Best of Enemies is a movie about television—specifically, the short debates between liberal novelist Gore Vidal and conservative magazine editor William F. Buckley that were broadcast live on ABC during nightly news coverage of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions in 1968. Vidal and Buckley loathed and disrespected each other, and each took it as his moral responsibility to drive the other from the public square. Their endless onscreen needling, still preserved on videotape, climaxed during the chaos of the Chicago Democratic convention when Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Buckley was mortified by his outburst, which was much remarked upon in the press, and still aggrieved by Vidal. Late that year he contacted Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, and asked if he could write an essay about the debates. According to Hayes, Buckley said, “I think if I were to try and write about it, I might be able to work out why I said what I did. I will need some length, and I must be assured that your lawyers will allow me to call Vidal a homosexual in print. Otherwise there is no point in undertaking it.” Esquire‘s researchers gathered enough information to prove this was so, and the magazine’s attorneys gave the OK, though Vidal had never come out (as his associate Matt Tyrnauer explains in Best of Enemies, he was “obsessed with shedding sexual labels”). Esquire would have to give Vidal a chance to reply, however, and as soon as he read a manuscript of Buckley’s gargantuan, 12,000-word piece, he began drawing up one of his own, hoping to expose Buckley as an anti-Semite once and for all.
Directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville
