POLITICS - The Low-Road

"When high-minded politicos Buckley and Vidal took the low road" PBS NewsHour 7/31/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The new documentary "Best of Enemies" pinpoints a key moment in broadcasting: a series of debates during the 1968 political conventions between two intellectual giants.  William F. Buckley on the right and Gore Vidal on the left attracted a high national audience with intelligence and wit, as well as putdowns and insults. Filmmakers Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon join Jeffrey Brown.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now to political commentary still steeped in intellect, but far less civil than Shields and Brooks.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

MAN:  To help us extract meaning from these conventions, two of America’s most eloquent commentators, William Buckley and Gore Vidal.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Hard to imagine now, a time before political pundits dominated cable and broadcast news programs.

The documentary “Best of Enemies” pinpoints a key moment of change, when two intellectual giants William F. Buckley on the right, Gore Vidal on the left, attracted a huge national audience with intelligence and wit, but also put-downs and insults.

Filmmakers Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon explored a series of debates the two held during the 1968 political conventions that, for a variety of reasons, would alter the future of political discourse on television.

We spoke recently at the AFI Docs Festival in Washington.

You set this up as both a personal and a kind of national epic.  Why do you think it rose to that level?

MORGAN NEVILLE, Director, “Best of Enemies”:  Gore Vidal and William Buckley represented the polar opposites of the left and the right at a time when America was kind of coming apart at the seams a little bit.  This is 1968.  There’s rioting in the streets.  And they’re representing those poles there on national TV.

But what I think what makes it such a dramatic story for us is that it was deeply personal.  It was under the veneer of politics, but I think they saw in the other person somebody who could detect their own insecurities and expose those to the world.

Gore Vidal and William Buckley debates YouTube