Movie Review: Best of Enemies, a documentary directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, starring William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal (2015)

Poster for the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies, directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville.

Vidal and Buckley in the makeup chair, 1968.

William F. Buckley, threatening to do bodily harm to Gore Vidal, 1968.

Best of Enemies, an excellent 2015 documentary directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, takes a look at the relationship between authors William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. Specifically, the film examines the ten debates between Buckley and Vidal during the 1968 Republican National Convention, held in Miami Beach, and the Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago. Buckley and Vidal were hired by ABC News to provide commentary on the happenings at the conventions, and also to debate with each other on the various issues facing the country. 

Buckley and Vidal hated each other by the time they met on camera in 1968. In fact, the one person Buckley said he would not debate with was Gore Vidal. But ABC News hired Vidal anyway. Buckley and Vidal had previously sparred in 1964 at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. That convention was the moment that Buckley’s right-wingers officially seized control of the Republican Party, as the nomination went to Senator Barry Goldwater rather than moderate Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was heckled by the crowd with shouts of “lover!” as he attempted to address them. The taunt was a reference to his recent divorce and quick remarriage. Rockefeller told the audience, “It’s still a free country, ladies and gentlemen.” And while Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in the fall, the seeds of a new Republican revolution were being planted. Just days before the 1964 Presidential election, actor Ronald Reagan gave a nationally televised half hour speech called “A Time for Choosing,” in support of Goldwater. The speech was responsible for Reagan’s entry into politics. When prominent California Republicans saw the speech, they immediately thought that Reagan might be a good candidate for the 1966 California Governor’s race. Never mind that Reagan had been a Democrat until 1962. Buckley was a good friend of Reagan’s, and one of the last books Buckley wrote was The Reagan I Knew, an ode to their friendship. 

Best of Enemies does a great job of showing us Buckley and Vidal’s lives and careers, and putting them in the context of their times. They were two of the leading American public intellectuals in 1968, back in the day when we actually had public intellectuals. Buckley was really the only choice ABC had for a conservative pundit, as he was the only conservative who was nationally known and was also an excellent speaker.

Vidal was partially to blame for Buckley’s rise as a media star, as he had mentioned Buckley in 1962 on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, and Buckley was given time by Paar to answer or clarify statements that Vidal had made about him. When Buckley appeared on Jack Parr’s show, Paar was expecting to come face to face with an ignorant bigot. But Buckley proved to be a handsome, well-spoken intellectual. And then there was his voice. Mellifluous and rich, Buckley’s unique plummy accent was a mixture of his mother’s Southern drawl, the typical rich East Coast establishment accent, and a brief spell at a British boarding school. With his intense blue eyes and toothy grin, Buckley looked like a lost Kennedy cousin, perhaps from another line of the family that had turned conservative rather than liberal. Buckley’s obvious ease on camera led to him starting his own public affairs television show, Firing Line, in 1966. Firing Line ran for 33 years and more than 1,500 episodes. 

Gore Vidal also knew how to best present himself on camera. Vidal was also quite handsome, and like Buckley, he had a typical East Coast establishment accent. (It’s sometimes difficult to tell Buckley and Vidal’s voices apart. Also, no one on television in 2016 would be caught dead with such an “elitist” accent!) Vidal was a polished TV performer, and he prepared extensively for the debates with Buckley, hiring a researcher and rehearsing his seemingly ad-libbed insults to Buckley. Vidal was out for blood, and in the earlier debates in Miami Beach Buckley seems slightly flustered, having not correctly anticipated Vidal’s venom. It doesn’t take long before things get personal, with Vidal saying that Buckley was the inspiration behind his transsexual character Myra Breckinridge, which was one of the most scandalous novels of 1968. 

One of the best quotes during the debates was when Buckley said, “Freedom breeds inequality.” When prodded by Vidal, Buckley expounded further: “Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom.” That struck me as a very true statement, but one that few people would actually own up to, since we like to think that freedom makes people more equal. You can have a society where everyone is equal, but that means you won’t have any freedom. And of course that’s never happened, because there’s never been a society where everyone is truly equal in every way.

The most infamous moment of the debates occurred in Chicago. Vidal and Buckley were discussing the anti-war protests and the extreme police response to them. Moderator Howard K. Smith said something about if the protestors raising a Viet Cong flag would be like raising a Nazi flag during World War II. Vidal then moved in for the kill, saying to Buckley, “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” Buckley responded, “Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” You can tell from the clip how pissed off Buckley was, as he leaned over towards Vidal and it seemed for a moment that he might make good on his threat. Reid Buckley, Bill’s younger brother, said in the documentary, “I think Gore Vidal was fortunate that Bill didn’t punch him in the nose.” The moment quickly became notorious, as the usual decorum of a debate had devolved into vicious name-calling on both sides. 

