Forty years ago, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. gave the nation one of the most infamous moments of incivility in television history. Buckley got over it; Gore Vidal never did.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective

It was hot the summer of 1968.

America was coming undone. Reacting to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ongoing Vietnam War, protesters had taken to the streets in violent rages.

In June, the nation watched in horror as Robert Kennedy, running for president, was gunned down in California. The anti-war movement had reason to be alarmed. Neither Vice President Hubert Humphrey nor former Vice President Richard Nixon, the two presumptive presidential nominees, were committed to a policy of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. It was expected that the political conventions would be contentious as student radicals, the intellectual Left and the anti-war movement all converged to express their displeasure with America and its government.

Television producers, being who they are, figured there had to be a way to make it yet more exciting. As they planned for their coverage of the Republican convention in Miami and the Democratic convention in Chicago, discussion revolved around which pundits or personalities should provide commentary about America’s great political circus.

There was no question that on the Right, one person stood out – William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was approaching the zenith of his political stardom. Founder of the nation’s most popular conservative political journal, author of a half-dozen books, former mayoral candidate in New York City, television star both as a guest on the networks and as host of his own show, Firing Line, there was really no one else in the conservative intellectual firmament to compare.

On the Left, on the other hand, there were many options. There were Democratic icons like economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who had served in both the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations. There was Murray Kempton, the liberal New York columnist. Noam Chomsky, whose anti-war writings and activities were becoming well known, was emerging as a leading New Left intellectual. Norman Mailer was already famous for his anti-establishment writings. And then was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a fixture of Democratic and liberal politics.

Buckley, having been contacted by ABC News, mentioned several of these names as possibilities. He had only one request — that he not be asked to spar with Gore Vidal. Having debated Vidal on several previous occasions, Buckley felt Vidal was a dishonorable character whose personality and technique would undermine attempts at constructive discourse. As Buckley would recall later, ABC immediately settled on Vidal.

One can appreciate the decision. To begin with, both men were handsome, urbane, articulate and highly literate. Vidal had established himself as a nouveau artiste insider. The grandson of former Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, he showed a remarkable capacity to ingratiate himself with the powerful and famous – from Tennessee Williams to Jackie Kennedy to the New York publishing houses.

Talented he was. He had written his first novel at the age of 19 and by the late 1950s, when he began to take an interest in politics, he had already published a half-dozen novels or plays. He wrote highly readable prose. His work appeared in esteemed journals such as the New York Review of Books and Esquire magazine and he had worked on Hollywood screenplays, including Ben Hur (though there is disagreement about the level of his contribution). No question he was every bit as precocious as Buckley, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, the other young men of letters who had achieved early stardom. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Vidal emerged as a political commentator on national television.

He began to make the rounds on shows like Jack Paar and David Susskind, and eventually became a regular on Susskind’s Open End, which offered guests an open forum during which to address critical issues of whatever sort suited them. On the surface smooth and charming, Vidal had a difficult personality. He could be petty, competitive and mean, and he wore his radical sexual views on his sleeve.

It was really no secret that he had a fascination with alternative lifestyles. His novel, The City and the Pillar, dealt openly with homosexual themes. By 1968, he had written Myra Breckinridge, a novelette that focused on the life of a transvestite. Vidal did not proclaim his sexual preferences, but they were well known to anyone who paid attention. He despised sexual normalcy and condemned America for its puritanical streak. He would admit to admiring John Kennedy for his adulterous lifestyle, considering it a healthy blow against traditional oppressive loyalties, irrespective of the impact on Kennedy’s wife whom Vidal claimed as a friend.

Buckley could not have been more different. He came from a large Catholic family firm in its traditional moral convictions. “The Buckleys,” wrote Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan, “had no doubt that God and the devil existed in tangible ways, that the dominating structure of life was a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil, and that eventually their Catholic God would be victorious.” Bill Buckley held similar views, argued Kaplan.

The enemies (actually, the forces of evil) were Communism, liberalism, unionism, humanism, atheism, the Democratic Party, and any and all movements that did not give higher priority to the forces of law and order. Anarchy and chaos needed to be rigorously suppressed.
– Kaplan, p. 550.

One suspects Buckley would ask if anarchy and chaos should be encouraged. More troubling is the sloppy attempt to combine all these “evils” as if Buckley equated unionism and the Democratic Party with communism. While Buckley opposed what he saw as liberalism’s steady slide toward socialism, he never equated Democrats with communists. He did suggest that some Democrats seemed determined to pursue policies that facilitated the communist road to power and tyranny.

