Willaim F. Buckley Jr. on Gore Vidal: "Now listen, you queer," he said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered."
I had the pleasure of seeing this live and I can still remember my rage. Buckley was already one of my heroes and this exchange elevated him to deity status, where he still remains.
BTW, I don't give a damn what Vidal thinks, but it is interesting to follow his rants. He certainly hates his country.
Political Animals:
Vidal, Buckley and the ’68 Conventions
pitt.edu
In all of Vidaliana, there may be no more famous moment than the evening of Aug. 22, 1968. It happened on live TV, with Gore Vidal on the Left, William F. Buckley Jr. on the Right, and the esteemed ABC newsman Howard K. Smith stuck in the middle. The place: Chicago - at the Democratic National Convention. The times: a’changin’.
Vidal and Buckley had long been ideological enemies, and naturally, that made good television. So ABC invited them to conduct a series of debates at the summer’s two big political shows. The men met five times at the GOP convention in Miami, and then five more times at the Democratic show in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley had mobilized a massive police force to make sure protesters - bitterly angry at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies in Vietnam - didn’t disrupt the show.
Hear a 21-minute clip from one of the August 1968 debates between Vidal & Buckley at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
INSTRUCTIONS: If you can't play the clip directly from this page, then download the clip to your hard drive and save it as "vidal.mp3" for it to play properly.
At the Aug. 22 debate in Chicago - the penultimate encounter in the series, with an estimated 10 million people watching - things began with relative calm. But it didn’t stay that way, and before long the men began exchanging words that one simply didn’t hear on TV at that time (see box below). Vidal called Buckley a "pro-crypto-Nazi," a modest slip of the tongue, he later said, because he was searching for the word "fascist" and it just didn't come out. Inflamed by the word "Nazi" and the whole tenor of the discussion, Buckley snapped: "Now listen, you queer," he said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered." Smith attempted to calm the exchange with "gentlemen, let's not call names," but the damage had been done. The two men, considerably subdued, met the following night for the last of their week of debates.
Watch a one minute, 15 second clip of the exchange where Vidal calls Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley calls Vidal a "queer."
INSTRUCTIONS: If you can't play the clip directly from this page, then download the clip to your hard drive and use RealPlayer to watch it.
By early 1969, Vidal had put the incident behind him. But Buckley had not, and so he proposed to the editors of Esquire that he write a piece about his exchanges with Vidal. Naturally, seeking fair play, the magazine asked Vidal if he would like to write about Buckley, and it was agreed that the pieces would run in consecutive issues - Buckley's in August 1969, Vidal's in September. The requisite lawsuits ensued. One forgets how they turned out, although it hardly matters: The elongated moment was just one of those things that happens on live television between political rivals - hardly the sort of thing a court of law could possibly settle.
I’ve received many queries over the years about where to find a videotape of that famous exchange, as well as all of the Vidal/Buckley debates from that hazy ancient summer.
Thomas Miles Gore, a cousin of Gore Vidal, has all 10 segments from Miami and Chicago and recently made a limited run of 20 copies available for purchase. These tapes have sold out, and Mr. Gore is making a list of people who are interested in having a tape. If he gets 20 orders, he may be able to make another set of tapes. You can contact him at this address: mgore@t-online.de
I offer this information as a service to readers of The Gore Vidal Index and play no role in the sale or distribution of the tapes, though I will say that I’ve found Mr. Gore to be an engaging correspondent, and the tape of the debates that he sent to me plays smoothly and looks remarkably good for a copy of such old audio-visual material.
Finally, if you came directly to this page, please visit The Gore Vidal Index.
Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh
kloman@pitt.edu |
