On Experiencing Gore Vidal
On Experiencing Gore Vidal
On Experiencing Gore Vidal
Gore Vida l
by William F . Buckley Jr .
Can there be any justification in calling a man a queer befor e
ten million people on television ?
namely : Excessive bitchery can get out of hand . But first the nar
rative .
In the late Fall of 1967 I had a telephone call from Mr . James Haggerty, vice-president of the American Broadcasting Company an d
former White House press chief for President Eisenhower . Would I ,
he asked, consent to confer with Mr . Elmer Lower and Mr . William
Sheehan concerning ABC's coverage of the 1968 political conventions? Yes I saidobviously . We met then, the heads of ABC New s
and Special Events and of ABC Television News and they disclose d
their plans for 1968 . Instead of covering the political convention s
"gavel to gavel," ABC would condense the day's events into ninet y
minutes of nightly television, divided into five segments . The fourt h
segment was conceived as broad-ranging commentary on the convention, and the forthcoming election, and on politics in general .
They had in mind that two people would share that time, one o f
them a conservative, the other a liberal . Would I ?
I asked a few mechanical questions, and indicated it would probably work out, and then asked them who would be my adversary .
They replied that he had not been selected, did I have any suggestions? I thought a while and gave them eight or ten names, amon g
whom were some of the obvious people (Schlesinger, Galbraith ,
Mailer), and some a little less obvious (for instance AI Lowenstein ,
Carey McWilliams Jr .) . Was there anyone at all I would refuse to
appear alongside? I wouldn't refuse to appear alongside any non Communist, I saidas a matter of principle ; but I didn't want to
appear opposite Gore Vidal (I said), because I had had unpleasan t
experiences with him in the past and did not trust him . A fe w
months later the announcement was made that Gore Vidal had been
selected as my opposite number . "We knew we wanted Buckley, "
Elmer Lower told a reporter in Miami at the outset of the Republican Convention, "because we were well familiar with him . . . . It
was a question of who would best play off against him . We considered a number of people and did some 'auditions,' sort of surreptitiously that is, watching people on the air without them knowin g
we were watching them . It looked as though Buckley would pla y
better with Vidal than with any of four or five other people ." I n
one sense he was right . Even before Chicagoa good week or te n
days after Miamithere were those who took pains to record thei r
misgivings . For instancenot exactly typigll, but singularly interestingStephanie Harrington, who wrote in The Village Voice ,
looking back on our first series of encounters at Miami :
"What political analysis ABC did try for turned out to be th e
most embarrassing ingredient in its grand innovation . This was it s
attempt to elevate the affair to the level of intelligent discussion b y
bringing together nightly Gore Vidal and William Buckley for thei r
commentswhich [discussions] had far more to do with their con tempts for each other than [with] their impressions of the convention . It was clearly a sequel to that painful moment some years bac k
when Buckley, during a televised debate with Vidal, descended to
his unique level of argument and in a typically Buckleyesque displa y
of dirty debater's tricks, destroyed his opponent not by logic but b y
using his personal life against him . [I interrupt Miss Harringto n
to bring you a special announcement : remember that phrase, 'personal life .'] Indeed, he tried again this time, dismissing Vidal's po-
litical opinions on the grounds that he is the kind of man who woul d
write a book like Myra Breckinridge . It was obvious that Buckley' s
heroics about the show going on despite the broken collarbone h e
suffered in a fall on his boat [heroics? I simply went . Heroism,
maybe ; heroics, no] had less to do with interest in the conventio n
than with eagerness to get his claws into Vidal again . "
Now under the stress of my conversations with ABC, we see tha t
the anchor of Miss Harrington's argument is uprooted, and her analysis drifts away into fantasy . Still, she did say a few things concerning which there has been considerable speculation which i s
relevant : so that (fulldisclosurewise) I now divulge the history ,
abbreviated but not censored, of my dealings with Mr . Vidal, acknowledging Miss Harrington's and others' suspicions that thos e
dealings figured, yes indeed, in the meetings at Miami and Chicago .
n January of 1962, appearing on the Jack Paar program t o
promote his play Romulus, Vidal went out of his way to observe that I had "attacked" Pope John XXIII for being "too
left wing" : which sorrowful recording of my impiety dre w
from the audience horrified tremors .
Paar was evidently pressured to invite me to reply, which he di d
and I did, on an evening Paar once reminisced about as having bee n
among the most memorable of his career, such was the ensuing up roar . Said uproar, for once, directed not against me, but agains t
Paar's assault on me after I had left the studio, which assault stimulated, by the count of one NBC spokesman, seven thousand (anti Paar) telegrams of protest and one (pro-Paar) phone call from th e
White House . That is by the waywhat I liked most in terms o f
the theatre of the episode was that instants after I left the studio ,
Paar ingenuously announced to the studio audience, "I just got a
call here . Gore Vidal's coming back tomorrow night!" Now Paar' s
shows were taped three hours before they were telecast . So that h e
couldn 't have received a telephone call from Gore Vidal reactin g
to my appearancebecause the show would not go out over the air waves for another three hours . (And they used to talk abou t
Tricky Dick . )
Anyway, Vidal showed up, and after cooing about him ("Notic e
the difference in manner and approach and reasoning") for a fe w
minutes Paar asked what had I actually said about the Pope and
the encyclical ?