Kaplan observed of the two men: “They were, from an even earlier date, natural enemies who gradually became aware of one another’s existence. Buckley had read The City and the Pillar and disapproved of it on moral grounds . . . When Gore and Buckley agreed in late 1961, at the request of the Associated Press, to debate in print the 'liberal' versus the 'conservative' position, their names were publicly juxtaposed for the first time.”

The incident that brought them head to head on national television was a 1962 appearance by Vidal on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, when Vidal made a passing reference to a statement in National Review critical of Pope John XXIII’s liberal social positions, including his support for aid to underdeveloped nations and his insufficient hostility to communism. Buckley felt Vidal misrepresented his position and asked for the opportunity to respond, which he received the following week. Vidal would later lament: “It is a source of some pain to me that, unwittingly, I helped Buckley lose his richly deserved anonymity.”

However Vidal might have lamented his role in bringing Buckley to the television arena, a star was instantly born, as Kaplan acknowledged.

Buckley’s first national television appearance the next week was a splendid success. Irregularly handsome, with a genius for distorting his facial features as if his skin were soft plastic and an ability to contort his figure into an infinite variety of slouches and stretches, he took to television with sly enthusiasm. The camera found him interesting if not fascinating. His face was often the highlight of the show.
– Kaplan, p 552.

The Paar appearance included discussion about McCarthy, Truman, and Communist China. After Buckley had left the show, Paar described his positions as “inhumane,” and he complained to his audience that Buckley did not like people and “certainly did not like Gore Vidal.”

Buckley, in an essay that appeared in Rumbles Left and Right, would describe his appearance on the Paar show in some detail including his interactions with Vidal, who was brought back to critique Buckley’s performance. When asked why so many former communists (Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, James Burnham, etc.) worked with Buckley at National Review, Vidal offered this: “For the simple reason that they’re attracted to things like Buckley because he’s as extreme on the right as the left wing was extreme. These are absolutists and they want a revolution . . . they’ve now all gone over to the right wing . . ..”

Buckley, after suggesting that the attraction might be explained by National Review’s adept ability to fight an enemy the former communists knew intimately, had this to say about Vidal: “Gore Vidal . . . is, in addition to being a telepathist, an intellectual, which profession cherishes the making of distinctions. Besides being an intellectual, Mr. Vidal is a friend of Paar, which friendship proved to be the dominate gene during the evening.” Buckley goes on to refute what he considered Vidal’s misrepresentations of his position on Pope John and his personal attacks, including claims that Buckley had never held a job. (He had.) When Vidal brought Buckley’s sisters into the discussion, he stepped over a line that would prove to be the powder at the end of a burning fuse.

The two men finally met on Susskind’s show. Observed Kaplan: “By the time they appeared together in September 1962 on the Susskind show, the personal pot was boiling, at least from Buckley’s point of view. He was especially ill at ease about Vidal’s and other people’s references to his dogmatically Catholic, ultra-conservative family background, with hints of dark views and unattractive prejudices.”

Unfortunately, Kaplan declined to tell readers that Buckley drove anti-semites out of the conservative movement, not to mention other fringe or reactionary groups such as the John Birchers. Nevertheless, Kaplan is correct that Buckley took offense at those who sought to muddy the reputations of his family, particularly over long ago incidents that had little to do with the current issues over which he engaged. Fortunately, the appearance on Susskind “focused on public issues, not personal matters.”

The Susskind debate must have been a rollicking good show for those who like intellectual clashes. Kaplan quoted the TV critic Jack Iams of the New York Herald Tribune, who called the debate: “one of the most stimulating programs ever offered by Open End . . . an intellectual free-for-all that must have left both participants nursing their lumps together. Aside from the mental gymnastics . . . it was the suavity and polish of their respective performances that made the program a consistently fascinating one.” Buckley’s performance surprised Iams, who noted that the “virtuosity that Buckley brought to this role, however infuriating it may have been at times, was truly remarkable. The supercilious manner in which Buckley displayed his vast erudition, the flashes of wit and velvety insults that were sprinkled throughout his remarks, reminded me of Noel Coward acting in one of his own plays. Buckley even looked a little like Noel Coward when he delivered a line . . ..” (As quoted in Kaplan, p. 555.)

