Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  By mid-July, Gore was in New York, eager to see friends, the private and the public air charged with anger and hapless foreboding. In anticipation, the conventions seemed both superfluous and signifiers of disaster, some of which had already devastatingly struck. There had been two years of sporadic but serious urban riots, most of them related to civil rights for blacks. The Tet Offensive in January 1968 had left Vietnam policy in bankrupt shambles, its leadership discredited. Public opinion was turning against the war. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis; in June, Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. To Gore, King’s assassination represented America’s ineradicable racism. Kennedy’s was an ironic tragedy, the unexpected exit of an enemy whose transformation into a supporter of the underprivileged and an opponent of the war Gore could not believe in. Both deaths seemed emblematic of the country’s commitment to violence. Many feared that what had seemed the worst was only prelude to something even more horrible. Most commentators expected it to be a difficult summer. In late spring, antiwar protests at campuses, particularly Berkeley and Columbia, had provoked university authorities to elicit police intervention. Buildings were occupied, property damaged, students dragged off to jail. In May, Fred Dupee, uncharacteristically political again, had gotten his eye blackened and some teeth broken when he stood with the students. “I assume you are collaborating with the forces of freedom at Hamilton Hall,” Gore wrote to him, tongue in cheek, from Rome. “So difficult in revolutionary times to know which side to join in order to betray. Best tend the garden, I suppose, though I’m catching the activist fever again. But what to do? There seems no solution to anything, and nothing worth suspending disbelief for. The Thirties were easier.” By July the upcoming Vidal-Buckley television appearances had taken on a minor press life of their own, partly because commentators anticipated that their “debates” might capture and encapsulate some of the strongly held views that divided the country. Buckley supported the war, Vidal did not. Buckley advocated suppression of demonstrations for peace or civil rights. Vidal did not, or at least he favored giving the demonstrators their due.

  Their mediated interchanges began in early August in Miami. Sometimes the mediation failed. Buckley’s distaste for Vidal was immediately apparent. Vidal was cooler, more urbane, his body language less expressive and explicit. Actually, his manner of being above the personal effectively conveyed his view that his opponent was, in his eyes, a nonperson. To many, Buckley’s voice seemed snide, Vidal’s condescending. They alternated between attempts to discuss the issues and inevitable digressions, some devoted to undercutting the other’s credibility or viability. Each advanced his own position primarily by attacking his opponent’s, often in the form of a correction of allegedly false or misleading assertions. Their interactions verged on bickering rather than on sustained presentation of a response to a substantive issue. Each tried to be witty. The strain showed. Inevitably the reviews were mixed, often a reflection of the political affiliation of the reviewer. No one had expected it to be sweetness, but it was also rarely light. To some extent ABC had miscalculated. Some of the audience cheered for Vidal, some for Buckley. But many found it too gladiatorial, the personal too inappropriately dominant. At the same time, the ratings were good, at least partly because ABC had correctly anticipated that whatever the other networks were showing was likely to have less interest for the viewer than Buckley-Vidal, even if there were strong reservations. From the participants’ point of view the engagement was not pleasurable. It was hard, dangerous, and mostly unsatisfactory work. Both their egos were enormously at stake. It was hand-to-hand battle, and each wanted the victory that neither had any chance of unequivocally achieving. Their partisans were immovably in place. Some were open-minded enough to do their best to keep score objectively. Many were not. If there was any vast uncommitted audience, it was more interested in I Love Lucy than in Vidal-Buckley, and to the extent that the audience was political, its desire was for both conventions to make some significant contribution to resolving the national nightmare. Nothing that these commentators might say could contribute to that. In fact, partly because of the format, mostly because of the nature of things, neither Vidal nor Buckley had anything new, let alone impressive, to say about the Republican process of choosing Richard Nixon as its standard-bearer. Both made reasonable, sometimes shrewd comments about the cast of characters of the moment, particularly Rockefeller on the left and Reagan on the right. The personal invective was sharp but mostly under control. At the end of the four days it was clear that Miami had been easy. The minor divisions within the Republican Party were readily reparable. As the party out of power, it was not the focus of responsibility for the state of the nation. The streets of Miami were sunny and calm.