Vidal : Yes, well what he actually saidand I went back an d
looked it up . . . in the month of August, Buckley attacked th e
Pope in a piece in his magazine, and the piece was called "A Venture in Triviality. "
(a, I did not "attack the Pope ." b, There was no "piece," merel y
a one-paragraph, unsigned editorial . c, The paragraph was no t
called "A Venture in Triviality" ; it bore no title ; one phrase in i t
said "[the encyclical] must strike many as a venture in triviality
coming at this particular time in history ." )
V . : It was a vicious piece, and America, which is the Jesuit
weekly in the United States, attacked Buckley in an editorial declaring that he owes his readers an apology, unquote .
(The demand by America for an apology was unrelated to th e
editorial in question . )
V . : And Buckley's answer to the Jesuits was : "You are impudent. "
(My answer to the Jesuits was in 2500 words, one sentence o f
which stated that it was impudent for America to ask a non-Catholic journal of opinion to apologize for a transgressioneven assuming that that is what it wasagainst exclusively Catholic protocol ;
and of course I was right . )
V . : I mean, who is he? Here's a guy who has never worked fo r
a living . . . has never had a job .
(I had held down one part-time job, as a member of the facult y
of Yale, 1947-1951 ; and three full-time jobs before going to wor k
for National Review, in 1955, which is at least a full-time job . )
V . : He's got two sisters .
(Six . )
V . : One said while she was at Smith . .
(It was ten years after she graduated . )
V. : . . . that the faculty was filled with Communists .
(She said four faculty members had Communist-front connections, which was true . )
V . : The other was at Vassar and started the same thing at
Vassar .
(She said that at Vassar the bias in the social-science departments was predominantly liberal, and of course she was right, ask
Mary McCarthy . )
V . : Meanwhile their brother was at Yale and wrote God and Ma n
at Yale and said that was full of Communists .
(My book did not charge or intimate that there was a single Communist at Yale . )
V . : He feels free to correct, through this little magazine of his ,
the actions of all our Presidents and the Pope, and philosopher s
. . . on the subject of philosophy I thought this might interes t
you, Jackof Albert Schweitzerwho is one of the great men o f
our time, and whose philosophy is reverence for lifehe wrote o f
Albert Schweitzer, quote : He is more destructive than the H Bomb ,
unquote .
(The quotation is not from me, but from a book review i n
National Reviewby a Ph .D . in philosophy . I do not censor th e
book reviewers . )
V. : On the subject of integration, Mr . Buckley wrote, quote : Segregation is not intrinsically immoral, unquote . Well, that's a doubl e
negative which means I don't quite dare to come out and say I' m
in favor of segregation, so I ' ll put it in a double negative .
(a, It isn't a double negative . b, It is a litotes, and should be recognized as such by a professional writer . The litotes has bee n
around as a necessary rhetorical refinement for years ; was used ,
for instance, by that old evader, Homer . c, I didn ' t in fact write tha t
phrase, I spoke it in the presence of a Catholic liberal, John Cogley ,
who d, agreed with me . )
V . : . . . but that's exactly what it means, which goes against not
only Catholic doctrine but I would think any humaneyou put you r
finger on it, you know, when you said there's no humanity there .
But Mr . Vidal was not through .
V . : I was just going to say one more thing struck me, listenin g
to Mr . Buckley . He said (and I was quite fascinated because it' s
amazing the things perhaps you can just get away with, this side
of libel) . . . . He said that Harry Truman had called Eisenhower
an anti-Semite and anti-Catholic .
Paar : Yes, he did say that . But what
Vidal : There's no evidence that Harry Truman ever said this .
Now I would like to say right now, on the air, that I will give $10 0
to the National Review, which is Buckley's magazine, if he can prov e
that Harry Truman ever said any such thing : and if he canno t
prove it, why I think he should then be regarded as what he is ,
which is an irresponsible liar . . . . As someone once said . . . [th e
Buckleys] are sort of the sick Kennedys .
I flew early the following morning to Switzerland, leaving a telegram to be dispatched by my office to Jack Paar . It read : "PLEAS E
INFORM GORE VIDAL THAT NEITHER I NOR MY FAMILY IS DISPOSED T O
RECEIVE LESSONS IN MORALITY FROM A PINK QUEER . IF HE WISHES T O
CHALLENGE THAT DESIGNATION, INFORM HIM THAT I SHALL FIGHT BY
THE LAWS OF THE MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY . HE WILL KNOW WHA T
I MEAN . WILLIAM F . BUCKLEY JR ." The telephone was ringing whe n
I reached my destination in Switzerland, as I half expected it woul d
be . Come on now, calm down, whaddaya say, forget it, write a piec e
about the whole thing instead . So I finally withdrew the telegram ,
and contented myself instead to send a letter to Jack Paar :
Dear Mr . Paar :
[I have been informed of what Mr . Gore Vidal said on your show
on February 1 . ]
1. The documentation, taken in each case from The New Yor k
Times, is as follows : On October 9, 1952, President'-Harry Truma n
accused the Republicans generally of supporting "the discredite d
and un-American theory of racial superiority ." On October 17 ,
Assistant Secretary of State Howland Sargeant read a messag e
from Mr . Truman to the Jewish Welfare Board in Washington .
