[Pen-l] Buckley dead

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

of historical interest:

 >In all of Vidaliana, there may be no more famous moment than the
 evening of Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1968. It happened at 9:39 p.m. EST, on
 live TV, with Gore Vidal on the Left, William F. Buckley Jr. on the
 Right, and the esteemed ABC newsman Howard K. Smith figuratively stuck
 in the middle (he was actually at an anchor desk in another room). 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. In fact, before the legendary encounters in
1968, they had debated twice before: first, in September 1962, for two
hours, with David Susskind as the moderator of his syndicated show
Open End; and in July 1964, during the Republican convention in San
Francisco, with Susskind again as moderator. So ABC invited them to
conduct a series of debates at the summer's two big political shows.
The men met four times at the GOP convention in Miami, and then four
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. Each encounter lasted between eight and 22
minutes.

 > At the Aug. 28 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 back:
"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.

 > By early 1969, Vidal said he 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 at the time, and Vidal, who made it clear to Buckley
that he would not back down, won something of a pyrrhic victory:
Buckley, told by a judge that he probably would not win if his suit
went to court, agreed to let Esquire pay his legal fees and issue an
apology, after which he dropped his lawsuit. Vidal's legal fees went
unreimbursed. <

 video and sound clips are available from the website that's the source
 of the above, at http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/debates.html
 --
 Jim Devine / "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't  get sucked into jet
 engines." -- John Benfield
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