Best of Enemies

In the late 1960s television news was quietly, modestly liberal. No one mistook Walter Cronkite on CBS and Chet Huntley/David Brinkley on NBC as karate champs or kickboxers. Few people watched ABC News, and no other TV news network existed. Then came an ABC stunt that opened the doors for today’s verbal cage-fighting—and Best of Enemies, an 87-minute documentary in some theaters and soon on DVDs, tells that story.

The two innovators could not have been more different ideologically or more similar stylistically. In 1968 Gore Vidal (who said he had sex with more than 1,000 men) published Myra Breckinridge, classified by one encyclopedia of gay culture as the first novel in which a major character undergoes a sex-change operation. Meanwhile, William F. Buckley Jr. edited National Review, then the one major U.S. conservative magazine, and a stern opponent of the cultural revolution Vidal promoted. But both had patrician mannerisms and well-turned-sentence eloquence, so they were evenly matched in the 10 live clashes ABC set up for them at the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions.

Best of Enemies shows the fireworks that resulted, and points to the new era of television news—ABC suddenly jumped to No. 1 in convention coverage ratings—that soon emerged. Documentaries have a reputation for dullness, but this one is alive: The commentary that accompanies the Buckley/Vidal jousting tilts liberal, but the clips themselves carry the show. We may be better off with today’s arguing than the pretense of reasonableness that once dominated television news, but neither is ideal. The Buckley/Vidal battles were both a low point—“crypto-Nazi … queer,” they snarled—and a high point for television news and views.