Eisenhower, Truman said, "cannot escape responsibility" for hi s
endorsement of Senator Revercomb, "the champion of the anti Catholic, anti-Jewish provisions of the original D .P . bill." Truman
charged that Eisenhower "has had an attack of moral blindness ,
for today he is willing to accept the very practices that identify th e
so-called 'master race' although he took a leading part in liberatin g
Europe from their domination . "
2. The following day, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, ex-President o f
the Zionist Organization of America, expressed "shock that an irresponsible statement of that character could be made . The at-
suggest to ABC that I'd prefer not to debate with him, and now I
gather that his exclusion graveled him . Indeed over the intervenin g
years I had never asked him to appear on Firing Line, which was
launched early in 1966 . "The one forum on which they have not
met is Buckley's syndicated series, Firing Line," a reporter wrote ,
after interviewing Vidal . "Buckley invited the novelist to the program, but 'I refused to give him that much help,' Vidal smiled
thinly ." (I'd have smiled thinly too if I told a reporter I refuse d
Ed Sullivan's invitation to tap dance on his show because I didn' t
want to give Sullivan that much help .) At San Francisco it wasn' t
just the usual things that aroused me, but an insight I got int o
what I now concluded was more than a merely episodic insensibilit y
to the truth . Specifically, Vidal announced on a television program ,
once again "moderated" by Suaskind (Susskind's advocacy of
Vidal's positions competed with the positions themselves in burdening Vidal), that I had that very afternoon importuned Barr y
Goldwater to accept a draft of an acceptance speech I had writte n
for him, and that Goldwater had brusquely turned me down, al l
of this in the presence of John Jones, a Goldwater aide . I tol d
him, a) that I had not laid eyes on Goldwater that afternoon ,
b) that I had not written nor suggested to anyone that I write a
draft of Goldwater's acceptance speech, and that c) although I kne w
very well who John Jones was, in fact I had never laid eyes o n
him in my entire life . Vidal not only refused to modify let alone
to withdraw his allegation, he reasserted it several times . The nex t
day, Suaskind (over Vidal's protests, Susekind subsequently told
me) read over the air a letter from Jones confirming my denials .
(Goldwater, it happened, had tuned in on the program, and was a s
nonplussed as Jones. )
There were one or two other instances of the same kind of thing ,
and I remember that it occurred to me then, as it did a couple o f
times in Miami and Chicago, that perhaps Vidal makes his ow n
reality, which is, all things considered, sufficient reason to understand his philosophical melancholy, even as the order of realit y
would be melancholy if it had conceived Vidal . At any rate, one
wants to stay away from such people, at least publicly . Yet once
again the debate had been lively. One reviewer, who took pains to
disavow any sympathy with my politics, said that, in the service
of "the radical right, [Buckley] was far more successful tha n
Susskind and Vidal on the medium left . . . Susskind and Vidal
rocked back and forth like two old harpies and spat at him with n o
visible effect on their target nor, I suspect, on viewers ." The other
reviewer "got the impression . . . that Susskind was a zookeepe r
trying to prevent two hissing adders from killing each other. But
the hissing was always wreathed in benign smiles ." August 7,
1968, The Rockford Star, "'I haven't seen Buckley since 1964 a t
the Cow Palace,' Vidal recalled . 'His last words to me were that
he never wanted to see me again .' " Needless to say, I did not sa y
those words. But they represented, accurately, my thoughts .
I find only two unpleasant references to Vidal written by me
between 1964 and 1968 . Commenting on an article by Vidal i n
Esquire on the Kennedy family, I wrote, "It is of course ironi c
that Mr. Vidal, the super-liberal super-thinker who in pursuit o f
the good life has tried everything, but everything in the world ,
including icon-smashing with a vengeance, now engages an icon h e
had a hand in molding ." The other reference was exhumed by th e
drama editor of The Miami Herald who wrote at the beginning o f
the Republican Convention that "Vidal is worried the broadcasts
may be a bit dull, feeling the allotted twenty minutes or so won' t
really give them time to get into things . That seems like an obscure
worry as only a couple of years ago, in his newspaper column ,
Buckley referred to Vidal as 'the playwright and quipster who los t
a congressional race a few years ago but continues to seek ou t
opportunities to advertise his ignorance of contemporary affairs . '"
ent on promoting their forthcoming programs, the peopl e
at ABC set up a lunch for me to meet the area's tele vision critics, and subsequently did as much, I assume,
for Vidal . Such meetings, as every writer knows, ar e
something of a strain : because you are generally mad e
to feel that you can only please by being viperish. What will I wan t
to say about the conventions when face to face with Vidal? I didn' t
know . My line on Vidal was that I thought his dissatisfaction wit h
America and with American politics was such as to make hi m
almost necessarily sour on anything that was likely to happen at
either convention .
