How the Buckley-Vidal debates changed TV political coverage

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is up in the polls this week as the GOP race continues. Some of his comments during the debates have shocked the media and caused viewers to question his morals. "Best of Enemies" co-director Robert Gordon would argue today's political discourse and coverage is much different than it used to be. His documentary examines the debates of ideological opponents Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions in the United States. Vidal was a left-leaning novelist, and Buckley an arch-conservative editor.

The two men almost came to fisticuffs and were calling each other slurs on national television.- Robert Gordon, Co-director of "Best of Enemies" 

Their debates were extremely heated, and arguably changed political discourse on television forever.

Robert Gordon joined us from Philadelphia to discuss Vidal, Buckley and politics today. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Brent Bambury: What do you think the conservatives of today would make of William F. Buckley?

Robert Gordon: Well, the conservatives of today have become kind of what Buckley moved the party from in the 1950s. He went into the conservative movement when it was ruled by the John Birch Society, and he kicked out what he called the kooks in the anti-semites and he gave the conservatives a philosophy and an intellectual rigor. And really the apogee of Bill Buckley's leadership was the establishment of Ronald Reagan as president of the US.

BB: Right. With the National Review he kind of sanitized the party in a lot of ways and took it in an intellectual direction and represented that intellectual impetus and force during those years.

RG: Exactly, which is sort of the antithesis of Fox News. He gave the party a mouthpiece that was filled with real issues and thought, and I think he would be quite dismayed today. He lived to see Sarah Palin become the vice presidential nominee, and I think that probably disheartened him as much as anything. I think if he lived much longer he'd have seen the rise of the Tea Party and I think that would have hit him even harder.

BB: And Gore Vidal on the other hand wasn't really affiliated with the Democratic Party in any way. How would he fit into the contemporary landscape?

RG: Well it's funny, it's taken fifty years but we are sort of in Gore's day now. In 1968 Gore had a best seller with a book called Myra Breckinridge about a man who becomes a woman who becomes a man. He was on national news. He was doing these commentaries about legalizing marijuana and all these ideas, which at the time just seemed like they would never ever happen. And Gore lived to see a good bit of that come to be. He died in 2012.

BB: So here we have these two giants, these two intellectuals, and one of the commentators in your film tells us both of these men saw the other as dangerous. What did that bring to those debates?

RG: The danger they saw each other was that the ideas of the other could take down the nation. The stakes were nothing less than the future of the Republic, and this is sort of the beginning of what we now call identity politics. Personal is becoming the political, and then the idea of the other's ideas taking down the nation was enough to let these high minded guys get on the very low road.  

BB: But those philosophies and ideas they were defending, those were deeply held ideas. These weren't ideas that they created or that they took on because they thought it might help them win an argument. These were things that they actually believed. And that's one of the things that makes the film kind of compelling when you compare it to the political landscape of today. What would Buckley and Vidal make of a figure like Donald Trump?

RG: I think they'd be extremely disappointed. These guys brought their knowledge of the classics of economics, of literature, and of philosophy all to bear on everything they did. They were original thinkers. These guys are not shills for a party or speaking talking points, and I think they would see someone like Donald Trump with a certain clownishness. Donald Trump understands the notion of raising people's emotions and getting them not to think but to react, and these guys were all about action through thought.

BB: There is a contradictory feeling in the film because on one hand it is an elegy for a time when these two erudite public intellectuals could be center stage. But on the other hand, these debates do usher in this kind of course and personalized political discourse.

RG: Well for starters, I'm reminded of the thought that F. Scott Fitzgerald had - "the sign of an intelligent mind is to be able to hold two contradictory thoughts and still act." And I feel like our film does that. It says there was a time in the 60's when there were only three news outlets, and there was a lot of good in that. The bad was that news was determined by white haired, white males and a skyscraper in New York. The good was that everyone shared that news and could argue. Now with the Internet, there's a democratization of the news, which is a great thing. You can be in Tahrir Square with your phone, or in Ferguson Missouri with your phone. You can bring the news to the world. But at the same time, you can be in your room creating falsehoods and a website that looks like the New York Times, and a web search engine would find it and say "oh look, a news site says that black is white." It's a double-edged sword. There's an old saying that goes, "everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but we all have to share the same facts." Today, we find ourselves in a time where that isn't true. It's like living in the pages of a George Orwell novel.

BB: How surprised do you think network executives were when they realized this kind of tension could bring in numbers?

RG: I think they were very surprised. They anticipated some tension. There was a history between Buckley and Vidal, but ABC was ridiculed by the other networks before the convention. Afterwards everyone adopted their format because their ratings tripled. The two men almost came to fisticuffs and were calling each other slurs on national television. ABC was anguished until the ratings came out.

BB: It's still a shocking moment. It is the pivotal moment of the debates, and when we see it in your film it's still shocking. Let's listen to it (plays clip). You just heard Gore Vidal calling William Buckley a crypto Nazi and William Buckley calling Gore Vidal a queer and threatening him with violence. What do you think would happen to a pundit today who said something like that on national television?

RG: I think every bit as much as what is said there is how it's said. You see the rictus of loathing on Bill Buckley when he delivers those words, and it is the explosion that you've watched for the previous nine debates. It's like the fuse has been burning and burning, and that's why people were starting to tune in. There was a tension developing. These guys had fifteen uninterrupted minutes each night, which was really hard for us to cut that stuff down because it's so great. But then you see it explode, and I think the networks took away the message that shouting sells, and they sort of missed the part about the content and the development of that tension. Because now it seems very scientifically engineered to get the most shouting as possible to punctuate the commercials.

BB: There's a lot of themes in your film, but as you look ahead to the American election in 2016, I'm curious about how making this film has changed the way you look at politics?

RG: It's made me wistful I would say, and it's really made me wistful more about the media than about politics. I feel like it's the media that has made the politicians dumb themselves down.

BB: Robert Gordon thank you for speaking with us.

RG: Thanks very much Brent.