Best Of Enemies

In political discourse and debate, there's name-calling and there's name-calling. The new documentary Best Of Enemies depicts the latter. In looking back at the ten televised debates between two eminent, erudite American intellectuals on opposite sides of the ideological fence, it makes the bulk of current commentary seem like cavemen clubbing each other with rocks.

Politically and socially, the late 1960s was a time of seismic shift in the United States and indeed around the world. To address the issues of the day, US television network ABC commissioned two high-profile pundits, conservative magazine editor William F Buckley, Jr, and left-wing author Gore Vidal to discuss everything from the war in Vietnam to the rise of the civil rights movement.

Said discussion, however, seemingly took a backseat to the two men taking shots at one another with the coldness and precision of snipers. (Well, Vidal kept his cool; Buckley certainly lost his on occasion.) Their mutual enmity appears to stem, as enmity often does, from their similarities — while they had opposing points of view, it seems that Buckley saw the blue-blooded Vidal as a traitor to the upper class.

Best Of Enemies doesn't set out to be a history lesson; it's more a portrait of an ongoing bout between two verbose intellectual heavyweights, with all the smart, snarky pleasures that entails. As the documentary states, Vidal and Buckley weren't arguing so much about the state of the world as who was the better person of the two. When the verbal volleys are so entertainingly barbed, that's more than enough.