Vidal was evidently much more detailed . One critic wrote tha t
according to Vidal he had "accepted ABC's offer, even though h e
was to be teamed with Buckley, a man with whom he has had
video encounters before and for whom he has utter contempt . "
Another quoted Vidal as saying, "Bill, of course, will try to personalize our shows . He thrives on insults . But I'll try to stick to
politics . He never sticks to a subject because he's on such wea k
ground ." Another wrote that Vidal "was not the least bit reluctant
to discuss his adversary. Vidal welcomed the chance to be quoted.
Apparently he relishes the vaudeville-team approach to interpretative journalism employed by ABC television for the national conventions and is anxious to allow the churlish nature of thei r
on-screen rapport to carry over into off-screen conversatio n
. . . . 'though I don't like being brought down to his level . That' s
the reason I've refused to appear with him over the last fouro r
is it six?years . . . . Buckley is frivolous, superficial and ofte n
very entertaining . '
And he told Mr . Hal Humphrey, whose column is widely syndicated, that he would "stipulate at least one ground rule . . . . 'Whe n
I'm talking I want the camera on me and not on Bill's face doin g
all those wild expressions of his while I'm just a voice off-stage .'"
Later he told a correspondent that he had complained to th e
director of getting insufficient camera time, and the director ha d
promptly complied with his requests . On these and related matter s
he proved most fastidious. "Buckley," a Miami reporter wrote ,
. . is as conservative about being pictured in the make-up chai r
as he is in his political philosophy . He submitted to a brief
[make-up], a quick swish of a comb by his wife Patricia who ha d
accompanied him . On the other hand, his fellow program jouste r
Gore Vidal was thoroughly liberal about being touched up . No
hurry-up job, this. Miss May leisurely cleansed the skin with an
antiseptic lotion, added a cream-type foundation and powder and
commented on his hairline : 'He has a good hairline ."l don't hav e
a wig,' he quipped . 'Tell your photographer not to make me look as
though I have . Past pictures have . See how vain I am . I'm letting
you take my bad side,' gesturing to his right ." *
In general, the press anticipated the forthcoming debates wit h
unmitigated glee. In Toledo the headline was, "Politicians Ar e
Forewarned/Bill, Gore May Steal Show ." The Washington Pos t
announced that "The best show during the Republican and Democratic Conventions next month will not be on the convention floor s
or in hotel corridors but in an ABC studio . . . . In Buckley an d
Vidal, ABC has a dream television match . They are graceful,
shrewd, cool antagonists ; paragons of caustic wit and established
observers of the American political scene ." "It's anybody's bal l
game," wrote the New York Daily News about the G .O.P . Convention, "as they've been telling us the past couple of days, but righ t
now the inside dope at the convention is that Bill Buckley and Gore
Vidal have it practically sewed up. As a team, Buckley is in the
No. 1 slot, naturally, since he's thoroughly committed, with Vidal ,
an expert sniper, as his running mate . And the beauty part of it is
that, disliking one another intensely and both gifted in invectiv e
(they are far and away the best infighters in Miami Beach), they'r e
a cinch to provide challenging leadership." "A rare stroke of good
television programing . . ." said the Philadelphia Daily News . "As
an ABC spokesman puts it, 'We fully expect the fur to fly whe n
those two come together,' and there wasn't a dissenting commen t
from his listeners . "
o there we were, Saturday, August 3, on duty for our firs t
broadcast, suddenly re-scheduled in a makeshift studio at
the Fontainebleau Hotel because the ceiling had caved i n
two days before over the studio at the convention site .
We were instructed that we must prerecord an initia l
statement of a sentence or two, and I knew, when I heard Vidal's ,
that the session was going to be grim . "To me," he said, "the principal question is, can a political party based almost entirely upon
human greed nominate anyone for President for whom the majority
of the American people would vote?" Now there was an interval of
eight or ten minutes before we swung into the live portion of th e
program . Diagonally across from us, William Lawrence was wel l
"We have found, especially in persons whose libidinal development has suffere d
some disturbance, as in perverts and homosexuals, that in the choice of thei r
love-object they have taken as their model not the mother but their own selves . "
Freud, On Narcissism, II .
into his political forecast, which had followed a pastiche of the day' s
events screened by ABC producers . Across from us was Howar d
K . Smith, suave, intelligent, mildly apprehensive, rehearsing wit h
his lips the lines he would presently deliver, directly in touch wit h
the controls, where twenty officials and technicians called the signals, to Smith, to Lawrence, to the thirty-forty-fifty technicians ,
reporters, directors, who filled the enormous room, at one corne r
of which, earphones attached, Vidal and I awaited the sound of th e
bell . We had exchanged minimal amenities, and I scribbled on m y
clipboard to avoid having to banter with him, and he did the same ,
and I felt my blood rising in temperature as I reflected on the
malevolent inanity of his introductory observation, and then the
resolution evolved that I would hit him back hard with a to quoque
involving Myra Breckinridgewhich I had not then read . . . . Bu t
Howard K . Smith derailed me by asking me not, as I had expected ,
to initiate the exchange by commenting on Vidal's description o f
the Republican Party, but rather to answer a specific question
who, in my judgment, was the Beat Man at Miami? We were off .
