In 1968, ABC News tried to improve on its lowly third-rank status by bringing on some rock-em, sock-em commentary around the two party conventions from two intellectual heavyweights: William F. Buckley Jr. On the right, and author Gore Vidal on the left.
A new documentary – from the left, considering it carries a tag from Independent Lens, a leftist documentary series for PBS – explores the battle, that turned personal on television. The filmmakers insisted on Wednesday night in Washington that it made them a pre-cursor to today’s talk/shout TV:
“We came upon the footage, and the footage, though 40 years old, spoke very much to the present moment,” Morgan [Neville] said after the opening-night screening on Wednesday at Newseum, noting that he was “struck by how it augured the culture wars of the present day in particular.”
Neville said: “They are two amazing characters. They just don’t make people like that anymore. It is so operatic. There are characters who are at once heroic and tragic and are so complex. I think that was the first hook for us.” He added, “I think we realized early on other people were seeing what we felt just watching the debates, that it was at once a cautionary tale and an absurdist comedy.”
At the screening was ABC News’ Sam Donaldson, who covered the convention that year. He said that despite the tumult going on in the streets of Chicago, “everyone was shocked” that the Vidal-Buckley exchange got so out of hand and personal.
You can catch a glimpse of young Sam in the trailer:
“As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself, ” Vidal said to Buckley on ABC on August. 28, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi. Stop or I’ll sock you in the goddamned face and you’ll stay plastered,” Buckley shot back.
The discussion had turned on demonstrators in Chicago carrying the Viet Cong flag, causing ABC anchor Howard K. Smith to suggest to Vidal it might be comparable to how it would feel for Americans to carry the Nazi flag during World War II.
Nina Burleigh brought the usual leftist snobbery to the subject for the Web-shell calling itself Newsweek:
Buckley, in seersucker and fresh off the yacht, was the embodiment of conservative cool – a coolness that the right, to its everlasting dismay, has never regained despite the best efforts of a generation of pretenders. Casually cruel, entitled to his privilege, jaw locked, Buckley was also a caricature of the New York-Connecticut snob, scooting around Manhattan on a Vespa, yachting to Cozumel instead of doing his homework. But he was also something more than that. He was a defender of the rights of the privileged, founder of the National Review, always in favor of the forces of order--which essentially in the 1960s was the nuclear bomb and the truncheons and tear gas of the cops-bashing protesters, or, as Bucky would sneer, this mob....
Vidal, no less aristocratic, the pansexual satyr with the sardonically lifted eyebrow, is equally seductive. Fresh off a bestselling book with a transsexual as the main character--later made into a film with Raquel Welch as the cross-gender hero--Vidal was steeped in the classics, practically an expat living in Italy. He deeply hated what Buckley stood for and actually did his homework.
A shot of conservative author Lee Edwards in a different trailer suggests at least they talked to some conservatives:
For his part, Buckley explored the entire battle with Vidal, before and during the conventions, for 30 pages or so in his book The Governor Listeth. He apologized for his language and regretted that he had said yes to ABC on the debates. But he underlines at length that Vidal had a very casual relationship with the truth, especially in public. "Homework" was not his strong suit.
PS: Jeremy Lott remembers it all when Vidal died in 2012.
