Jim Holt discusses the new documentary, Best of Enemies, which is about the infamous William F. Buckley – Gore Vidal debates on ABC in ’68. These debates culminated in a steel cage match between the two men, which I previously discussed here. Holt writes:
Vidal and Buckley were both patrician in manner, glamorous in aura, irregularly handsome, self-besottedly narcissistic, ornate in vocabulary, casually erudite, irrepressibly witty, highly telegenic, and by all accounts great fun to be around… Each spoke in a theatrical accent of his own invention: They did not merely have opinions, they pronounced them…
How equally pitted were they? Well, Buckley was “the great debater of his time,” and Vidal was “the great talker of his time” — so observes Sam Tanenhaus, a former New York Times editor long at work on a biography of Buckley. And there was a sort of perverse Freudian reciprocity between Vidal and Buckley that heightened their mutual wariness. As Tanenhaus puts it, “Each one saw in the other a kind of exaggerated image of his own anxious version of himself.”…
The back-and-forth innuendo continued through the debates, with Buckley referring to Vidal as “feline” and his political analysis as “neurotic” and “diseased,” and Vidal calling Buckley “the Marie Antoinette of the right wing.”