  In New York for two weeks in August, Vidal, as did Buckley, took informal soundings among friends and acquaintances and sought the readily-forthcoming praise of partisans. Whatever Vidal’s noticeable departures from Democratic Party orthodoxy, everyone to the left of Buckley who was not a partisan Republican agreed with Gore’s attacks on the illiberal conservatism that Buckley represented. For Gore there was, as much as anything, the heady awareness of national fame that saturation television exposure provided, and some anticipatory anxiety about the Chicago convention. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota had emerged in the winter and spring as the only prominent Democrat willing to oppose Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy. In March he had made a strong enough showing in New Hampshire to embarrass Johnson and make his own candidacy viable. When in late March, Johnson announced he would not stand for reelection, Vice President Hubert Humphrey became heir apparent. A longstanding liberal with impressive credentials, as Vice President he had subordinated himself to Johnson, including giving his unqualified public support to the war. Robert Kennedy’s death in June left the war’s numerous opponents with no alternative but McCarthy, yet Humphrey would almost certainly be the nominee. If he accepted a war plank and continued to advocate Johnson’s Vietnam policy, the party would be irreparably split. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, representing prosegregationist and redneck populism, seemed likely to draw more votes away from Democrats than Republicans. Humphrey would inherit a relatively worthless nomination. Both Buckley and Vidal knew Richard Nixon was likely to be the next President.

  When he flew to Chicago late in August, the author of The Best Man knew that the best man would not win the nomination. He had, though, become an avid McCarthy supporter, despite the odds, hoping delegates would at least succumb sufficiently to pro-peace pressure not to write into the party platform a pro-war plank. Each night he appeared on the ABC news with Buckley. The exchanges immediately became directly confrontational. Between conventions, Buckley had read Myra Breckinridge. At the Republican convention he had considered attacking Vidal as a pornographer—but he had not then read Myra. Now he had no doubt that Vidal was a pornographer whose credibility as a commentator on political events should be emphatically destroyed by that fact. For Buckley all political questions were essentially moral issues. Immoral people should have no political credibility. How dare the author of Myra Breckinridge attack the Republican Party as immoral? Furious, Gore responded with a defense of his novel’s seriousness and a counterattack on his attacker. As the evening went on, matters got worse in the studio. Each morning, with John Kenneth Galbraith, Gore went from delegation to delegation to try to get support for McCarthy. “Vidal was achieving much political celebrity,” Galbraith later wrote in his memoir, “by flagrantly libelous exchanges on television with William F. Buckley,” with whom Galbraith was cordial though in total disagreement on political issues. “In my introduction of him to the state delegations I would suggest that Vidal’s congressional campaign a few years earlier … had established an all-time record for Democratic defeats. This Vidal would deny. ‘A good solid defeat but not a record.’ Then, unfailingly, would come the question: ‘Mr. Vidal, where is your friend Mr. Buckley?’ ‘Mr. Buckley?’ he would reply with a surprised look. ‘Oh, B
uckley. He’s over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods.’” Unfortunately, neither television protagonist was any longer capable of humor when on camera together. Clearly, visibly, they were getting on one another’s nerves, digging into one another’s skin, as if sharing a stage had become a combination of tedious and unbearable. When Gore saw Norman Mailer chatting amiably with Buckley, he assumed that Mailer had gone over to the enemy.

