Best of Enemies

I really enjoyed Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville's Best of Enemies (2015), which chronicles the seminal political left-right debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential elections for ABC. The directors did a good job of setting up the importance of these debates on TV and how it invented a new type of journalism: pitting point-counterpoint pundits against one another without hitting the viewer over the head with the significance of this. The rise of the right in American politics has been a subject of interest for me for sometime and this is yet another snapshot of how the nation started veering right in politics-this election would see Nixon land in the whitehouse. The timing of these elections showed America fraught with tensions about personal/civil rights and opposition to the rising influence of America in the Vietnam War. It is a small but important snapshot of a turbulent time. But also a window into a very infamous public political/personal feud between Buckley and Vidal. It seems that Vidal had gotten the upper hand by calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" which led Buckley to call Vidal queer and physically threaten him on TV in front of millions. It was something Buckley never lived down.