Posted on 08/25/2015 12:11:09 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
What does ‘The Best of Enemies’ get wrong? Just about everything, but especially the battle between left and right.
I'm disappointed to report that “The Best of Enemies,” the new film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, is the worst of documentaries. I should know—I was acquainted with both men, and neither the individuals nor their philosophies are accurately portrayed. Worst of all, the movie badly misrepresents the very issue it purports to illuminate: the titanic battle between liberalism and conservatism in the middle of the 20th century.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as a second-generation neoconservative Democrat, I was as close as anyone of my generation to Bill Buckley, outside of his staff at National Review. I worked with him on books and op-eds, spent weekends at his estate in Connecticut, sailed and vacationed with him. Later, after I became one of the best-known young defectors from the intellectual right, I became slightly acquainted with Gore Vidal, supposedly a representative of the intellectual left. I corresponded with Vidal and sent books to his home in Ravello, Italy, received a blurb from him for my book Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, and once joined him at a dinner party in his honor when he visited Washington, D.C.
As it happens, I broke with both Buckley and Vidal over their responses to figures of the radical right. In the mid-1990s, before I left his circle, I was deeply disappointed when Buckley refused to support me after I published exposes of the conspiracy theories about Jews and Freemasons and “Illuminati” being peddled by the Reverend Pat Robertson, head of the Christian Coalition, then a powerful force in the Republican Party. And like many others, including his former disciple Christopher Hitchens, I let my acquaintance with Gore Vidal lapse in the late 1990s after he portrayed the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995—the worst act of mass murder on American soil before 9/11—as a martyr to liberty.
Recently I went to the movie theater, then, with a personal interest in the subject. The documentary is, first of all, tedious. The filmmakers padded the film with commentary from present-day writers and academics, none of whom, except for Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus and the critic Frank Rich, has anything insightful to say.
Even worse, elementary requirements of exposition are sometimes ignored by the makers of “The Best of Enemies.” The film notes that both Buckley and Vidal came from families who were outsiders to the Northeastern establishment, and then cuts to Reid Buckley, Bill’s brother, making the point that his father was from the frontier. What frontier? The Canadian? The Hawaiian? If movie-goers don’t already know that Bill’s father was a South Texas oil man they will be mystified.
But these are minor lapses. Far worse is the utterly unintellectual nature of a movie that is supposed to be about two intellectuals. Buckley is identified as a conservative and Vidal as a liberal. But what these philosophies meant for these two, beyond opposing perspectives on pornography and the Vietnam War, is never explored. Instead, the film-makers have compiled clips of the two trading insults, culminating in the infamous exchange in which Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley called Vidal a “queer.” At first the spectacle is funny. But it soon becomes depressing and squalid. Anyone unfamiliar with the history of the time would see only two pompous men with old-fashioned accents insulting each other.
The greatest missed opportunity in “The Best of Enemies” occurs when Buckley and Vidal debate as part of ABC’s coverage at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Footage shows police rounding up anti-Vietnam War protestors. Buckley defends the police, while Vidal declares that America has become a police state. The two also debate the Vietnam War, with Buckley supporting it and Vidal opposed. It is moderator Howard K. Smith’s comparison of supporters of the Vietnamese communists with American supporters of the Nazis during World War II that leads to the exchange of slurs that is the movie’s climax.
That sounds straightforward enough. But I am willing to bet that few if any of the young people in the cinema with me, watching “The Best of Enemies,” were aware that Buckley was defending the foreign policy of the liberal Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, and the police force of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, another Democrat, against Gore Vidal, the assigned representative of “liberalism.” Nor would any young viewer likely be aware from the film that Vidal represented not the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but the faction in the party that was defeated in 1968.