I answered : Reagan and Nixon, and said why, more or less . Vidal
came back with Rockefeller"I cannot possibly imagine Richar d
Nixon President of the U . S." He backed this failure of his imagination by reciting an arresting catalog of Nixon's sins, so livid up
against the exigencies of the day :
"And here you have a man who when he was in Congress voted
against public housing, against slum clearance, against rent control, against farm housing, against extending the minimum wage .
. . . He said, 'I am opposed to pensions in any form as it make s
loafing more attractive than working .' And now today he offers u s
a program for the ghettos which he's made much of, and wha t
is it? Well, he is going to give tax cuts to private businesses tha t
go into the ghetto and help the Negroes . Now in actual fact privat e
business is set up to make private profits. . . . So I would say that
so far as Mr . Nixon goes he is an impossible choice domestically ."
Now up against an extended barrage like that, a debater ha s
problems . Point-by-point refutation is clearly impossible . As a rule
one doesn't have handy the relevant material for coping with suc h
arcana . And anyway, in network situations, an elementary sense o f
theatre (which if you don't have it, you won't ever face the proble m
of what to do in network situations) disciplines you in the knowledge that you simply don't have the time it takes for detailed
confutation . Nixon hadn't been in Congress for sixteen years . Jus t
to begin with, whatever Nixon did in Congress between 1947 and
1962 was largely irrelevant . Apart from that, what on earth doe s
it mean, Nixon "voted against," say, "rent control"? Rent contro l
survives in only a few places, primarily New York City . How ca n
any attitude he took toward "farm housing" eighteen years ago
bear on his present qualifications for the Presidency? And what
sort of a "farm housing" bill did he vote against? How can w e
know?maybe it was the same farm housing bill that the Americans for Democratic Action also opposed? And anyway, wasn't
Nixon selected in 1952 by Eisenhower because he had a reputatio n
as a domestic liberal (one of Christian Herter's boys) and as a
tough anti-Communista good combination in 1952? Hadn' t
Nixon's preference for Eisenhower over Taft situated him in th e
liberal wing of the G .O .P . ?
And then there was the problem of the directly quoted sentence .
Vidal quoted Nixon as saying, " I am opposed to pensions in any
form as it makes loafing more attractive than working ." The
debater knows by the application of rudimentary discriminator y
intelligence that no politician in the history of the world ever sai d
that, and most probably no non-politician : and certainly not anyon e
who ever contemplated running for the Presidency . The mind needs
to work quickly in such situations, canvassing rapidly the possibilities that a direct challenge might lead him into a carefull y
planned ambush. . . . So one comes in on the subject from th e
other direction : If Nixon had ever uttered a sentence so preposterouscondemning pensions paid even to ninety-year-old widows, o n
the grounds that they are conducive to slothwouldn't a fatuit y
so lapidary have instantly become a part of the political folklore,
like, for instance, Mr . Agnew's "If you've seen one slum you've see n
them all"? The answer is of course yes ; so that in debate, unde r
these circumstances, you can feel safe in saying, "Nixon never sai d
that"even though such a denial is itself a) unprovable, and b )
silly ; since no one on earth is familiar with every statement Nixo n
ever made ; and no one therefore can know as a certitude that he
asked me to encourage the attacks on Myra because the book wholesalers have been calling all day with orders . . . . Bill refuses t o
deal with the issues because he doesn't know what they are, so h e
uses the personal attack . I spend my time reading statements o f
Nixon, Reagan and Rockefeller, and I'm able to deal with thei r
positions . Buckley doesn't do much reading . He just arranges hi s
prejudices ." Vidal was very pleased by his performance . The television people, he explained, learned greatly from it . "Did yo u
notice," he asked another critic, "that after our first meeting th e
other commentators began to change their styleto try for wit an d
candor? Even Cronkite tried to be funny . It's possible that AB C
is exploiting our names and reputations . But I couldn't turn dow n
the audience . Just think of how many millions of people who neve r
heard of either of us now know who we are," he crowed . "He went
over each encounter," the critic reported, "claiming that he 'absolutely destroyed' Buckley in their first preview meeting. . . . 'Th e
camera did focus on Buckley too much during Tuesday's session ,
but I put a stop to that,' Vidal said . 'The next night there wer e
not so many full-face reaction shots of him .' "
The press wasn't, or at least not all of it, quite so appreciative .
Dean Gysel, who had talked about the dream team, referred to th e
shows' "waspish bitchery ." "Vidal was especially guilty of makin g
personal attacks," said another reviewer . "There was somethin g
positively obscene," wrote Terrence O'Flaherty, who had writte n
four years earlier about the San Francisco encounter, sounding a
note of warning . . . "about . . . [the] face-splitting exchang e
[which] was irresistible as well as embarrassing . . . . It was not
the dialogue itself that made the conversation obscene ; it was the
expression of almost sensual relish which flashed across their face s
as they thrust and stabbedfor obviously they enjoyed these duel s
as much as the audience . [Point : what is obvious may not be true ,
and in this case, speaking authoritatively about my own state o f
mind, I not only didn't enjoy the evening, I detested it .] [But ]
suddenly the conversation gets the teeth on edge ." And Jack Gould,
of The New York Times : "[Their] petty confrontations shoul d
qualify them as the week's major bores in Miami Beach . . . .