  For Vidal, when the convention approved a pro-war plank, the scene turned even darker. The Humphrey-Johnson victory was imminent, and the gentlemen in the studio were being upstaged by events in the streets and in the convention hall. The Chicago police could not accept that the antiwar demonstrators had the right to say whatever they wanted in any fashion that did not threaten lives or property. The Chicago Democratic establishment, controlled by Mayor Richard Daley, who supported the war plank and detested even peaceful demonstrations, instructed the police to use force if necessary to control the crowd. In effect, he ordered that the demonstrations be suppressed, which the police themselves were eager to do for temperamental and ideological reasons. Some of the demonstrators provoked repression. They assumed it would work to their favor. They taunted the police, mainly through obscenities. Suddenly, without any immediately flagrant act of provocation, the police attacked, severely clubbing many of the demonstrators in nearby Lincoln Park. The television cameras broadcast the carnage to the nation. It looked like a war scene, something Americans associated with repressive regimes, like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. The public, generally more sympathetic to the police than the demonstrators, found both appalling. In the convention hall the governor of Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff, a longtime Kennedy stalwart who had served in his cabinet and now supported Senator George McGovern, looked down at Daley from the platform on which he was giving a nominating speech, not more than twenty feet away from the mayor, and said, as the networks broadcast his words, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago!” Furious, purple with rage, Daley “shouted back with words that, while drowned out in the bedlam, were lip-read by many in the national television audience: ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home!’” While Buckley shared neither Daley’s crudity nor his political affiliation, their cultural and temperamental predilections were similar, though they came to them from radically different backgrounds. Though Daley was a vulgar political operative and Buckley a sophisticated intellectual ideologue, their take on disorder had much in common. Under almost no circumstances should it be permitted. Like Daley, Buckley more than disapproved of obscenities. He found them emotionally inflammatory, hostile to cultural stability. To permit such language or conduct in public was to let the barbarians in at the gate. If discouragement was not effective, repression was in order. And while he did not condone police violence, he did not believe that the police deserved to be criticized for reacting violently to such provocation, or at least that much emphasis need be put on that reaction. The problem was not repression but revolution, not the misuse of power but the abuse of free speech.

  When Buckley and Vidal joined Howard K. Smith in the ABC studio on Wednesday August 28 for the next to last of their live convention telecasts, both men had experienced their own versions of the nation’s distress. They had separately trembled through the long night and horrible day of demonstrations, confrontations, and assaults, each deeply identifying with the national trauma. But they had experienced separate nightmares. For Buckley, vicious anarchy had its dirty hands around the neck of the republic. For Vidal, the police state and the American empire were murdering free speech. Both, in their different ways, as the circumstances warranted, were angry and frightened. For Buckley, there was victory in the horror. The forces of law were restoring order. A Nixon victory in November now seemed assured. The Democratic Party had wounded itself mortally. For Vidal, who abhorred the ameliorative acceptance of the status quo at a time when radical change seemed essential, there was an almost tragic sense of “I told you so.” That night Howard K. Smith set the scene for their comments with selected clips of the street clubbings and beatings. The antagonisms of their previous appearances had an even darker, more somber cast. The context was now violence, not words. When Gore referred to the beatings in the streets as “police violence,” Buckley defended the Chicago police. They had been, he argued, provoked beyond endurance. Only a small number of them had been violent. The entire police force should not be blamed. What about the fact that the demonstrators had raised a Vietcong flag? Howard K. Smith asked. Was that not an extreme provocation? Was that not equivalent to Americans’ raising a Nazi flag during World War II? No, Vidal responded, America was not officially at war with the Vietcong, and consequently nonviolent expressions of opposition to the war were constitutionally protected.

  The sharpness of the exchanges, the hostility in their voices intensified. Buckley was angry, defensive, and aggressive. Vidal was angry, aggressive, and defensive. For Buckley, the police needed to be defended, the demonstrators attacked; for Vidal, the reverse. Yes, Buckley responded to Smith, the demonstrators had behaved like provocateurs, just as George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party had when they had marched recently in Skokie, Illinois. Repression was justified. Buckley may have had in the back of his mind Ribicoff’s statement about Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago. Both Smith and Buckley had introduced the comparison into the telecast by reference to how American pro-Nazis were and should have been treated during World War II. “As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself,” Vidal replied. “I was trying to think of the word fascist,” he later explained. “It had gone out of my head. The only word I could think of—I was stalling for time until I could remember. I knew I was going to end up saying … so I was stalling for time until I could remember. So I said ‘the only pro-’—can’t remember—‘the only crypto-’—can’t remember—‘Nazi I can think of is you.’ It was all because the word ‘fascist’ didn’t come tripping off my tongue.” Furious, his voice rising to a half shout, Buckley turned on Vidal. “Now, listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Let’s not call names,” Smith pleaded. “Let the author of Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making allusions of Nazism,” Buckley shouted with uncontrolled anger. Stunned, for the moment reduced to disputing Buckley’s claim that he had served in the Marines, Vidal could hardly believe that Buckley had revealed both his homophobia and his temper on national television. It seemed almost a victory for him. “What about Sharon?” Vidal said. Howard K. Smith attempted as quickly as possible to bring the combatants under control, to turn away from invective to issues.