Vidal and Buckley squared off again on the Susskind show in 1964, when they discussed the Republican National Convention. A local commentator for the San Francisco Chronicle would accuse both men of acting like “professional wrestlers. “Susskind was a zookeeper trying to prevent two hissing adders from killing each other. But the hissing was always wreathed in benign smiles.”

Vidal and Buckley sparred over this detail or another – did Buckley or did he not attempt to write a speech for Goldwater (when the alleged source publicly agreed with Buckley, Vidal was annoyed that Susskind read the denial, over Vidal’s objections, on the air). Did Truman accuse Eisenhower of holding anti-Jewish prejudices? Buckley and Vidal squabbled and Vidal bet Buckley he could not prove it. All of this, Kaplan claimed, made Buckley “bitterly angry.” Buckley conceded in the Esquire article that he did not consider Vidal an honorable opponent. 

“It was during the Republican Convention at San Francisco in 1964 that I resolved I would not again debate with Gore Vidal. It was the memory of that encounter, added to everything else, that made me suggest to ABC that I’d prefer not to debate him . . ..”

Suffice it to say that Louis Auchincloss was probably right in suggesting that Vidal was one of the few people who annoyed Buckley and around whom he lost his cool. Whether this stemmed from Vidal’s propensity to cattily distort reality, or his flaunting of sacred norms Buckley embraced, or simply temperamental and political differences, is uncertain. Probably all of this combined created a toxic mixture.

And so we return to the summer of 1968 and the political conventions. Nothing could cool the tensions raging through the land. Racial disharmony, the war in Vietnam, radical changes in the cultural climate, all of these issues pitted the Left against the more conservative mainstream. More than 60 riots had broken out across the nation in the months since King’s murder.

The pairing of Vidal with Buckley was greatly anticipated. Wrote Kaplan: “By July the upcoming Vidal-Buckley television appearances had taken on a minor press life of their own, partly because commentators anticipated that their debates might capture and encapsulate some of the strongly held views that divided the country. Buckley supported the war, Vidal did not. Buckley advocated suppression of demonstrators for peace or civil rights, Vidal did not, or at least he favored giving the demonstrations their due.”  (Buckley opposed illegal demonstrations, but I am not aware that he ever advocated the violent suppression of peaceful protests. That does not mean he was sympathetic to those who, as he would later observe, advocated the shooting of American soldiers.)

Again, Kaplan captured the mood between the two men as they prepared to discuss the Republican convention in Miami. “Buckley’s distaste for Vidal was immediately apparent. Vidal was cooler, more urbane, his body language less expressive and explicit. Actually, his manner of being above the personal effectively conveyed his view that his opponent was, in his eyes, a nonperson. To many Buckley’s voice seemed snide, Vidal’s condescending.”

The stage was set and the discussion in Miami quickly degenerated into bickering rather than substantive dialogue, a rare turn for Buckley if not for Vidal.

B: It seems to me that the earlier focus of Mr. Vidal here on human greed – you remember that he said he found himself wondering whether the party that was devoted to the concept of human greed could ever hope to get a majority of the America people to vote for it. Now the author of Myra Breckinridge is well acquainted with the imperatives of human greed –

V: (Laughing). If I may say so, Bill, before you go any further, that if there were a contest for Mr. Myra Breckinridge, you would unquestionably win it. I based the entire style polemically upon you — passionate and irrelevant.

B: That’s too convoluted to follow. Perhaps one of these days you can explain it . . ..

V: You follow it.

What is one to make of this? First, Buckley’s reference to Myra Breckinridge seems gratuitous. Whatever the book’s merits or demerits, why did Buckley steer the conversation in that direction rather than, say, in a way he normally would – e.g., that fostering free enterprise made more sense than state intervention of the sort Vidal supported? One can only conclude that Buckley, still steaming from Vidal’s attacks on his family, wanted to discredit Vidal as a credible source on moral or ethical matters. Vidal hardly needed any provocation to respond in kind, and did so. They veered from the personal to policy and back again. Buckley made reference to Vidal’s preference for spending time in Europe, only infrequently returning to the United States “in order to disdain the American democratic process and to condemn a particular party as one that has engaged in the pursuit of greed . . ..” Vidal responded that if Nixon became president he might make his stays in Europe longer.

B: Yes, I think a lot of people hope you will. As a matter of fact, Mr. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who is a member of your party, not mine, [has] reminded you of your promise to renounce your American citizenship unless you get a satisfactory party in November.