Sure, there was also the world of the satisfied . "Both stress style
over content," one critic wrote, "but it is high style . Both may be
irrelevant, but they are passionately irrelevant . The polemics ar e
such that the rubber band often breaks, but then they define thei r
positions ." And the ratings were very high .
My own feeling was that the encounter had confirmed my misgivings . On Sunday morning I telephoned to Wally Pfister, the producer, and suggested the possibility of alternative formats : perhaps two or three minutes of Vidal, followed by two or three minutes of Buckley, but no cross-talk . He reported back the conclusio n
of the brass that that would make for uninteresting fare . To a television critic he spoke without making reference to my expresse d
dissatisfactions . . . . "Pfister revealed that the day after the firs t
debate, Vidal called him and said : 'I sure took care of him [Buck ley] last night, didn't I?' Later, Buckley called him and said : ' I
certainly made him [Vidal] look silly, didn't I?' The mighty ar e
human, too," the critic concluded . The mighty are unmighty too ,
he'd have better concluded .
idal's political philosophy is, I discovered fairly early
in our association, elusive . His attitudes, if you look
them up in the yellow pages, are neatly left-liberal i n
purely conventional terms . However there are anomalies . There is a strain of populism . Buf populism, afte r
all, should be popular . I have heard John Kenneth Galbraith cal l
himself a populist, always on the understanding that he does no t
thereby deprive himself of his right to intellectually aristocrati c
habits, e .g . in the case of Galbraith cultural elitism, and in th e
case of Vidal, that much at least ; and, touching on the point alread y
raised, sexual singularity as well . But on the whole, populists shoul d
be not only expert but enthusiastic at reasoning through to th e
justification of the people's demands . Vidal isn't good at this a t
all : or rather, one comes across an impenetrable barrier to th e
understanding . Towards "the people," he has ambiguous relations .
though he appears not to be able to do without them, at least no t
for as long as twenty network minutes . Even though "they" are ,
strangely, always out to get him . "Vidal expresses the hope," wrot e
Hal Humphrey in a syndicated story "that security provisions at
the conventions are especially good be- (Continued on page 122)
Liam Eythe. By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able t o
defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tejo .
Could we do it again? Are the privat e
eyes and denatured cowboys poten t
enough to serve as imperial exemplars? No . At best, there is Jame s
Bond . . . and he invariably ends u p
tied to a slab of marble with a blow torch aimed at his crotch . Glory ha s
fled and only the television commercials exist to remind us of the republic's early greatness and virile youth .' "
"Glory" has fledalong with
necessarily with?the convention i n
favor of heterosexuality as the "normal" sexual relationship . We move i n
a different direction, as we are emancipated from surely the only prejudice
commonly shared by St . Paul, Marx ,
and Freud . . "Some novels," write s
Michael O'Malley in The Critic, "smell
of beer, others of marijuana or per fume . . . . This one is soaked in estrogen . A tone entirely estrous : everyone in continual heat, an itchy, yowling, manic, pussycat heat that is righ t
out of The Pearl and as ludicrous ,
as depressing.
. The whole thin g
seems to have been written from a
point of observation to the rear of th e
characters and about eighteen inche s
off the pavement . This may be a privileged angle to some but for me it produces almost at once a severe pain in
the neck . The story itself is Odds an d
Ends . Rear ends . There are more
bottoms here than in Twenty Thou sand Leagues Under the Sea . Th e
heart of the bookand the part wher e
you throw up your hands and you r
lunch and realize that you're dealing
with yet another pale echo of Genet' s
masturbatory daydreamsis thi s
rape . It just goes on and on with an
interminable homosexual nittynes s
. . . . Other Odds against you include a
masochist with a touch of nymphomania, the rapee who turns sadist homosexual, a Negro queen called Irvin g
Amadeus, the profoundly lesbian Mis s
Cluff, a rock group that practices bestiality, the bisexual Gloria Gordon, a
bit of a satyr, the obligatory Holly wood orgy scene, and some busines s
lifted from Catullus to add tone . Catullus did it better . "
But then Catullus had other thing s
on his mind, whereas Myra is plainl y
intended as allegory, in the continuin g
crusade of Gore Vidal not only to license homosexuality but to desacraliz e
heterosexuality : in the interest of a
true understanding of human nature,
such as has not been nobly or ignobl y
understood by any dominant philosophical or imperial figure sinc e
Plato and the Twelve Caesars ; and
(bonus!) is in any case desirable i f
only as the humane solution to pressing social problems . "In other words, "
Time magazine commented, "the remedy for overpopulation might be homosexuality . "
But the allegory fails, straining
vainly against paradigms artistic a s
well as moral . "Is this Paradise Lost, "
asks The Times Literary Supplement,
in a review entitled "Pathetic Phallusy," "or merely a Golden Ass penetrated? Milton, Blake said, was 'of th e
Devil's party without knowing it' ; Vi dal, it seems, is of the Devil's party
and knows it . For he connives wit h
his temptress, his tutelary female, th e
eternal aggressive whore, or porne incarnate, deflating, deflowering th e
tumescent males. Myra Breckinridg e
herself sees all life as a naming o f
parts, an equating of groins, a pleasing and/or painful forcing of orifices .