Best of Enemies makes it clear that Buckley was troubled by the incident. I think Buckley was chagrined that he had resorted to the personal attack. As time went on, it became clear that the exchange with Vidal was the one time that Buckley ever lost his cool during a debate. In an effort to examine his feelings, Buckley wrote an essay for Esquire magazine, “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” which was published in the August, 1969 issue. Vidal was allowed to respond, and his own essay, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr.” was published in the September, 1969 issue. Both essays generated much controversy, and Buckley sued Vidal for libel, on the grounds that Vidal had implied that Buckley was gay. Vidal promptly countersued Buckley. The case ground through the courts for years, and eventually all the suits were dropped, with Esquire footing the bills for Buckley’s legal fees, and apologizing to Buckley in the pages of the magazine. Part of the settlement also stipulated that Vidal’s essay would not be republished in any future book. (It’s one of the rarest Vidal essays; it’s only been republished in Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties.) Buckley took the opportunity to declare legal victory, which of course irked Vidal. 

In the years following their encounter, the two men took different approaches to the incident. Buckley rarely mentioned it again, whereas Vidal never missed an opportunity to bash Buckley. To me, that speaks to the difference in character between Buckley and Vidal. My own politics are more in line with Gore Vidal’s than William Buckley’s, but from everything I’ve read about both of them, Buckley was by far the nicer person and better man. Vidal was an amazingly talented writer who wrote sentences of incomparable beauty. His range of gifts was immense, as he authored screenplays, essays, plays, and novels. And yet, at the same time, he was a rather nasty person. If you look at Vidal’s life, it’s full of feuds and fights. As Vidal once wrote, “Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies.” That quote sums up Gore Vidal so well that it’s actually the British title of Jay Parini’s 2015 biography of Vidal. (The title in the United States is Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal.) A quote that venomous would have never passed the lips of William F. Buckley, who was extremely generous and thoughtful to pretty much everyone he dealt with. Buckley could even strike up friendships with those on the opposite side of the aisle from him politically, like his famous friendship with the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. One has only to read some of Buckley’s more personal non-fiction, in books like Cruising Speed, Overdrive, and Miles Gone By to get a sense of his zest for life, and the friendships and relationships that made his life worthwhile. Buckley had a generous spirit, and Gore Vidal did not. Buckley had hobbies and passions, like sailing, painting, and playing Bach concertos on the harpsichord. Gore Vidal’s only passion was for himself. 

Buckley was even generous towards Gore Vidal’s talents as a writer. When asked in 1978 if he thought there were any good liberal writers, Buckley said, “Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. And Gore Vidal-in his essays-has great style.” (Conversations with William F. Buckley, Jr., p.79) Buckley could have easily used the question as an opportunity to attack Vidal, but he didn’t. In an incident described in Best of Enemies, after Buckley taped the last episode of Firing Line in 1999, Ted Koppel interviewed Buckley and showed the clip of him calling Vidal a queer. Buckley said nothing. When there was a break in taping, he hurried over to Sam Tanenhaus and said, “I thought that tape had been destroyed.” Buckley was still unwilling to say anything bad about Vidal, but if that clip had been shown to Vidal in a similar setting, I feel quite confident that he would have used it to attack Buckley.

Gore Vidal proved again what a jerk he was after Buckley passed away in 2008. Vidal wrote an essay in which he savaged Buckley, writing, “RIP WFB-in hell.” Well, that’s subtle and clever. Gore Vidal never had a kind word for anyone. There was no forgiveness possible in his egocentric world. Christopher Buckley, WFB’s son, wrote of Vidal in 2012, after Vidal’s passing, “…one was left to wonder what it was within him that animated such hatred in him, at such a late stage?... Why was Vidal’s cauldron of bile still set, not on ‘simmer’ but on high in his final years? WFB had—to my knowledge—not once opened his mouth or uncapped his pen against his old adversary since the early 1970’s. I was present, on a number of occasions when WFB was accosted by an interviewer or lunch guest, asking for comment about Vidal. Without exception, he demurred—and demurral was emphatically not WFB’s default position.” 

One of the saddest moments in Best of Enemies is a clip of William Buckley being interviewed by Charlie Rose in March, 2006, less than two years before Buckley’s death.

Rose: “Do you wish you were 20?”

WFB: “No, absolutely not. If I had a pill which would reduce my age by 25 years, I wouldn’t take it.”

Rose: “Why not?”

WFB: “Because I’m tired of life.”

Rose: “Are you really?”