V: Now, now, Bill, that isn’t quite what I said. I said it would be morally the correct thing to do but I can behave as immorally as the Republicans.

B: I believe that, too.

And so it went. Reviews were not all negatives (both men, one critic wrote, displayed high style), but others commented that they found the men “too gladiatorial” and that they spent too much time hectoring one another rather than debating the issues. (Buckley covers all of this in some depth in his essay in Esquire “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” which can also be found in his collection, The Governor Listeth.)

Nevertheless, the thread of Buckley’s attack anticipated Jeanne Kirkpatrick in the 1980s, who charged that a certain element on the Left did not share traditional patriotic feelings toward their country and worked to undermine both the reputation and policies of the American government. She called them the “blame America” crowd. Whatever their efforts, Kaplan would write: “In fact, partly because of the format, mostly because of the nature of things, neither Vidal nor Buckley had anything new, let alone impressive, to say about the Republican process of choosing Richard Nixon.” (Buckley had recommended changing to a less confrontational format, but the network declined.)

In the month between the two conventions, Vidal became more committed to Eugene McCarthy, the one stridently anti-war candidate. Buckley meanwhile read Myra Breckinridge, a book that he found every bit as distasteful as Vidal himself. He continued to be outraged that Vidal presumed to pass moral judgment on conservatives or the Republican Party. When they reconvened in Chicago, their clash resumed, with Vidal increasingly agitated by police action against demonstrators, and Buckley determined to defend police officers forced to endure intense and intentional provocation. Kaplan observed: “Buckley was angry, defensive and aggressive. Vidal was angry, aggressive and defensive.” (p. 600).

In truth, just about everyone in Chicago was angry. When Abraham Ribicoff took the platform at the convention and accused Daley of employing fascist tactics on the streets against protestors, Daley fumed and cursed him from the floor. The environment was certainly conducive to what would happen between Buckley and Vidal. As they debated heatedly about the protesters (who were highly provocative and obscene, argued Buckley) and the police response (brutal and Stalinist, argued Vidal), the discussion took a turn for the worse, which was saying something. Howard K. Smith, unwittingly, got things rolling by asking Vidal if it was not provocative for protesters to fly the Viet Cong flag. John Judis, in his biography on Buckley, The Patron Saint of Conservatives, includes verbatim the now famous exchange that followed:

V: You must realize what some of the political issues are here, the million . . .

B: (To Smith) You’re so naive.

V: People in the United States happen to believe that the United States' policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Viet Cong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and many other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad. I assume it is the point of American democracy that you can express any point of view you want . . .

B: And some people were pro-Nazi and some people were pro-Nazi.

V: Shut up a minute.

B: No I won’t. And some people were pro-Nazi and that answer is that they were well treated by people who ostracized them . . . And I am for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care because you don’t have any sense of identification . . .

V: As far as I am concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi that I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I would only say we can’t have the right of assembly if they’re . . .

S: Let’s — let’s not call names . . .

B: Now, listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi . . .

S: Let’s stop. Let’s stop . . .

B: . . .or I’ll sock you in the goddam face . . .

V: Oh Bill you’re so extraordinary.

S: Gentleman, let’s stop calling names.

B: . . .and you’ll stay plastered. Let the author of Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making allusions of Nazism to somebody who was in the last war and fought the Nazis.

V: You were not in the infantry.

S: Gentlemen, I beg you to…

V: As a matter of fact . . .

B: I was a second lieutenant in the infantry.

V: You were not. You’re distorting your military record.

S: Mr. Vidal . . .

The three men were stunned. The pundits’ entourages in nearby trailers were stunned. The nation was stunned. After the broadcast, Buckley retreated to his trailer, only to be confronted by Paul Newman (who routinely stopped by for beer). Newman called Buckley’s attack despicable. When Buckley fired back that Vidal had called him a Nazi, Newman responded: “That was purely political. What you called him was personal.”

In the months that followed, Buckley would brood over the incident, while Vidal claimed to enjoy the sensation it created. Murray Kempton offered this tortured explanation for what occurred.

Buckley has taken as his the masculine side of the argument and Vidal is cast in the feminine. Yet no one who at all knows the private Buckley can have failed to detect in him a deep personal kindness, even sentimentality, those qualities we like to admire as womanly.

Vidal’s qualities, on the other hand, seem all on the side of what we used to think of as the manly valors; he is detached, tough, cold, and calculating in battle . . . Inevitably, then, Vidal controls the argument; this, like all his more notorious quarrels, ends with the incitement of an excess of someone else’s false masculinity by this false femininity of his.
– Judis, p. 295.

