It’s like watching the ‘Thrilla in Manila,’ except with words.”

That’s what Tom Graves, an assistant professor of literature and
humanities at LeMoyne-Owen College, says about the infamous series of
1968 televised debates between conservative leader William F. Buckley
and progressive man of letters Gore Vidal. The debates were broadcast
live by ABC News as part of its presidential convention coverage that
year but will reappear — for perhaps the first time since,
at least in their entirety — in Memphis this week when Graves
hosts a screening at the Brooks Museum of Art.

Graves, an author whose most recent book is Crossroads: The Life
and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, has been fascinated
by Vidal and Buckley since his days as a freshman journalism student at
then Memphis State University in the early ’70s.

“My politics were naturally on the left and pretty much always have
been,” Graves says. “But at the same time, I admired Buckley’s
eloquence, his ability to debate, his dry wit.”

About five years ago, Graves set out to find a copy of the famous
debates, which had all but disappeared, in order to write a stage drama
based on Buckley and Vidal, in the mode of Frost/Nixon. About
two years ago, Graves finally obtained a copy from a relative of
Vidal’s, who gave him permission to screen them.

Graves has completed and is shopping his stage play based on the
debates, but he is screening the full debates this week in conjunction
with LeMoyne-Owen’s honors week. Though there are snippets of the
debates on YouTube and in a documentary about the late Buckley, Graves
believes this week’s Memphis screening will be the first time the
debates have been shown in their entirety since the initial live
broadcast.

When ABC producers paired Buckley, founder of the conservative
National Review and later godfather to the so-called Reagan
Revolution, with Vidal, a writer then best known for his political play
The Best Man and his satiric novel Myra Breckenridge,
they likely expected a lively and erudite exchange of opposing
political views. They got that, but they also got some unexpected
fireworks.

The most famous moment in the series of eight debates
— broadcast from the Republican convention in Miami and then
the historically contentious Democratic convention in Chicago
— occurs during the seventh meeting of two men who clearly
didn’t much like one another.

In the midst of an increasingly heated exchange about the role and
treatment of Vietnam War protesters in Chicago, Buckley tries to
interrupt Vidal, who tells him to “shut up” with a dismissive wave.
When Vidal responds to Buckley’s characterization of war protests by
labeling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley fires back.

“Now listen, you queer,” Buckley snaps, leaning into Vidal. “Stop
calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and
you’ll stay plastered.” Then, referencing Myra Breckenridge,
which concerns transexuality, he tells Vidal to “go back to your
pornography.”

The explosive moment is the culmination of long-simmering tension
that is palpable from the first debate, when Buckley attacks Vidal for
maintaining a residence in Europe, and Vidal responds by labeling
Buckley “passionate and irrelevant.” By the third meeting, Buckley is
accusing Vidal of being “a literary producer of perverted,
Hollywood-minded prose” and Vidal is calling Buckley “the Marie
Antoinette of the right wing … imposing your own bloodthirsty
neurosis” on American politics.

“The two of them both said they didn’t want to debate each other,”
Graves says. “‘Anybody but Vidal.’ ‘Anybody but Buckley.’ But, deep
down, I think they really wanted to. I think each one thought they
would outdo the other one. And I think it’s obvious right off the bat
that they were out for blood. They wanted to score points. They wanted
to win.”

Buckley vs. Vidal: back, at the Brooks, on Thursday

This mutual disdain didn’t fade. Dueling Esquire essays
following the ABC debates led to a libel suit from Buckley, who died in
2008 at age 82.

“When Buckley died, people were after Vidal for some kind of
statement,” Graves says. “And the last words of what he wrote were
‘WFB-RIP — in hell.'”

The exchange of poison-dart retorts is what has survived of the
Buckley-Vidal debate, but what most don’t remember is that Buckley’s
meltdown was preceded by discussion of the constitutional rights of
assembly in which Buckley quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes
off-the-cuff.

Juicy name-calling aside, Buckley-Vidal was political discourse at a
level rarely given such prominence today, and the debate is resonant in
multiple ways.

“One of the interesting things about these debates is we have 40
years to reflect on what these guys had to say,” says Graves, who
points out just how much the politics of 1968 reverberates today as
Buckley and Vidal debate the difficulties of empire and the dangers of
military adventurism, the proper balance of free-market capitalism and
the federal government, and the propriety of political dissent.

Though Buckley had a larger impact in his own time, with his direct
role in the rise of Reagan, and though Vidal was proven wrong in his
prediction of the rise of a permanent alternative to the Democratic and
Republican parties, it is Vidal who seems most prescient.

Vidal’s opening line in the first debate: “I cannot possibly imagine
Richard Nixon as the president of the United States. I think he is
essentially the Hollow Man.” By the last debate, he was ruefully
predicting a Nixon victory.

But Buckley-Vidal resonates as much in form as content: Emblems of
their respective ideologies, Buckley and Vidal were also
representatives of a dying species: the public intellectual. These
days, the television equivalent is more likely to be Keith Olbermann
and Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh.

“These were almost like Renaissance men,” Graves says. “They’ve been
replaced by the shouters — guys with nowhere near their
intellectual gifts who have to rely on soundbites. It’s all staged for
television now, and most of these guys haven’t written much of
substance outside of television.”

One of the debates is introduced thusly by moderator Howard K.
Smith: “On this first day on the floor at the Republican convention,
we’ve heard a few all-right speeches and quite a few ho-hum-type
speeches. We would like now to demonstrate how the English language
ought to be used, by two craftsmen.”

Buckley and Vidal don’t disappoint on this score. When Vidal pounds
Nixon on civil rights and social policy, Buckley’s eyes flare as only
his could and he retorts, “I have no doubt there’s somebody in
Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village who considers your caricature
fetching. I don’t.”

Later, following a particularly ornate savaging from Buckley, Vidal
just smiles and compliments his opponent’s “elegant prose style.”
There’s a glint of sarcasm there — but also honest
appreciation.

“That’s great entertainment to me,” Graves says. “I find it
fascinating.”

The Buckley-Vidal Debates

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Thursday, April 16th

7 p.m.; $5