Which is the essence, after all, of pornography . All is referred to the phallic point, the reductio ad absurdum
of the genitalia . Nor is the respons e
spiked, but silkily sensuous to mal e
buttocks, nipples, pubic hair, and the
normal curiosity . Censorship is probably not the answer . Bu`; with the
repudiation of censorship, somethin g
very strange happened . The corollary
was unthinkingly accepted that no on e
is censurable . "And on my left, Mr .
Gore Vidal, the liberal author, an d
playwright, and novelist, whose most
recent book is Myra Breckinridge. Mr .
Vidal, could we have your views o n
the moral qualifications of the Republican nominee, Mr . Richard Nixon, to
serve as President? "
nd so we met again, at Chicago .
No need to describe the surrounding tumult. The unhappy delegates
could not give satisfaction . Lyndon
Johnson was still powerful, but not s o
much so as to risk a personal appearance, not even to celebrate his birth day . Eugene McCarthyit was some how intuitedsimply wouldn't do ; in deed the Kennedy forces had, in in explicit recognition of McCarthy' s
Presidential shortcomings, extrude d
Senator George McGovern, who, in hi s
few personal appearances, had captivated the beholders ; but he was a staying operation, clearly sohis practical role being secondarily the tacit
repudiation of McCarthy and primarily a foot in the door for a blitzkrei g
by Senator Kennedy.
For a while the official attitude to wards Mayor Daley was toleranthi s
was an adamantine history of pro Kennedyism, and he foreswore o n
Sunday the expected endorsemen t
of Hubert Humphrey. So that the
pressure on Daley mounted, and hi s
ensuing ineptitudes might have bee n
stagemanaged by Lowenstein an d
Unruh . In the turmoil, the delegates
and the publicreached hagiologically for the single nominee they kne w
they could not conscript, because Bob by Kennedy was dead . But his name,
especially now that he was dead, wa s
holy ; even as Goldwater's would hav e
been, if he had been assassinated minutes after triumphing over Rockefeller in the California primary (I can see
John Lindsay at the Communion rail) .
I trafficked on Robert Kennedy' s
prestige, though not, I like to think ,
in a way he'd have disapproved of . . .
It was on Tuesday and the Vietnam
plank was on the agenda . After a
while Vidal made a pass at realpolitik . He yearned for the diplomacy o f
the nineteenth century, shorn of
morality and pietism, and wondere d
whether, in fact, it wouldn't be cleve r
of the United States to back Ho Ch i
Minh, on the grounds that he and Ma o
Tse-tung were natural enemies . (Virginia Kirkus was to comment on Vidal's Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship,
"Vidal seems fatally addicted to th e
worldly skeptical tone with a Bo y
Scout aria tagged on at the end, rathe r
like Vidal imitating Talleyrand imitating Walter Lippmann ." )
At the mention of Ho Chi Minh an d
the Vietcong, I saw an opening I ha d
been waiting for . . . .
*
*
The discussion turned blisteringl y
to the question of what does the Constitution guarantee, what doesn't it ,
with Vidal insisting on the blamelessness of the demonstrators. . . .
V. : When they were in the park s
on Monday night, when I observe d
them, watched the police come in lik e
this from all directions, standing .
They were sitting there, singing fol k
songs. There were none of the obscenities which your ear alone seems t o
have picked up . [What I and my wif e
had heard, fourteen stories high was :
F --- L.B .J .! . . . F - - - Mayor Daley !
how do you begin producin g
witnesses when there are, say, 50,00 0
of them available?] They were absolutely well-behaved . Then, suddenly ,
the police began . You'd see one littl e
stirring up in one corner . Then, you' d
suddenly see a bunch of them come i n
with their night clubs and I might say ,
without their badges, which is illegal, Smith : Mr . Vidal, wasn't it a pro vocative act to try to raise the Vietcong flag in the park, in the film w e
just saw? Wouldn't that inviteraising a Nazi flag in World War II, woul d
have had similar consequences ?
Vidal explained that there are different points of view about the Vietnam war, and that "I assume tha t
the point of American democracy i s
you can express any point of view yo u
want "
B . : (garbled) .
V . : Shut up a minute.
B . : No, I won't. The answer is : they
were well-treated by people who ostracized them and I am for ostracizing
people who egg on other people to
office at the convention site . . . have been saints . But not to perceive
[However] an apology was ada- it at allnot even to be tempted t o
mantly denied by Vidal when reached resentmentto accept it as the mos t
in his Ambassador Hotel suite in Chi- ordinary thing in the worldargue s
cago . 'What would I have apologized a terrifying insensibility. . . Thus
for?' he asked . 'It's Mr . Buckley who the absence of anger, especially tha t
begins the personal attack . I simply sort of anger which we call indigna.respond in kind.'" "ABC official El- tion, can, in my opinion, be a mos t
mer Lower," the same story reported, alarming symptom . And the presenc e
"referred to the verbal volley yester- of indignation may be a good one .