Perhaps, though, this seems overly analytical and Freudian. More simply, Vidal liked cat fights and was good at stirring them up with other major persons of letters with whom he came in contact. Buckley, who held deeply traditional notions of honor, was appalled by what he perceived to be the absence of honor in Vidal’s style and personality. And so he struggled to put the matter behind him. Which only led to further conflict. When Buckley insisted on writing about the episode for Esquire, he ignited the dispute again. Vidal demanded a right to respond, which led to tedious editorial negotiations, and finally lawsuits. In his lengthy essay, which is fascinating reading, Buckley recounted in detail the history of his exchanges with Vidal, including their political differences. He spent several pages documenting the lewd nature of the novel, Myra Breckenridge, and he made it clear that while it was true that Vidal was a homosexual, acknowledging this on air, while in a state of anger, was wrong. He concluded: “. . . which is why I herewith apologize to Gore Vidal.”

Vidal responded a month later in Esquire with his essay, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr.” in which he claimed that he had intended to bait Buckley into such an exchange to expose his “cuckoo” brain. (Kaplan reported that Vidal had meant to call Buckley a fascist, not a Nazi, but came up with the wrong formulation.) Vidal also disputed Buckley’s claims that he had misrepresented his positions on the issues. Finally Vidal insinuated that Buckley was not only a fascist war monger, he might well be a homosexual himself. (“We are all bisexual to begin with,” he wrote.) And perhaps most offensive to Buckley, Vidal opened the article by recounting an episode, involving Buckley’s sisters when they were teenagers, in which they vandalized a local church.

Twenty-four years later, on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o’clock in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley, Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out spring that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.

Despite Esquire’s attempts to negotiate between the two parties and avoid legal problems, Buckley filed suit and Vidal then countersued. From Buckley’s point of view, it was a clear case of right and wrong. What he had written about Vidal was true. What Vidal had called Buckley was not. One commentator in Time remarked: “Not since George Sanders divorced Zsa Zsa Gabor has so much talent been wasted on a nasty spat.” (As quoted in Judis, p. 293.)

Buckley insisted on the suit despite advice of close friends like Hugh Kenner and John Kenneth Galbraith, not to mention his own family, that this was unwise and hardly productive. Galbraith, who would be one of Buckley’s closest friends for the next 40 years, told him that as a public person who agreed to debate Vidal, despite his known reputation, taking such action would look unprofessional. Buckley didn’t care. Something about the episode stuck deep in his gut. Even after the case was settled, Buckley held a news conference in an attempt to take the moral high ground. That news conference itself proved controversial because it violated the spirit of an agreement that Esquire felt it had negotiated on the matter.

It was not Buckley’s finest hour. First, no one took his apology in Esquire at face value, for clearly he was trying to justify what had occurred to his own satisfaction. Moreover, Vidal, being unscrupulous, would not suffer half the anxiety that Buckley did by keeping the issue aflame. To add to the mix, Kenner observed that Buckley, in agreeing to participate in these kinds of forums, was becoming a celebrity rather than an educator. The charge that would be repeated over the years by those who felt Buckley squandered to a degree his immense intellectual gifts by becoming a public personality. (See, for example, Talking Heads by Alan Hirsch.)

Not surprisingly, the two men never debated again. The most critical intellectual exchange in which names were used occurred in Buckley’s book, In Search of Anti-Semitism, which was published in the early 1990s. Buckley not only put his friendships with Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran to the test, he revived his polemics with Vidal.

In question was a column Vidal had written for The Nation on Israel. That column, Buckley reported, spurred a response from Norman Podhoretz, who felt it crossed the line by suggesting that Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Dector, were so obsessively pro-Israel that they had lost the capacity to separate America’s interests from those of the Jewish state.

Buckley, who had cultivated a friendship with Podhoretz, saw an opportunity to defend a friend and tweak an old adversary. This he surely did in his treatment of Vidal in the book. While raising a legitimate question about the tone and content of Vidal’s commentary, Buckley could not resist a few personal swipes. He made a gratuitous reference to Vidal’s work appearing in a pornographic magazine. When Vidal observed that one critic of his Israel piece had taken his comments out of context, he added that he was used to being lied about. Buckley observed that to lie about Vidal was to do him a service. Clearly embers still burned.