WFB: “Yeah. I really am. I’m utterly prepared to stop living on. There are no enticements to me that justify the weariness, the repetition.” 

Even as Buckley says this, his eyes still sparkle. The indefatigable William F. Buckley still managed to write four more books in the less than two years he had left on Earth. 

Best of Enemies is a superb documentary, and it is essential viewing for fans of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley. My vote for the most entertaining person in the documentary goes to Reid Buckley, Bill’s younger brother, who looks and sounds just like Bill. It’s clear that Reid had the same joie de vivre that his older brother did. 

One final quote on the whole matter, which the directors used at the very end of the movie, and seems an apt summing up: “There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable, and that which is highly illuminating.”-William F. Buckley.

Book Review: Cruising Speed: A Documentary, by William F. Buckley (1971)

My well-worn paperback copy of Cruising Speed, by William F. Buckley, 1971. Yes, that's my shelf of books by William Buckley and his son Christopher. (Photo by Mark Taylor.)

William F. Buckley at his desk.

On December 5, 1970, while at a nightclub with Truman Capote, William F. Buckley decided to write a journal covering one week in his life. This experiment ultimately resulted in the highly entertaining book Cruising Speed: A Documentary, published in September, 1971. Buckley would later revisit this same formula in his excellent 1983 book Overdrive, which I previously reviewed here. 

Cruising Speed covers the week of November 30^th to December 6^th, 1970. This was an exciting time for Buckley, as the previous month his older brother James was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. Buckley was a uniquely busy man, as he was writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column three times a week, hosting Firing Line, a weekly television show about current events, and editing the bi-weekly magazine that he had founded, National Review.  

Buckley encounters many different people throughout the course of the week, from former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who “has been a very old friend and supporter of NR,” (p.27) to Otto Von Hapsburg, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, who asks Buckley “whether I would join a very small organization that meets two or three times a year, in Europe usually, but sometimes in America, to discuss deeply, and off the record, public policies affecting the future of the West.” (p.150) William F. Buckley led a remarkable life, and the nine page index at the end of Cruising Speed gives some idea of his varied pursuits and interests. Someone should really write annotated versions of Cruising Speed and Overdrive, so future readers will know who all of these people Buckley interacts with were, instead of having to constantly look them up on Wikipedia. 

One of the more interesting tidbits that came up in the course of Buckley’s week is a letter from Edgar Eisenhower, Dwight’s older brother, concerning the foundation of John T. Gaty. Gaty was a businessman from Wichita, Kansas, who bequeathed a significant part of his estate to a foundation that would support conservative organizations. The trustees that Gaty named to the foundation included Buckley, J. Edgar Hoover, Edgar Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and other prominent conservatives. Incredibly, all of these men met in Wichita once a year for ten years to distribute money from the foundation. (Hoover never attended, sending an alternate in his place.) Someone should really write a book about the Gaty trust, as a fascinating footnote to the nascent conservative movement. 

Buckley’s excellent sense of humor is on display throughout the book, and perhaps my favorite humorous anecdote from Cruising Speed is the story that Buckley tells about a friend of his who was entertaining guests from France. Buckley’s friend turned on Firing Line, as Buckley was interviewing Hugh Hefner. There was a problem with the sound on the TV, so everyone watched in silence. When the sound came on, the French visitors were shocked as they had concluded from the body language of the two men that Buckley was the libertine publisher of Playboy magazine, and Hugh Hefner was the conservative Republican writer. (p.53)

Throughout both Cruising Speed and Overdrive you see how much William F. Buckley enjoyed his life. At the very end of Cruising Speed Buckley writes that his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist, urged Buckley to give up his newspaper column, Firing Line, and National Review, to enter academia and write books. (p.229) Unsurprisingly, Buckley turns down Galbraith’s suggestion. It’s clear that Buckley loved all of the different things that he did, and if he had just focused on one thing, he probably wouldn’t have been happy. I suspect that Buckley enjoyed the challenge of keeping all of those balls up in the air. 

I wish that we saw more of how Buckley wrote, but he was able to write so quickly that maybe he didn’t have much to say about his writing process. On the Wednesday covered in Cruising Speed, Buckley is late delivering his column, so he has to go to the offices of his syndicate, which he only does when the column must be written immediately. He writes it in half an hour. There are many excellent passages throughout Cruising Speed, and one concerns dealing with writers and artists as editor of National Review, “…what it comes down to is this-that concerning certain things, everyone is inaccessible to reason, and the trick is to find out what those things are, and simply accept the given in the situation.” (p.6) That’s a great piece of advice, and not just for editors. 

