POLITICO COLUMN: …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, the network 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 claimed 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, not insignificantly, 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.”
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. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley called Vidal a queer and threatened physical violence. They each knew the single term that could pierce the other’s psyche… (more)