Even so, Buckley would in the final years of his life work at putting conflicts behind him. He would reconcile with Garry Wills, Sobran and others. He clearly saw them as good men with whom he shared common values, not least an abiding faith. Vidal, on the other hand, took great pains to treat nastily those with whom he disputed. He showed an open disdain for values that Buckley felt critical to sustain civil society.

And then there is the matter of their political differences. While it could be argued that Buckley softened his views on some of the controversial issues that raged during the 1960s and 1970s (civil rights, drug laws, etc.), Vidal continued to move toward the fringe Left even as he wrote his celebrated fictional accounts on America’s history (he once described himself as America’s historian). His political views descended into conspiracies of the sort that might justify the word he used to describe Buckley – cuckoo. (Buckley, in his anti-Semitism tract, would observe that Vidal could quickly go “banshee” when faced with a sustained critique of his views, which was putting it about right.)

Vidal warned that virtually every American president was ready to catapult the world into a nuclear black hole at the slightest provocation. In the case of Reagan and George W. Bush, he introduced a religious dimension that is particularly appealing to leftist doomsayers, who are certain that the little man behind the imperial curtain is a Jerry Falwell wannabe or perhaps Pat Robertson, but certainly a crazed fundamentalist who would find the Apocalypse an entertainment of the highest order.

He wrote endlessly about the evils of the American empire, but seemed immune to the challenges posed by the Soviet Union. “Our masters would have us believe that all our problems are the fault of the Evil Empire of the East, with its satanic and atheistic religion, ever ready to destroy us in the night. This nonsense began at a time when we had atomic weapons and the Russians did not . . . what was the reason for the big scare?”

Vidal’s answer then was pretty much the same as it is now: big business. “Well, the Second War made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic, with many a wink, in the people’s name.” (At Home, p. 106)

In short, the military industrial complex was an institutional device aimed at keeping the rich and powerful rich and powerful, even at the expense of decency, common sense and the American taxpayer. Vidal, despite his love of melodrama, never quite got used to an actor as president, at least not an actor named Reagan, and he pounded a familiar theme.

By accident, the producers of that one-time hit-show the United States of America picked for the part of president a star with primitive religious longings. We cannot blame them. How could they have known? They thought that he was giving all that money to defense simply to reward them for giving him the lead, which he was doing, in part; but he was also responding to Ezekiel, and the glory of the coming end.
– At Home, p. 103.

All of this was written in the 1980s and the bulk of it was proven to be pure nonsense, but Vidal lacked the capacity of self-criticism; that Reagan not only did not blow up the world, but actually negotiated arms reductions with Gorbachav, and brought the “evil empire” down with nary a shot being fired, Vidal could not bring himself to acknowledge.

Instead, he has continued to publish collections of essays aimed at discrediting his own country. His views do not deviate markedly from those of Noam Chomsky – Vidal just writes better.  In The Last Empire he argues that the Cold War was basically an American-made conflict, the better to further the goals of our military industrial complex and our capitalist interests. Stalinist Russia, Vidal would write, was the victim.

Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous communist enemy . . . Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons.

You will search without success for some mention of the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland. You will find no mention of the stated aim of world communism to destroy the West and its economic systems. You might think our concerns were possibly rooted in Stalin’s ruthless treatment of his own country, or his expressed desire to dominate Eastern Europe. Might it be that the Soviet Union’s support of radical movements responsible for millions of deaths was a real concern? This was all illusory in Vidal’s version of history.

Buckley, of course, stood on the opposite side of these issues. It is one of the sad truths of American political culture that conservatives who faced down communist tyranny are blamed endlessly for indulging McCarthy but given scant credit for leading the moral movement to liberate half the globe. Yet, Buckley did not shrink from the challenge. Any system that enslaved millions of people and murdered millions more must be resisted. When Premier Khrushchev was invited to address the United Nations in 1960, Buckley would use the dictator’s own language against him.

We deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep . . . Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature . . . Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.

Gore Vidal, our own Mordred of letters, has never put aside his hysterical critique of American foreign policy. With the Soviets gone and communism in disrepair, he turned his guns on George W. Bush and the terror war. Not content to level fair criticism at the President for mistakes in Iraq (as Buckley did), Vidal reached as usual for the handy conspiracy. We found a convenient enemy, apparently, in Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait we secretly encouraged and whose violation of United Nations resolutions we exploited. That we suffered the worst attack in our history during 9/11 is an afterthought for Vidal, who cannot be distracted from the real evils of our world, the American military and its industrial partners.