  But ABC had achieved climactic drama. The network’s choice of disputants had paid off, even if in an excessiveness that had its embarrassing side. The ten million people watching had heard a first, something almost unbelievable in those censored and sensitive days. Buckley had not only used the word “queer” but had used it as a censorious epithet. Whether the target was or was not homosexual made no difference. It simply was not done. He had used a homophobic epithet at a time when the general understanding was that such epithets were only for private use. The advocate of high public standards had broken not only the national prohibition but his own Christian and civic code. It was a deeply embarrassing, even shameful moment. When, in 1962, after he had clashed with Vidal on the Paar show for the first time, Buckley had composed a telegram to Paar: “PLEASE INFORM GORE VIDAL THAT NEITHER I NOR MY FAMILY IS DISPOSED TO RECEIVE LESSONS IN MORALITY FROM A PINK QUEER. IF HE WISHES TO CHALLENGE THAT DESIGNATION, INFORM HIM THAT I SHALL FIGHT BY THE LAWS OF THE MARQUESS OF QUEENSBURY.” Wisely, he had not sent the telegram. Unwisely, he had now said much the same on national television.

  As the fifteen minutes limped to a close, all three men, still stunned, could not have been more relieved for the camera no long
er to be running. Gore, who was being interviewed by a reporter for Life magazine, stayed a few minutes longer in the studio. Buckley, accompanied by his son Christopher, went to his trailer, where he met Paul Newman, who had continued his nightly habit of going to Buckley’s trailer to help himself from the ample supply of beer and then taking his can to Gore’s nearby trailer, where the two friends would discuss the telecast. Newman, a delegate from Connecticut, had watched each night’s telecast from the ABC control room. Just after he left Buckley’s trailer, he met Buckley, still seething, and immediately said words to the effect of “That was the most disgusting display I’ve ever seen.” “But Vidal called me a Nazi,” Buckley responded. “That’s political,” Newman said. “What you called him is personal.” Buckley declined to see the difference, and of course Vidal had not called him a Nazi, though the comparison was not clearly enough identified as metaphoric for it not to be inflammatory. It would have been the rare person who would not have taken it personally. But it also would have been the rare person who would not have understood that Vidal meant that Buckley, by defending what Ribicoff had called “Gestapo tactics” and by his long-standing advocacy of repression of inflammatory acts of free speech and aggressive first-strike action against those with whom America had foreign-policy disagreements, had certain Nazi-like views and values. It was a harsh way of stating what Vidal and many others believed. If Vidal had said “fascist,” as he had intended, Buckley’s response might have been different. If he had explained that the intent of the prefixes “pro-” or “crypto-” was to emphasize that he did not mean the designation to apply literally, as if Buckley belonged to a Nazi Party, past or present, Buckley might not have felt quite as demeaned. There seemed no reason to think, however, that any of the viewers missed that it was a comparison, not an equivalence, something one would say in the heat of debate as a vigorous way to condemn an opponent’s views. As such, Vidal thought it no worse than on the far edge of normative public discourse. Buckley, though, was furious. The unforgivable had occurred. He may have feared, or instinctively felt the possibility, that Vidal might bring up the 1944 Sharon incident, which had been a stain on the family’s honor. It would be all too easy to make the connection between the accusations of anti-Semitism against his sisters and the “pro-” or “crypto-Nazi” description of himself. As they left the studio, Gore said words to the effect of “We put on a good show.” Buckley turned away. The next night both appeared subdued, drained, mostly going through the motions. Neither addressed the other directly. When, in November, Buckley agreed to fulfill his ABC commitment to appear with Vidal in New York on a postelection summa, he insisted on arrangements that kept them not only physically apart but invisible to one another. They entered and exited the studio by separate doors. They sat on opposite sides of a gray curtain drawn across the room. His anger at Vidal was intense. But he was also deeply disappointed with himself and angry at himself. He could not let go of his anguish. Vidal assumed that the episode was over.