A Buckley Revival

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

He’s not like those other conservatives.

ANDREW FERGUSON

Aug 3, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 44

 

‘It’s as if he never existed,” a friend of a certain age (same as mine) said to me not long ago. He was referring to William F. Buckley Jr. When he died in 2008, at age 82, Buckley was eulogized as the most consequential American journalist of the second half of the last century: editor for 35 years of National Review, founding father of the conservative movement, bosom pal of Ronald Reagan, author of many bestselling books, and host of Firing Line, the longest-running single-host public affairs show in television history.

 

(Snip)

 

 

William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal

 

Earlier last month W.W. Norton published Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, by a historian named Kevin M. Schultz, whose emphatic theme is seen in the subtitle. And July 31 will bring the New York and Los Angeles premiere of Best of Enemies, a documentary about a series of televised debates Buckley had with the novelist-gadfly Gore Vidal during the momentous political conventions of 1968.

 

(Snip)

 

The pleasures of Best of Enemies consist in watching the recovered video of these encounters. They are so entertaining, and handled so deftly by Neville and Gordon, that they can almost bear the ponderous weight of the movie’s thesis—the one about changing TV forever. “The seeds [were] planted for our present media landscape,” Gordon has written, “when the spectacle trumps the content of [the] argument.”

 

It’s arguable, but unprovable, that ABC’s success in whittling down its coverage to the bare minimum, and replacing a comprehensive report on the convention’s progress with left-versus-right gasbaggery, sent a signal that other networks couldn’t ignore. Nowadays, nearly 50 years later, any network news division would be lucky to get even an hour of primetime during a national convention. But the disintegration of TV political journalism—from jowly old Walter Cronkite to sputtering Sean Hannity—has been an inevitable consequence of technology and economics. Even if ABC avoided the gasbaggery in 1968, we would still bear the burden of MSNBC and Fox today.

 

But what gasbaggery it was! Personally, William Buckley was a man of bottomless kindness and generosity; personally, Gore Vidal was a skunk. The ABC camera well captures the skunk. It fails to grasp the Buckley known by friends and colleagues. Partly this is by Buckley’s own design—as a performer in debate he could be curt and wounding. The two had a bitter rivalry in print, as ABC executives well knew, though rivalry is probably too mild a word. They loathed each other. The “analysis” they were hired to provide quickly became a oneupmanship of insults and ad hominem argument. It didn’t take Vidal long to call Buckley the “Marie Antoinette of the right” and for Buckley to refer to Vidal, the author of the ambisexual novel Myra Breckinridge, as a “pornographer.” Then things got personal.

 

(Snip)