day as 'intemperate language.' He Even when that indignation passe s
said that 'ABC was upset about what into bitter personal vindictiveness, i t
happened, but what can you do ex- may still be a good symptom, thoug h
cept talk to the individuals and ask bad in itself . It is a sin ; but it at least
that it not happen again?' " Well you shows that those who commit it hav e
can of course do that much, which in not sunk below the level at which th e
fact ABC did not do .
temptation to that sin existsjust a s
I wondered as the clippings came the sins (often quite appalling )of th e
pouring in at the all but universal great patriot or great reformer point
conclusion that my outburst had to something in him above mere self .
identified me as the equal of Vidal in If the Jews cursed more bitterly tha n
the Pagans, this was, I think, at leas t
intemperance . And worse . Commentary magazine, shrewd and deliber- in part because they took right an d
ate, wrote that "It was really rather wrong more seriously . "
irresponsible to choose this pair as Can it be that the rhetorical total the chief editorialists on the ABC ism of the present day has etiolate d
every epithet? It was a commonplace
team. Though their political opinions
certainly added up to a rather peri- at Chicago to call the police and the
lolls balance, the shameful pleasure mayor Fascists and Nazis, and th e
of watching them match wits had less country yawned, indeed much of i t
to do with a search for political en- expected that so should the police an d
lightenment than with such archaic mayor have yawned . Everybody get s
or illegal entertainments as cockfight- away with everything . Paul Krassner
of The Realist, addressing the kids a t
ing, duels to the death, and fliting .
The effect was the opposite of edify- the Coliseum at L .B .J.'s "unbirthday
party," attaches the very highest iming . Certainly, Dr . Frederick Wertham must have been worried by Buck- portance to impunity . "I have it o n
good authority," he yelled into th e
ley's scarcely controlled ferocity as
he shook his fist and drawled . loudspeaker,"that when someone pri After drama like that, who could be vately asked L .B .J . why he kept u p
content to turn back to the maunder- the war, he answered, 'The Commie s
ings of Carl Albert?" I wondered are saying F - - - you L .B .J . ; and no that the editors of Commentary, of body gets away with that .' Well, to all people, should apparently think it night, as a birthday present, we ar e
irrelevant to specify what it was that all going to say 'F - - - you L .B .J .
and get away with it .'" To that Colicatalyzed the scarcely controlled ferocity . One wonders how the editor of seum William Burroughs dispatche d
Commentary would have reacted if he a congratulatory message calling th e
had been called a crypto Nazi in the cops dogs, and Jean Genet topped him
presence of a dozen million people .
and called them mad dogs, and Terr y
WoOld he take the position that that Southern said they weren't dogs bu t
swine. Can such men understand th e
was merely a political charge, in a
causes of anger in others? Under response to which one has no reaso n
stand the special reverence we need to
, lose one's cool? If, in non-academic
feel for that which is hateful? I d o
~cumstances, you call a man a Nazi ,
not believe that anyone thought me a
re you evoking ethnocentric nationNazi because Vidal called me one, bu t
alismor Buchenwald? A single ediI do believe that everyone who heard
torialistin The Arizona Republic
him call me one without a sense of
:aught the point.
shock, without experiencing anger ,
"This was a smear of the worst
thinks more tolerantly about Nazis m
'rind . The New York Times, whic h
was so mad it couldn't see straigh t than once he did, than even now h e
should
.
when Spiro Agnew said Huber t
And then finally, the word I did
Humphrey was soft on communism ,
use, which was "personal" in the ungnored it completely . . . . In order to
)ut the incident in better perspective ,
derstanding of Paul Newmanand a
ust suppose that Buckley had called few others . Perhaps if I had merel y
Tidal a pro or crypto Communist . . . . "
threatened to hit him, that woul d
For days and weeks, indeed fo r have been all right . But to call him a
e
queer
" I 've been aware of you, " on e
nonths, I tormented myself with th
man wrote me, months after the
question, What should I have said ?
)bviously my response was the wrong
affair, and apropos of nothing, "since
ne if it is always wrong to lose one's the old days when you were on the
emper, as I was disposed ("th e debating team at Yale and I sat an d
Grath of man worketh not the right- watched and listened . I admired yo u
then, and sinceuntil you called
ousness of God") to believe that it is .
Vas my mistake that of going on T V
Vidal a 'homosexual' on TV . This re t all, in the light of the abundan t minded mesomehow and so much
'arnings, with Vidal (who says A ,
of Of Human Bondage when Mildred
lust say B) ? Assume that. But even called the doctor a 'cripple.' I mean ,
the question is not then answered :
he did have a clubfoot, a limp, true ,
Vhat might have been done withi n but it was wildly cruel of her t o
ne narrow context? Could it be tha t
iy emotional reaction was defensibl e
nd even healthy, but that my word s
'ere ill-chosen? "The higher th e
takes," C . S . Lewis wrote, "the
reater the temptation to lose your
amper. . . . We must not over-valu e
le relative harmlessness of the little ,
msual
elous people . They ar e
)t
below, some tempta v had perceived, an d
'id feel, the diabolich theym let u s
me] comitting
/\
in, they would
A.