After Cruising Speed was published an interviewer asked Buckley “Don’t you think it a bit much to write an entire book devoted to the events of a single week?” Buckley’s tongue in cheek response was “I don’t know. John Keats devoted an entire ode to a single Grecian urn.” (Quote from Overdrive, by William F. Buckley, p.154)I wish more people would write books like Cruising Speed, as I would be fascinated to read what a week in the life of other public figures is like. I suppose that now, in the never-ending news cycles of 2015, one might encounter more resistance to the idea, and get more flack for being so supremely solipsistic. The interesting thing about both Cruising Speed and Overdrive is that while they both look into Buckley’s life, they are not overly confessional. Although Buckley does catalog some personal faults, as he writes, "I do not know why my memory is so bad, or for that matter why I read so slowly." (p.57) I find it difficult to believe that William F. Buckley did anything slowly, but there you have it. Buckley tell us that book critic Isabel Paterson thinks these problems stem from him not learning to read until the age of 6 or 7, which is also when he began speaking English, his first language having been Spanish. 

 Cruising Speed humanizes Buckley. Even if you disagree with his politics you get to see his incredible work ethic and the humanity that animated his work. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said of Buckley “What Buckley has is a sort of sparkle and grace, equally in his speaking, writing, and television appearances. It is not just a question of agreeing with Buckley. Rather, it is that in our time free minds are desperately rare and precious, and in him I detect one.”

Book Review: Conversations with William F. Buckley, Jr. edited by William F. Meehan III (2009)

Conversations with William F. Buckley Jr., 2009.

William F. Buckley looking like a rock star riding his moped in New York City in the 1960's.

William F. Buckley at his desk.

I’ve written about William F. Buckley before on this blog, as I recently reviewed his novel Saving the Queen and I wrote a very long piece about his fascinating book Overdrive, which chronicled a week in his fast-moving life. My political sympathies run to the opposite end of the spectrum from the late Mr. Buckley, but that does not preclude my enjoyment of his writings and his personal style. I’m also an admirer of his son Christopher, who has written many very funny satirical novels. 

Having thus established my Buckley bona fides, I turn to the subject at hand: the 2009 book Conversations with William F. Buckley, Jr. It’s from the long-running “Literary Conversations Series” published by the University Press of Mississippi, and these volumes have proven to be endlessly fascinating for fans of the authors profiled. The University Press of Mississippi has done readers an immeasurable service through this series by rounding up these interviews and collecting them in one volume. The volume on William F. Buckley is shorter than those on other writers, as it runs just 186 pages. 

The earliest interview in the book is from Playboy magazine in 1970, and it’s arguably the most interesting, as Buckley holds court on all manner of topics. The Playboy interview is also by far the longest included, as it runs for more than 40 pages. One of Buckley’s funniest quips from that interview is when he says that too many people are voting, and the interviewer asks him who he would exclude from voting. Buckley’s response is: “A while ago, George Gallup discovered that 25 percent or so of the American people had never heard of the United Nations. I think if we could find that 25 percent, they’d be reasonable candidates for temporary disenfranchisement.” (p.24) Buckley’s quote reminds me of Gore Vidal’s witty remark: “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President. One hopes it is the same half.” 

Most of the later interviews in the book discuss Buckley’s novel writing, so there is some repetition as Buckley describes his working methods again and again. The interviews that delve into politics the most are the Playboy interview and an interesting 1978 interview with The American Civil Liberties Review. The focus on Buckley’s novels makes sense given the interests of William F. Meehan III, the editor of the book, as he wrote a dissertation on Buckley’s fiction.

Conversations with William F. Buckley sheds more light on the fascinating personality of one of the 20^th century’s most prolific public intellectuals. Surprisingly enough, Buckley claimed that he didn’t enjoy writing, as he says in a 1978 interview, “I get pleasure out of having written. I like to paint. I don’t like writing, but there is a net satisfaction when it’s done.” (p.75) In another interview from 1978, Buckley shared the success of his famous productivity: “Deadlines. I have deadlines for everything. I find them liberating.” (p.69) Buckley expounded a little more in a 1983 interview: “I had three deadlines this weekend. And because they simply had to be done, they were done. And if you know that you’ve got to phone in six columns, they get phoned in. The people I pity are not the people who have deadlines, they’re the people who don’t have deadlines.” (p.84) That sounds easy enough, right? Just set some deadlines for yourself and you’ll soon be as productive as William F. Buckley. I think it helped that Buckley had a tremendous work ethic.

Throughout the book, Buckley comes across as smart, witty, funny, and someone who must have been a lot of fun to hang out with. I’d recommend Conversations with William F. Buckley to anyone with an interest in this fascinating, entertaining, sesquipedalian writer and thinker.