Gore Vidal Pages

Will Intellectual Combat Ever Top Buckley-Vidal? -- NYMag

From Jim Holt's great write-up in New York Magazine about Best of Enemies:

Buckley and Vidal, each deemed a “national treasure” at the time, are now largely forgotten, which is sad. And we have no one like them today, which is sadder. We do have plenty of “public intellectuals” — scholars, thinkers, and literary types who write for the middle-to-highbrow press and give lectures at the 92nd Street Y. Some of them tub-thump against religion; some take brave stands on sexual culture; some run for political office. But their disputes play out on Twitter and other social media, before an audience fragmented into a thousand niche groups. And none of them are glamorous and magnetic the way Buckley and Vidal were....

Read the article at nymag.com.

"How one yearns for a little of their exquisitely distilled poison among the moronic TV screamers of today"

From Lanre Bakare's review in The Guardian of Best of Enemies at SXSW 2015, "Best of Enemies review – the tale of a literary feud packed with ad hom bombs":

Gore Vidal and William J Buckley were on opposing sides of the 60s political divide, and Best of Enemies adroitly shows what happened when they met head on....It’s set in a pre-culture wars America, where anti-intellectualism was prevalent but two articulate, self-indulgent and arrogant debaters could pull in huge television audience while lamenting the other’s inability to grasp 'axiomatic' theories.

From John Patterson's review in The Guardian for the general release of Best of Enemies, "The Best Of Enemies: political feuding from the golden age of TV":

The intense 1968 TV debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley are preserved forever in a film that shows up the moronic TV screamers of today."
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How one yearns for a little of their exquisitely distilled poison among the moronic TV screamers of today.

Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport; NY Times review by Michael M. Grynbaum

From The New York Times article, "Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport," a review by Michael M. Grynbaum of the new documentary, Best of Enemies:

Literary aristocrats and ideological foes, [Gore] Vidal and [William F.] Buckley attracted millions of viewers to what, at the time, was a highly irregular experiment: the spectacle of two brilliant minds slugging it out — once, almost literally — on live television. It was witty, erudite and ultimately vicious, an early intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news.
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[The documentary's] directors, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, present their ideas with a wide scope....
“They don’t make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore,” Mr. Neville said in a recent interview. “Their lives are the kind of American lives that people don’t have anymore. To me, just on a theatrical level, it seemed operatic: this kind of grand battle.”