In an interview published in Counterpunch, which originally aired on Dateline, SBS TV Australia, he explained why he became a full-time political polemicist. “I’ve spent most of my life marinated in the history of my country and I’m so alarmed by what is happening with our global empire, and our wars against the rest of the world . . ..”

Vidal went on to completely misrepresent reality to a foreign audience. He hammered the President: “We’ve never had a kind of reckless one who may believe – and there’s a whole theory now that he’s inspired by the love of Our Lord – that he is an apocalyptic Christian who’ll be going to Heaven while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn’t the case. I hope that’s exaggeration.” It all sounded remarkably like the same argument targeted at Reagan 20 years before. As for 9/11, he said: “Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world.”

Not everyone was convinced by this line of reasoning. Christopher Hitchens, who in 1999 wrote a fawning tribute to Vidal in the New York Review of Books, would find it necessary to break ranks with Vidal and two other icons of the Left whose rantings, it suddenly occurred to him, placed them solidly on the lunatic fringe. Hitchens wrote in the December 16, 2002 issue of The Nation:

Just watching the sluggish stream sliding by in the past few months, I have seen the editor of CounterPunch, one of our fellow columnists, reprint a vicious and paranoid and subliterate screed, explicitly associating Jew power with the destruction of the World Trade Center. I have read Gore Vidal's dark suggestion that September 11 was prearranged, and Norman Mailer's view that the dead of that day are no more significant than traffic accidents and Noam Chomsky's repeated assertion that Al Qaeda at its worst is no better than American foreign policy on a good day. I think I have just named some of the political and cultural centerpieces of the Nation worldview. If you can spare a whole column for me, perhaps you will find some room for a critique of these offenders as well? Or at least to try to explain to one or two of them, and to yourself, how they sign Ramsey Clark's petitions without quite knowing what they are doing? This is a serious time.

If it took the shock of 9/11 to shake Hitchens from his pro-Vidal reveries, it certainly didn’t surprise the rest of us that Vidal’s conspiratorial musings were at best half-baked nonsense served up to those already certifiably attached to the leftist view of history. His pamphlets, Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, are broadsides not only against Bush but on the foreign policy direction of the United States since World War II. Not only our Cold War stance, but our actions in Panama (now enjoying democracy), Grenada (also a democracy), against Libya (which had sponsored terrorism around the globe) and against Saddam's regime in Iraq are all, apparently, indications of our imperial designs.

Vidal would complain soon thereafter that if people only knew the truth about America, they would appreciate just how deranged our government is. “The censorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly in network television. So nobody’s getting the facts.”

Let me confirm your incredulity. Gore Vidal has been published in and reviewed by the New York Review of Books dozens of times. His interviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly, and Salon, his columns in the Nation and C-SPAN has on several occasions devoted hours to his books and his political views. Norman Mailer, another critic of U.S. foreign policy, has gotten as much air time as Vidal, though Vidal, given his feuds with Mailer, would probably explain this as a conspiracy against his preeminence in American letters. If Vidal really wanted to understand the meaning of censorship, perhaps he should chat with Solzhenitsyn.

Let us conclude with one of his most outlandish fantasies. On page 879 of his huge collection of essays, United States, he suggests that in 1972 George Wallace posed a threat to Nixon’s re-election. Consequently, he implies that the man convicted of trying to assassinate Wallace, Arthur Bremer, might well have been a puppet of Republican operatives who wanted to ensure Nixon’s victory. “Want to assassinate a rival? Then how about the Dallas scenario? One slips into reverie. Why not set up Bremer as a crazy who wants to shoot Nixon (that will avert suspicion)? But have him fail to kill Nixon, just as Oswald was said to have failed to kill his first target, General Walker. In midstream have Bremer – like Oswald – shift to a different quarry. To the real quarry.” (p. 883)

We interrupt this reverie for a moment of reality. For the uninitiated, General Edwin Walker was a right-winger Oswald tried to shoot months before Kennedy’s visit to Dallas; this according to Oswald’s widow, who learned of that attempted murder directly from her husband. Note the language Vidal uses in describing Oswald’s actions, as if there is doubt about this story, as if the attempt on Walker was all a put-up job, even though the source of the story was the assassin’s own widow, who had nothing to gain by volunteering this information.

This strange fantasy about Bremer also includes a theory that perhaps E. Howard Hunt was the mastermind behind a diary left in Bremer’s car, which Vidal subjects to textual analysis. This is what happens, I suppose, when persona overtakes critical ability and anything that one writes is immediately viewed as profound. Vidal can entertain any conspiracy except the one that really existed – the Soviet Union’s stated aim to undermine the West and dominate the world. His “cuckoo” version of history is right out of the American Free Press. But why should we be surprised? In addition to being a fine essayist, Vidal is also one of America’s most celebrated writers of fiction.

***

Upon Buckley’s death, Charlie Rose, a fan and a friend, convened a panel to discuss Buckley’s legacy in American politics. Those on hand were friends of various political stripes. Rich Lowry, editor of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, had been tapped by Buckley to run the journal. Jeff Greenfield of CBS News got his start on Firing Line. The historian Garry Wills, though he had broken with Buckley quite publicly and bitterly, gracefully acknowledged Buckley’s generosity and his role in getting Wills started as a serious writer. Richard Brookhiser was stoic and yet somehow the most moving of all, having sustained his association with Buckley longer than anyone on the panel. And Mona Charon, the columnist, also owed Buckley her start in journalism.

It was Greenfield who observed that there was something anti-Darwinian in the fact that Buckley had been replaced by Rush Limbaugh as the critical voice in American conservatism. The remark prompted Lowry to defend Limbaugh, who reaches 20 million people three hours a day. Even Buckley acknowledged this was a remarkable undertaking.

Still, Limbaugh, who loved Buckley, but grew weary of the comparisons, reminded everyone that Buckley was no kitten during his years as a conservative lightning rod. Sure enough he found and replayed the exchange with Vidal, just to remind folks that the level of discourse even then could slide into nasty confrontation. What it really underscored was how gracefully Buckley evolved into an elder statesman in the world of political letters while Vidal descended into near political madness.

To understand Vidal one must appreciate that to a degree uncommon even in our age, he is an extreme narcissist, a flaw no doubt encouraged by many within the Left and liberal establishment. The point is ready made by this excerpt from the piece by Hitchens in the New York Review of Books.

Here is a report from The New York Times of September 12, 1960, written from Poughkeepsie under the byline of Ira Henry Freeman:

“Gore Vidal, Democratic candidate for Representative in the twenty-ninth Congressional District, sprawled barefoot in a gilded fauteuil of his luxurious octagonal Empire study as he considered the question whether he could win the election.

"If this were not a Presidential year, I might have a chance," he said. "As it is, every four years, about 20,000 extra people crawl out of their Hudson Gothic woodwork up here to vote for William McKinley."

Mr. Vidal is 34 years old, slender, smooth in dress and manner, bright, sharp, sophisticated. He looks like a juvenile lead and talks like Mort Sahl. "I say 80 per cent of what I think, a hell of a lot more than any politician I know," he said.
– NYRB, April 22, 1999.

Most normal adults eventually outgrow their vanities (even Buckley had them), but Vidal never did. He achieved stardom at a young age and took seriously comparisons to Henry Adams, Mencken and Twain. One senses he never got over his great moment basking side by side with JFK and Jackie and Tennessee Williams, all those glittering parties and the world at his feet. Buckley learned to put it in perspective because his values and faith demanded it. Vidal lacks the capacity to check his envy and his ego, which no doubt explains why not only Buckley, but Robert Kennedy, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Podhoretz, among others, all wound up in bitter confrontation with him. None dare compete with his wit or his literary dominance.

This was evident 40 years ago when Vidal smugly claimed victory over Buckley in his response to Buckley’s Esquire essay, suggesting that he had intentionally provoked him. Fast-forward 40 years and Vidal was still trying to secure that victory, even as Buckley lie lifeless, mourned by friends and a grateful nation. Upon hearing of Buckley’s death, Vidal told the New York Times:

I was never on his show. I don’t like fascism much . . . I was one of the first people he asked. And, of course, I refused to be on it. And, of course, he lied about it afterward.

Buckley for his part seemed to have finally put it behind him. In the days after Buckley passed away, Sam Tanenhaus, one of his biographers, was asked by curious New York Times readers about Buckley’s attitude toward Vidal. Tanenhaus told them that Buckley refused to speak ill of Vidal in their many interviews and even acknowledged that Vidal was a good writer.

Two personalities, two journeys, two different views of the world: Buckley and Vidal gave the nation one of the most infamous moments of incivility in television history. Buckley got over it. Gore Vidal remains as petty today as he was 40 years ago.