reminder of how far we’ve fallen.

In 2010, Memphis writer and professor Tom Graves (also publisher of this book) shared a bootleg copy of the debates with me. I immediately wanted to make a documentary film built around them and set about doing so with my film partner Morgan Neville and with Tom. The resulting Best of Enemies has served to jolt audiences the way the debates jolted us. Time and again it has been introduced with the word “delicious,” though that word is nowhere in the movie or our press materials; it indicates the hunger Americans have for intellectual rigor, even if the serving in these debates is only an appetizer. Televised political commentary, like fast food, is filling but it does not nourish. Audiences are welcoming the opportunity to view people committed to considered, deliberate thought. To grow as a nation, to flourish as a republic, we need our fourth estate to strengthen us, not fatten us.

I have a naïve hope for the documentary. In the vast and shallow mediascape in which we live, when variations of a single idea fill hour after hour on network after network, such that the hundreds of channels seem to offer less variety than the three networks did those many years ago, there must be a failing network that will look around and ask itself, Before we fold entirely, is there an audience not yet being served for whom we could create programming? A format that allows deep discussion, that lets educated people speak without driving them always to the day’s most salacious doings, that doesn’t shy from vehement disagreement but also doesn’t guarantee it — would people want to watch that?

I remember how radio station WDIA, in the late 1940s, found that Memphis, Tennessee didn’t need a sixth spot on the dial like all the other five, and before going under, they took a wild shot and began programming 15 minutes a day for African-Americans. In short order, WDIA grew to become the first station in the country with an all-black on-air line up, and it jumped from last place to #2 and then led the market.

It’s true that today we are hard put to make a list of public intellectuals who might fill such a network. The venues that used to incubate them are gone. But they are out there, in universities, as occasional guests on radio and TV talk shows where their thoughts are cut off and debased. Give them some air time and the ethos will grow, the mighty will rise to the occasion.

We need public intellectuals to help us understand our times. Otherwise, we are subject to the Internet, where authority has been replaced by graphics — if it looks real it must be real, and where search engines create echo chambers of opinion. That is, we each may search Google, but the responses to “Obama” or “healthcare” or “same-sex marriage” will be different, can be antithetical, based upon what the search engine has gleaned are the askers’ individual viewpoints. Lies and fictions are presented as truths by bloggers and websites (search engines do not check facts, only seek words), allowing contradictory statements to co-exist when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.