A friend writes: “Here’s a fifteen-second clip of the famous 1968 television exchange between Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal over the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the Vietnam War. Buckley loses it and calls Vidal a queer after Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi.
“Buckley has never, ever gotten over it and is mortified whenever the video resurfaces. There’s a 21-minute version on-line as well, here. Links couresy of the Gore Vidal Index page.”
After all these years, how should we evaluate these men? Vidal is one of our great men of letters, and an untiring advocate of peace and civil liberties; Buckley’s writings have disappeared, but not his work on behalf of the warfare-welfare state.
12:21 pm on January 16, 2004