The Democrats in Chicago in 1968 repudiated the antiwar left by nominating Hubert Humphrey, a reluctant supporter of the Vietnam War begun by Democratic President John F. Kennedy and escalated by his Democratic successor, Lyndon Johnson. Humphrey lost the presidential election that followed—not because he was too conservative, but because he wasn’t conservative enough. The Democratic presidential vote was split between Humphrey and independent George Wallace, a racist and populist Southern Democrat, ensuring the election of Republican Richard Nixon. Wallace and Nixon were more hawkish on Vietnam and more conservative on social issues than either Humphrey or Johnson. And yet it is an article of faith among Baby Boomer liberals to this day that Humphrey could have won by moving leftward in 1968 on both foreign and domestic policy.
Avenging their defeat at the 1968 Democratic convention, Democratic doves nominated a presidential candidate of their own in 1972: George McGovern. The result was Nixon’s re-election by a landslide and generation-long control of the White House by hawkish Republicans from 1968 to 1992. Republican presidential hegemony was interrupted only by Jimmy Carter in 1976, a center-right former Georgia governor and a former military officer, and ended only by Bill Clinton in 1992, a center-right former Arkansas governor whose campaign was supported by many Democratic hawks.
What is missed completely by the makers of “The Best of Enemies” in their focus on snarky one-upmanship is that the strange-bedfellows alliance between Buckley’s movement conservatives and the Democratic Party establishment symbolized by Humphrey and Daley in 1968 foreshadowed the Reagan revolution. Today’s conventional conservative narrative, in which the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marks the triumph of the “movement conservatism” of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater over FDR-LBJ liberalism, gets the history wrong. So does the conventional liberal narrative, in which there is a direct line between today’s Democrats and the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
The truth is that the Reagan majority owed far less to the small number of Goldwater conservatives than to defectors from the New Deal Democratic coalition at both the electoral and elite levels. Economically-liberal, culturally-conservative white working-class “Reagan Democrats” who revered the memory of FDR and JFK helped make Reagan president. Many foreign policy advisors from the Truman and Kennedy-Johnson administrations, including Paul Nitze, served under Reagan. Reagan Republicans benefited from a backlash against the civil rights revolution, but race was only one of many factors, including foreign policy and changing sexual mores and censorship issues, that explain the appeal of Nixon and Reagan to many traditional Democrats. As president, Reagan, who had begun as a Democrat, told Dan Rather that his favorite president was FDR, for whom he had voted four times.
I want to see this film.
I was a big Buckley fan.... what a mind :-)
Woody Allen vs William Buckley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNErWi_lTig
Why? They’ll just trash WFB. The only reason anybody makes this movie is to trash WFB and to prop up super drunk fag vidal as his intellectual equal.
Homo Vidal thought he could just call Buckley names without a response? He had something else coming.
Lind has the "conventional conservative narrative" wrong.
It was Reagan's winning of the Republican nomination that was the triumph of "movement conservatism", not his election. The election demonstrated that a conservative running as a conservative could win a national election, negating the previous narrative from the 1964 Goldwater debacle.
I do dis agree with Lind---who, by the way, went on to write a good nook defending the Vietnam War---that Reagan was more the product of some fusion of Dems and New Dealers who saw the light than of traditional Republican forces. Those Dems came later, especially in 1984. Reagan in 1980 represented a protest vote against Carter by people willing to give him a handle but not yet fully convinced about conservative ideas. Lind is trying to give Dems too much credit for Reagan's initial rise.
In a sense, both Carter and Reagan ran "against Vietnam", Carter for going in, Reagan for not winning. There were almost no Dems in 1980 who supported Reagan's view. Lind eventually came around.
Really? Did this guy put Jimmy Carter down the memory hole?
Not to mention that Grrald Ford was not exactly a "hawk".
My opinion of the two men differ from FR. I think Vidal was a brilliant novelist and essayist; Buckley unreadable - particularly his fiction. I never got over Buckley’s awful condescension to the Moral Majority guests on one of his programs years ago. I guess it was Firing Line, this was the very late 70s/early 80s. Not “intellectual” types, he kept asking them questions in that double-negative form he loved so much but left me so cold.
:: the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh ::
Slipped this one, didn’t he?
McVeigh was an anarchist; neither “left-wing” or “right-wing”. His ideology flowed more from Guy Fawkes and the present-day “Occupy” group than from either end of the political spectrum.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.